GROWTH AND DIFFUSION OF CRITICAL SPIRIT. 161 



in the form of literary, philological, and historical criti- 

 cism, permeated, and ultimately dominated, the scholarly 

 literature of that country. One of the first fruits of 46. 



First appli- 



that other and independent line of thought which we 

 trace back to Kant was the appearance in the year 1791 

 of Fichte's anonymously published ' Criticism of Reve- 

 lation.' It created such a stir that it was in the 

 beginning taken for a work of Kant himself. It was 

 followed, in the year 1793, by Kant's work, entitled 

 ' Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason.' In these V 

 writings, as also in those of many other followers of 

 Kant and Fichte, an idea was more systematically 

 worked out, which we find already in Lessing, and in 

 a vaguer form in Herder : the idea of regarding religion 

 in its historical development, and especially revealed 

 religion, as an educational process, which, under Divine 

 guidance, has led mankind on to a purer morality and 

 a more spiritual life. This idea was worked out from 

 various points of view, more or less poetically, intel- 

 lectually, ethically, or spiritually, according to the 

 personal bias and tastes of different writers. From the 

 position taken up in this respect by Lessing, Herder, 

 Kant, and Fichte, the way could easily be found into all 

 shades of orthodoxy or rationalism, of deism or super- 

 naturalism, of theism or pantheism, of a prosaic moralis- 

 ing or a poetical idealisation. 



As history has shown, none of these ways remained 

 untrodden, 1 so great was the perplexity in which 

 thinkers found themselves involved, so great the desire 



1 This is fully brought out in the 

 ' History of Protestant Theology in 

 Germany ' by J. A. Dorner (Eng. 



trans, by Robson and Taylor, 1871), 

 see vol. ii. pp. 293-344, and especi- 

 ally the retrospect, pp. 345-47. 



VOL. III. L 



