VIII THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY 371 



fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the ethical and 

 intellectual criticism of theology once more recom- 

 menced, and arrived at a temporary resting-place 

 in the confessions of the various reformed Pro- 

 testant sects in the sixteenth century ; almost all 

 of which, as soon as they were strong enough, 

 began to persecute those who carried criticism 

 beyond their own limit. But the movement was 

 not arrested by these ecclesiastical barriers, as 

 their constructors fondly imagined it would be ; it 

 was continued, tacitly or openly, by Galileo, by 

 Hobbes, by Descartes, and especially by Spinoza, 

 in the seventeenth century ; by the English Free- 

 thinkers, by Kousseau, by the French Encyclo- 

 paedists, and by the German Rationalists, among 

 whom Lessing stands out a head and shoulders 

 taller than the rest, throughout the eighteenth 

 century ; by the historians, the philologers, the 

 Biblical critics, the geologists, and the biologists 

 in the nineteenth century, until it is obvious to 

 all who can see that the moral sense and the 

 really scientific method of seeking for truth are 

 once more predominating over false science. Once 

 more ethics and theology are parting company. 



It is my conviction that, with the spread of true 

 scientific culture, whatever may be the medium, 

 historical, philological, philosophical, or physical , 

 through which that culture is conveyed, and with 

 its necessary concomitant, a constant elevation of 

 the standard of veracity, the end of the evolution 



