It is hardly necessary to speak here of the attitude towards the old
"supernatural" religion taken by the English Deists of the last half
of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century. Here
was the first definite struggle of the English church with a group
of thinkers who, under the leadership of Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke
and others, attempted to adapt humanistic philosophy to theological
speculation, to establish the sufficiency of natural religion as
opposed to revelation, and to deny the unique significance of the
Old and New Testament Scriptures. The English Deists were not deep
or comprehensive thinkers, but they were typically humanistic in that
their interests were not mainly theological or religious but rather
those of a general culture. They were inconsistent with their humanism
in their doctrine of a personal God who was not only remote but
separated from his universe, a _deus ex machina_ who excluded the idea
of immanence. While less influential in England, they had a powerful
effect upon French and German thinking. Both Voltaire and Rousseau
were rationalists and Deists to the end of their days and both were
unwearied foes of any other-than-natural sources for our spiritual
knowledge and religious values.
In Germany the humanistic movement continued under Herder and his
younger contemporaries, Schiller and Goethe.
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