The Rise of Modern Religious Ideas Author:Arthur Cushman McGiffert Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE ENLIGHTENMENT The period of the Enlightenment witnessed a general change of the widest range and deepest significance in the temper and atti... more »tude of the peoples of Northern and Western Europe. Tendencies already at work in the age of the Renaissance, after being checked for some generations by the Protestant Reformation and the religious wars which followed, became everywhere dominant in the eighteenth century, commonly known as the century of the Enlightenment, and the whole world of thought and culture was transformed. The humility, the self-distrust, the dependence upon supernatural powers, the submission to external authority, the subordination of time to eternity and of fact to symbol, the conviction of the insignificance and meanness of the present life, the somber sense of the sin of man and the evil of the world, the static interpretation of reality, the passive acceptance of existing conditions and the belief that amelioration can come only in another world beyond the grave, the dualism between God and man, heaven and earth, spirit and flesh, the ascetic renunciation of the world and its pleasures—all of which characterized the Middle Ages—were widely overcome, andmen faced life with a new confidence in themselves, with a new recognition of human power and achievement, with a new appreciation of present values, and with a new conviction of the onward progress of the race in past and future. The fast multiplying discoveries of physical science and the ever advancing conquest of the forces of nature gave them a growing sense of mastery over their . environment, while the promise of ever new secrets to be disclosed and ever new victories to be achieved made the world far more interesting than it had once been and endowed it with a new fascination fo...« less