Rhineland, as every Pietist and Methodist hymn-book
testifies.

The same century that produced the founders of
evangelicalism witnessed the impressive discovery of
the Newtonian system of nature. As the fact of
natural law gradually permeated the minds of people,
a new and very different type of liberal Protestantism
developed. Its aim was to free the religious tradition
of elements which might impede the development of
natural knowledge. It sought to eliminate extrava-
gant supernaturalism, and to grasp "the analogy of
religion to the constitution and order of nature." Its
liberalism was that of freedom from superstition, of
encouraging solid thought in the furtherance of human
welfare.

For a time this humanitarian program of eighteenth
century rationalism seemed to advance along simple
lines. But gradually with the accumulation of knowl-
edge and power, the constitution and order of nature
were seen to be more complicated than hitherto sup-
posed, and the elements of human welfare to be more
varied. The nineteenth century produced a bewilder-
ing variety both of theoretical and of practical per-
spectives. It would be hard to say where the choice
of reason is most difficult: whether in the field of
metaphysics, beset as it is, on the side of natural phil-
osophy, with the problems of interpreting evolution
and relativity (not to mention the claim of metaphysi-
cal idealism to supplant all naturalism), or in the field
of competing economic interests, or yet again in the
realm of contrary cultural ideals. This new situation
has given rise to another form of religious liberalism,
namely modernism. The liberalism of the modernist

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