Note 116 — Chapter XII · THE REFORMATION AND FREETHOUGHT

Thus concerning the Reformation generally “we are obliged to confess that, especially in Germany, it soon parted company with free learning; that it turned its back upon culture; that it lost itself in a maze of arid theological controversy; that it held out no hand of welcome to awakening science. Presently we shall see that the impulse to an enlightened study and criticism of the Scriptures came chiefly from heretical quarters; that the unbelieving Spinoza and the Arminian Le Clerc pointed the way to investigations which the great Protestant systematizers thought neither necessary nor useful. Even at a later time it has been the divines who have most loudly declared their allegiance to the theology of the Reformation who have also looked most askance at science, and claimed for their statements an entire independence of modern knowledge.”116 In fine, “to look at the Reformation by itself, to judge it only by its theological and ecclesiastical development, is to pronounce it a failure”; and the claim that “to consider it as part of a general movement of European thought ... is at once to vindicate its past and to promise it the future”—this amounts merely to avowing the same thing. Only as an eddy in the movement of freethought is the Reformation intellectually significant. Politically it is a great illustration of the potency of economic forces.