It is not difficult to see how it is that this truth is not more generally recognised. The doctrine of the Trinity, by which the Christian idea of God absorbed Greek speculation into itself, had but little _point d'appui_ in the unmetaphysical western world. It bore the _imprimatur_ of the Church; it was easily deducible from the words of Holy Scripture; it was seen to be essential to the holding of the divinity of Christ. But men forgot that the doctrine was 'addressed to the reason[130];' and so its metaphysical meaning and value were gradually lost sight of. In the days of the mediaeval Papacy, ecclesiastical were more effective than metaphysical weapons, and Scholasticism knew so much about the deepest mysteries of God, that it almost provoked an agnostic reaction, in the interests of reverence and intellectual modesty. With the Reformation came the appeal to the letter of Holy Scripture, and the age of biblical, as contrasted with scientific, theology. The only scientific theology of the Reformation period was the awful and immoral system of John Calvin, rigorously deduced from a one-sided truth. Then came the age of physical science. The break up of the mediaeval system of thought and life resulted in an atomism, which, if it had been more perfectly consistent with itself, would have been fatal alike to knowledge and society. Translated into science it appeared as mechanism in the Baconian and Cartesian physics: translated into politics it appeared as rampant individualism, though combined by Hobbes with Stuart absolutism. Its theory of knowledge was a crude empiricism; its theology unrelieved deism. God was 'throned in magnificent inactivity in a remote corner of the universe,' and a machinery of 'second causes' had practically taken His place. It was even doubted, in the deistic age, whether God's delegation of His power was not so absolute as to make it impossible for Him to 'interfere' with the laws of nature. The question of miracles became the burning question of the day, and the very existence of God was staked on His power to interrupt or override the laws of the universe. Meanwhile His immanence in nature, the 'higher pantheism,' which is a truth essential to true religion, as it is to true philosophy, fell into the background.