The general tendency of thought since the Reformation has been in the direction of these partial presentations of Christianity. The Reformers, from various causes, were so occupied with what is now called Soteriology, or the scheme of salvation, that they paid but scant attention to the other aspects of the Gospel. And the consequence was that a whole side of the great Christian tradition, and one on which many of its greatest thinkers had lavished the labours of a lifetime, was allowed almost unconsciously to lapse into comparative oblivion; and the religion of the Incarnation was narrowed into the religion of the Atonement. Men's views of the faith dwindled and became subjective and self-regarding, while the gulf was daily widened between things sacred and things secular; among which latter, art and science, and the whole political and social order, gradually came to be classed. Far otherwise was it with the great thinkers of the early Church; and that not from an under-estimate of the saving power of the Cross, which was bearing daily fruit around them, of penitence, and sanctity, and martyrdom; but from their regarding Christian salvation in its context. They realized that redemption was a means to an end, and that end the reconsecration of the whole universe to God. And so the very completeness of their grasp on the Atonement led them to dwell upon the cosmical significance of the Incarnation, its purpose to 'gather together all things in one.' For it was an age in which the problems of the universe were keenly felt. Philosophical thinking, if less mature, was not less exuberant than now, and had already a great past behind it. And the natural world, though its structural secrets were little understood, fascinated the imagination and strained the heart with its appealing beauty. Spiritualism, superstition, scepticism, were tried in turn but could not satisfy. The questionings of the intellect still pressed for a solution. And the souls of Christians were stirred to proclaim that the new power which they felt within them, restoring, quickening, harmonizing the whole of their inner life, would also prove the key to all these mysteries of matter and of mind.