A Critical History of the Evolution of Trinitarianism
by Levi Leonard Paine (9780217632652)

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 VH THE DEMAND OF THE HISTORICAL SPIRIT It will be seen as we proceed that these three demands are organically related and that the order above given is the logical one, and consequently the one that the historical evolution will naturally take. Every epoch has its own peculiar Zeitgeist, or time spirit. Some periods are creative and constructive, others are traditional and conservative, others still are reactionary, critical, revolutionary. The different ages of the world have their varied types and characteristics by which they are known to historians. That which characterizes our own age above everything else is historical criticism. The historical is the time spirit of the nineteenth century, and every other spirit must yield obedience to it. It had its birth in the scientific inductive method. When that method of research was applied to historical events as well as scientific investigation, a revolution was at once precipitated in the whole range of historical studies. History itself had to be re-written. Myth, legend, miracle, all the marvels of a supernatural realm of beings supposed to hold close relations with mankind were step by step eliminatedfrom the annals of human events. Mythology and the miraculous may have place in a cosmogony or a philosophy of God and the universe, but they are not integral elements of human action, or of history, which is simply a record of such action. The literary revolution caused by this critical movement is already a matter of history. But it is the work of a single century. Distinguished among its pioneers are Gibbon and Niebuhr. Niebuhr's critical reconstruction of Livy's " Roman History" by which the miraculous legends that had grown up around the origins of Rome were separated from the authentic narrative, made an epoch i...

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