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Rh religion could not lie in any unintelligible element ; though we cannot know the real essence of God or of any of his creatures, yet our beliefs about God must be thoroughly consistent with reason. Afterwards, Toland discussed, with considerable real learning and much show of candour, the comparative evidence for the canonical and apocryphal Scrip tures, and demanded a careful and complete historical exami nation of the grounds on which our acceptance of the New Testament canon rests. He contributed little to the solution of the problem, but forced the investigation of the canon alike on theologians and the reading public. Again, he sketched a view of early church history, further worked out by Semler, and surprisingly like that which, as elaborated by the Tubingen school, is still held with modifications by a large number of students of Christian antiquity. He tried to show, both from Scripture and extra-canonical literature, that the primitive church, so far from being an incorporate body of believers with the same creed and customs, really consisted of two schools, each possessing its &quot; own gospel &quot; a school of Ebionites or Judaizing Christians, and the more liberal school of Paul. These parties, consciously but amicably differing in their whole relation to the Jewish law and the outside world, were subsequently forced into a non-natural uniformity. The cogency of Toland s argu ments was weakened by his manifest love of paradox. Collins, who had created much excitement by his Discourse of Free-thinking, insisting on the value and necessity of unprejudiced inquiry, published at a later stage of the deistic controversy the famous argument on the evidences of Christianity. Christianity is founded on Judaism ; its main prop is the argument from the fulfil ment of prophecy. Yet no interpretation or re-arrangement of the text of Old Testament prophecies will secure a fair and non-allegorical correspondence between these and their alleged fulfilment in the New Testament. The inference is not expressly drawn. Collins indicates the possible extent to which the Jews may have been indebted to Chaldeans and Egyptians for their theological views, especially as great part of the Old Testament would appear to have been re-modelled by Ezra ; and, after dwelling on the points in which the prophecies attributed to Daniel differ from all other Old Testament predictions, he states the greater number of the arguments still used to show that the book of Daniel deals with events past a-nd contemporaneous, and is from the pen of a writer of the Maccabean period. Wooleton, at first to all appearance working earnestly in behalf of an allegorical but believing interpretation of the New Testament miracles, ended by assaulting, with a yet unknown violence of speech, the absurdity of accepting them as actual historical events, and did his best to over throw the credibility of Christ s principal miracles. The bitterness of his outspoken invective against the clergy, against all priestcraft and priesthood, was a new feature in deistic literature, and injured the author more than it furthered his cause. Tindal s aim seems to have been a sober statement of the whole case in favour of natural religion, with copious but moderately worded criticism of such beliefs and usages in the Christian and other religions as he conceived to be either non-religious or directly immoral and unwhole some. The work in which he endeavoured to prove that true Christianity is as old as the creation, and is really but the republication of the gospel of nature, soon gained the name of the &quot; Deist s Bible.&quot; Morgan criticised with great freedom the moral character of the persons and events of Old Testament history, developing the theory of conscious &quot; accommodation &quot; on the part of the leaders of the Jewish church. This accommodation of truth, by altering the form and substance of it to meet the views and secure the favour of ignorant and bigoted contemporaries, Morgan attributes also to the apostles and to Jesus. He likewise expands at great length a theory of the origin of the Catholic Church much like that sketched by Toland, but assumes that Paul and his party, latterly at least, were distinctly hostile to the Judaical party of their fellow-believers in Jesus as the Messias, while the college of the original twelve apostles and their adherents viewed Paul and his followers with suspicion and disfavour. Persecution from without Morgan regards as the influence which mainly forced the antagonistic parties into the one ness of the catholic and orthodox church. Annet made it his special work to invalidate belief in the resurrection of Christ, and to discredit the work of Paul. Chubb, the least learnedly educated of the deists, did more than any of them, save Herbert, to round his system into a logical whole. From the New Testament he sought to show that the teaching of Christ substantially coincides with natural religion as he understood it. But his main contention is that Christianity is not a doctrine but a life, not the reception of a system of truths or facts, but a pious effort to live in accordance with God s will here, in the hope of joining him hereafter. Chubb dwells with special emphasis on the fact that Christ preached the gospel to the poor, and argues, as Tindal had done, that the gospel must therefore be accessible to all men without any need for learned study of evidences for miracles, and intelligible to the meanest capacity. DodwelTs ingenious thesis, that Christianity is not founded on argument, was certainly not meant as an aid to faith ; and, though its starting-point is different from all other deistical works, it may safely be reckoned amongst their number. Though himself contemporary with the earlier deists, Bolingbroke s principal works were posthumously published after interest in the controversy had declined. His whole strain, in sharp contrast to that of most of his predecessors, is cynical and satirical, and suggests that most of the matters discussed were of small personal concern to himself. He gives fullest scope to the ungenerous view that a vast proportion of professedly revealed truth was ingeniously palmed off by the more cunning on the more ignorant for the corvenience of keeping the latter under. But he writes with keenness and wit, and knows well how to use the materials already often taken advantage of by earlier deists. In the substance of what they received as natural religion, the deists were for the most part agreed ; Herbert s articles continued to contain the fundamentals of their theology. Religion, though not identified with morality, had its most important outcome in a faithful following of the eternal laws of morality, regarded as the will of God. With the virtuous life was further to be conjoined a humble disposi- tion to adore the Creator, avoiding all factitious forms of worship as worse than useless. The small value attributed to all outward and special forms of service, and the want of any sympathetic craving for the communion of saints, saved the deists from attempting to found a free-thinking church, a creedless communion. They seem generally to have inclined to a quietistic accommodation to established forms of faith, till better times came. They steadfastly sought to eliminate the miraculous from theological belief, and to expel from the system of religious truth all debat able, difficult, or mysterious articles. They aimed at a rational and intelligible faith, professedly in order to make religion, in all its width and depth, the heritage of every man. They regarded with as much suspicion the notion of a &quot; peculiar people &quot; of God, as of a unique revelation, and insisted on the salvability of the heathen. They rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, and protested against mediatorship, atonement, and the imputed righte ousness of Christ, always laying more stress on the teach-

