Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/215

 MORGAN, BOLINGBROKE. 193 law of Moses is characterized as a civil code limited to ex- ternal conduct, to national and mundane affairs, with merely temporal sanctions, and the ceremonial law as an act of worldly statecraft ; David is declared a gifted poet, musician,, hypocrite, and coward; the prophets arc made professors of theology and moral philosophy ; and Paul is praised as the greatest freethinker of his time, who defended reason against authority and rejected the Jewish ritual law as indif- ferent. Whatever is spurious in Christianity is a remnant of Judaism, all its mysteries are misunderstood and falsely (/. e,^ literally) applied allegories. Out of regard for Jewish prej- udices Christ's death was figuratively described as sacrificial, as in earlier times Moses had been forced to yield to the Egyptian superstitions of his people. Morgan looks for the final victory of the rational morality of the pure, Pau- line, or deistic Christianity over the Jewish Christianity of orthodoxy. Among the works of his opponents the follow- ing deserve mention : William Warburton's Divine Legation of AIoses,3iXd Samuel Chandler's Vindication of the History of the Old Testament. It may be doubted whether Bolingbroke (died 1751 ; cf. p. 203) is to be classed among the deists or among their oppo- nents. On the one hand, he finds in monotheism the original true religion, which has degenerated into supersti- tion through priestly cunning and fantastical philosophy; in primitive Christianity, the system of natural religion, which has been transformed into a complicated and con- tentious science by its weak, foolish, or deceitful adher- ents ; in theology, the corruption of religion ; in Bacon, Descartes, and Locke, types of untrammeled investigation. On the other hand, he seeks to protect revelation from the reason whose cultivation he has just commended, and to keep faith and knowledge distinct, while he demands that the Bible, with all the undemonstrable and absurd elements which it contains, be accepted on its own authority. Reli- gion is an instrument indispensable to the government for keeping the people in subjection. Only the fear of a higher power, not the reason, holds the masses in check; and the freethinkers do wrong in taking a bit out of the mouth of the sensual multitude, when it were better to add to those already there.