Page:Supplement to the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica - with preliminary dissertations on the history of the sciences - illustrated by engravings (IA gri 33125011196181).pdf/120

66 ciples of religion and morality to the establishment of his conclusions, his works not only gave offence to the friends of liberty, but excited a general alarm among all sound moralists. His doctrine, in particular, that there is no natural distinction between Right and Wrong, and that these are dependent on the arbitrary will of the civil magistrate, was so obviously subversive of all the commonly received ideas concerning the moral constitution of human nature, that it became indispensably necessary, either to expose the sophistry of the attempt, or to admit, with Hobbes, that man is a beast of prey, incapable of being governed by any motives but fear, and the desire of self-preservation.

Between some of these tenets of the courtly Hobbists, and those inculcated by the Cromwellian Antinomians, there was a very extraordinary and unfortunate coincidence; the latter insisting, that, in expectation of Christ’s second coming, “the obligations of morality and natural law were suspended; and that the elect, guided by an internal principle, more perfect and divine, were superior to the beggarly elements of justice and humanity.” It was the object of Cudworth to vindicate, against the assaults of both parties, the immutability of moral distinctions.

In the prosecution of his very able argument on this subject, Cudworth displays a rich store of enlightened and choice erudition, penetrated throughout with a peculiar vein of sobered and subdued Platonism, from whence some German systems, which have attracted no small notice in our own times, will be found, when stripped of their deep neological disguise, to have borrowed their most valuable materials.

Another coincidence between the Hobbists and the Antinomians, may be remarked in

10