be hopeless to supplant Christianity by reason. But his writings contain effective arguments which go to undermine Revelation. The most important was his Free Inquiry into Christian miracles (1748), which put in a new and dangerous light an old question: At what time did the Church cease to have the power of performing miracles? We shall see presently how Gibbon applied Middleton's method.
The leading adversaries of the deists appealed, like them, to reason, and, in appealing to reason, did much to undermine authority. The ablest defence of the faith, Bishop Butler's Analogy (1736), is suspected of having raised more doubts than it appeased. This was the experience of William Pitt the Younger, and the Analogy made James Mill (the utilitarian) an unbeliever. The deists argued that the unjust and cruel God of Revelation could not be the God of nature; Butler pointed to nature and said, There you behold cruelty and injustice. The argument was perfectly good against the optimism of Shaftesbury, but it plainly admitted of the conclusion—opposite to that which Butler wished to establish—that a just and beneficent God does not exist. Butler is driven to fall back on the sceptical argument that we are extremely ignorant; that all things
