for which they wrought. Founding ethics on the native and
cultivable capacity in men to appreciate worth in men and actions,
and, like the ancient Greek thinkers whom he followed, associating
the apprehension of morality with the apprehension of beauty,
he makes morality wholly independent of scriptural enactment,
and still more, of theological forecasting of future bliss or agony.
He yet insisted on religion as the crown of virtue; and, arguing
that religion is inseparable from a high and holy enthusiasm for
the divine plan of the universe, he sought the root of religion in
feeling, not in accurate beliefs or meritorious good works. He set
little store on the theology of those who in a system of dry and
barren notions “pay handsome compliments to the Deity,”
“remove providence,” “explode devotion,” and leave but “little
of zeal, affection, or warmth in what they call rational religion.”
In the protest against the scheme of “judging truth by counting
noses,” Shaftesbury recognized the danger of the standard which
seemed to satisfy many deists; and in almost every respect
he has more in common with those who afterwards, in Germany,
annihilated the pretensions of complacent rationalism than with
the rationalists themselves.
Toland, writing at first professedly without hostility to any of the received elements of the Christian faith, insisted that Christianity was not mysterious, and that the value of religion could not lie in any unintelligible or self-contradictory elements; 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 Scriptures, and demanded a careful and complete historical examination 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 Johann Salomo Semler (1725–1791), and surprisingly like that which was later elaborated by the Tübingen school. 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 “own gospel”—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 arguments was weakened by his manifest love of paradox. Wollaston upheld the “intellectual” theory of morality, and all his reasoning is independent of any authority or evidence derived from revelation. His system was simplicity itself, all sin being reduced to the one form of lying. He favoured the idea of a future life as being necessary to set right the mistakes and inequalities of the present.
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 fulfilment of prophecy. Yet no interpretation or rearrangement 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, though it becomes perfectly clear from his refutation of William Whiston’s curious counter theory that there were in the original Hebrew scriptures prophecies which were literally fulfilled in the New Testament, but had been expunged at an early date by Jewish scribes. 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 remodelled 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 and contemporaneous, and is from the pen of a writer of the Maccabean period, a view now generally accepted. Collins resembles Blount in “attacking specific Christian positions rather than seeking for a foundation on which to build the edifice of Natural Religion.” Amongst those who replied to him were Richard Bentley, Edward Chandler, bishop of Lichfield, and Thomas Sherlock, afterwards bishop of London, who also attacked Woolston. They refuted him easily on many specific points, but carefully abstained from discussing the real question at issue, namely the propriety of free inquiry.
Woolston, 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 overthrow 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 unwholesome. 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 “Deist’s Bible.” It was against Tindal that the most important of the orthodox replies were directed, e.g. John Conybeare’s Defence of Revealed Religion, William Law’s Case of Reason and, to a large extent, Butler’s Analogy.
Morgan criticized with great freedom the moral character of the persons and events of Old Testament history, developing the theory of conscious “accommodation” 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 oneness of the catholic and orthodox church. Morgan “seems to have discerned the dawning of a truer and better method” than the others. “He saw dimly that things require to be accounted for as well as affirmed or denied,” and he was “one of the pioneers of modern historical science as applied to biblical criticism.”
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. He sought to show that even in the New Testament there are essential contradictions, and instances the unconditional forgiveness preached by Christ in the gospels as compared with Paul’s doctrine of forgiveness by the mediation of Christ. Externally Chubb is interesting as representing the deism of the people contrasted with that of Tindal the theologian.
