charge to which he replied in an anonymous tract, An Address to the Inhabitants of London and Westminster, a second and larger edition of which appeared in 1730. In this tract[1] he makes a valiant defence of the deists and of the use of reason in religious matters, and anticipates here and there his Christianity as Old as the Creation; or the Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature, London, 1730 (2d ed., 1731; 3d, 1732; 4th, 1733), which was regarded by friends and foes alike as the "Bible" of deism. It was really only the first part of the whole work, and the second, though written and entrusted in manuscript to a friend, never saw the light. It was said that Dr Gibson prevented its publication. The first part made a great noise, and the answers to it were numerous, the most able being by Dr James Foster (1730), Dr John Conybeare (1732), Dr John Leland (1733), and Bishop Butler (1736). It was translated into German by J. Lorenz Schmidt (1741), and from it dates the influence of English deism on German theology. It is by this book that Tindal is now chiefly remembered; but he had probably adopted substantially the principles it expounds before he wrote his essay of 1697. He objected to be called a simple deist, and claimed the name of " Christian deist," as he held that true Christianity is identical with the eternal religion of nature. He died at Oxford on 16th August 1733.
The religious system expounded in Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation, unlike the earlier system of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, was based on the empirical principles of Locke's philosophy. It assumed the traditional deistic antitheses of external and internal, positive and natural, revelations and religions, and perpetuated at the same time the prevalent misconceptions as to the nature of religion and revelation. The system was, moreover, worked out by the purely a priori method, with all but a total disregard of the facts of religious history. It starts from the tremendous assumptions that true religion must, both from the nature of God and the nature of things, be eternal, universal, simple, and perfect; it maintains that this religion can consist of nothing but the simple and universal duties towards God and man, the first consisting in the fulfilment of the second, in other words, the practice of morality. The author's moral system is somewhat confused and inconsistent, but is essentially utilitarian. From such principles it follows necessarily that the true revealed religion can be nothing more nor less than a republication of the religion of nature or reason, and that, if Christianity is the perfect religion, it can only be that republication, and must be as old as the creation. The special mission of Christianity, therefore, was simply to deliver men from the superstition which had in course of time got mixed up with the religion of nature. True Christianity consequently must be a perfectly "reasonable service"; arbitrary and positive precepts can form no true part of it; revelation and reason can never disagree; reason must be supreme, and the Scriptures as well as all religious doc trines must submit to its tests; and only such writings can be regarded as Divine Scripture which tend to the honour of God and the good of man. Thus tested, much in the Old and the New Testaments must be rejected as defective in morality or erroneous in fact and principle. The strength of Tindal's position was the underlying conviction of the essential harmony between man's religious and rational nature, and consequently of the rationality of Christianity. Its weakness was that, like the whole religious philosophy of the time, it was founded on a total misconception of the nature of religion and of revelation, and on as complete a disregard of the course of man's religious development. Weak points in it were ably exposed by Foster, Conybeare, Butler, and others; but its radical errors needed for their complete exposure the higher conceptions of religion and religious history which were originated by Lessing, Schleiermacher, and Hegel.
See Leland, View of the Principal Deistical Writers (London, 1798); Lechler, Geschichte des Englischen Deismus (Stuttgart, 1841); Theological Review, November 1864; Hunt, Religious Thought in England from the Reformation to the End of Last Century (London, 1870–73); Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1876–80); A. S. Farrar, Bampton Lecture (1862), lect. iv.
TINGHAE.See Chusan.
TINNÉ, Alexandrine (1839–1869), African traveller, born at The Hague on 17th October 1839, was the daughter of an English merchant and his wife, Baroness van Steengracht-Capellen. Her father died when she was five years old, leaving her the richest heiress in the Netherlands. After travelling in Norway, Italy, and the East, and visiting Egypt, when she ascended the Nile to near the equator, Mademoiselle Tinné left Europe again in 1861 for a prolonged sojourn in the Nile regions. Accompanied by her mother and her aunt, she set out from Cairo on 9th January 1862. After a short stay at Khartoum, the party ascended the White Nile as far as Gondokoro and explored a part of the Sobat, returning to Khartoum in November. Baron von Heuglin and Dr Steudner having meantime joined the ladies at Khartoum, the whole party set out in February 1863 to explore the Bahr-el-Ghazal. The limit of navigation at the Bahr-el-Homr was reached on 10th March. From Lake Rek a journey was made overland, across the Bahr Jur and south-west by the Bahr Kosango, to Jebel Kosango, on the borders of the Niam-Niam country. During the journey all the travellers suffered severely. Steudner died in April and Madame Tinné in June, and after many fatigues and dangers the remainder of the party reached Khartoum in July 1864. Mademoiselle Tinné returned to Cairo by Berber and Suakim. The geographical and scientific results of the expedition, largely into a new country, were highly important, as will be seen in Heuglin's narrative in Petermann's Mittheilungen (Erg.-hft, Nov. 15, 1865), and in his own Travels in the Region of the White Nile (1869). At Cairo Mademoiselle Tinné lived in somewhat Oriental style during the next four years, visiting Algeria, Tunis, and other parts of the Mediterranean. In January 1869 she started from Tripolis with a caravan, intending to proceed to Lake Tchad, and thence by Wadai, Darfur, and Kordofan to the Upper Nile. In July, however, on the route from Murzuk to Rhat, she was murdered by her escort.
Besides the references already given, see John A. Tinné's Geographical Notes of an Expedition in Central Africa by three Dutch Ladies, Liverpool, 1864.
- ↑ A Second Address to the Inhabitants, &c., with replies to some of the critics of that book, bears the same date, 1730, though some of the works it refers to appeared in 1731.
