French deism, the direct progeny of the English movement, was equally short-lived. Voltaire was to the end a deist of the school of Bolingbroke; Rousseau could have claimed kindred with the nobler deists. Diderot was for a time heartily in sympathy with deistic thought; and the Encyclopédie was in its earlier portion an organ of deism. But as Locke's philosophy became in France sensationalism, and as Locke's pregnant question, reiterated by Collins, how we know that the divine power might not confer thought on matter, led the way to dogmatic materialism, so deism soon gave way to forms of thought more directly and extremely subversive of the traditional theology.
In Germany there was a native free-thinking theology nearly contemporary with that of England, whence it was greatly developed and supplemented. The compact rational philosophy of Wolff nourished a theological rationalism which in Reimarus was wholly undistinguishable from dogmatic deism; while, in the case of the historico-critical school to which Semler belonged, the distinction is not always easily drawn although these rationalists professedly recognized in Scripture a real divine revelation, mingled with local and temporary elements. It deserves to be noted here that the former, the theology of the Aufklärung, was, like that of the deists, destined to a short-lived notoriety; whereas the solid, accurate, and scholarly researches of the rationalist critics of Germany, undertaken with no merely polemical spirit, not only form an epoch in the history of theology, but have taken a permanent place in the body of theological science. Ere rationalismus vulgaris fell before the combined assault of Schieiermacher's subjective theology and the deeper historical in sight of the Hegelians, it had found a refuge successively in the Kantian postulates of the practical reason, and in the vague but earnest faith-philosophy of Jacobi.
In England, though the deists were forgotten, their spirit was not wholly dead. For men like Hume and Gibbon the standpoint of deism was long left behind; yet Gibbon's famous two chapters might well have been written by a deist. Even now, between scientific atheism and speculative agnosticism on the one hand and church orthodoxy on the other, many seem to cling to a theology nearly allied to deism. Rejecting miracles and denying the infallibility of Scripture, protesting against Calvinistic views of sovereign grace and having no interest in evangelical Arminianism, the faith of such inquirers seems fairly to coincide with that of the deists. Wherever religious indifferentism is rife, the less generous forms of deism are still alive. And even some cultured theologians, the historical representatives of latitudinarianism, seem to accept the great body of what was contended for by the deists, though they have a fuller appreciation of the power of spiritual truth, and a truer insight into the ways of God with man in the history of the world.
The deists displayed a singular incapacity to understand the true conditions of history; yet amongst them there were some who pointed the way to the truer, more generous interpretation of the past. When Shaftsbury wrote that "religion is still a discipline, and progress of the soul towards perfection," he gave birth to the same thought that was afterwards hailed in Lessing's Erziehung des Menschengeschlechtes as the dawn of a fuller and a purer light on the history of religion and on the development of the spiritual life of mankind.
See Leland's View of the Principal Deistical Writers, 2 vols. 1754; Lechler's Geschichte des Englischen Deismus, 1841; Rev. John Hunt, Religious Thought in England, 3 vols. 1870-72; Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the I8th Century, 2 vols. 1876. (D. P.)
DEJANIRA, the wife of Hercules. See Hercules.
DEKKER, Jeremias De (1610-1666), a Dutch poet, was born at Dort in 1610. He received his entire education from his father, a native of Antwerp, who, having embraced the reformed religion, had been compelled to take refuge in Holland. Entering his father's business at an early age, he found leisure to cultivate his taste for literature and especially for poetry, and to acquire without assistance a competent knowledge of English, French, Latin, and Italian. His first poem was a paraphrase of the Lamentations of Jeremiah (Klaagliedern van Jeremias), which was followed by translations and imitations of Horace, Juvenal, and other Latin poets. The most important of his original poems were a collection of epigrams (Puntdichten) and a satire in praise of avarice (Lof der Geldzucht). The latter is his best known work. Written in a vein of light and yet effective irony, it is usually ranked by critics along with Erasmus's Praise of Folly. Dekker died at Amsterdam in November 1666. A complete collection of his poems, edited by Brouerius van Nideck, was published at Amsterdam in 1726 under the title Exercises Poetiqnes (2 vols. 4to). Selections from his poems are included in Siegenbeck's Proeven van nederduitsche Dichtkunde (1823), and from his epigrams in Geijsbeek's Epigrammatische Antholoyie, 1827.
DEKKER, Thomas, dramatist. It is impossible to make out, from the scanty records of Dekker's personal life, what manner of man he was. His name occurs fre quently in Henslowe's Diary during the last year of the 16th century; he is mentioned there as receiving loans and payments for writing plays in conjunction with Ben Jonson, Chettle, Haughton, and Day, and he would appear to have been then in the most active employment as a playwright. The titles of the plays on which he was engaged from April 1599 to March 1599-1600 are Troilus and Cressida, Orestes Fures, Agamemnon, The Stepmother's Tragedy, Bear a Brain, Pagge of Plymouth, Robert the Second. Patient Grissel, The Shoemaker's Holiday, Truth's Supplication to Candlelight, The Spanish Moor's Tragedy, The Seven. Wise Masters. At that date it is evident that Dekker's services were in great request for the stage. He is first mentioned in the Diary two years before, as having sold a book; the payments in 1599 are generally made in advance, "in earnest" of work to be done. In the case of three of the above plays, Orestes Fures, Truth's Supplication, and the Shoemaker's Holiday, Dekker is paid as the sole author. Only the Shoemaker's Holiday has been preserved; it was published in 1600. It would be unsafe to argue from the classical subjects of some of these plays that Dekker was then a young man from the university, who had come up like so many others to make a living by writing for the stage. Classical knowledge was then hi the air; playwrights in want of a subject were content with translations, if they did not know the originals. However educated, Dekker was then a young man just out of his teens, if he spoke with any accuracy when he said that he was threescore in 1637; and it was not in scholarly themes that he was destined to find his true vein. The call for the publication of the Shoemaker's Holiday, which deals with the life of the city, showed him where his strength lay. To give a general idea of the substance of Dekker's plays, there is no better way than to call him the Dickens of the Elizabethan period. The two men were as unlike as possible in their habits of work, Dekker having apparently all the thriftlessness and impecunious shamelessness of Micawber himself. Dekker's Bohemianism appears in the slightness and hurry of his work, a strong contrast to the thoroughness and rich completeness of every labour to which Dickens applied himself; perhaps also in the exquisite freshness and sweetness of his songs, and the natural charm of stray touches of expression and description in his plays. But he was like Dickens in the bent of his genius towards the representation of the life around him in
