ing of Christ than on the teaching of the church about him ; but they repeatedly laid claim to the name of Christians or of Christian deists. Against superstition, fanaticism, and priestcraft they were incessantly lifting up their testimony. They all recognized the soul of man not regarded as intellectual alone as the ultimate court of appeal. But they varied much in their attitude towards the Bible. Some were content to argue their own ideas into Scripture, and those they disliked out of it ; to one or two it seemed a satisfaction to discover diffi culties in Scripture, to point to historical inaccuracies and moral defects. Probably Chubb s position on this head is most fairly characteristic of deism. He holds that the narrative, especially of the New Testament, is in the main accurate, but, as written after the events narrated, has left room for misunderstandings aud mistakes. The apostles were good men, to whom, after Christ, we are most indebted : but they were fairly entitled to their own private opinions, and naturally introduced these into their writings. The epistles, according to Chubb, contain errors of fact, false interpretations of the Old Testament, and sometimes disfigurement of religious truth. Fortunately, however, the points on which the private opinions of apos tolic men might naturally differ most widely, such as the doctrine of the Logos, are matters which have nothing to do with the salvation of souls, The general tendency of the deistical writings is sufficiently self-consistent to justify a common name. But it is vain to speak of deism as a compact system, or to regard it as the outcome of any one line of philosophical thought. Of matters generally regarded as pertaining to natural religion, that on which they were least agreed was the certainty, philosophical demonstrability, and moral significance of the immortality of the soul, so that the deists have sometimes been grouped into "mortal" and "immortal" deists. For some the belief in future rewards and punish ments was an essential of religion ; some seem to have questioned the doctrine as a whole ; and, while others made it a basis of morality, Shaftesbury protested against the ordinary theological form of the belief as immoral. No two thinkers could well be more opposed than Shaftesbury and Hobbes ; yet sometimes ideas from both were combined by the same writer. Collins was a pronounced necessitarian ; Morgan regarded the denial of free will as tantamount to atheism. And nothing can be more misleading than to assume that the belief in a Creator, existent wholly apart from the work of his hands, was characteristic of the deists as a body. In none of them is any theory on the subject specially prominent ; save in their denial of miracles, of supernatural revelation, and a special redemptive interposition of God in history, they seem to have thought of providence much as the mass of their opponents did. Herbert starts his chief theological work with the design of vindicating God s providence. Shaftes bury vigorously protests against the notion of a wholly transcendent God. Morgan more than once expresses a theory that would now be pronounced one of immanence. Toland, the inventor of the name of pantheism, was noto riously, for a great part of his life, in some sort a pantheist. And while as thinkers they diverged in their opinions, so too the deists differed radically from one another in their character, in reverence for their subject, and in religious earnestness and moral worth. The deists were not powerful writers ; none of them was distinguished by wide and accurate scholarship ; hardly any was either a deep or comprehensive thinker. But though they generally had the best scholarship of England against them, they were bold, acute, well-informed men ; they appreciated more fully than their contemporaries not a few truths now all but universally accepted ; and they seemed therefore entitled to leave their mark on subsequent theological thought. Yet while the seed they sowed was taking deep root in France and in Germany, the English deists, the most notable men of their time, were soon for gotten, or at least ceased to be a prominent factor in the intellectual life of the century. The controversies they had provoked collapsed rather than were finally settled ; and deism became a by-word even amongst those who were in no degree anxious to appear as champions of ortho doxy. The fault was not wholly in the subjectivism of the movement. But the subjectivism that founded its theology on the " common sense " of the individual was accompanied by a fatal pseudo-universalisrn which, cutting away all that was peculiar, individual, and most intense in all religions, left in any one of them but a lifeless form. A theology consisting of a few vague generalities was sufficient to sustain the piety of the best of the deists ; but it had not the concreteuess or intensity necessary to take a firm hold on those whom it emancipated from the old beliefs. The negative side of deism came to the front, aud, communicated with fatal facility, seems ultimately to have constituted the deism that was commonly professed at the clubs of the wits and the tea-tables of polite society. But the intenser religious life before which deism fell was also a revolt against the abstract and argumentative ortho doxy of the time. That the deists appreciated fully the scope of difficulties in Christian theology and the sacred books is not their most noteworthy feature ; but that they made a stand, sometimes cautiously, often with outspoken fearlessness, against the presupposition that the Bible is the religion of Protestants. They themselves gave way to another presup position equally fatal to true historical research, though in great measure common to them and their opponents. It was assumed by deists in debating against the orthodox, as it is now by orthodox Protestants in contending against the Romish Church, that the flood of error in the hostile camp was due to the benevolent cunning or deliberate self- seeking of unscrupulous men, held to by the ignorant with the obstinacy of prejudice. Yet deism deserves to be remembered as a strenuous pro test against bibliolatry in every degree and against all traditionalism in theology. It sought to look not a few facts full in the face, from a new point of view and with a thoroughly modern, though unhistorical spirit. It was not a religious movement; and though, as a defiance of the accepted theology, its character was mainly theological, the deistical crusade belongs, not to the history of the church, or of dogma, but to the history of general culture. It was an attitude of mind, not a body of doctrine ; its nearest parallel is probably to be found in the eclectic strivings of the Renaissance philosophy and the modernizing tendencies of cisalpine humanism. The controversy was assumed to be against prejudice, ignor ance, obscurantism ; what monks were to Erasmus the clergy as such were to Woolston. Yet English deism was in many ways characteristically English. The deists were, as usually happens with the leaders of English thought, no class of professional men, but represented every rank in the community. They made their appeal in the mother tongue to all men who could read and think, and sought to reduce the controversy to its most direct practical issue, making it turn as much as possible on hard facts or the data of common sense. And, with but one or two exceptions, they avoided wildness in their language as much as in the general scheme of theology they proposed. If at times they had recourse to ambiguity of speech and veiled polemic, this might be partly excused by the death of Aikinhead on the scaffold, and Woolston s imprisonment.
