19° ENGLISH DEISM. After Shaftesbury had based morah'ty on a natural instinct for the beautiful and had made it independent of reh'gion, as well as served the cause of free thought by a keenly ironical campaign against enthusiasm and ortho- doxy, and Clarke had furnished the representatives of natural religion a useful principle of morals in the objective rationality of things, the debate concerning prophecy and miracles* threatened to dissipate the deistic movement into scattered theological skirmishes. At this juncture Matthew Tindal (1657-1733) led it back to the main question. His Christianity as Old as the Creation is the doomsday book of deism. It contains all that has been given above as the core of this view of religion. Christ came not to bring in a new doctrine, but to exhort to repentance and atone- ment, and to restore the law of nature, which is as old as
- The chief combatant in the conflict over the argument from prophecy,
which was called forth by Whiston's corruption hypothesis, was Collins {A Dis- tourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, 1724). Christianity is based on Judaism ; its fundamental article is that Jesus is the prophesied Messiah of the Jews, its chief proof the argument from Old Testament prophecy, which, it is true, depends on the typical or allegorical interpretation of the passages in question. Whoever rejects this cuts away the ground from under the Christian revelation, which is only the allegorical import of the revelation of the Jews. — The second proof of revelation, the argument from miracles, was shaken by Thomas Woolston {^Six Discourses on the Aliracles of our Saviour, 1727-30), by his extension of the allegorical interpretation to these also. He supported himself in this by the authority of the Church Fathers, and, above all, by the argument that the accounts of the miracles, if taken literally, contradict all sense and understanding. The unavoidable doubts which arise concerning the literal interpretation of the resurrection of the dead, the healing of the sick, the driving out of devils, and the other miracles, prove that these were intended onty as symbolic representations of the mysterious and wonderful effects which Jesus was to accomplish. Thus Jairus's daughter means the Jewish Church, which is to be revived at the second coming of Christ; Lazarus typifies humanity, which will be raised again at the last day ; the account of the bodily resurrection of Jesus is a symbol of his spiritual resurrection from his grave in the letter of Scripture. Sherlock, whose Trial of the Witnesses of the Resurrection of Jesus was long considered a cogent answer to the attacks of Woolston, was opposed by Peter Annet, who, without leaving the refuge of figurative interpretation open, pro- ceeded still more regardlessly in the discovery of contradictory and incredible elements in the Gospel reports, and declared all the scriptural writers together to be liars and falsifiers. If a man believes in miracles as supernatural inter- ferences with the regular course of nature (and they must be so taken if they are to certify to the divine origin of the Scriptures), he makes God mutable, and natural laws imperfect arrangements which stand in need of correction. The troth of religion is independent of all history.
