David Patrick

“ DEISM is the received name for a current of theological thought which, though not confined to one country, or to any well-defined period, had England for its principal source, and was most conspicuous in the last years of the 17th and the first half of the 18th century. The deists, differing widely in important matters of belief, were yet agreed in seeking above all to establish the certainty and sufficiency of natural religion- in opposition to the positive religions, and in tacitly or expressly denying the unique significance of a supernatural revelation in the Old and New Testaments. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Founding ethics on the native and cultivable capacity in men to appreciate worth in men and actions, and associating the apprehension of morality with the appre hension of beauty, he makes morality wholly independent of scriptural enactment, and still more, of theological forecast ing of future bliss or agony. He yet insisted on religion as the crown of virtue ; and, arguing that religion is insepar able 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. ”

“ 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 element ”

“ 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 fulfil ment of prophecy. Yet no interpretation or re-arrangement 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. ”

“ Naturalists was a name frequently used of such as recognized no god but nature, of so-called Spinozists, atheists ; but both in England and Germany, in the 18th century, this word was more commonly and aptly in use for those who founded their religion on the lumen naturce alone. ”

“ Locke s philosophy, as well as his theology, served as a school for the deists. Men had becomff weary of Protestant scholas ticism ; religious wars had made peaceful thinkers seek to take the edge off dogmatical rancour ; and the multiplicity of religious sects provoked distrust of the common basis on which all founded. There was a school of distinctively latitudinarian thought in the Church of England ; others not unnaturally thought it better to extend the realm of the adiaphora beyond the sphere of Protestant ritual or the details of systematic divinity. ”

“ 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 the substance of what they received as natural religion, the deists were for the most part agreed ; Herbert s articles continued to contain the fundamentals of their theology. Religion, though not identified with morality, had its most important outcome in a faithful following of the eternal laws of morality, regarded as the will of God. With the virtuous life was further to be conjoined a humble disposi- tion to adore the Creator, avoiding all factitious forms of worship as worse than useless. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And amongst the divinely implanted, original, indefeasible notitice com munes of the human mind, he found as foremost his five articles : that there is one supreme God, that he is to be worshipped, that worship consists chiefly of virtue and piety, that we must repent of our sins and cease from them, and that there are rewards and punishments here and here after. ”

“ Blount assaults the doctrine of a mediator as irreligious ; and much more pronouncedly than Herbert he dwells on the view, afterwards regarded as a special characteristic of all deists, that much or most error in religion has been invented or knowingly maintained by sagacious men for the easier main tenance of good government, or in the interests of themselves and their class. ”

“ The small value attributed to all outward and special forms of service, and the want of any sympathetic craving for the communion of saints, saved the deists from attempting to found a free-thinking church, a creedless communion. They seem generally to have inclined to a quietistic accommodation to established forms of faith, till better times came. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”