n effect, to these three fundamental principles: (1) Conform
to the rational law of love to God and one's neighbor; this is the only
ground of divine acceptance. (2) After transgression of the law, repentance
and reformation are the only grounds of divine grace and forgiveness. (3)
At the last day every one will be rewarded according to his works. By
proclaiming these doctrines, by carrying them out in his own pure life
and typical death, and by founding religio-ethical associations on the
principle of brotherly equality, Christ selected the means best fitted for
the attainment of his purpose, the salvation of human souls. His aim was
to assure men of future happiness (and of the earthly happiness connected
therewith), and to make them worthy of it; and this happiness can only be
attained when from free conviction we submit ourselves to the natural moral
law, which is grounded on the moral fitness of things. Everything which
leads to the illusion that the favor of God is attainable by any other
means than by righteousness and repentance, is pernicious; as, also, the
confusion of Christian societies with legal and civil societies, which
pursue entirely different aims.

Thomas Morgan _(The Moral Philosopher, a Dialogue between the Christian
Deist, Philalethes, and the Christian Jew, Theophanes, 1737 seq_.) stands
on the same ground as his predecessors, by holding that the moral truth of
things is the criterion of the divinity of a doctrine, that the Christian
religion is merely a restoration of natural religion, and that the apostles
were not infallible. Peculiar to him are the application of the first of
these principles to the Mosaic law, with the conclusion that this was not a
revelation; the complete separation of the New Testament from the Old (the
Church of Christ and the expected kingdom of the Jewish Messiah are as
opposed to each other as heaven and earth); and the endeavor to give a
more exact explanation of the origin of superstition, the pre-Christian
manifestations of which he traces back to the fall of the angels, and those
since Christ to the intermixture of Jewish elements. He seeks to solve his
problem by a detailed critique of Israelitish history, which is lacking in
sympathy but not in spirit, and in which, introducing modern relations
into the earliest times, he explains the Old Testament miracles in part as
myths, in part as natural phenomena, and deprives the heroes of the Jews of
their moral renown. T