he Jewish historians are ranked among the poets; the
God of Israel is reduced to a subordinate, local tutelary divinity; the
moral law of Moses is characterized as a civil code limited to external
conduct, to national and mundane affairs, with merely temporal sanctions,
and the ceremonial law as an act of worldly statecraft; David is declared
a gifted poet, musician, hypocrite, and coward; the prophets are made
professors of theology and moral philosophy; and Paul is praised as the
greatest freethinker of his time, who defended reason against authority
and rejected the Jewish ritual law as indifferent. Whatever is spurious in
Christianity is a remnant of Judaism, all its mysteries are misunderstood
and falsely (_i.e._ literally) applied allegories. Out of regard for Jewish
prejudices Christ's death was figuratively described as sacrificial, as in
earlier times Moses had been forced to yield to the Egyptian superstitions
of his people. Morgan looks for the final victory of the rational morality
of the pure, Pauline, or deistic Christianity over the Jewish Christianity
of orthodoxy. Among the works of his opponents the following deserve
mention: William Warburton's _Divine Legation of Moses, and_ Samuel
Chandler's _Vindication of the History of the Old Testament_.

It maybe doubted whether Bolingbroke (died 1751; cf. p. 203) is to be
classed among the deists or among their opponents. On the one hand, he
finds in monotheism the original true religion, which has degenerated
into superstition through priestly cunning and fantastical philosophy; in
primitive Christianity, the system of natural religion, which has been
transformed into a complicated and contentious science by its weak,
foolish, or deceitful adherents; in theology, the corruption of religion;
in Bacon, Descartes, and Locke, types of untrammeled investigation. On
the other hand, he seeks to protect revelation from the reason whose
cultivation he has just commended, and to keep faith and knowledge
distinct, while he demands that the Bible, with all the undemonstrable
and absurd elements which it contains, be accepted on its own authority.
Religion is an instrument indispensable to the government for keeping the
people in subjection. Only the fear of a higher power, not the reason,
holds the masses in check; and the freethinkers do wrong in taking a bit
out of the mouth of the sensual multitude, when it were better to add to
those already there.

As Hume, the skep