tic, leads empiricism to its fall, so Hume, the
philosopher of religion (see below), leads deism toward dissolution. Among
those who defended revealed Christianity against the deistical attacks we
may mention the names of Conybeare (1732) and Joseph Butler (1736). The
former argues from the imperfection and mutability of our reason to like
characteristics in natural religion. Butler (cf. p. 206) does not admit
that natural and revealed religion are mutually exclusive. Christian
revelation lends a higher authority to natural religion, in which she finds
her foundation, and adapts it to the given relations and needs of mankind,
adding, however, to the rational law of virtue new duties toward God the
Son and God the Holy Ghost. It is evident that in order to be able to deal
with their opponents, the apologetes are forced to accommodate themselves
to the deistic principle of a rational criticism of revelation.

Notwithstanding the fear which this principle inspired in the men of the
time, it soon penetrated the thought even of its opponents, and found
its way into the popular mind through the channels of the Illumination.

Although it was often defended and applied with violence and with a
superfluous hatred of the clergy, it forms the justifiable element in the
endeavors of the deists. It is a commonplace to-day that everything which
claims to be true and valid must justify itself before the criticism of
reason; but then this principle, together with the distinction between
natural and positive religion based upon it, exerted an enlightening and
liberating influence. The real flaw in the deistical theory, which was
scarcely felt as such, even by its opponents, was its lack of religious
feeling and all historical sense, a lack which rendered the idea acceptable
that religions could be "made," and priestly falsehoods become world-moving
forces. Hume was the first to seek to rise above this unspeakable
shallowness. There was a remarkable conflict between the ascription to
man, on the one hand, of an assured treasure of religious knowledge in
the reason, and the abandonment of him, on the other, to the juggling of
cunning priests and despots. Thus the deists had no sense either for the
peculiarities of an inward religious feeling, which, in happy prescience,
rises above the earthly circle of moral duties to the world beyond, or for
the involuntary, historically necessary origin and growth of the particular
forms of religion. He