m despair of gaining or keeping
people's affections without having recourse to such mean acts?"

He exposes with considerable effect the monstrosity of the doctrine of
exclusive salvation. Must we not consider, he asks, whether one can be
said to be sent as a Saviour of mankind, if he comes to shut Heaven's
gate against those to whom, before he came, it was open provided they
followed the dictates of their reason? He criticizes the inconsistency
of the impartial and universal goodness of God, known to us by the light
of nature, with acts committed by Jehovah or his prophets. Take the
cases in which the order of nature is violated to punish men for crimes
of which they were not guilty, such as Elijah's hindering rain from
falling for three years and a half. If God could break in upon the
ordinary rules of his providence to punish the innocent for the guilty,
we have no guarantee that if he deals thus with us in this life, he will
not act in the same way in the life to come, "since if the eternal rules
of justice are once broken how can we imagine any stop?" But the ideals
of holiness and justice in the Old Testament are strange indeed. The
holier men

[147] are represented to be, the more cruel they seem and the more
addicted to cursing. How surprising to find the holy prophet Elisha
cursing in the name of the Lord little children for calling him Bald-
pate! And, what is still more surprising, two she-bears immediately
devoured forty-two little children.

I have remarked that theologians at this time generally took the line of
basing Christianity on reason and not on faith. An interesting little
book, Christianity not founded on Argument, couched in the form of a
letter to a young gentleman at Oxford, by Henry Dodwell (Junior),
appeared in 1741, and pointed out the dangers of such confidence in
reason. It is an ironical development of the principle of Bayle, working
out the thesis that Christianity is essentially unreasonable, and that
if you want to believe, reasoning is fatal. The cultivation of faith and
reasoning produce contrary effects; the philosopher is disqualified for
Divine influences by his very progress in carnal wisdom; the Gospel must
be received with all the obsequious submission of a babe who has no
other disposition but to learn his lesson. Christ did not propose his
doctrines to investigation; he did not lay the arguments for his mission
before his disciples and give them time to consider

[148] ca