mpt
to appeal on every subject to ultimate principles of reason. This tone in
truth marked the age, and acting in every region of thought, affected
alike the orthodox and the unbelieving. Accordingly, as we pass away from
the speculations which mark the early period of deism to those which
belong to its maturity, we find that the attack on Christianity is less
suggested by political considerations, and more entirely depends on an
appeal to reason, intellectual or moral.

The principal phases belonging to this period of the maturity of deism,
which we shall now successively encounter, are four:

(1) An examination of the first principles of religion, on its dogmatic or
theological side, with a view of asserting the supremacy of reason to
interpret all mysteries, and defending absolute toleration of free
thought. This tendency is seen in Toland and Collins,

(2) An examination of religion on the ethical side occurs, with the object
of asserting the supremacy of natural ethics as a rule of conduct, and
denying the motive of reward or punishment implied in dependent morality.
This is seen in Lord Shaftesbury.

After the attack has thus been opened against revealed religion, by
creating prepossessions against mystery in dogma and the existence of
religious motives in morals, there follows a direct approach against the
outworks of it by an attack on the evidences,

(3) In an examination, critical rather than philosophical, of the
prophecies of the Old Testament by Collins, and of the miracles of the New
by Woolston.

The deist next approaches as it were within the fortress, and advances
against the doctrines of revealed religion; and we find accordingly,

(4) A general view of natural religion, in which the various
differences,--speculative, moral, and critical, are combined, as in Tindal;
or with a more especial reference to the Old Testament as in Morgan, and
the New as in Chubb; the aim of each being constructive as well as
destructive; to point out the absolute sufficiency of natural religion and
of the moral sense as religious guides, and the impossibility of accepting
as obligatory that which adds to or contradicts them; and accordingly they
point out the elements in Christianity which they consider can be retained
as absolutely true.

The first two of these attacks occur in the first two decades of the
century: the two latter in the period from 1720 to 1740, when the public
mind not being diverted by foreign w