he French school of infidelity, and affected the English
unbelievers of the latter half of the century.

Deism had now reached its maximum. The attention of the age was turned
aside from religion to politics by the political dangers incident to the
attempts of the Pretender; and when Hume's scepticism was promulgated in
1749 it was received without interest, and Bolingbroke's posthumous
writings published in 1754 fell comparatively dead. These two names mark
the period which we called the decline of deism. Bolingbroke's views(467)
however depict deistical opinions of the period when it was at its height,
and are a transition into the later form seen in Hume, and therefore
require to be stated first, though posterior in the date of publication.

Bolingbroke's writings command respect from their mixture of clearness of
exposition with power of argument. They form also the transition to the
literature of the next age, in turning attention to history. Bolingbroke
had great powers of psychological analysis, but he despised the study of
it apart from experience. His philosophy was a philosophy of history. In
his attacks on revelation we have the traces of the older philosophical
school of deists; but in the consciousness that an historical, not a
philosophical, solution must be sought to explain the rise of an
historical phenomenon such as Christianity, he exemplifies the historic
spirit which was rising, and anticipates the theological inquiry found in
Gibbon; and, in his examination of the external historic evidence, both
the documents by which the Christian religion is attested, and the effects
of tradition in weakening historic data, he evinces traces of the
influence of the historical criticism which had arisen in France under his
friend Pouilly.(468)

His theological writings(469) are in the form of letters, or of essays,
the common form of didactic writings in that age. We shall briefly state
his views on deity, futurity, and revelation.

He teaches the existence of a deity, but was led, by the sensational
philosophy which he adopted from Locke, to deny the possibility of an _a
priori_ proof of the divine existence,(470) and contends strongly that the
divine attributes can only be known by observation of nature, and not by
the analogy of man's constitution. He considers too that the deity whose
existence he has thus allowed, exercises a general but not a special
providence;(471) the world being a machine moving by de