oarse spirit of bitter hostility, and want of real
insight into the excellence of the system which it opposed, it recalls in
some respects the attack of the ancient heathen Celsus; and the
difficulties propounded are frequently not dissimilar to those stated by
him, though resulting from a different philosophical school. The tenacious
grasp which it maintained of the doctrine of the unity of God would cause
it to bear a closer resemblance to the system of Julian, if the deists had
not lacked the literary tastes which strengthened his love for heathenism.
The monotheism constitutes also a line of demarcation between deism and
more modern forms of unbelief. It restrained the deists from falling into
the forms of subtle pantheism previously noticed, and the atheism which
will hereafter meet us. The character of their doubts too, selected from
patent facts of mind and heart, which appealed to common sense, and were
not taken from a minute literary criticism, which removes doubt from the
sphere of the ordinary understanding into the world of literature,
separates them from more modern critical unbelief.

Standing thus apart, characterised by intense attachment to monotheism,
and placing its foundation in the great facts of nature, deism errs by
defect rather than excess; in that which it denies, not in that which it
asserts. It is a system of naturalism or rationalism; the interpretation
which reason, without attaining the deepest analysis, offers of the scheme
of the world, natural and moral. Its only parallel is the particular
species of German thought derived from it which existed at the close of
the last century, and sought like it to reduce revealed religion to
natural.(487)

Whether emotional causes, personal moral faults coincided with these
intellectual causes, and were the obstacle which prevented the attainment
of a deeper insight into the mysteries of revelation, and made them to
halt in the mysteries of nature, ought to be taken into account in forming
a judgment on the concrete cases, but does not so properly belong to the
general consideration in which we are now engaged, of tracing the types of
deist thought. Some of the deists were very moral men, a few immoral; but
the truth or untruth of opinions may be studied apart from the character
of the persons who maintain them.

The movement, if viewed as a whole, is obsolete. If the same doubts are
now repeated, they do not recur in the same form, but are connecte