chiefly from Bolingbroke, the most French in mind of
any of the English school.

A few words therefore will suffice to characterise his opinions. It
appears that he believed in a God,(531) but firmly disbelieved the divine
origin of the revealed religion, Jewish and Christian. The main purpose of
his life however was not affirmation, but denial.(532) Accordingly the
sole object of all his efforts was to destroy belief in the plenary
inspiration of the scriptures, and the divine origin of revelation which
is attested by them. There is hardly a book in scripture that he did not
attack. Successively surveying the narrative of Jewish history, the
Gospels, and statements of early church history,(533) he tried to show
absurdities and contradictions in them all; not so much literary
differences in the authors as difficulties of belief in the material
revealed. In his views of Judaism and of Christianity he seems to have
fluctuated between attributing them to the fraud or mistake of their
propagators, and denying their originality. The science of historical
criticism was beginning in his day, and was applied to the legends of
Roman history. Voltaire embodied the spirit of this inquiry. In his
histories he exemplified the cold, worldly, modern mode of looking at
events, as opposed to the providential and theocratic view of them which
had found expression as recently as in the works of Bossuet.(534) And he
transferred this method to the treatment of holy scripture. No new branch
of information was left unused by him for contributing to his impious
purpose. The numerous works of travels which were affording an
acquaintance with the mythology of other nations, were made to furnish him
with the materials for hastily applying one solution to all the early
Jewish histories, which he failed to invalidate by the application of the
historic method just described. By an inversion of the argument of the
early Christian apologists, he pretended that the early history preserved
among the Hebrews was borrowed from the heathens, instead of claiming that
the heathen mythology was a trace of Hebrew tradition; and, with a view to
sustain this opinion, he discredited the integrity of the Hebrew
literature. In nothing is his singular want of poetic taste, and of the
power to appreciate the beauties of the literature of young nations, and
the ethical value of moral institutions, more visible, than in denying the
literary and monumental value of the B