Rotterdam. From Holland,
earlier, had proceeded an apologetic work by a man of European fame.
Hugo Grotius's _De Veritate Christianae Religionis_ (1627) is partly the
medieval tradition:--Oppose Mahommedans and Jews! It is partly
practical:--Arm Christian sailors against religious danger! But in its
cool spirit it forecasts the coming age, whose master is John Locke. His
_Reasonableness of Christianity_ (1695) is the thesis of "a whole
century" of theologians. And his _Essay on the Human Understanding_
(1690) is almost a Bible to men of education during the same period; its
lightest word treasured. Locke does not break with the compromise of
Aquinas. But he transfers attention from _contents_ to _proof_. Reason
proves that a revelation has been made-and then submits. Leibnitz has to
supplement rather than correct Locke on this point.

In such an atmosphere, deism readily uttered its protest against
mysterious revelation. Deism is, in fact, the Thomist natural theology
(more clearly distinguished from dogmatic theology than in the middle
ages, alike by Protestants and by the post-Tridentine Church of Rome)
now dissolving partnership with dogmatic and starting in business for
itself. Or it is the doctrine of unfallen man's "natural state"--a
doctrine intensified in Protestantism--separating itself from the
theologians' grave doctrine of sin. If Socinianism had challenged
natural theology--Christ, according to it, was the prophet who first
revealed the way to eternal life--it had glorified the natural powers of
man; and the learning of the Arminian divines (friends of Grotius and
Locke) had helped to modernize Christian apologetics upon rational
lines. Deism now taught that reason, or "the light of nature," was
all-sufficient.

Not to dwell upon earlier continental "Deists" (mentioned by Viret as
quoted first in Bayle's _Dictionary_ and again in the introduction to
Leland's _View of the Deistical Writers_), Lord Herbert of Cherbury (_De
Veritate_, 1624; _De Religione Gentilium_, 1645?--according to J.G.
Walch's _Bibliotheca Theologica_ (1757) not published complete until
1663) was universally understood as hinting conclusions hostile to
Christianity (cf. also T. Hobbes, _Leviathan_, 1651, ch. xxxi.; Spinoza,
_Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_, 1670, ch. xiv.). Professedly,
Herbert's contention merely is that non-Christians feeling after the
"supreme God" and the law of righteousness must have a chance of
salvation. Herber