ll, but
there is a significant difference, attributable perhaps to the weakening
of orthodox theology and the spreading influence of the Shaftesburian
school of ethical theorists. In the older theology, man's progressive
loss of grace correspondingly releases his natural propensity for evil,
and working in these concepts neither Hill nor Lillo hesitated to show
his hero descending to murder. Moore, influenced perhaps by the ethical
sentiments of the day, compromised his theological concepts and
permitted his hero no really evil act (excluding of course his suicide),
and stressed instead Beverly's mistaken trust in Stukely, who is, as
Elton has pointed out, a "Mandevillian man" (_Survey of English
Literature: 1730-1760_, I, 329-30).

There is another significant difference between the two plays which
reflects the development of religious thought in the first half of the
eighteenth century. Commenting on the too-late arrival of the news of
the uncle's death, Elton remarks that "this _too-lateness_... which
is in the nature of an accident, is a common and mechanical device of
Georgian tragedy" (I, 330). Hill employed the device, the good news
coming as a complete surprise, but he made it part of a carefully
ordered plot designed to reveal the direct intervention and mysterious
workings of a particular Providence, making characterization and action
consistent, and giving his play a precise theological significance. In
Moore's day, however, under the impact of deism and the developing
rationalism, the concept of a particular Providence in orthodox theology
had become so subtilized that the older idea of direct and striking
intervention in human affairs all but disappeared. By mid-eighteenth
century, deity, as Leslie Stephen points out, "appears under the
colourless shape of Providence--a word which may be taken to imply
a remote divine superintendence, without admitting an actual divine
interference" (_History of English Thought In the Eighteenth Century_,
II, 336). The references to Providence in Moore's play are of this type,
pious labels on prudential morality. Moore carefully avoids the various
devices employed by Hill to indicate direct divine intervention;
consequently the late arrival of the news of the uncle's death (which
was expected throughout the play) is without special meaning, and serves
only as a theatrical device intended to heighten the emotional effect.
_The Gamester_, then, is a clear reflection of the st