er-Terres, presented to him by the
University of Cambridge, in the time of the Civil Wars.--Young Matthew
was educated at Oxford, where at twenty-eight he took the degree of
LL.D. Matthew Tindal, LL. D., was early tossed about by the winds of
doctrine. First he embraced Romanism: afterwards he became a Protestant.
Then politics interested him, and he engaged in controversy on the side
of William III. He was appointed Commissioner of a Court for Trying
Foreigners. In 1693 he published an essay on the Law of Nations
When fifty-four, in 1710, he entered so vigorously into theological
controversy, arising out of Trinitarian criticism, that his marked
satire led to his books being condemned by the House of Commons, and
burnt by the hangman. He resented this indignity by a spirited attack on
the dominant priestly party in his "High Church Catechism," and he also
wrote in defence of philosophical necessity. But his most notable work
was the performance of his old age, his "Christianity as Old as the
Creation: or, the Gospel, a Republication of the Religion of Nature."
This was produced in his seventy-third year. He was attacked in Reply
by Bishop Waterland. It is generally agreed that in point of good spirit
and good temper the Bishop was far inferior to the Deist. Dr. Conyers
Middleton, says Thomas Cooper, in his brief sketch of Tindal, appeared
in defence of Tindal in a "Letter to Dr. Waterland," whom he condemned
for the shallowness of his answer to Tindal, and boldly and frankly
admitted that the Freethinker was right in asserting that the Jews
borrowed some of their ceremonies and customs from Egypt; that allegory
was, in some cases, employed in the Scriptures, where common readers
took the relation for fact; and, that the Scriptures are _not_ of
"absolute and universal inspiration." The following sentence, which will
be found in this "Letter" of Dr. Conyers Middleton, does honor to his
name:--"If religion consists in depreciating moral duties and depressing
natural reason; if the duty of it be to hate and persecute for
a different way of thinking where the best and wisest have never
agreed--then. I declare myself an Infidel, and to have no share in that
religion." Matthew Tindal died at his house in Coldbath Fields, of the
stone, 1773, aged seventy-seven. * Rysbrach, the famous statuary, took a
model of him.

* Julian Hibbert gives 1656-7: Dr. Beard, 1556; Thomas
Cooper, 1657, as the year of Tindal's birth. All