e of all the disasters and
errors of several generations. Romanists had quoted them when they
condemned Protestants to the stake, Protestants when they condemned
Jesuits to the block. The Roundhead had founded his wild reign of
fanaticism on their authority. The Cavalier had texts ready at hand to
sanction the most unconstitutional measures. 'The right divine of kings
to govern wrong' had been grounded on Scriptural authority. All the
strange vagaries in which the seventeenth century had been so fruitful
claimed the voice of Scripture in their favour.

Such reckless use of Scripture tended to throw discredit upon it as a
revelation from God; while, on the other hand, the grand discoveries in
natural science which were a distinguishing feature of the seventeenth
century equally tended to exalt men's notions of that other revelation
of Himself which God has made in the Book of Nature. The calm attitude
of the men of science who had been steadily advancing in the knowledge
of the natural world, and by each fresh discovery had given fresh proofs
of the power, and wisdom, and goodness of God, stood forth in painful
contrast with the profitless wranglings and bitter animosities of
Divines. Men might well begin to ask themselves whether they could not
find rest from theological strife in natural religion? and the real
object of the Deists was to demonstrate that they could.

Thus the period of Deism was the period of a great religious crisis in
England. It is our present purpose briefly to trace the progress and
termination of this crisis.

It is hardly necessary to remark that Deism was not a product of the
eighteenth century. The spirit in which Deism appeared in its most
pronounced form had been growing for many generations previous to that
date. But we must pass over the earlier Deists, of whom the most
notable was Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and come at once to a writer who,
although his most notorious work was published before the seventeenth
century closed, lived and wrote during the eighteenth, and may fairly be
regarded as belonging to that era.

No work which can be properly called Deistical had raised anything like
the excitement which was caused by the anonymous publication in 1696 of
a short and incomplete treatise entitled 'Christianity not Mysterious,
or a Discourse showing that there is nothing in the Gospel contrary to
Reason nor above it, and that no Christian Doctrine can properly be
called a Mystery.' In