cal and anti-Deistical literature. What
Dodwell urges in bitter irony, John Wesley urged in sober seriousness,
when he intimated that Deists and evidence writers alike were strangers
to those truths which are 'spiritually discerned.'

There is yet one more writer who is popularly regarded not only as a
Deist, but as the chief of the Deists--Lord Bolingbroke, to whom Leland
gives more space than to all the other Deists put together. So far as
the eminence of the man is concerned, the prominence given to him is not
disproportionate to his merits, but it is only in a very qualified sense
that Lord Bolingbroke can be called a Deist. He lived and was before the
public during the whole course of the Deistical controversy, so far as
it belongs to the eighteenth century; but he was known, not as a
theologian, but first as a brilliant, fashionable man of pleasure, then
as a politician. So far as he took any part in religious matters at all,
it was as a violent partisan of the established faith and as a
persecutor of Dissenters. It was mainly through his instrumentality that
the iniquitous Schism Act of 1713 was passed. In the House of Commons he
called it 'a bill of the last importance, since it concerned the
security of the Church of England, the best and firmest support of the
monarchy.' In his famous letter to Sir W. Wyndham, he justified his
action in regard to this measure, and the kindred bill against
occasional conformity, on purely political grounds. He publicly
expressed his abhorrence of the so-called Freethinkers, whom he
stigmatised as 'Pests of Society.' But in a letter to Mr. Pope, he gave
some intimation of his real sentiments, and at the same time justified
his reticence about them. 'Let us,' he writes, 'seek truth, but quietly,
as well as freely. Let us not imagine, like some who are called
Freethinkers, that every man who can think and judge for himself, as he
has a right to do, has therefore a right of speaking any more than
acting according to freedom of thought.' Then, after expressing
sentiments which are written in the very spirit of Deism, he adds, 'I
neither expect nor desire to see any public revision made of the present
system of Christianity. I should fear such an attempt, &c.' It was
accordingly not until after his death that his theological views were
fully expressed and published. These are principally contained in his
'Philosophical Works,' which he bequeathed to David Mallet with
instructions for