their publication; and Mallet accordingly gave them to
the world in 1754. Honest Dr. Johnson's opinion of this method of
proceeding is well known. 'Sir, he was a scoundrel and a coward; a
scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality, a
coward because he had no resolution to fire it off himself, but left
half-a-crown to a beggarly Scotchman to draw the trigger after his
death.' This is strong language, but it is not wholly undeserved. There
is something inexpressibly mean in a man countenancing the persecution
of his fellow creatures for heterodoxy, while he himself secretly held
opinions more heterodox than any of those whom he helped to persecute.
No doubt Bolingbroke regarded religion simply from a political point of
view; it was a useful, nay, a necessary engine of Government. He,
therefore, who wilfully unsettled men's minds on the subject was a bad
citizen, and consequently deserving of punishment. But then, this line
of argument would equally tell against the publication of unsettling
opinions after his death, as against publishing them during his
life-time. _Apres moi le deluge_, is not an elevated maxim; yet the only
other principle upon which his mode of proceeding admits of explanation
is, that he wrote his last works in the spirit of a soured and
disappointed man, who had been in turn the betrayer and betrayed of
every party with which he had been connected.

What his motives, however, were, can only be a matter of conjecture; let
us proceed to examine the opinions themselves. They are contained
mainly[161] in a series of essays or letters addressed by him to his
friend Pope, who did not live to read them; and they give us in a
somewhat rambling, discursive fashion, his views on almost all subjects
connected with religion. Many passages have the genuine Deistical ring
about them. Like his precursors, he declares that he means particularly
to defend the Christian religion; that genuine Christianity contained in
the Gospels is the Word of God. Like them, he can scarcely find language
strong enough to express his abhorrence of the Jews and the Old
Testament generally. Like them, he abuses divines of all ages and their
theological systems in the most unmeasured terms. It is almost needless
to add that, in common with his predecessors, he contemptuously rejects
all such doctrines as the Divinity of the Word, Expiation for Sin in any
sense, the Holy Trinity, and the Efficacy of the Sacraments.