ing neglect of the earlier history of Christianity,
the comparative cessation of minor disputes, and the greater
emancipation of reason through the recent Act of Toleration, all
combined to encourage it. Besides this, physical science was making
great strides. The revolution of ideas effected by Newton's great
discovery made a strangely wide gap between seventeenth and eighteenth
century modes of thinking and speaking on many points connected with the
material universe. It was felt more or less clearly by most thinking men
that the relations of theology to the things of outward sense needed
readjustment. Newton himself, like his contemporaries, Boyle, Flamsteed,
and Halley, was a thoroughly religious man, and his general faith as a
Christian was confirmed rather than weakened by his perception of the
vast laws which had become disclosed to him. On many others the first
effect was different. Either they were impressed with exorbitant ideas
of the majesty of that faculty of reasoning which could thus transcend
the bounds of all earthly space, or else the sense of a higher spiritual
life was overpowered by the revelation of uniform physical laws
operating through a seeming infinite expanse of material existence. The
one cause tended to create a notion that unassisted reason was
sufficient for all human needs; the other developed a frequent bias to
materialism. Both alike rendered it imperative to earnest minds that
felt competent to the task to inquire what reason had to say about the
nature of our spiritual life, and the principles and religious motives
which chiefly govern it. Difficulties arising out of man's position as a
part of universal nature had scarcely been felt before. Nor even in the
last century did they assume the proportions they have since attained.
But they deserve to be largely taken into account in any review of the
evidence writers of that period. Not to speak of Derham's
'Physico-Theology' and other works of that class, neither Berkeley,
Butler, nor Paley--three great names--can be properly understood without
reference to the greatly increased attention which was being given to
the physical sciences. Berkeley's suggestive philosophy was distinctly
based upon an earnest wish to release the essence of all theology from
an embarrassing dependence upon the outward world of sense. Butler's
'Analogy'--by far the greatest theological work of the century--aims
throughout at creating a strong sense of the unity