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which was strong, like reeds; and at the hole or place which was left to go in or out by the ladder, I had placed a kind of trap-door, which, if it had been attempted on the outside, would not have opened at all, but would have fallen down, and made a great noise; and as to weapons, I took them all into my side every night.

But I needed none of all this precaution; for never man had a more faithful, loving, sincere servant than Friday was to me; without passions, sullenness, or designs, perfectly obliged and engaged; his very affec tions were tied to me, like those of a child to a father; and I dare say he would have sacrificed his life for the saving mine, upon any occasion whatsoever. The many testimonies he gave me of this put it out of doubt, and soon convinced me that I needed to use no precautions as to my safety on his account.

(From Robinson Crusoe.)

See the Lives by Chalmers (1786), Walter Wilson (1830), William Chadwick (1859), William Lee (1869), H. Morley (1889), and Thomas Wright (1894); the studies by Scott, Lamb, Hazlitt, Forster, Leslie Stephen, and Minto; and the editions of Defoe's works in Bohn's British Classics' (1854-55), and those by Scott (novels, 1810), Hazlitt (1840), and Aitken (16 vols. 1895). Lee edited three volumes of newly discovered writings,' mostly short articles, in 1869.

Francis Atterbury (1662-1732), Bishop of Rochester, was born at Milton-Keynes, near Newport-Pagnell, and educated at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford. In 1687 he answered a pseudonymous attack on Protestantism, and, taking orders, won reputation as a preacher in a succession of charges and a royal chaplainry. Charles Boyle's Examination of Bentley's Dissertations on the Epistles of Phalaris (1698), clever but shallow, was really by Atterbury, who had been Boyle's tutor at Christ Church; his defence (1700) of Convocation won him the archdeaconry of Totnes and a canonry of Exeter. In 1704 he was promoted to the deanery of Carlisle, in 1712 became Dean of Christ Church, and in 1713 was made Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster. His reputation as the best preacher of his day is commemorated in the Tatler, where Steele, after reference to the apathetic pulpit manner of most of the London clergy, goes on to praise the 'dean' who 'is an orator.' To Atterbury is ascribed, with great likeliood, Dr Sacheverel's famous defence (1710) before the Lords; and he was author of the scarcely less famous Representation of the State of Religion (1711). The death of Queen Anne extinguished his hopes of the primacy. His Jacobite leanings secured the disfavour of the new king. In 1715 he refused to sign the bishops' declaration of fidelity, and in 1722 he was committed to the Tower. A bill of pains and penalties deprived him of all his offices and banished him for ever. In 1723 he quitted England, and after a short stay at Brussels, settled in Paris, where he died; he was afterwards laid in a nameless grave in Westminster Abbey. His works comprise sermons, and letters to Pope, Swift, Bolingbroke, and others of his friends. Macaulay's famous article is still an authority; in 1869 Williams published two volumes of Atterbury's

Correspondence. His farewell letter to Pope from the Tower (10th April 1723) is a specimen of his letters (Pope's reply is given below at page 194):

DEAR SIR-I thank you for all the instances of your A friendship, both before and since my misfortunes. little time will complete them, and separate you and me for ever. But in what part of the world soever I am, I will live mindful of your sincere kindness to me; and will please myself with the thought that I still live in your esteem and affection as much as ever I did, and that no accident of life, no distance of time or place, will alter you in that respect. It never can me, who have loved and valued you ever since I knew you, and shall not fail to do it when I am not allowed to tell you so, as the case will soon be. Give my faithful services to Dr Arbuthnot, and thanks for what he sent me, which was much to the purpose, if anything can be said to be to the purpose in a case that is already determined. Let him know my defence will be such, that neither my friends need blush for me, nor will my enemies have great occasion to triumph, though sure of the victory. I shall want his advice before I go abroad in many things. But I question whether I shall be permitted to see him or anybody but such as are absolutely necessary towards the dispatch of my private affairs. If so, God bless you both! and may no part of the ill-fortune that attends me ever pursue either of you. I know not but I may call upon you at my hearing, to say somewhat about my way of spending my time at the deanery, which did not seem calculated towards manag ing plots and conspiracies. But of that I shall consider. You and I have spent many hours together upon much pleasanter subjects; and, that I may preserve the old custom, I shall not part with you now till I have closed this letter with three lines of Milton, which you will, I know, readily, and not without some degree of concern, apply to your ever-affectionate, &c.

'Some natural tears he dropped, but wiped them soon; The world was all before him where to choose His place of rest, and Providence his guide.'

William Whiston (1667-1752), an accomplished but eccentric theologian, born at Norton rectory in Leicestershire, became successively a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge (1693), chaplain to the Bishop of Norwich, and (1698) rector of Lowestoft. He was ere this known as a zealous exponent of Newton's system. His Theory of the Earth (1696), meant to supersede Thomas Burnet's, brought him reputation, and in 1703 he was appointed Newton's successor as Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge. But for Arianism (Eusebianism he frankly professed) he was in 1710 deprived of his professorship and expelled from the university. His Primitive Christianity Revived (1711-12) included the famous heretical essay on the Apostolic Constitutions, first sketched in a paper in 1708, which maintained that this work was the most sacred of the canonical books of the New Testament, and that the doctrine of the Trinity was unscriptural. Whiston spent the remainder of his life in London, incessantly employed in writing, controversy, scientific crotchets, lectures, and the services of a 'Primitive Christian' congregation. Though an Arian he was a strong

supernaturalist, even anointing the sick and touching for the king's evil, and wrote vigorously against the deists, with whom he was in the popular mind associated. He was a transparently honest and sincere man, conscientious and outspoken, but full of scrupulosities, fads, and vagaries, who would unhesitatingly quarrel with his bread and butter for the merest trifles, and cheerfully confute his dearest friend. He was much taken up with the fulfilment of prophecy, the identification of the lost tribes with the Tartars, the approach of the millennium, and the restoration of the Jews. But it should be remembered that he was one of the very first to illustrate his lectures (on astronomy, earthquakes, and a great variety of subjects) with experiments. Whiston may have been in Goldsmith's mind when he was depicting the simple-minded vagaries of Dr Primrose. Mr Leslie Stephen has recorded fifty-two publications by Whiston. Of his standard (though far from impeccable) translation of Josephus (1737) there is a good edition by Shilleto (1890), his Life of Samuel Clarke (1730) was admirable, and the Primitive New Testament (1745) is a curiosity. His autobiographical Memoirs (1749; new ed. 1753) truly reflect, even in their pragmatical and at times tedious detail, his attractive character as well as his foibles. The following is a fragment:

The Discovery of the Newtonian Philosophy.

After I had taken holy orders, I returned to the college, and went on with my own studies there, particularly the mathematics and the Cartesian philosophy, which was alone in vogue with us at that tine. But it was not long before I, with immense pains but no assistance, set myself with the utmost zeal to the study of Sir Isaac Newton's wonderful discoveries in his Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica, one or two of which lectures I had heard him read in the public schools, though I understood them not at all at that time; being indeed greatly excited thereto by a paper of Dr Gregory's when he was professor in Scotland, wherein he had given the most prodigious commendations to that work, as not only right in all things, but in a manner the effect of a plainly divine genius, and had already caused several of his scholars to keep acts, as we call them, upon several branches of the Newtonian philosophy; while we at Cambridge, poor wretches, were ignominiously studying the fictitious hypotheses of the Cartesian, which Sir Isaac Newton had also himself done formerly, as I have heard him say. What the occasion of Sir Isaac Newton's leaving the Cartesian philosophy, and of discovering his amazing theory of gravity, was, I have heard him long ago, soon after my first acquaintance with him, which was 1694, thus relate, and of which Dr Pemberton gives the like account, and somewhat more fully, in the preface to his explication of his philosophy: It was this. inclination came into Sir Isaac's mind to try whether the same power did not keep the moon in her orbit, notwithstanding her projectile velocity, which he knew always tended to go along a straight line the tangent of that orbit, which makes stones and all heavy bodies with us fall downward, and which we call gravity;

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taking this postulatum, which had been thought of before, that such power might decrease in a duplicate proportion of the distances from the earth's centre. Upon Sir Isaac's first trial, when he took a degree of a great circle on the earth's surface, whence a degree at the distance of the moon was to be determined also, to be sixty measured miles only, according to the gross measures then in use, he was in some degree disappointed; and the power that restrained the moon in her orbit, measured by the versed sines of that orbit, appeared not to be quite the same that was to be expected had it been the power of gravity alone by which the moon was there influenced. Upon this disappointment, which made Sir Isaac suspect that this power was partly that of gravity and partly that of Cartesius's vortices, he threw aside the paper of his calculation, and went to other studies. However, some time afterward, when Monsieur Picart had much more exactly measured the earth, and found that a degree of a great circle was sixty-nine and a half such miles, Sir Isaac, in turning over some of his former papers, lighted upon this old imperfect calculation, and, correcting his former error, discovered that this power, at the true correct distance of the moon from the earth, not only tended to the earth's center, as did the common power of gravity with us, but was exactly of the right quantity; and that if a stone was carried up to the moon, or to sixty semidiameters of the earth, and let fall downward by its gravity, and the moon's own menstrual [monthly] motion was stopped, and she was let fall by that power which before retained her in her orbit, they would exactly fall towards the same point, and with the same velocity; which was therefore no other power than that of gravity. And since that power appeared to extend as far as the moon, at the distance of 240,000 miles, it was but natural, or rather necessary, to suppose it might reach twice, thrice, four times, &c., the same distance, with the same diminution, according to the squares of such distances perpetually: which noble discovery proved the happy occasion of the invention of the wonderful Newtonian philosophy.

David Gregory left his chair of mathematics in Edinburgh in 1691 to become Savilian professor of astronomy at Oxford. For the discovery of gravitation, see above at Newton, page 11.

Samuel Clarke (1675-1729), born at Norwich, was the son of the M.P. for the town, and at Caius College, Cambridge, studied physics, philosophy, and theology. The Cartesian system then held almost universal sway, but Clarke adopted the views of Newton, and expounded them in his edition of Rohault's Physics. He took orders in 1698. Chaplain from 1698 to Bishop Moore of Norwich, in 1706 he became chaplain to Queen Anne, and in 1709 rector of St James's, Westminster. By his work on the Trinity (1712), in which he denied that that doctrine was held by the early Church, he raised the controversy in which Waterland was his chief opponent. His own views seem to have a distinctly Arian character or tendency; and when he was charged with heresy, the form in which he stated his adherence to orthodoxy was held by some to be a conscious evasion. He recanted nothing, but promised not to write more on the subject, and

escaped the fate that had befallen Whiston four years earlier. Clarke was a vigorous antagonist

of the deists; he wrote against materialism, empiricism, and necessitarianism, and maintained the essential immortality of the soul. He taught that the fundamental truths of morals were as absolutely certain as the truths of mathematics; space and time he held to be attributes of an infinite and immaterial being. His famous Discourse concerning the Being and Attributes of God, originally the Boyle Lectures of 1704-5, was in answer to Hobbes, Spinoza, Blount, and the freethinkers, and contained the famous demonstration of the existence of God, often, but inaccurately, called an a priori argument. He expressly says of some points in his argument that they are not easily proved a priori, and as expressly proves them a posteriori, using these terms. The main propositions in this celebrated argument as given in summary by Clarke himself

are:

(1) That something has existed from eternity; (2) That there has existed from eternity some one immutable and independent being; (3) That that immutable and independent being, which has existed from eternity, without any external cause of its existence, must be self-existent, that is, necessarily existing; (4) What the substance or essence of that being, which is self-existent or necessarily existing, is we have no idea, neither is it at all possible for us to comprehend it; (5) That though the substance or essence of the self-existent being is itself absolutely incomprehensible to us, yet many of the essential attributes of his nature are strictly demonstrable, as well as his existence, and, in the first place, that he must be of necessity eternal; (6) That the self-existent being must of necessity be infinite and omnipresent, (7) Must be but one, (8) Must be an intelligent being, (9) Must be not a necessary agent, but a being indued with liberty and choice, (10) Must of necessity have infinite power, (11) Must be infinitely wise, and (12) Must of necessity be a being of infinite goodness, justice, and truth, and all other moral perfections, such as become the supreme governor and judge of the world.

Clarke, who was after Locke the most notable English philosopher of the day, was opposed to Locke in the whole attitude of his mind, and might in contrast to Locke be described as an a priori philosopher. He was more decidedly a metaphysician, more inclined to speculation, more given to drawing large conclusions from abstract postulates and propositions, an intuitionalist in ethics, metaphysics, and theology. He was rather admirably skilful in the controversial handling of philosophical commonplaces than an original thinker, a keen and powerful dialectician than a profound theologian or philosopher. But though without any gift of style other than the power of making himself as clear as the argument permitted, he was for many years the most conspicuous English writer in the domain of philosophy and theology, and in morals he ranks as founder of the intellectual school of which Wollaston and Price were exponents, affirming that the nature of good

and evil, the obligation to virtue, are evident from the principles of reason, and that immorality means a perversity or obtuseness of intelligence. Pope assailed his 'high priori road' in the Dunciad; Bolingbroke often attacked his views. Hoadly and other latitudinarian Churchmen were devoted disciples; Butler, Berkeley, Hutcheson, were correspondents. Clarke's keen correspondence with Leibnitz (published in 1717) dealt with space and time and their relations to God, and with moral freedom. He wrote as forcibly on the proportion of force to velocity as on the being of God, translated Newton's Optics into Latin for him, and published editions of Cæsar and of the Iliad, the latter with a Latin version mainly original, though the notes were compiled from various quarters. The following (from the great Discourse, Part II.) is a statement by Clarke on the Essential Difference between Right and Wrong.

But as

The principal thing that can with any colour of reason seem to countenance the opinion of those who deny the natural and eternal difference of good and evil . . . is the difficulty there may sometimes be to define exactly the bounds of right and wrong; the variety of opinions that have obtained even among understanding and learned men concerning certain questions of just and unjust, especially in political matters; and the many contrary laws that have been made in divers ages and in different countries concerning these matters. in painting two very different colours, by diluting each other very slowly and gradually, may, from the highest intenseness in either extreme, terminate in the midst insensibly, and so run one into the other that it shall not be possible even for a skilful eye to determine exactly where the one ends and the other begins; and yet the colours may really differ as much as can be, not in degree only but entirely in kind, as red and blue, or white and black: so though it may perhaps be very difficult in some nice and perplexed cases (which yet are very far from occurring frequently) to define exactly the bounds of right and wrong, just and unjust—and there may be some latitude in the judgment of different men, and the laws of divers nations—yet right and wrong are nevertheless in themselves totally and essentially different; even altogether as much as white and black, light and darkness. The Spartan law, perhaps, which permitted their youth to steal, may, as absurd as it was, bear much dispute whether it was absolutely unjust or no; because, every man having an absolute right in his own goods, it may seem that the members of any society may agree to transfer or alter their own properties upon what conditions they shall think fit. But if it could be supposed that a law had been made at Sparta, or at Rome, or in India, or in any other part of the world, whereby it had been commanded or allowed that every man might rob by violence, and murder whomsoever he met with, or that no faith should be kept with any man, nor any equitable compacts performed, no man, with any tolerable use of his reason, whatever diversity of judgment might be among them in other matters, would have thought that such a law could have authorised or excused, much less have justified such actions, and have made them become good because 'tis plainly not in men's power to make

falsehood be truth, though they may alter the property of their goods as they please. Now if in flagrant cases the natural and essential difference between good and evil, right and wrong, cannot but be confessed to be plainly and undeniably evident, the difference between them must be also essential and unalterable in all, even the smallest and nicest and most intricate cases, though it be not so easy to be discerned and accurately distinguished. For if, from the difficulty of determining exactly the bounds of right and wrong in many perplext cases, it could truly be concluded that just and unjust were not essentially different by nature, but only by positive constitution and custom, it would follow equally that they were not really, essentially, and unalterably different, even in the most flagrant cases that can be supposed. Which is an assertion so very absurd that Mr Hobbes himself could hardly vent it without blushing, and discovering plainly, by his shifting expressions, his secret self-condemnation. There are therefore certain necessary and eternal differences of things, and certain fitnesses or unfitnesses of the application of different things, or different relations one to another, or depending on any positive constitutions, but founded unchangeably in the nature and reason of things, and unavoidably arising from the difference of the things themselves.

See the Life by Hoadly prefixed to his collected works (4 vols. 1738-42), that by Whiston (1741), and a German one by R. Zimmermann (Vienna, 1870).

John Toland (1669-1722) was born of Catholic parents near the village of Redcastle in County Londonderry. He entered the University of Glasgow in 1687, but removing to Edinburgh, abandoned the Roman Catholic faith and passed M.A. in 1690. At Leyden, where he spent two years, he studied theology under Spanheim, and made the acquaintance of the famous Le Clerc, foremost and most accomplished of the 'advanced' theologians of Europe, and distinctly 'unsound' on the inspiration of the Scriptures. He resided for a time at Oxford, and in the Bodleian collected the materials of more than one of his later publications. In Christianity not Mysterious (1696) he expressly claimed to accept all the essentials of Christianity, but maintained that the value of religion could not lie in any unintelligible element, and that no part of the truth could be contrary to reason. He chose his title with evident reference to Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), and professed to have at heart the defence of revelation against deists and atheists. But the anti-supernatural and freethinking tendency-and disguised intention-of the work was obvious; it greatly perturbed the theological world, began the 'deistical controversy' that occupied so much of the early eighteenth century, and led to several replies (as by Stillingfleet). Locke somewhat anxiously sought to disavow community of thought. Prosecuted in Middlesex, Toland withdrew to Ireland; but when by vote of the Irish House of Commons his book was burned publicly by the common hangman, and a prosecution decided on, he fled back to London. He annoyed Shaftesbury by surreptitiously publishing his Inquiry in 1699.

In Amyntor (1699) and other works he fairly raised the question as to the comparative evidence for the canonical and apocryphal scriptures, with professed candour but unmistakably mischievous intent. A pamphlet entitled Anglia Libera, on the succession of the House of Brunswick, led to his being received with favour by the Princess Sophia when he accompanied the English ambassador to the court of Hanover; and from 1707 to 1710 he lived in Berlin and various Continental towns. His after-life was that of a literary adventurer, and fills a painful chapter in D'Israeli's Calamities of Authors. He was apparently employed as an agent by Harley, and he did some political pamphleteering-latterly against Jacobitism and High-Church views. In Nazarenus (1720) he insisted, somewhat on the lines developed by Semler and the Tübingen school, that there were two distinctly opposed parties in the early Christian Church-one Judaistic (which he identified with the Ebionites), and one Pauline or liberal. His Pantheisticon, a pantheistic liturgy for a hypothetical society of new light philosophers, was regarded as an offensive parody of the Anglican Prayer-book. He resided from the year 1718 at Putney, and there he died.

Besides the works named, and various defences, apologies, and pamphlets, he wrote a Life of Milton, prefixed to an edition of the prose works (1698), which gave room for criticisms of Church polity and implicit commendation of unorthodoxy ; an Account of Prussia and Hanover (1705); Adeisidæmon (1709); Origines Judaicæ (1709); and a History of the Druids. Hodegus explains that the pillar of cloud and fire was not meant by the author of the Pentateuch to be taken as miraculous, but was a portable fire or ambulatory beacon carried on a proper machine on a pole, such as we know were used by the ancient Persians; and in the twenty-two short chapters of Hypatia, written when Whiston was suffering for his heresies, he finds plenty of room for assailing the pride, malice, cruelty, and unscrupulousness of the Churchmen of all ages.

He was an acute and audacious pioneer of freethought, versatile but vain, unseasonably aggressive in diffusing his new light, and widely read rather than really learned; and he wrote with point and vigour. His grasp of some of the problems of early Christian history was really remarkable, and seems to have had some influence on German rationalism. His precarious life cut him off from the chance of scholarly research, but he was quite unjustly despised by the orthodox. Defoe-not himself a model character-reflects the general attitude towards deists. Reporting the death of 'the late eminent or rather notorious Mr Toland,' he was sadly scandalised at Toland's character and history, 'how he has for many years employed the best parts and a great stock of reading to the worst purposes, namely, to shock the faith of Christians in the glorious person and divinity of their Redeemer, and to sap and under

mine the principles of the orthodox faith.' And he held that the premature death of one 'who has been so great an enemy of revealed religion, so open an opposer of orthodox principles, and had so often blasphemed the divinity of our blessed Redeemer,' confirms his own observation that 'he never knew an open blasphemer of God live to be an old man.'

From the Life of Milton.

He was never very healthy, nor too sickly; and the distemper that troubled him most of any other was the gout, of which he dyed without much pain in the year from the birth of Christ 1674, and in the six-and-sixtieth of his age. All his learned and great friends in London, not without a friendly concourse of the vulgar, accompanied his body to the church of St Giles near Cripplegate, where he lies buried in the chancel; and where the piety of his admirers will shortly erect a monument becoming his worth, and the incouragement of letters in king William's reign.

Thus lived and died John Milton, a person of the best accomplishments, the happiest genius, and the vastest learning which this nation, so renowned for producing excellent writers, could ever yet shew: esteemed indeed at home, but much more honoured abroad, where almost in his childhood he made a considerable figure, and continues to be still reputed one of the brightest luminaries of the sciences. He was middle-sized and well proportioned, his deportment erect and manly, his hair of a light brown, his features exactly regular, his complexion wonderfully fair when a youth, and ruddy to the very last. He was affable in conversation, of an equal and cheerful temper, and highly delighted with all sorts of music, in which he was himself not meanly skilled. He was extraordinary temperat in his diet, which was any thing most in season or the easiest procured, and was no friend to sharp or strong liquors. His recreations, before his sight was gone, consisted much in feats of activity, particularly in the exercise of his arms, which he could handle with dexterity: but when blindness and age confined him, he played much upon an organ he kept in the house, and had a pully to swing and keep him in motion. But the love of books exceeded all his other passions. In summer he would be stirring at four in the morning, and in winter at five; but at night he used to go to bed by nine, partly attributing the loss of his eys to his late watching when he was a student, and looking on this custom as very pernicious to health at any time: but when he was not disposed to rise at his usual hours, he always had one to read to him by his bedside. As he looked upon true and absolute freedom to be the greatest happiness of this life, whether to societies or single persons; so he thought constraint of any sort to be the utmost misery: for which reason he used to tell those about him the intire satisfaction of his mind, that he had constantly imployed his strength and faculties in the defence of liberty, and in a direct opposition to slavery. He ever exprest the profoundest reverence to the Deity as well in deeds as words; and would say to his friends, that the divine properties of goodness, justice, and mercy were the adequate rule of human actions, nor less the object of imitation for privat advantages, than of admiration or respect for their own excellence and perfection. In his early days he was a favorer of those Protestants

then opprobriously called by the name of Puritans: In his middle years he was best pleased with the Independents and Anabaptists, as allowing of more liberty than others, and coming nearest in his opinion to the primitive practice: but in the latter part of his life, he was not a profest member of any particular sect among Christians, he frequented none of their assemblies, nor made use of their particular rites in his family. Whether this proceeded from a dislike of their uncharitable and endless disputes, and that love of dominion, or inclination to persecution, which, he said, was a piece of Popery inseparable from all churches; or whether he thought one might be a good man without subscribing to any party, and that they had all in some things corrupted the institutions of Jesus Christ, I will by no means adventure to determine: for conjectures on such occasions are very uncertain, and I never met with any of his acquaintance who could be positive in assigning the true reasons of his conduct.

I shall now conclude this discourse with a character given of him by a man of unparalleled diligence and industry, who has disobliged all sides merely for telling the truth either intirely or without disguise, and who, since most men have the frailty of ingaging in factions, cannot be suspected of partiality in favor of Milton. He was a person, says Anthony Wood in the first volume of his Athena Oxonienses, of wonderful parts, of a very sharp, biting, and satyrical wit; he was a good philosopher and historian; an excellent poet, Latinist, Grecian, and Hebrician; a good mathematician and musician; and so rarely endowed by nature, that had he bin but honestly principled, he might have bin highly useful to that party against which he all along appeared with much malice and bitterness.

There is a Life by Des Maizeaux prefixed to two vols, of Toland's posthumous works (1747), and a monograph by Berthold, Jehu Toland und der Monismus der Gegenwart (Heidelb. 1876). For Toland's partial anticipation of Semler and Baur, see an article in the Theological Review, 1877.

Matthew Tindal (1656–1733), deistical writer, born at Beerferris rectory, South Devon, was elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. A Roman Catholic under James II., he reverted to Protestantism of a freethinking type, and wrote An Essay of Obedience to the Supreme Powers (1693) and Rights of the Christian Church asserted against the Romish and all other Priests (1706). The latter raised a storm of opposition; but even a prosecution failed to prevent a fourth edition in 1709. In 1730 Tindal published his Christianity as old as the Creation, which was soon known as 'The Deist's Bible;' its aim is not merely to state the case in favour of natural religion, but, less directly, to infer the superfluousness of any other. He seems to admit an actual revelation confirming natural religion, but, seeing that in this case there was nothing new revealed, the result is to eliminate the supernatural element from Christianity, and to prove that its morality is its only claim to the reverence of mankind. 'Answers' were innumerable, and the deistical controversy was an outstanding topic of interest to all educated men, to laymen as much as to those theologically educated. The note of the deistical writers was their reliance on common-sense argument rather

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