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Updated: May 10, 2025
For, however irreligious and profane Voltaire and his associates might be, and however devoted to their avowed object of crushing Christ and his cause, so significantly indicated by their motto and watchword, "Ecrasez l'Infame;" yet they continued, as a party, to advocate Deism, and seemed at least to oppose the bolder speculations of the author of the "Systeme de la Nature."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge relates how the clergy raised the cry of Atheism against him, although he had never advanced further than Deism. And it is to his credit that in referring to this charge he said: Little do these men know what Atheism is. Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an Atheist. I repeat it.
It seems that Darwin in his theology is not only inclined to theism, but, following the traditions of his countrymen of the last century, to a quite cool and superficial deism, and that he permits himself to be too much impressed by the anti-teleological deductions of many of his followers, and to be induced to separate in his later publications the Creator and his work more widely than he has done in the beginning.
What shadow of pretence have ye now to produce for continuing the blasphemous fraud? What have ye still to offer against the pure and moral religion of deism, in support of your system of falsehood, idolatry, and pretended revelation?
The rather abstract and futile Deism of the eighteenth century, of "votre Etre supreme" who bored the friends of Robespierre, was a sterile thing, it has little relation to these modern developments, it conceived of God as an infinite Being of no particular character whereas God is a finite being of a very especial character.
Therefore, so long as attempts at explaining the different forms of existence in the world wholly from one another keep within their own limits, and do not of themselves undermine theism; and so long as there are men who on the one hand favor such a mode of explanation and on the other hand still adhere firmly to a faith in God, whether it be the deeper theism or the more shallow and superficial deism so long religion has no reason for opposing those attempts at explanation.
It is neither above his power, nor, when employed for a sufficient purpose, inconsistent with his majesty, wisdom, and goodness. This is the ever open and vulnerable part of Deism. The Deist, as a Deist, believes, 'implicite' at least, so many and stupendous miracles as to render his disbelief of lesser miracles, simply because they are miraculous, gross inconsistencies.
Referring to Coleridge, it is stated that he "was dishonored at Cambridge for preaching Deism, and that he had since left his native country, and left his poor children fatherless, and his wife destitute:" ex his disce his friends Lamb and Southey. A scurrilous libel of this stamp would now be rejected by all persons of good feeling or good character.
This was an examination not of the truth, but of the usefulness of religious belief, in the most general sense, apart from the peculiarities of any special revelation; which, of all the parts of the discussion concerning religion, is the most important in this age, in which real belief in any religious doctrine is feeble and precarious, but the opinion of its necessity for moral and social purposes almost universal; and when those who reject revelation, very generally take refuge in an optimistic Deism, a worship of the order of Nature, and the supposed course of Providence, at least as full of contradictions, and perverting to the moral sentiments, as any of the forms of Christianity, if only it is as completely realized.
Add to all this that the progress and zenith of Deism followed in direct chronological order after the publication of Locke's two great works, and that in consequence of these works he was distinctly identified by several obscure and at least one very distinguished writer with 'the gentlemen of the new way of thinking. But there is another side of the picture to which we must now turn.
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