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Updated: June 10, 2025
Now that he has read my spiritualistic articles, he tries hard to break down my arguments. On the third side, my uncle, as a Mahometan, wants to convert him to deism; you may judge from this how much harmony there is between us; you might take us for an Academy!
Is it not more safe that we stop ourselves at the plain, pure, and unmixed belief of one God, which is deism, than that we commit ourselves on an ocean of improbable, irrational, indecent, and contradictory tales? The first question, however, upon the books of the New Testament, as upon those of the Old, is, Are they genuine? were they written by the persons to whom they are ascribed?
Is it a wonder that this God-less world should be a dismal place and full of misery, and that human nature, left to itself, should have "no health" in it? It would be matter for wonder if it were otherwise; and thus Deism is well in accord with those gloomier forms of religious thought which for a long time were the generally predominating ones.
The question then naturally arises, 'What will you substitute in its place? or rather, to put the question as a Deist would have put it, 'What will you substitute in the place of the popular conception of Christianity? for this alone, not Christianity itself, Deism professed to attack. In other words, 'What is the positive or constructive side of Deism?
Deism was comparatively impotent against the Church of England, first, because it was an intellectual movement, and not a social one; second, because the constitutional doctrines of the church were flexible. Deism in the hands of its French propagators became connected with social liberalism, because the Catholic church in those days was identified with all the ideas of repression.
They looked on miracles as impossible, and regarded all the Bible accounts of supernatural events as fables. They were Deists. One I found who declared his disbelief in a future life. There was a gradual incline from the almost Christian doctrine of Carpenter and Channing, down to the principles of Deism and Atheism. While in London I became acquainted with Dr.
The result, however, of all this is that the conflicting tendencies which have always been present in the Church have been greatly deepened. There are to be found within it men whose opinions can hardly be distinguished from simple Deism or Unitarianism, and men who abjure the name of Protestant and are only divided by the thinnest of partitions from the Roman Church.
ENGLISH DEISM. The religious debates and the religious wars of the seventeenth century were followed by much indifference and disbelief in the eighteenth. Weariness with sectarian struggles, and revolt against the yoke of creeds, were pushed to the extreme of a denial of revealed religion, finally, in France, to a denial of the truths of natural religion also.
Goldsmith's famous lines in Retaliation show how they all deplored that he should to party give up what was meant for mankind. They often told one another that Edmund Burke was the man whose genius pointed him out as the triumphant champion of faith and sound philosophy against deism, atheism, and David Hume. They loved to see him, as Goldsmith said, wind into his subject like a serpent.
Paine was a deist, and he wrote The Age of Reason on the threshold of a French prison, primarily to counteract the atheism which he thought he saw at work among the Jacobins an odd diagnosis, for Robespierre was at least as ardent in his deism as Paine himself.
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