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Updated: June 10, 2025
He belonged, therefore, to what he himself called the school of Eclectical Christiology; and accommodated the reasonings of Deism to the doctrines of the Church, if not as a creed, at least as an institution. Finally, he united all the Chillingly votes in his favour; and when he departed from the Hall carried off Kenelm for his initiation into the new ideas that were to govern his generation.
In religion Cassier at first strongly advocated the principles of Lutheranism; but, as is ever the case with those set adrift on the sea of doubt, freed from the anchor of faith, the definite character of his belief was shipwrecked in a confusion of ideas. At length he lapsed into the negative deism of the French infidels, just then commencing to gain ground in France.
This kind of conception is extremely primitive, and is unfavourable to religion itself, for in it mystery is done away with and arranged according to rubric, and everything has become quite “simple.” Moreover, this doctrine has a necessary tendency to turn into the dreaded “Deism.” According to the deistic view, God made the world in the beginning, and set the system of natural causes in motion, in such a way that no farther assistance was given, and everything went on of itself.
There is a state religion, Deism. There is probably no one who does not believe in God. But if any atheist were discovered, he would be put through a course of experimental physics. If he remained obdurate in his rejection of a "palpable and salutary truth," the nation would go into mourning and banish him from its borders. Every one has to work, but labour no longer resembles slavery.
Unlike most inquirers of that time, he had no love for the abstract and the controversial, but entertained them freely as finally discovering some path to the concrete and the unquestioned. He declared that only to superficial persons was skepticism the terminus of speculative deism.
Let us not imagine, like some who are called Freethinkers, that every man who can think and judge for himself, as he has a right to do, has therefore a right of speaking any more than acting according to freedom of thought. Then, after expressing sentiments which are written in the very spirit of Deism, he adds, 'I neither expect nor desire to see any public revision made of the present system of Christianity.
By friend and foe alike Tindal seems to have been regarded as the chief exponent of Deism. Tindal was in many respects fitted for the position which he occupied. He was an old man when he wrote his great work, and had observed and taken an interest in the whole course of the Deistical controversy for more than forty years.
The year after the publication of Woolston's discourses, and some years before Annet wrote, by far the most important work which ever appeared on the part of the Deists was published. Hitherto Deism had mainly been treated on its negative or destructive side.
'Deism, they said, 'is opposed to Atheism on the one side and to superstition on the other; but to Christianity true, original Christianity as it came forth from the hands of its founder, the Deists are so far from being opposed, that they are its truest defenders. Whether their position was logically tenable is quite another question, but that they assumed it in all sincerity there is no reason to doubt.
But there is yet one more author to be noticed whose works were still written in the earlier vein of Deism. So far Deism had not found a representative writer among the lower classes.
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