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Updated: June 25, 2025
So long as deistic views of the relation of God to man and the world held the field, revelation meant something interjected ab extra into the established order of things. The popular theology which so abhorred deism was yet essentially deistic in its notion of God and of his separation from the world.
The eager continuance of the deistic controversy suggests that there was something of novelty beneath the calm; for Tindal and Woolston and Chubb struck at the root of religious belief, and Shaftesbury's exaltation of Hellenism not only contributed to the Aufklarung in Scotland, but suggested that Christian ideals were not to go unchallenged.
In a number of myths, the god is said to have visited the earth to cohabitate with the women, an occurrence which was doubtless desired, in order that the deistic attributes might be continued in the race.
As a boy he had been fond of reading French plays, had learned Latin against his father's will, had filled his mind with the ideas of deistic philosophers, and had seemed likely to become a dreamer instead of a ruler.
Such a view of the case, as we have already said in our previous chapter, is purely deistic; but we must now proceed to point out, with great respect for so great an intellect as Mill's, that the supposition which, he says, "avails nothing on the theory of an omnipotent Creator" viz., that susceptibility to pleasure involves susceptibility to pain seems to us to fit and cover the facts precisely; for a capacity for pain and a capacity for pleasure are not two different things which could conceivably exist apart from each other, but are only different manifestations of one and the same capacity, viz., for experiencing sensations of any kind whatsoever.
And this is the fearful issue to which the more recent schools of speculation are manifestly tending. The first French Revolution was brought about by the labors of men who fought against Christianity, at least ostensibly, under the banner of Deism or Natural Religion; the second Revolution was consummated under the auspices, not of a Deistic, but of an Atheistic philosophy.
"Yet you accept his 'compensation. Are you prepared to receive his deistic system?" Cornelia leaned forward and spoke eagerly. Beulah smiled. "Why strive to cloak the truth? I should not term his fragmentary system 'deistic. He knows not yet what he believes. There are singular antagonisms existing among even his pet theories."
Natural science was deistic with Locke and Voltaire, it was pantheistic in the antique sense with Shaftesbury, it was pantheistic-mystical with Spinoza, spiritualistic with Descartes, theistic with Leibnitz, materialistic with the men of the Encyclopædia. It was orthodox with nobody. The miracle as traditionally defined became impossible.
This view of the matter, it is evident, readily leads to a deistic view of the universe, or to that burlesque of the Christian view spoken of as the doctrine of an "absentee God," watching His universe run from the outside, slightly concerned with what it does.
His philosophy while it led to new speculative systems in which the name of God was used to mean something very different from the Deistic conception was a significant step further in the deliverance of reason from the yoke of authority. For the sake of simplicity I use deist in this sense throughout, though theist is now the usual term.
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