United States or Costa Rica ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
At the beginning of the eighteenth century there were few, except Quakers, who were willing to accept from a wholly Christian point of view the element of truth contained in the Deistical argument of 'Christianity as old as the Creation.
It is somewhat discouraging to an aspirant after literary immortality, to reflect that in spite of the enormous amount of learned writing which the Deistical controversy elicited, many educated people who have not made the subject a special study, probably derive their knowledge of the Deists mainly from two unpretentious volumes Leland's 'View of the Deistical Writers.
The strictures of the latter formed part of the great Deistical controversy, and were therefore replied to by the champions of orthodoxy; but the reckless aspersions of the former, not being bound up with any controversy, were for the most part suffered to pass unchallenged.
In the other course, on Christian Evidences, he did not include any discussion on Theism which probably because of his special familiarity with the Deistical and kindred controversies, and also because the modern assaults on supernatural Christianity from the Evolutionary and Agnostic standpoint had not yet become pressing he postulated.
They referred even the most subtle questions to the pure reason, as no one now would do. The deistical movement was not really defeated. It largely compelled its opponents to adopt its methods. It left a deposit which is more nearly rated at its worth at the present than it was in its own time. But it ceased to command confidence, or even interest.
No work which can be properly called Deistical had raised anything like the excitement which was caused by the anonymous publication in 1696 of a short and incomplete treatise entitled 'Christianity not Mysterious, or a Discourse showing that there is nothing in the Gospel contrary to Reason nor above it, and that no Christian Doctrine can properly be called a Mystery. In the second edition, published the same year, the author discovered himself to be a young Irishman of the name of John Toland, who had been brought up a Roman Catholic.
But if the restrictions which Christianity imposes were not the real objections to it in the minds of the Deistical writers, at any rate their writings, or rather perhaps hazy notions of those writings picked up at second-hand, were seized upon by others who were glad of any excuse for throwing off the checks of religion.
These are the names of Alexander Pope and John Locke. The former was, as is well known, by profession a Roman Catholic; but in his most elaborate, if not his most successful poem, he has been supposed to express the sentiments of one, if not two, of the most sceptical of the Deistical writers.
During his studies, he met with a clever and brilliant friend who had imbibed the deistical teaching of the French Revolution, and infected him with it, and he came home at seventeen the winner of all the honours and prizes that the College afforded, but announcing himself to his parents as a decided infidel!
It is not improbable they may meet with some advocate of deistical principles or libertine conduct, who zealously instils into them the maxim of the well-known Earl of Shaftesbury, that "whoever is searching for truth, should examine if they cannot find out something that may be justly laughed at;" and if they can be persuaded as he was, "not to think on the subject of religion, without endeavouring to put himself in as good a humour as possible," it is not unlikely they may adopt what he calls a natural suspicion, that "the holy records themselves were no other than the pure invention and artificial compliment of an interested party, in behalf of the richest corporation and most profitable monopoly which could be erected in the world."
Word Of The Day