Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 6, 2025
He still accepted Thomas Brown as a great metaphysician, but thought that in moral questions Brown's deistical optimism required to be corrected by an infusion of Butler's theory of conscience. He could adapt Butler's Analogy, and write an edifying Bridgewater Treatise.
'Put all such abstruse matters aside, Chubb says in effect to his fellow-workmen, 'they have nothing to do with the main point at issue, they are no parts of the true Gospel. His rocks of offence, too, are just those against which the working man would stumble. The shortcomings of the clergy had long been part of the stock-in-trade of almost all the Deistical writers.
Their studies are chiefly confined to Rollin and Plutarch, the deistical works of Voltaire, and the visionary politics of Jean Jaques. Hence they amuse their hearers with allusions to Caesar and Lycurgus, the Rubicon, and Thermopylae. Hence they pretend to be too enlightened for belief, and despise all governments not founded on the Contrat Social, or the Profession de Foi.
Indeed, human life is too short to enable the general reader to do more than skim cursorily over a work of such proportions. Warburton's theory was novel and startling; and perhaps few even of the Deistical writers themselves evoked more criticism and opposition from the orthodox than this doughty champion of orthodoxy. But Warburton was in his element when engaged in controversy.
The constant charges of heresy which were brought against him were ungrounded, and often serve to call attention to passages where he has shown himself specially anxious to meet Deistical objections. But there were deficiencies and omissions in his teaching which might very properly be regarded with distrust and alarm.
Published in the year 1736, when the excitement raised by 'Christianity as old as the Creation' was at its height, it was, as has been well remarked, 'the result of twenty years' study, the very twenty years during which the Deistical notions formed the atmosphere which educated people breathed. For those twenty years and longer still, the absolute certainty of God's revelation of Himself in nature, and the absolute perfection of the religion founded on that revelation, in contradistinction to the uncertainty and imperfection of all traditional religions, had been the incessant cry of the new school of thought, a cry which had lately found its strongest and ablest expression in Tindal's famous work.
If they are forbidden to speak at all upon such subjects, or if they find it really dangerous to do so, they will then redouble their disguise, involve themselves in mysteriousness, and talk so as hardly to be understood or at least not plainly interpreted by those who are disposed to do them a mischief. The general tendency, however, of his writings is pretty clear, and is in harmony with the Deistical theory that God's revelation of Himself in Nature is certain, clear, and sufficient for all practical purposes, while any other revelation is uncertain, obscure, and unnecessary.
This was the opening of the deistical reaction; it was thus, associated with everything that struck imagination and moved the sentiment of his readers, that Rousseau brought back those sophistical conclusions which Pascal had drawn from premisses of dark profound truth, and that enervating displacement of reason by celestial contemplation, which Fénelon had once made beautiful by the persuasion of virtuous example.
"We will try to evade these," said he, "and, supposing you should be caught, if once you are Laird of Dalcastle and Balgrennan, what are the penalties to you?" "Might we not rather pop him off in private and quietness, as we did the deistical divine?" said I. "The deed would be alike meritorious, either way," said he. "But may we not wait for years before we find an opportunity?
He appears to have met with little encouragement, and at least one Catholic bishop lost no time in cursing 'these nefarious deistical schools'; but some schools were established, and Peel has the merit of being one of the earliest advocates of a general system of unsectarian national education for Ireland, which many years after was accomplished.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking