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Updated: May 6, 2025
And although many of its leaders were men who had not come to their prime till the Deistical controversy was almost over, and who would probably have viewed the strife, if it had still been raging, with scarcely any other feeling than one of alarmed concern, this was at all events not the case with John Wesley.
I had used it as a school book, translating it both out of Latin into English, and out of English back into Latin, imprinting it thereby almost word for word upon my memory. I had also read the work of his commentator on the causes of incredulity. Leland on the deistical writers, and Paley's Evidences, and others, I read after.
Again, when professor Leechman was quarreled with for his deistical sermon on prayer, by the presbytery of Glasgow, and afterward carried before the assembly; yet although in all his sermons, he presents God as the object of prayer, merely as our Creator, without any relation to Christ, as Mediator; but recommends to his hearers, as the only acceptable disposition of mind, an assured confidence in the goodness and mercy of their Creator: not only has that Christless sermon been very much extolled, but the author dismissed from the assembly's bar in such a manner, as if thereby he had merited their applause.
He hit, and hit very forcibly, a blot which belonged to almost all writers in common who took part in this controversy. The great deficiency of the age a want of spiritual earnestness, an exclusive regard to the intellectual, to the ignoring of the emotional element of our nature nowhere appears more glaringly than in the Deistical and anti-Deistical literature.
Buckingham and Shaftesbury, the infidel leader of the Independents and the deistical leader of the Presbyterians, were alike playing a part. But the largeness and fairness of his temper saved Dryden's satire from the vicious malignity of that of Pope. He has an artistic love of picturesque contrast, he has a great writer's pride in the consciousness of power.
Of the many controversies which were rife during the first half of the eighteenth century, none raised a question of greater importance than that which lay at the root of the Deistical controversy. That question was, in a word, this How has God revealed Himself how is He still revealing Himself to man?
His Christianity not Mysterious marks an epoch in religious disputes, for it started the deistical controversy which was so distinctive a feature of the first half of the eighteenth century. It shared a similar fate to that of the Case Stated, though on very different grounds, and was ordered by the Irish parliament to be burned by the hangman.
Those who do not accept the definition of man as a compound of two substances, and who regard the Deistical dogma of the immortality of the soul as in contradiction with physiology, love to fall back upon the hope of a final reparation, which under an unknown form shall satisfy the wants of the heart of man.
All this, however, down to the deistical movement which Rousseau found in progress at Geneva in 1754, was distinctly the outcome in a more or less marked way of a rationalising and philosophic spirit, and not of the religious spirit. The sceptical side of it with reference to revealed religion, predominated over the positive side of it with reference to natural religion.
Toplady, after he had seen Olivers, wrote: 'To say the truth, I am glad I saw Mr. It will be remembered that the Deistical controversy was conducted with considerable acrimony on both sides; but the Deistical and anti-Deistical literature is amenity itself when compared with the bitterness and scurrility with which the Calvinistic controversy was carried on.
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