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Updated: June 9, 2025
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.
Yet, in truth, there was some reason for the young man's fears; since, even in those days, Catholics were hunted down both by law and by public opinion, as virulently as Protestant nonconformists. All who kept out of the pale of the national church were denounced as schismatics, deists, atheists it was all one. "But why do you wish to leave the world?" "I am sick of it.
It consists in walking about through the woods, or paddling along a stream, until you meet a bear; then you try to shoot him. This would seem to be, as the Rev. Mr. Leslie called his book against the deists of the eighteenth century, "A Short and Easie Method." But in point of fact there are two principal difficulties.
I also read Leland's View of Deistical Writers, Leslie's Short and Easy Method with Deists, Faber's Difficulties of Infidelity, Fuller's Gospel its Own Witness, Butler's Analogy, Baxter's Unreasonableness of Infidelity, and his Evidences of Christianity, Simpson's Plea for Religion and the Sacred Writings, Ryan on the Beneficial Effects of Christianity, Cave on the Early Christians, the Debate between R. Owen and A. Campbell, Scotch Lectures, G. Campbell on Miracles, Ray's Wisdom of God in Creation, Constable's History of Converts from Infidelity, Newton on the Prophecies, Locke on the Reasonableness of Christianity, Nelson on the Cause and Cure of Infidelity, Priestley's Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion, Jews' Letters to Voltaire, and works by Beattie, Soame Jenyns, West, Lyttleton, Ogilvie, Addison, Gilbert Wakefield and others.
His Sermon on the Mount gives some precepts which are impracticable, inconsistent with natural instinct and quite destructive of society. His miracles may be explained away. It may be said, indeed, that most of these tenets are contained in the germ in the writings of earlier Deists. But there are yet others of which this cannot be said.
This strong feeling against the Deists is all the more remarkable when we remember that it existed at a time of great religious apathy, and at a time when illiberality was far from being a besetting fault. The dominant party in the Church was that which would now be called the Broad Church party, and among the Dissenters at least equal latitudinarianism was tolerated.
Even those documents depended upon Deism; their real strength will survive in men who are still Deists; and the men who are still Deists are more than Deists.
Chubb, being an illiterate man, made here and there slips of scholarship, but he wrote in a clear, vigorous, sensible style, and his works had considerable influence over those to whom they were primarily addressed. The cause of Deism in its earlier sense was now almost extinct. Those who were afterwards called Deists really belong to a different school of thought.
He was nominally opposed to both, for both the Deists and their adversaries agreed that reason and revelation were in perfect harmony. The Deist accused the Orthodox of sacrificing reason at the shrine of revelation, the Orthodox accused the Deist of sacrificing revelation at the shrine of reason; but both sides vehemently repudiated the charge.
There was a general disposition, in which even such men as Bishop Berkeley shared, to relegate all doubters to the class of Deists and 'Atheists. Tillotson strove practically against this fatal tendency, but his reasonings on the subject were confused.
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