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Updated: July 9, 2025
The effects, however, of the great controversy were not all evil. If such sentiments as those to which the Deists gave utterance were floating in men's minds, it was well that they should find expression. A state of smouldering scepticism is always a dangerous state. Whatever the doubts and difficulties might be, it was well that they should be brought into the full light of day.
She flattered the fierce Deists by owning fealty to "Le Roi Voltaire;" she flattered the mild Deists by calling in La Harpe as the tutor of her grandson; she flattered the Atheists by calling in Diderot as a tutor for herself. Her murders and orgies were soon forgotten in the new hopes for Russian regeneration. Her dealings with Russia strengthened these hopes.
She had been thrown much among those who were Deists in thought, and this gospel-message seemed a revelation to her. The next morning Mr. Savery came to Earlham Hall to breakfast. "From this day," say her daughters, in their interesting memoir of their mother, "her love of pleasure and the world seemed gone."
The controversy with the Deists necessitated a perpetual reference to the grounds upon which belief is based both in the Christian revelation, and in those fundamental truths of natural religion upon which arguers on either side were agreed.
Prideaux, whose Vie de Mahomet appeared in the same year in Amsterdam, abused and shuddered with them, and held up his biography of Mohammed as a mirror to "unbelievers, atheists, deists, and libertines."
Again, the Deists contributed in some degree, though not intentionally, towards encouraging the low tone of morals which is admitted on all sides to have been prevalent during the first half of the eighteenth century. It was constantly insinuated that the Deists themselves were men of immoral lives.
Reimarus, the able author of the Fragments, in his attack upon the evidences of revealed religion, had taken the same ground as Voltaire and the old English deists.
As plausible as this project seems, there may a dangerous design lurk under it: Nothing can be more notorious, than that the Atheists, Deists, Socinians, Anti-trinitarians, and other subdivisions of freethinkers, are persons of little zeal for the present ecclesiastical establishment: Their declared opinion is for repealing the Sacramental Test; they are very indifferent with regard to ceremonies; nor do they hold the jus divinum of Episcopacy.
The catholic spirit of Carlyle's works cannot be better illustrated than by the fact that he has received letters from all sorts and conditions of men, Methodists and Shakers, Churchmen and Romanists, Deists and Infidels, all claiming his fellowship, and thinking they find their peculiarities of thought in him.
In the Dialogues on Natural Religion which were not published till after his death , Hume made an attack on the argument from design, on which deists and Christians alike relied to prove the existence of a Deity.
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