Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 9, 2025
Moreover, if the Deists did no other good, they at least brought out the full strength of the Christian cause, which otherwise might have lain dormant. Although much of the anti-Deistical literature perished with the occasion which called it forth, there is yet a residuum which will be immortal.
The mystical tendencies of his religion, whatever may have been the special dangers incidental to them, at all events enabled him to meet the Deists with advantage on their own chosen ground. How he met Tindal's 'Christianity as Old as Creation' has been already mentioned. As Eusebius and St.
Many, again, who dreaded the Deists, but were disturbed by their arguments, were wisely anxious to see what was advanced against them by the distinguished prelate who had been said to agree with them in some of their leading principles. Meanwhile liberty of thought, independently of 'Freethinking, in the obnoxious sense of the word, attracted a growing amount of attention.
It is an honour to the English race that, in the period of the rising might of the rational spirit throughout the western world, men should have sought at once to utilise that force for the restatement of religion. Yet one may say quite simply that this undertaking of the deists was premature. The time was not ripe for the endeavour.
At first the assault was carried on with most vigour and ability by the English deists, who, though their writings are little read now, did memorable work by their polemic against the authority of revealed religion.
Baxter's inconsistency on this subject would be inexplicable, did we not know his zealotry against Harrington, the Deists and the Mystics; so that, like an electrified pith-ball, he is for ever attracted towards their tenets concerning the pretended perfecting of spiritual sentences by the civil magistrate, but he touches only to fly off again. "Toleration! dainty word for soul-murder!
I belong to the party called Hicksites, deists, and schismatics; and I suppose they are the ones to whom thou hast alluded as having gone off from the Society. I should like to talk with thee concerning the separation in America; for we have been greatly misrepresented.
There was a want of any definite scheme or unanimity of opinion on the part of the Deists. Collins boasted of the rise and growth of a new sect. But, as Dr. Monk justly observes, 'the assumption of a growing sect implies an uniformity of opinions which did not really exist among the impugners of Christianity.
We have seen in the chapter on the Deists how the Church suffered in her practical work from the controversies of her own generation; and no less did she suffer from the effects left by the controversies of a preceding age.
In the third place, the conviction that humanity, at least at present, as a whole, progresses, has absolutely nothing to do with the antagonism between materialism and idealism. The French materialists had this conviction, to a fanatical degree, no less than the deists, Voltaire and Rousseau, and made the greatest personal sacrifices for it.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking