[179] See Bishop Butler's charge to the clergy of Durham, 1751.—'A great source of infidelity plainly is, the endeavour to get rid of religious restraints.'
[180] Mr. Leslie Stephen, Essays on Freethinking and Plain Speaking. On Shaftesbury's 'Characteristics.'—'The Deists were not only pilloried for their heterodoxy, but branded with the fatal inscription of "dulness."' This view is amplified in his larger work, published since the above was written.
[181] Aids to Faith, p. 44.
[182] In a brilliant review of Mr. Leslie Stephen's work in Macmillan's Magazine, February 1877, Mr. James Cotter Morison remarks on the Deists' view that natural religion must be always alike plain and perspicuous, 'against this convenient opinion the only objection was that it contradicted the total experience of the human race.'
[183] Monk's Life of Bentley, vol. i. See also Berkeley's Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher, 107.
[184] Advertisement to the first edition of The Analogy, p. xiv. See also Swift's description of the Duchess of Marlborough, in Last four Years of Queen Anne, bk. i. The first and most prominent subject of Bishop Butler's 'Durham Charge,' is 'the general decay of religion,' 'which,' he says, 'is now observed by everyone, and has been for some time the complaint of all serious persons' (written in 1751). The Bishop then instructs his clergy at length how this sad fact is to be dealt with; in fact this, directly or indirectly, is the topic of the whole Charge.
[185] He wrote to Courayer in 1726,—'No care is wanting in our clergy to defend the Christian Faith against all assaults, and I believe no age or nation has produced more or better writings, &c.... This is all we can do. Iniquity in practice, God knows, abounds,' &c.
[186] Watson's Life of Warburton, p. 293.
[187] Guardian, No. 3.
[188] Guardian, No. 88.