That which we have here summarized as the general position of deism, gained gradual expression through the regular development and specialization of deistic ideas in individual representatives of the movement. The chief points and epochs were marked by Toland's Christianity not Mysterious, 1696; Collins's Discourse of Freethinking, 1713; Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation, 1730; and Chubb's True Gospel of Jesus Christ, 1738. The first of these demands a critique of revelation, the second defends the right of free investigation, the third declares the religion of Christ, which is merely a revived natural religion, to be the oldest religion, the fourth reduces it entirely to moral life.
The deistic movement was called into life by Lord Herbert of Cherbury (pp. 79-80) and continued by Locke, in so far as the latter had intrusted to reason the discrimination of true from false revelation, and had admitted in Christianity elements above reason, though not things contrary to reason. Following Locke, John Toland (1670-1722) goes a step further with the proof that the Gospel not only contains nothing contrary to reason, but also nothing above reason, and that no Christian doctrine is to be called mysterious. To the demand that we should worship what we do not comprehend, he answers that reason is the only basis of certitude, and alone decides on the divinity of the Scriptures, by a consideration of their contents. The motive which impels us to assent to a truth must lie in reason, not in revelation, which, like all authority and experience, is merely the way by which we attain the knowledge of the truth; it is a means of instruction, not a ground of conviction. All faith has knowledge and understanding for its conditions, and is rational conviction. Before we can put our trust in the Scriptures, we must be convinced that they were in fact written by the authors to whom they are ascribed, and must consider whether these men, their deeds, and their works, were worthy of God. The fact that God's inmost being is for us inscrutable does not make him a mystery, for even the common things of nature are known to us only by their properties. Miracles are also in themselves nothing incomprehensible; they are simply enhancements of natural laws beyond their ordinary operations, by supernatural assistance, which God vouchsafes but rarely and only for extraordinary ends. Toland explains the mysteries smuggled into the ethical religion of Christianity as due to the toleration of Jewish and heathen customs, to the entrance of learned speculation, and to the selfish inventions of the clergy and the rulers. The Reformation itself had not entirely restored the original purity and simplicity.
Thus far Toland the deist. In his later writings, the five Letters to Serena, 1704, addressed to the Prussian queen, Sophia Charlotte, and the Pantheisticon (Cosmopoli, 1720), he advances toward a hylozoistic pantheism.
The first of the Letters discusses the prejudices of mankind; the second, the heathen doctrine of immortality; the third, the origin of idolatry; while the fourth and fifth are devoted to Spinoza, the chief defect in whose philosophy is declared to be the absence of an explanation of motion. Motion belongs to the notion of matter as necessarily as extension and impenetrability. Matter is always in motion; rest is only the reciprocal interference of two moving forces. The differences of things depend on the various movements of the particles of matter, so that it is motion which individualizes matter in general into particular things. As the Letters ascribe the purposive construction of organic beings to a divine reason, so the Pantheisticon also stops short before it reaches the extreme of naked materialism. Everything is from the whole; the whole is infinite, one, eternal, all-rational. God is the force of the whole, the soul of the world, the law of nature. The treatise includes a liturgy of the pantheistic society with many quotations from the ancient poets.
Anthony Collins (1676-1729), in his Discourse of Free-thinking, shows the right of free thought (i. e., of judgment on rational grounds) in general, from the principle that no truth is forbidden to us, and that there is no other way by which we can attain truth and free ourselves from superstition, and the right to apply it to God and the Bible in particular, from the fact that the clergy differ concerning the most important matters. The fear that the differences of opinion which spring from freethinking may endanger the peace of society lacks foundation; on the contrary, it is only restriction of the freedom of thought which leads to disorders, by weakening moral zeal. The clergy are the only ones who condemn liberty of thought. It is sacrilege to hold that error can be beneficial and truth harmful. As a proof that freethinking by no means corrupts character, Collins gives in conclusion a list of noble freethinkers from Socrates down to Locke and Tillotson. Among the replies to the views of Collins we may mention the calmly objective Boyle Lectures by Ibbot, and the sharp and witty letter of Richard Bentley, the philologist. Neither of these attacks Collins's leading principle, both fully admitting the right to employ the reason, even in religious questions; but they dispute the implication that freethinking is equivalent to contentious opposition. On the one hand, they maintain that Collins's thinking is too free, that is, unbridled, hasty, presumptuous, and paradoxical; on the other, that it is not free enough (from prejudice).
After Shaftesbury had based morality on a natural instinct for the beautiful and had made it independent of religion, as well as served the cause of free thought by a keenly ironical campaign against enthusiasm and orthodoxy, and Clarke had furnished the representatives of natural religion a useful principle of morals in the objective rationality of things, the debate concerning prophecy and miracles[1] threatened to dissipate the deistic movement into scattered theological skirmishes. At this juncture Matthew Tindal (1657-1733) led it back to the main question. His Christianity as Old as the Creation is the doomsday book of deism. It contains all that has been given above as the core of this view of religion. Christ came not to bring in a new doctrine, but to exhort to repentance and atonement, and to restore the law of nature, which is as old as the creation, as universal as reason, and as unchangeable as God, human nature, and the relations of things, which we should respect in our actions. Religion is morality; more exactly, it is the free, constant disposition to do as much good as possible, and thereby to promote the glory of God and our own welfare. For the harmony of our conduct with the rules of reason constitutes our perfection, and on this depends our happiness. Since God is infinitely blessed and self-sufficient his purpose in the moral law is man's happiness alone. Whatever a positive religion contains beyond the moral law is superstition, which puts emphasis on worthless trivialities. The true religion occupies the happy mean between miserable unfaith, on the one hand, and timorous superstition, wild fanaticism, and pietistical zeal on the other. In proclaiming the sovereignty of reason in the sphere of religion as well as elsewhere, we are only openly demanding what our opponents have tacitly acknowledged in practice (e. g.> in allegorical interpretation) from time immemorial. God has endowed us with reason in order that we should by it distinguish truth from falsehood.
[Footnote 1: The chief combatant in the conflict over the argument from prophecy, which was called forth by Whiston's corruption hypothesis, was Collins (A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, 1724). Christianity is based on Judaism; its fundamental article is that Jesus is the prophesied Messiah of the Jews, its chief proof the argument from Old Testament prophecy, which, it is true, depends on the typical or allegorical interpretation of the passages in question. Whoever rejects this cuts away the ground from under the Christian revelation, which is only the allegorical import of the revelation of the Jews.—The second proof of revelation, the argument from miracles, was shaken by Thomas Woolston (Six Discourses on the Miracles of our Saviour, 1727-30), by his extension of the allegorical interpretation to these also. He supported himself in this by the authority of the Church Fathers, and, above all, by the argument that the accounts of the miracles, if taken literally, contradict all sense and understanding. The unavoidable doubts which arise concerning the literal interpretation of the resurrection of the dead, the healing of the sick, the driving out of devils, and the other miracles, prove that these were intended only as symbolic representations of the mysterious and wonderful effects which Jesus was to accomplish. Thus Jairus's daughter means the Jewish Church, which is to be revived at the second coming of Christ; Lazarus typifies humanity, which will be raised again at the last day; the account of the bodily resurrection of Jesus is a symbol of his spiritual resurrection from his grave in the letter of Scripture. Sherlock, whose Trial of the Witnesses of the Resurrection of Jesus was long considered a cogent answer to the attacks of Woolston, was opposed by Peter Annet, who, without leaving the refuge of figurative interpretation open, proceeded still more regardlessly in the discovery of contradictory and incredible elements in the Gospel reports, and declared all the scriptural writers together to be liars and falsifiers. If a man believes in miracles as supernatural interferences with the regular course of nature (and they must be so taken if they are to certify to the divine origin of the Scriptures), he makes God mutable, and natural laws imperfect arrangements which stand in need of correction. The truth of religion is independent of all history.]
Thomas Chubb (1679-1747), a man of the people (he was a glove maker and tallow-chandler), and from 1715 on a participant in deistic literature and concerned to adapt the new ideas to the men of his class, preached in The True Gospel of Jesus Christ an honorable working-man's Christianity., Faith means obedience to the law of reason inculcated by Christ, not the acceptance of the facts reported about him. The gospel of Christ was preached to the poor before his death and his asserted resurrection and ascension. It is probable that Christ really lived, because of the great effect of his message; but he was a man like other men. His gospel is his teaching, not his history, his own teaching, not that of his followers—the reflections of the apostles are private opinions. Christ's teaching amounts, in effect, to these three fundamental principles: (1) Conform to the rational law of love to God and one's neighbor; this is the only ground of divine acceptance. (2) After transgression of the law, repentance and reformation are the only grounds of divine grace and forgiveness. (3) At the last day every one will be rewarded according to his works. By proclaiming these doctrines, by carrying them out in his own pure life and typical death, and by founding religio-ethical associations on the principle of brotherly equality, Christ selected the means best fitted for the attainment of his purpose, the salvation of human souls. His aim was to assure men of future happiness (and of the earthly happiness connected therewith), and to make them worthy of it; and this happiness can only be attained when from free conviction we submit ourselves to the natural moral law, which is grounded on the moral fitness of things. Everything which leads to the illusion that the favor of God is attainable by any other means than by righteousness and repentance, is pernicious; as, also, the confusion of Christian societies with legal and civil societies, which pursue entirely different aims.
Thomas Morgan (The Moral Philosopher, a Dialogue between the Christian Deist, Philalethes, and the Christian Jew, Theophanes, 1737 seq.) stands on the same ground as his predecessors, by holding that the moral truth of things is the criterion of the divinity of a doctrine, that the Christian religion is merely a restoration of natural religion, and that the apostles were not infallible. Peculiar to him are the application of the first of these principles to the Mosaic law, with the conclusion that this was not a revelation; the complete separation of the New Testament from the Old (the Church of Christ and the expected kingdom of the Jewish Messiah are as opposed to each other as heaven and earth); and the endeavor to give a more exact explanation of the origin of superstition, the pre-Christian manifestations of which he traces back to the fall of the angels, and those since Christ to the intermixture of Jewish elements. He seeks to solve his problem by a detailed critique of Israelitish history, which is lacking in sympathy but not in spirit, and in which, introducing modern relations into the earliest times, he explains the Old Testament miracles in part as myths, in part as natural phenomena, and deprives the heroes of the Jews of their moral renown. The Jewish historians are ranked among the poets; the God of Israel is reduced to a subordinate, local tutelary divinity; the moral law of Moses is characterized as a civil code limited to external conduct, to national and mundane affairs, with merely temporal sanctions, and the ceremonial law as an act of worldly statecraft; David is declared a gifted poet, musician, hypocrite, and coward; the prophets are made professors of theology and moral philosophy; and Paul is praised as the greatest freethinker of his time, who defended reason against authority and rejected the Jewish ritual law as indifferent. Whatever is spurious in Christianity is a remnant of Judaism, all its mysteries are misunderstood and falsely (i.e. literally) applied allegories. Out of regard for Jewish prejudices Christ's death was figuratively described as sacrificial, as in earlier times Moses had been forced to yield to the Egyptian superstitions of his people. Morgan looks for the final victory of the rational morality of the pure, Pauline, or deistic Christianity over the Jewish Christianity of orthodoxy. Among the works of his opponents the following deserve mention: William Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses, and Samuel Chandler's Vindication of the History of the Old Testament.
It maybe doubted whether Bolingbroke (died 1751; cf. p. 203) is to be classed among the deists or among their opponents. On the one hand, he finds in monotheism the original true religion, which has degenerated into superstition through priestly cunning and fantastical philosophy; in primitive Christianity, the system of natural religion, which has been transformed into a complicated and contentious science by its weak, foolish, or deceitful adherents; in theology, the corruption of religion; in Bacon, Descartes, and Locke, types of untrammeled investigation. On the other hand, he seeks to protect revelation from the reason whose cultivation he has just commended, and to keep faith and knowledge distinct, while he demands that the Bible, with all the undemonstrable and absurd elements which it contains, be accepted on its own authority. Religion is an instrument indispensable to the government for keeping the people in subjection. Only the fear of a higher power, not the reason, holds the masses in check; and the freethinkers do wrong in taking a bit out of the mouth of the sensual multitude, when it were better to add to those already there.