lated five propositions which he conceived to express the essence of natural religion and which he supposed had the sanction of universal assent.[1] Coming down to the better known Deists of the eighteenth century, we find the doctrine implied by John Toland, who argued that there is no Christian doctrine which is either contrary to reason or above it.[2] That is, Christianity is to be identified with purely rational theology, undefiled by the traditions of superstition and priestcraft. What doctrines ordinarily accepted as Christian were to be discarded as mysterious we are not told, but the confusion of Christianity as an historical belief with a rational theology assumed to be Christian is evident. The same position was explicitly taken by Tindal in Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730). The argument is briefly as follows: God is perfect and immutable, and accordingly we must assume that his law is of the same nature; his ordinances are from everlasting to everlasting. Natural and revealed religion are coincident, 'like two talkers exactly answering one another.' This religion is completely rational and eternally the same for all men, the assumption being tacitly made that human nature is, in respect of religion at least, everywhere the same. That this natural religion does not now exist among men is due to the crafty machinations of the priests, who have fostered superstition as a means of gaining power. The advent of Christ added no new doctrine to the original religion, but merely purified it from the accretions of superstition which had formed around it.
Tindal thus showed the originality of rational religion deductively from the immutability of God. Two later and more obscure Deists, Thomas Chubb and Thomas Morgan, attempted to support the same position a posteriori by an historical examination of Christ's teaching. In The True Gospel of Jesus Christ (1738), Chubb tries to reduce to the lowest terms the doctrines of Christ as reported in the New Testament, and concludes that
- ↑ De veritate, prout distinguitur a revelatione, a verisimili a possibili et a falso, 1624; De religione gentilium, errorumque apud eos causis, 1645. The five doctrines are the existence of God, the duty of worshipping him, the importance of virtue as a chief part of this duty, the propriety of repentance, and the expectation of rewards and punishments in a future life. See E. Pfleiderer, Empirismus und Skepsis in Dav. Humes Philosophie, pp. 426 ff.
- ↑ Christianity net Mysterious, 1696.
