The Scriptures had for many years been used to sanction the most diametrically opposite views.  They had been the watchword of each party in turn whose extravagances had been the cause of all the disasters and errors of several generations.  Romanists had quoted them when they condemned Protestants to the stake, Protestants when they condemned Jesuits to the block.  The Roundhead had founded his wild reign of fanaticism on their authority.  The Cavalier had texts ready at hand to sanction the most unconstitutional measures.  ’The right divine of kings to govern wrong’ had been grounded on Scriptural authority.  All the strange vagaries in which the seventeenth century had been so fruitful claimed the voice of Scripture in their favour.

Such reckless use of Scripture tended to throw discredit upon it as a revelation from God; while, on the other hand, the grand discoveries in natural science which were a distinguishing feature of the seventeenth century equally tended to exalt men’s notions of that other revelation of Himself which God has made in the Book of Nature.  The calm attitude of the men of science who had been steadily advancing in the knowledge of the natural world, and by each fresh discovery had given fresh proofs of the power, and wisdom, and goodness of God, stood forth in painful contrast with the profitless wranglings and bitter animosities of Divines.  Men might well begin to ask themselves whether they could not find rest from theological strife in natural religion? and the real object of the Deists was to demonstrate that they could.

Thus the period of Deism was the period of a great religious crisis in England.  It is our present purpose briefly to trace the progress and termination of this crisis.

It is hardly necessary to remark that Deism was not a product of the eighteenth century.  The spirit in which Deism appeared in its most pronounced form had been growing for many generations previous to that date.  But we must pass over the earlier Deists, of whom the most notable was Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and come at once to a writer who, although his most notorious work was published before the seventeenth century closed, lived and wrote during the eighteenth, and may fairly be regarded as belonging to that era.

No work which can be properly called Deistical had raised anything like the excitement which was caused by the anonymous publication in 1696 of a short and incomplete treatise entitled ’Christianity not Mysterious, or a Discourse showing that there is nothing in the Gospel contrary to Reason nor above it, and that no Christian Doctrine can properly be called a Mystery.’  In the second edition, published the same year, the author discovered himself to be a young Irishman of the name of John Toland, who had been brought up a Roman Catholic.  Leland passes over this work with a slight notice; but it marked a distinct epoch in Deistical literature.  For the first time, the secular arm was brought to bear