[147] are represented to be, the more cruel they seem and the more addicted to cursing.  How surprising to find the holy prophet Elisha cursing in the name of the Lord little children for calling him Bald-pate!  And, what is still more surprising, two she-bears immediately devoured forty-two little children.

I have remarked that theologians at this time generally took the line of basing Christianity on reason and not on faith.  An interesting little book, Christianity not founded on Argument, couched in the form of a letter to a young gentleman at Oxford, by Henry Dodwell (Junior), appeared in 1741, and pointed out the dangers of such confidence in reason.  It is an ironical development of the principle of Bayle, working out the thesis that Christianity is essentially unreasonable, and that if you want to believe, reasoning is fatal.  The cultivation of faith and reasoning produce contrary effects; the philosopher is disqualified for Divine influences by his very progress in carnal wisdom; the Gospel must be received with all the obsequious submission of a babe who has no other disposition but to learn his lesson.  Christ did not propose his doctrines to investigation; he did not lay the arguments for his mission before his disciples and give them time to consider

[148] calmly of their force, and liberty to determine as their reason should direct them; the apostles had no qualifications for the task, being the most artless and illiterate persons living.  Dodwell exposes the absurdity of the Protestant position.  To give all men liberty to judge for themselves and to expect at the same time that they shall be of the Preacher’s mind is such a scheme for unanimity as one would scarcely imagine any one could be weak enough to devise in speculation and much less that any could ever be found hardy enough to avow and propose it to practice.  The men of Rome “shall rise up in the judgment (of all considering persons) against this generation and shall condemn it; for they invented but the one absurdity of infallibility, and behold a greater absurdity than infallibility is here.”

I have still to speak of the (Third) Earl of Shaftesbury, whose style has rescued his writings from entire neglect.  His special interest was ethics.  While the valuable work of most of the heterodox writers of this period lay in their destructive criticism of supernatural religion, they clung, as we have seen, to what was called natural religion—­ the belief in a kind and wise personal God, who created the world, governs it by natural laws, and desires our happiness.  The idea

[149] was derived from ancient philosophers and had been revived by Lord Herbert of Cherbury in his Latin treatise On Truth (in the reign of James I).  The deists contended that this was a sufficient basis for morality and that the Christian inducements to good behaviour were unnecessary.  Shaftesbury in his Inquiry concerning Virtue (1699) debated the question and argued that the scheme of heaven and hell,