One of the most striking features of this strange controversy was its sudden collapse about the middle of the century.  The whole interest in the subject seems to have died away as suddenly as it arose fifty years before.  This change of feeling is strikingly illustrated by the flatness of the reception given by the public to Bolingbroke’s posthumous works in 1754.  For though few persons will be inclined to agree with Horace Walpole’s opinion that Bolingbroke’s ’metaphysical divinity was the best of his writings,’ yet the eminence of the writer, the purity and piquancy of his style, the real and extensive learning which he displayed, would, one might have imagined, have awakened a far greater interest in his writings than was actually shown.  Very few replies were written to this, the last, and in some respects, the most important—­certainly the most elaborate attack that ever was made upon popular Christianity from the Deistical standpoint.  The ’five pompous quartos’ of the great statesman attracted infinitely less attention than the slight, fragmentary treatise of an obscure Irishman had done fifty-eight years before.  And after Bolingbroke not a single writer who can properly be called a Deist appeared in England.

How are we to account for this strange revulsion of feeling, or rather this marvellous change from excitement to apathy?  One modern writer imputes it to the inherent dulness of the Deists themselves;[180] another to their utter defeat by the Christian apologists.[181] No doubt there is force in both these reasons, but there were other causes at work which contributed to the result.

One seems to have been the vagueness and unsatisfactoriness of the constructive part of the Deists’ work.  They set themselves with vigour to the work of destruction, but when this was completed—­what next?  The religion which was to take the place of popular Christianity was at best a singularly vague and intangible sort of thing.  ’You are to follow nature, and that will teach you what true Christianity is.  If the facts of the Bible don’t agree, so much the worse for the facts.’  There was an inherent untenableness in this position.[182] Having gone thus far, thoughtful men could not stand still.  They must go on further or else turn back.  Some went forward in the direction of Hume, and found themselves stranded in the dreary waste of pure scepticism, which was something very different from genuine Deism.  Others went backwards and determined to stand upon the old ways, since no firm footing was given them on the new.  There was a want of any definite scheme or unanimity of opinion on the part of the Deists.  Collins boasted of the rise and growth of a new sect.  But, as Dr. Monk justly observes, ’the assumption of a growing sect implies an uniformity of opinions which did not really exist among the impugners of Christianity.’[183]

The independence of the Deists in relation to one another might render it difficult to confute any particular tenet of the sect, for the simple reason that there was no sect:  but this same independence prevented them from making the impression upon the public mind which a compact phalanx might have done.  The Deists were a company of Free Lances rather than a regular army, and effected no more than such irregular forces usually do.