[Footnote 179:  See Bishop Butler’s charge to the clergy of Durham, 1751.—­’A great source of infidelity plainly is, the endeavour to get rid of religious restraints.’]

[Footnote 180:  Mr. Leslie Stephen, Essays on Freethinking and Plain Speaking.  On Shaftesbury’s ’Characteristics.’—­’The Deists were not only pilloried for their heterodoxy, but branded with the fatal inscription of “dulness."’ This view is amplified in his larger work, published since the above was written.]

[Footnote 181:  Aids to Faith, p. 44.]

[Footnote 182:  In a brilliant review of Mr. Leslie Stephen’s work in Macmillan’s Magazine, February 1877, Mr. James Cotter Morison remarks on the Deists’ view that natural religion must be always alike plain and perspicuous, ’against this convenient opinion the only objection was that it contradicted the total experience of the human race.’]

[Footnote 183:  Monk’s Life of Bentley, vol. i.  See also Berkeley’s Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher, 107.]

[Footnote 184:  Advertisement to the first edition of The Analogy, p. xiv.  See also Swift’s description of the Duchess of Marlborough, in Last four Years of Queen Anne, bk. i.  The first and most prominent subject of Bishop Butler’s ‘Durham Charge,’ is ’the general decay of religion,’ ‘which,’ he says, ’is now observed by everyone, and has been for some time the complaint of all serious persons’ (written in 1751).  The Bishop then instructs his clergy at length how this sad fact is to be dealt with; in fact this, directly or indirectly, is the topic of the whole Charge.]

[Footnote 185:  He wrote to Courayer in 1726,—­’No care is wanting in our clergy to defend the Christian Faith against all assaults, and I believe no age or nation has produced more or better writings, &c....  This is all we can do.  Iniquity in practice, God knows, abounds,’ &c.]

[Footnote 186:  Watson’s Life of Warburton, p. 293.]

[Footnote 187:  Guardian, No. 3.]

[Footnote 188:  Guardian, No. 88.]

[Footnote 189:  Examiner, xxxix.  See also Charles Leslie’s Theological Works, vol. ii. 533.]

[Footnote 190:  Tatler, No. 108.]

[Footnote 191:  Tatler, No. 137.]

[Footnote 192:  See Amelia, bk. i. ch. iii. &c.]

[Footnote 193:  Dedication of first three books of the Divine Legation.  See also Pattison’s Essay in Essays and Reviews.]

[Footnote 194:  Farrar’s Bampton Lectures, ‘History of Free Thought.’]

* * * * *

CHAPTER IV.

LATITUDINARIAN CHURCHMANSHIP.

(1) CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF ARCHBISHOP TILLOTSON’S THEOLOGY.