nevertheless independent of it.  Horror of fanaticism, distrust of authority, an increasing neglect of the earlier history of Christianity, the comparative cessation of minor disputes, and the greater emancipation of reason through the recent Act of Toleration, all combined to encourage it.  Besides this, physical science was making great strides.  The revolution of ideas effected by Newton’s great discovery made a strangely wide gap between seventeenth and eighteenth century modes of thinking and speaking on many points connected with the material universe.  It was felt more or less clearly by most thinking men that the relations of theology to the things of outward sense needed readjustment.  Newton himself, like his contemporaries, Boyle, Flamsteed, and Halley, was a thoroughly religious man, and his general faith as a Christian was confirmed rather than weakened by his perception of the vast laws which had become disclosed to him.  On many others the first effect was different.  Either they were impressed with exorbitant ideas of the majesty of that faculty of reasoning which could thus transcend the bounds of all earthly space, or else the sense of a higher spiritual life was overpowered by the revelation of uniform physical laws operating through a seeming infinite expanse of material existence.  The one cause tended to create a notion that unassisted reason was sufficient for all human needs; the other developed a frequent bias to materialism.  Both alike rendered it imperative to earnest minds that felt competent to the task to inquire what reason had to say about the nature of our spiritual life, and the principles and religious motives which chiefly govern it.  Difficulties arising out of man’s position as a part of universal nature had scarcely been felt before.  Nor even in the last century did they assume the proportions they have since attained.  But they deserve to be largely taken into account in any review of the evidence writers of that period.  Not to speak of Derham’s ‘Physico-Theology’ and other works of that class, neither Berkeley, Butler, nor Paley—­three great names—­can be properly understood without reference to the greatly increased attention which was being given to the physical sciences.  Berkeley’s suggestive philosophy was distinctly based upon an earnest wish to release the essence of all theology from an embarrassing dependence upon the outward world of sense.  Butler’s ’Analogy’—­by far the greatest theological work of the century—­aims throughout at creating a strong sense of the unity and harmony which subsists between the operations of God’s providence in the material world of nature, and in that inner spiritual world which finds its chiefmost exposition in Revelation.  Paley’s ‘Natural Theology,’ though not the most valuable, is by no means the least interesting of his works, and was intended by him to stand in the same relation to natural, as his ‘Evidences’ to revealed religion.