As a rule, they showed no desire to separate themselves from communion with the National Church, although they were quite out of harmony both with the articles of its belief and the spirit of its prayers.  A few negative tenets were perhaps more or less common to all.  That no traditional revelation can have the same force of conviction as the direct revelation which God has given to all mankind—­in other words, that what is called revealed religion must be inferior and subordinate to natural—­that the Scriptures must be criticised like any other book, and no part of them be accepted as a revelation from God which does not harmonise with the eternal and immutable reason of things; that, in point of fact, the Old Testament is a tissue of fables and folly, and the New Testament has much alloy mingled with the gold which it contains; that Jesus Christ is not co-equal with the one God, and that his death can in no sense be regarded as an atonement for sin, are tenets which may be found in most of the Deistical writings; but beyond these negative points there is little or nothing in common between the heterogeneous body of writers who passed under the vague name of Deists.  To complicate matters still further, the name ‘Deist’ was loosely applied as a name of reproach to men who, in the widest sense of the term, do not come within its meaning.  Thus Cudworth, Tillotson, Locke, and Samuel Clarke were stigmatised as Deists by their enemies.  On the other hand, men were grouped under the category whose faith did not rise to the level of Deism.  Thus Hume is classified among the Deists.  Yet if the term ‘Deism’ is allowed to have any definite meaning at all, it implies the certainty and obligation of natural religion.  It is of its very essence that God has revealed himself so plainly to mankind that there is no necessity, as there is no sufficient evidence, for a better revelation.  But Hume’s scepticism embraced natural as well as revealed religion.  Hobbes, again, occupies a prominent place among the Deists of the seventeenth century, although the whole nature of his argument in ‘The Leviathan’ is alien to the central thought of Deism.  Add to all this, that the Deists proper were constantly accused of holding views which they never held, and that conclusions were drawn from their premisses which those premisses did not warrant, and the difficulty of treating the subject as a whole will be readily perceived.  And yet treated it must be; the most superficial sketch of English Church History during the eighteenth century would be almost imperfect if it did not give a prominent place to this topic, for it was the all-absorbing topic of a considerable portion of the period.

The Deistical writers attracted attention out of all proportion to their literary merit.  The pulpit rang with denunciations of their doctrines.  The press teemed with answers to their arguments.  It may seem strange that a mere handful of not very voluminous writers, not one of whom can be said to have attained to the eminence of an English classic,[147] should have created such a vast amount of excitement.  But the excitement was really caused by the subject itself, not by the method in which it was handled.  The Deists only gave expression—­often a very coarse and inadequate expression—­to thoughts which the circumstances of the times could scarcely fail to suggest.