is all doubt and suspicion; the groundwork of religion is all submission and faith.  The enlightened scholar of the Cross, if he regards the one thing needful, rightly despises all lower studies.  When he turns to these he leaves his own proper sphere.  Julian was all in the wrong when he closed the philosophical schools to the Christians.  He should have given them all possible privileges that they might undermine the principles of Christ.  “Not many wise men after the flesh are called.”  All attempts to establish a rational faith, from the time of Origen to that of Tillotson, Dr. Clarke, and the Boyle lectures, are utterly useless.  Tertullian was right when he said Credo quia absurdum et quia impossibile est, for there is an irreconcilable repugnancy in their natures between reason and belief; therefore, “My son, give thyself to the Lord with thy whole heart and lean not to thy own understanding."’

Such is the substance of this remarkable work.  He hit, and hit very forcibly, a blot which belonged to almost all writers in common who took part in this controversy.  The great deficiency of the age—­a want of spiritual earnestness, an exclusive regard to the intellectual, to the ignoring of the emotional element of our nature—­nowhere appears more glaringly than in the Deistical and anti-Deistical literature.  What Dodwell urges in bitter irony, John Wesley urged in sober seriousness, when he intimated that Deists and evidence writers alike were strangers to those truths which are ‘spiritually discerned.’

There is yet one more writer who is popularly regarded not only as a Deist, but as the chief of the Deists—­Lord Bolingbroke, to whom Leland gives more space than to all the other Deists put together.  So far as the eminence of the man is concerned, the prominence given to him is not disproportionate to his merits, but it is only in a very qualified sense that Lord Bolingbroke can be called a Deist.  He lived and was before the public during the whole course of the Deistical controversy, so far as it belongs to the eighteenth century; but he was known, not as a theologian, but first as a brilliant, fashionable man of pleasure, then as a politician.  So far as he took any part in religious matters at all, it was as a violent partisan of the established faith and as a persecutor of Dissenters.  It was mainly through his instrumentality that the iniquitous Schism Act of 1713 was passed.  In the House of Commons he called it ’a bill of the last importance, since it concerned the security of the Church of England, the best and firmest support of the monarchy.’  In his famous letter to Sir W. Wyndham, he justified his action in regard to this measure, and the kindred bill against occasional conformity, on purely political grounds.  He publicly expressed his abhorrence of the so-called Freethinkers, whom he stigmatised as ‘Pests of Society.’  But in a letter to Mr. Pope, he gave some intimation of his real sentiments, and at the same time justified