=The English Deists.= We have seen how Rationalism, especially in the case of Descartes, tried at the beginning to reconstruct theology without breaking with established dogma. Gradually, however, rationalism and revealed religion showed signs of divorce. Some of the rationalists came to take the stand that if reason can understand the nature of God, revelation is either incredible or superfluous. The revealed religions differ. The god of the mediæval people is not the same as the god of the heathen nor as the Jehovah of the Jews. There are many religions and many sects in each religion. There must be to them all a common basis, which is the true religion. This was the creed of Deism or Natural Religion. Positive religions are only the corruptions of natural religion, or the religion of reason. Deism sought to separate religion from special revelations, which were looked upon as the irrational elements of religion. Bacon and Descartes had freed natural science from church dogma; Hobbes had freed psychology from the same dogma; Grotius had freed the conception of law from dogma. The Deists would free religion from dogma. Deism was founded on three principles; (1) the origin and truth of religion may be scientifically investigated; (2) the origin of religion is the conscience; (3) positive religions are degenerate forms of natural religion. The tendency of the Enlightenment was deistical, and the movement was powerful in England, France, and Germany. Deism was quite consistent with the central principle of this period――the self-sufficiency of the individual. In England the first deist was Herbert of Cherbury (1581–1648), with his “five fundamental propositions of religion.” The body of English deists, however, got their cue from Locke’s identification of the moral law with the law of nature; but Locke himself was not a deist. The literature of deism coincides for the most part with the English moral philosophy of the period, but usually the group of English deists is supposed to include only Toland, Chubb, Tindal, Collins, Morgan, and Bolingbroke. These men lived in the first half of the Enlightenment. They were much despised by the scholars of the time as being mere dabblers in letters. “They were but a ragged regiment whose whole ammunition of learning was a trifle when compared with the abundant stores of a single light of orthodoxy; whilst in speculative ability they were children by the side of their antagonists.”[39]