The first drastic attacks of a direct and businesslike kind on orthodoxy were those of the English Deists of the early years of the eighteenth century, typified in the works of Anthony Collins, who soberly and amiably called in question alike revelation, prophecy, and miracles. Soon such criticism was reinforced by the inquiry of Middleton into Roman Catholic miracles, on lines which implicitly called in question those of the gospels; and the essay of Hume on miracles in general put the case against them on grounds which could be turned only by arguments that evaded them. The polemic of the whole French school of freethinkers, headed by Voltaire, thereafter attacked every aspect of Jewish and Christian supernaturalism and of Jewish and Christian history considered as a moral dispensation; the English Unitarians, represented by Priestley, made a number of converts to their compromise; and when Gibbon came to deal with the rise of Christianity in his great work (1776-88), he set forth on naturalistic grounds a tentative sociological explanation which could not be overthrown by orthodox methods, and is to be superseded only by a more searching analysis on the same lines. So decisive was the total effect of the critical attack that in the last quarter of the eighteenth century many German theologians within the Church had begun to deal with the supernatural elements in the Old Testament on rationalistic though temporizing methods, and some had even begun to apply the same treatment to the New. Finally came, in England, the powerful common-sense attack of Thomas Paine (1793), which at once set up a movement of popular rationalism that has never since ceased.