his Heresiography (1644), speaks loosely of an "atheistical sect who affirm that men's soules sleep with them until the day of judgment"; and tells of some alleged atheist merely that he "mocked and jeared at Christ's Incarnation." [368] Similarly a work, entitled Dispute betwixt an Atheist and a Christian (1646), shows the existence not of atheists but of deists, and the deist in the dialogue is a Fleming. More trustworthy is the allusion in Nathaniel Culverwel's Discourse of the Light of Nature (written in 1646, published posthumously in 1652) to "those lumps and dunghills of all sects ... that young and upstart generation of gross anti-scripturalists, that have a powder-plot against the Gospel, that would very compendiously behead all Christian religion at one blow, a device which old and ordinary heretics were never acquainted withal." [369] The reference is presumably to the followers of Lawrence Clarkson. Yet even here we have no mention of atheism, which is treated as something almost impossible. Indeed, the very course of arguing in favour of a "Light of Nature" seems to have brought suspicion on Culverwel himself, who shows a noticeable liking for Herbert of Cherbury. [370] He is, however, as may be inferred from his angry tone towards anti-scripturalists, substantially orthodox, and not very important. It is contended for Culverwel by modern admirers (ed. cited, p. xxi) that he deserves the praise given by Hallam to the later Bishop Cumberland as "the first Christian writer who sought to establish systematically the principle of moral right independent of revelation." [See above, p. 74, the similar tribute of Mosheim to Ames.] But Culverwel does not really make this attempt. His proposition is that reason, "the candle of the Lord," discovers "that all the moral law is founded in natural and common light, in the light of reason, and that there is nothing in the mysteries of the Gospel contrary to the light of reason" (Introd. end); yet he contends not only that faith transcends reason, but that Abraham's attempt to slay his son was a dutiful obeying of "the God of nature" (pp. 225-26). He does not achieve the simple step of noting that the recognition of revelation as such must be performed by reason, and thus makes no advance on the position of Bacon, much less on those of Pecock and Hooker. His object, indeed, was not to justify orthodoxy by reason against rationalistic unbelief, but to make a case for reason in theology against the Lutherans and others who, "because Socinus has burnt his wings at this candle of the Lord," scouted all use of it (Introd.). Culverwel, however, was one of the learned group in Emanuel College, Cambridge, whose tradition developed in the next generation into Latitudinarianism; and he may be taken as a learned type of a number of the clergy who were led by the abundant discussion all around them into