professing and encouraging a ratiocinative habit of mind. Thus we find Dean Stuart, Clerk of the Closet to Charles I, devoting one of his short homilies to Jerome's text, Tentemus animas quæ deficiunt a fide naturalibus rationibus adjurare. "It is not enough," he writes, "for you to rest in an imaginary faith, and easiness in beleeving, except yee know also what and why and how you come to that beleef. Implicite beleevers, ignorant beleevers, the adversary may swallow, but the understanding beleever hee must chaw, and pick bones before hee come to assimilate him, and make him like himself. The implicite beleever stands in an open field, and the enemy will ride over him easily: the understanding beleever is in a fenced town." (Catholique Divinity, 1657, pp. 133-34--a work written many years earlier.) The discourse on Atheism, again, in the posthumous works of John Smith of Cambridge (d. 1652), is entirely retrospective; but soon another note is sounded. As early as 1652, the year after the issue of Hobbes's Leviathan, the prolific Walter Charleton, who had been physician to the king, published a book entitled The Darkness of Atheism Expelled by the Light of Nature, wherein he asserted that England "hath of late produced and doth ... foster more swarms of atheistical monsters ... than any age, than any Nation hath been infested withal." In the following year Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, published his Antidote against Atheism. The flamboyant dedication to Viscountess Conway affirms that the existence of God is "as clearly demonstrable as any theorem in mathematicks"; but, the reverend author adds, "considering the state of things as they are, I cannot but pronounce that there is more necessity of this my Antidote than I could wish there were." At the close of the preface he pleasantly explains that he will use no Biblical arguments, but talk to the atheist as a "mere Naturalist"; inasmuch as "he that converses with a barbarian must discourse to him in his own language," and "he that would gain upon the more weak and sunk minds of sensual mortals is to accommodate himself to their capacity, who, like the bat and owl, can see nowhere so well as in the shady glimmerings of their twilight." Then, after some elementary play with the design argument, the entire Third Book of forty-six folio pages is devoted to a parade of old wives' tales of witches and witchcraft, witches' sabbaths, apparitions, commotions by devils, ghosts, incubi, polter-geists--the whole vulgar medley of the peasant superstitions of Europe.