Tindal’s object is to show that natural religion is absolutely perfect, and can admit of no increase so as to carry obligation. For this purpose he tries to establish, first, that revelation is unnecessary,(441) and secondly, that obligation to it is impossible. His argument in favour of the first of these two positions is, that if man’s perfection be the living according to the constitution of human nature,(442) and God’s laws with the penalties attached be for man’s good,(443) nothing being required by God for its own sake;(444) then true religion, whether internally or externally revealed, having the one end, human happiness, must be identical in its precepts.(445) Having denied the necessity, he then disputes the possibility, of revelation, on the ground that the inculcation of positive as distinct from moral duties, is inconsistent with the good of man, as creating an independent rule.(446) Assuming the moral faculty to be the foundation of all obligation, he reduces all religious truth to moral. It is in thus showing the impossibility of any revelation save the republication of the law of nature that he notices many of the difficulties in scripture which form the mystery to the theologian, the ground of doubt to the objector. Some of these are of a literary character, such as the assertion of the failure of the fulfilment of prophecies, and of marks of fallibility in the scripture writers, like the mistake which he alleges in respect to the belief in the immediate coming of Christ.(447) Others of them are moral difficulties, points where the revealed system seems to him to contradict our instincts, such as the destruction of the Canaanites.(448) In reference to this last example, which may be quoted as a type of his assertions, he argues against the possibility of a divine commission for the act, on the principle asserted by Clarke,(449) that a miracle can never prove the divine truth of a doctrine which contravenes the moral idea of justice; or, in more modern phrase, that no supposed miracle can be a real one, if it attest a doctrine which bears this character. In the present work Tindal denied the necessity and possibility of a new revelation distinct from natural religion. He did not live to complete the concluding part of his book, wherein he intended to show that all the truths of Christianity were as old as the creation; i.e. were a republication of the religion of nature.