Bolingbroke’s writings command respect from their mixture of clearness of exposition with power of argument. They form also the transition to the literature of the next age, in turning attention to history. Bolingbroke had great powers of psychological analysis, but he despised the study of it apart from experience. His philosophy was a philosophy of history. In his attacks on revelation we have the traces of the older philosophical school of deists; but in the consciousness that an historical, not a philosophical, solution must be sought to explain the rise of an historical phenomenon such as Christianity, he exemplifies the historic spirit which was rising, and anticipates the theological inquiry found in Gibbon; and, in his examination of the external historic evidence, both the documents by which the Christian religion is attested, and the effects of tradition in weakening historic data, he evinces traces of the influence of the historical criticism which had arisen in France under his friend Pouilly.(468) His theological writings(469) are in the form of letters, or of essays, the common form of didactic writings in that age. We shall briefly state his views on deity, futurity, and revelation. He teaches the existence of a deity, but was led, by the sensational philosophy which he adopted from Locke, to deny the possibility of an _à priori_ proof of the divine existence,(470) and contends strongly that the divine attributes can only be known by observation of nature, and not by the analogy of man’s constitution. He considers too that the deity whose existence he has thus allowed, exercises a general but not a special providence;(471) the world being a machine moving by delegated powers without the divine interference. The philosophy expressed in Pope’s didactic poetry gives expression to Bolingbroke’s opinions(472) on providence. In his views of human duty Bolingbroke refers conduct to self-love as a cause, and to happiness as an end; and doubts a future state,(473) either on the ground of materialism, or possibly because his favourite principle, that “whatever is, is best,” led him to disbelieve the argument for a future life adduced from the inequality of present rewards. Future punishment is rejected, on the ground that it can offer no end compatible with the moral object of punishment, which is correction.