Although it was often defended and applied with violence and with a superfluous hatred of the clergy, it forms the justifiable element in the endeavors of the deists. It is a commonplace to-day that everything which claims to be true and valid must justify itself before the criticism of reason; but then this principle, together with the distinction between natural and positive religion based upon it, exerted an enlightening and liberating influence. The real flaw in the deistical theory, which was scarcely felt as such, even by its opponents, was its lack of religious feeling and all historical sense, a lack which rendered the idea acceptable that religions could be "made," and priestly falsehoods become world-moving forces. Hume was the first to seek to rise above this unspeakable shallowness. There was a remarkable conflict between the ascription to man, on the one hand, of an assured treasure of religious knowledge in the reason, and the abandonment of him, on the other, to the juggling of cunning priests and despots. Thus the deists had no sense either for the peculiarities of an inward religious feeling, which, in happy prescience, rises above the earthly circle of moral duties to the world beyond, or for the involuntary, historically necessary origin and growth of the particular forms of religion. Here, again, we find that turning away from will and feeling to thought, from history to nature, from the oppressive complexity of that which has been developed to the simplicity of that which is original, which we have noted as one of the most prominent characteristics of the modern period. %3. Moral Philosophy.%