Natural theology had a representative of much higher moral calibre than professional theology found in Sherlock in John Ray (1628-1705). Ray, a Cambridge man, prevented by scruples from ministering in the Church of England after the fatal legislation of 1662, but substantially accepting her doctrines, was the first English naturalist of eminence, and wrote chiefly in Latin, but composed his treatise on _The Wisdom of God in the Creation_ in his mother-tongue. The anthropomorphism of this earnest, lucid, and ingenious book, the prototype of Paley's, is a defect hardly to be avoided in an age when the Deity was almost universally conceived as an artificer; and yet Ray comes very near indeed to the conception of a power immanent in Nature. His style is limpid and persuasive; his reasoning cogent; his good sense is apparent in his discussion of spontaneous generation and the stories related in its support, although the caution and modesty of his temper sometimes incline him to defer too much to authority. He has no mercy, for example, on frogs rained from the sky, but will not, in the face of the testimony of eye-witnesses, carry scepticism to the point of disputing that they may have been occasionally found immured in the middle of stones. Ray's teleology had allies in Derham (1657-1735), an observant naturalist and author of _Astro-Theology_, and in the Hon. Robert Boyle, the best of men in disposition, and an admirable natural philosopher, but feeble and diffuse as a natural theologian. [Sidenote: Thomas Burnet (1635?-1715).]