The English Church in the Eighteenth CenturyAbbey, Charles J. (Charles John)
History
The English Church in the Eighteenth Century
Abbey, Charles J. (Charles John)
Church of England -- History -- 18th century
life was overpowered by the revelation of uniform physical laws
operating through a seeming infinite expanse of material existence. The
one cause tended to create a notion that unassisted reason was
sufficient for all human needs; the other developed a frequent bias to
materialism. Both alike rendered it imperative to earnest minds that
felt competent to the task to inquire what reason had to say about the
nature of our spiritual life, and the principles and religious motives
which chiefly govern it. Difficulties arising out of man's position as a
part of universal nature had scarcely been felt before. Nor even in the
last century did they assume the proportions they have since attained.
But they deserve to be largely taken into account in any review of the
evidence writers of that period. Not to speak of Derham's
'Physico-Theology' and other works of that class, neither Berkeley,
Butler, nor Paley--three great names--can be properly understood without
reference to the greatly increased attention which was being given to
the physical sciences. Berkeley's suggestive philosophy was distinctly
based upon an earnest wish to release the essence of all theology from
an embarrassing dependence upon the outward world of sense. Butler's
'Analogy'--by far the greatest theological work of the century--aims
throughout at creating a strong sense of the unity and harmony which
subsists between the operations of God's providence in the material
world of nature, and in that inner spiritual world which finds its
chiefmost exposition in Revelation. Paley's 'Natural Theology,' though
not the most valuable, is by no means the least interesting of his
works, and was intended by him to stand in the same relation to natural,
as his 'Evidences' to revealed religion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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