Bolingbroke's views on the moral attributes of the Deity were the result of his mania to get rid of the arguments for a future state. Virtue is frequently oppressed and suffering in this world, and vice prosperous; the wicked defraud, supplant, and persecute the upright; and in manifold ways the felicities of life are not proportioned to the behaviour of men. A righteous Deity, we may be sure, would not ordain a constitution of things in which the good should repeatedly fare worse than the bad, often in consequence of their persistence in goodness, and then perish unrewarded in the midst of their self-denial. The inference is plain that they will be finally compensated in a kingdom to come. The struggle between sin and rectitude in good men continues all their days, and when the battle has been fought out, and the victory won, they are removed from the world. It is incredible that a benevolent ruler should set us to maintain a painful conflict with evil, and when we are disciplined to holiness should consign us to annihilation. The hope that well-doing will not go unrewarded, the apprehension that wickedness will not go unpunished, are sentiments engrained in the heart of man, and we may be confident that the source of all truth would not direct us to govern our conduct by false anticipations. The supposition that there is no future life is therefore inconsistent with the moral attributes of God, and to avoid this deduction Bolingbroke took up the theory of one of the worst class of deists, and contended that the moral attributes of the Creator were not the same as in our ideas, and could not be judged by our notions. He said he "ascribed all conceivable perfections to God," and that he was as "far from denying his justice and goodness as his wisdom and power," but insisted that his justice and goodness differed from ours in kind as well as in degree.[757] Wherever this hypothesis was brought in, the epithets "just and good" either ceased to have any meaning for us, or they meant exactly the reverse of "just and good." The object of the theory was, indeed, to set up the maxim that conduct which would be thought immoral among men might be the morality of God. Bolingbroke's philosophic vision was limited to a single point at a time. He abounds in astounding contradictions from his inability to keep his most emphatic principles before his mind, and he might be answered, without a word of comment, by ranging in parallel columns the passages of his writings which are mutually destructive. His hypothesis on the moral attributes of the Deity shared the usual fate of his dogmas. He denounced the doctrine of predestination, and called it "blasphemous," "impious," "devilish," because it was "scandalously repugnant to our ideas of God's moral perfections," and supposed "a God such as no one could acknowledge."[758] The moment he had to deal with an opinion he disliked, he thought it impious to imagine that the