fender of infant baptism; Humphrey Prideaux
(1648-1724), who wrote the _Connection of the Old and New Testaments_;
and Matthew Henry (1662-1714), still valued for his quaint and suggestive
_Commentary on the Scriptures_.

Here, too, belong George Fox (1624-1690) and Robert Barclay (1648-1690),
the heroic founder and the learned champion of the Society of Friends,
the former's _Journal_ and the latter's _Apology for the True Christian
Divinity_ being worthy of special note. William Penn (1644-1718), more
eminent as the chief colonizer of Pennsylvania, also wrote many powerful
works in advocacy of Quaker teachings; and William Sewel's (1650-1726)
_History of the Quakers_ is a notable contribution to the literature of
that much-misunderstood and persecuted people.

Among those who graced the first half of the eighteenth century we find
the Irish man of letters, Charles Leslie (1650-1722), who gave among
others a celebrated treatise on _A Short and Easy Method with the
Deists_; Francis Atterbury (1662-1732), Bishop of Rochester, whose
_Sermons_ still survive; William Wollaston (1659-1724), known as the
author of _The Religion of Nature_, a plea for truth; Samuel Clarke
(1675-1729), the {308} philosophical writer of _The Demonstration of the
Being and Attributes of God_; Matthew Tindal (1657-1733), the leading
deist of his day, whose chief work was _Christianity as Old as Creation_;
Robert Wodrow (1679-1734), a Scotch preacher who wrote a _History of the
Sufferings of the Church of Scotland_; and Thomas Wilson (1663-1755),
Bishop of Sodor and Man for fifty-seven years and the author of many
useful works on the Scriptures and Christianity. Bishop Joseph Butler
(1692-1752) appeared as the champion of Christianity and successfully
answered the deistical tendency of Tindal and others by his _Analogy of
Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of
Nature_, which, though obscure in style, is still in high repute for its
massive thought and mighty logic.

Thomas Stackhouse (1680-1752) and his _History of the Bible_; John
Bampton (1689-1751), whose estate still speaks at Oxford in defense of
Christianity in the annual lectures on Divinity; Daniel Waterland
(1683-1740), in his defense of the divinity of Christ; and Joseph Bingham
(1668-1723), in his learned treatise on _The Antiquities of the Christian
Church_, are also in the front rank of this period. Daniel Neal
(1678-1743), in his _History of the Puritan