question, and submitted to
the test of reason. Is there such a thing as a revelation from God to
men of Himself and of His will? If so, what is its nature, its purposes,
its limits? What are the attributes of God? What is the meaning of life?
What is man's hereafter? Does a divine spirit work in man? and if it
does, what are its operations, and how are they distinguishable? What is
spirit? and what is matter? What does faith rest upon? What is to be
said of inspiration, and authority, and the essential attributes of a
church? These, and other questions of the most essential religious
importance, as the nature and signification of the doctrines of the
Trinity, of the Incarnation of Christ, of Redemption, of Atonement,
discussions as to the relations between faith and morals, and on the
old, inevitable enigmas of necessity and liberty, all more or less
entered into that mixed whirl of earnest inquiry and flippant scepticism
which is summed up under the general name of the Deistic Controversy.
For it is not hard to see how intimately the secondary controversies of
the time were connected with that main and central one, which not only
engrossed so much attention on the part of theologians and students, but
became a subject of too general conversation in every coffee-house and
place of public resort.

In mental, as well as in physical science, it seems to be a law that
force cannot be expended in one direction without some corresponding
relaxation of it in another. And thus the disproportionate energies
which were diverted to the intellectual side of religion were exercised
at some cost to its practical part. Bishops were writing in their
libraries, when otherwise they might have been travelling round their
dioceses. Men were pondering over abstract questions of faith and
morality, who else might have been engaged in planning or carrying out
plans for the more active propagation of the faith, or a more general
improvement in popular morals. The defenders of Christianity were
searching out evidences, and battling with deistical objections, while
they slackened in their fight against the more palpable assaults of the
world and the flesh. Pulpits sounded with theological arguments where
admonitions were urgently needed. Above all, reason was called to decide
upon questions before which man's reason stands impotent; and
imagination and emotion, those great auxiliaries to all deep religious
feeling, were bid to stand rebuked in h