k was held by his own party.

Tindal was in many respects fitted for the position which he occupied.
He was an old man when he wrote his great work, and had observed and
taken an interest in the whole course of the Deistical controversy for
more than forty years. He had himself passed through many phases of
religion, having been a pupil of Hickes the Nonjuror, at Lincoln
College, Oxford, then a Roman Catholic, then a Low Churchman, and
finally, to use his own designation of himself, 'a Christian Deist.' He
had, no doubt, carefully studied the various writings of the Deists and
their opponents, and had detected the weak points of all. His book is
written in a comparatively temperate spirit, and the subject is treated
with great thoroughness and ability. Still it has many drawbacks, even
from a literary point of view. It is written in the wearisome form of
dialogue, and the writer falls into that error to which all
controversial writers in dialogue are peculiarly liable. When a man has
to slay giants of his own creation, he is sorely tempted to make his
giants no stronger than dwarfs. To this temptation Tindal yielded. His
defender of orthodoxy is so very weak, that a victory over him is no
great achievement. Again, there is a want of order and lucidity in his
book, and not sufficient precision in his definitions. But the worst
fault of all is the unfairness of his quotations, both from the Bible
and other books.

Perhaps one reason why, in spite of these defects, the book exercised so
vast an influence is, that the minds of many who sympathised with the
destructive process employed by preceding Deists may have begun to yearn
for something more constructive. They might ask themselves, 'What then
_is_ our religion to be? And Tindal answers the question after a
fashion. 'It is to be the religion of nature, and an expurgated
Christianity in so far as it agrees with the religion of nature.' The
answer is a somewhat vague one, but better than none, and as such may
have been welcomed. This, however, is mere conjecture.

Deism, as we have seen, had now reached its zenith; henceforth its
history is the history of a rapid decline. Tindal did not live to
complete his work; but after his death it was taken up by far feebler
hands.

Dr. Morgan in a work entitled 'The Moral Philosopher, or a Dialogue
between Philalethes a Christian Deist, and Theophanes a Christian Jew,'
follows closely in Tindal's footsteps. Like him, he insists