Note 141 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

The opening even of Jeremy Taylor’s Ductor Dubitantium, so far as it goes, falls little short of the deistic position.141 A new vein of rationalism, too, is opened in the theological field by the great Cambridge scholar John Spencer, whose Discourse concerning Prodigies (1663; 2nd ed. 1665), though quite orthodox in its main positions, has in part the effect of a plea for naturalism as against supernaturalism. Spencer’s great work, De legibus Hebræorum (1685), is, apart from Spinoza, the most scientific view of Hebrew institutions produced before the rise of German theological rationalism in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Holding most of the Jewish rites to have been planned by the deity as substitutes for or safeguards against those of the Gentiles which they resembled, he unconsciously laid, with Herbert, the foundations of comparative hierology, bringing to the work a learning which is still serviceable to scholars.142 And there were yet other new departures by clerical writers, who of course exhibit the difficulty of attaining a consistent rationalism.