Note 131 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

On the other hand, even deists who were affected by the plea that the Bible need not be more consistent and satisfactory than Nature, could find refuge in Unitarianism, a creed which, as industriously propounded by Priestley131 towards the end of the century, made a numerical progress out of all proportion to that of orthodoxy. The argument of William Law,132 again, which insisted on the irreconcilability of the course of things with human reason, and called for an abject submission to revelation, could appeal only to minds already thus prostrate. Both his and Butler’s methods, in fact, prepared the way for Hume. And in the year 1741, five years after the issue of the Analogy and seven before the issue of Hume’s Essay on Miracles, we find the thesis of that essay tersely affirmed in a note to Book II of an anonymous translation (ascribed to T. Francklin) of Cicero’s De Natura Deorum.