Note 749 — Chapter VII · (continued 2)

Mr. Hallam (Lit. of Europe, vol. iii. p. 390) says, that Cumberland ‘seems to have been the first Christian writer who sought to establish systematically the principles of moral right independently of revelation.’ See also, on this important change, Whewell's Hist. of Moral Philosophy in England, pp. 12, 54. The dangers always incurred by making theology the basis of morals are now pretty well understood; but by no writer have they been pointed out more clearly than by M. Charles Comte: see the able exposition in his Traité de Législation, vol. i. pp. 223–247. There is a short and unsatisfactory account of Cumberland's book in Mackintosh's Ethical Philosophy, pp. 134–137. He was a man of considerable learning, and is noticed by M. Quatremère as one of the earliest students of Coptic. Quatremère sur la Langue et la Littérature de l'Egypte, p. 89. He was made a bishop in 1691, having published the De Legibus in 1672. Chalmers's Biog. Dict. vol. xi. pp. 133, 135.