human
--this twenty years before the issue of the epoch-making works of Hutton. [913] In England the impulse seems to have come from the writings of the Abbé Langlet du Fresnoy, De Maillet, and Mirabaud, challenging the Biblical account of the antiquity of the earth. The new phase of
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was of course furiously denounced, one of the most angry and most absurd of its opponents being the poet Cowper. [914] Still rationalism persisted. Paley, writing in 1786, protests that
human
Infidelity is now served up in every shape that is likely to allure, surprise, or beguile the imagination, in a fable, a tale, a novel, or a poem, in interspersed or broken hints, remote and oblique surmises, in books of travel, of philosophy, of natural history--in a word, in any form rather than that of a professed and regular disquisition. [915] The orthodox Dr. J. Ogilvie, in the introduction to his Inquiry into the Causes of the Infidelity and Skepticism of the Times (1783), begins:
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That the opinions of the deists and skeptics have spread more universally during a part of the last century and in the present than at any former æra since the resurrection of letters, is a truth to which the friends and the enemies of religion will give their suffrage without hesitation.