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The history of the gospel, he writes,
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I hope may be true, though the history of the Church be fabulous. [863] But his argument against post-Apostolic miracles is so strictly naturalistic that no vigilant reader could fail to realize its fuller bearing upon all miracles whatsoever. With Hume and Francklin, he insisted that facts incredible in themselves could not be established by any amount or kind of testimony; and he suggested no measure of comparative credibility as between the two orders of miracle. With the deists in general, he argued that knowledge
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was to be had only through study of
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[864] An antagonist accordingly wrote that his theses were:
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First, that there were no miracles wrought in the primitive Church; Secondly, that all the primitive fathers were fools or knaves, and most of them both one and the other. And it is easy to observe, the whole tenor of your argument tends to prove, Thirdly, that no miracles were wrought by Christ or his apostles; and Fourthly, that these too were fools or knaves, or both. [865] A more temperate opponent pressed the same point in less explosive language. Citing Middleton's demand for an inductive method, this critic asks with much point:
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What does he mean by 'deserting the path of Nature and experience,' but giving in to the belief of any miracles, and acknowledging the reality of events contrary to the known effects of the established Laws of Nature?
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Middleton describes an answer made to him by the apologist Chapman as a sample of a kind of writing which did
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to Christianity
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[867] In support of the miracles of the gospel and the apostolic history he offers merely conventional pleas: against the miracles related by the Fathers he brings to bear an incessant battery of destructive criticism. We may sum up that by the middle of the eighteenth century the essentials of the Christian creed, openly challenged for a generation by avowed deists, were abandoned by not a few scholars within the pale of the Church, of whom Middleton was merely the least reticent. After his death was published his Vindication of the Inquiry (1751); and in his collected works (1752) was included his Reflections on the Variations or Inconsistencies which are found among the Four Evangelists, wherein it is demonstrated that
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[868] The main grounds of orthodoxy were thus put in doubt in the name of a critical orthodoxy. In short, the deistic movement had done what it lay in it to do. The old evangelical or pietistic view of life was discredited among instructed people, and in this sense it was Christianity that had