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Who now reads Bolingbroke and the rest of the older deists. [907] The fashionable public was actually reading Bolingbroke even then; [908] and the work of the older deists was being done with new incisiveness and thoroughness by their successors. [909] In the unstudious world of politics, if the readers were few the indifferentists were many. Evanson could truthfully write to Bishop Hurd in 1777 that
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That general unbelief of revealed religion among the higher orders of our countrymen, which, however your Lordship and I might differ in our manner of accounting for it, is too notorious for either of us to doubt of, hath, by a necessary consequence, produced in the majority of our present legislators an absolute indifference towards religious questions of every kind.
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Bishop Butler's work raised in his mind more doubts than it had answered. Gladstone points to another passage in Wilberforce's diary which states that Pitt
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(Life, i, 90). But the context shows that Pitt had commended the book for the express purpose of turning Wilberforce's mind from its evangelical bias. Wilberforce was never a deist, and the purpose accordingly could not have been to make him orthodox. The two testimonies are thus perfectly consistent; especially when we note the further statement credibly reported to have been made by Wilberforce (Life, i, 95), that Pitt later
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We have yet further the emphatic declaration of Pitt's niece, Lady Hester Stanhope, that he