No other answer was seriously possible. In the very act of ostentatiously terming Tindal an "infidel," Middleton describes an answer made to him by the apologist Chapman as a sample of a kind of writing which did "more hurt and discredit" to Christianity "than all the attacks of its open adversaries." [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 "the belief of the inspiration and absolute infallibility of the evangelists seems to be more absurd than even that of transubstantiation itself." [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 "decayed." Its later recovery was economic, not intellectual.
Thus Skelton writes in 1751 that "our modern apologists for Christianity often defend it on deistical principles" (Deism Revealed, pref. p. xii. Cp. vol. ii, pp. 234, 237). See also Sir Leslie Stephen as cited above, p. 149, note; and Gostwick, German Culture and Christianity, 1882, pp. 33-36.
An interesting instance of liberalizing orthodoxy is furnished by the Rev. Arthur Ashley Sykes, who contributed many volumes to the general deistic discussion, some of them anonymously. In the preface to his Essay on the Truth of the Christian Religion (1732; 2nd ed. enlarged, 1755) Sykes remarks that "since ... systematical opinions have been received and embraced in such a manner that it has not been safe to contradict them, the burden of vindicating Christianity has been very much increased. Its friends have been much embarrassed through fear of speaking against local truths; and its adversaries have so successfully attacked those weaknesses that Christianity itself has been deemed indefensible, when in reality the follies of Christians alone have been so." Were Christians left to the simple doctrines of Christ and the Apostles, he contends, Infidelity could make no converts. And at the close of the book he writes: "Would to God that Christians would be content with the plainness and simplicity of the gospel.... That they would not vend under the name of evangelical truth the absurd and contradictory schemes of ignorant or wicked men! That they would part with that load of rubbish which makes thinking men almost sink under the weight, and gives too great a handle for Infidelity!" Such writing could not give satisfaction to the ecclesiastical authorities; and as little could Sykes's remarkable admission (The Principles and Connection of Natural and Revealed Religion, 1740, p. 242): "When the advantages of revelation are to be specified, I cannot conceive that it should be maintained as necessary to fix a rule of morality. For what one principle of morality is there which the heathen moralists had not asserted or maintained? Before ever any revelation is offered to mankind they are supposed to be so well acquainted with moral truths as from them to judge of the truth of the revelation itself." Again he writes:--