The opening even of Jeremy Taylor's Ductor Dubitantium, so far as it goes, falls little short of the deistic position. [449] A new vein of rationalism, too, is opened in the theological field by the great Cambridge scholar John Spencer, whose Discourse concerning Prodigies (1663; 2nd ed. 1665), though quite orthodox in its main positions, has in part the effect of a plea for naturalism as against supernaturalism. Spencer's great work, De legibus Hebræorum (1685), is, apart from Spinoza, the most scientific view of Hebrew institutions produced before the rise of German theological rationalism in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Holding most of the Jewish rites to have been planned by the deity as substitutes for or safeguards against those of the Gentiles which they resembled, he unconsciously laid, with Herbert, the foundations of comparative hierology, bringing to the work a learning which is still serviceable to scholars. [450] And there were yet other new departures by clerical writers, who of course exhibit the difficulty of attaining a consistent rationalism.
One clergyman, Joseph Glanvill, is found publishing a treatise on The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661; amended in 1665 under the title Scepsis Scientifica), [451] wherein, with careful reservation of religion, the spirit of critical science is applied to the ordinary processes of opinion with much energy, and the "mechanical philosophy" of Descartes is embraced with zeal. Following Raleigh and Hobbes, [452] Glanvill also puts the positive view of causation [453] afterwards fully developed by Hume. [454] Yet he not only vetoed all innovation in "divinity," but held stoutly by the crudest forms of the belief in witchcraft, and was with Henry More its chief English champion in his day against rational disbelief. [455] In religion he had so little of the skeptical faculty that he declared "Our religious foundations are fastened at the pillars of the intellectual world, and the grand articles of our belief as demonstrable as geometry. Nor will ever either the subtile attempts of the resolved Atheist, or the passionate hurricanes of the wild enthusiast, any more be able to prevail against the reason our faith is built on, than the blustering winds to blow out the Sun." [456] He had his due reward in being philosophically assailed by the Catholic priest Thomas White as a promoter of skepticism, [457] and by an Anglican clergyman, wroth with the Royal Society and all its works, as an infidel and an atheist. [458]