# Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Tindal, Matthew

See also Matthew Tindal on Wikipedia; Tindal, Matthew in the 11th Edition; and the disclaimer.
The religious system expounded in Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation, unlike the earlier system of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, was based on the empirical principles of Locke's philosophy. It assumed the traditional deistic antitheses of external and internal, positive and natural, revelations and religions, and perpetuated at the same time the prevalent misconceptions as to the nature of religion and revelation. The system was, moreover, worked out by the purely a priori method, with all but a total disregard of the facts of religious history. It starts from the tremendous assumptions that true religion must, both from the nature of God and the nature of things, be eternal, universal, simple, and perfect; it maintains that this religion can consist of nothing but the simple and universal duties towards God and man, the first consisting in the fulfilment of the second, in other words, the practice of morality. The author's moral system is somewhat confused and inconsistent, but is essentially utilitarian. From such principles it follows necessarily that the true revealed religion can be nothing more nor less than a republication of the religion of nature or reason, and that, if Christianity is the perfect religion, it can only be that republication, and must be as old as the creation. The special mission of Christianity, therefore, was simply to deliver men from the superstition which had in course of time got mixed up with the religion of nature. True Christianity consequently must be a perfectly "reasonable service"; arbitrary and positive precepts can form no true part of it; revelation and reason can never disagree; reason must be supreme, and the Scriptures as well as all religious doc trines must submit to its tests; and only such writings can be regarded as Divine Scripture which tend to the honour of God and the good of man. Thus tested, much in the Old and the New Testaments must be rejected as defective in morality or erroneous in fact and principle. The strength of Tindal's position was the underlying conviction of the essential harmony between man's religious and rational nature, and consequently of the rationality of Christianity. Its weakness was that, like the whole religious philosophy of the time, it was founded on a total misconception of the nature of religion and of revelation, and on as complete a disregard of the course of man's religious development. Weak points in it were ably exposed by Foster, Conybeare, Butler, and others; but its radical errors needed for their complete exposure the higher conceptions of religion and religious history which were originated by Lessing, Schleiermacher, and Hegel.
See Leland, View of the Principal Deistical Writers (London, 1798); Lechler, Geschichte des Englischen Deismus (Stuttgart, 1841); Theological Review, November 1864; Hunt, Religious Thought in England from the Reformation to the End of Last Century (London, 1870–73); Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1876–80); A. S. Farrar, Bampton Lecture (1862), lect. iv.