Still his strong historic sense and solid erudition would be more likely to be repelled than attracted by their vague and inaccurate scholarship, and chimerical theories of the light of Nature.

Still we know that he practically adopted, in the end, at least the negative portion of these views, and the question is, When did he do so?
His visit to Paris, and the company that he frequented there, might suggest that as a probable date of his change of opinions.

But the entry just referred to was subsequent by several months to that visit, and we may with confidence assume that no freethinker of the eighteenth century would pronounce the austerities of a Communion Sunday in a Calvinist town an edifying spectacle.

It is probable that his relinquishing of dogmatic faith was gradual, and for a time unconscious.

It was an age of tepid belief, except among the Nonjurors and Methodists; and with neither of these groups could he have had the least sympathy.