Then Middleton turned to deal with the miracles (though he prudently refrained from touching on those ascribed to Jesus himself). What were the facts of the case? What did observation and experience teach us? Roman Catholics might still believe in nonsense such as liquefying blood and weeping statues of the Madonna, but sober Protestants all agreed that the age of miracles was past. Why was this? A difficult question to answer while still proclaiming belief in the historical validity of attested ones. Was it not more probable that these so-called miracles had been no more than the delusions of weak and silly men (for so he described the revered Fathers of the Church) or had been devised by unscrupulous ones to establish their own authority? The evidence was worthless for "no force of testimony can alter the nature of things". It was not so long since a belief in witchcraft had been general, but "the belief in witches is now extinct and has been quietly buried". Alleged miracles that fly in the face of the Laws of Nature are equally incredible absurdities.

As for the prophets, they too offered mere assertion. "The case is the same in theology as in natural enquiries; it is experience alone, and the observation of facts, which can illustrate the truth of principles." There was no need of miracles and prophecies, when God has revealed himself "continually before our eyes, in the wonderful works and beautiful fabric of the visible world". But no man of sense could suppose that doctrines such as the Incarnation, the Resurrection and the Trinity were "probable". 

In short, Middleton was a deist who saw nothing in Christianity superior to the religion of the wisest men of Antiquity. This did not, however, mean that he saw no value in religion and religious observance. On the contrary, what he called "natural religion" was to be honoured "as a rule of life and manners", and was "best calculated for the benefit of society and the support of government".

It is here that Middleton the deist parts company from modern atheists. "He was not," Trevor-Roper writes, "a religious man. He had no sense of awe or devotion, except in the presence of Nature, of ‘the wonderful fabric of the world'. He had no feeling of sin, no need for redemption, no tragic sense of the world. But he recognised that deism was not enough. It might satisfy ‘the wiser sort', but it could not, by itself, provide a means of social control." And such control was necessary.

Gibbon, as Middleton's disciple, would take up the same position. "The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful."

True in the eyes of the credulous, false in the opinion of the wise, useful to government. This was not quite a dismissal of religion, but it was at best a tepid endorsement. There might be a Prime Mover, God the Creator, and the beauty and order of the natural world suggested that there was such a being. But sensible men could no more credit the doctrines of the Christian Church than the philosophers of Greece and Rome could give credence to the stories of the Olympian gods. Invocation of the saints was no more likely to bring desired results than the sacrifice of cattle on pagan altars and the reading of their entrails. This was the conclusion that made deists of Middleton and Hume, Voltaire and Gibbon, and Robert Burns.