It was not, however, necessary to discard religion or overthrow churches. Indeed, it was desirable not to do so. The ethical teaching of Christ was admirable and the improbability of the Resurrection did not make it less so. Religion had a social value. Without religion, what was to prevent men from regressing to the Hobbesian state of nature where life was "nasty , brutish and short"? A century later, Dostoevsky would declare that, if there was no God, then anything was permitted. 

This was the frightening and bottomless pit that yawned before 18th-century deists. The props of the Christian religion might have rotted. The churches might preach doctrines that no sensible man could credit. No reasonable person could believe, as Gibbon put it, that in the youth of the Christian religion, "the lame walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, demons were expelled, and the laws of Nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the Church". And yet...and yet. What was to be put in place of revealed religion? There was no easy or satisfactory answer. Therefore, scepticism must be expressed with restraint and the teaching, if not the mysteries, of the Church must be accorded respect. For the 18th century was not only a rational age, it was also an aristocratic one with a fear of the social consequences of free-thinking and of the unbridled passions of the mob. 

The French Revolution showed these fears to be well-founded. Voltaire and the other philosophes — men of the Enlightenment, deists, enemies of the Church, if not of natural religion — had undermined the authority of the clergy, and the floodgates were opened. There was an understandable retreat from advanced opinion. Burke wrote: "We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages." Middleton, had he lived to contemplate the Revolution, would surely have agreed with Burke. Had not Cicero spoken with like reverence of the inherited wisdom of the Roman Republic and been punctilious in the observance of religious rituals that honoured the gods in whom he did not believe? Soon, however, religion was back in fashion: in France, Chateaubriand rather than Voltaire; in England, Newman and the Oxford Movement instead of the cool scepticism of Middleton and Gibbon. In 1843, Trevor-Roper writes, "When Newman and his Oxford friends were putting the clock back, and reviving, with infantile credulity, the miracles of the third and fourth centuries, Macaulay could exclaim, ‘the times require a Middleton'." Instead they got Darwin and The Origin of Species. 

Darwin destroyed whatever remained of the authority of the Book of Genesis, and today's atheists are Darwin's heirs. The Churches no longer play the part that Middleton assigned to them, for, in a democratic age, when each individual picks his creed and ethical standpoint for himself, they can no longer provide "a means of social control". Yet something must do that, and so the authority of the State has assumed the role that used to be reserved to religion. The State, a human construction, presides complacently over a world where God is deemed to have died. Yet men must believe in something. Middleton's view remains valid, and the State itself does not satisfy. So we have made for ourselves two objects of reverence, both inherited from the Enlightenment.

The first is the doctrine of human rights. The precise delineation of these may vary. Their origin is as obscure as any of the mysteries of religion. They have manifestly been ignored or trampled on for most of the course of history. Burke viewed claims to such rights with a degree of scepticism but now these rights, however arbitrarily determined, have been enshrined in a Convention to which all EU states subscribe. This convention plays the part that Middleton granted to religion, prescribing a code of conduct and imposing on us a duty to observe it. Much that it ordains flies in the face of traditional Christian morality, especially in sexual matters. Yet the Christian Churches have adapted to it and speak its languages. Even the proud Church of Rome preaches the toleration that it once anathematised.