302 A TOPOGRAPHICAL 



number of works, the greatest part of which he is said to have 

 burned during the two or three last years of his life; but some 

 imperfect sketches remain. 



Not long before his death, he published his treatise intitled 

 The Religion of Nature Delineated, a work for which so great a 

 demand was made, that more than ten thousand were sold in a very 

 few years. He had scarcely completed the publication of it, when he 

 unfortunately broke an arm ; and this, adding strength to distem- 

 pers that had been growing upon him for some time, accelerated his 

 death, which happened upon the 29th of October, 1724. He was 

 a tender, humane, and in all respects worthy man ; but is represented 

 to have had something of the irascible in his constitution and tem- 

 perament. His Religion of Nature Delineated exposed him to the 

 censure of our zealous Christians, as if he had put a slight upon 

 Christianity by laying so much stress, as he does in this work, upon 

 the obligations of truth, reason, and virtue ; and by making no 

 mention of revealed religion, nor even so much as dropping the 

 least and most distant hints in its favour. It has indeed made him 

 pass for an unbeliever of revelation with others who have not ex- 

 pressed any zeal at all for it ; for the late Lord Bolingbroke sup- 

 poses Dr. Clarke to have had him in his eye when he described his 

 fourth sort of theists. Mr. Wollaston held and has asserted the 

 being and attributes of God, natural and moral ; a Providence, ge- 

 neral and particular ; the obligations to morality ; the immateriality 

 and immortality of the soul ; a future state : and Clarke's fourth 

 sort of theists held and asserted the same. But whether Mr. Wol- 

 laston, like those theists, rejected all above this in the system of 

 revelation, cannot with any certainty be concluded; and though at 

 the same time the contrary perhaps may not appear, because, what- 

 ever might have been thought necessary to prevent offence from be- 

 ing taken, it was not essential to Mr. Wollaston's design to meddle 

 with revealed religion. In the mean time, Lord Bolingbroke has 

 treated Mr. Wollaston's Religion of Nature Delineated as a system 

 of theism ; which it certainly is, whether Mr. Wollaston was a be- 

 liever or not. His Lordship calls it " strange theism, as dogmati- 

 cal and absurd as artificial theology," and has spent several pages 

 to prove it so ; yet allows the author of it to have been " a man of 

 parts, of learning, a philosopher, and a geometrician." It 

 written with a degree of elegance far superior to the style of 

 English writers, and may justly be regarded as one of the best am 

 most classical works in the English language. He was buried 



