of a Theological Writer. VII

The Jewish service is irresponsibly mutilated. irresponsibly mutilated. The Jewish worship must have been, if not entirely then in many respects, a human invention, and must have filled the Old Testament religion with superstition. Whatever Christ said against this is accepted, but everything is drawn in that direction, leaving him perhaps little else than the introduction of a form of worship in which even a Deist A follower of Deism, a belief system that acknowledges a creator based on reason but rejects supernatural revelation or divine intervention in the world. could participate. The morality of Jesus is also accepted "in appearance," but his holy teachings are weakened by the frivolous method of explanation which remained open after the hypothesis of oriental figurative language A 18th-century scholarly theory suggesting that biblical expressions were merely poetic exaggerations typical of the "Orient" rather than literal truths. and the Hebrew-Greek expression in the New Testament had found approval. Consequently, so many readers of the same began to believe that the previously common interpretation—because it had adhered to the vivid expression of the New Testament language—had exaggerated almost everything, or at least presented it in a very distorted way.