In 1776 Soame Jenyns (1704-1787) published his "View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion." Though at one period of his life he had affected a kind of deistic scepticism, Jenyns now returned to orthodoxy. There seems no reason to doubt his sincerity, questioned at the time, in defending Christianity on the ground of its total variance with the principles of human reason. The work was praised for its literary merits - but not by Archibald Maclaine, author of these letters, who chose to combat some of Jenyns' more fanciful notions regarding Christianity. Maclaine (1722-1804) published this work just a few months after Gibbon published the first volume of his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" and Gibbon is mentioned in the text. A second edition came out in 1778. Although this book appears to be complete in one volume, spine is marked as volume 2.
