China and the West

Bolingbroke, Henry St. John. The philosophical works [ID D20007].
A. Owen Aldridge : Lord Bolingbroke presented China as "a country, into the antiquities of which we look further back than into those of any other, and where we may find examples [of]... the effects of natural religion, unmixed and uncorrupted, with those of artificial theology and superstition". Bolingbroke claimed, moreover, that natural religion, the deist's name for their ideological system based on reason rather than revelation, "seems to have been preserved more pure and unmixed in this country than in any other, and for a longer time from that when it was first inhabited, and government was first established". According to Bolingbroke, "this people enjoyed, under their two first imperial families, which continued eleven hundred years, all the blessings of public and private virtue, that humanity is capable of enjoying. So we must understand the descriptions of this golden age".