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THEOPHILUS GALE (1628-1678)

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Originally appearing in Volume V11, Page 398 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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THEOPHILUS GALE (1628-1678)  ,
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English
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nonconformist divine, was born in 1628 at Kingsteignton, in Devonshire, where his
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father was vicar . In 1647 he was entered at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he took his B.A. degree in 1649, and M.A. in 1652 . In 165o he was made
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fellow and tutor of his college . He remained some years at Oxford, discharging actively the duties of tutor, and was in 1657 appointed as preacher in Winchester
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cathedral . In 1662 he refused to submit to the Act of Uniformity, and was ejected . He became tutor to the sons of Lord Wharton, whom he accompanied to the
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Protestant college of
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Caen, in
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Normandy, returning to England in 1665 . The latter portion of his
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life he passed in
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London as assistant to John Rowe, an
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Independent minister who had charge of an important church in
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Holborn; Gale succeeded Rowe in 1677, and died in the following
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year . His
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principal
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work, The Court of the Gentiles, which appeared in parts in 1669, 1671 and 1676, is a strange storehouse of
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miscellaneous philosophical learning . It resembles the Intellectual
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System of Ralph Cudworth, though much inferior to that work both in general construction and in fundamental idea . Gale's endeavour (based on a hint of Grotius in De veritate, i . 16) is to prove that the whole philosophy of the Gentiles is a distorted or mangled
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reproduction of Biblical truths . Just as Cudworth referred the Dennocritean
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doctrine of atoms to Moses as the
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original author, so Gale tries to show that the various systems of Greek thought may be traced back to Biblical
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sources .

Like so many of the learned

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works of the 17th century, the Court of the Gentiles is chaotic and unsystematic, while its erudition is rendered almost valueless by the
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complete absence of any critical discrimination . His other writings are: A True Idea of
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Jansenism (1669); Theophil, or a Discourse of the Saint's Amitie with
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God in Christ (1671) ; Anatomie of Infidelitie (1672) ; Idea theologiae (1693); Philosophic generalis (1676) .

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