J. M. Robertson

It appears from our survey that the “deistic movement,” commonly assigned to the eighteenth century, had been abundantly prepared for in the seventeenth, which, in turn, was but developing ideas current in the sixteenth. When, in 1696, John Toland published his Christianity Not Mysterious, the sensation it made was due not so much to any unheard-of boldness in its thought as to the simple fact that deistic ideas had thus found their way into print.1 So far the deistic position was explicitly represented in English literature only by the works of Herbert, Hobbes, and Blount; and of these only the first (who wrote in Latin) and the third had put the case at any length. Against the deists or atheists of the school of Hobbes, and the Scriptural Unitarians who thought with Newton and Locke, there stood arrayed the great mass of orthodox intolerance which clamoured for the violent suppression of every sort of “infidelity.” It was this feeling, of which the army of ignorant rural clergy were the spokesmen, that found vent in the Blasphemy Act of 1697. The new literary growth dating from the time of Toland is the evidence of the richness of the rationalistic soil already created. Thinking men craved a new atmosphere. Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity is an unsuccessful compromise: Toland’s book begins a new propagandist era.

Toland’s treatise,2 heretical as it was, professed to be a defence of the faith, and avowedly founded on Locke’s anonymous Reasonableness of Christianity, its young author being on terms of acquaintance with the philosopher.3 He claimed, in fact, to take for granted “the Divinity of the New Testament,” and to “demonstrate the verity of divine revelation against atheists and all enemies of revealed religion,” from whom, accordingly, he expected to receive no quarter. Brought up, as he declared, “from my cradle, in the grossest superstition and idolatry,” he had been divinely led to make use of his own reason; and he assured his Christian readers of his perfect sincerity in “defending the true religion.”4 Twenty years later, his primary positions were hardly to be distinguished from those of ratiocinative champions of the creed, save in respect that he was challenging orthodoxy where they were replying to unbelievers. Toland, however, lacked alike the timidity and the prudence which so safely guided Locke in his latter years; and though his argument was only a logical and outspoken extension of Locke’s position, to the end of showing that there was nothing supra-rational in Christianity of Locke’s type, it separated him from “respectable” society in England and Ireland for the rest of his life. The book was “presented” by the Grand Juries of Middlesex and Dublin;5 the dissenters in Dublin being chiefly active in denouncing it—with or without knowledge of its contents;6 half-a-dozen answers appeared; and when in 1698 Toland produced another, entitled Amyntor, showing the infirm foundation of the Christian canon, there was again a speedy crop of replies. Despite the oversights inevitable to such pioneer work, this opens, from the side of freethought, the era of documentary criticism of the New Testament; and in some of his later freethinking books, as the Nazarenus (1718) and the Pantheisticon (1720), he continues to show himself in advance of his time in “opening new windows” for his mind.7 The latter work represents in particular the influence of Spinoza, whom he had formerly criticized somewhat forcibly8 for his failure to recognize that motion is inherent in matter. On that head he lays down9 the doctrine that “motion is but matter under a certain consideration”—an essentially “materialist” position, deriving from the pre-Socratic Greeks, and incidentally affirmed by Bacon.10 He was not exactly an industrious student or writer; but he had scholarly knowledge and instinct, and several of his works show close study of Bayle.

As regards his more original views on Christian origins, he is not impressive to the modern reader; but theses which to-day stand for little were in their own day important. Thus in his Hodegus (pt. i of the Tetradymus, 1720) it is elaborately argued that the “pillar of fire by night and of cloud by day” was no miracle, but the regular procedure of guides in deserts, where night marches are the rule; the “cloud” being simply the smoke of the vanguard’s fire, which by night flared red. Later criticism decides that the whole narrative of the Exodus is myth. Toland’s method, however, was relatively so advanced that it had not been abandoned by theological “rationalists” a century later. Of that movement he must be ranked an energetic pioneer: though he lacked somewhat the strength of character that in his day was peculiarly needed to sustain a freethinker. Much of his later life was spent abroad; and his Letters to Serena (1704) show him permitted to discourse to the Queen of Prussia on such topics as the origin and force of prejudice, the history of the doctrine of immortality, and the origin of idolatry. He pays his correspondent the compliment of treating his topics with much learning; and his manner of assuming her own orthodoxy in regard to revelation could have served as a model to Gibbon.11 But, despite such distinguished patronage, his life was largely passed in poverty, cheerfully endured,12 with only chronic help from well-to-do sympathizers, such as Shaftesbury, who was not over-sympathetic. When it is noted that down to 1761 there had appeared no fewer than fifty-four answers to his first book,13 his importance as an intellectual influence may be realized.

A certain amount of evasion was forced upon Toland by the Blasphemy Law of 1697; inferentially, however, he was a thorough deist until he became pantheist; and the discussion over his books showed that views essentially deistic were held even among his antagonists. One, an Irish bishop, got into trouble by setting forth a notion of deity which squared with that of Hobbes.14 The whole of our present subject, indeed, is much complicated by the distribution of heretical views among the nominally orthodox, and of orthodox views among heretics.15 Thus the school of Cudworth, zealous against atheism, was less truly theistic than that of Blount,16 who, following Hobbes, pointed out that to deny to God a continual personal and providential control of human affairs was to hold to atheism under the name of theism;17 whereas Cudworth, the champion of theism against the atheists, entangled himself hopelessly18 in a theory which made deity endow Nature with “plastic” powers and leave it to its own evolution. The position was serenely demolished by Bayle,19 as against Le Clerc, who sought to defend it; and in England the clerical outcry was so general that Cudworth gave up authorship.20 Over the same crux, in Ireland, Bishop Browne and Bishop Berkeley accused each other of promoting atheism; and Archbishop King was embroiled in the dispute.21 On the other hand, the theistic Descartes had laid down a “mechanical” theory of the universe which perfectly comported with atheism, and partly promoted that way of thinking;22 and a selection from Gassendi’s ethical writings, translated into English23 (1699), wrought in the same direction. The Church itself contained Cartesians and Cudworthians, Socinians and deists.24 Each group, further, had inner differences as to free-will25 and Providence; and the theistic schools of Newton, Clarke, and Leibnitz rejected each other’s philosophies as well as that of Descartes. Leibnitz complained grimly that Newton and his followers had “a very odd opinion concerning the Work of God,” making the universe an imperfect machine, which the deity had frequently to mend; and treating space as an organ by which God perceives things, which are thus regarded as not produced or maintained by him.26 Newton’s principles of explanation, he insisted, were those of the materialists.27 John Hutchinson, a professor at Cambridge, in his Treatise of Power, Essential and Mechanical, also bitterly assailed Newton as a deistical and anti-scriptural sophist.28 Clarke, on the other hand, declared that the philosophy of Leibnitz was “tending to banish God from the world.”29 Alongside of such internecine strife, it was not surprising that the great astronomer Halley, who accepted Newton’s principles in physics, was commonly reputed an atheist; and that the freethinkers pitted his name in that connection against Newton’s.30 As it was he who first suggested31 the idea of the total motion of the entire solar system in space—described by a modern pietist as “this great cosmical truth, the grandest in astronomy”32—they were not ill justified. It can hardly be doubted that if intellectual England could have been polled in 1710, under no restraints from economic, social, and legal pressure, some form of rationalism inconsistent with Christianity would have been found to be nearly as common as orthodoxy. In outlying provinces, in Devon and Cornwall, in Ulster, in Edinburgh and Glasgow, as well as in the metropolis, the pressure of deism on the popular creed evoked expressions of Arian and Socinian thought among the clergy.33 It was, in fact, the various restraints under notice that determined the outward fortunes of belief and unbelief, and have substantially determined them since. When the devout Whiston was deposed from his professorship for his Arianism, and the unbelieving Saunderson was put in his place,34 and when Simson was suspended from his ministerial functions in Glasgow,35 the lesson was learned that outward conformity was the sufficient way to income.36

Hard as it was, however, to kick against the pricks of law and prejudice, it is clear that many in the upper and middle classes privately did so. The clerical and the new popular literature of the time prove this abundantly. In the Tatler and its successors,37 the decorous Addison and the indecorous Steele, neither of them a competent thinker, frigidly or furiously asperse the new tribe of freethinkers; while the evangelically pious Berkeley and the extremely unevangelical Swift rival each other in the malice of their attacks on those who rejected their creed. Berkeley, a man of philosophic genius but intense prepossessions, maintained Christianity on grounds which are the negation of philosophy.38 Swift, the genius of neurotic misanthropy, who, in the words of Macaulay, “though he had no religion, had a great deal of professional spirit,”39 fought venomously for the creed of salvation. And still the deists multiplied. In the Earl of Shaftesbury40 they had a satirist with a finer and keener weapon than was wielded by either Steele or Addison, and a much better temper than was owned by Swift or Berkeley. He did not venture to parade his unbelief: to do so was positively dangerous; but his thrusts at faith left little doubt as to his theory. He was at once dealt with by the orthodox as an enemy, and as promptly adopted by the deists as a champion, important no less for his ability than for his rank. Nor, indeed, is he lacking in boldness in comparison with contemporary writers. The anonymous pamphlet entitled The Natural History of Superstition, by the deist John Trenchard, M.P. (1709), does not venture on overt heresy. But Shaftesbury’s Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (1708), his Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709), and his treatise The Moralists (1709), had need be anonymous because of their essential hostility to the reigning religious ethic.

Such polemic marks a new stage in rationalistic propaganda. Swift, writing in 1709, angrily proposes to “prevent the publishing of such pernicious works as under pretence of freethinking endeavour to overthrow those tenets in religion which have been held inviolable in almost all ages.”41 But his further protest that “the doctrine of the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the immortality of the soul, and even the truth of all revelation, are daily exploded and denied in books openly printed,” points mainly to the Unitarian propaganda. Among freethinkers he names, in his Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), Asgill, Coward, Toland, and Tindal. But the first was an ultra-Christian; the second was a Christian upholder of the thesis that spirit is not immaterial; and the last, at that date, had published only his Four Discourses (collected in 1709) and his Rights of the Christian Church, which are anti-clerical, but not anti-Christian. Prof. Henry Dodwell, who about 1673 published Two Letters of Advice, I, For the Susception of Holy Orders; II, For Studies Theological, especially such as are Rational, and in 1706 an Epistolary Discourse Concerning the Soul’s Natural Mortality, maintaining the doctrine of conditional immortality,42 which he made dependent on baptism in the apostolical succession, was a devout Christian; and no writer of that date went further. Dodwell is in fact blamed by Bishop Burnet for stirring up fanaticism against lay-baptism among dissenters.43 It would appear that Swift spoke mainly from hearsay, and on the strength of the conversational freethinking so common in society.44 But the anonymous essays of Shaftesbury which were issued in 1709 might be the immediate provocation of his outbreak.45

An official picture of the situation is formally drawn in A Representation of the Present State of Religion, with regard to the late excessive growth of infidelity, heresy, and profaneness, drawn up by the Upper House of Convocation of the province of Canterbury in 1711.46 This sets forth, as a result of the disorders of the Rebellion, a growth of all manner of unbelief and profanity, including denial of inspiration and the authority of the canon; the likening of Christian miracles to heathen fables; the treating of all religious mysteries as absurd speculations; Arianism and Socinianism and scoffing at the doctrine of the Trinity; denial of natural immortality; Erastianism; mockery of baptism and the Lord’s Supper; decrying of all priests as impostors; the collecting and reprinting of infidel works; and publication of mock catechisms. It is explained that all such printing has greatly increased “since the expiration of the Act for restraining the press”; and mention is made of an Arian work just published to which the author has put his name, and which he has dedicated to the Convocation itself. This was the first volume of Whiston’s Primitive Christianity Revived, the work of a devout eccentric, who had just before been deprived of his professorship at Cambridge for his orally avowed heresy. Whiston, whose cause was championed, and whose clerical opponents were lampooned, in an indecorous but vigorous sketch, The Tryal of William Whiston, Clerk, for defaming and denying the Holy Trinity, before the Lord Chief Justice Reason (1712; 3rd ed. 1740), always remained perfectly devout in his Arian orthodoxy; but his and his friends’ arguments were rather better fitted to make deists than to persuade Christians; and Convocation’s appeal for a new Act “restraining the present excessive and scandalous liberty of printing wicked books at home, and importing the like from abroad” was not responded to. There was no love lost between Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury; but the government in which the former, a known deist, was Secretary of State, could hardly undertake to suppress the works of the latter.

Deism had been thus made in a manner fashionable47 when, in 1713, Anthony Collins (1676–1729) began a new development by his Discourse of Freethinking. He had previously published a notably freethinking Essay Concerning the Use of Reason (1707), albeit without specific impeachment of the reigning creed; carried on a discussion with Clarke on the question of the immateriality of the soul; and issued treatises entitled Priestcraft in Perfection (1709, dealing with the history of the Thirty-nine Articles)48 and A Vindication of the Divine Attributes (1710), exposing the Hobbesian theism of Archbishop King on lines followed twenty years later by Berkeley in his Minute Philosopher. But none of these works aroused such a tumult as the Discourse of Freethinking, which may be said to sum up and unify the drift not only of previous English freethinking, but of the great contribution of Bayle, whose learning and temper influence all English deism from Shaftesbury onwards.49 Collins’s book, however, was unique in its outspokenness. To the reader of to-day, indeed, it is no very aggressive performance: the writer was a man of imperturbable amenity and genuine kindliness of nature; and his style is the completest possible contrast to that of the furious replies it elicited. It was to Collins that Locke wrote, in 1703: “Believe it, my good friend, to love truth for truth’s sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues; and, if I mistake not, you have as much of it as I ever met with in anybody.”50 The Discourse does no discredit to this uncommon encomium, being a luminous and learned plea for the conditions under which alone truth can be prosperously studied, and the habits of mind which alone can attain it. Of the many replies, the most notorious is that of Bentley writing as Phileleutherus Lipsiensis, a performance which, on the strength of its author’s reputation for scholarship, has been uncritically applauded by not a few critics, of whom some of the most eminent do not appear to have read Collins’s treatise.51 Bentley’s is in reality pre-eminent only for insolence and bad faith, the latter complicated by lapses of scholarship hardly credible on its author’s part.

One mistranslation which appears to have been a printer’s error, and one mis-spelling of a Greek name, are the only heads on which Bentley confutes his author. He had, in fact, neither the kind of knowledge nor the candour that could fit him to handle the problems raised. It was Bentley’s cue to represent Collins as an atheist, though he was a very pronounced deist;52 and in the first uproar Collins thought it well to fly to Holland to avoid arrest.53 But deism was too general to permit of such a representative being exiled; and he returned to study quietly, leaving Bentley’s vituperation and prevarication unanswered, with the other attacks made upon him. In 1715 he published his brief but masterly Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty—anonymous, like all his works—which remains unsurpassed as a statement of the case for Determinism.54

The welcome given to Bentley’s attack upon Collins by the orthodox was warm in proportion to their sense of the general inadequacy of the apologetics on their side. Amid the common swarm of voluble futilities put forth by Churchmen, the strident vehemence as well as the erudite repute of the old scholar were fitted at least to attract the attention of lay readers in general. Most of the contemporary vindications of the faith, however, were fitted only to move intelligent men to new doubt or mere contempt. A sample of the current defence against deism is the treatise of Joseph Smith on The Unreasonableness of Deism, or, the Certainty of a Divine Revelation, etc. 1720, where deists in general are called “the Wicked and Unhappy men we have to deal with”:55 and the argumentation consists in alleging that a good God must reveal himself, and that if the miracle stories of the New Testament had been false the Jews would have exposed and discarded them. Against such nugatory traditionalism, the criticism of Collins shone with the spirit of science. Not till 1723 did he publish his next work, A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, a weighty attack on the argument from prophecy, to which the replies numbered thirty-five; on which followed in 1727 his Scheme of Literal Prophecy Considered, a reply to criticisms. The former work was pronounced by Warburton one of the most plausible ever written against Christianity, and he might well say so. It faced the argument from prophecy not merely with the skepticism of the ordinary deist, but with that weapon of critical analysis of which the use had been briefly shown by Hobbes and Spinoza. Apparently for the first time, he pointed out that the “virgin prophecy” in Isaiah had a plain reference to contemporary and not to future events; he showed that the “out of Egypt” prophecy referred to the Hebrew past; and he revived the ancient demonstration of Porphyry that the Book of Daniel is Maccabean. The general dilemma put by Collins—that either the prophecies must be reduced, textually and otherwise, to non-prophetic utterances, or Christianity must give up prophetic claims—has never since been solved.

The deistic movement was now in full flood, the acute Mandeville56 having issued in 1720 his Free Thoughts on Religion, and in 1723 a freshly-expanded edition of his very anti-evangelical Fable of the Bees; while an eccentric ex-clergyman, Thomas Woolston, who had already lost his fellowship of Sidney-Sussex College, Cambridge, for vagaries of doctrine and action, contributed in 1726–28 his freshly reasoned but heedlessly ribald Discourses on Miracles. Voltaire, who was in England in 1728, tells that thirty thousand copies were sold;57 while sixty pamphlets were written in opposition. Woolston’s were indeed well fitted to arouse wrath and rejoinder. The dialectic against the argument from miracles in general, and the irrelevance or nullity of certain miracles in particular, is really cogent, and anticipates at points the thought of the nineteenth century. But Woolston was of the tribe who can argue no issue without jesting, and who stamp levity on every cause by force of innate whimsicality. Thus he could best sway the light-hearted when his cause called for the winning-over of the earnest. Arguments that might have been made convincing were made to pass as banter, and serious spirits were repelled. It was during this debate that Conyers Middleton, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, produced his Letter from Rome (1729), wherein the part of paganism in Christianity is so set forth as to carry inference further than the argument ostensibly goes. In that year the heads of Oxford University publicly lamented the spread of open deism among the students; and the proclamation did nothing to check the contagion. In Fogg’s Weekly Journal of July 4, 1730, it is announced that “one of the principal colleges in Oxford has of late been infested with deists; and that three deistical students have been expelled; and a fourth has had his degree deferred two years, during which he is to be closely confined in college; and, among other things, is to translate Leslie’s Short and Easy Method with the Deists.”58 It is not hard to divine the effect of such exegetic methods. In 1731, the author of an apologetic pamphlet in reply to Woolston laments that even at the universities young men “too often” become tainted with “infidelity”; and, on the other hand, directing his battery against those who “causelessly profess to build their skeptical notions” on the writings of Locke, he complains of Dr. Holdsworth and other academic polemists who had sought to rob orthodoxy of the credit of such a champion as Locke by “consigning him over to that class of freethinkers and skeptics to which he was an adversary.”59

With the most famous work of Matthew Tindal,60 Christianity as Old as Creation (1730), the excitement seems to have reached high-water mark. Here was vivacity without flippancy, and argument without irrelevant mirth; and the work elicited from first to last over a hundred and fifty replies, at home and abroad. Tindal’s thesis is that the idea of a good God involved that of a simple, perfect, and universal religion, which must always have existed among mankind, and must have essentially consisted in moral conduct. Christianity, insofar as it is true, must therefore be a statement of this primordial religion; and moral reason must be the test, not tradition or Scripture. One of the first replies was the Vindication of Scripture by Waterland, to which Middleton promptly offered a biting retort in a Letter to Dr. Waterland (1731) that serves to show the slightness of its author’s faith. After demolishing Waterland’s case as calculated rather to arouse than to allay skepticism, he undertakes to offer a better reply of his own. It is to the simple effect that some religion is necessary to mankind in modern as in ancient times; that Christianity meets the need very well; and that to set up reason in its place is “impracticable” and “the attempt therefore foolish and irrational,” in addition to being “criminal and immoral,” when politically considered.61 Such legalist criticism, if seriously meant, was hardly likely to discredit Tindal’s book. Its directness and simplicity of appeal to what passed for theistic common-sense were indeed fitted to give it the widest audience yet won by any deist; and its anti-clericalism would carry it far among his fellow Whigs to begin with.62 One tract of the period, dedicated to the Queen Regent, complains that “the present raging infidelity threatens an universal infection,” and that it is not confined to the capital, but “is disseminated even to the confines of your kingdom.”63 Tindal, like Collins, wrote anonymously, and so escaped prosecution, dying in 1733, when the second part of his book, left ready for publication, was deliberately destroyed by Bishop Gibson, into whose hands it came. In 1736 he and Shaftesbury are described by an orthodox apologist as the “two oracles of deism.”64

Woolston, who put his name to his books, after being arrested in May, 1728, and released on bail, was prosecuted in 1729 on the charge of blasphemy, in that he had derided the gospel miracles and represented Jesus alternately as an impostor, a sorcerer, and a magician. His friendly counsel ingeniously argued that Woolston had aimed at safeguarding Christianity by returning to the allegorical method of the early Fathers; and that he had shown his reverence for Jesus and religion by many specific expressions; but the jury took a simpler view, and, without leaving the court, found Woolston guilty. He was sentenced to pay a fine of £100, to suffer a year’s imprisonment, and either to find surety for his future good conduct or pay or give sureties for £2,000.65 He is commonly said to have paid the penalty of imprisonment for the rest of his life (d. 1733), being unable to pay the fine of £100; but Voltaire positively asserts that “nothing is more false” than the statement that he died in prison; adding: “Several of my friends have seen him in his house: he died there, at liberty.”66 The solution of the conflict seems to be that he lived in his own house “in the rules of” the King’s Bench Prison—that is, in the precincts, and under technical supervision.67 In any case, he was sentenced; and the punishment was the measure of the anger felt at the continuous advance of deistic opinions, or at least against hostile criticism of the Scriptures.

Unitarianism, formerly a hated heresy, was now in comparison leniently treated, because of its deference to Scriptural authority. Where the deists rejected all revelation, Unitarianism held by the Bible, calling only for a revision of the central Christian dogma. It had indeed gained much theological ground in the past quarter of a century. Nothing is more instructive in the culture-history of the period than the rapidity with which the Presbyterian succession of clergy passed from violent Calvinism, by way of “Baxterian” Arminianism, to Arianism, and thence in many cases to Unitarianism. First they virtually adopted the creed of the detested Laud, whom their fathers had hated for it; then they passed step by step to a heresy for which their fathers had slain men. A closely similar process took place in Geneva, where Servetus after death triumphed over his slayer.68 In 1691, after a generation of common suffering, a precarious union was effected between the English Presbyterians, now mostly semi-Arminians, and the Independents, still mostly Calvinists: but in 1694 it was dissolved.69 Thereafter the former body, largely endowed by the will of Lady Hewley in 1710, became as regards its Trust Deeds the freest of all the English sects in matters of doctrine.70 The recognition of past changes had made their clergy chary of a rigid subscription. Naturally the movement did not gain in popularity as it fell away from fanaticism; but the decline of Nonconformity in the first half of the eighteenth century was common to all the sects, and did not specially affect the Presbyterians. Of the many “free” churches established in England and Wales after the Act of Toleration (1689), about half were extinct in 1715;71 and of the Presbyterian churches the number in Yorkshire alone fell from fifty-nine in 1715 to a little over forty in 1730.72 Economic causes were probably the main ones. The State-endowed parish priest had an enduring advantage over his rival. But the Hewley endowment gave a certain economic basis to the Presbyterians; and the concern for scholarship which had always marked their body kept them more open to intellectual influences than the ostensibly more free-minded and certainly more democratic sectaries of the Independent and Baptist bodies.73

The result was that, with free Trust Deeds, the Presbyterians openly exhibited a tendency which was latent in all the other churches. In 1719, at a special assembly of Presbyterian ministers at Salters’ Hall, it was decided by a majority of 73 to 69 that subscription to the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity should no longer be demanded of candidates for the ministry.74 Of the 73, the majority professed to be themselves orthodox; but there was no question that antitrinitarian opinions had become common, especially in Devonshire, where the heresy case of Mr. Peirce of Exeter had brought the matter to a crisis.75 From this date “Arian” opinions spread more rapidly in the dwindling denomination, shading yet further into Unitarianism, step for step with the deistic movement in the Church. “In less than half a century the doctrines of the great founders of Presbyterianism could scarcely be heard from any Presbyterian pulpit in England.”76 “In the English Presbyterian ministry the process was from Arian opinions to those called Unitarian ... by a gradual sliding,” even as the transition had been made from Calvinism to Arminianism in the previous century.77

Presbyterianism having thus come pretty much into line with Anglicanism on the old question of predestination, while still holding fast by Scriptural standards as against the deists, the old stress of Anglican dislike had slackened, despite the rise of the new heretical element. Unitarian arguments were now forthcoming from quarters not associated with dissent, as in the case of Thomas Chubb’s first treatise, The Supremacy of the Father Asserted (1715), courteously dedicated “To the Reverend the Clergy, and in particular to the Right Reverend Gilbert Lord Bishop of Sarum, our vigilant and laborious Diocesan.” Chubb (1679–1747) had been trained to glove-making, and, as his opponents took care to record, acted also as a tallow-chandler;78 and the good literary quality of his work made some sensation in an England which had not learned to think respectfully of Bunyan. Chubb’s impulse to write had come from the perusal of Whiston’s Primitive Christianity Revived, in 1711, and that single-minded Arian published his book for him.

The Unitarians would naturally repudiate all connection with such a performance as A Sober Reply to Mr. Higgs’s Merry Arguments from the Light of Nature for the Tritheistic Doctrine of the Trinity, which was condemned by the House of Lords on February 12, 1720, to be burnt, as having “in a daring, impious manner, ridiculed the doctrine of the Trinity and all revealed religion.” Its author, Joseph Hall, a serjeant-at-arms to the King, seems to have undergone no punishment, and more decorous antitrinitarians received public countenance. Thus the Unitarian Edward Elwall,79 who had published a book called A True Testimony for God and his Sacred Law (1724), for which he was prosecuted at Stafford in 1726, was allowed by the judge to argue his cause fully, and was unconditionally acquitted, to the displeasure of the clergy.

Anti-scriptural writers could not hope for such toleration, being doubly odious to the Church. Berkeley, in 1721, had complained bitterly80 of the general indifference to religion, which his writings had done nothing to alter; and in 1736 he angrily demanded that blasphemy should be punished like high treason.81 His Minute Philosopher (1732) betrays throughout his angry consciousness of the vogue of freethinking after twenty years of resistance from his profession; and that performance is singularly ill fitted to alter the opinions of unbelievers. In his earlier papers attacking them he had put a stress of malice that, in a mind of his calibre, is startling even to the student of religious history.82 It reveals him as no less possessed by the passion of creed than the most ignorant priest of his Church. For him all freethinkers were detested disturbers of his emotional life; and of the best of them, as Collins, Shaftesbury, and Spinoza, he speaks with positive fury. In the Minute Philosopher, half-conscious of the wrongness of his temper, he sets himself to make the unbelievers figure in dialogue as ignorant, pretentious, and coarse-natured; while his own mouthpieces are meant to be benign, urbane, wise, and persuasive. Yet in the very pages so planned he unwittingly reveals that the freethinkers whom he goes about to caricature were commonly good-natured in tone, while he becomes as virulent as ever in his eagerness to discredit them. Not a paragraph in the book attains to the spirit of judgment or fairness; all is special pleading, overstrained and embittered sarcasm, rankling animus. Gifted alike for literature and for philosophy, keen of vision in economic problems where the mass of men were short-sighted, he was flawed on the side of his faith by the hysteria to which it always stirred him. No man was less qualified to write a well-balanced dialogue as between his own side and its opponents. To candour he never attains, unless it be in the sense that his passion recoils on his own case. Even while setting up ninepins of ill-put “infidel” argument to knock down, he elaborates futilities of rebuttal, indicating to every attentive reader the slightness of his rational basis.

On the strength of this performance he might fitly be termed the most ill-conditioned sophist of his age, were it not for the perception that religious feeling in him has become a pathological phase, and that he suffers incomparably more from his own passions than he can inflict on his enemies by his eager thrusts at them. More than almost any gifted pietist of modern times he sets us wondering at the power of creed in certain cases to overgrow judgment and turn to naught the rarest faculties. No man in Berkeley’s day had a finer natural lucidity and suppleness of intelligence; yet perhaps no polemist on his side did less either to make converts or to establish a sound intellectual practice. Plain men on the freethinking side he must either have bewildered by his metaphysic or revolted by his spite; while to the more efficient minds he stood revealed as a kind of inspired child, rapt in the construction and manipulation of a set of brilliant sophisms which availed as much for any other creed as for his own. To the armoury of Christian apologetic now growing up in England he contributed a special form of the skeptical argument: freethinkers, he declared, made certain arbitrary or irrational assumptions in accepting Newton’s doctrine of fluxions, and it was only their prejudice that prevented them from being similarly accommodating to Christian mysteries.83 It is a kind of argument dear to minds pre-convinced and incapable of a logical revision, but worse than inept as against opponents; and it availed no more in Berkeley’s hands than it had done in those of Huet.84 To theosophy, indeed, Berkeley rendered a more successful service in presenting it with the no better formula of “existence [i.e., in consciousness] dependent upon consciousness”—a verbalism which has served the purposes of theology in the philosophic schools down till our own day. For his, however, the popular polemic value of such a theorem must have been sufficiently countervailed by his vehement championship of the doctrine of passive obedience in its most extreme form—“that loyalty is a virtue or moral duty; and disloyalty or rebellion, in the most strict and proper sense, a vice or crime against the law of nature.”85

It belonged to the overstrung temperament of Berkeley that, like a nervous artist, he should figure to himself all his freethinking antagonists as personally odious, himself growing odious under the obsession; and he solemnly asserts, in his Discourse to Magistrates, that there had been “lately set up within this city of Dublin” an “execrable fraternity of blasphemers,” calling themselves “blasters,” and forming “a distinct society, whereof the proper and avowed business shall be to shock all serious Christians by the most impious and horrid blasphemies, uttered in the most public manner.”86 There appears to be not a grain of truth in this astonishing assertion, to which no subsequent historian has paid the slightest attention. In a period in which freethinking books had been again and again burned in Dublin by the public hangman, such a society could be projected only in a nightmare; and Berkeley’s hallucination may serve as a sign of the extent to which his judgment had been deranged by his passions.87 His forensic temper is really on a level with that of the most incompetent swashbucklers on his side.

When educated Christians could be so habitually envenomed as was Berkeley, there was doubtless a measure of contrary heat among English unbelievers; but, apart altogether from what could be described as blasphemy, unbelief abounded in the most cultured society of the day. Bolingbroke’s rationalism had been privately well known; and so distinguished a personage as the brilliant and scholarly Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, hated by Pope, is one of the reputed freethinkers of her time.88 In the very year of the publication of Berkeley’s Minute Philosopher, the first two epistles of the Essay on Man of his own friend and admirer, Pope, gave a new currency to the form of optimistic deism created by Shaftesbury, and later elaborated by Bolingbroke. Pope was always anxiously hostile in his allusions to the professed freethinkers89—among whom Bolingbroke only posthumously enrolled himself—and in private he specially aspersed Shaftesbury, from whom he had taken so much;90 but his prudential tactic gave all the more currency to the virtual deism he enunciated. Given out without any critical allusion to Christianity, and put forward as a vindication of the ways of God to men, it gave to heresy, albeit in a philosophically incoherent exposition, the status of a well-bred piety. A good authority pronounces that “the Essay on Man did more to spread English deism in France than all the works of Shaftesbury”;91 and we have explicit testimony that the poet privately avowed the deistic view of things.92

In point of fact, deism was the fashionable way of thinking among cultured people. Though Voltaire testifies from personal knowledge that there were in England in his day many principled atheists,93 there was little overt atheism,94 whether by reason of the special odium attaching to that way of thought, or of a real production of theistic belief by the concurrence of the deistic propaganda on this head with that of the clergy, themselves in so many cases deists.95 Bishop Burnet, in the Conclusion to the History of his Own Time, pronounces that “there are few atheists, but many infidels, who are indeed very little better than the atheists.” Collins observed that nobody had doubted the existence of God until the Boyle lecturers began to prove it; and Clarke had more than justified the jest by arguing, in his Boyle Lectures for 1705, that all deism logically leads to atheism. But though the apologists roused much discussion on the theistic issue, the stress of the apologetic literature passed from the theme of atheism to that of deism. Shaftesbury’s early Inquiry Concerning Virtue had assumed the existence of a good deal of atheism; but his later writings, and those of his school, do not indicate much atheistic opposition.96 Even the revived discussion on the immateriality and immortality of the soul—which began with the Grand Essay of Dr. William Coward,97 in 1704, and was taken up, as we have seen, by the non-juror Dodwell98—was conducted on either orthodox or deistic lines. Coward wrote as a professed Christian,99 to maintain, “against impostures of philosophy,” that “matter and motion must be the foundation of thought in men and brutes.” Collins maintained against Clarke the proposition that matter is capable of thought; and Samuel Strutt (“of the Temple”), whose Philosophical Inquiry into the Physical Spring of Human Actions, and the Immediate Cause of Thinking (1732), is a most tersely cogent sequence of materialistic argument, never raises any question of deity. The result was that the problem of “materialism” was virtually dropped, Strutt’s essay in particular passing into general oblivion.

No less marked is the failure to develop the “higher criticism” from the notable start made in 1739 in the very remarkable Inquiry into the Jewish and Christian Revelations by Samuel Parvish, who made the vital discovery that Deuteronomy is a product of the seventh century B.C.100 His book, which is in the form of a dialogue between a Christian and a Japanese, went into a second edition (1746); but his idea struck too deep for the critical faculty of that age, and not till the nineteenth century was the clue found again by De Wette, in Germany.101 Parvish came at the end of the main deistic movement,102 and by that time the more open-minded men had come to a point of view from which it did not greatly matter when Deuteronomy was written, or precisely how a cultus was built up; while orthodoxy could not dream of abandoning its view of inspiration. There was thus an arrest alike of historical criticism and of the higher philosophic thought under the stress of the concrete disputes over ethics, miracles, prophecy, and politics; and a habit of taking deity for granted became normal, with the result that when the weak point was pressed upon by Law and Butler there was a sense of blankness on both sides. But among men theistically inclined, the argument of Tindal against revelationism was extremely telling, and it had more literary impressiveness than any writing on the orthodox side before Butler. By this time the philosophic influence of Spinoza—seen as early as 1699 in Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue,103 and avowed by Clarke when he addressed his Demonstration (1705) “more particularly in answer to Mr. Hobbs, Spinoza, and their followers”—had spread among the studious class, greatly reinforcing the deistic movement; so that in 1732 Berkeley, who ranked him among “weak and wicked writers,” described him as “the great leader of our modern infidels.”

Among the deists of the upper classes was the young William Pitt, afterwards Lord Chatham, if, as has been alleged, it was he who in 1733, two years before he entered Parliament, contributed to the London Journal a “Letter on Superstition,” the work of a pronounced freethinker.104 On the other hand, such deistic writing as that with which Chubb, in a multitude of tracts, followed up his early Unitarian essay of 1715, brought an ethical “Christian rationalism” within the range of the unscholarly many. Thomas Morgan (d. 1741), a physician, began in the Moral Philosopher, 1739–1740,105 to sketch a rationalistic theory of Christian origins, besides putting the critical case with new completeness. Morgan had been at one time a dissenting minister at Frome, Somerset, and had been dismissed because of his deistical opinions. Towards the Jehovah and the ethic of the Old Testament he holds, however, the attitude rather of an ancient Gnostic than of a modern rationalist; and in his philosophy he is either a very “godly” deist or a pantheist miscarried.106

At the same time Peter Annet (1693–1769), a schoolmaster and inventor of a system of shorthand, widened the propaganda in other directions. He seems to have been the first freethought lecturer, for his first pamphlet, Judging for Ourselves: or, Freethinking the Great Duty of Religion, “By P. A., Minister of the Gospel” (1739), consists of “Two Lectures delivered at Plaisterers’ Hall.” Through all his propaganda, of which the more notable portions are his Supernaturals Examined and a series of controversies on the Resurrection, there runs a train of shrewd critical sense, put forth in crisp and vivacious English, which made him a popular force. What he lacked was the due gravity and dignity for the handling of such a theme as the reversal of a nation’s faith. Like Woolston, he is facetious where he should be serious; entertaining where he had need be impressive; provocative where he should have aimed at persuasion. We cannot say what types he influenced, or how deep his influence went: it appears only that he swayed many whose suffrages weighed little. At length, when in 1761 he issued nine numbers of The Free Inquirer, in which he attacked the Pentateuch with much insight and cogency, but with a certain want of rational balance (shown also in his treatise, Social Bliss Considered, 1749), he was made a victim of the then strengthened spirit of persecution, being sentenced to stand thrice in the pillory with the label “For Blasphemy,” and to suffer a year’s hard labour. Nevertheless, he was popular enough to start a school on his release.

Such popularity, of course, was alien to the literary and social traditions of the century; and from the literary point of view the main line of deistic propaganda, as apart from the essays and treatises of Hume and the posthumous works of Bolingbroke, ends with the younger Henry Dodwell’s (anonymous) ironical essay, Christianity not Founded on Argument (1741). So rigorously congruous is the reasoning of that brilliant treatise that some have not quite unjustifiably taken it for the work of a dogmatic believer, standing at some such position as that taken up before him by Huet, and in recent times by Cardinal Newman.107 He argues, for instance, not merely that reason can yield none of the confidence which belongs to true faith, but that it cannot duly strengthen the moral will against temptations.108 But the book at once elicited a number of replies, all treating it unhesitatingly as an anti-Christian work; and Leland assails it as bitterly as he does any openly freethinking treatise.109 Its thesis might have been seriously supported by reference to the intellectual history of the preceding thirty years, wherein much argument had certainly failed to establish the reigning creed or to discredit the unbelievers.

Of the work done by English deism thus far, it may suffice to say that within two generations it had more profoundly altered the intellectual temper of educated men than any religious movement had ever done in the same time. This appears above all from the literature produced by orthodoxy in reply, where the mere defensive resort to reasoning, apart from the accounts of current rationalism, outgoes anything in the previous history of literature. The whole evolution is a remarkable instance of the effect on intellectual progress of the diversion of a nation’s general energy from war and intense political faction to mental activities. A similar diversion had taken place at the Restoration, to be followed by a return to civil and foreign strife, which arrested it. It was in the closing years of Anne, and in the steady rÉgime of Walpole under the first two Georges, that the ferment worked at its height. Collins’s Discourse of Freethinking was synchronous with the Peace of Utrecht: the era of war re-opened in 1739, much against the will of Walpole, who resigned in 1742. Home and foreign wars thereafter became common; and in 1751 Clive opened the period of imperialistic expansion, determining national developments on that main line, concurrently with that of the new industry. Could the discussion have been continuous—could England have remained what she was in the main deistic period, a workshop of investigation and a battleground of ideas—all European development might have been indefinitely hastened. But the deists, for the most part educated men appealing to educated men or to the shrewdest readers among the artisans, had not learned to reckon with the greater social forces; and beyond a certain point they could not affect England’s intellectual destinies.

It is worse than idle to argue that “the true cause of the decay of deism is to be sought in its internal weakness,” in the sense that “it was not rooted in the deepest convictions, nor associated with the most powerful emotions of its adherents.”110 No such charge can be even partially proved. The deists were at least as much in earnest as two-thirds of the clergy: the determining difference, in this regard, was the economic basis of the latter, and their social hold of an ignorant population. The clergy, who could not argue the deists down in the court of culture, had in their own jurisdiction the great mass of the uneducated lower classes, and the great mass of the women of all classes, whom the ideals of the age kept uneducated, with a difference. And while the more cultured clergy were themselves in large measure deists, the majority, in the country parishes, remained uncritical and unreflective, caring little even to cultivate belief among their flocks. The “contempt of the clergy” which had subsisted from the middle of the seventeenth century (if, indeed, it should not be dated from the middle of the sixteenth) meant among other things that popular culture remained on a lower plane. With the multitude remaining a ready hotbed for new “enthusiasm,” and the women of the middle and upper orders no less ready nurturers of new generations of young believers, the work of emancipation was but begun when deism was made “fashionable.” And with England on the way to a new era at once of industrial and imperial expansion, in which the energies that for a generation had made her a leader of European thought were diverted to arms and to commerce, the critical and rationalizing work of the deistical generation could not go on as it had begun. That generation left its specific mark on the statute-book in a complete repeal of the old laws relating to witchcraft;111 on literature in a whole library of propaganda and apology; on moral and historic science in a new movement of humanism, which was to find its check in the French Revolution.

How it affected the general intelligence for good may be partly gathered from a comparison of the common English political attitudes towards Ireland in the first and the last quarters of the century. Under William was wrought the arrest of Irish industry and commerce, begun after the Restoration; under Anne were enacted the penal laws against Catholics—as signal an example of religious iniquity as can well be found in all history. By the middle of the century these laws had become anachronisms for all save bigots.

The denunciations of the penal laws by Arthur Young in 1780112 are the outcome of two generations of deistic thinking; the spirit of religion has been ousted by judgment.113 Could that spirit have had freer play, less hindrance from blind passion, later history would have been a happier record. But for reasons lying in the environment as well as in its own standpoint, deism was not destined to rise on continuous stepping-stones to social dominion.

If we were to set up a theory of intellectual possibilities from what has actually taken place in the history of thought, and without regard to the economic and political conditions above mentioned, we might reason that deism failed permanently to overthrow the current creed because it was not properly preceded by discipline in natural science. There might well be stagnation in the higher criticism of the Hebrew Scriptures when all natural science was still coloured by them. In nothing, perhaps, is the danger of Sacred Books more fully exemplified than in their influence for the suppression of true scientific thought. A hundredfold more potently than the faiths of ancient Greece has that of Christendom blocked the way to all intellectually vital discovery. If even the fame and the pietism of Newton could not save him from the charge of promoting atheism, much less could obscure men hope to set up any view of natural things which clashed with pulpit prejudice. But the harm lay deeper, inasmuch as the ground was preoccupied by pseudo-scientific theories which were at best fanciful modifications of the myths of Genesis. Types of these performances are the treatise of Sir Matthew Hale on The Primitive Origination of Mankind (1685); Dr. Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1680–1689); and Whiston’s New Theory of the Earth (1696)—all devoid of scientific value; Hale’s work being pre-Newtonian; Burnet’s anti-Newtonian, though partly critical as regards the sources of the Pentateuch; and Whiston’s a combination of Newton and myth with his own quaint speculations. Even the Natural History of the Earth of Prof. John Woodward (1695), after recognizing that fossils were really prehistoric remains, decided that they were deposited by the Deluge.120

Woodward’s book is in its own way instructive as regards the history of opinion. A “Professor of Physick” in Gresham College, F.C.P., and F.R.S., he goes about his work in a methodical and ostensibly scientific fashion, colligates the phenomena, examines temperately the hypotheses of the many previous inquirers, and shows no violence of orthodox prepossession. He claims to have considered Moses “only as an historian,” and to give him credit finally because he finds his narrative “punctually true.”121 He had before him an abundance of facts irreconcilable with the explanation offered by the Flood story; yet he actually adds to that myth a thesis of universal decomposition and dissolution of the earth’s strata by the flood’s action122—a hypothesis far more extravagant than any of those he dismissed. With all his method and scrutiny he had remained possessed by the tradition, and could not cast it off. It would seem as if such a book, reducing the tradition to an absurdity, was bound at least to put its more thoughtful readers on the right track. But the legend remained in possession of the general intelligence as of Woodward’s; and beyond his standpoint science made little advance for many years. Moral and historical criticism, then, as regards some main issues, had gone further than scientific; and men’s thinking on certain problems of cosmic philosophy was thus arrested for lack of due basis or discipline in experiential science.

The final account of the arrest of exact Biblical criticism in the eighteenth century, however, is that which explains also the arrest of the sciences. English energy, broadly speaking, was diverted into other channels. In the age of Chatham it became more and more military and industrial, imperialist and commercial; and the scientific work of Newton was considerably less developed by English hands than was the critical work of the first deists. Long before the French Revolution, mathematical and astronomical science were being advanced by French minds, the English doing nothing. Lagrange and Euler, Clairaut and D’Alembert, carried on the task, till Laplace consummated it in his great theory, which is to Newton’s what Newton’s was to that of Copernicus. It was Frenchmen, freethinkers to a man, who built up the new astronomy, while England was producing only eulogies of Newton’s greatness. “No British name is ever mentioned in the list of mathematicians who followed Newton in his brilliant career and completed the magnificent edifice of which he laid the foundation.”123 “Scotland contributed her Maclaurin, but England no European name.”124 Throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century “there was hardly an individual in this country who possessed an intimate acquaintance with the methods of investigation which had conducted the foreign mathematicians to so many sublime results.”125 “The English mathematicians seem to have been so dazzled with the splendour of Newton’s discoveries that they never conceived them capable of being extended or improved upon”;126 and Newton’s name was all the while vaunted, unwarrantably enough, as being on the side of Christian orthodoxy. Halley’s great hypothesis of the motion of the solar system in space, put forward in 1718, borne out by Cassini and Le Monnier, was left to be established by Mayer of GÖttingen.127 There was nothing specially incidental to deism, then, in the non-development of the higher criticism in England after Collins and Parvish, or in the lull of critical speculation in the latter half of the century. It was part of a general social readjustment in which English attention was turned from the mental life to the physical, from intension of thought to extension of empire.

It has been commonly assumed that after Chubb and Morgan the deistic movement in England “decayed,” or “passed into skepticism” with Hume; and that the decay was mainly owing to the persuasive effect of Bishop Butler’s Analogy (1736).128 This appears to be a complete misconception, arising out of the habit of looking to the mere succession of books without considering their vogue and the accompanying social conditions. Butler’s book had very little influence till long after his death,129 being indeed very ill-fitted to turn contemporary deists to Christianity. It does but develop one form of the skeptical argument for faith, as Berkeley had developed another; and that form of reasoning never does attain to anything better than a success of despair. The main argument being that natural religion is open to the same objections as revealed, on the score (1) of the inconsistency of Nature with divine benevolence, and (2) that we must be guided in opinion as in conduct by probability, a Mohammedan could as well use the theorem for the Koran as could a Christian for the Bible; and the argument against the justice of Nature tended logically to atheism. But the deists had left to them the resource of our modern theists—that of surmising a beneficence above human comprehension; and it is clear that if Butler made any converts they must have been of a very unenthusiastic kind. It is therefore safe to say with Pattison that “To whatever causes is to be attributed the decline of deism from 1750 onwards, the books polemically written against it cannot be reckoned among them.”130

On the other hand, even deists who were affected by the plea that the Bible need not be more consistent and satisfactory than Nature, could find refuge in Unitarianism, a creed which, as industriously propounded by Priestley131 towards the end of the century, made a numerical progress out of all proportion to that of orthodoxy. The argument of William Law,132 again, which insisted on the irreconcilability of the course of things with human reason, and called for an abject submission to revelation, could appeal only to minds already thus prostrate. Both his and Butler’s methods, in fact, prepared the way for Hume. And in the year 1741, five years after the issue of the Analogy and seven before the issue of Hume’s Essay on Miracles, we find the thesis of that essay tersely affirmed in a note to Book II of an anonymous translation (ascribed to T. Francklin) of Cicero’s De Natura Deorum.

What Hume did was to elaborate the skeptical argument with a power and fullness which forced attention once for all, alike in England and on the Continent. It is not to be supposed, however, that Hume’s philosophy, insofar as it was strictly skeptical—that is, suspensory—drew away deists from their former attitude of confidence to one of absolute doubt. Nor did Hume ever aim at such a result. What he did was to countermine the mines of Berkeley and others, who, finding their supra-rational dogmas set aside by rationalism, deistic or atheistic, sought to discredit at once deistic and atheistic philosophies based on study of the external world, and to establish their creed anew on the basis of their subjective consciousness. As against that method, Hume showed the futility of all apriorism alike, destroying the sham skepticism of the Christian theists by forcing their method to its conclusions. If the universe was to be reduced to a mere contingent of consciousness, he calmly showed, consciousness itself was as easily reducible, on the same principles, to a mere series of states. Idealistic skepticism, having disposed of the universe, must make short work of the hypostatized process of perception. Hume, knowing that strict skepticism is practically null in life, counted on leaving the ground cleared for experiential rationalism. And he did, insofar as he was read. His essay, Of Miracles (with the rest of the Inquiries of 1748–1751, which recast his early Treatise of Human Nature, 1739), posits a principle valid against all supernaturalism whatever; while his Natural History of Religion (1757), though affirming deism, rejected the theory of a primordial monotheism, and laid the basis of the science of Comparative Hierology.133 Finally, his posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) admit, though indirectly, the untenableness of deism, and fall back decisively upon the atheistic or agnostic position.134 Like Descartes, he lacked the heroic fibre; but like him he recast philosophy for modern Europe; and its subsequent course is but a development of or a reaction against his work.

It is remarkable that this development of opinion took place in that part of the British Islands where religious fanaticism had gone furthest, and speech and thought were socially least free. Freethought in Scotland before the middle of the seventeenth century can have existed only as a thing furtive and accursed; and though, as we have seen from the Religio Stoici of Sir George Mackenzie, unbelief had emerged in some abundance at or before the Restoration, only wealthy men could dare openly to avow their deism.135 Early in 1697 the clergy had actually succeeded in getting a lad of eighteen, Thomas Aikenhead, hanged for professing deism in general, and in particular for calling the Old Testament “Ezra’s Fables,” ridiculing the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and expressing the hope and belief that Christianity would be extinct within a century.136 The spirit of the prosecution may be gathered from the facts that the boy broke down and pleaded penitence,137 and that the statute enacted the capital penalty only for obstinately persisting in the denial of any of the persons of the Trinity.138 He had talked recklessly against the current creed among youths about his own age, one of whom was in Locke’s opinion “the decoy who gave him the books and made him speak as he did.”139 It would appear that a victim was very much wanted; and Aikenhead was not allowed the help of a counsel. It is characteristic of the deadening effect of dogmatic religion on the heart that an act of such brutish cruelty elicited no cry of horror from any Christian writer. At this date the clergy were hounding on the Privy Council to new activity in trying witches; and all works of supposed heretical tendency imported from England were confiscated in the Edinburgh shops, among them being Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth.140 Scottish intellectual development had in fact been arrested by the Reformation, so that, save for Napier’s Logarithms (1614) and such a political treatise as Rutherford’s Lex Rex (1644), the nation of Dunbar and Lyndsay produced for two centuries no secular literature of the least value, and not even a theology of any enduring interest. Deism, accordingly, seems in the latter half of the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth century to have made fully as much progress in Scotland as in England; and the bigoted clergy could offer little intellectual resistance.

Even apart from deism there had arisen a widespread aversion to dogmatic theology and formal creeds, so that an apologist of 1715 speaks of his day as “a time when creeds and Confessions of Faith are so generally decried, and not only exposed to contempt, as useless inventions ... but are loaded by many writers of distinguished wit and learning with the most fatal and dangerous consequences.”141 This writer admits the intense bitterness of the theological disputes of the time;142 and he speaks, on the other hand, of seeing “the most sacred mysteries of godliness impudently denied and impugned” by some, while the “distinguishing doctrines of Christianity are by others treacherously undermined, subtilized into an airy phantom, or at least doubted, if not disclaimed.”143 His references are probably to works published in England, notably those of Locke, Toland, Shaftesbury, and Collins, since in Scotland no such literature could then be published; but he doubtless has an eye to Scottish opinion.

While, however, the rationalism of the time could not take book form, there are clear traces of its existence among educated men, even apart from the general complaints of the apologists. Thus the Professor of Medicine at Glasgow University in the opening years of the eighteenth century, John Johnston, was a known freethinker.144 In the way of moderate or Christian rationalism, the teaching of the prosecuted Simson seems to have counted for something, seeing that Francis Hutcheson at least imbibed from him “liberal” views about future punishment and the salvation of the heathen, which gave much offence in the Presbyterian pulpit in Ulster.145 And Hutcheson’s later vindication of the ethical system of Shaftesbury in his Inquiry Concerning the Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725) must have tended to attract attention in Scotland to the Characteristics after his instalment as a Professor at Glasgow. In an English pamphlet, in 1732, he was satirized as introducing Shaftesbury’s system into a University,146 and it was from the Shaftesbury camp that the first literary expression of freethought in Scotland was sent forth. A young Scotch deist of that school, William Dudgeon, published in 1732 a dialogue entitled The State of the Moral World Considered, wherein the optimistic position was taken up with uncommon explicitness; and in 1739 the same writer printed A Catechism Founded upon Experience and Reason, prefaced by an Introductory Letter on Natural Religion, which takes a distinctly anti-clerical attitude. The Catechism answers to its title, save insofar as it is À priori in its theism and optimistic in its ethic, as is another work of its author in the same year, A View of the Necessarian or Best Scheme, defending the Shaftesburyan doctrine against the criticism of Crousaz on Pope’s Essay. Still more heterodox is his little volume of Philosophical Letters Concerning the Being and Attributes of God (1737), where the doctrine goes far towards pantheism. All this propaganda seems to have elicited only one printed reply—an attack on his first treatise in 1732. In the letter prefaced to his Catechism, however, he tells that “the bare suspicion of my not believing the opinions in fashion in our country hath already caused me sufficient trouble.”147 His case had in fact been raised in the Church courts, the proceedings going through many stages in the years 1732–36; but in the end no decision was taken,148 and the special stress of his rationalism in 1739 doubtless owes something alike to the prosecution and to its collapse. Despite such hostility, he must privately have had fair support.149

The prosecution of Hutcheson before the Glasgow Presbytery in 1738 reveals vividly the theological temper of the time. He was indicted for teaching to his students “the following two false and dangerous doctrines: first, that the standard of moral goodness was the promotion of the happiness of others; and, second, that we could have a knowledge of good and evil without and prior to a knowledge of God.”150 There has been a natural disposition on the orthodox side to suppress the fact that such teachings were ever ecclesiastically denounced as false, dangerous, and irreligious; and the prosecution seems to have had no effect beyond intensifying the devotion of Hutcheson’s students. Among them was Adam Smith, of whom it has justly been said that, “if he was any man’s disciple, he was Hutcheson’s,” inasmuch as he derived from his teacher the bases alike of his moral and political philosophy and of his deistic optimism.151 Another prosecution soon afterwards showed that the new influences were vitally affecting thought within the Church itself. Hutcheson’s friend Leechman, whom he and his party contrived to elect as professor of theology in Glasgow University, was in turn proceeded against (1743–44) for a sermon on Prayer, which Hutcheson and his sympathizers pronounced “noble,”152 but which “resolved the efficacy of prayer into its reflex influence on the mind of the worshipper”153—a theorem which has chronically made its appearance in the Scottish Church ever since, still ranking as a heresy, after having brought a clerical prosecution in the last century on at least one divine, Prof. William Knight, and rousing a scandal against another, the late Dr. Robert Wallace.154

Leechman in turn held his ground, and later became Principal of his University; but still the orthodox in Scotland fought bitterly against every semblance of rationalism. Even the anti-deistic essays of Lord-President Forbes of Culloden, head of the Court of Session, when collected155 and posthumously published, were offensive to the Church as laying undue stress on reason; as accepting the heterodox Biblical theories of Dr. John Hutchinson; and as making the awkward admission that “the freethinkers, with all their perversity, generally are sensible of the social duties, and act up to them better than others do who in other respects think more justly than they.”156 Such an utterance from such a dignitary told of a profound change; and, largely through the influence of Hutcheson and Leechman on a generation of students, the educated Scotland of the latter half of the eighteenth century was in large part either “Moderate” or deistic. After generations of barren controversy,157 the very aridity of the Presbyterian life intensified the recoil among the educated classes to philosophical and historical interests, leading to the performances of Hume, Smith, Robertson, Millar, Ferguson, and yet others, all rationalists in method and sociologists in their interests.

Of these, Millar, one of Smith’s favourite pupils, and a table-talker of “magical vivacity,”158 was known to be rationalistic in a high degree;159 while Smith and Ferguson were certainly deists, as was Henry Home (the judge, Lord Kames), who had the distinction of being attacked along with his friend Hume in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1755–56. Home wrote expressly to controvert Hume, alike as to utilitarianism and the idea of causation; but his book, Essays on Morality and Natural Religion (published anonymously, 1751), handled the thorny question of free-will in such fashion as to give no less offence than Hume had done; and the orthodox bracketed him with the subject of his criticism. His doctrine was indeed singular, its purport being that there can be no free-will, but that the deity has for wise purposes implanted in men the feeling that their wills are free. The fact of his having been made a judge of the Court of Session since writing his book had probably something to do with the rejection of the whole subject by the General Assembly, and afterwards by the Edinburgh Presbytery; but there had evidently arisen a certain diffidence in the Church, which would be assiduously promoted by “moderates” such as Principal Robertson, the historian. It is noteworthy that, while Home and Hume thus escaped, the other Home, John, who wrote the then admired tragedy of Douglas, was soon after forced to resign his position as a minister of the Church for that authorship, deism having apparently more friends in the fold than drama.160 While the theatre was thus being treated as a place of sin, many of the churches in Scotland were the scenes of repeated Sunday riots. A new manner of psalm-singing had been introduced, and it frequently happened that the congregations divided into two parties, each singing in its own way, till they came to blows. According to one of Hume’s biographers, unbelievers were at this period wont to go to church to see the fun.161 Naturally orthodoxy did not gain ground.

In the case of Adam Smith we have one of the leading instances of the divorce between culture and creed in the Scotland of that age. His intellectual tendencies, primed by Hutcheson, were already revealing themselves when, seeking for something worth study in the unstudious Oxford of his day, he was found by some suspicious supervisor reading Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. The book was seized and the student scolded.162 When, in 1751, he became Professor of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow University, he aroused orthodox comment by abandoning the Sunday class on Christian Evidences set up by Hutcheson, and still further, it is said, by petitioning the Senatus to be allowed to be relieved of the duty of opening his class with prayer.163 The permission was not given; and the compulsory prayers were “thought to savour strongly of natural religion”; while the lectures on Natural Theology, which were part of the work of the chair, were said to lead “presumptuous striplings” to hold that “the great truths of theology, together with the duties which man owes to God and his neighbours, may be discovered by the light of nature without any special revelation.”164 Smith was thus well founded in rationalism before he became personally acquainted with Voltaire and the other French freethinkers; and the pious contemporary who deplores his associations avows that neither before nor after his French tour was his religious creed ever “properly ascertained.”165 It is clear, however, that it steadily developed in a rationalistic direction. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) the prevailing vein of theistic optimism is sufficiently uncritical; but even there there emerges an apparent doubt on the doctrine of a future state, and positive hostility to certain ecclesiastical forms of it.166 In the sixth edition, which he prepared for the press in 1790, he deleted the passage which pronounced the doctrine of the Atonement to be in harmony with natural ethics.167 But most noteworthy of all is his handling of the question of religious establishments in the Wealth of Nations.168 It is so completely naturalistic that only the habit of taking the Christian religion for granted could make men miss seeing that its account of the conditions of the rise of new cults applied to that in its origin no less than to the rise of any of its sects. As a whole, the argument might form part of Gibbon’s fifteenth chapter. And even allowing for the slowness of the average believer to see the application of a general sociological law to his own system, there must be inferred a great change in the intellectual climate of Scottish life before we can account for Smith’s general popularity at home as well as abroad after his handling of “enthusiasm and superstition” in the Wealth of Nations. The fact stands out that the two most eminent thinkers in Scotland in the latter half of the eighteenth century were non-Christians,169 and that their most intellectual associates were in general sympathy with them.

In Ireland, at least in Dublin, during the earlier part of the century, there occurred, on a smaller scale, a similar movement of rationalism, also largely associated with Shaftesbury. In Dublin towards the close of the seventeenth century we have seen Molyneux, the friend and correspondent of Locke, interested in “freethought,” albeit much scared by the imprudence of Toland. At the same period there germinated a growth of Unitarianism, which was even more fiercely persecuted than that of Toland’s deism. The Rev. Thomas Emlyn, an Englishman, co-pastor of the Protestant Dissenting Congregation of Wood Street (now Strand Street), Dublin, was found by a Presbyterian and a Baptist to be heretical on the subject of the Trinity, and was indicted in 1702 for blasphemy. He was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and a fine of £1,000, which was partly commuted on his release. He protested that South and Sherlock and other writers on the Trinitarian controversy might have been as justly prosecuted as he; but Irish Protestant orthodoxy was of a keener scent than English, and Emlyn was fain, when released, to return to his native land.170 His colleague Boyse, like many other Churchmen, wished that the unhappy trinitarian controversy “were buried in silence,” but was careful to conform doctrinally. More advanced thinkers had double reason to be reticent. As usual, however, persecution provoked the growth it sought to stifle; and after the passing of the Irish Toleration Act of 1719, a more liberal measure than the English, there developed in Ulster, and even in Dublin, a Unitarian movement akin to that proceeding in England.171 In the next generation we find in the same city a coterie of Shaftesburyans, centring around Lord Molesworth, the friend of Hutcheson, a man of affairs devoted to intellectual interests. It was within a few years of his meeting Molesworth that Hutcheson produced his Inquiry, championing Shaftesbury’s ideas;172 and other literary men were similarly influenced. It is even suggested that Hutcheson’s clerical friend Synge, whom we have seen173 in 1713 attempting a ratiocinative answer to the unbelief he declared to be abundant around him, was not only influenced by Shaftesbury through Molesworth, but latterly “avoided publication lest his opinions should prejudice his career in the Church.”174 After the death of Molesworth, in 1725, the movement he set up seems to have languished;175 but, as we have seen, there were among the Irish bishops men given to philosophic controversy, and the influence of Berkeley cannot have been wholly obscurantist. When in 1756 we read of the Arian Bishop Clayton176 proposing in the Irish House of Lords to drop the Nicene and Athanasian creeds, we realize that in Ireland thought was far from stagnant. The heretic bishop, however, died (February, 1758) just as he was about to be prosecuted for the anti-Athanasian heresies of his last book; and thenceforth Ireland plays no noticeable part in the development of rationalism, political interests soon taking the place of religious, with the result that orthodoxy recovered ground.

It cannot be doubted that the spectacle of religious wickedness presented by the operation of the odious penal laws against Catholics, and the temper of the Protestant Ascendancy party in religious matters, had bred rational skepticism in Ireland in the usual way. Molesworth stands out in Irish history as a founder of a new and saner patriotism; and his doctrines would specially appeal to men of a secular and critical way of thinking. Heretical bishops imply heretical laymen. But the environment was unpropitious to dispassionate thinking. The very relaxation of the Penal Code favoured a reversion to “moderate” orthodoxy; and the new political strifes of the last quarter of the century, destined as they were to be reopened in the next, determined the course of Irish culture in another way.

In England, meanwhile, there was beginning the redistribution of energies which can be seen to have prepared for the intellectual and political reaction of the end of the century. There had been no such victory of faith as is supposed to have been wrought by the forensic theorem of Butler. An orthodox German observer, making a close inquest about 1750, cites the British Magazine as stating in 1749 that half the educated people were then deists; and he, after full inquiry, agrees.177 In the same year, Richardson speaks tragically in the Postscriptum to Clarissa of seeing “skepticism and infidelity openly avowed, and even endeavoured to be propagated from the press; the great doctrines of the gospel brought into question”; and he describes himself as “seeking to steal in with a disguised plea for religion.” Instead of being destroyed by the clerical defence, the deistic movement had really penetrated the Church, which was become as rationalistic in its methods as its function would permit, and the educated classes, which had arrived at a state of compromise. Pope, the chief poet of the preceding generation, had been visibly deistic in his thinking; as Dryden had inferribly been before him; and to such literary prestige was added the prestige of scholarship. The academic Conyers Middleton, whose Letter from Rome had told so heavily against Christianity in exposing the pagan derivations of much of Catholicism, and who had further damaged the doctrine of inspiration in his anonymous Letter to Dr. Waterland (1731), while professing to refute Tindal, had carried to yet further lengths his service to the critical spirit. In his famous Free Inquiry into the miracles of post-apostolic Christianity (1749), again professing to strike at Rome, he had laid the foundations of a new structure of comparative criticism, and had given permanent grounds for rejecting the miracles of the sacred books.

Middleton’s book appeared a year after Hume’s essay Of Miracles, and it made out no such philosophic case as Hume’s against the concept of miracle; but it created at once, by its literary brilliance and its cogent argument, a sensation such as had thus far been made neither by Hume’s philosophic argument nor by Francklin’s anticipation of that.178 Middleton had duly safeguarded himself by positing the certainty of the gospel miracles and of those wrought by the Apostles, on the old principle179 that prodigies were divinely arranged so far forth as was necessary to establish Christianity, but no further. “The history of the gospel,” he writes, “I hope may be true, though the history of the Church be fabulous.”180 But his argument against post-Apostolic miracles is so strictly naturalistic that no vigilant reader could fail to realize its fuller bearing upon all miracles whatsoever. With Hume and Francklin, he insisted that facts incredible in themselves could not be established by any amount or kind of testimony; and he suggested no measure of comparative credibility as between the two orders of miracle. With the deists in general, he argued that knowledge “either of the ways or will of the Creator” was to be had only through study of “that revelation which he made of himself from the beginning in the beautiful fabric of this visible world.”181 An antagonist accordingly wrote that his theses were: “First, that there were no miracles wrought in the primitive Church; Secondly, that all the primitive fathers were fools or knaves, and most of them both one and the other. And it is easy to observe, the whole tenor of your argument tends to prove, Thirdly, that no miracles were wrought by Christ or his apostles; and Fourthly, that these too were fools or knaves, or both.”182 A more temperate opponent pressed the same point in less explosive language. Citing Middleton’s demand for an inductive method, this critic asks with much point: “What does he mean by ‘deserting the path of Nature and experience,’ but giving in to the belief of any miracles, and acknowledging the reality of events contrary to the known effects of the established Laws of Nature?”183

No other answer was seriously possible. In the very act of ostentatiously terming Tindal an “infidel,” Middleton describes an answer made to him by the apologist Chapman as a sample of a kind of writing which did “more hurt and discredit” to Christianity “than all the attacks of its open adversaries.”184 In support of the miracles of the gospel and the apostolic history he offers merely conventional pleas: against the miracles related by the Fathers he brings to bear an incessant battery of destructive criticism. We may sum up that by the middle of the eighteenth century the essentials of the Christian creed, openly challenged for a generation by avowed deists, were abandoned by not a few scholars within the pale of the Church, of whom Middleton was merely the least reticent. After his death was published his Vindication of the Inquiry (1751); and in his collected works (1752) was included his Reflections on the Variations or Inconsistencies which are found among the Four Evangelists, wherein it is demonstrated that “the belief of the inspiration and absolute infallibility of the evangelists seems to be more absurd than even that of transubstantiation itself.”185 The main grounds of orthodoxy were thus put in doubt in the name of a critical orthodoxy. In short, the deistic movement had done what it lay in it to do. The old evangelical or pietistic view of life was discredited among instructed people, and in this sense it was Christianity that had “decayed.” Its later recovery was economic, not intellectual.

The next intellectual step in natural course would have been a revision of the deistic assumptions, insofar, that is, as certain positive assumptions were common to the deists. But, as we have seen, certain fresh issues were raised as among the deists themselves. In addition to those above noted, there was the profoundly important one as to ethics. Shaftesbury, who rejected the religious basis, held a creed of optimism; and this optimism was assailed by Mandeville, who in consequence was opposed as warmly by the deist Hutcheson and others as by Law and Berkeley. To grapple with this problem, and with the underlying cosmic problem, there was needed at least as much general mental activity as went to the antecedent discussion; and the main activity of the nation was now being otherwise directed. The negative process, the impeachment of Christian supernaturalism, had been accomplished so far as the current arguments went. Toland and Collins had fought the battle of free discussion, forcing ratiocination on the Church; Collins had shaken the creed of prophecy; Shaftesbury had impugned the religious conception of morals; and Mandeville had done so more profoundly, laying the foundations of scientific utilitarianism.186 So effective had been the utilitarian propaganda in general that the orthodox Brown (author of the once famous Estimate of the life of his countrymen), in his criticism of Shaftesbury (1751), wrote as a pure utilitarian against an inconsistent one, and defended Christianity on strictly utilitarian lines. Woolston, following up Collins, had shaken the faith in New Testament miracles; Middleton had done it afresh with all the decorum that Woolston lacked; and Hume had laid down with masterly clearness the philosophic principle which rebuts all attempts to prove miracles as such.187 Tindal had clinched the case for “natural” theism as against revelationism; and the later deists, notably Morgan, had to some extent combined these results.188 This literature was generally distributed; and so far the case had been thrashed out.

To carry intellectual progress much further there was needed a general movement of scientific study and a reform in education. The translation of La Mettrie’s Man a Machine (1749)189 found a public no better prepared for the problems he raised than that addressed by Strutt eighteen years before; and the reply of Luzac, Man More than a Machine, in the preface to which the translator (1752) declared that “irreligion and infidelity overspread the land,” probably satisfied what appetite there was for such a discussion. There had begun a change in the prevailing mental life, a diversion of interest from ideas as such to political and mercantile interests. The middle and latter part of the eighteenth century is the period of the rise of (1) the new machine industries, and (2) the new imperialistic policy of Chatham.190 Both alike withdrew men from problems of mere belief, whether theological or scientific.191 That the reaction was not one of mere fatigue over deism we have already seen. It was a general diversion of energy, analogous to what had previously taken place in France in the reign of Louis XIV. As the poet Gray, himself orthodox, put the case in 1754, “the mode of freethinking has given place to the mode of not thinking at all.”192 In Hume’s opinion the general pitch of national intelligence south of the Tweed was lowered.193 This state of things of course was favourable to religious revival; but what took place was rather a new growth of emotional pietism in the new industrial masses (the population being now on a rapid increase), under the ministry of the Wesleys and Whitefield, and a further growth of similar religion in the new provincial middle-class that grew up on the industrial basis. The universities all the while were at the lowest ebb of culture, but officially rabid against philosophic freethinking.194

It would be a great mistake, however, to suppose that all this meant a dying out of deism among the educated classes. The statement of Goldsmith, about 1760, that deists in general “have been driven into a confession of the necessity of revelation, or an open avowal of atheism,”195 is not to be taken seriously. Goldsmith, whose own orthodoxy is very doubtful, had a whimsical theory that skepticism, though it might not injure morals, has a “manifest tendency to subvert the literary merits” of any country;196 and argued accordingly. Deism, remaining fashionable, did but fall partly into the background of living interests, the more concrete issues of politics and the new imaginative literature occupying the foreground. It was early in the reign of George III that Sir William Blackstone, having had the curiosity to listen in succession to the preaching of every clergyman in London, “did not hear a single discourse which had more Christianity in it than the writings of Cicero,” and declared that it would have been impossible for him to discover from what he heard whether the preacher were a follower of Confucius, of Mahomet, or of Christ.197 When the Church was thus deistic, the educated laity can have been no less so. The literary status of deism after 1750 was really higher than ever. It was now represented by Hume; by Adam Smith (Moral Sentiments, 1759); by the scholarship of Conyers Middleton; and by the posthumous works (1752–54) of Lord Bolingbroke, who, albeit more of a debater than a thinker, debated often with masterly skill, in a style unmatched for harmony and energetic grace, which had already won him a great literary prestige, though the visible insincerity of his character, and the habit of browbeating, always countervailed his charm. His influence, commonly belittled, was much greater than writers like Johnson would admit; and it went deep. Voltaire, who had been his intimate, tells198 that he had known some young pupils of Bolingbroke who altogether denied the historic actuality of the Gospel Jesus—a stretch of criticism beyond the assimilative power of that age.

His motive to write for posthumous publication, however, seems rather to have been the venting of his tumultuous feelings than any philosophic purpose. An overweening deist, he is yet at much pains to disparage the À priori argument for deism, bestowing some of his most violent epithets on Dr. Samuel Clarke, who seems to have exasperated him in politics. But his castigation of “divines” is tolerably impartial on that side; and he is largely concerned to deprive them of grounds for their functions, though he finally insists that churches are necessary for purposes of public moral teaching. His own teachings represent an effort to rationalize deism. The God whom he affirms is to be conceived or described only as omnipotent and omniscient (or all-wise), not as good or benevolent any more than as vindictive. Thus he had assimilated part of the Spinozistic and the atheistic case against anthropomorphism, while still using anthropomorphic language on the score that “we must speak of God after the manner of men.” Beyond this point he compromises to the extent of denying special while admitting collective or social providences; though he is positive in his denial of the actuality or the moral need of a future state. As to morals he takes the ordinary deistic line, putting the innate “law of nature” as the sufficient and only revelation by the deity to his creatures. On the basis of that inner testimony he rejects the Old Testament as utterly unworthy of deity, but endorses the universal morality found in the gospels, while rejecting their theology. It was very much the deism of Voltaire, save that it made more concessions to anti-theistic logic.

The weak side of Bolingbroke’s polemic was its inconsistency—a flaw deriving from his character. In the spirit of a partisan debater he threw out at any point any criticism that appeared for the moment plausible; and, having no scientific basis or saving rectitude, would elsewhere take up another and a contradictory position. Careful antagonists could thus discredit him by mere collation of his own utterances.199 But, the enemy being no more consistent than he, his influence was not seriously affected in the world of ordinary readers; and much of his attack on “divines,” on dogmas, and on Old Testament morality must have appealed to many, thus carrying on the discredit of orthodoxy in general. Leland devoted to him an entire volume of his View of the Principal Deistical Writers, and in all bestows more space upon him than on all the others together—a sufficient indication of his vogue.

In view of such a reinforcement of its propaganda, deism could not be regarded as in the least degree written down. In 1765, in fact, we find Diderot recounting, on the authority of d’Holbach, who had just returned from a visit to this country, that “the Christian religion is nearly extinct in England. The deists are innumerable; there are almost no atheists; those who are so conceal it. An atheist and a scoundrel are almost synonymous terms for them.”200 Nor did the output of deistic literature end with the posthumous works of Bolingbroke. These were followed by translations of the new writings of Voltaire,201 who had assimilated the whole propaganda of English deism, and gave it out anew with a wit and brilliancy hitherto unknown in argumentative and critical literature. The freethinking of the third quarter of the century, though kept secondary to more pressing questions, was thus at least as deeply rooted and as convinced as that of the first quarter; and it was probably not much less common among educated men, though new social influences caused it to be more decried.

The hapless Chatterton, fatally precocious, a boy in years and experience of life, a man in understanding at seventeen, incurred posthumous obloquy more for his “infidelity” than for the harmless literary forgeries which reveal his poetic affinity to a less prosaic age. It is a memorable fact that this first recovery of the lost note of imaginative poetry in that “age of prose and reason” is the exploit of a boy whose mind was as independently “freethinking” on current religion as it was original even in its imitative reversion to the poetics of the past. Turning away from the impossible mythicism and mysticism of the Tudor and Stuart literatures, as from the fanaticism of the Puritans, the changing English world after the Restoration had let fall the artistic possession of imaginative feeling and style which was the true glory of the time of Renascence. The ill-strung genius of Chatterton seems to have been the first to reunite the sense of romantic beauty with the spirit of critical reason. He was a convinced deist, avowing in his verse, in his pathetic will (1770), in a late letter, and at times in his talk, that he was “no Christian,” and contemning the ethic of Scripture history and the absurdity of literal inspiration.202 Many there must have been who went as far, with less courage of avowal.

What was lacking to the age, once more, was a social foundation on which it could not only endure but develop. In a nation of which the majority had no intellectual culture, such a foundation could not exist. Green exaggerates203 when he writes that “schools there were none, save the grammar schools of Edward and Elizabeth”;204 but by another account only twelve public schools were founded in the long reign of George III;205 and, as a result of the indifference of two generations, masses of the people “were ignorant and brutal to a degree which it is hard to conceive.”206 A great increase of population had followed on the growth of towns and the development of commerce and manufactures even between 1700 and 1760;207 and thereafter the multiplication was still more rapid. There was thus a positive fall in the culture standards of the majority of the people. According to Massey, “hardly any tradesman in 1760 had more instruction than qualified him to add up a bill”; and “a labourer, mechanic, or domestic servant who could read or write possessed a rare accomplishment.”208 As for the Charity Schools established between 1700 and 1750, their express object was to rear humble tradesmen and domestics, not to educate in the proper sense of the term.

Of the work here noted a considerable amount was done by Unitarians, Evanson being of that persuasion, though at the time of writing his earlier Unitarian works he was an Anglican vicar.211 During the first half of the eighteenth century, despite the movement at the end of the seventeenth, specific anti-Trinitarianism was not much in evidence, the deistic controversy holding the foreground. But gradually Unitarianism made fresh headway. One dissenting clergyman, Martin Tomkyns, who had been dismissed by his congregation at Stoke Newington for his “Arian or Unitarian opinions,” published in 1722 A Sober Appeal to a Turk or an Indian, concerning the plain sense of the Trinity, in reply to the treatise of Dr. Isaac Watts on The Christian Doctrine of the Trinity. A second edition of Tomkyns’s book appeared in 1748, with a further reply to Watts’s Dissertations of 1724. The result seems to have been an unsettlement of the orthodoxy of the hymn-writer. There is express testimony from Dr. Lardner, a very trustworthy witness, that Watts in his latter years, “before he was seized with an imbecility of his faculties,” was substantially a Unitarian. His special papers on the subject were suppressed by his executors; but the full text of his Solemn Address to the Great and Blessed God goes far to bear out Lardner’s express assertion.212 Other prominent religionists were more outspoken. The most distinguished names associated with the position were those of Lardner and Priestley, of whom the former, trained as a simple “dissenter,” avowedly reached his conclusions without much reference to Socinian literature;213 and the second, who was similarly educated, no less independently gave up the doctrines of the Atonement and the Trinity, passing later from the Arian to the Socinian position after reading Lardner’s Letter on the Logos.214 As Priestley derived his determinism from Collins,215 it would appear that the deistical movement had set up a general habit of reasoning which thus wrought even on Christians who, like Lardner and Priestley, undertook to rebut the objections of unbelievers to their faith. A generally rationalistic influence is to be noted in the works of the Unitarian AntipÆdobaptist Dr. Joshua Toulmin, author of lives of Socinus (1777) and Biddle (1789), and many other solid works, including a sermon on “The Injustice of classing Unitarians with Deists and Infidels” (1797). In his case the “classing” was certainly inconvenient. In 1791 the effigy of Paine was burned before his door, and his windows broken. His house was saved by being closely guarded; but his businesses of schoolkeeping and bookselling had to be given up. It thus becomes intelligible how, after a period in which Dissent, contemned by the State Church, learned to criticize that Church’s creed, there emerged in England towards the close of the eighteenth century a fresh movement of specific Unitarianism.

Evanson and Toulmin were scholarly writers, though without the large learning of Lardner and the propagandist energy and reputation of Priestley; and the Unitarian movement, in a quiet fashion, made a numerical progress out of all proportion to that of orthodoxy. It owed much of its immunity at this stage, doubtless, to the large element of tacit deism in the Church; and apart from the scholarly work of Lardner both Priestley and Evanson did something for New Testament criticism, as well as towards the clearing-up of Christian origins. Evanson was actually prosecuted in 1773, on local initiative, for a sermon of Unitarian character delivered by him in the parish church of Tewkesbury on Easter-Day of 1771; and, what is much more remarkable, members of his congregation, at a single defence-meeting in an inn, collected £150 to meet his costs.216 Five years later he had given up the belief in eternal punishment, though continuing to believe in “long protracted” misery for sinners.217 Still later, after producing his Dissonance, he became uncommonly drastic in his handling of the Canon. He lived well into the nineteenth century, and published in 1805 a vigorous tractate, Second Thoughts on the Trinity, recommended to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Gloucester. In that he treats the First Gospel as a forgery of the second century. The method is indiscriminating, and the author lays much uncritical stress upon prophecy. On the whole, the Unitarian contribution to rational thought, then as later, was secondary or ancillary, though on the side of historical investigation it was important. Lardner’s candour is as uncommon as his learning; and Priestley218 and Evanson have a solvent virtue.219 In all three the limitation lies in the fixed adherence to the concept of revelation, which withheld them from radical rationalism even as it did from Arianism. Evanson’s ultra-orthodox acceptance of the Apocalypse is significant of his limitations; and Priestley’s calibre is indicated by his life-long refusal to accept the true scientific inference from his own discovery of oxygen. A more pronounced evolution was that of the Welsh deist David Williams, who, after publishing two volumes of Sermons on Religious Hypocrisy (1774), gave up his post as a dissenting preacher, and, in conjunction with Franklin and other freethinkers, opened a short-lived deistic chapel in Margaret Street, London (1776), where there was used a “Liturgy on the Universal Principles of Religion and Morality.”220

On the other hand, apart from the revival of popular religion under Whitefield and Wesley, which won multitudes of the people whom no higher culture could reach, there was no recovery of educated belief upon intellectual lines; though there was a steady detachment of energy to the new activities of conquest and commerce which mark the second half of the eighteenth century in England. On this state of things supervened the massive performance of the greatest historical writer England had yet produced. Gibbon, educated not by Oxford but by the recent scholarly literature of France, had as a mere boy seen, on reading Bossuet, the theoretic weakness of Protestantism, and had straightway professed Romanism. Shaken as to that by a skilled Swiss Protestant, he speedily became a rationalist pure and simple, with as little of the dregs of deism in him as any writer of his age; and his great work begins, or rather signalizes (since Hume and Robertson preceded him), a new era of historical writing, not merely by its sociological treatment of the rise of Christianity, but by its absolutely anti-theological handling of all things.

The importance of the new approach may be at once measured by the zeal of the opposition. In no case, perhaps, has the essentially passional character of religious resistance to new thought been more vividly shown than in that of the contemporary attacks upon Gibbon’s History. There is not to be found in controversial literature such another annihilating rejoinder as was made by Gibbon to the clerical zealots who undertook to confound him on points of scholarship, history, and ratiocination. The contrast between the mostly spiteful incompetence of the attack and the finished mastery of the reply put the faith at a disadvantage from which it never intellectually recovered, though other forces reinstated it socially. By the admission of Macaulay, who thought Gibbon “most unfair” to religion, the whole troup of his assailants are now “utterly forgotten”; and those orthodox commentators who later sought to improve on their criticism have in turn, with a notable uniformity, been rebutted by their successors; till Gibbon’s critical section ranks as the first systematically scientific handling of the problem of the rise of Christianity. He can be seen to have profited by all the relevant deistic work done before him, learning alike from Toland, from Middleton, and from Bolingbroke; though his acknowledgments are mostly paid to respectable Protestants and Catholics, as Basnage, Beausobre, Lardner, Mosheim, and Tillemont; and the sheer solidity of the work has sustained it against a hundred years of hostile comment.221 While Gibbon was thus earning for his country a new literary distinction, the orthodox interest was concerned above all things to convict him of ignorance, incompetence, and dishonesty; and Davis, the one of his assailants who most fully manifested all of these qualities, and who will long be remembered solely from Gibbon’s deadly exposure, was rewarded with a royal pension. Another, Apthorp, received an archiepiscopal living; while Chelsum, the one who almost alone wrote against him like a gentleman, got nothing. But no cabal could avail to prevent the instant recognition, at home and abroad, of the advent of a new master in history; and in the worst times of reaction which followed, the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire impassively defied the claims of the ruling creed.

In a literary world which was eagerly reading Gibbon222 and Voltaire,223 there was a peculiar absurdity in Burke’s famous question (1790) as to “Who now reads Bolingbroke” and the rest of the older deists.224 The fashionable public was actually reading Bolingbroke even then;225 and the work of the older deists was being done with new incisiveness and thoroughness by their successors.226 In the unstudious world of politics, if the readers were few the indifferentists were many. Evanson could truthfully write to Bishop Hurd in 1777 that “That general unbelief of revealed religion among the higher orders of our countrymen, which, however your Lordship and I might differ in our manner of accounting for it, is too notorious for either of us to doubt of, hath, by a necessary consequence, produced in the majority of our present legislators an absolute indifference towards religious questions of every kind.”227 Beside Burke in Parliament, all the while, was the Prime Minister, William Pitt the younger, an agnostic deist.

There is clear testimony that Charles James Fox, Pitt’s illustrious rival, was no more of a believer than he,228 though equally careful to make no profession of unbelief. And it was Fox who, above all the English statesmen of his day, fought the battle of religious toleration229—a service which finally puts him above Burke, and atones for many levities of political action.

Among thinking men too the nascent science of geology was setting up a new criticism of “revelation”—this twenty years before the issue of the epoch-making works of Hutton.230 In England the impulse seems to have come from the writings of the AbbÉ Langlet du Fresnoy, De Maillet, and Mirabaud, challenging the Biblical account of the antiquity of the earth. The new phase of “infidelity” was of course furiously denounced, one of the most angry and most absurd of its opponents being the poet Cowper.231 Still rationalism persisted. Paley, writing in 1786, protests that “Infidelity is now served up in every shape that is likely to allure, surprise, or beguile the imagination, in a fable, a tale, a novel, or a poem, in interspersed or broken hints, remote and oblique surmises, in books of travel, of philosophy, of natural history—in a word, in any form rather than that of a professed and regular disquisition.”232 The orthodox Dr. J. Ogilvie, in the introduction to his Inquiry into the Causes of the Infidelity and Skepticism of the Times (1783), begins: “That the opinions of the deists and skeptics have spread more universally during a part of the last century and in the present than at any former Æra since the resurrection of letters, is a truth to which the friends and the enemies of religion will give their suffrage without hesitation.” In short, until the general reversal of all progress which followed on the French Revolution, there had been no such change of opinion as Burke alleged.

One of the most popular poets and writers of the day was the celebrated Erasmus Darwin, a deist, whose Zoonomia (1794) brought on him the charge of atheism, as it well might. However he might poetize about the Creator, Dr. Darwin in his verse and prose alike laid the foundations of the doctrines of the transmutation of species and the aqueous origin of simple forms of life which evolved into higher forms; though the idea of the descent of man from a simian species had been broached before him by Buffon and HelvÉtius in France, and Lords Kames and Monboddo in Scotland. The idea of a Natura naturans was indeed ancient; but it has been authoritatively said of Erasmus Darwin that “he was the first who proposed and consistently carried out a well-rounded theory with regard to the development of the living world—a merit which shines forth more brilliantly when we compare it with the vacillating and confused attempts of Buffon, LinnÆus, and Goethe. It is the idea of a power working from within the organisms to improve their natural position”233—the idea which, developed by Lamarck, was modified by the great Darwin of the nineteenth century into the doctrine of natural selection.

And in the closing years of the century there arose a new promise of higher life in the apparition of Mary Wollstonecraft, ill-starred but noble, whose Letters on Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) show her to have been a freethinking deist of remarkable original faculty,234 and whose Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was the first great plea for the emancipation of her sex.

Even in rural Scotland, the vogue of the poetry of Burns told of germinal doubt. To say nothing of his mordant satires on pietistic types—notably Holy Willie’s Prayer, his masterpiece in that line—Burns even in his avowed poems235 shows small regard for orthodox beliefs; and his letters reveal him as substantially a deist, shading into a Unitarian. Such pieces as A Prayer in the prospect of Death, and A Prayer under the pressure of Violent Anguish, are plainly unevangelical;236 and the allusions to Jesus in his letters, even when writing to Mrs. Maclehose, who desired to bring him to confession, exclude orthodox belief,237 though they suggest Unitarianism. He frequently refers to religion in his letters, yet so constantly restricts himself to the affirmation of a belief in a benevolent God and in a future state that he cannot be supposed to have held the further beliefs which his orthodox correspondents would wish him to express. A rationalistic habit is shown even in his professions of belief, as here: “Still I am a very sincere believer in the Bible; but I am drawn by the conviction of a man, not the halter of an ass”;238 and in the passage: “Though I have no objection to what the Christian system tells us of another world, yet I own I am partial to those proofs and ideas of it which we have wrought out of our own heads and hearts.”239 Withal, Burns always claimed to be “religious,” and was so even in a somewhat conventional sense. The lines:

exhibit a sufficiently commonplace conception of Omnipotence; and there is no sign that the poet ever did any hard thinking on the problem. But, emotionalist of genius as he was, his influence as a satirist and mitigator of the crudities and barbarities of Scots religion has been incalculably great, and underlies all popular culture progress in Scotland since his time. Constantly aspersed in his own day and world as an “infidel,” he yet from the first conquered the devotion of the mass of his countrymen; though he would have been more potent for intellectual liberation if he had been by them more intelligently read. Few of them now, probably, realize that their adored poet was either a deist or a Unitarian—presumably the former.

With the infelicity in prediction which is so much commoner with him than the “prescience” for which he is praised, Burke had announced that the whole deist school “repose in lasting oblivion.” The proposition would be much more true of 999 out of every thousand writers on behalf of Christianity. It is characteristic of Burke, however, that he does not name Shaftesbury, a Whig nobleman of the sacred period.241 A seeming justice was given to Burke’s phrase by the undoubted reaction which took place immediately afterwards. In the vast panic which followed on the French Revolution, the multitude of mediocre minds in the middle and upper classes, formerly deistic or indifferent, took fright at unbelief as something now visibly connected with democracy and regicide; new money endowments were rapidly bestowed on the Church; and orthodoxy became fashionable on political grounds just as skepticism had become fashionable at the Restoration. Class interest and political prejudice wrought much in both cases; only in opposite directions. Democracy was no longer Bibliolatrous, therefore aristocracy was fain to became so, or at least to grow respectful towards the Church as a means of social control. Gibbon, in his closing years, went with the stream. And as religious wars have always tended to discredit religion, so a war partly associated with the freethinking of the French revolutionists tended to discredit freethought. The brutish wrecking of Priestley’s house and library and chapel by a mob at Birmingham in 1791 was but an extreme manifestation of a reaction which affected every form of mental life. But while Priestley went to die in the United States, another English exile, temporarily returned thence to his native land, was opening a new era of popular rationalism. Even in the height of the revolutionary tumult, and while Burke was blustering about the disappearance of unbelief, Thomas Paine was laying deep and wide the English foundations of a new democratic freethought; and the upper-class reaction in the nature of the case was doomed to impermanency, though it was to arrest English intellectual progress for over a generation. The French Revolution had re-introduced freethought as a vital issue, even in causing it to be banned as a danger.

As regards England, Paine is the great popular factor; and it is the bare truth to say that he brought into the old debate a new earnestness and a new moral impetus. The first part of the Age of Reason, hastily put together in expectation of speedy death in 1793, and including some astronomic matter that apparently antedates 1781,242 is a swift outline of the position of the rationalizing deist, newly conscious of firm standing-ground in astronomic science. That is the special note of Paine’s gospel. He was no scholar; and the champions of the “religion of Galilee” have always been prompt to disparage any unlearned person who meddles with religion as an antagonist; but in the second part of his book Paine put hard criticism enough to keep a world of popular readers interested for well over a hundred years. The many replies are forgotten: the Biblical criticism of Paine will continue to do its work till popular orthodoxy follows the lead of professional scholarship and gives up at once the acceptance and the circulation of things incredible and indefensible as sacrosanct.

Henceforth there is a vital difference in the fortunes of freethought and religion alike. Always in the past the institutional strength of religion and the social weakness of freethought had lain in the credulity of the ignorant mass, which had turned to naught an infinity of rational effort. After the French Revolution, when over a large area the critical spirit began simultaneously to play on faith and life, politics and religion, its doubled activity gave it a new breadth of outlook as of energy, and the slow enlightenment of the mass opened up a new promise for the ultimate reign of reason.

1 As Voltaire noted, Toland was persecuted in Ireland for his circumspect and cautious first book, and left unmolested in England when he grew much more aggressive.?

2 First ed. anonymous. Second ed., of same year, gives author’s name. Another ed. in 1702.?

3 See Dynamics of Religion, p. 129.?

4 Pref. to 2nd ed. pp. vi, viii, xxiv, xxvi.?

5 As late as 1701 a vote for its prosecution was passed in the Lower House of Convocation. Farrar, Crit. Hist. of Freethought, p. 180.?

6 Molyneux, in Familiar Letters of Locke, etc. p. 228.?

7 No credit for this is given in Sir Leslie Stephen’s notice of Toland in English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, i, 101–12. Compare the estimate of Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, i, 272–76 (Eng. tr. i, 324–30). Lange perhaps idealizes his subject somewhat.?

8 In two letters published along with the Letters to Serena, 1704.?

9 Letters to Serena, etc. 1704, pref.?

10 De Principiis atque Originibus (Routledge’s 1-vol. ed. pp. 651, 667).?

11 Letters to Serena, pp. 19, 67.?

12 Sir Henry Craik (cited by Temple Scott, Bohn ed. of Swift’s Works, iii, 9) speaks of Toland as “a man of utterly worthless character.” This is mere malignant abuse. Toland is described by Pope in a note to the Dunciad (ii, 399) as a spy to Lord Oxford. There could hardly be a worse authority for such a charge.?

13 Gostwick, German Culture and Christianity, 1882, p. 26.?

14 Cp. Stephen, as cited, p. 115.?

15 “The Christianity of many writers consisted simply in expressing deist opinions in the old-fashioned phraseology” (Stephen, i, 91).?

16 Cp. PÜnjer, Christ. Philos. of Religion, i, 289–90; and Dynamics of Religion, pp. 94–98. Lord Morley’s reference to “the godless deism of the English school” (Voltaire, 4th ed. p. 69) is puzzling. Cp. Rosenkranz (Diderot’s Leben und Werke, 1866, ii, 421) on “den ungÖttlichen Gott der Jesuiten and Jansenisten, dies monstrÖse Zerrbild des alten Jehovah, diesen apotheosirten Tyrannen, diesen Moloch.” The latter application of the term seems the more plausible.?

17 Macaulay’s description of Blount as an atheist is therefore doubly unwarranted.?

18 Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 94–98.?

19 Continuation des PensÉes Diverses ... À l’occasion de la ComÈte ... de 1680, Amsterdam, 1705, i, 91.?

20 Warburton, Divine Legation, vol. ii, preface.?

21 Stephen, English Thought, i, 114–18.?

22 This, according to John Craig, was Newton’s opinion. “The reason of his [Newton’s] showing the errors of Cartes’s philosophy was because he thought it made on purpose to be the foundation of infidelity.” Letter to Conduitt, April 7, 1727, in Brewster’s Memoirs of Newton, ii, 315. Clarke, in his Answer to Butler’s Fifth Letter, expresses a similar view.?

23 “Three Discourses of Happiness, Virtue, and Liberty, Collected from the Works of the Learn’d Gassendi by Monsieur Bernier. Translated out of the French, 1699.”?

24 Cp. W. Sichel, Bolingbroke and His Times, 1901, i, 175.?

25 Sir Leslie Stephen (i, 33) makes the surprising statement that a “dogmatic assertion of free-will became a mark of the whole deist and semi-deist school.” On the contrary, Hobbes and Anthony Collins, not to speak of Locke, wrote with uncommon power against the conception of free-will, and had many disciples on that head.?

26 Letter to the Princess of Wales, November, 1715, in Brewster, ii, 284–85.?

27 Second Letter to Clarke, par. 1.?

28 Abstract from the Works of John Hutchinson, 1755, pp. 149–63.?

29 Clarke’s Answer to Leibnitz’s First Letter, end.?

30 Berkeley, Defence of Freethinking in Mathematics, par. vii; and Stock’s Memoir of Berkeley. Cp. Brewster, Memoirs of Newton, ii, 408.?

31 In the Philosophical Transactions, 1718, No. 355, i, v, vi.?

32 Brewster, More Worlds than One, 1854, p. 110.?

33 Lecky, Hist. of England in the Eighteenth Cent. ed. 1892, iii, 22–24.?

34 The tradition of Saunderson’s unbelief is constant. In the memoir prefixed to his Elements of Algebra (1740) no word is said of his creed, though at death he received the sacrament.?

35 See The State of the Process depending against Mr. John Simson, Edinburgh, 1728. Simson always expressed himself piously, but had thrown out such expressions as Ratio est principium et fundamentum theologiÆ, which “contravened the Act of Assembly, 1717” (vol. cited, p. 316). The “process” against him began in 1714, and dragged on for nearly twenty years, with the result of his resigning his professorship of theology at Glasgow in 1729, and seceding from the Associate Presbytery in 1733. Burton, History of Scotland, viii, 399–400.?

36 Cp. the pamphlet by “A Presbyter of the Church of England,” attributed to Bishop Hare, cited in Dynamics of Religion, pp. 177–78, and by Lecky, iii, 25.?

37 Tatler, Nos. 12, 111, 135; Spectator, Nos. 231, 381, 389, 599; Guardian, Nos. 3, 9, 27, 35, 39, 55, 62, 70, 77, 83, 88, 120, 130, 169. Most of the Guardian papers cited are by Berkeley. They are extremely virulent; but Steele’s run them hard.?

38 Analyst, Queries 60 and 62: Defence of Freethinking in Mathematics, §§ 5, 6, 50. Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 141–42.?

39 Letter in De Morgan’s Newton: his Friend: and his Niece, 1885, p. 69.?

40 The essays in the Characteristics (excepting the Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit, which was published by Toland, without permission, in 1699) appeared between 1708 and 1711, being collected in the latter year. Shaftesbury died in 1713, in which year appeared his paper on The Judgment of Hercules.?

41 A Project for the Advancement of Religion. Bohn ed. of Works, iii, 44. In this paper Swift reveals his moral standards by the avowal (p. 40) that “hypocrisy is much more eligible than open infidelity and vice: it wears the livery of religion ... and is cautious of giving scandal.”?

42 Sir Leslie Stephen (English Thought, i, 283) speaks of Dodwell’s thesis as deserving only “pity or contempt.” Cp. Macaulay, Student’s ed. ii, 107–108. But a doctrine of conditional immortality had been explicitly put by Locke in his Reasonableness of Christianity, 1695, p. 13. Cp. Prof. Fraser’s Locke, 1890, pp. 259–60, and Fox Bourne’s Life of Locke, ii, 287. The difference was that Dodwell elaborately gave his reasons, which, as Dr. Clarke put it, made “all good men sorry, and all profane men rejoice.”?

43 History of his Own Time, ed. 1838, p. 887.?

44 Compare his ironical Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, 1708.?

45 He had, however, hailed the anonymous Letter Concerning Enthusiasm as “very well writ,” believing it to be by a friend of his own—(Robert Hunter, to whom, accordingly, it has since been mistakenly attributed by various bibliographers, including Barbier). “Enthusiasm,” as meaning “popular fanaticism,” was of course as repellent to a Churchman as to the deists.?

46 Printed in folio 1711. Rep. in vol. xi of the Harleian Miscellany, p. 168 sq. (2nd ed. p. 163 sq.).?

47 Dr. E. Synge, of Dublin (afterwards Archbishop of Tuam), in his Religion Tryed by the Test of Sober and Impartial Reason, published in 1713, seems to be writing before the issue of Collins’s book when he says (Dedication, p. 11) that the spread of the “disease not only of Heterodoxy but of Infidelity” is “too plain to be either denied or dissembled.”?

48 Leslie affirms in his Truth of Christianity Demonstrated (1711, p. 14) that the satirical Detection of his Short Method with the Deists, to which the Truth is a reply, was by the author of Priestcraft in Perfection; but, while the Detection has some of Collins’s humour, it lacks his amenity, and is evidently not by him.?

49 An English translation of the Dictionary, in 5 vols. folio, with “many passages restored,” appeared in 1734.?

50 A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke, 1720, p. 271.?

51 E.g. Mark Pattison, who calls Collins’s book of 178 pages a “small tract.”?

52 “Ignorance,” Collins writes, “is the foundation of Atheism, and Freethinking the cure of it” (Discourse of Freethinking, p. 105). Like Newton, he contemplated only an impossible atheism, never formulated by any writer. The Philosophical Principles of Religion, Natural and Reveal’d, of Dr. George Cheyne (1705, 2nd ed. 1715), similarly declares (pref. end) that “if the modern [i.e. Newtonian] philosophy demonstrates nothing else, yet it infallibly proves Atheism to be the most gross ignorance.” Thus the vindicator of “religion” was writing in the key of the deist.?

53 Mr. Temple Scott, in his Bohn ed. of Swift’s Works (iii, 166), asserts that Swift’s satire “frightened Collins into Holland.” For this statement there is no evidence whatever, and as it stands it is unintelligible. The assertion that Collins had had to fly to Holland in 1711 (Dr. Conybeare, Hist. of N. T. Crit. R. P. A. 1910, p. 38) is also astray.?

54 Second ed. 1717. Another writer, William Lyons, was on the same track, publishing The Infallibility of Human Judgment, its Dignity and Excellence (2nd ed. 1720), and A Discourse of the Necessity of Human Actions (1730).?

55 Work cited, p. 13.?

56 As to whose positions see a paper in the writer’s Pioneer Humanists, 1907.?

57 There were six separate Discourses. Voltaire speaks of “three editions coup sur coup of ten thousand each” (Lettre sur les auteurs Anglais—in Œuvres, ed. 1792. lxviii, 359). This seems extremely unlikely as to any one Discourse; and even 5,000 copies of each Discourse is a hardly credible sale, though the writer of the sketch of his life (1733) says that “the sale of Mr. Woolston’s works was very great.” In any case, Woolston’s Discourses are now seldomer met with than Collins’s Discourse of Freethinking. Alberti (Briefe betreffend den Zustand der Religion in Gross-Brittannien) wrote in 1752 that the Discourses were even in that day somewhat rare, and seldom found together. Many copies were probably destroyed by the orthodox, and many would doubtless be thrown away, as tracts so often are.?

58 Tyerman’s Life of Wesley, ed. 1871, i, 65–66.?

59 The Infidel Convicted, 1731, pp. 33, 62.?

60 Tindal (1653–1733) was the son of a clergyman, and in 1678 was elected a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford. From 1685 to 1688 he was a Roman Catholic. Under William III he wrote three works on points of political freedom—one, 1698, on The Liberty of the Press. His Rights of the Christian Church, anonymously published in 1706, a defence of Erastianism, made a great sensation, and was prosecuted—only to be reprinted. His later Defence of the Rights of the Christian Church was in 1710, by order of the House of Commons, burned by the common hangman.?

61 Middleton’s Works, 2nd ed. 1755, iii, 50–56.?

62 Tindal (Voltaire tells) regarded Pope as devoid of genius and imagination, and so trebly earned his place in the Dunciad.?

63 A Layman’s Faith.... “By a Freethinker and a Christian,” 1732.?

64 Title-page of Rev. Elisha Smith’s Cure of Deism, 1st ed. 1736; 3rd ed. 1740.?

65 Le Moine, Dissertation historique sur les Écrits de Woolston, sa condemnation, etc. pp. 29–31, cited by Salchi, Lettres sur le DÉisme, 1759, p. 67 sq.?

66 Lettre sur les auteurs Anglais, as cited. Voltaire tells that, when a she-bigot one day spat in Woolston’s face, he calmly remarked: “It was so that the Jews treated your God.” Another story reads like a carefully-improved version of the foregoing. A woman is said to have accosted him as a scoundrel, and asked him why he was not yet hanged. On his asking her grounds for such an accost, she replied: “You have writ against my Saviour. What would become of my poor sinful soul if it was not for my dear Saviour—my Saviour who died for such wicked sinners as I am.” Life of Mr. Woolston, prefixed to a reprint of his collected Discourses, 1733, p. 27. Cp. Salchi, p. 78.?

67 Life cited, pp. 22, 26, 29.?

68 An Historical Defence of the Trustees of Lady Hewley’s Foundations, by the Rev. Joseph Hunter, 1834, pp. 17, 35; The History, Opinions, and present legal position of the English Presbyterians, 1834, pp. 18, 29; Skeats, History of the Free Churches of England, ed. Miall, p. 240.?

69 Hunter, as cited, p. 17; History of the Presbyterians, as cited, p. 19; Fletcher, History of Independency, 1862, iv, 266–67.?

70 Hunter, pp. 37, 39.?

71 Skeats, as cited, p. 226.?

72 Hunter, pp. 24–25.?

73 Skeats (pp.239–40) sums up that while the Baptists had probably “never been entirely free from the taint” of Unitarianism, the Particular Baptists and the Congregationalists were saved from it by their lack of men of “eminently speculative mind”; while the Presbyterians “were men, for the most part, of larger reading than other Nonconformists, and the writings of Whiston and Clarke had found their way among them.” But the tendency existed before Whiston and Clarke.?

74 History, cited, p. 22; Hunter, pp. 44–45; Skeats, pp. 243–44.?

75 Skeats, pp. 240–43, 245 sq.?

76 Skeats, p. 248.?

77 Hunter, p. 50.?

78 As Sir Leslie Stephen has observed (English Thought, i, 164), Chubb “deserves the praise of Malthusians.” Having a sufficiency of means for himself, but not more, he “lived a single life, judging it greatly improper to introduce a family into the world without a prospect of maintaining them.” The proverb as to mouths and meat, he drily observes, had not been verified in his experience. (The Author’s Account of Himself, pref. to Posthumous Works, 1748, i, p. iv.)?

79 One of the then numerous tribe of eccentrics. He held by Judaic Sabbatarianism, and affected a Rabinnical costume. He made a competence, however, as an ironmonger.?

80 Essay Towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain.?

81 Discourse to Magistrates.?

82 Guardian, Nos. 3, 55, 88.?

83 The Analyst, Queries, 55–67.?

84 See above, pp. 126–28.?

85 Discourse of Passive Obedience, § 26.?

86 Works, ed. 1837, p. 352.?

87 See the whole context, which palpitates with excitement.?

88 Mr. Walter Sichel (Bolingbroke and his Times, 1901, i, 175) thinks fit to dispose of her attitude as “her aversion to the Church and to everything that transcended her own faculties.” So far as the evidence goes, her faculties were much superior to those of most of her orthodox contemporaries. For her tone see her letters.?

89 E.g. Dunciad, ii, 399; iii, 212; iv, 492.?

90 Voltaire commented pointedly on Pope’s omission to make any reference to Shaftesbury, while vending his doctrine. (Lettres Philosophiques, xxii.) As a matter of fact Pope does in the Dunciad (iv, 488) refer maliciously to the Theocles of Shaftesbury’s Moralists as maintaining a Lucretian theism or virtual atheism. The explanation is that Shaftesbury had sharply criticized the political course of Bolingbroke, who in turn ignored him as a thinker. See the present writer’s introd. to Shaftesbury’s Characteristics, ed. 1900 (rep. in Pioneer Humanists); and cp. W. R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson, 1900, p. 101.?

91 Texte, Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature, Eng. tr. pp. 117–18.?

92 Chesterfield in his Characters (app. to the Letters) testifies that Pope “was a deist believing in a future state; this he has often owned himself to me.” (Bradshaw’s ed. of Letters, iii, 1410.) Chesterfield makes a similar statement concerning Queen Caroline:—“After puzzling herself in all the whimsies and fantastical speculations of different sects, she fixed herself ultimately in Deism, believing in a future state.” (Id. p. 1406.)?

93 Dict. Philos. art. AthÉe, § 2.?

94 Wise, in his adaptation of Cudworth, A Confutation of the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism (1706), writes (i, 5) that “the philosophical atheists are but few in number,” and their objections so weak “as that they deserve not a hearing but rather neglect”; but confusedly goes on to admit that “one or two broachers of ’em maybe thought able to infect a whole nation, as ... sad experience tells us.”?

95 Complaint to this effect was made by orthodox writers. The Scotch Professor Halyburton, for instance, complains that in many sermons in his day “Heathen Morality has been substituted in the room of Gospel Holiness. And Ethicks by some have been preached instead of the Gospels of Christ.” Natural Religion Insufficient (Edinburgh), 1714, p. 25. Cp. pp. 23, 26–27, 59, etc. Bishop Burnet, in the Conclusion to his History of his Own Time, declares, “I must own that the main body of our clergy has always seemed dead and lifeless to me,” and ascribes much more zeal to Catholics and dissenters. (Ed. 1838, pp. 907–910.)?

96 The Moralists deals rather with strict skepticism than with substantive atheism.?

97 The Grand Essay: or, a Vindication of Reason and Religion against Impostures of Philosophy. The book was, on March 18, 1704, condemned by the House of Commons to be burned in Palace Yard, along with its author’s Second Thoughts Concerning the Human Soul (1702). A second ed. of the latter appeared soon after.?

98 Above, p. 153.?

99 Mr. Herbert Paul, in his essay on Swift (Men and Letters, 1901, p. 267), lumps as deists the four writers named by Swift in his Argument. Not having read them, he thinks fit to asperse all four as bad writers. Asgill, as was noted by Coleridge (Table Talk, July 30, 1831; April 30, 1832), was one of the best writers of his time. He was, in fact, a master of the staccato style, practised by Mr. Paul with less success.?

100 Work cited, p. 324. The book is now rare.?

101 Cp. Cheyne, Founders of Old Testament Criticism, 1893, p. 2.?

102 Dr. Cheyne expresses surprise that a “theological writer” who got no far should not have been “prompted by his good genius to follow up his advantage.” It is, however, rather remarkable that Parvish, who was a bookseller at Guildford (Alberti, Briefe, p. 426), should have achieved what he did. It was through not being a theological writer that he went so far, no theologian of his day following him.?

103 See the author’s introduction to ed. of the Characteristics, 1900, rep. in Pioneer Humanists.?

104 The question remains obscure. Cp. the Letter cited, reprinted at end of Carver’s 1830 ed. of Paine’s Works (New York); F. Thackeray’s Life of Chatham, ii, 405; and Chatham’s “scalping-knife” speech.?

105 A Vindication of the Moral Philosopher appeared in 1741.?

106 Cp. Lechler, pp. 371, 386.?

107 Cp. Cairns, Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century, 1881, p. 101.?

108 Ed. 1741, p. 30 sq.?

109 View of the Deistical Writers, Letter XI (X in 1st ed.).?

110 Sir Leslie Stephen, English Thought, i, 169.?

111 Act 9th, Geo. II (1736), ch. 5.?

112 A Tour in Ireland, ed. 1892, ii, 59–72.?

113 Young at this period was entirely secular in his thinking. Telling of his recovery from a fever in 1790, he writes: “I fear that not one thought of God ever occurred to me at that time” (Autobiography, 1898, p. 188). Afterwards he fell into religious melancholia (Introd. note of editor).?

114 Really an abler man than half the others in the list, but himself a good deal of a heretic. So far from attempting to make “victims,” he pleaded for a more candid treatment of deistic objections.?

115 Doddridge himself was not theologically orthodox, but was an evangelical Christian. Dr. Stoughton, Religion in England under Queen Anne and the Georges, 1878, i, 344–46.?

116 Whose doctrine Sir Leslie Stephen elsewhere (p. 258) calls a “brutal theology which gloried in trampling on the best instincts of its opponents,” and a “most unlovely product of eighteenth-century speculation.”?

117 Of Warburton Sir Leslie writes elsewhere (p. 353) that “this colossus was built up of rubbish.” See p. 352 for samples. Again he speaks (p. 368) of the bishop’s pretensions as “colossal impudence.” It should be noted, further, that Warburton’s teaching in the Divine Legation was a gross heresy in the eyes of William Law, who in his Short but Sufficient Confutation pronounced its main thesis a “most horrible doctrine.” Ed. 1768, as cited, i, 217.?

118 As to whose “senile incompetence” see same vol. p. 234.?

119 History of Protestant Theology, Eng. tr. ii, 77. For the influence of deism on Germany, see Tholuck (Vermischte Schriften, Bd. ii) and Lechler (Gesch. des englischen Deismus).—Note by Dr. Cheyne.?

120 An Essay towards a Natural History of the Earth, 3rd ed. 1723, pref. and pp. 16 sq., 77 sq. Cp. White, Warfare of Science with Theology, i. 227.?

121 End of pref.?

122 Work cited, p. 85.?

123 Playfair, in the Edinburgh Review, January, 1808, cited by Brewster, Memoirs of Newton, 1855. i, 347.?

124 Brewster, as last cited.?

125 Grant, History of Physical Astronomy, 1852, p. 108.?

126 Baden Powell, Hist. of Nat. Philos. 1834, p. 363.?

127 Brewster, More Worlds than One, 1854, p. 111.?

128 Sir James Stephen, HorÆ SabbaticÆ, ii, 281; Lechler, p. 451.?

129 See details in Dynamics of Religion, ch. viii.?

130 Essay on “Tendencies of Religious Thought in England: 1688–1750,” in Essays and Reviews, 9th ed. p. 304.?

131 In criticizing whom Sir Leslie Stephen barely notices his scientific work, but dwells much on his religious fallacies—a course which would make short work of the fame of Newton.?

132 In his Case of Reason; or, Natural Religion Fully and Fairly Stated, in answer to Tindal (1732). See the argument set forth by Sir Leslie Stephen, i, 158–63. It is noteworthy, however, that in his Spirit of Prayer (1750), pt. ii, dial. i, Law expressly argues that “No other religion can be right but that which has its foundation in Nature. For the God of Nature can require nothing of his creatures but what the state of their nature calls them to.” Like Baxter, Berkeley, Butler, and so many other orthodox polemists, Law uses the argument from ignorance when it suits him, and ignores or rejects it when used by others.?

133 The general reader should take note that in A. Murray’s issue of Hume’s Essays (afterwards published by Ward, Lock, and Co.), which omits altogether the essays on Miracles and a Future State, the Natural History of Religion is much mutilated, though the book professes to be a verbatim reprint.?

134 Even before his death he was suspected of that view. When his coffin was being carried from his house for interment, one of “the refuse of the rabble” is said to have remarked, “Ah, he was an atheist.” “No matter,” replied another, “he was an honest man” (Curious Particulars, etc., respecting Chesterfield and Hume, 1788, p. 15).?

135 See Burton, Hist. of Scotland, viii, 549–50, as to the case of Pitcairne.?

136 Howell’s State Trials, xiii (1812), coll. 917–38.?

137 Macaulay, History, ch. xxii; student’s ed. ii, 620–21; Burton, History of Scotland, viii, 76–77. Aikenhead seems to have been a boy of unusual if unbalanced capacity, even by the bullying account of Macaulay, who missed no opportunity to cover himself by stoning heretics. See the boy’s arguments on the bases of ethics, set forth in his “dying speech,” as cited by Halyburton, Natural Religion Insufficient, 1714, pp. 119–23, 131, and the version in the State Trials, xiii, 930–34.?

138 Macaulay ascribes the savagery of the prosecution to the Lord Advocate, Sir James Stewart, “as cruel as he was base”; but a letter printed in the State Trials, from a member of the Privy Council, says the sentence would have been commuted if “the ministers would intercede.” They, however, “spoke and preached for cutting him off.” Trials, xiii, 930; Burton, viii, 77.?

139 Letter to Sir Francis Masham, printed in the State Trials, xiii, 928–29—evidently written by Locke, who seems to have preserved all the papers printed by Howell.?

140 Macaulay, as cited. In 1681 one Francis Borthwick, who had gone abroad at the age of fourteen and turned Jew, was accused of blaspheming Jesus, and had to fly for his life, being outlawed. State Trials, as cited, col. 939.?

141 A Full Account of the Several Ends and Uses of Confessions of Faith, first published in 1719 as a preface to a Collection of Confessions of Faith, by Prof. W. Dunbar, of Edinburgh University, 3rd ed. 1775, p. 1.?

142 Work cited, p. 48.?

143 Id. p. 198.?

144 Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century. From the MSS. of John Ramsay, of Ochtertyre, 1888, i, 277. Ramsay describes Johnston as a “joyous, manly, honourable man,” of whom Kames “was exceedingly fond” (p. 278).?

145 W. R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson, 1900, pp. 15, 20–21.?

146 Id. p. 52.?

147 Cp. Alberti, Briefe betreffende den Zustand der Religion in Gross-Brittannien, 1752, pp. 430–31.?

148 See Dr. McCosh’s Scottish Philosophy, 1875, pp. 111–13. Dr. McCosh notes that at some points Dudgeon anticipated Hume.?

149 Dr. McCosh, however, admits that the absence of the printer’s name on the 1765 edition of Dudgeon’s works shows that there was then no thorough freedom of thought in Scotland.?

150 Rae, Life of Adam Smith, 1895, p. 13. Prof. Fowler shows no knowledge of this prosecution in his monograph on Hutcheson (Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, 1882); and Mr. W. R. Scott, in his, seems to rely for the wording of the indictment solely on Mr. Rae, who gives no references, drawing apparently on unpublished MSS.?

151 Rae, as cited, pp. 11–15.?

152 Scott, as cited, p. 87.?

153 Dr. James Orr, David Hume and his Influence, etc., 1903. pp. 36–37.?

154 Also for a time a theological professor in Edinburgh University.?

155 The Thoughts Concerning Religion, Natural and Revealed, appeared in 1735; the Letter to a Bishop in 1732; and the Reflections on the Sources of Incredulity (left unfinished) posthumously about 1750. Forbes in his youth had been famed as one of the hardest drinkers of his day.?

156 Reflections on Incredulity, in Works, undated, ii, 141–42. Yet the works of Forbes were translated for orthodox purposes into German, and later into French by PÈre Houbigant (1769), who preserves the passage on freethinkers’ morals, though curtailing the Reflections as a whole.?

157 As to which see A Sober Enquiry into the Grounds of the Present Differences in the Church of Scotland, 1723.?

158 Cockburn’s Life of Jeffrey, ed. 1872, p. 10.?

159 See the Autobiography of the Rev. Dr. A. Carlyle, 1860, pp. 492–93. Millar’s Historical View of the English Government (censured by Hallam) was once much esteemed; and his Origin of Ranks is still worth the attention of sociologists.?

160 Ritchie’s Life of Hume, 1807, pp. 52–81; Tytler’s Life of Lord Kames, 2nd ed. 1814, i, ch. v; Burton’s Life of Hume, i, 425–30.?

161 Ritchie, as cited, p. 57.?

162 McCulloch, Life of Smith prefixed to ed. of Wealth of Nations, ed. 1839, p. ii.?

163 Ramsay of Ochtertyre, Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, 1888, i, 462–63. Mr. Rae doubts the story, Life of Adam Smith, 1895, p. 60.?

164 Ramsay, as last cited.?

165 Ramsay, passage cited.?

166 Theory of Moral Sentiments, pt. iii, ch. ii, end.?

167 Cp. Rae, pp. 427–30. Mr. Rae thinks the deletion stood for no change of opinion, and cites Smith’s own private explanation (Sinclair’s Life of Sir John Sinclair, i, 40) that he thought the passage “unnecessary and misplaced.” But this expression must be read in the light of Smith’s general reticence concerning established dogmas. Certainly he adhered to his argument—which does not claim to be a demonstration—for the doctrine of a future state.?

168 Bk. v, ch. i, pt. iii, art. 3.?

169 Smith’s admiration for Voltaire might alone indicate his mental attitude. As to that see F. W. Hirst, Adam Smith (Eng. Men of Letters ser.), pp. 127–28. But the assertion of Skarzinski, that Smith, after being an Idealist under the influence of Hume, “returned a materialist” from his intercourse with Voltaire and other French freethinkers, is an exhibition of learned ignorance. See Hirst, p. 181.?

170 An Explanation and Defence of the Principles of Protestant Dissent, by the Rev. Dr. W. Hamilton Drummond, 1842, pp. 5–6. 47; Skeats, Hist. of the Free Churches of England, ed. Miall, pp. 238–39; Wallace, Anti-Trinitarian Biography, iii, art. 360.?

171 Cp. Drummond, as cited, pp. 29–30; History, Opinions, etc., of the English Presbyterians, 1834, p. 29.?

172 W. R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson, p. 31.?

173 Above, p. 154, note.?

174 Scott, pp. 28–29, 35–36. The suggestion is not quite convincing. Synge, after becoming Archbishop of Tuam, continued to publish his propagandist tracts, among them An Essay towards making the Knowledge of Religion Easy to the Meanest Capacity (6th ed. 1734), which is quite orthodox, and which argues (p. 3) that the doctrine of the Trinity is to be believed, and not pried into, “because it is above our understanding to comprehend.” All the while there was being sold also his early treatise, “A Gentleman’s Religion: in Three Parts ... with an Appendix, wherein it is proved that nothing contrary to our Reason can possibly be the object of our belief, but that it is no just exception against some of the doctrines of Christianity that they are above our reason.”?

175 Scott, p. 36.?

176 All that is told of this prelate by Lecky (Hist. of Ireland in the 18th Cent. 1892. i, 207) is that at Killala he patronized horse-races. He was industrious on more episcopal lines. He wrote an Introduction to the History of the Jews; a Vindication of Biblical Chronology; two treatises on prophecy; an anti-Athanasian Essay on Spirit (1751), which aroused much controversy; A Vindication of the Histories of the Old and New Testament, in answer to Bolingbroke (2 vols. 1752–1754; 2nd ed. 1757; rep. with the Essay on Spirit, Dublin, 1759), which led to his being prosecuted; and other works. The offence given by the Vindication lay in his denunciation of the Athanasian creed, and of the bigotry of those who supported it. See pt. iii, letters i and ii. The Essay on Spirit is no less heterodox. In other respects, however, Clayton is ultra-orthodox.?

177 Dr. G. W. Alberti, Briefe betreffende den Zustand der Religion in Gross-Brittannien, Hannover, 1752, p. 440.?

178 Above, p. 180.?

179 Put by Huarte in 1575. Above, i, 472.?

180 Inquiry, p. 162.?

181 Inquiry, pref. pp. x, xxii.?

182 A Letter to the Rev. Dr. Conyers Middleton, occasioned by his late “Free Inquiry,” 1749, pp. 3–4.?

183 A Free Answer to Dr. Middleton’s “Free Inquiry,” by William Dodwell [son of the elder and brother of the younger Henry], Rector of Shottesbrook, 1749, pp. 14–15.?

184 Inquiry, p. 162.?

185 Works, 2nd ed. 1755, ii, 348.?

186 Cp. essay on Mandeville, in the author’s Pioneer Humanists, 1907.?

187 As against the objections of Mr. Lang, see the author’s paper in Studies in Religious Fallacy.?

188 Cp. the summary of Farrar, Crit. Hist. of Freethought, pp. 177–78, which is founded on that of Pusey’s early Historical Enquiry concerning German Rationalism, pp. 124–26.?

189 Rep. same year at Dublin: 2nd ed. 1750. The first ed. was ascribed to D’Argens—an error caused though not justified by the publisher’s notice.?

190 The point is further discussed in Dynamics of Religion, pp. 175–76.?

191 Cp. G. B. Hertz, The Old Colonial System, 1905, pp. 4, 22, 93, 157.?

192 Letter xxxi, in Mason’s Memoir.?

193 Hill Burton’s Life of Hume, ii, 433, 434, 484–85, 487.?

194 Compare the verdicts of Gibbon in his Autobiography, and of Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. v, ch. i, art. 2; and see the memoir of Smith in 1831 ed. and McCulloch’s ed., and Rae’s Life of Adam Smith, p. 24. It appears that about 1764 many English people sent their sons to Edinburgh University on account of the better education there. Letter of Blair, in Burton’s Life of Hume, ii, 229.?

195 Essays, iv, end.?

196 Present State of Polite Learning, 1765, ch. vi. His story of how the father of St. Foix cured the youth of the desire to rationalize his creed is not suggestive of conviction. The father pointed to a crucifix, saying, “Behold the fate of a reformer.” The story has been often plagiarized since—e.g., in Galt’s Annals of the Parish.?

197 Abbey and Overton, The English Church in the Eighteenth Century, 1878, ii, 37.?

198 Dieu et les Hommes, ch. xxxix.?

199 Cp. Bishop Law, Considerations on the Theory of Religion, 6th ed. 1774, p. 65, note, and the Analysis of Bolingbroke’s writings (1755) there cited. Mr. Sichel’s reply to Sir L. Stephen’s criticism may or may not be successful; but he does not deal with Bishop Law’s.?

200 MÉmoires de Diderot, ed. 1841, ii, 25.?

201 These had begun as early as 1753 (MicromÉgas).?

202 Works, ed. 1842, i, pp. cix, 445; ii, 628, 728. Cp. the poem Kew Gardens, left in MS.?

203 I here take a few sentences from my paper, The Church and Education, 1903.?

204 Short History, p. 717. The Concise Description of the Endowed Grammar Schools, by Nicholas Carlisle, 1818, shows that schools were founded in all parts of the country by private bequest or public action during the eighteenth century.?

205 Collis, in Transactions of the Social Science Association, 1857, p. 126. According to Collis, 48 had been founded by James I, 28 under Charles I, 16 under the Commonwealth, 36 under Charles II, 4 under James II, 7 under William and Mary, 11 under Anne, 17 under George I, and 7 under George II. He does not indicate their size.?

206 Green, as last cited.?

207 Gibbins, Industrial History of England, 1894, p. 151.?

208 Hist. of England under George III, ed. 1865, ii, 83.?

209 The document is given in Ritchie’s Life of Hume, 1807, pp. 53–55.?

210 A reply, The World proved to be not eternal nor mechanical, appeared in 1790.?

211 The Doctrines of a Trinity and the Incarnation of God was published anonymously.?

212 See the Biographical Introduction to the Unitarian reprint of Watts’s Solemn Address, 1840, which gives the letters of Lardner. And cp. Skeats, Hist. of the English Free Churches, ed. Miall, p. 240.?

213 Life of Lardner, by Dr. Kippis, prefixed to Works, ed. 1835, i, p. xxxii.?

214 Memoirs of Priestley, 1806, pp. 30–32, 35, 37. The Letter on the Logos was addressed by Lardner to the first Lord Barrington, and was first published anonymously, in 1759.?

215 Memoirs of Priestley, p. 19.?

216 Pamphlet of 1778, printing the sermon, with reply to a local attack.?

217 MS. alteration in print. See also p. 1 of Epistle Dedicatory.?

218 In criticizing whom Sir Leslie Stephen barely notices his scientific work, but dwells much on his religious fallacies—a course which would make short work of the fame of Newton.?

219 A Church dignitary has described Evanson’s Dissonance as “the commencement of the destructive criticism of the Fourth Gospel” (Archdeacon Watkins’s Bampton Lectures, 1890, p. 174).?

220 Williams (d. 1816), who published 3 vols. of “Lectures on Education” and other works, has a longer claim on remembrance as the founder of the “Literary Fund.”?

221 The subject is discussed at length in the essay on Gibbon in the author’s Pioneer Humanists.?

222 Cp. Bishop Watson’s Apology for Christianity (1776) as to the vogue of unbelief at that date. (Two Apologies, ed. 1806, p. 121. Cp. pp. 179, 399.)?

223 The panegyric on Voltaire delivered at his death by Frederick the Great (Nov. 26, 1778) was promptly translated into English (1779).?

224 Reflections on the French Revolution, 1790, p. 131.?

225 See Hannah More’s letter of April, 1777, in her Life, abridged 16mo-ed. p. 36. An edition of Shaftesbury, apparently, appeared in 1773, and another in 1790.?

226 The essays of Hume, including the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779), were now circulated in repeated editions. Mr. Rae, in his valuable Life of Adam Smith, p. 311, cites a German observer, Wendeborn, as writing in 1785 that the Dialogues, though a good deal discussed in Germany, had made no sensation in England, and were at that date entirely forgotten. But a second edition had been called for in 1779, and they were added to a fresh edition of the essays in 1788. Any “forgetting” is to be set down to preoccupation with other interests.?

227 Letter to the Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, 1777, p. 3.?

228 Dr. Parr, Characters of C. J. Fox, i, 220; cited in Charles James Fox, a Commentary, by W. S. Landor, ed. by S. Wheeler, 1907, p. 147. Fox’s secretary and biographer, Trotter, while anxious to discredit the statement of Parr, gives such a qualified account (Memoirs of the Latter Years of C. J. Fox, 1811, pp. 470–71) of Fox’s views on immortality as to throw much doubt on the stronger testimony of B. C. Walpole (Recollections of C. J. Fox, 1806, p. 242).?

229 See J. L. Le B. Hammond, Charles James Fox, 1903, ch. xiii.?

230 See a letter in Bishop Watson’s Life, i, 402; and cp. Buckle, ch. vii, note 218.?

231 See his Task, bk. iii, 150–90 (1783–1784), for the prevailing religious tone.?

232 Princ. of Moral Philos. bk. v, ch. ix. The chapter tells of widespread freethinking.?

233 Ernest Krause, Erasmus Darwin, Eng. tr. 1879, p. 211. Cp. pp. 193, 194.?

234 Letters vii, viii, ix, xix, xxii.?

235 E.g., The Ordination, the Address to the Deil, A Dedication to Gavin Hamilton, The Kirk’s Alarm, etc.?

236 See also the pieces printed between these in the Globe edition, pp. 66–68.?

237 The benevolent Supreme Being, he writes, “has put the immediate administration of all this into the hands of Jesus Christ—a great personage, whose relation to Him we cannot fathom, but whose relation to us is [that of] a guide and Saviour.” Letter 86 in Globe ed. Letters 189 and 197, to Mrs. Dunlop, similarly fail to meet the requirements of the orthodox correspondent. The poem Look up and See, latterly printed several times apart from Burns’s works, and extremely likely to be his, is a quite Voltairean criticism of David. If the poem be ungenuine, it is certainly by far the ablest of the unacknowledged pieces ascribed to him, alike in diction and in purport.?

238 Letter to Mrs. Dunlop, Jan. 1, 1789, in Robert Burns and Mrs. Dunlop, ed. by W. Wallace, 1898, p. 129. The passage is omitted from Letter 168 in the Globe ed., and presumably from other reprints.?

239 Letter to Mrs. Dunlop, July 9, 1790. Published for the first time in vol. cited, p. 266.?

240 Epistle to a Young Friend.?

241 Lecky, writing in 1865, and advancing on Burke, has said of the whole school, including Shaftesbury, that “the shadow of the tomb rests on all: a deep, unbroken silence, the chill of death, surrounds them. They have long ceased to wake any interest” (Rationalism in Europe, i, 116). As a matter of fact, they had been discussed by Taylor in 1853; by Pattison in 1860; and by Farrar in 1862; and they have since been discussed at length by Dr. Hunt, by Dr. Cairns, by Lange, by Gyzicki, by M. Sayous, by Sir Leslie Stephen, by Prof. HÖffding, and by many others.?

242 Conway, introd. to Age of Reason, in his ed. of Paine’s Works, iv, 3.?