J. M. Robertson

The propagandist literature of deism begins with an English diplomatist, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the friend of Bacon, who stood in the full stream of the current freethought of England and France1 in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. English deism, as literature, is thus at its very outset affiliated with French; all of its elements, critical and ethical, are germinal in Bodin, Montaigne, and Charron, each and all of whom had a direct influence on English thought; and we shall find later French thought, as in the cases of Gassendi, Bayle, Simon, St. Evremond, and Voltaire, alternately influenced by and reacting on English. But, apart from the undeveloped rationalism of the Elizabethan period, which never found literary expression, the French ferment seems to have given the first effective impulse; though it is to be remembered that about the same time the wars of religion in Germany, following on an age of theological uproar, had developed a common temper of indifferentism which would react on the thinking of men of affairs in France.

We have seen the state of upper-class and middle-class opinion in France about 1624. It was in Paris in that year that Herbert published his De Veritate, after acting for five years as the English ambassador at the French court—an office from which he was recalled in the same year.2 By his own account the book had been “begun by me in England, and formed there in all its principal parts,”3 but finished at Paris. He had, however, gone to France in 1608, and had served in various continental wars in the years following; and it was presumably in these years, not in his youth in England, that he had formed the remarkable opinions set forth in his epoch-making book.

Hitherto deism had been represented by unpublished arguments disingenuously dealt with in published answers; henceforth there slowly grows up a deistic literature. Herbert was a powerful and audacious nobleman, with a weak king; and he could venture on a publication which would have cost an ordinary man dear. Yet even he saw fit to publish in Latin; and he avowed hesitations.4 The most puzzling thing about it is his declaration that Grotius and the German theologian Tielenus, having read the book in MS., exhorted him “earnestly to print and publish it.” It is difficult to believe that they had gathered its substance. Herbert’s work has two aspects, a philosophical and a political, and in both it is remarkable.5 Like the Discours de la MÉthode of Descartes, which was to appear thirteen years later, it is inspired by an original determination to get at the rational grounds of conviction; and in Herbert’s case the overweening self-esteem which disfigures his Autobiography seems to have been motive force for the production of a book signally recalcitrant to authority. Where Bacon attacks Aristotelianism and the habits of mind it had engendered, Herbert counters the whole conception of revelation in religion. Rejecting tacitly the theological basis of current philosophy, he divides the human mind into four faculties—Natural Instinct, Internal Sense, External Sense, and the Discursive faculty—through one or other of which all our knowledge emerges. Of course, like Descartes, he makes the first the verification of his idea of God, pronouncing that to be primary, independent, and universally entertained, and therefore not lawfully to be disputed (already a contradiction in terms); but, inasmuch as scriptural revelation has no place in the process, the position is conspicuously more advanced than that of Bacon in the De Augmentis, published the year before, and even than that of Locke, sixty years later. On the question of concrete religion Herbert is still more aggressive. His argument6 is, in brief, that no professed revelation can have a decisive claim to rational acceptance; that none escapes sectarian dispute in its own field; that, as each one misses most of the human race, none seems to be divine; and that human reason can do for morals all that any one of them does. The negative generalities of Montaigne here pass into a positive anti-Christian argument; for Herbert goes on to pronounce the doctrine of forgiveness for faith immoral.

Like all pioneers, Herbert falls into some inconsistencies on his own part; the most flagrant being his claim to have had a sign from heaven—that is, a private and special revelation—encouraging him to publish his book.7 But his criticism is nonetheless telling and persuasive so far as it goes, and remains valid to this day. Nor do his later and posthumous works8 add to it in essentials, though they do much to construct the deistic case on historical lines. The De religione gentilium in particular is a noteworthy study of pre-Christian religions, apparently motived by doubt or challenge as to his theorem of the universality of the God-idea. It proves only racial universality without agreement; but it is so far a scholarly beginning of rational hierology. The English Dialogue between a Teacher and his Pupil, which seems to have been the first form of the Religio Gentilium,9 is a characteristic expression of his whole way of thought, and was doubtless left unpublished for the prudential reasons which led him to put all his published works in Latin. But the fact that the Latin quotations are translated shows that the book had been planned for publication—a risk which he did wisely to shun. The remarkable thing is that his Latin books were so little debated, the De Veritate being nowhere discussed before Culverwel.10 Baxter in 1672 could say that Herbert, “never having been answered, might be thought unanswerable”;11 and his own “answer” is merely theological.

The next great freethinking figure in England is Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), the most important thinker of his age, after Descartes, and hardly less influential. But the purpose of Hobbes being always substantially political and regulative, his unfaith in the current religion is only incidentally revealed in the writings in which he seeks to show the need for keeping it under monarchic control.12 Hobbes is in fact the anti-Presbyterian or anti-Puritan philosopher; and to discredit anarchic religion in the eyes of the majority he is obliged to speak as a judicial Churchman. Yet nothing is more certain than that he was no orthodox Christian; and even his professed theism resolves itself somewhat easily into virtual agnosticism on logical pressure. No thought of prudence could withhold him from showing, in a discussion on words, that he held the doctrine of the Logos to be meaningless.13 Of atheism he was repeatedly accused by both royalists and rebels; and his answer was forensic rather than fervent, alike as to his scripturalism, his Christianity, and his impersonal conception of Deity.14 Reviving as he did the ancient rationalistic doctrine of the eternity of the world,15 he gave a clear footing for atheism as against the JudÆo-Christian view. In affirming “one God eternal” of whom men “cannot have any idea in their mind, answerable to his nature,” he was negating all creeds. He expressly contends, it is true, for the principle of a Providence; but it is hard to believe that he laid any store by prayer, public or private; and it would appear that whatever thoughtful atheism there was in England in the latter part of the century looked to him as its philosopher, insofar as it did not derive from Spinoza.16 Nor could the Naturalist school of that day desire a better, terser, or more drastic scientific definition of religion than Hobbes gave them: “Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind or imagined from tales publicly allowed, Religion; not allowed, Superstition.”17 As the Churchmen readily saw, his insistence on identifying the religion of a country with its law plainly implied that no religion is any more “revealed” than another. With him too begins (1651) the public criticism of the Bible on literary or documentary grounds;18 though, as we have seen, this had already gone far in private;19 and he gave a new lead, partly as against Descartes, to a materialistic philosophy.20 His replies to the theistic and spiritistic reasonings of Descartes’s MÉditations are, like those of Gassendi, unrefuted and irrefutable; and they are fundamentally materialistic in their drift.21 He was, in fact, in a special and peculiar degree for his age, a freethinker; and so deep was his intellectual hostility to the clergy of all species that he could not forego enraging those of his own political side by his sarcasms.22 Here he is in marked contrast with Descartes, who dissembled his opinion about Copernicus and Galileo for peace’ sake,23 and was the close friend of the apologist Mersenne down to his death.24

With the partial exception of the more refined and graceful Pecock, Hobbes has of all English thinkers down to his period the clearest and hardest head for all purposes of reasoning, save in the single field of mathematics, where he meddled without mastery; and against the theologians of his time his argumentation is as a two-edged sword. That such a man should have been resolutely on the side of the king in the Civil War is one of the proofs of the essential fanaticism and arbitrariness of the orthodox Puritans, who plotted more harm to the heresies they disliked than was ever wreaked on themselves. Hobbes came near enough being clerically ostracized among the royalists; but among the earlier Puritans, or under an Independent Puritan Parliament at any time, he would have stood a fair chance of execution. It was doubtless largely due to the anti-persecuting influence of Cromwell, as well as to his having ostensibly deserted the royalists, that Hobbes was allowed to settle quietly in England after making his submission to the Rump Parliament in 1651. In 1666 his Leviathan and De Cive were together condemned by the Restoration Parliament in its grotesque panic of piety after the Great Fire of London; and it was actually proposed to revive against him the writ de heretico comburendo;25 but Charles II protected and pensioned him, though he was forbidden to publish anything further on burning questions, and Leviathan was not permitted in his lifetime to be republished in English.26 He was thus for his generation the typical “infidel,” the royalist clergy being perhaps his bitterest enemies. His spontaneous hostility to fanaticism shaped his literary career, which began in 1628 with a translation of Thucydides, undertaken by way of showing the dangers of democracy. Next came the De Cive (Paris, 1642), written when he was already an elderly man; and thenceforth the Civil War tinges his whole temper.

It is in fact by way of a revolt against all theological ethic, as demonstrably a source of civil anarchy, that Hobbes formulates a strictly civic or legalist ethic, denying the supremacy of an abstract or À priori natural moral law (though he founded on natural law), as well as rejecting all supernatural illumination of the conscience.27 In the Church of Rome itself there had inevitably arisen the practice of Casuistry, in which to a certain extent ethics had to be rationally studied; and early Protestant Casuistry, repudiating the authority of the priest, had to rely still more on reason.

Compare Whewell, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. 1862, pp. 25–38, where it is affirmed that, after the Reformation, “Since the assertions of the teacher had no inherent authority, he was obliged to give his proofs as well as his results,” and “the determination of cases was replaced by the discipline of conscience” (p. 29). There is an interesting progression in English Protestant casuistry from W. Perkins (1558–1602) and W. Ames (pub. 1630), through Bishops Hall and Sanderson, to Jeremy Taylor. Mosheim (17 Cent. sec. ii, pt. ii, § 9) pronounces Ames “the first among the Reformed who attempted to elucidate and arrange the science of morals as distinct from that of dogmatics.” See biog. notes on Perkins and Ames in Whewell, pp. 27–29, and Reid’s Mosheim, p. 681.

But Hobbes passed in two strides to the position that natural morality is a set of demonstrable inferences as to what adjustments promote general well-being; and further that there is no practical code of right and wrong apart from positive social law.28 He thus practically introduced once for all into modern Christendom the fundamental dilemma of rationalistic ethics, not only positing the problem for his age,29 but anticipating it as handled in later times.30

How far his rationalism was ahead of that of his age may be realized by comparing his positions with those of John Selden, the most learned and, outside of philosophy, one of the shrewdest of the men of that generation. Selden was sometimes spoken of by the Hobbists as a freethinker; and his Table Talk contains some sallies which would startle the orthodox if publicly delivered;31 but not only is there explicit testimony by his associates as to his orthodoxy:32 his own treatise, De Jure Naturali et Gentium juxta disciplinam EbrÆorum, maintains the ground that the “Law of Nature” which underlies the variants of the Laws of Nations is limited to the precepts and traditions set forth in the Talmud as delivered by Noah to his posterity.33 Le Clerc said of the work, justly enough, that in it “Selden only copies the Rabbins, and scarcely ever reasons.” It is likely enough that the furious outcry against Selden for his strictly historical investigation of tithes, and the humiliation of apology forced upon him in that connection in 1618,34 made him specially chary ever afterwards of any semblance of a denial of the plenary truth of theological tradition; but there is no reason to think that he had ever really transcended the Biblical view of the world’s order. He illustrates, in fact, the extent to which a scholar could in that day be anti-clerical without being rationalistic. Like the bulk of the Parliamentarians, though without their fanaticism, he was thoroughly opposed to the political pretensions of the Church,35 desiring however to leave episcopacy alone, as a matter outside of legislation, when the House of Commons abolished it. Yet he spoke of the name of Puritan as one which he “trusted he was not either mad enough or foolish enough to deserve.”36 There were thus in the Parliamentary party men of very different shades of opinion. The largest party, perhaps, was that of the fanatics who, as Mrs. Hutchinson—herself fanatical enough—tells concerning her husband, “would not allow him to be religious because his hair was not in their cut.”37 Next in strength were the more or less orthodox but anti-clerical and less pious Scripturalists, of whom Selden was the most illustrious. By far the smallest group of all were the freethinkers, men of their type being as often repelled by the zealotry of the Puritans as by the sacerdotalism of the State clergy. The Rebellion, in short, though it evoked rationalism, was not evoked by it. Like all religious strifes—like the vaster Thirty Years’ War in contemporary Germany—it generated both doubt and indifferentism in men who would otherwise have remained undisturbed in orthodoxy.

When, however, we turn from the higher literary propaganda to the verbal and other transitory debates of the period of the Rebellion, we realize how much partial rationalism had hitherto subsisted without notice. In that immense ferment some very advanced opinions, such as quasi-Anarchism in politics38 and anti-Scripturalism in religion, were more or less directly professed. In January, 1646 (N.S.), the authorities of the City of London, alarmed at the unheard-of amount of discussion, petitioned Parliament to put down all private meetings;39 and on February 6, 1646 (N.S.), a solemn fast, or “day of publique humiliation,” was proclaimed on the score of the increase of “errors, heresies, and blasphemies.” On the same grounds, the Presbyterian party in Parliament pressed an “Ordinance for the suppression of Blasphemies and Heresies,” which, long held back by Vane and Cromwell, was carried in their despite in 1648, by large majorities, when the royalists renewed hostilities. It enacted the death penalty against all who should deny the doctrine of the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the inspiration of the Bible, a day of judgment, or a future state; and prescribed imprisonment for Arminianism, rejection of infant baptism, anti-Sabbatarianism, anti-Presbyterianism, or defence of the doctrine of Purgatory or the use of images.40 And of aggressive heresy there are some noteworthy traces. In a pamphlet entitled “Hell Broke Loose: a Catalogue of the many spreading Errors, Heresies, and Blasphemies of these Times, for which we are to be humbled” (March 9, 1646, N.S.), the first entry—and in the similar Catalogue in Edwards’s GangrÆna, the second entry—is a citation of the notable thesis, “That the Scripture, whether a true manuscript or no, whether Hebrew, Greek, or English, is but humane, and not able to discover a divine God.”41 This is cited from “The Pilgrimage of the Saints, by Lawrence Clarkson,” presumably the Lawrence Clarkson who for his book The Single Eye was sentenced by resolution of Parliament on September 27, 1650, to be imprisoned, the book being burned by the common hangman.42 He is further cited as teaching that even unbaptized persons may preach and baptize. Of the other heresies cited the principal is the old denial of a future life, and especially of a physical and future hell. In general the heresy is pietistic or antinomian; but we have also the declaration “that right Reason is the rule of Faith, and that we are to believe the Scriptures and the doctrine of the Trinity, Incarnation, Resurrection, so far as we see them to be agreeable to reason and no further.” Concerning Jesus there are various heresies, from simple Unitarianism to contemptuous disparagement, with the stipulation for a “Christ formed in us.” But though there are cases of unquotable or ribald blasphemy there is little trace of scholarly criticism of the Bible, of reasoning against miracles or the inconsistencies of Scripture, as apart from the doctrine of deity. Nonetheless, it is very credible that “multitudes, unsettled ... have changed their faith, either to Scepticisme, to doubt of everything, or Atheisme, to believe nothing.”43

Against the furious intolerance of the Puritan legislature some pleaded with new zeal for tolerance all round; arguing that certainty on articles of faith and points of religion was impossible—a doctrine promptly classed as a bad heresy.44 The plea that toleration would mean concord was met by the confident and not unfounded retort that the “sectaries” would themselves persecute if they could.45 But this could hardly have been true of all. Notable among the new parties were the Levellers, who insisted that the State should leave religion entirely alone, tolerating all creeds, including even atheism; and who put forward a new and striking ethic, grounding on “universal reason” the right of all men to the soil.46 In the strictly theological field the most striking innovation, apart from simple Unitarianism, is the denial of the eternity or even the existence of future torments—a position first taken up, as we have seen, either by the continental Socinians or by the unnamed English heretics of the Tudor period, who passed on their heresy to the time of Marlowe.47 In this connection the learned booklet48 entitled Of the Torments of Hell: the foundations and pillars thereof discover’d, search’d, shaken, and removed (1658) was rightly thought worth translating into French by d’Holbach over a century later.49 It is an argument on scriptural lines, denying that the conception of a place of eternal torment is either scriptural or credible; and pointing out that many had explained it in a “spiritual” sense.

Humane feeling of this kind counted for much in the ferment; but a contrary hate was no less abundant. The Presbyterian Thomas Edwards, who in a vociferous passion of fear and zeal set himself to catalogue the host of heresies that threatened to overwhelm the times, speaks of “monsters” unheard-of theretofore, “now common among us—as denying the Scriptures, pleading for a toleration of all religions and worships, yea, for blasphemy, and denying there is a God.”50 “A Toleration,” he declares, “is the grand design of the Devil, his masterpiece and chief engine”; “every day now brings forth books for a Toleration.”51 Among the 180 sects named by him52 there were “Libertines,” “Antiscripturists,” “Skeptics and Questionists,”53 who held nothing save the doctrine of free speech and liberty of conscience;54 as well as Socinians, Arians, and Anti-trinitarians; and he speaks of serious men who had not only abandoned their religious beliefs, but sought to persuade others to do the same.55 Under the rule of Cromwell, tolerant as he was of Christian sectarianism, and even of Unitarianism as represented by Biddle, the more advanced heresies would get small liberty; though that of Thomas Muggleton and John Reeve, which took shape about 1651 as the Muggletonian sect, does not seem to have been molested. Muggleton, a mystic, could teach that there was no devil or evil spirit, save in “man’s spirit of unclean reason and cursed imagination”;56 but it was only privately that such men as Henry Marten and Thomas Chaloner, the regicides, could avow themselves to be of “the natural religion.” The statement of Bishop Burnet, following Clarendon, that “many of the republicans began to profess deism,” cannot be taken literally, though it is broadly intelligible that “almost all of them were for destroying all clergymen ... and for leaving religion free, as they called it, without either encouragement or restraint.”

Between the advance in speculation forced on by the disputes themselves, and the usual revolt against the theological spirit after a long and ferocious display of it, there spread even under the Commonwealth a new temper of secularity. On the one hand, the temperamental distaste for theology, antinomian or other, took form in the private associations for scientific research which were the antecedents of the Royal Society. On the other hand, the spirit of religious doubt spread widely in the middle and upper classes; and between the dislike of the Roundheads for the established clergy and the anger of the Cavaliers against all Puritanism there was fostered that “contempt of the clergy” which had become a clerical scandal at the Restoration and was to remain so for about a century.57 Their social status was in general low, and their financial position bad; and these circumstances, possible only in a time of weakened religious belief, necessarily tended to further the process of mental change. Within the sphere of orthodoxy, it operated openly. It is noteworthy that the term “rationalist” emerges as the label of a sect of Independents or Presbyterians who declare that “What their reason dictates to them in church or State stands for good, until they be convinced with better.”58 The “rationalism,” so-called, of that generation remained ostensibly scriptural; but on other lines thought went further. Of atheism there are at this stage only dubious biographical and controversial traces, such as Mrs. Hutchinson’s characterization of a Nottingham physician, possibly a deist, as a “horrible atheist,”59 and the Rev. John Dove’s Confutation of Atheism (1640), which does not bear out its title. Ephraim Pagitt, in his Heresiography (1644), speaks loosely of an “atheistical sect who affirm that men’s soules sleep with them until the day of judgment”; and tells of some alleged atheist merely that he “mocked and jeared at Christ’s Incarnation.”60 Similarly a work, entitled Dispute betwixt an Atheist and a Christian (1646), shows the existence not of atheists but of deists, and the deist in the dialogue is a Fleming.

More trustworthy is the allusion in Nathaniel Culverwel’s Discourse of the Light of Nature (written in 1646, published posthumously in 1652) to “those lumps and dunghills of all sects ... that young and upstart generation of gross anti-scripturalists, that have a powder-plot against the Gospel, that would very compendiously behead all Christian religion at one blow, a device which old and ordinary heretics were never acquainted withal.”61 The reference is presumably to the followers of Lawrence Clarkson. Yet even here we have no mention of atheism, which is treated as something almost impossible. Indeed, the very course of arguing in favour of a “Light of Nature” seems to have brought suspicion on Culverwel himself, who shows a noticeable liking for Herbert of Cherbury.62 He is, however, as may be inferred from his angry tone towards anti-scripturalists, substantially orthodox, and not very important.

The discourse on Atheism, again, in the posthumous works of John Smith of Cambridge (d. 1652), is entirely retrospective; but soon another note is sounded. As early as 1652, the year after the issue of Hobbes’s Leviathan, the prolific Walter Charleton, who had been physician to the king, published a book entitled The Darkness of Atheism Expelled by the Light of Nature, wherein he asserted that England “hath of late produced and doth ... foster more swarms of atheistical monsters ... than any age, than any Nation hath been infested withal.” In the following year Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, published his Antidote against Atheism. The flamboyant dedication to Viscountess Conway affirms that the existence of God is “as clearly demonstrable as any theorem in mathematicks”; but, the reverend author adds, “considering the state of things as they are, I cannot but pronounce that there is more necessity of this my Antidote than I could wish there were.” At the close of the preface he pleasantly explains that he will use no Biblical arguments, but talk to the atheist as a “mere Naturalist”; inasmuch as “he that converses with a barbarian must discourse to him in his own language,” and “he that would gain upon the more weak and sunk minds of sensual mortals is to accommodate himself to their capacity, who, like the bat and owl, can see nowhere so well as in the shady glimmerings of their twilight.” Then, after some elementary play with the design argument, the entire Third Book of forty-six folio pages is devoted to a parade of old wives’ tales of witches and witchcraft, witches’ sabbaths, apparitions, commotions by devils, ghosts, incubi, polter-geists—the whole vulgar medley of the peasant superstitions of Europe.

It is not that the Platonist does violence to his own philosophic tastes by way of influencing the “bats and owls” of atheism. This mass of superstition is his own special pabulum. In the preface he has announced that, while he may abstain from the use of the Scriptures, nothing shall restrain him from telling what he knows of spirits. “I am so cautious and circumspect,” he claims, “that I make use of no narrations that either the avarice of the priest or the credulity and fancifulness of the melancholist may render suspected.” As for the unbelievers, “their confident ignorance shall never dash me out of confidence with my well-grounded knowledge; for I have been no careless inquirer into these things.” It is after a polter-geist tale of the crassest description that he announces that it was strictly investigated and attested by “that excellently-learned and noble gentleman, Mr. E. Boyle,” who avowed “that all his settled indisposedness to believe strange things was overcome by this special conviction.”63 And the section ends with the proposition: “Assuredly that saying is not more true in politick, No Bishop, no King, than this in metaphysicks, No Spirit, no God.” Such was the mentality of some of the most eminent and scholarly Christian apologists of the time. It seems safe to conclude that the Platonist made few converts.

More avowed that he wrote without having read previous apologists; and others were similarly spontaneous in the defence of the faith. In 1654 there is noted64 a treatise called Atheismus Vapulans, by William Towers, whose message can in part be inferred from his title;65 and in 1657 Charleton issued his Immortality of the Human Soul demonstrated by the Light of Nature, wherein the argument, which says nothing of revelation, is so singularly unconfident, and so much broken in upon by excursus, as to leave it doubtful whether the author was more lacking in dialectic skill or in conviction. And still the traces of unbelief multiply. Baxter and Howe were agreed, in 1658, that there were both “infidels and papists” at work around them; and in 1659 Howe writes: “I know some leading men are not Christians.”66 “Seekers, Vanists, and Behmenists” are specified as groups to which both infidels and papists attach themselves. And Howe, recognizing how religious strifes promote unbelief, bears witness “What a cloudy, wavering, uncertain, lank, spiritless thing is the faith of Christians in this age become!... Most content themselves to profess it only as the religion of their country.”67

Alongside of all this vindication of Christianity there was going on constant and cruel persecution of heretic Christians. The Unitarian John Biddle, master of the Gloucester Grammar School, was dismissed for his denial of the Trinity; and in 1647 he was imprisoned, and his book burned by the hangman. In 1654 he was again imprisoned; and in 1655 he was banished to the Scilly Islands. Returning to London after the Restoration, he was again arrested, and died in gaol in 1662.68 Under the Commonwealth (1656) James Naylor, the Quaker, narrowly escaped death for blasphemy, but was whipped through the streets, pilloried, bored through the tongue with a hot iron, branded in the forehead, and sent to hard labour in prison. Many hundreds of Quakers were imprisoned and more or less cruelly handled.

From the Origines SacrÆ (1662) of Stillingfleet, nevertheless, it would appear that both deism and atheism were becoming more and more common.69 He states that “the most popular pretences of the atheists of our age have been the irreconcilableness of the account of times in Scripture with that of the learned and ancient heathen nations, the inconsistency of the belief of the Scriptures with the principles of reason; and the account which may be given of the origin of things from the principles of philosophy without the Scriptures.” These positions are at least as natural to deists as to atheists; and Stillingfleet is later found protesting against the policy of some professed Christians who give up the argument from miracles as valueless.70 His whole treatise, in short, assumes the need for meeting a very widespread unbelief in the Bible, though it rarely deals with the atheism of which it so constantly speaks. After the Restoration, naturally, all the new tendencies were greatly reinforced,71 alike by the attitude of the king and his companions, all influenced by French culture, and by the general reaction against Puritanism. Whatever ways of thought had been characteristic of the Puritans were now in more or less complete disfavour; the belief in witchcraft was scouted as much on this ground as on any other;72 and the deistic doctrines found a ready audience among royalists, whose enemies had been above all things Bibliolaters.

We gather this, however, still from the apologetic treatises and the historians, not from new deistic literature; for in virtue of the Press Licensing Act, passed on behalf of the Church in 1662, no heretical book could be printed; so that Herbert was thus far the only professed deistic writer in the field, and Hobbes the only other of similar influence. Baxter, writing in 1655 on The Unreasonableness of Infidelity, handles chiefly Anabaptists; and in his Reformed Pastor (1656), though he avows that “the common ignorant people,” seeing the endless strifes of the clergy, “are hardened by us against all religion,” the only specific unbelief he mentions is that of “the devil’s own agents, the unhappy Socinians,” who had written “so many treatises for ... unity and peace.”73 But in his Reasons of the Christian Religion, issued in 1667, he thinks fit to prove the existence of God and a future state, and the truth and the supernatural character of the Christian religion. Any deist or atheist who took the trouble to read through it would have been rewarded by the discovery that the learned author has annihilated his own case. In his first part he affirms: “If there were no life of Retribution after this, Obedience to God would be finally men’s loss and ruine: But Obedience to God shall not be finally men’s loss and ruine: Ergo, there is another life.”74 In the second part he writes that “Man’s personal interest is an unfit rule and measure of God’s goodness”;75 and, going on to meet the new argument against Christianity based on the inference that an infinity of stars are inhabited, he writes:—

Thus the second part absolutely destroys one of the fundamental positions of the first. No semblance of levity on the part of the freethinkers could compare with the profound intellectual insincerity of such a propaganda as this; and that deism and atheism continued to gain ground is proved by the multitude of apologetic treatises. Even in church-ridden Scotland they were found necessary; at least the young advocate George Mackenzie, afterwards to be famous as the “bluidy Mackenzie” of the time of persecution, thought it expedient to make his first appearance in literature with a Religio Stoici (1663), wherein he sets out with a refutation of atheism. It is difficult to believe that his counsel to Christians to watch the “horror-creating beds of dying atheists”77—a false pretence as it stands—represented any knowledge whatever of professed atheism in his own country; and his discussion of the subject is wholly on the conventional lines—notably so when he uses the customary plea, later associated with Pascal, that the theist runs no risk even if there is no future life, whereas the atheist runs a tremendous risk if there is one;78 but when he writes of “that mystery why the greatest wits are most frequently the greatest atheists,”79 he must be presumed to refer at least to deists. And other passages show that he had listened to freethinking arguments. Thus he speaks80 of those who “detract from Scripture by attributing the production of miracles to natural causes”; and again81 of those who “contend that the Scriptures are written in a mean and low style; are in some places too mysterious, in others too obscure; contain many things incredible, many repetitions, and many contradictions.” His own answers are conspicuously weak. In the latter passage he continues: “But those miscreants should consider that much of the Scripture’s native splendour is impaired by its translators”; and as to miracles he makes the inept answer that if secondary causes were in operation they acted by God’s will; going on later to suggest on his own part that prophecy may be not a miraculous gift, but “a natural (though the highest) perfection of our human nature.”82 Apart from his weak dialectic, he writes in general with cleverness and literary finish, but without any note of sincerity; and his profession of concern that reason should be respected in theology83 is as little acted on in his later life as his protest against persecution.84 The inference from the whole essay is that in Scotland, as in England, the civil war had brought up a considerable crop of reasoned unbelief; and that Mackenzie, professed defender of the faith as he was at twenty-five, and official persecutor of nonconformists as he afterwards became, met with a good deal of it in his cultured circle. In his later booklet, Reason: an Essay (1690), he speaks of the “ridiculous and impudent extravagance of some who ... take pains to persuade themselves and others that there is not a God.”85 He further coarsely asperses all atheists as debauchees,86 though he avows that “Infidelity is not the cause of false reasoning, because such as are not atheists reason falsely.”

When anti-theistic thought could subsist in the ecclesiastical climate of Puritan Scotland, it must have flourished somewhat in England. In 1667 appeared A Philosophicall Essay towards an eviction of the Being and Attributes of God, etc., of which the preface proclaims “the bold and horrid pride of Atheists and Epicures” who “have laboured to introduce into the world a general Atheism, or at least a doubtful Skepticisme in matters of Religion.” In 1668 was published Meric Casaubon’s treatise, Of Credulity and Incredulity in things Natural, Civil, and Divine, assailing not only “the Sadducism of these times in denying spirits, witches,” etc., but “Epicurus ... and the juggling and false dealing lately used to bring Atheism into Credit”—a thrust at Gassendi. A similar polemic is entombed in a ponderous folio “romance” entitled Bentivolio and Urania, by Nathaniel Ingelo, D.D., a fellow first of Emanuel College, and afterwards of Queen’s College, Cambridge (1660; 4th ed. amended, 1682). The second part, edifyingly dedicated to the Earl of Lauderdale, one of the worst men of his day, undertakes to handle the “Atheists, Epicureans, and Skepticks”; and in the preface the atheists are duly vituperated; while Epicurus is described as a gross sensualist, in terms of the legend, and the skeptics as “resigned to the slavery of vice.” In the sixth book the atheists are allowed a momentary hearing in defence of their “horrid absurdities,” from which it appears that there were current arguments alike anthropological and metaphysical against theism. The most competent part of the author’s own argument, which is unlimited as to space, is that which controverts the thesis of the invention of religious beliefs by “politicians”87—a notion first put in currency, as we have seen, by those who insisted on the expediency and value of such inventions; as, Polybius among the ancients, and Machiavelli among the moderns; and further by Christian priests, who described all non-Christian religions as human inventions.

Dr. Ingelo’s folio seems to have had many readers; but he avowedly did not look for converts; and defences of the faith on a less formidable scale were multiplied. A “Person of Honour” (Sir Charles Wolseley) produced in 1669 an essay on The Unreasonableness of Atheism made Manifest, which, without supplying any valid arguments, gives some explanation of the growth of unbelief in terms of the political and other antecedents;88 and in 1670 appeared Richard Barthogge’s Divine Goodness Explicated and Vindicated from the Exceptions of the Atheists. Baxter in 167189 complains that “infidels are grown so numerous and so audacious, and look so big and talk so loud”; and still the process continues. In 1672 Sir William Temple writes indignantly of “those who would pass for wits in our age by saying things which, David tells us, the fool said in his heart.”90 In the same year appeared The Reasonableness of Scripture-Belief, by Sir Charles Wolseley, and The Atheist Silenced, by one J. M.; in 1674, Dr. Thomas Good’s Firmianus et Dubitantius, or Dialogues concerning Atheism, Infidelity, and Popery; in 1675, the posthumous treatise of Bishop Wilkins (d. 1672), Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion, with a preface by Tillotson; and a Brevis Demonstratio, with the modest sub-title, “The Truth of Christian Religion Demonstrated by Reasons the best that have yet been out in English”; in 1677, Bishop Stillingfleet’s Letter to a Deist; and in 1678 the massive work of Cudworth on The True Intellectual System of the Universe attacking atheism (not deism) on philosophic lines which sadly compromised the learned author.91 English dialectic being found insufficient, there was even produced in 1679 a translation by the Rev. Joshua Bonhome of the French L’AthÉisme Convaincu of David Dersdon, published twenty years before.

All of these works explicitly avow the abundance of unbelief; Tillotson, himself accused of it, pronounces the age “miserably overrun with Skepticism and Infidelity”; and Wilkins, avowing that these tendencies are common “not only among sensual men of the vulgar sort, but even among those who pretend to a more than ordinary measure of wit and learning,” attempts to meet them by a purely deistic argument, with a claim for Christianity appended, as if he were concerned chiefly to rebut atheism, and held his own Christianity on a very rationalistic tenure. The fact was that the orthodox clergy were as hard put to it to repel religious antinomianism on the one hand as to repel atheism on the other; and no small part of the deistic movement seems to have been set up by the reaction against pious lawlessness.92 Thus we have Tillotson, writing as Dean of Canterbury, driven to plead in his preface to the work of Wilkins that “it is a great mistake” to think the obligation of moral duties “doth solely depend upon the revelation of God’s will made to us in the Holy Scriptures.” It was such reasoning that brought upon him the charge of freethinking.

If it be now possible to form any accurate picture of the state of belief in the latter part of the seventeenth century, it may perhaps be done by recognizing three categories of temperament or mental proclivity. First we have to reckon with the great mass of people held to religious observance by hebetude,93 devoid of the deeper mystical impulse or psychic bias which exhibited itself on the one hand among the dissenters who partly preserved the “enthusiasms” of the Commonwealth period, and on the other among the more cultured pietists of the Church who, banning “enthusiasm” in its stronger forms, cultivated a certain “enthusiasm” of their own. Religionists of the latter type were ministered to by superstitious mystics like Henry More, who, even when undertaking to “prove” the existence of God and the separate existence of the soul by argument and by demonology, taught them to cultivate a “warranted enthusiasm,” and to “endeavour after a certain principle more noble and inward than reason itself, and without which reason will falter, or at least reach but to mean and frivolous things” ... “something in me while I thus speak, which I must confess is of so retruse a nature that I want a name for it, unless I should adventure to term it divine sagacity, which is the first rise of successful reason, especially in matters of great comprehension and moment.”94 There was small psychic difference between this dubiously draped affirmation of the “inner light” and the more orotund proclamations of it by the dissenters who, for a considerable section of the people, still carried on the tradition of rapturous pietism; and the dissenters were not always at a disadvantage in that faculty for rhetoric which has generally been a main factor in doctrinal religion.95

From the popular and the eclectic pietist alike the generality of the Anglican clergy stood aloof; and among them, in turn, a rationalistic and anti-mythical habit of mind in a manner joined men who were divided in their beliefs. The clergymen who wrote lawyer-like treatises against schism were akin in psychosis to those who, in their distaste for the parade of inspiration, veered towards deism. Tillotson was not the only man reputed to have done so: fervid dissenters declared that many of the established clergy paid “more respect to the light of reason than to the light of the Scriptures,” and further “left Christ out of their religion, disowned imputed righteousness, derided the operations of the holy spirit as the empty pretences of enthusiasts.”96 Of men of this temperament, some would open dialectic batteries against dissent; while others, of a more searching proclivity, would tend to construct for themselves a rationalistic creed out of the current medley of theological and philosophic doctrine. The great mass of course maintained an allegiance of habit to the main formulas of the faith, putting quasi-rational aspects on the trinity, providence, redemption, and the future life, very much as the adherents of political parties normally vindicate their supposed principles; and there was a good deal of surviving temperamental piety even in the Restoration period.97 But the outstanding feature of the age, as contrasted with previous periods, was the increasing commonness of the skeptical or rationalistic attitude in general society. Sir Charles Wolseley protests98 that “Irreligion, ’tis true, in its practice hath still been the companion of every age, but its open and public defence seems the peculiar of this”; adding that “most of the bad principles of this age are of no earlier a date than one very ill book, and indeed but the spawn of the Leviathan.” This, as we have seen, is a delusion; but the influence of Hobbes was a potent factor.

All the while, the censorship of the press, which was one of the means by which the clerical party under Charles combated heresy, prevented any new and outspoken writing on the deistic side. The Treatise of Humane [i.e. Human] Reason (1674)99 of Martin Clifford, a scholarly man-about-town,100 who was made Master of the Charterhouse, went indeed to the bottom of the question of authority by showing, as Spinoza had done shortly before,101 that the acceptance of authority is itself in the last resort grounded in reason. The author makes no overt attack on religion, and professes Christian belief, but points out that many modern wars had been on subjects of religion, and elaborates a skilful argument on the gain to be derived from toleration. Reason alone, fairly used, will bring a man to the Christian faith: he who denies this cannot be a Christian. As for schism, it is created not by variation in belief, but by the refusal to tolerate it. This ingenious and well-written treatise speedily elicited three replies, all pronouncing it a pernicious work. Dr. Laney, Bishop of Ely, is reported to have declared that book and author might fitly be burned together;102 and Dr. Isaac Watts, while praising it for “many useful notions,” found it “exalt reason as the rule of religion as well as the guide, to a degree very dangerous.”103 Its actual effect seems to have been to restrain the persecution of dissenters.104 In 1680, three years after Clifford’s death, there appeared An Apology for a Treatise of Humane Reason, by Albertus Warren, wherein one of the attacks, entitled Plain Dealing, by a Cambridge scholar, is specially answered.105 This helped to evoke the anonymous Discourse of Things above Reason (1681), by Robert Boyle, the distinguished author of The Sceptical Chemist, whom we have seen backing up Henry More in acceptance of the grossest of ignorant superstitions. The most notable thing about the Discourse is that it anticipates Berkeley’s argument against freethinking mathematicians.106

The stress of new discussion is further to be gathered from the work of Howe, On the Reconcilableness of God’s Prescience of the Sins of Men with the Wisdom and Sincerity of his Counsels and Exhortations, produced in 1677 at Boyle’s request. As a modern admirer admits that the thesis was a hopeless one,107 it is not to be supposed that it did much to lessen doubt in its own day. The preface to Stillingfleet’s Letter to a Deist (1677), which for the first time brings that appellation into prominence in English controversy, tacitly abandoning the usual ascription of atheism to all unbelievers, avows that “a mean esteem of the Scriptures and the Christian Religion” has become very common “among the Skepticks of this Age,” and complains very much, as Butler did sixty years later, of the spirit of “Raillery and Buffoonery” in which the matter was too commonly approached. The “Letter” shows that a multitude of the inconsistencies and other blemishes of the Old Testament were being keenly discussed; and it cannot be said that the Bishop’s vindication was well calculated to check the tendency. Indeed, we have the angry and reiterated declaration of Archdeacon Parker, writing in 1681, that “the ignorant and the unlearned among ourselves are become the greatest pretenders to skepticism; and it is the common people that nowadays set up for Skepticism and Infidelity”; that “Atheism and Irreligion are at length become as common as Vice and Debauchery”; and that “Plebeans and Mechanicks have philosophized themselves into Principles of Impiety, and read their Lectures of Atheism in the Streets and Highways. And they are able to demonstrate out of the Leviathan that there is no God nor Providence,” and so on.108 As the Archdeacon’s method of refutation consists mainly in abuse, he doubtless had the usual measure of success. A similar order of dialectic is employed by Dr. Sherlock in his Practical Discourse of Religious Assemblies (1681). The opening section is addressed to the “speculative atheists,” here described as receding from the principles of their “great Master, Mr. Hobbs,” who, “though he had no great opinion of religion in itself, yet thought it something considerable when it became the law of the nation.” Such atheists, the reverend writer notes, when it is urged on them that all mankind worship “some God or other,” reply that such an argument is as good for polytheism and idolatry as for monotheism; so, after formally inviting them to “cure their souls of that fatal and mortal disease, which makes them beasts here and devils hereafter,” and lamenting that he is not dealing with “reasonable men,” he bethinks him that “the laws of conversation require us to treat all men with just respects,” and admits that there have been “some few wise and cautious atheists.” To such, accordingly, he suggests that the atheist has already a great advantage in a world morally restrained by religion, where he is under no such restraint, and that, “if he should by his wit and learning proselyte a whole nation to atheism, Hell would break loose on Earth, and he might soon find himself exposed to all those violences and injuries which he now securely practises.” For the rest, they had better not affront God, who may after all exist, and be able to revenge himself.109 And so forth.

Of deists as such, Sherlock has nothing to say beyond treating as “practical atheists” men who admit the existence of God, yet never go to church, though “religious worship is nothing else but a public acknowledgment of God.” Their non-attendance “is as great, if not a greater affront to God, and contempt of him, than atheism itself.”110 But the reverend writer’s strongest resentment is aroused by the spectacle of freethinkers asking for liberty of thought.

Dr Sherlock was not going to do good if the devil bade him.

The faith had a wittier champion in South; but he, in a Westminster Abbey sermon of 1684–5,112 mournfully declares that

How general was the ferment of discussion may be gathered from Dryden’s Religio Laici (1682), addressed to the youthful Henry Dickinson, translator of PÈre Richard Simon’s Critical History of the Old Testament (Fr. 1678). The French scholar was suspect to begin with; and Bishop Burnet tells that Richard Hampden (grandson of the patriot), who was connected with the Rye House Plot and committed suicide in the reign of William and Mary, had been “much corrupted” in his religious principles by Simon’s conversation at Paris. In the poem, Dryden recognizes the upsetting tendency of the treatise, albeit he terms it “matchless”:—

and his flowing disquisition, which starts from poetic contempt of reason and ends in prosaic advice to keep quiet about its findings, leaves the matter at that. The hopelessly confused but musical passage:

begins the poem; but the poet thinks it necessary both in his preface and in his piece to argue with the deists in a fashion which must have entertained them as much as it embarrassed the more thoughtful orthodox, his simple thesis being that all ideas of deity were dÉbris from the primeval revelation to Noah, and that natural reason could never have attained to a God-idea at all. And even at that, as regards the Herbertian argument:

he confesses that

and feebly proceeds to argue away the worst meaning of the creed of “the good old man” Athanasius. Finally, we have a fatherly appeal for peace and quietness among the sects:—

It must have been the general disbelief in Dryden’s sincerity on religious matters that caused the ascription to him of various freethinking treatises, for there is no decisive evidence that he was ever pronouncedly heterodox. His attitude to rationalism in the Religio Laici is indeed that of one who either could not see the scope of the problem or was determined not to indicate his recognition of it; and on the latter view the insincerity of both poem and preface would be exorbitant. By his nominal hostility to deism, however, Dryden did freethought a service of some importance. After his antagonism had been proclaimed, no one could plausibly associate freethinking with licentiousness, in which Dryden so far exceeded nearly every poet and dramatist of his age that the non-juror Jeremy Collier was free to single him out as the representative of theatrical lubricity. But in simple justice it must also be avowed that of all the opponents of deism in that day he is one of the least embittered, and that his amiable superficiality of argument must have tended to stimulate the claims of reason.

How far the process of reasoning had gone among quiet thinking people before the Revolution may be gathered from the essay entitled Miracles no Violations of the Laws of Nature, published in 1683.113 Its thesis is that put explicitly by Montaigne and implicitly by Bacon, that Ignorance is the only worker of miracles; in other words, “that the power of God and the power of Nature are one and the same”—a simple and straightforward way of putting a conception which Cudworth had put circuitously and less courageously a few years before. No Scriptural miracle is challenged qua event. “Among the many miracles related to be done in favour of the Israelites,” says the writer, “there is (I think) no one that can be apodictically demonstrated to be repugnant to th’ establisht Order of Nature”;114 and he calmly accepts the Biblical account of the first rainbow, explaining it as passing for a miracle merely because it was the first. He takes his motto from Pliny: “Quid non miraculo est, cum primum in notitiam venit?”115 This is, however, a preliminary strategy; as is the opening reminder that “most of the ancient Fathers ... and of the most learned Theologues among the moderns” hold that the Scriptures as regards natural things do not design to instruct men in physics but “aim only to excite pious affections in their breasts.”

We accordingly reach the position that the Scripture “many times speaks of natural things, yea even of God himself, very improperly, as aiming to affect and occupy the imagination of men, not to convince their reason.” Many Scriptural narratives, therefore, “are either delivered poetically or related according to the preconceived opinions and prejudices of the writer.” “Wherefore we here absolutely conclude that all the events that are truly related in the Scripture to have come to pass, proceeded necessarily ... according to the immutable Laws of Nature; and that if anything be found which can be apodictically demonstrated to be repugnant to those laws ... we may safely and piously believe the same not to have been dictated by divine inspiration, but impiously added to the sacred volume by sacrilegious men; for whatever is against Nature is against Reason; and whatever is against Reason is absurd, and therefore also to be rejected and refuted.”116

Lest this should be found too hard a doctrine there is added, Àpropos of Joshua’s staying of the sun and moon, a literary solution which has often done duty in later times. “To interpret Scripture-miracles, and to understand from the narrations of them how they really happened, ’tis necessary to know the opinions of those who first reported them ... otherwise we shall confound ... things which have really happen’d with things purely imaginary, and which were only prophetic representations. For in Scripture many things are related as real, and which were also believ’d to be real even by the relators themselves, that notwithstanding were only representations form’d in the brain, and merely imaginary—as that God, the Supreme Being, descended from heaven ... upon Mount Sinai...; that Elias ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot ... which were only representations accommodated to their opinions who deliver’d them down to us.”117 Such argumentation had to prepare the way for Hume’s Essay Of Miracles, half a century later; and concerning both reasoners it is to be remembered that their thought was to be “infidelity” for centuries after them. It needed real freethinking, then, to produce such doctrine in the days of the Rye House Plot.

Meanwhile, during an accidental lapse of the press laws, the deist Charles Blount118 (1654–1693) had produced with his father’s help his Anima Mundi (1679), in which there is set forth a measure of cautious unbelief; following it up (1680) by his much more pronounced essay, Great is Diana of the Ephesians, a keen attack on the principle of revelation and clericalism in general, and his translation [from the Latin version] of Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana, so annotated119 as to be an ingenious counterblast to the Christian claims, and so prefaced as to be an open challenge to orthodoxy. The book was condemned to be burnt; and only the influence of Blount’s family,120 probably, prevented his being prosecuted. The propaganda, however, was resumed by Blount and his friends in small tracts, and after his suicide121 in 1693 these were collected as the Oracles of Reason (1693), his collected works (without the Apollonius) appearing in 1695. By this time the political tension of the Revolution of 1688 was over; Le Clerc’s work on the inspiration of the Old Testament, raising many doubts as to the authorship of the Pentateuch, had been translated in 1690; Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) had been translated into English in 1689, and had impressed in a similar sense a number of scholars; his Ethica had given a new direction to the theistic controversy; the Boyle Lecture had been established for the confutation of unbelievers; and after the political convulsion of 1688 has subsided it rains refutations. Atheism is now so fiercely attacked, and with such specific arguments—as in Bentley’s Boyle Lectures (1692), Edwards’s Thoughts concerning the Causes of Atheism (1695), and many other treatises—that there can be no question as to the private vogue of atheistic or agnostic opinions. If we are to judge solely from the apologetic literature, it was more common than deism. Yet it seems impossible to doubt that there were ten deists for one atheist. Bentley’s admission that he never met an explicit atheist122 suggests that much of the atheism warred against was tentative. It was only the deists who could venture on open avowals; and the replies to them were most discussed.

Still there was no new deistic literature apart from Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious (1696) and his unauthorized issue (of course without author’s name) of Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue in 1699; and in that there is little direct conflict with orthodoxy, though it plainly enough implied that scripturalism would injuriously affect morals. It seems at that date, perhaps through the author’s objection to its circulation, to have attracted little attention; but he tells that it incurred hostility.125 Blount’s famous stratagem of 1693126 had led to the dropping of the official censorship of the press, the Licensing Act having been renewed for only two years in 1693 and dropped in 1695; but after the prompt issue of Blount’s collected works in that year, and the appearance of Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious in the next, the new and comprehensive Blasphemy Law of 1697127 served sufficiently to terrorize writers and printers in that regard for the time being.128 Bare denial of the Trinity, of the truth of the Christian religion, or of the divine authority of the Scriptures, was made punishable by disability for any civil office; and on a second offence by three years’ imprisonment, with withdrawal of all legal rights. The first clear gain from the freedom of the press was thus simply a cheapening of books in general. By the Licensing Act of Charles II, and by a separate patent, the Stationers’ Company had a monopoly of printing and selling all classical authors; and while their editions were disgracefully bad, the importers of the excellent editions printed in Holland had to pay them a penalty of 6s. 8d. on each copy.129 By the same Act, passed under clerical influence, the number even of master printers and letter-founders had been reduced, and the number of presses and apprentices strictly limited; and the total effect of the monopolies was that when Dutch-printed books were imported in exchange for English, the latter sold more cheaply at Amsterdam than they did in London, the English consumer, of course, bearing the burden.130 The immediate effect, therefore, of the lapse of the Licensing Act must have been to cheapen greatly all foreign books by removal of duties, and at the same time to cheapen English books by leaving printing free. It will be seen above that the output of treatises against freethought at once increases in 1696. But the revolution of 1688, like the Great Rebellion, had doubtless given a new stimulus to freethinking; and the total effect of freer trade in books, even with a veto on “blasphemy,” could only be to further it. This was ere long to be made plain.

Alongside of the more popular and native influences, there were at work others, foreign and more academic; and even in professedly orthodox writers there are signs of the influence of deistic thought. Thus Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (written about 1634, published 1642) has been repeatedly characterized131 as tending to promote deism by its tone and method; and there can be no question that it assumes a great prevalence of critical unbelief, to which its attitude is an odd combination of humorous cynicism and tranquil dogmatism, often recalling Montaigne,132 and at times anticipating Emerson. There is little savour of confident belief in the smiling maxim that “to confirm and establish our belief ’tis best to argue with judgments below our own”; or in the avowal, “In divinity I love to keep the road; and though not in an implicit yet an humble faith, follow the great wheel of the Church, by which I move.”133 The pose of the typical believer: “I can answer all the objections of Satan and my rebellious reason with that odd resolution I learned of Tertullian, Certum est quia impossibile est,”134 tells in his case of no anxious hours; and such smiling incuriousness is not conducive to conviction in others, especially when followed by a recital of some of the many insoluble dilemmas of Scripture. When he reasons he is merely self-subversive, as in the saying, “’Tis not a ridiculous devotion to say a prayer before a game at tables; for even in sortileges and matters of greatest uncertainty there is a settled and pre-ordered course of effects”;135 and after remarking that the notions of Fortune and astral influence “have perverted the devotion of many into atheism,” he proceeds to avow that his many doubts never inclined him “to any point of infidelity or desperate positions of atheism; for I have been these many years of opinion there never was any.”136 Yet in his later treatise on Vulgar Errors (1645) he devotes a chapter137 to the activities of Satan in instilling the belief that “there is no God at all ... that the necessity of his entity dependeth upon ours...; that the natural truth of God is an artificial erection of Man, and the Creator himself but a subtile invention of the Creature.” He further notes as coming from the same source “a secondary and deductive Atheism—that although men concede there is a God, yet should they deny his providence. And therefore assertions have flown about, that he intendeth only the care of the species or common natures, but letteth loose the guard of individuals, and single existences therein.”138 Browne now asserts merely that “many there are who cannot conceive that there was ever any absolute Atheist,” and does not clearly affirm that Satan labours wholly in vain. The broad fact remains that he avows “reason is a rebel unto faith”; and in the Vulgar Errors he shows in his own reasoning much of the practical play of the new skepticism.139 Yet it is finally on record that in 1664, on the trial of two women for witchcraft, Browne declared that the fits suffered from by the children said to have been bewitched “were natural, but heightened by the devil’s co-operating with the malice of the witches, at whose instance he did the villainies.”140 This amazing deliverance is believed to have “turned the scale” in the minds of the jury against the poor women, and they were sentenced by the sitting judge, Sir Matthew Hale, to be hanged. It would seem that in Browne’s latter years the irrational element in him, never long dormant, overpowered the rational. The judgment is a sad one to have to pass on one of the greatest masters of prose in any language. In other men, happily, the progression was different.

The opening even of Jeremy Taylor’s Ductor Dubitantium, so far as it goes, falls little short of the deistic position.141 A new vein of rationalism, too, is opened in the theological field by the great Cambridge scholar John Spencer, whose Discourse concerning Prodigies (1663; 2nd ed. 1665), though quite orthodox in its main positions, has in part the effect of a plea for naturalism as against supernaturalism. Spencer’s great work, De legibus HebrÆorum (1685), is, apart from Spinoza, the most scientific view of Hebrew institutions produced before the rise of German theological rationalism in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Holding most of the Jewish rites to have been planned by the deity as substitutes for or safeguards against those of the Gentiles which they resembled, he unconsciously laid, with Herbert, the foundations of comparative hierology, bringing to the work a learning which is still serviceable to scholars.142 And there were yet other new departures by clerical writers, who of course exhibit the difficulty of attaining a consistent rationalism.

One clergyman, Joseph Glanvill, is found publishing a treatise on The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661; amended in 1665 under the title Scepsis Scientifica),143 wherein, with careful reservation of religion, the spirit of critical science is applied to the ordinary processes of opinion with much energy, and the “mechanical philosophy” of Descartes is embraced with zeal. Following Raleigh and Hobbes,144 Glanvill also puts the positive view of causation145 afterwards fully developed by Hume.146 Yet he not only vetoed all innovation in “divinity,” but held stoutly by the crudest forms of the belief in witchcraft, and was with Henry More its chief English champion in his day against rational disbelief.147 In religion he had so little of the skeptical faculty that he declared “Our religious foundations are fastened at the pillars of the intellectual world, and the grand articles of our belief as demonstrable as geometry. Nor will ever either the subtile attempts of the resolved Atheist, or the passionate hurricanes of the wild enthusiast, any more be able to prevail against the reason our faith is built on, than the blustering winds to blow out the Sun.”148 He had his due reward in being philosophically assailed by the Catholic priest Thomas White as a promoter of skepticism,149 and by an Anglican clergyman, wroth with the Royal Society and all its works, as an infidel and an atheist.150

This was as true as clerical charges of the kind usually were in the period. But without any animus or violence of interpretation, a reader of Glanvill’s visitation sermon on The Agreement of Reason and Religion151 might have inferred that he was a deist. It sets forth that “religion primarily and mainly consists in worship and vertue,” and that it “in a secondary sense consists in some principles relating to the worship of God, and of his Son, in the ways of devout and vertuous living”; Christianity having “superadded” baptism and the Lord’s Supper to “the religion of mankind.” Apart from his obsession as to witchcraft—and perhaps even as to that—Glanvill seems to have grown more and more rationalistic in his later years. The Scepsis omits some of the credulous flights of the Vanity of Dogmatizing;152 the re-written version in the collected Essays omits such dithyrambs as that above quoted; and the sermon in its revised form sets out with the emphatic declaration: “There is not anything that I know which hath done more mischief to religion than the disparaging of reason under pretence of respect and favour to it; for hereby the very foundations of Christian faith have been undermined, and the world prepared for atheism. And if reason must not be heard, the Being of a God and the authority of Scripture can neither be proved nor defended; and so our faith drops to the ground like an house that hath no foundation.” Such reasoning could not but be suspect to the orthodoxy of the age.

Apart from the influence of Hobbes, who, like Descartes, shaped his thinking from the starting-point of Galileo, the Cartesian philosophy played in England a great transitional part. At the university of Cambridge it was already naturalized;153 and the influence of Glanvill, who was an active member of the Royal Society, must have carried it further. The remarkable treatise of the anatomist Glisson,154 De natura substantiÆ energetica (1672), suggests the influence of either Descartes or Gassendi; and it is remarkable that the clerical moralist Cumberland, writing his Disquisitio de legibus NaturÆ (1672) in reply to Hobbes, not only takes up a utilitarian position akin to Hobbes’s own, and expressly avoids any appeal to the theological doctrine of future punishments, but introduces physiology into his ethic to the extent of partially figuring as an ethical materialist.155 In regard to Gassendi’s direct influence it has to be noted that in 1659 there appeared The Vanity of Judiciary Astrology, translated by “A Person of Quality,” from P. Gassendus; and further that, as is remarked by Reid, Locke borrowed more from Gassendi than from any other writer.156

It is clear, however, that insofar as new science set up a direct conflict with Scriptural assumptions it gained ground but slowly and indirectly. It is difficult to-day to realize with what difficulty the Copernican and Galilean doctrine of the earth’s rotation and movement round the sun found acceptance even among studious men. We have seen that Bacon finally rejected it. And as Professor Masson points out,157 not only does Milton seem uncertain to the last concerning the truth of the Copernican system, but his friends and literary associates, the “Smectymnuans,” in their answer to Bishop Hall’s Humble Remonstrance (1641), had pointed to the Copernican doctrine as an unquestioned instance of a supreme absurdity. Glanvill, remarking in 1665 that “it is generally opinion’d that the Earth rests as the world’s centre,” avows that “for a man to go about to counter-argue this belief is as fruitless as to whistle against the winds. I shall not undertake to maintain the paradox that confronts this almost Catholic opinion. Its assertion would be entertained with the hoot of the rabble; the very mention of it as possible, is among the most ridiculous.”158 All he ventures to do is to show that the senses do not really vouch the ordinary view. Not till the eighteenth century, probably, did the common run of educated people anywhere accept the scientific teaching.

On the other hand, however, there was growing up not a little Socinian and other Unitarianism, for some variety of which we have seen two men burned in 1612. Church measures had been taken against the importation of Socinian books as early as 1640. The famous Lord Falkland, slain in the Civil War, is supposed to have leant to that opinion;159 and Chillingworth, whose Religion of Protestants (1637) was already a remarkable application of rational tests to ecclesiastical questions in defiance of patristic authority,160 seems in his old age to have turned Socinian.161 Violent attacks on the Trinity are noted among the heresies of 1646.162 Colonel John Fry, one of the regicides, who in Parliament was accused of rejecting the Trinity, cleared himself by explaining that he simply objected to the terms “persons” and “subsistence,” but was one of those who sought to help the persecuted Unitarian Biddle. In 1652 the Parliament ordered the destruction of a certain Socinian Catechism; and by 1655 the heresy seems to have become common.163 It is now certain that Milton was substantially a Unitarian,164 and that Locke and Newton were at heart no less so.165

The temper of the Unitarian school appears perhaps at its best in the anonymous Rational Catechism published in 1686. It purports to be “an instructive conference between a father and his son,” and is dedicated by the father to his two daughters. The “Catechism” rises above the common run of its species in that it is really a dialogue, in which the rÔles are at times reversed, and the catechumen is permitted to think and speak for himself. The exposition is entirely unevangelical. Right religion is declared to consist in right conduct; and while the actuality of the Christian record is maintained on argued grounds, on the lines of Grotius and Parker, the doctrine of salvation by faith is strictly excluded, future happiness being posited as the reward of good life, not of faith. There is no negation, the author’s object being avowedly peace and conciliation; but the Epistle Dedicatory declares that religious reasoners have hitherto “failed in their foundation-work. They have too much slighted that philosophy which is the natural religion of all men; and which, being natural, must needs be universal and eternal: and upon which therefore, or at least in conformity with which, all instituted and revealed religion must be supposed to be built.” We have here in effect the position taken up by Toland ten years later; and, in germ, the principle which developed deism, albeit in connection with an affirmation of the truth of the Christian records. Of the central Christian doctrine there is no acceptance, though there is laudation of Jesus; and reprints after 1695 bore the motto, from Locke:166 “As the foundation of virtue, there ought very earnestly to be imprinted on the mind of a young man a true notion of God, as of the independent supreme Being, Author, and Maker of all things: And, consequent to this, instil into him a love and reverence of this supreme Being.” We are already more than half-way from Unitarianism to deism.

Indeed, the theism of Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding undermined even his Unitarian Scripturalism, inasmuch as it denies, albeit confusedly, that revelation can ever override reason. In one passage he declares that “reason is natural revelation,” while “revelation is natural reason enlarged by a new set of discoveries communicated by God immediately, which reason vouchsafes the truth of.”167 This compromise appears to be borrowed from Spinoza, who had put it with similar vagueness in his great Tractatus,168 of which pre-eminent work Locke cannot have been ignorant, though he protested himself little read in the works of Hobbes and Spinoza, “those justly decried names.”169 The Tractatus being translated into English in the same year with the publication of the Essay, its influence would concur with Locke’s in a widened circle of readers; and the substantially naturalistic doctrine of both books inevitably promoted the deistic movement. We have Locke’s own avowal that he had many doubts as to the Biblical narratives;170 and he never attempts to remove the doubts of others. Since, however, his doctrine provided a sphere for revelation on the territory of ignorance, giving it prerogative where its assertions were outside knowledge, it counted substantially for Unitarianism insofar as it did not lead to deism.

In his “practical” treatise on The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) Locke played a similar part. It was inspired by the genuine concern for social peace which had moved him to write an essay on Toleration as early as 1667,171 and to produce from 1685 onwards his famous Letters on Toleration, by far the most persuasive appeal of the kind that had yet been produced;172 all the more successful so far as it went, doubtless, because the first Letter ended with a memorable capitulation to bigotry: “Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all. Besides, also, those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion can have no pretence of religion whereupon to challenge the privilege of a toleration.” This handsome endorsement of the religion which had repeatedly “dissolved all” in a pandemonium of internecine hate, as compared with the one heresy which had never broken treaties or shed blood, is presumably more of a prudent surrender to normal fanaticism than an expression of the philosopher’s own state of mind;173 and his treatise on The Reasonableness of Christianity is an attempt to limit religion to a humane ethic, with sacraments and mysteries reduced to ceremonies, while claiming that the gospel ethic was “now with divine authority established into a legible law, far surpassing all that philosophy and human reason had attained to.”174 Its effect was, however, to promote rationalism without doing much to mitigate the fanaticism of belief.

That Locke was felt to have injured orthodoxy is further proved by the many attacks made on him from the orthodox side. Even the first Letter on Toleration elicited retorts, one of which claims to demonstrate “the Absurdity and Impiety of an Absolute Toleration.”175 On his positive teachings he was assailed by Bishop Stillingfleet; by the Rev. John Milner, B.D.; by the Rev. John Morris; by William Carrol; and by the Rev. John Edwards, B.D.;176 his only assailant with a rationalistic repute being Dr. Thomas Burnet. Some attacked him on his Essays; some on his Reasonableness of Christianity; orthodoxy finding in both the same tendency to “subvert the nature and use of divine revelation and faith.”177 In the opinion of the Rev. Mr. Bolde, who defended him in Some Considerations published in 1699, the hostile clericals had treated him “with a rudeness peculiar to some who make a profession of the Christian religion, and seem to pride themselves in being the clergy of the Church of England.”178 This is especially true of Edwards, a notably ignoble type;179 but hardly of Milner, whose later Account of Mr. Lock’s Religion out of his Own Writings, and in his Own Words (1700), pressed him shrewdly on the score of his “Socinianism.” In the eyes of a pietist like William Law, again, Locke’s conception of the infant mind as a tabula rasa was “dangerous to religion,” besides being philosophically false.180 Yet Locke agreed with Law181 that moral obligation is dependent solely on the will of God—a doctrine denounced by the deist Shaftesbury as the negation of morality.

On the whole, it is clear, the effect of his work, especially of his naturalistic psychology, was to make for rationalism; and his compromises furthered instead of checking the movement of unbelief. His ideal of practical and undogmatic Christianity, indeed, was hardly distinguishable from that of Hobbes,182 and, as previously set forth by the Rev. Arthur Bury in his Naked Gospel (1690), was so repugnant to the Church that that book was burned at Oxford as heretical.183 Locke’s position as a believing Christian was indeed extremely weak, and could easily have been demolished by a competent deist, such as Collins,184 or a skeptical dogmatist who could control his temper and avoid the gross misrepresentation so often resorted to by Locke’s orthodox enemies. But by the deists he was valued as an auxiliary, and by many latitudinarian Christians as a helper towards a rationalistic if not a logical compromise.

Rationalism of one or the other tint, in fact, seems to have spread in all directions. Deism was ascribed to some of the most eminent public men. Bishop Burnet has a violent passage on Sir William Temple, to the effect that “He had a true judgment in affairs, and very good principles with relation to government, but in nothing else. He seemed to think that things are as they were from all eternity; at least he thought religion was only for the mob. He was a great admirer of the sect of Confucius in China, who were atheists themselves, but left religion to the rabble.”185 The praise of Confucius is the note of deism; and Burnet rightly held that no orthodox Christian in those days would sound it. Other prominent men revealed their religious liberalism. The accomplished and influential George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, often spoken of as a deist, and even as an atheist, by his contemporaries,186 appears clearly from his own writings to have been either that or a Unitarian;187 and it is not improbable that the similar gossip concerning Lord Keeper Somers was substantially true.188

That Sir Isaac Newton was “some kind of Unitarian”189 is proved by documents long withheld from publication, and disclosed only in the second edition of Sir David Brewster’s Memoirs. There is indeed no question that he remained a mere scripturalist, handling the texts as such,190 and wasting much time in vain interpretations of Daniel and the Apocalypse.191 Temperamentally, also, he was averse to anything like bold discussion, declaring that “those at Cambridge ought not to judge and censure their superiors, but to obey and honour them, according to the law and the doctrine of passive obedience”192—this after he had sat on the Convention which deposed James II. In no aspect, indeed, apart from his supreme scientific genius, does he appear as morally193 or intellectually pre-eminent; and even on the side of science he was limited by his theological presuppositions, as when he rejected the nebular hypothesis, writing to Bentley that “the growth of new systems out of old ones, without the mediation of a Divine power, seems to me apparently absurd.”194 There is therefore more than usual absurdity in the proclamation of his pious biographer that “the apostle of infidelity cowers beneath the implied rebuke”195 of his orthodoxy. The very anxiety shown by Newton and his friends196 to checkmate “the infidels” is a proof that his religious work was not scientific even in inception, but the expression of his neurotic side; and the attempt of some of his scientific admirers to show that his religious researches belong solely to the years of his decline is a corresponding oversight. Newton was always pathologically prepossessed on the side of his religion, and subordinated his science to his theology even in the Principia. It is therefore all the more significant of the set of opinion in his day that, tied as he was to Scriptural interpretations, he drew away from orthodox dogma as to the Trinity. Not only does he show himself a destructive critic of Trinitarian texts and an opponent of Athanasius197: he expressly formulates the propositions (1) that “there is one God the Father ... and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus”; (2) that “the Father is the invisible God whom no eye hath seen or can see. All other beings are sometimes visible”; and (3) that “the Father hath life in himself, and hath given the Son to have life in himself.”198 Such opinions, of course, could not be published: under the Act of 1697 they would have made Newton liable to loss of office and all civil rights. In his own day, therefore, his opinions were rather gossipped-of than known;199 but insofar as his heresy was realized, it must have wrought much more for unbelief than could be achieved for orthodoxy by his surprisingly commonplace strictures on atheism, which show the ordinary inability to see what atheism means.

The argument of his Short Scheme of True Religion brackets atheism with idolatry, and goes on: “Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind that it never had many professors. Can it be by accident that all birds, beasts, and men have their right side and left side alike shaped (except in their bowels), and just two eyes, and no more, on either side of the face?” etc. (Brewster, ii, 347). The logical implication is that a monstrous organism, with the sides unlike, represents “accident,” and that in that case there has either been no causation or no “purpose” by Omnipotence. It is only fair to remember that no avowedly “atheistic” argument could in Newton’s day find publication; but his remarks are those of a man who had never contemplated philosophically the negation of his own religious sentiment at the point in question. Brewster, whose judgment and good faith are alike precarious, writes that “When Voltaire asserted that Sir Isaac explained the prophecies in the same manner as those who went before him, he only exhibited his ignorance of what Newton wrote, and what others had written” (ii, 331, note; 355). The writer did not understand what he censured. Voltaire meant that Newton’s treatment of prophecy is on the same plane of credulity as that of his orthodox predecessors.

Even within the sphere of the Church the Unitarian tendency, with or without deistic introduction, was traceable. Archbishop Tillotson (d. 1694) was often accused of Socinianism; and in the next generation was smilingly spoken of by Anthony Collins as a leading Freethinker. The pious Dr. Hickes had in fact declared of the Archbishop that “he caused several to turn atheists and ridicule the priesthood and religion.”200 The heresy must have been encouraged even within the Church by the scandal which broke out when Dean Sherlock’s Vindication of Trinitarianism (1690), written in reply to a widely-circulated antitrinitarian compilation,201 was attacked by Dean South202 as the work of a Tritheist. The plea of Dr. Wallis, Locke’s old teacher, that a doctrine of “three somewhats”—he objected to the term “persons”—in one God was as reasonable as the concept of three dimensions,203 was of course only a heresy the more. Outside the Church, William Penn, the great Quaker, held a partially Unitarian attitude;204 and the first of his many imprisonments was on a charge of “blasphemy and heresy” in respect of his treatise The Sandy Foundation Shaken, which denied (1) that there were in the One God “three distinct and separate persons”; (2) the doctrine of the need of “plenary satisfaction”; and (3) the justification of sinners by “an imputative righteousness.” But though many of the early Quakers seem to have shunned the doctrine of the Trinity, Penn really affirmed the divinity of Christ, and was not a Socinian but a Sabellian in his theology. Positive Unitarianism all the while was being pushed by a number of tracts which escaped prosecution, being prudently handled by Locke’s friend, Thomas Firmin.205 A new impulse had been given to Unitarianism by the learning and critical energy of the Prussian Dr. Zwicker, who had settled in Holland;206 and among those Englishmen whom his works had found ready for agreement was Gilbert Clerke (b. 1641), who, like several later heretics, was educated at Sidney College, Cambridge. In 1695 he published a Unitarian work entitled Anti-Nicenismus, and two other tracts in Latin, all replying to the orthodox polemic of Dr. Bull, against whom another Unitarian had written Considerations on the Explications of the Doctrine of the Trinity in 1694, bitterly resenting his violence.207 In 1695 appeared yet another treatise of the same school, The Judgment of the Fathers concerning the Doctrine of the Trinity. Much was thus done on Unitarian lines to prepare an audience for the deists of the next reign.208 But the most effective influence was probably the ludicrous strife of the orthodox clergy as to what orthodoxy was. The fray over the doctrine of the Trinity waxed so furious, and the discredit cast on orthodoxy was so serious,209 that in the year 1700 an Act of Parliament was passed forbidding the publication of any more works on the subject.

Meanwhile the so-called Latitudinarians,210 all the while aiming as they did at a non-dogmatic Christianity, served as a connecting medium for the different forms of liberal thought; and a new element of critical disintegration was introduced by a speculative treatment of Genesis in the ArchÆologiÆ PhilosophiÆ (1692) of Dr. Thomas Burnet, a professedly orthodox scholar, Master of the Charterhouse and chaplain in ordinary to King William, who nevertheless treated the Creation and Fall stories as allegories, and threw doubt on the Mosaic authorship of parts of the Pentateuch. Though the book was dedicated to the king, it aroused so much clerical hostility that the king was obliged to dismiss him from his post at court.211 His ideas were partly popularized through a translation of two of his chapters, with a vindicatory letter, in Blount’s Oracles of Reason (1695); and that they had considerable vogue may be gathered from the Essay towards a Vindication of the Vulgar Exposition of the Mosaic History of the Fall of Adam, by John Witty, published in 1705. Burnet, who published three sets of anonymous Remarks on the philosophy of Locke (1697–1699), criticizing its sensationist basis, figured after his death (1715), in posthumous publications, as a heretical theologian in other regards; and then played his part in the general deistic movement; but his allegorical view of Genesis does not seem to have seriously affected speculation in his time, the bulk of the debate turning on his earlier Telluris Theoria Sacra (1681; trans. 1684), to which there were many rejoinders, both scientific and orthodox. On this side he is unimportant, his science being wholly imaginative; and in the competition between his Theory and J. Woodward’s Essay towards a Natural History of the Earth (1695) nothing was achieved for scientific progress.

Much more remarkable, but outside of popular discussion, were the Evangelium medici (1697) of Dr. B. Connor, wherein the gospel miracles were explained away, on lines later associated with German rationalism, as natural phenomena; and the curious treatise of Newton’s friend, John Craig,212 TheologiÆ christianÆ principia mathematica (1699), wherein it is argued that all evidence grows progressively less valid in course of time;213 and that accordingly the Christian religion will cease to be believed about the year 3144, when probably will occur the Second Coming. Connor, when attacked, protested his orthodoxy; Craig held successively two prebends of the Church of England;214 and both lived and died unmolested, probably because they had the prudence to write in Latin, and maintained gravity of style. About this time, further, the title of “Rationalist” made some fresh headway as a designation, not of unbelievers, but of believers who sought to ground themselves on reason. Such books as those of Clifford and Boyle tell of much discussion as to the efficacy of “reason” in religious things; and in 1686, as above noted, there appears A Rational Catechism,215 a substantially Unitarian production, notable for its aloofness from evangelical feeling, despite its many references to Biblical texts in support of its propositions. In the Essays Moral and Divine of the Scotch judge, Sir William Anstruther, published in 1701, there is a reference to “those who arrogantly term themselves Rationalists”216 in the sense of claiming to find Christianity not only, as Locke put it, a reasonable religion, but one making no strain upon faith. Already the term had become potentially one of vituperation, and it is applied by the learned judge to “the wicked reprehended by the Psalmist.”217 Forty years later, however, it was still applied rather to the Christian who claimed to believe upon rational grounds than to the deist or unbeliever;218 and it was to have a still longer lease of life in Germany as a name for theologians who believed in “Scripture” on condition that all miracles were explained away.

1 Jenkin Thomasius in his Historia Atheismi (1692) joins Herbert with Bodin as having five points in common with him (ed. 1709, ch. ix, § 2, pp. 76–77).?

2 It might have been supposed that he was recalled on account of his book; but it was not so. He was recalled by letter in April, returned home in July, and seems to have sent his book thence to Paris to be printed.?

3 Autobiography, Sir S. Lee’s 2nd ed. p. 132.?

4 The book was reprinted at London in Latin in 1633; again at Paris in 1636; and again at London in 1645. It was translated and published in French in 1639, but never in English.?

5 Compare the verdict of Hamilton in his ed. of Reid, note A, § 6, 35 (p. 781).?

6 For a good analysis see PÜnjer, Hist. of the Christ. Philos. of Religion, Eng. trans. 1887, pp. 292–99; also Noack, Die Freidenker in der Religion, Bern, 1853, i, 17–40; and Lechler, Geschichte des englischen Deismus, pp. 36–54.?

7 See his Autobiography, as cited, pp. 133–34.?

8 De causis errorum, una cum tractate de religione laici et appendice ad sacerdotes (1645); De religione gentilium (1663). The latter was translated into English in 1705. The former are short appendices to the De Veritate. In 1768 was published for the first time from a manuscript, A Dialogue between a Tutor and his Pupil, which, despite the doubts of Lechler, may confidently be pronounced Herbert’s from internal evidence. See the “Advertisement” by the editor of the volume, and cp. Lee, p. xxx, and notes there referred to. The “five points,” in particular, occur not only in the Religio Gentilium, but in the De Veritate. The style is clearly of the seventeenth century.?

9 Sir Sidney Lee can hardly be right in taking the Dialogue to be the “little treatise” which Herbert proposed to write on behaviour (Autobiography, Lee’s 2nd ed. p. 43). It does not answer to that description, being rather an elaborate discussion of the themes of Herbert’s main treatises, running to 272 quarto pages.?

10 See below, p. 80.?

11 More Reasons for the Christian Religion, 1672, p. 79.?

12 It is to be remembered that the doctrine of the supremacy of the civil power in religious matters (Erastianism) was maintained by some of the ablest men on the Parliamentary side, in particular Selden.?

13 Leviathan, ch. iv, H. Morley’s ed. p. 26.?

14 Cp. his letter to an opponent, Considerations upon the Reputation, etc., of Thomas Hobbes, 1680, with chs. xi and xii of Leviathan, and De Corpore Politico, pt. ii, c. 6. One of his most explicit declarations for theism is in the De Homine, c. 1, where he employs the design argument, declaring that he who will not see that the bodily organs are a mente aliqua conditas ordinatasque ad sua quasque officia must be himself without mind. This ascription of “mind,” however, he tacitly negates in Leviathan, ch. xi, and De Corpore Politico, pt. ii, c. 6.?

15 De Corpore, pt. ii, c. 8, § 20.?

16 Cp. Bentley’s letter to Bernard, 1692, cited in Dynamics of Religion, pp. 82–83.?

17 Leviathan, pt. i, ch. vi. Morley’s ed. p. 34.?

18 Leviathan, pt. iii, ch. xxxiii.?

19 Above, p. 24.?

20 On this see Lange, Hist. of Materialism, sec. iii, ch. ii.?

21 Molyneux, an anti-Hobbesian, in translating Hobbes’s objections along with the Meditations (1680) claims that the slightness of Descartes’s replies was due to his unacquaintance with Hobbes’s works and philosophy in general (trans. cited, p. 114). This is an obviously lame defence. Descartes does parry some of the thrusts of Hobbes; others he simply cannot meet.?

22 E.g., Leviathan, pt. iv, ch. xlvii.?

23 Kuno Fischer, Descartes and his School, pp. 232–35. Cp. Bentley, Sermons on Atheism (i.e., his Boyle Lectures), ed. 1724, p. 8.?

24 Hobbes also was of Mersenne’s acquaintance, but only as a man of science. When, in 1647, Hobbes was believed to be dying, Mersenne for the first time sought to discuss theology with him; but the sick man instantly changed the subject. In 1648 Mersenne died. He thus did not live to meet the strain of Leviathan (1651), which enraged the French no less than the English clergy. (Croom Robertson’s Hobbes, pp. 63–65.)?

25 Hobbes lived to see this law abolished (1677). There was left, however, the jurisdiction of the bishops and ecclesiastical courts over cases of atheism, blasphemy, heresy, and schism, short of the death penalty.?

26 Croom Robertson, Hobbes, p. 196; Pepys’s Diary, Sept. 3, 1668.?

27 Leviathan, ch. ii; Morley’s ed. p. 19; chs. xiv, xv, pp. 66, 71, 72, 78; ch. xxix, pp. 148, 149.?

28 Leviathan, chs. xv, xvii, xviii. Morley’s ed. pp. 72, 82, 83, 85.?

29 “For two generations the effort to construct morality on a philosophical basis takes more or less the form of answers to Hobbes” (Sidgwick, Outlines of the History of Ethics, 3rd ed. p. 169).?

30 As when he presents the law of Nature as “dictating peace, for a means of the conservation of men in multitudes” (Leviathan, ch. xv. Morley’s ed. p. 77).?

31 See the headings, Council, Religion, etc.?

32 G. W. Johnson, Memoirs of John Selden, 1835, pp. 348, 362.?

33 G. W. Johnson, p. 264.?

34 Above, p. 20.?

35 G. W. Johnson, pp. 258, 302.?

36 Id. p. 302. Cp. in the Table Talk, art. Trinity, his view of the Roundheads.?

37 Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. 1810, i, 181. Cp. i, 292; ii, 44.?

38 Cp. Overton’s pamphlet, An Arrow against all Tyrants and Tyranny (1646), cited in the History of Passive Obedience since the Reformation, 1689, i, 59; pt. ii of Thomas Edwards’s GangrÆna: or a Catalogue and Discovery of many of the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies, and pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of this time, etc., 2nd ed. 1646, pp. 33–34 (Nos. 151–53).?

39 Lords Journals, January 16, 1645–1646; GangrÆna, as cited, p. 150; cp. Gardiner, Hist. of the Civil War, ed. 1893, iii, 11.?

40 Green, Short Hist. ch. viii, § 8, pp. 551–52; Gardiner, Hist. of the Civil War, iv, 22.?

41 GangrÆna, p. 18.?

42 In 1644 he had been imprisoned at Bury St. Edmunds for “dipping” adults, and after six months’ durance had been released on a recantation and promise of amendment. GangrÆna, as cited, pp. 104–105.?

43 Rev. James Cranford, HÆreseo-Machia, a Sermon, 1646, p. 10.?

44 No. 100 in GangrÆna.?

45 Cranford, as cited, p. 11 sq.?

46 See G. P. Gooch’s Hist. of Democ. Ideas in England in the 17th Century, 1898, ch. vi.?

47 Above, pp. 4 and 8.?

48 In the British Museum copy the name Richardson is penned, not in a contemporary hand, at the end of the preface; and in the preface to vol. ii of the Phenix, 1708, in which the treatise is reprinted, the same name is given, but with uncertainty. The Richardson pointed at was the author of The Necessity of Toleration in Matters of Religion (1647). E. B. Underhill, in his collection of that and other Tracts on Liberty of Conscience for the Hanserd Knollys Society, 1846, remains doubtful (p. 247) as to the authorship of the tract on hell.?

49 The fourth English edition appeared in 1754.?

50 GangrÆna, ep. ded. (p. 5). Cp. pp. 47, 151, 178–79; and Bailie’s Letters, ed. 1841, ii, 234–37; iii, 393. The most sweeping plea for toleration seems to have been the book entitled Toleration Justified, 1646. (GangrÆna, p. 151.) The Hanserd Knollys collection, above mentioned, does not contain one of that title.?

51 GangrÆna, pp. 152–53.?

52 Pp. 18–36.?

53 Id. p. 15. As to other sects mentioned by him cp. Tayler, p. 194.?

54 On the intense aversion of most of the Presbyterians to toleration see Tayler, Retrospect of Relig. Life of Eng. p. 136. They insisted, rightly enough, that the principle was never recognized in the Bible.?

55 See the citations in Buckle, 3-vol. ed. i, 347; 1-vol. ed. p. 196.?

56 Alex. Ross, Pansebeia, 4th ed. 1672, p. 379.?

57 Cp. the present writer’s Buckle and his Critics, 1895, ch. viii, § 2.?

58 See above, vol. i, p. 5.?

59 Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, 3rd ed. i, 200.?

60 Heresiography: The Heretics and Sectaries of these Times, 1614. Epist. Ded.?

61 Discourse, ed. 1857, p. 226.?

62 Dr. J. Brown’s pref. to ed. of 1857, p. xxii.?

63 More, Collection of Philosophical Writings, 4th ed. 1692, p. 95.?

64 Fabricius, Delectus Argumentorum et Syllabus Scriptorum, 1725, p. 341.?

65 No copy in British Museum.?

66 Urwick, Life of John Howe, with 1846 ed. of Howe’s Select Works, pp. xiii, xix. Urwick, a learned evangelical, fully admits the presence of “infidels” on both sides in the politics of the time.?

67 Discourse Concerning Union Among Protestants, ed. cited, pp. 146, 156, 158. In the preface to his treatise, The Redeemer’s Tears Wept over Lost Souls, Howe complains of “the atheism of some, the avowed mere theism of others,” and of a fashionable habit of ridiculing religion. This sermon, however, appears to have been first published in 1684; and the date of its application is uncertain.?

68 Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography, Art. 285.?

69 The preface begins: “It is neither to satisfie the importunity of friends, nor to prevent false copies (which and such like excuses I know are expected in usual prefaces), that I have adventured abroad this following treatise: but it is out of a just resentment of the affronts and indignities which have been cast on religion, by such who account it a matter of judgment to disbelieve the Scriptures, and a piece of wit to dispute themselves out of the possibility of being happy in another world.”?

70 See bk. ii, ch. x. Page 338, 3rd ed. 1666.?

71 Cp. Glanvill, pref. Address to his Scepsis Scientifica, Owen’s ed. 1885, pp. lv–lvii; and Henry More’s Divine Dialogues, Dial. i, ch. xxxii.?

72 Cp. Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, i. 109.?

73 The Reformed Pastor, abr. ed. 1826, pp. 236, 239.?

74 Work cited, ed. 1667, p. 136. The proposition is reiterated.?

75 Id. p. 388.?

76 Reasons of the Christian Religion, pp. 388–89.?

77 Religio Stoici, Edinburgh, 1663. p. 19. The essay was reprinted in 1665, and in London in 1693 under the title of The Religious Stoic.?

78 Id. p. 18.?

79 Id. p. 124.?

80 Id. p. 76.?

81 Id. p. 69.?

82 Religio Stoici, p. 116.?

83 Id. p. 122.?

84 This last is interesting as a probable echo of opinions he had heard from some of his older contemporaries: “Opinion kept within its proper bounds is an [ = the Scottish “ane”] pure act of the mind; and so it would appear that to punish the body for that which is a guilt of the soul is as unjust as to punish one relation for another” (pref. pp. 10–11). He adds that “the Almighty hath left no warrand upon holy record for persecuting such as dissent from us.”?

85 Reason: an Essay, ed. 1690, p. 21. Cp. p. 152.?

86 Id. p. 82. It is noteworthy that Mackenzie puts in a protest against “implicit Faith and Infallibility, those great tyrants over Reason” (p. 88). But the essay as a whole is ill-planned and unimpressive.?

87 Work cited, 2nd ed. pt. ii, pp. 106–15.?

88 Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 86–87, 89–90. This explanation is also given by Bishop Wilkins in his treatise on Natural Religion, 7th ed. p. 354.?

89 Replying to Herbert’s De Veritate, which he seems not to have read before.?

90 Pref. to Obs. upon the United Prov. of the Netherlands, in Works, ed. 1814, i, 36.?

91 Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 87, 94–98, 111, 112.?

92 As to the religious immoralism see Mosheim, 17 Cent. sec. ii, pt. ii, ch. ii, § 23, and Murdock’s notes.?

93 Compare the picture of average Protestant deportment given by Benjamin Bennet in his Discourses against Popery, 1714, p. 377.?

94 More, Coll. of Philos. Writings, 4th ed. 1712, gen. pref. p. 7.?

95 Compare some of the extracts in Thomas Bennet’s Defence of the Discourse of Schism, etc., 2nd ed. 1704, from the sermons of R. Gouge (1688). The description of men as “mortal crumbling bits of dependency, yesterday’s start-ups, that come out of the abyss of nothing, hastening to the bosom of their mother earth” (work cited, p. 93) is a reminder that the resonant and cadenced rhetoric of the Brownes and Taylors and Cudworths was an art of the age, at the command of different orders of propaganda.?

96 Cited by Bonnet, A Defence of the Discourse of Schism, etc., as cited, p. 41.?

97 Thus Henry More’s biographer, the Rev. Richard Ward, says “the late Mr. Chiswel told a friend of mine that for twenty years together after the return of King Charles the Second the Mystery of Godliness, and Dr. More’s other works, ruled all the booksellers in London” (Life of More, 1710, pp. 162–63). We have seen the nature of some of More’s “other works.”?

98 The Reasonableness of Scripture Belief, 1672, Epist. Ded.?

99 Rep. 1675; 2nd ed. 1691; rep. in the Phoenix, vol. ii, 1708; 3rd ed. 1736.?

100 A very hostile account of him is given in Dict. of Nat. Biog. He was, however, the friend of Cowley, and the “M. Clifford” to whom Sprat addressed his sketch of Cowley’s Life. He was also a foe of Dryden—the “malicious Matt Clifford” of Dryden’s Sessions of the Poets; and he attacked the poet in Notes on Dryden’s Poems (published 1687), and is supposed to have had a hand in the Rehearsal. He was befriended by Shaftesbury.?

101 Tract. Theol. Polit. c. 15.?

102 Wood, AthenÆ Oxonienses, ii, 381–82; Granger, Biog. Hist. of England, 5th ed. v, 293.?

103 Johnson’s Life of Dr. Watts, 1785, App. i.?

104 Toulmin, Hist. of the Prot. Dissenters, 1814, citing Johnson’s Life of Dr. Watts.?

105 It has been suggested that this was really written by Clifford, for posthumous publication. The humorous sketch of “His Character” at the close, suggesting that his vices seem to the writer to have outweighed his virtues, hints of ironical mystification.?

106 Work cited, pp. 10, 14, 30, 55.?

107 Dr. Urwick, Life of Howe, as cited, p. xxxii.?

108 A Demonstration of the Divine Authority of the Law of Nature and of the Christian Religion, by Samuel Parker, D.D., 1681, pref. The first part of this treatise is avowedly a popularization of the argument of Cumberland’s Disquisitio de Legibus NaturÆ, 1672. Parker had previously published in Latin a Disiputatio de Deo et Providentia Divina, in which he raised the question, An Philosophorum ulli, et quinam Athei fuerunt (1678).?

109 Work cited, 2nd ed. 1682, pp. 32, 38–40, 45–48.?

110 Id. pp. 54–55.?

111 Id. p. 52.?

112 Twelve Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions, 1692, pp. 438–39.?

113 This has been ascribed, without any good ground, to Charles Blount. It does not seem to me to be in his style.?

114 Premonition to the Candid Reader.?

115 Hist. Nat. vii, 1.?

116 Pamphlet cited, pp. 20, 21.?

117 Id. p. 23.?

118 Concerning whom see Macaulay’s History, ch. xix, ed. 1877, ii, 411–12—a very prejudiced account. Blount is there spoken of as “one of the most unscrupulous plagiaries that ever lived,” and as having “stolen” from Milton, because he issued a pamphlet “By Philopatris,” largely made up from the Areopagitica. Compare Macaulay’s treatment of Locke, who adopted Dudley North’s currency scheme (ch. xxi, vol. ii, p. 547).?

119 Bayle (art. Apollonius, note), who is followed by the French translator of Philostratus with Blount’s notes in 1779 (J. F. Salvemini de Castillon), says the notes were drawn from the papers of Lord Herbert of Cherbury; but of this Blount says nothing.?

120 As to these see the Dict. of Nat. Biog. The statements of Anthony Wood as to the writings of Blount’s father, relied on in the author’s Dynamics of Religion, appear to be erroneous. Sir Thomas Pope Blount, Charles’s eldest brother, shows a skeptical turn of mind in his Essays (3rd ed. 1697, Essay 7). Himself a learned man, he disparages learning as checking thought; and, professing belief in the longevity of the patriarchs (p. 187), pronounces popery and pagan religion to be mere works of priestcraft (Essay 1). He detested theological controversy and intolerance, and seems to have been a Lockian.?

121 All that is known of this tragedy is that Blount loved his deceased wife’s sister and wished to marry her; but she held it unlawful, and he was in despair. According to Pope, a sufficiently untrustworthy authority, he “gave himself a stab in the arm, as pretending to kill himself, of the consequence of which he really died” (note to Epilogue to the Satires, i, 123). An overstrung nervous system may be diagnosed from his writing.?

122 Boyle Lectures on Atheism, ed. 1724, p. 4.?

123 Reflexions upon the Books of the Holy Scriptures to establish the Truth of the Christian Religion, by Peter Allix, D.D., 1688, i, 6–7.?

124 As cited by Leslie, Truth of Christianity Demonstrated, 1711, pp. 17–21.?

125 Characteristics, ii, 263 (Moralists, pt. ii, § 3). One of the most dangerous positions from the orthodox point of view would be the thesis that while religion could do either great good or great harm to morals, atheism could do neither. (Bk. I, pt. iii, § 1.) Cp. Bacon’s Essay, Of Atheism.?

126 Blount, after assailing in anonymous pamphlets Bohun the licenser, induced him to license a work entitled King William and Queen Mary Conquerors, which infuriated the nation. Macaulay calls the device “a base and wicked scheme.” It was almost innocent in comparison with Blount’s promotion of the “Popish plot” mania. See Who Killed Sir Edmund Godfrey Berry? by Alfred Marks. 1905, pp. 133–35, 150.?

127 See the text in Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner’s Penalties upon Opinion, pp. 19–21. Macaulay does not mention this measure.?

128 The Act had been preceded by a proclamation of the king, dated Feb. 24. 1697.?

129 As to an earlier monopoly of the London booksellers, see George Herbert’s letters to the Archbishop of Canterbury and to Bacon, Jan. 29, 1620. In Works of George Herbert, ed. 1841, i. 217–18.?

130 See Locke’s notes on the Licensing Act in Lord King’s Life of Locke, 1829, pp. 203–206; Fox Bourne’s Life of Locke, ii. 313–14; Macaulay’s History, ii, 504.?

131 Trinius, Freydenker-Lexicon, 1759, p. 120; PÜnjer, i, 291, 300–301. Browne was even called an atheist. Arpe, Apologia pro Vanino, 1712, p. 27, citing Welschius. Mr. A. H. Bullen, in his introduction to his ed. of Marlowe (1885, vol. i, p. lviii), remarks that Browne, who “kept the road” in divinity, “exposed the vulnerable points in the Scriptural narratives with more acumen and gusto than the whole army of freethinkers, from Anthony Collins downwards.” This is of course an extravagance, but, as Mr. Bullen remarks in the Dict. of Nat. Biog. vii, 66, Browne discusses “with evident relish” the “seeming absurdities in the Scriptural narrative.”?

132 Browne’s Annotator points to the derivation of his skepticism from “that excellent French writer Monsieur Mountaign, in whom I often trace him” (Sayle’s ed. 1904, i, p. xviii).?

133 Religio Medici, i, 6.?

134 Id. i, 9.?

135 Id. i, 18.?

136 Religio Medici, i, 20.?

137 Bk. I, ch. x.?

138 Here we have a theorem independently reached later (with the substitution of Nature for God) by Mary Wollstonecraft and Tennyson in turn. Browne cites yet another: “that he looks not below the moon, but hath resigned the regiment of sublunary affairs unto inferior deputations”—a thesis adopted in effect by Cudworth.?

139 By an error of the press, Browne is made in Mr. Sayle’s excellent reprint (i, 108) to begin a sentence in the middle of a clause, with an odd result:—“I do confess I am an Atheist. I cannot persuade myself to honour that the world adores.” The passage should obviously read: “to that subterraneous Idol (avarice) and God of the Earth I do confess I am an Atheist,” etc.?

140 Hutchinson, Histor. Essay Conc. Witchcraft, 1718, p. 118; 2nd ed. 1720, p. 151.?

141 Cp. Whewell, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. 1862, p. 33.?

142 Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, 1889, pref. p. vi; Rev. Dr. Duff, Hist. of Old Test. Criticism, R. P. A. 1910, p. 113.?

143 This appears again, much curtailed and “so altered as to be in a manner new,” in its author’s collected Essays on Several Important Subjects in Religion and Philosophy (1676), under the title Against Confidence in Philosophy.?

144 See the Humane Nature (1640), ch. iv, §§ 7–9.?

145 Scepsis Scientifica, ch. 23, § 1.?

146 See the passages compared by Lewes, History of Philosophy, 4th ed. ii, 338.?

147 In his Blow at Modern Sadducism (4th ed. 1668), Sadducismus Triumphatus (1681; 3rd ed. 1689), and A Whip to the Droll, Fidler to the Atheist (1688—a letter to Henry More, who was zealous on the same lines). These works seem to have been much more widely circulated than the Scepsis Scientifica.?

148 Scepsis, ch. 20, § 3.?

149 See Glanvill’s reply in a letter to a friend (1665), re-written as Essay II, Of Scepticism and Certainty: in A short Reply to the learned Mr. Thomas White in his collected Essays on Several Important Subjects, 1676.?

150 See the reply in Plus Ultra: or, the Progress and Advancement of Knowledge since the days of Aristotle, 1668, Epist. Ded. Pref. ch. xviii, and Conclusion. [The re-written treatise, in the collected Essays, eliminates the controversial matter.]?

151 First printed with Glanvill’s Philosophia Pia in 1671. Rep. as an essay in the collected Essays.?

152 Owen, pref. to Scepsis, pp. xx–xxii.?

153 Owen, pref. to ed. of Scepsis Scientifica, p. ix.?

154 Of whom, however, a high medical authority declares that, “as a physiologist, he was sunk in realism” (that is, metaphysical apriorism). Prof. T. Clifford Allbutt, Harveian Oration on Science and Medieval Thought, 1901, p. 44.?

155 Cp. Whewell, as last cited, pp. 75–83; Hallam, Literature of Europe, iv, 159–71.?

156 Reid, Intellectual Powers, Essay I, ch. i; Hamilton’s ed. of Works, p. 226. Glanvill calls Gassendi “that noble wit.” (Scepsis Scientifica, Owen’s ed. p. 151.)?

157 Poet. Works of Milton, 1874, Introd. i, 92 sq.?

158 Scepsis Scientifica, Owen’s ed. p. 66. In the condensed version of the treatise in Glanvill’s collected Essays (1676, p. 20), the language is to the same effect.?

159 J. J. Tayler, Retrospect of the Religious Life of England, Martineau’s ed. p. 204; Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography, iii, 152–53.?

160 Cp. Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 347–51; 1-vol. ed. pp. 196–99.?

161 Tayler, Retrospect, pp. 204–205; Wallace, iii, 154–56.?

162 GangrÆna, pt. i, p. 38.?

163 Tayler, p. 221. As to Biddle, the chief propagandist of the sect, see pp. 221–24, and Wallace, Art. 285.?

164 Macaulay, Essay on Milton. Cp. Brown’s ed. (Clarendon Press) of the poems of Milton, ii, 30.?

165 Cp. Dynamics of Religion, ch. v.?

166 Of Education, § 136.?

167 Essay, bk. iv, ch. xix. § 4.?

168 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, c. 15.?

169 Third Letter to the Bishop of Worcester.?

170 Some Familiar Letters between Mr. Locke and Several of his Friends, 1708, pp. 302–304.?

171 Fox Bourne, Life of Locke, 1876, ii, 34.?

172 The first Letter, written while he was hiding in Holland in 1685, was in Latin, but was translated into French, Dutch, and English.?

173 Mr. Fox Bourne, in his biography (ii, 41), apologizes for the lapse, so alien to his own ideals, by the remark that “the atheism then in vogue was of a very violent and rampant sort.” It is to be feared that this palliation will not hold good—at least, the present writer has been unable to trace the atheism in question. For “atheism” we had better read “religion.”?

174 Second Vindication of “The Reasonableness of Christianity,” 1697, pref.?

175 Fox Bourne, Life of Locke, ii, 181.?

176 Son of the Presbyterian author of the famous GangrÆna.?

177 Said by Carrol, Dissertation on Mr. Lock’s Essay, 1706, cited by Anthony Collins, Essay Concerning the Use of Reason, 1709, p. 30.?

178 Cited by Fox Bourne, Life of Locke, ii, 438.?

179 Whose calibre may be gathered from his egregious doctoral thesis, Concio ad clerum de dÆmonum malorum existentia et natura (1700). After a list of the deniers of evil spirits, from the Sadducees and Sallustius to Bekker and Van Dale, he addresses to his “dilectissimi in Christo fratres” the exordium: “En, Academici, veteres ac hodiernos SadducÆos! quibuscum tota Atheorum cohors amicissimÈ congruit; nam qui divinum numen, iidem ipsi infernales spiritus acriter negant.”?

180 Confutation of Warburton (1757) in Extracts from Law’s Works, 1768, i, 208–209.?

181 Cp. the Essay, bk. i, ch. iii, § 6, with Law’s Case of Reason, in Extracts, as cited, p. 36.?

182 Cp. Dynamics of Religion, p. 122.?

183 Fox Bourne, ii, 404–405.?

184 An ostensibly orthodox Professor of our own day has written that Locke’s doctrine as to religion and ethics “shows at once the sincerity of his religious convictions and the inadequate conception he had formed to himself of the grounds and nature of moral philosophy” (Fowler, Locke, 1880, p. 76).?

185 Burnet, History of his Own Time, ed. 1838, p. 251. Burnet adds that Temple “was a corrupter of all that came near him.” The 1838 editor protests against the whole attack as the “most unfair and exaggerated” of Burnet’s portraits; and a writer in The Present State of the Republick of Letters, Jan., 1736, p. 26, carries the defence to claiming orthodoxy for Temple. But the whole cast of his thought is deistic. Cp. the Essay upon the Origin and Nature of Government, and ch. v of the Observations upon the United Provinces (Works, ed. 1770, i, 29, 36, 170–74).?

186 Cp. Macaulay, History, ch. ii. Student’s ed. i, 120.?

187 Compare his Advice to a Daughter, § 1 (in Miscellanies, 1700), and his Political Thoughts and Reflections: Religion.?

188 See Macaulay, ch. xx. Student’s ed. ii, 459.?

189 De Morgan, as cited, p. 107.?

190 See Brewster, ii, 318, 321–22, 323, 331 sq., 342 sq.?

191 Id. p. 327 sq.?

192 Id. p. 115.?

193 Cp. De Morgan, pp. 133–45.?

194 Four Letters from Sir Isaac Newton to Dr. Bentley, ed. 1756, p. 25. Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 97–102.?

195 Brewster, ii, 314.?

196 Id. pp. 315–16.?

197 Id. pp. 342–46.?

198 Brewster, p. 349. See the remaining articles, and App. XXX, p. 532.?

199 Id. p. 388.?

200 Discourse on Tillotson and Burnet, pp. 38, 40, 74, cited by Collins, Discourse of Freethinking, 1713, pp. 171–72.?

201 The Brief Notes on the Creed of St. Athanasius (author unknown), printed by Thomas Firmin. Late in 1693 appeared another antitrinitarian tract, by William Freke, who was prosecuted, fined £500, and ordered to make a recantation in the Four Courts of Westminster Hall. The book was burnt by the hangman. Wallace, Art. 354. There had also been “two quarto volumes of tracts in support of Unitarianism,” published in 1691 (Dr. W. H. Drummond, An Explanation and Defence of the Principles of Protestant Dissent, 1842, p. 17).?

202 “Locke’s ribald schoolfellow of nearly fifty years ago” (Fox Bourne, ii, 405).?

203 Id. ib.?

204 Tayler, Retrospect, p. 226; Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography, i, 160–69.?

205 Fox Bourne, ii, 405; Wallace, art. 353.?

206 Above, pp. 35–36.?

207 Nelson’s Life of Bishop Bull, 2nd ed. 1714, p. 398.?

208 “Perhaps at no period was the Unitarian controversy so actively carried on in England as between 1690 and 1720.” History, Opinions, etc., of the English Presbyterians, 1834, p. 22.?

209 Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 113–15—Tayler, Retrospect, p. 227.?

210 As to whom see Tayler, Retrospect, ch. v. § 4. They are spoken of as “the new sect of Latitude-Men” in 1662; and in 1708 are said to be “at this day Low Churchmen.” See A Brief Account of the New Sect of Latitude-Men, by “S. P.” of Cambridge, 1662, reprinted in The Phenix, vol. ii, 1708. and pref. to that vol. From “S. P.’s” account it is clear that they connected with the new scientific movement, and leant to Cartesianism. As above noted, they included such prelates as Wilkins and Tillotson. The work of E. A. George, Seventeenth Century Men of Latitude (1908), deals with Hales, Chillingworth, Whichcote, H. More, Taylor, Browne, and Baxter.?

211 Toulmin, Histor. View of the Prot. Dissenters, 1814, p. 270. A main ground of the offence taken was a somewhat trivial dialogue in Burnet’s book between Eve and the serpent, indicating the “popular” character of the tale. This was omitted from a Dutch edition at the author’s request, and from the 3rd ed. 1733 (Toulmin, as cited). It is given in the partial translation in Blount’s Oracles of Reason.?

212 See Brewster’s Memoirs of Newton, 1855, ii, 315–16, for a letter indicating Craig’s religious attitude. He contributed to Dr. George Cheyne’s Philosophical Principles of Religion, Natural and Revealed, 1705. (Pref. to pt. i, ed. 1725.)?

213 See the note of Pope and Warburton on the Dunciad, iv, 462.?

214 See arts. in Dict. of Nat. Biog.?

215 Reprinted at Amsterdam, 1712.?

216 Essays as cited, p. 84.?

217 Id. p. 30.?

218 See Christianity not Founded on Argument (by Henry Dodwell, jr.), 1741, pp. 11, 34. Waterland, as cited by Bishop Hurst, treats the terms Reasonist and Rationalist as labels or nicknames of those who untruly profess to reason more scrupulously than other people. The former term may, however, have been set up as a result of Le Clerc’s rendering of “the Logos,” in John i, 1, by “Reason”—an argument to which Waterland repeatedly refers.?