Holland, so notable for relative hospitality to freethinking in the seventeenth century, continued to exhibit it in the eighteenth, though without putting forth much native response. After her desperate wars with Louis XIV, the Dutch State, now monarchically ruled, turned on the intellectual side rather to imitative belles lettres than to the problems which had begun to exercise so much of English thought. It was an age of “retrogression and weakness.”1 Elizabeth Wolff, nÉe Bekker, one of the most famous of the numerous Dutch women-writers of the century (1738–1804), is notable for her religious as well as for her political liberalism;2 but her main activity was in novel-writing; and there are few other signs of freethinking tendencies in popular Dutch culture. It was impossible, however, that the influences at work in the neighbouring lands should be shut out; and if Holland did not produce innovating books she printed many throughout the century.

In 1708 there was published at Amsterdam a work under the pseudonym of “Juan di Posos,” wherein, by way of a relation of imaginary travels, something like atheism was said to be taught; but the pastor Leenhof had in 1703 been accused of atheism for his treatise, Heaven on Earth, which was at most Spinozistic.3 Even as late as 1714 a Spinozist shoemaker, Booms, was banished for his writings; but henceforth liberal influences, largely traceable to the works of Bayle, begin to predominate. Welcomed by students everywhere, Bayle must have made powerfully for tolerance and rationalism in his adopted country, which after his time became a centre of culture for the States of northern Europe rather than a source of original works. Holland in the eighteenth century was receptive alike of French and English thought and literature, especially the former;4 and, besides reprinting many of the French deists’ works and translating some of the English, the Dutch cities harboured such heretics as the Italian Alberto Radicati, Count Passerano, who, dying at Rotterdam in 1736, left a collection of deistic treatises of a strongly freethinking cast to be posthumously published.

The German traveller Alberti,5 citing the London Magazine, 1732, states that Passerano visited England and published works in English through a translator, Joseph Morgan, and that both were sentenced to imprisonment. This presumably refers to his anonymous Philosophical Dissertation upon Death, “by a friend to truth,” published in English in 1732.6 It is a remarkable treatise, being a hardy justification of suicide, “composed for the consolation of the unhappy,” from a practically atheistic standpoint. Two years earlier he had published in English, also anonymously, a tract entitled Christianity set in a True Light, by a Pagan Philosopher newly converted; and it may be that the startling nature of the second pamphlet elicited a prosecution which included both. The pamphlet of 1730, however, is a eulogy of the ethic of Jesus, who is deistically treated as a simple man, but with all the amenity which the deists usually brought to bear on that theme. Passerano’s Recueil des piÈces curieuses sur les matiÈres les plus interessants, published with his name at Rotterdam in 1736,7 includes a translation of Swift’s ironical Project concerning babies, and an Histoire abregÉe de la profession sacerdotale, which was published in a separate English translation.8 Passerano is noticeable chiefly for the relative thoroughness of his rationalism.9 In the Recueil he speaks of deists and atheists as being the same, those called atheists having always admitted a first cause under the names God, Nature, Eternal Germs, movement, or universal soul.10

The currency given in Holland to such literature tells of growing liberality of thought as well as of political freedom. But the conditions were not favourable to such general literary activity as prevailed in the larger States, though good work was done in medicine and the natural sciences. Not till the nineteenth century did Dutch scholars again give a lead to Europe in religious thought.

1. Traces of new rationalistic life are to be seen in the Scandinavian countries at least as early as the times of Descartes. There, as elsewhere, the Reformation had been substantially a fiscal or economic revolution, proceeding on various lines. In Denmark the movement, favoured by the king, began among the people; the nobility rapidly following, to their own great profit; and finally Christian III, who ruled both Denmark and Norway, acting with the nobles, suppressed Catholic worship, and confiscated to the crown the “castles, fortresses, and vast domains of the prelates.”11 In Sweden the king, Gustavus Vasa, took the initiative, moved by sore need of funds, and a thoroughly anti-ecclesiastical temper,12 the clergy having supported the Danish rule which he threw off. The burghers and peasants promptly joined him against the clergy and nobles, enabling him to confiscate the bishops’ castles and estates, as was done in Denmark; and he finally secured himself with the nobles by letting them reclaim lands granted by their ancestors to monasteries.13 His anti-feudal reforms having stimulated new life in many ways, further evolution followed.

In Sweden the stimulative reign of Gustavus Vasa was followed by a long period of the strife which everywhere trod on the heels of the Reformation. The second successor of Gustavus, his son John, had married a daughter of the Catholic Sigismund of Poland, and sought to restore her religion to power, causing much turmoil until her death, whereafter he abandoned the cause. His Catholic son Sigismund recklessly renewed the effort, and was deposed in consequence; John’s brother Charles becoming king. In Denmark, meanwhile, Frederick II (d. 1588) had been a bigoted champion of Lutheranism, expelling a professor of Calvinistic leanings on the Eucharist, and refusing a landing to the Calvinists who fled from the Netherlands. On the other hand he patronized and pensioned Tycho BrahÉ, who, until driven into banishment by a court cabal during the minority of Christian IV, did much for astronomy, though unable to accept Copernicanism.

In 1611 there broke out between Sweden and Denmark the sanguinary two-years’ “War of Calmar,” their common religion availing nothing to avert strife. Thereafter Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, as Protestant champion in the Thirty Years’ War, in succession to Christian IV of Denmark, fills the eye of Europe till his death in 1632; eleven years after which event Sweden and Denmark were again at war. In 1660 the latter country, for lack of goodwill between nobles and commoners, underwent a political revolution whereby its king, whose predecessors had held the crown on an elective tenure, became absolute, and set up a hereditary line. The first result was a marked intellectual stagnation. “Divinity, law, and philosophy were wholly neglected; surgery was practised only by barbers; and when Frederick IV and his queen required medical aid, no native physician could be found to whom it was deemed safe to entrust the cure of the royal patients.... The only name, after Tycho BrahÉ, of which astronomy can boast, is that of Peter Horrebow, and with him the cultivation of the science became extinct.”14

2. For long, the only personality making powerfully for culture was Holberg,15 certainly a host in himself. Of all the writers of his age, the only one who can be compared with him in versatility of power is Voltaire, whom he emulated as satirist, dramatist, and historian; but all his dramatic genius could not avail to sustain against the puritanical pietism which then flourished, the Danish drama of which he was the fecund creator. After producing a brilliant series of plays (1722–1727) he had to witness the closing of the Copenhagen Theatre, and take to general writing, historical and didactic. In 1741 he produced in Latin his famous Subterranean Journey of Nicolas Klimius,16 one of the most widely famous performances of its age.17 He knew English, and must have been influenced by Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which his story frequently recalls. The hero catastrophically reaches a “subterranean” planet, with another social system, and peopled by moving trees and civilized and socialized animals. With the tree-people, the Potuans, the tale deals at some length, giving a chapter on their religion,18 after the manner of Tyssot de Patot in Jacques MassÉ. They are simple deists, knowing nothing of Christianity; and the author makes them the mouthpieces of criticisms upon Christian prayers, Te Deums, and hymn-singing in general. They believe in future recompenses, but not in providential government of this life; and at various points they improve upon the current ethic of Christendom.19

There is a trace of the tone of Frederick alike in the eulogy of tolerance and in the intimation that anyone who disputes about the character of the deity and the properties of spirits or souls is “condemned to phlebotomy” and to be detained in the general hospital (nosocomium).20 It was probably by way of precaution that in the closing paragraph of the chapter the Potuans are alleged to maintain that, though their creed “seemed mere natural religion, it was all revealed in a book which was sent from the sky some centuries ago”; but the precaution is slight, as they are declared to have practically no dogmas at all. It is thus easy to read between the lines of the declaration of Potuan orthodoxy: “Formerly our ancestors contented themselves to live in natural religion alone; but experience has shown that the mere light of nature does not suffice, and that its precepts are effaced in time by the sloth and negligence of some and the philosophic subtleties of others, so that nothing can arrest freethinking (libertatem cogitandi) or keep it within just bounds. Thence came depravation; and therefore it was that God had chosen to give them a written law.”21 Such a confutation of “the error of those who pretend that a revelation is unnecessary” must have given more entertainment to those in question than satisfaction to the defenders of the faith. But a general tone of levity and satire, maintained at the expense of various European nations, England included,22 together with his popularity as a dramatist, saved Holberg from the imputation of heresy. His satire reached and was realized by the cultured few alone: the multitude was quite unaffected; and during the reign of Christian VI all intellectual efforts beyond the reign of science were subjected to rigorous control.23 As a culture force, Protestantism had failed in the north lands as completely as Catholicism in the south.

3. In Sweden, meantime, there had occurred some reflex of the intellectual renascence. Towards the middle of the seventeenth century there are increasing traces of rationalism at the court of the famous Christina, who already in her youth is found much interested in the objections of “Jews, heathens, and philosophers against Christian doctrine”;24 and her invitation of Descartes to her court (1649) implies that Sweden had been not a little affected by the revulsion of popular thought which followed on the Thirty Years’ War in Germany. Christina herself, however, was a remarkable personality, unfeminine, strong-willed, with a vigorous but immature intelligence; and she did much of her early skeptical thinking for herself. In the course of a few years, the new spirit had gone so far as to make church-going matter for open scoffing at the Swedish court;25 and the Queen’s adoption of Romanism, for which she prepared by abdicating the crown, appears to have been by way of revulsion from a state of mind approaching atheism, to which she had been led by her freethinking French physician, Bourdelot, after Descartes’s death.26 It has been confidently asserted that she really cared for neither creed, and embraced Catholicism only by way of conformity for social purposes, retaining her freethinking views.27 It is certain that she was always unhappy in her Swedish surroundings. But her course may more reasonably be explained as that of a mind which could not rest in deism or face atheism, and sought in Catholicism the sense of anchorage which is craved by temperaments ill-framed for the discipline of reason. The author of the Histoire des intrigues galantes de la reine Christine de SuÈde (1697), who seems to have been one of her suite, insists that while she “loved bigots no more than atheists,”28 and although her religion had been shaken in her youth by Bourdelot and other freethinkers, she was regular in all Catholic observances; and that once, looking at the portrait of her father, she said he had failed to provide for the safety of his soul, and thanked God for having guided her aright.29

Her annotations of Descartes are of little importance; but it is noteworthy that she accorded to his orthodox adherents a declaration that he had “greatly contributed” to her “glorious conversion” to the Catholic faith.30 Whatever favour she may have shown to liberty of thought in her youth, no important literary results could follow in the then state of Swedish culture, when the studies at even the new colleges were mainly confined to Latin and theology.31 The German Pufendorf, indeed, by his treatises On the Law of Nature and Nations and On the Duty of Man and Citizen (published at Lund, where he was professor, in 1672–73), did much to establish the utilitarian and naturalistic tendency in ethics which was at work at the same time in England; but his latent deism had no great influence even in Germany, his Scripture-citing orthodoxy countervailing it, although he argued for a separation of Church and State.32

4. That there was, however, in eighteenth-century Sweden a considerable amount of unpublished rationalism may be gathered from the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, himself something of a freethinker in his very supernaturalism. His frequent subacid allusions to those who “regarded Nature instead of the divine,” and “thought from science,”33 tell not merely of much passive opposition to his own prophetic claims (which he avenged by much serene malediction and the allotment of bad quarters in the next world), but of reasoned rejection of all Scriptural claims. Thus in his Sapientia Angelica de Divina Providentia34 (1764) he sets himself35 to deal with a number of the ways in which “the merely natural man confirms himself in favour of Nature against God” and “comes to the conclusion that religion in itself is nothing, but yet that it is necessary because it serves as a restraint.” Among the sources of unbelief specified are ethical revolt alike against the Biblical narratives and against the lack of moral government in the world; the recognition of the success of other religions than the Christian, and of the many heresies within that; and dissatisfaction with the Christian dogmas. As Swedenborg sojourned much in other countries, he may be describing men other than his countrymen; but it is very unlikely that the larger part of his intercourse with his fellows counted for nothing in this account of contemporary rationalism.

With his odd mixture of scripturalism and innovating dogmatism, Swedenborg disposes of difficulties about Genesis by reducing Adam and Eve to an allegory of the “Most Ancient Church,” tranquilly dismissing the orthodox belief by asking, “For who can suppose that the creation of the world could have been as there described?”36 His own scientific training, which had enabled him to make his notable anticipation of the nebular theory,37 made it also easy for him to reduce to allegory the text of what he nevertheless insisted on treating as a divine revelation; and his moral sense, active where he felt no perverting resentment of contradiction by reasoners,38 made him reject the orthodox doctrine of salvation by faith, even as he did the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. On these points he seems to have had a lead from his father, Bishop Jasper Svedberg,39 as he had in his overwhelming physiological bias to subjective vision-making. But a message which finally amounted to the oracular propounding of a new and bewildering supernaturalism, to be taken on authority like the old, could make for freethought only by rousing rational reaction. It was Swedenborg’s destiny to establish, in virtue of his great power of orderly dogmatism, a new supernaturalist and scripturalist sect, while his scientific conceptions were left for other men to develop. In his own country, in his own day, he had little success qua prophet, though always esteemed for his character and his high secular competence; and he finally figured rather as a heresiarch than otherwise.40

5. According to one of Swedenborg’s biographers, the worldliness of most of the Swedish clergy in the middle of the eighteenth century so far outwent even that of the English Church that the laity were left to themselves; while “gentlemen disdained the least taint of religion, and except on formal occasions would have been ashamed to be caught church-going.”41 But this was a matter rather of fashion than of freethought; and there is little trace of critical life in the period. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, doubtless, the aristocracies and the cultured class in the Scandinavian States were influenced like the rest of Europe by the spirit of French freethought,42 which everywhere followed the vogue of the French language and literature. Thus we find Gustavus III of Sweden, an ardent admirer of Voltaire, defending him in company, and proposing in 1770, before the death of his father prevented it, to make a pilgrimage to Ferney.43 It is without regard to this testimony that Gustavus, who was assassinated, is said to have died “with the fortitude and resignation of a Christian.”44 He was indeed flighty and changeable,45 and after growing up a Voltairean was turned for a year or two into a credulous mystic, the dupe of pseudo-Swedenborgian charlatans;46 but there is small sign of religious earnestness in his fashion of making his dying confession.47 Claiming at an earlier date to believe more than Joseph II, who in his opinion “believed in nothing at all,” he makes light of their joint parade of piety at Rome,48 and seems to have been at bottom a good deal of an indifferentist. During his reign his influence on literature fostered a measure of the spirit of freethought in belles lettres; and in the poets J. H. Kjellgren and J. M. Bellman (both d. 1795) there is to be seen the effect of the German AufklÄrung and the spirit of Voltaire.49 Their contemporary, Tomas Thoren, who called himself Torild (d. 1812), though more of an innovator in poetic style than in thought, wrote among other things a pamphlet on The Freedom of the General Intelligence. But Torild’s nickname, “the mad magister,” tells of his extravagance; and none of the Swedish belletrists of that age amounted to a European influence. Finally, in the calamitous period which followed on the assassination of Gustavus III, all Swedish culture sank heavily. The desperate energies of Charles XII had left his country half-ruined in 1718; and even while LinnÆus and his pupils were building up the modern science of botany in the latter half of the century the economic exhaustion of the people was a check on general culture. The University of Upsala, which at one time had over 2,000 students, counted only some 500 at the close of the eighteenth century.50

6. In Denmark, on the other hand, the stagnation of nearly a hundred years had been ended at the accession of Frederick V in 1746.51 National literature, revivified by Holberg, was further advanced by the establishment of a society of polite learning in 1763; under Frederick’s auspices Danish naturalists and scholars were sent abroad for study; and in particular a literary expedition was sent to Arabia. The European movement of science, in short, had gripped the little kingdom, and the usual intellectual results began to follow, though, as in Catholic Spain, the forces of reaction soon rallied against a movement which had been imposed from above rather than evolved from within.

The most celebrated northern unbeliever of the French period was Count Struensee, who for some years (1770–72) virtually ruled Denmark as the favourite of the young queen, the king being half-witted and worthless. Struensee was an energetic and capable though injudicious reformer: he abolished torture; emancipated the enslaved peasantry; secured toleration for all sects; encouraged the arts and industry; established freedom of the press; and reformed the finances, the police, the law courts, and sanitation.52 His very reforms, being made with headlong rapidity, made his position untenable, and his enemies soon effected his downfall and death. The young queen, who was not alleged to have been a freethinker, was savagely seized by the hostile faction and put on her trial on a charge of adultery, which being wholly unproved, the aristocratic faction proposed to try her on a charge of drugging her husband. Only by the efforts of the British court was she saved from imprisonment for life in a fortress, and sent to Hanover, where, three years later, she died. She too was a reformer, and it was on that score that she was hated by the nobles.53 Both she and Struensee, in short, were the victims of a violent political reaction. There is an elaborate account of Struensee’s conversion to Christianity in prison by the German Dr. Munter,54 which makes him out by his own confession an excessive voluptuary. It is an extremely suspicious document, exhibiting strong political bias, and giving Struensee no credit for reforms; the apparent assumption being that the conversion of a reprobate was of more evidential value than that of a reputable and reflective type.

In spite of the reaction, rationalism persisted among the cultured class. Mary Wollstonecraft, visiting Denmark in 1795, noted that there and in Norway the press was free, and that new French publications were translated and freely discussed. The press had in fact been freed by Struensee, and was left free by his enemies because of the facilities it had given them to attack him.55 “On the subject of religion,” she added, “they are likewise becoming tolerant, at least, and perhaps have advanced a step further in freethinking. One writer has ventured to deny the divinity of Jesus Christ, and to question the necessity or utility of the Christian system, without being considered universally as a monster, which would have been the case a few years ago.”56 She likewise noted that there was in Norway very little of the fanaticism she had seen gaining ground, on Wesleyan lines, in England.57 But though the Danes had “translated many German works on education,” they had “not adopted any of their plans”; there were few schools, and those not good. Norway, again, had been kept without a university under Danish rule; and not until one was established at Christiania in 1811 could Norwegian faculty play its part in the intellectual life of Europe. The reaction, accordingly, soon afterwards began to gain head. Already in 1790 “precautionary measures” had been attempted against the press;58 and, these being found inefficient, an edict was issued in 1799 enforcing penalties against all anonymous writers—a plan which of course struck at the publishers. But the great geographer, Malte-Brun, was exiled, as were Heiberg, the dramatic poet, and others; and again there was “a temporary stagnation in literature,” which, however, soon passed away in the nineteenth century. Meantime Sweden and Denmark had alike contributed vitally to the progress of European science; though neither had shared in the work of freethought as against dogma.

1. In Poland, where, as we saw, Unitarian heresy had spread considerably in the sixteenth century, positive atheism is heard of in 1688–89, when Count Liszinski (or Lyszczynski), among whose papers, it was said, had been found the written statement that there is no God, or that man had made God out of nothing, was denounced by the bishops of Posen and Kioff, tried, and found guilty of denying not only the existence of God but the doctrine of the Trinity and the Virgin Birth. After being tortured, beheaded, and burned, his ashes were scattered from a cannon.59 The first step was to tear out his tongue, “with which he had been cruel towards God”; the next to burn his hands at a slow fire. It is all told by Zulaski, the leading Inquisitionist.60 But even had a less murderous treatment been meted out to such heresy, anarchic Poland, ridden by Jesuits, was in no state to develop a rationalistic literature. The old king, John Sobieski, made no attempt to stop the execution, though he is credited with a philosophical habit of mind, and with reprimanding the clergy for not admitting modern philosophy in the universities and schools.61

2. In Russia the possibilities of modern freethought emerge only in the seventeenth century, when Muscovy was struggling out of Byzantine barbarism. The late-recovered treasure of ancient folk-poesy, partly preserved by chance among the northern peasantry, tells of the complete rupture wrought in the racial life by the imposition of Byzantine Christianity from the south. As early as the fourteenth century the Strigolniks, who abounded at Novgorod, had held strongly by anti-ecclesiastical doctrines of the Paulician and Lollard type;62 but orthodox fanaticism ruled life in general down to the age of Peter the Great. In the sixteenth century we find the usual symptom of criticism of the lives of the monks;63 but the culture was almost wholly ecclesiastical; and in the seventeenth century the effort of the turbulent Patriarch Nikon (1605–1681), to correct the corrupt sacred texts and the traditional heterodox practices, was furiously resisted, to the point of a great schism.64 He himself had violently denounced other innovations, destroying pictures and an organ in the manner of Savonarola; but his own elementary reforms were found intolerable by the orthodox,65 though they were favoured by Sophia, the able and ambitious sister of Peter.66 The priest Kriezanitch (1617–1678), who wrote a work on “The Russian Empire in the second half of the Seventeenth Century,” denounced researches in physical science as “devilish heresies”;67 and it is on record that scholars were obliged to study in secret and by night for fear of the hostility of the common people.68 Half-a-century later the orthodox majority seems to have remained convinced of the atheistic tendency of all science;69 and the friends of the new light doubtless included deists from the first. Not till the reforms of Peter had begun to bear fruit, however, could freethought raise its head. The great Czar, who promoted printing and literature as he did every other new activity of a practical kind, took the singular step of actually withdrawing writing materials from the monks, whose influence he held to be wholly reactionary.70 In 1703 appeared the first Russian journal; and in 1724 Peter founded the first Academy of Sciences, enjoining upon it the study of languages and the production of translations. Now began the era of foreign culture and translations from the French.71 Prince Kantemir, the satirist, who was with the Russian embassy in London in 1733, pronounced England, then at the height of the deistic tide, “the most civilized and enlightened of European nations.”72 The fact that he translated Fontenelle on The Plurality of Worlds tells further of his liberalism.73 Gradually there arose a new secular faction, under Western influences; and other forms of culture slowly advanced likewise, notably under Elisabeth Petrovna. At length, in the reign of Catherine II, called the Great, French ideas, already heralded by belles lettres, found comparatively free headway. She herself was a deist, and a satirist of bigots in her comedies;74 she accomplished what Peter had planned, the secularization of Church property;75 and she was long the admiring correspondent of Voltaire, to whom and to D’Alembert and Diderot she offered warm invitations to reside at her court. Diderot alone accepted, and him she specially befriended, buying his library when he was fain to sell it, and constituting him its salaried keeper. In no country, not excepting England, was there more of practical freedom than in Russia under her rule;76 and if after the outbreak of the Revolution she turned political persecutor, she was still not below the English level. Her half-crazy son Paul II, whom she had given cause to hate her, undid her work wherever he could. But neither her reaction nor his rule could eradicate the movement of thought begun in the educated classes; though in Russia, as in the Scandinavian States, it was not till the nineteenth century that original serious literature flourished.

1. Returning to Italy, no longer the leader of European thought, but still full of veiled freethinking, we find in the seventeenth century the proof that no amount of such predisposition can countervail thoroughly bad political conditions. Ground down by the matchless misrule of Spain, from which the conspiracy of the monk Campanella vainly sought to free her, and by the kindred tyranny of the papacy, Italy could produce in its educated class, save for the men of science and the students of economics, only triflers, whose unbelief was of a piece with their cynicism. While Naples and the south decayed, mental energy had for a time flourished in Tuscany, where, under the grand dukes from Ferdinando I onwards, industry and commerce had revived; and even after a time of retrogression Ferdinando II encouraged science, now made newly glorious by the names of Galileo and Torricelli. But again there was a relapse; and at the end of the century, under a bigoted duke, Florence was priest-ridden and, at least in outward seeming, gloomily superstitious; while, save for the better conditions secured at Naples under the viceroyalty of the Marquis of Carpi,77 the rest of Italy was cynically corrupt and intellectually superficial.78 Even in Naples, of course, enlightenment was restricted to the few. Burnet observes that “there are societies of men at Naples of freer thoughts than can be found in any other place of Italy”; and he admits a general tendency of intelligent Italians to recoil from Christianity by reason of Catholic corruption. But at the same time he insists that, though the laity speak with scorn of the clergy, “yet they are masters of the spirits of the people.”79 Yet it only needed the breathing time and the improved conditions under the Bourbon rule in the eighteenth century to set up a wonderful intellectual revival.

2. First came the great work of Vico, the Principles of a New Science (1725), whereof the originality and the depth—qualities in which, despite its incoherences, it on the whole excels Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws—place him among the great freethinkers in philosophy. It was significant of much that Vico’s book, while constantly using the vocabulary of faith, grappled with the science of human development in an essentially secular and scientific spirit. This is the note of the whole eighteenth century in Italy.80 Vico posits Deity and Providence, but proceeds nevertheless to study the laws of civilization inductively from its phenomena. He permanently obscured his case, indeed, by insisting on putting it theologically, and condemning Grotius and others for separating the idea of law from that of religion. Only in a pantheistic sense has Vico’s formula any validity; and he never avows a pantheistic view, refusing even to go with Grotius in allowing that Hebrew law was akin to that of other nations. But a rationalistic view, had he put it, would have been barred. The wonder is, in the circumstances, not that he makes so much parade of religion, but that he could venture to undermine so vitally its pretensions, especially after he had found it prudent to renounce the project of annotating the great work of Grotius, De Jure Belli et Pacis, on the score that (as he puts it in his Autobiography) a good Catholic must not endorse a heretic.

3. It is noteworthy, indeed, that the “New Science,” as Vico boasted, arose in the Catholic and not in the Protestant world. We might say that, genius apart, the reason was that the energy which elsewhere ran to criticism of religion as such had in Catholic Italy to take other channels. By attacking a Protestant position which was really less deeply heterodox than his own, Vico secured Catholic currency for a philosopheme which on its own merits Catholic theologians would have scouted as atheism. As it was, Vico’s sociology aroused on the one hand new rationalistic speculation as to the origin of civilization, and on the other orthodox protest on the score of its fundamentally anti-Biblical character. It was thus attacked in 1749 by Damiano Romano, and later by Finetti, a professor at Padua, Àpropos of the propaganda raised by Vico’s followers as to the animal origin of the human race. This began with Vico’s disciple, Emmanuele Duni, a professor at Rome, who published a series of sociological essays in 1763. Thenceforth for many years there raged, “under the eyes of Pope and cardinals,” an Italian debate between the Ferini and Antiferini, the affirmers and deniers of the animal origin of man, the latter of course taking up their ground on the Bible, from which Finetti drew twenty-three objections to Vico.81 Duni found it prudent to declare that he had “no intention of discussing the origin of the world, still less that of the Hebrew nation, but solely that of the Gentile nations”; but even when thus limited the debate set up far-reaching disturbance. At this stage Italian sociology doubtless owed something to Montesquieu and Rousseau; but the fact remains that the Scienza Nuova was a book “truly Italian; Italian par excellence.”82 It was Vico, too, who led the way in the critical handling of early Roman history, taken up later by Beaufort, and still later by Niebuhr; and it was he who began the scientific analysis of Homer, followed up later by F. A. Wolf.83 By a fortunate coincidence, the papal chair was held at the middle of the century (1740–1758) by the most learned, tolerant, and judicious of modern popes, Benedict XIV,84 whose influence was used for political peace in Europe and for toleration in Italy; and whom we shall find, like Clement XIV, on friendly terms with a freethinker. In the same age Muratori and Giannone amassed their unequalled historical learning; and a whole series of Italian writers broke new ground on the field of social science, Italy having led the way in this as formerly in philosophy and physics.85 The Hanoverian Dr. G. W. Alberti, of Italian descent, writes in 1752 that “Italy is full of atheists”;86 and Grimm, writing in 1765, records that according to capable observers the effect of the French freethinking literature in the past thirty years had been immense, especially in Tuscany.87

4. Between 1737 and 1798 may be counted twenty-eight Italian writers on political economy; and among them was one, Cesare Beccaria, who on another theme produced perhaps the most practically influential single book of the eighteenth century,88 the treatise on Crimes and Punishments (1764), which affected penal methods for the better throughout the whole of Europe. Even were he not known to be a deist, his strictly secular and rationalist method would have brought upon him priestly suspicion; and he had in fact to defend himself against pertinacious and unscrupulous attacks,89 though he had sought in his book to guard himself by occasionally “veiling the truth in clouds.”90 As we have seen, Beccaria owed his intellectual awakening first to Montesquieu and above all to HelvÉtius—another testimony to the reformative virtue of all freethought.

Of the aforesaid eight-and-twenty writers on economics, probably the majority were freethinkers. Among them, at all events, were Count Algarotti (1712–1764), the distinguished Æsthetician, one of the group round Frederick at Berlin and author of Il Newtonianismo per le dame (1737); Filangieri, whose work on legislation (put on the Index by the papacy) won the high praise of Franklin; the Neapolitan abbate Ferdinando Galiani, one of the brightest and soundest wits in the circle of the French philosophes; the other Neapolitan abbate Antonio Genovesi (1712–1769), the “redeemer of the Italian mind,”91 and the chief establisher of economic science for modern Italy.92 To these names may be added those of Alfieri, one of the strongest anti-clericalists of his age; Bettinelli, the correspondent of Voltaire and author of The Resurrection of Italy (1775); Count Dandolo, author of a French work on The New Men (1799); and the learned Giannone, author of the great anti-papal History of the Kingdom of Naples (1723), who, after more than one narrow escape, was thrown in prison by the king of Sardinia, and died there (1748) after twelve years’ confinement.

To the merits of Algarotti and Genovesi there are high contemporary testimonies. Algarotti was on friendly terms with Cardinal Ganganelli, who in 1769 became Pope Clement XIV. In 1754 the latter writes93 him: “My dear Count, Contrive matters so, in spite of your philosophy, that I may see you in heaven; for I should be very sorry to lose sight of you for an eternity. You are one of those rare men, both for heart and understanding, whom we could wish to love even beyond the grave, when we have once had the advantage of knowing them. No one has more reasons to be convinced of the spirituality and immortality of the soul than you have. The years glide away for the philosophers as well as for the ignorant; and what is to be the term of them cannot but employ a man who thinks. Own that I can manage sermons so as not to frighten away a bel esprit; and that if every one delivered as short and as friendly sermons as I do, you would sometimes go to hear a preacher. But barely hearing will not do ... the amiable Algarotti must become as good a Christian as he is a philosopher: then should I doubly be his friend and servant.”94

In an earlier letter, Ganganelli writes: “The Pope [Benedict XIV] is ever great and entertaining for his bons mots. He was saying the other day that he had always loved you, and that it would give him very great pleasure to see you again. He speaks with admiration of the king of Prussia ... whose history will make one of the finest monuments of the eighteenth century. See here and acknowledge my generosity! For that prince makes the greatest jest possible of the Court of Rome, and of us monks and friars. Cardinal Querini will not be satisfied unless he have you with him for some time at Brescia. He one day told me that he would invite you to come and dedicate his library.... There is no harm in preaching to a philosopher who seldom goes to hear a sermon, and who will not have become a great saint by residing at Potsdam. You are there three men whose talents might be of great use to religion if you would change their direction—viz. Yourself, Mons. de Voltaire, and M. de Maupertuis. But that is not the ton of the age, and you are resolved to follow the fashion.”95 Ganganelli in his correspondence reveals himself as an admirer of Newton96 and somewhat averse to religious zeal.97 Of the papal government he admitted that it was favourable “neither to commerce, to agriculture, nor to population, which precisely constitute the essence of public felicity,” while suavely reminding the Englishman of the “inconveniences” of his own government.98 To the learned Muratori, who suffered at the hands of the bigots, he and Pope Benedict XIV gave their sympathy.99

But Ganganelli’s own thinking on the issues between reason and religion was entirely commonplace. “Whatever,” he wrote, “departs from the account given of the Creation in the book of Genesis has nothing to support it but paradoxes, or, at most, mere hypotheses. Moses alone, as being an inspired author, could perfectly acquaint us with the formation of the world, and the development of its parts.... Whoever does not see the truth in what Moses relates was never born to know it.”100 It was only in his relation to the bigots of his own Church that his thinking was rationalistic. “The Pope,” he writes to a French marquis, “relies on Providence; but God does not perform miracles every time he is asked to do it. Besides, is he to perform one that Rome may enjoy a right of seignory over the Duchy of Parma?”101 At his death an Italian wrote of him that “the distinction he was able to draw between dogmas or discipline and ultramontane opinions gave him the courage to take many opportunities of promoting the peace of the State.” His tolerance is sufficiently exhibited in one of his letters to Algarotti: “I hope that you will preach to me some of these days, so that each may have his turn.”102 Freethought had achieved something when a Roman Cardinal, a predestinate Pope, could so write to an avowed freethinker. Concerning Galiani we have the warm panegyric of Grimm. “If I have any vanity with which to reproach myself,” he writes, “it is that which I derive in spite of myself from the fact of the conformity of my ideas with those of the two rarest men whom I have the happiness to know, Galiani and Denis Diderot.”103 Grimm held Galiani to be of all men the best qualified to write a true ecclesiastical history. But the history that would have satisfied him and Grimm was not to be published in that age.

Italy, however, had done her full share, considering her heritage of burdens and hindrances, in the intellectual work of the century; and in the names of Galvani and Volta stands the record of one more of her great contributions to human enlightenment. Under Duke Leopold II of Tuscany the papacy was so far defied that books put on the Index were produced for him under the imprint of London;104 and the papacy itself at length gave way to the spirit of reform, Clement XIV consenting among other things to abolish the Order of Jesuits (1773), after his predecessor had died of grief over his proved impotence to resist the secular policy of the States around him.105 In Tuscany, indeed, the reaction against the French Revolution was instant and severe. Leopold succeeded his brother Joseph as emperor of Austria in 1790, but died in 1792; and in his realm, as was the case in Denmark and in Spain in the same century, the reforms imposed from above by a liberal sovereign were found to have left much traditionalism untouched. After 1792, Ferdinando III suspended some of his father’s most liberal edicts, amid the applause of the reactionaries; and in 1799, after the first short stay of the revolutionary French army, out of its one million inhabitants no fewer than 22,000 were prosecuted for “French opinions.”106 Certainly some of the “French opinions” were wild enough; for instance, the practice among ladies of dressing alla ghigliottina, with a red ribbon round the neck, a usage borrowed about 1795 from France.107 As Quinet sums up, the revolution was too strong a medicine for the Italy of that age. The young abbate Monti, the chief poet of the time, was a freethinker, but he alternated his strokes for freedom with unworthy compliances.108 Such was the dawn of the new Italian day that has since slowly but steadily broadened, albeit under many a cloud.

1. For the rest of Europe during the eighteenth century, we have to note only traces of receptive thought. Spain under Bourbon rule, as already noted, experienced an administrative renascence. Such men as Count Aranda (1718–99) and Aszo y del Rio (1742–1814) wrought to cut the claws of the Inquisition and to put down the Jesuits; but not yet, after the long work of destruction accomplished by the Church in the past, could Spain produce a fresh literature of any far-reaching power. When Aranda was about to be appointed in 1766, his friends the French EncyclopÉdistes prematurely proclaimed their exultation in the reforms he was to accomplish; and he sadly protested that they had thereby limited his possibilities.109 Nonetheless he wrought much, the power of the Inquisition in Spain being already on the wane. Dr. Joaquin Villanueva, one of the ecclesiastical statesmen who took part in its suppression by the Cortes at Cadiz in 1813, tells how, in his youth, under the reign of Charles III, it was a current saying among the students at college that while the clever ones could rise to important posts in the Church, or in the law, the blockheads would be sure to find places in the Inquisition.110 It was of course still powerful for social terrorism and minor persecution; but its power of taking life was rapidly dwindling. Between 1746 and 1759 it had burned only ten persons; from 1759 until 1781 it burned only four; thereafter none,111 the last case having provoked protests which testified to the moral change wrought in Europe by a generation of freethought.

In Spain too, as elsewhere, freethought had made way among the upper classes; and in 1773 we find the Duke d’Alba (formerly Huescar), ex-ambassador of Spain to France, subscribing eighty louis for a statue to Voltaire. “Condemned to cultivate my reason in secret,” he wrote to D’Alembert, “I see this opportunity to give a public testimony of my gratitude to and admiration for the great man who first showed me the way.”112

2. Still all freethinking in Spain ran immense risks, even under Charles III. The Spanish admiral Solano was denounced by his almoner to the Inquisition for having read Raynal, and had to demand pardon on his knees of the Inquisition and God.113 Aranda himself was from first to last four times arraigned before the Inquisition,114 escaping only by his prestige and power. So eminent a personage as P. A. J. OlavidÈs, known in France as the Count of Pilos (1726–1803), could not thus escape. He had been appointed by Charles III prefect of Seville, and had carried out for the king the great work of colonizing the Sierra Morena,115 of which region he was governor. At the height of his career, in 1776, he was arrested and imprisoned, “as suspected of professing impious sentiments, particularly those of Voltaire and Rousseau, with whom he had carried on a very intimate correspondence.” He had spoken unwarily to inhabitants of the new towns under his jurisdiction concerning the exterior worship of deity in Spain, the worship of images, the fast days, the cessation of work on holy days, the offerings at mass, and all the rest of the apparatus of popular Catholicism.116 OlavidÈs prudently confessed his error, declaring that he had “never lost his inner faith.” After two years’ detention he was forced to make his penance at a lesser auto da fÉ in presence of sixty persons of distinction, many of whom were suspected of holding similar opinions, and were thus grimly warned to keep their counsel. During four hours the reading of his process went on, and then came the sentence. He was condemned to pass eight years in a convent; to be banished forever from Madrid, Seville, Cordova, and the new towns of the Sierra Morena, and to lose all his property; he was pronounced incapable henceforth of holding any public employment or title of honour; and he was forbidden to mount a horse, to wear any ornament of gold, silver, pearls, diamonds, or other precious stones, or clothing of silk or fine linen. On hearing his sentence he fainted. Afterwards, on his knees, he received absolution. Escaping some time afterwards from his convent, he reached France. After some years more, he cynically produced a work entitled The Gospel Triumphant, or the Philosopher Converted, which availed to procure a repeal of his sentence; and he returned into favour.117 In his youth he “had not the talent to play the hypocrite.” In the end he mastered the art as few had done.

3. Another grandee, Don Christophe Ximenez de Gongora, Duke of Almodobar, published a free and expurgated translation of Raynal’s History of the Indies under another title;118 and though he put upon the book only an anagram of his name, he presented copies to the king. The inquisitors, learning as much, denounced him as “suspected of having embraced the systems of unbelieving philosophers”; but this time the prosecution broke down for lack of evidence.119 A similar escape was made by Don Joseph Nicholas d’Azara, who had been minister of foreign affairs, minister plenipotentiary of the king at Rome, and ambassador extraordinary at Paris, and was yet denounced at Saragossa and Madrid as an “unbelieving philosopher.”120 Count Ricla, minister of war under Charles III, was similarly charged, and similarly escaped for lack of proofs.121

4. In another case, a freethinking priest skilfully anticipated prosecution. Don Philip de Samaniego, “priest, archdeacon of Pampeluna, chevalier of the order of St. James, counsellor of the king and secretary-general, interpreter of foreign languages,” was one of those invited to assist at the auto da fÉ of OlavidÈs. The impression made upon him was so strong that he speedily prepared with his own hand a confession to the effect that he had read many forbidden books, such as those of Voltaire, Mirabeau, Rousseau, Hobbes, Spinoza, Montesquieu, Bayle, D’Alembert, and Diderot; and that he had been thus led into skepticism; but that after serious reflection he had resolved to attach himself firmly and forever to the Catholic faith, and now begged to be absolved. The sentence was memorable. He was ordered first to confirm his confession by oath; then to state how and from whom he had obtained the prohibited books, where they now were, with what persons he had talked on these matters, what persons had either refuted or adopted his views, and which of those persons had seemed to be aware of such doctrines in advance; such a detailed statement being the condition of his absolution. Samaniego obeyed, and produced a long declaration in which he incriminated nearly every enlightened man at the court, naming Aranda, the Duke of Almodobar, Ricla, and the minister Florida Blanca; also General Ricardos, Count of Truillas, General Massones, Count of Montalvo, ambassador at Paris and brother of the Duke of Sotomayor; and Counts Campomanes, Orreilly, and Lascy. Proceedings were begun against one and all; but the undertaking was too comprehensive, and the proofs were avowed to be insufficient.122 What became of Samaniego, history saith not. A namesake of his, Don Felix-Maria de Samaniego, one of the leading men of letters of the reign of Charles IV, was arraigned before the Inquisition of Logrogno as “suspected of having embraced the errors of modern philosophers and read prohibited books,” but contrived, through his friendship with the minister of justice, to arrange the matter privately.123

5. Out of a long series of other men of letters persecuted by the Inquisition for giving signs of enlightenment, a few cases are preserved by its historian, Llorente. Don Benedict Bails, professor of mathematics at Madrid and author of a school-book on the subject, was proceeded against in his old age, towards the end of the reign of Charles III, as suspected of “atheism and materialism.” He was ingenuous enough to confess that he had “had doubts on the existence of God and the immortality of the soul,” but that after serious reflection he was repentant and ready to abjure all his errors. He thus escaped, after an imprisonment. Don Louis Cagnuelo, advocate, was forced to abjure for having written against popular superstition and against monks in his journal The Censor, and was forbidden to write in future on any subject of religion or morals. F. P. Centeno, one of the leading critics of the reigns of Charles III and Charles IV, was an Augustinian monk; but his profession did not save him from the Inquisition when he made enemies by his satirical criticisms, though he was patronized by the minister Florida Blanca. To make quite sure, he was accused at once of atheism and Lutheranism. He had in fact preached against ceremonialism, and as censor he had deleted from a catechism for the free schools of Madrid an article affirming the existence of the Limbo of children who had died unbaptized. Despite a most learned defence, he was condemned as “violently suspected of heresy” and forced to abjure, whereafter he went mad and in that state died.124

6. Another savant of the same period, Don Joseph de Clavijo y Faxardo, director of the natural history collection at Madrid, was in turn arraigned as having “adopted the anti-Christian principles of modern philosophy.” He had been the friend of Buffon and Voltaire at Paris, had admirably translated Buffon’s Natural History, with notes, and was naturally something of a deist and materialist. Having the protection of Aranda, he escaped with a secret penance and abjuration.125 Don Thomas Iriarte, chief of the archives in the ministry of foreign affairs, was likewise indicted towards the end of the reign of Charles III, as “suspected of anti-Christian philosophy,” and escaped with similarly light punishment.126

7. Still in the same reign, the Jesuit Francisco de Ista, author of an extremely popular satire against absurd preachers, the History of the famous preacher Fray Gerondif, published under the pseudonym of Don Francisco Lobon de Salazar—a kind of ecclesiastical Don Quixote—so infuriated the preaching monks that the Holy Office received “an almost infinite number of denunciations of the book.” Ista, however, was a Jesuit, and escaped, through the influence of his order, with a warning.127 Influence, indeed, could achieve almost anything in the Holy Office, whether for culprits or against the uninculpable. In 1796, Don Raymond de Salas, a professor at Salamanca, was actually prosecuted by the Inquisition of Madrid as being suspected of having adopted the principles of Voltaire, Rousseau, and other modern philosophers, he having read their works. The poor man proved that he had done so only in order to refute them, and produced the theses publicly maintained at Salamanca by his pupils as a result of his teachings. The prosecution was a pure work of personal enmity on the part of the Archbishop of Santiago (formerly bishop of Salamanca) and others, and Salas was acquitted, with the statement that he was entitled to reparation. Again and again did his enemies revive the case, despite repeated acquittals, he being all the while in durance, and at length he had to “abjure,” and was banished the capital. After a time the matter was forced on the attention of the Government, with the result that even Charles IV was asked by his ministers to ordain that henceforth the Inquisition should not arrest anyone without prior intimation to the king. At this stage, however, the intriguing archbishop successfully intervened, and the ancient machinery for the stifling of thought remained intact for the time.128

8. It is plain that the combined power of the Church, the orders, and the Inquisition, even under Charles III, had been substantially unimpaired, and rested on a broad foundation of popular fanaticism and ignorance. The Inquisition attacked not merely freethought but heresy of every kind, persecuting Jansenists and Molinists as of old it had persecuted Lutherans, only with less power of murder. That much the Bourbon kings and their ministers could accomplish, but no more. The trouble was that the enlightened administration of Charles III in Spain did not build up a valid popular education, the sole security for durable rationalism. Its school policy, though not without zeal, was undemocratic, and so left the priests in control of the mind of the multitude; and throughout the reign the ecclesiastical revenues had been allowed to increase greatly from private sources.129 Like Leopold of Tuscany, he was in advance of his people, and imposed his reforms from above. When, accordingly, the weak and pious Charles IV succeeded in 1788, three of the anti-clerical Ministers of his predecessor, including Aranda, were put under arrest,130 and clericalism resumed full sway, to the extent even of vetoing the study of moral philosophy in the universities.131 Mentally and materially alike, Spain relapsed to her former state of indigence; and the struggle for national existence against Napoleon helped rather traditionalist sentiment than the spirit of innovation.

9. Portugal in the same period, despite the anti-clerical policy of the famous Marquis of Pombal, made no noticeable intellectual progress. Though that powerful statesman in 1761 abolished slavery in the kingdom,132 he too failed to see the need for popular education, while promoting that of the upper classes.133 His expulsion of the Jesuits, accordingly, did but raise up against him a new set of enemies in the shape of the Jacobeos, “the Blessed,” a species of Catholic Puritan, who accused him of impiety. His somewhat forensic defence134 leaves the impression that he was in reality a deist; but though he fought the fanatics by imprisoning the Bishop of Coimbra, their leader, and by causing MoliÈre’s Tartufe to be translated and performed, he does not seem to have shown any favour to the deistical literature of which the Bishop had composed a local Index Expurgatorius.135 In Portugal, as later in Spain, accordingly, a complete reaction set in with the death of the enlightened king. Dom Joseph died in 1777, and Pombal was at once disgraced and his enemies released, the pious Queen Maria and her Ministers subjecting him to persecution for some years. In 1783, the Queen, who became a religious maniac, and died insane,136 is found establishing new nunneries, and so adding to one of the main factors in the impoverishment, moral and financial, of Portugal.

During the period we have been surveying, up to the French Revolution, Switzerland, which owed much of new intellectual life to the influx of French Protestants at the revocation of the Edict of Nantes,137 exhibited no less than the other European countries the inability of the traditionary creed to stand criticism. Calvinism by its very rigour generated a reaction within its own special field; and the spirit of the slain Servetus triumphed strangely over that of his slayer. Genevan Calvinism, like that of the English Presbyterians, was transmuted first into a modified Arminianism, then into “Arianism” or Socinianism, then into the Unitarianism of modern times. In the eighteenth century Switzerland contributed to the European movement some names, of which by far the most famous is Rousseau; and the potent presence of Voltaire cannot have failed to affect Swiss culture. Before his period of influence, indeed, there had taken place not a little silent evolution of a Unitarian and deistic kind; Socinianism, as usual, leading the way. Among the families of Italian Protestant refugees who helped to invigorate the life of Switzerland, as French Protestants did later that of Germany, were the Turrettini, of whom Francesco came to Geneva in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. One of his sons, Benedict, made a professor at twenty-four, became a leading theologian and preacher of orthodox Calvinism, and distinguished himself as an opponent of Arminianism.138 Still more distinguished in his day was Benedict’s son FranÇois (1623–1687), also a professor, who repeated his father’s services, political and controversial, to orthodoxy, and combated Socinianism, as Benedict had done Arminianism. But FranÇois’s son Jean-Alphonse, also a professor (whose Latin work on Christian evidences, translated into French by a colleague, we have seen adopted and adapted by the Catholic authorities in France), became a virtual Unitarian139 (1671–1737), and as such is still anathematized by Swiss Calvinists. Against the deists, however, he was industrious, as his grandfather, a heretic to Catholicism, had been against the Arminians, and his father against the Socinians. The family evolution in some degree typifies the theological process from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century; and the apologetics of Jean-Alphonse testify to the vogue of critical deism among the educated class at Geneva in the days of Voltaire’s nonage. He (or his translator) deals with the “natural” objections to the faith, cites approvingly Locke, Lardner, and Clarke, and combats Woolston, but names no other English deist. The heresy, therefore, would seem to be a domestic development from the roots noted by Viret nearly two centuries before. One of Turrettini’s annotators complacently observes140 that though deists talk of natural religion, none of them has ever written a book in exposition of it, the task being left to the Christians. The writer must have been aware, on the one hand, that any deist who in those days should openly expound natural religion as against revealed would be liable to execution for blasphemy in any European country save England, where, as it happened, Herbert, Hobbes, Blount, Toland, Collins, Shaftesbury, and Tindal had all maintained the position, and on the other hand he must have known that the Ethica of Spinoza was naturalistic. The false taunt merely goes to prove that deists could maintain their heresy on the Continent at that time without the support of books. But soon after Turrettini’s time they give literary indication of their existence even in Switzerland; and in 1763 we find Voltaire sending a package of copies of his treatise on Toleration by the hand of “a young M. Turretin of Geneva,” who “is worthy to see the brethren, though he is the grandson of a celebrated priest of Baal. He is reserved, but decided, as are most of the Genevese. Calvin begins in our cantons to have no more credit than the pope.”141 For this fling there was a good deal of justification. When in 1763 the Council of Geneva officially burned a pamphlet reprint of the Vicaire Savoyard from Rousseau’s Émile there was an immediate public protest by “two hundred persons, among whom there were three priests”;142 and some five weeks later “a hundred persons came for the third time to protest.... They say that it is permissible to every citizen to write what he will on religion; that he should not be condemned without a hearing; and that the rights of men must be respected.”143 All this was not a sudden product of the freethinking influence of Voltaire and Rousseau, which had but recently begun. An older leaven had long been at work. The Principes du Droit Naturel of J. J. Burlamaqui (1748), save for its subsumption of deity as the originator of all human tendencies, is strictly naturalistic and utilitarian in its reasoning, and clearly exhibits the influence of Hobbes and Mandeville.144 Voltaire, too, in his correspondence, is found frequently speaking with a wicked chuckle of the Unitarianism of the clergy of Geneva,145 a theme on which D’Alembert had written openly in his article GenÈve in the EncyclopÉdie in 1756.146 So early as 1757, Voltaire roundly affirms that there are only a few Calvinists left: “tous les honnÊtes gens sont dÉistes par Christ.”147 And when the younger Salchi, professor at Lausanne, writes in 1759 that “deism is become the fashionable religion.... Europe is inundated with the works of deists; and their partisans have made perhaps more proselytes in the space of eighty years than were made by the apostles and the first Fathers of the Church,”148 he must be held to testify in some degree concerning Switzerland. The chief native service to intellectual progress thus far, however, was rendered in the field of the natural sciences, Swiss religious opinion being only passively liberalized, mainly in a Unitarian direction.