Infidelity.—Its Growth in England, and little Extent.—Pythagoreans.—Thomas Tryon.—Ritson.—Pagans.—A Cock sacrificed.—Thomas Taylor.
From From Jew to Infidel—an easy transition, after the example of Acosta and Spinosa.
When the barriers of religion had been broken down by the schism, a way was opened for every kind of impiety. Infidelity was suspected to exist at the court of the accursed Elizabeth; it was avowed at her successor's by Lord Herbert of Cherbury; a man unfortunate in this deadly error, but otherwise, for his genius and valour and high feelings of honour, worthy to have lived in a happier age and country. His brother was a religious poet, famous in his day: had they been Spaniards, the one would have been a hero, the other a saint; but the good seed fell among thorns, and the thorns sprung up with it and choked it. During the great Rebellion, a small party of the leaders were Deists; fanaticism was then the epidemic; they made no attempt to spread their principles, and were swept away at the Restoration, which, after it had destroyed rebellion and fanaticism, struck at the root of liberty and morals. An open profligacy of manners had shewn itself under the reign of the first James; it disappeared during the subsequent struggles, when all the stronger passions and feelings were called into action: but when once the country felt itself settled in peace, this spirit revived, and the court of Charles exhibited a shameless indecency, of which Europe had seen no example since the days of the Roman emperors. Yet, perhaps, the most shocking blasphemy of this blasphemous age is the canonization of King Charles the Martyr; for such they style him, in mockery, as it might seem, of martyrdom, if we did not know the impudence of adulation. His office, for his festival is regularly celebrated, applies to this heretical king those texts of Scripture which most pointedly allude to the sufferings and death of Christ. A poet of that reign even dared to call him Christ the Second!—It is not true that the prayers to the most Holy Virgin were ever addressed in the churches to Elizabeth, as Ribadaneyra has said: but this impiety, not less shocking, and not less absurd, is continued to this day,—and the breviary which contains it, in the vulgar tongue, is in every person's hands.
From the time of the Revolution, in 1688, the Deists became bolder, and ventured to attack Christianity from the press. They did it, indeed, covertly and with decency. The infidelity of these writers bears no resemblance to the irreligious profligacy of Charles's courtiers, in whom disbelief was the effect of a vicious heart. It proceeded in these from an erring reason; their books were suppressed as soon as the tendency was discovered, and the authors sometimes punished, so that they did little mischief. Condorcet has mentioned some of them as the great philosophers of England; but the French are ridiculously ignorant of English literature, and the truth is that they have no reputation, nobody ever thinking either of them or their works. Bolingbroke alone is remembered for his political life, so mischievous to his own country and to Europe; his literary fame has died a natural death,—he was equally worthless as a writer and a man.
Voltaire infected this island as he did the continent—of all authors the most mischievous and the most detestable. His predecessors had disbelieved Christianity, but he hated Christ; their writings were addressed to studious men; he wrote for the crowd, for women and boys, addressing himself to their vilest and basest passions, corrupting their morals that he might destroy their faith. Yet notwithstanding the circulation of his worst works on dirty paper and in worn types by travelling auctioneers and at country fairs; notwithstanding the atheism with which the Scotch universities have spawned since the days of Hume; and notwithstanding the union between infidelity and sedition during the late war, which ruined the democratic party, it is remarkable how trifling an effect has been produced. An attempt was made some twenty years ago to establish a deistical place of worship; it fell to the ground for want of support.—The Theophilanthropists never extended to England. A few clerks and prentices will still repeat the jests of Paine, and the blasphemies of Voltaire; and a few surgeons and physicians will continue in their miserable physics or metaphysics to substitute Nature in the place of God; but this is all. Even these, as they grow older, conform to some of the many modes of worship in the country, either from conviction, or for interest, or because, whatever they may think of the importance of religion to themselves, they feel that it is indispensable for their families. Judaism can be dangerous nowhere unless where a large proportion of the people are concealed Jews: but that infidelity, unrestrained as it is in this land of error, should be able to produce so little evil, is indeed honourable to the instincts of our nature, and to the truth of a religion, which, mutilated and corrupted as it is, can still maintain its superiority.
Where every man is allowed to have a faith of his own, you will not wonder if the most ludicrous opinions should sometimes be started, if any opinions in so important a matter may be called ludicrous without impiety. The strangest which I have yet heard is that of an extraordinary man who had passed great part of his life in Spain. It was his opinion that there is no God now, but that there would be one by and by; for the organization of the universe, when it became perfect, would produce a universal Mind or common Sensorium. A sailor, who published the History of his Voyages, expresses his abhorrence of a watery grave, because it would be out of reach of the sun, which else, he thought, would revivify him in the shape of some plant or animal, such perhaps as he might have had a sympathetic affection for while he lived. Pythagoreans in diet have been rather more common than in faith. A certain Thomas Tryon attempted to form a sect of such about a century ago; the disciple who wrote his epitaph says that he almost worked his body up into soul. But, though almost every folly seems to strike root in England as in a congenial soil, this never could be naturalized. The pulse diet of Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego, would hardly become popular in a country where Beef-eater is a title of honour, where the soldiers march to battle with a song about roast-beef in their mouths, instead of a prayer, and where the whole nation personify themselves by the name of John the Bull.[17] This Tryon published a few books in his lifetime: his sect, if he ever formed any, died with him—and he is so nearly forgotten, that, when I heard him spoken of lately, a new book upon the same principle being the topic of conversation, the rest of the company were as ignorant of his existence as myself. The new book which led to this is the work of Ritson, one of the most learned English antiquarians, but of so unhappy a temper, that it is generally believed he is deranged. We should think him possessed, from the evidence of this essay, every page and almost every line of which teems with blasphemy;—it is full of open and avowed hatred of Religion and of Nature, and declarations that if there be a God, he must be a Being who delights in malignity. God have mercy upon this poor wretched man, who seems to find a heavier punishment in the wickedness of his own heart, than earthly laws could inflict upon him!
The principle of abstaining from animal food is not in itself either culpable or ridiculous, if decently discussed. We know that in many cases where indulgence is not sinful, abstinence is meritorious. There is therefore nothing irreligious in the opinion, and certainly it is favourable in some of its consequences to morality. But ultimately it resolves itself into the political question, Whether the greater population can be maintained upon animal or vegetable diet? It is to be wished the Pythagoreans in England were numerous and philosophical enough to carry on a series of experiments upon this subject, and upon the physical effects of their system.
We who acknowledge fasting to be a duty at stated times, and an act of devotion at others, and who have the example of the more rigid monastic orders, shall think these people less absurd than their own countrymen think them, and perhaps less than they really are, as the principles of religion have nothing to do with their speculations. But what will you say when I tell you, that there are also Pagans in the country, actual worshippers of Jupiter and Juno, who believe in Orpheus instead of Christ, Homer and Hesiod instead of the prophets, Plato and Plotinus instead of the apostles? There is a story of an Englishman at Rome who pulled off his hat to a statue of Jupiter, saying, "I beg, sir, if ever you get into power again, you will remember that I paid my respects to you in your adversity." Those whom I now speak of are more serious in their faith. I have heard of one who sacrificed a cock to Esculapius, at midnight, and upon a high place, in the midst of a large city.
The great apostle of the Heathen gods is one Thomas Taylor. He openly avows his belief, saying, in a page prefixed to one of his works, which he dedicates to the Sacred Majesty of Truth,—"Mr Thomas Taylor, the Platonic philosopher, and the modern Plethon, consonant to that philosophy, professes polytheism." For many years he has been labouring indefatigably to propagate this faith by the most unexceptionable means, that of translating the Heathen philosophers, and elucidating their most mysterious parts. His doctrines have made little or no progress, not because they are too nonsensical, for in these cases the more nonsense the better, but because they are too obscure, and require too much attention to be understood, if, indeed, they be not altogether unintelligible. His fame, however, has reached the Continent. Early in the French Revolution the Marquis Valedi came over to visit him: he called at his house, dressed in white like an aspirant; fell at his feet to worship the divine restorer of the Platonic philosophy; rose up to put a bank note of twenty pounds in his hand as an offering, and insisted upon being permitted to live in the house with him, that he might enjoy every possible opportunity of profiting by his lessons. In vain did the philosopher represent the want of room in his house, his method of living, the inconvenience to himself and to his pupil. Nothing would satisfy the marquis,—if there was no other room, he would have a bed put up in the study where they were conversing:—away he went to order it, and was immediately domesticated.—After some little time it was discovered that he was disposed to worship the wife instead of the husband, and here ended the Platonism. They parted, however, in friendship. Valedi had left France to escape from a young wife, because, he said, she had no soul: he went back to take a part in the Revolution. Taylor saw him in the diligence as he was setting off; he was in complete regimentals, with a fierce cocked hat,—and his last words were, "I came here Diogenes, and I return Alexander." His fate was like that of many wiser and better men; he perished by the guillotine, being one of the twenty-two who suffered with Brissot.
Transmigration forms a part of this Pythagorean Platonist's creed. He says of Julian the Apostate, "The greatness of his soul is so visible in his writings, that we may safely believe what he asserted of himself, that he had formerly been Alexander the Great."
