CHAPTER XIV

BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

§ 1

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 France

[309] 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. [310] By his own account the book had been "begun

by me in England, and formed there in all its principal parts," [311]

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Hitherto deism had been represented by unpublished arguments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. [312]

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. [313] 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 argument [314] 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. [315] 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 works [316] 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, [317] 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. [318] Baxter in 1672

could say that Herbert, "never having been answered, might be thought

unanswerable"; [319] 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. [320]

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. [321] 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. [322] Reviving as he did the ancient

rationalistic doctrine of the eternity of the world, [323] 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. [324]

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." [325]

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;

[326] though, as we have seen, this had already gone far in private;

[327] and he gave a new lead, partly as against Descartes, to a

materialistic philosophy. [328] 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. [329] 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. [330]

Here he is in marked contrast with Descartes, who dissembled his

opinion about Copernicus and Galileo for peace' sake, [331] and was

the close friend of the apologist Mersenne down to his death. [332]

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; [333]

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. [334]

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. [335] 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. [336] He thus

practically introduced once for all into modern Christendom the

fundamental dilemma of rationalistic ethics, not only positing the

problem for his age, [337] but anticipating it as handled in later

times. [338]

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;

[339] but not only is there explicit testimony by his associates

as to his orthodoxy: [340] 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. [341] 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, [342] 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, [343] 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." [344] 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." [345] 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.

§ 2

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 politics [346] 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; [347] 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. [348] 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." [349] 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. [350] 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." [351]

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. [352] 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. [353]

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. [354] 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. [355]

In this connection the learned booklet [356] 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. [357] 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." [358]

"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." [359] Among the 180 sects named by him [360] there

were "Libertines," "Antiscripturists," "Skeptics and Questionists,"

[361] who held nothing save the doctrine of free speech and liberty of

conscience; [362] 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. [363] 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"; [364] 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."

See Burnet's History of His Own Time, bk. i, ed. 1838, p. 43. The

phrase, "They were for pulling down the churches," again, cannot

be taken literally. Of those who "pretended to little or no

religion and acted only upon the principles of civil liberty,"

Burnet goes on to name Sidney, Henry Nevill, Marten, Wildman, and

Harrington. The last was certainly of Hobbes's way of thinking in

philosophy (Croom Robertson, Hobbes, p. 223, note); but Wildman

was one of the signers of the Anabaptist petition to Charles II

in 1658 (Clarendon, Hist. of the Rebellion, bk. xv, ed. 1843,

p. 855). As to Marten and Chaloner, see Carlyle's Cromwell,

iii, 194; and articles in Nat. Dict. of Biog. Vaughan (Hist. of

England, 1840, ii, 477, note) speaks of Walwyn and Overton as

"among the freethinkers of the times of the Commonwealth." They

were, however, Biblicists, not unbelievers. Prof. Gardiner

(Hist. of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii, 253, citing a

News-letter in the Clarendon MSS.) finds record in 1653 of "a man

[who] preached flat atheism in Westminster Hall, uninterrupted by

the soldiers of the guard"; but this obviously counts for little.

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. [365]

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." [366] 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," [367] 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." [368] 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." [369] 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. [370] He is, however, as may be inferred from

his angry tone towards anti-scripturalists, substantially orthodox,

and not very important.

It is contended for Culverwel by modern admirers (ed. cited,

p. xxi) that he deserves the praise given by Hallam to the later

Bishop Cumberland as "the first Christian writer who sought to

establish systematically the principle of moral right independent

of revelation." [See above, p. 74, the similar tribute of Mosheim

to Ames.] But Culverwel does not really make this attempt. His

proposition is that reason, "the candle of the Lord," discovers

"that all the moral law is founded in natural and common light,

in the light of reason, and that there is nothing in the mysteries

of the Gospel contrary to the light of reason" (Introd. end);

yet he contends not only that faith transcends reason, but that

Abraham's attempt to slay his son was a dutiful obeying of "the

God of nature" (pp. 225-26). He does not achieve the simple step of

noting that the recognition of revelation as such must be performed

by reason, and thus makes no advance on the position of Bacon,

much less on those of Pecock and Hooker. His object, indeed, was

not to justify orthodoxy by reason against rationalistic unbelief,

but to make a case for reason in theology against the Lutherans

and others who, "because Socinus has burnt his wings at this candle

of the Lord," scouted all use of it (Introd.). Culverwel, however,

was one of the learned group in Emanuel College, Cambridge, whose

tradition developed in the next generation into Latitudinarianism;

and he may be taken as a learned type of a number of the clergy

who were led by the abundant discussion all around them into

professing and encouraging a ratiocinative habit of mind. Thus

we find Dean Stuart, Clerk of the Closet to Charles I, devoting

one of his short homilies to Jerome's text, Tentemus animas quæ

deficiunt a fide naturalibus rationibus adjurare. "It is not

enough," he writes, "for you to rest in an imaginary faith, and

easiness in beleeving, except yee know also what and why and how

you come to that beleef. Implicite beleevers, ignorant beleevers,

the adversary may swallow, but the understanding beleever hee must

chaw, and pick bones before hee come to assimilate him, and make

him like himself. The implicite beleever stands in an open field,

and the enemy will ride over him easily: the understanding beleever

is in a fenced town." (Catholique Divinity, 1657, pp. 133-34--a

work written many years earlier.)

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." [371] 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 noted [372] a treatise called Atheismus Vapulans, by

William Towers, whose message can in part be inferred from his title;

[373] 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." [374]

"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." [375]

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. [376] 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. [377] 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. [378] 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, [379] 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; [380]

and the deistic doctrines found a ready audience among royalists,

whose enemies had been above all things Bibliolaters.

There is evidence that Charles II, at least up to the time of

his becoming a Catholic, and probably even to the end, was at

heart a deist. See Burnet's History of his Own Time, ed. 1838,

pp. 61, 175, and notes; and cp. refs. in Buckle, 3-vol. ed. i,

362, note; 1-vol. ed. p. 205. St. Evremond, who knew him and

many of his associates, affirmed expressly that Charles's creed

"étoit seulement ce qui passe vulgairement, quoiqu' injustement,

pour une extinction totale de Religion: je veux dire le Déisme"

(OEuvres mélées: t. viii of OEuvres, ed. 1714, p. 354). His

opinion, St. Evremond admits, was the result of simple recognition

of the actualities of religious life, not of reading, or of much

reflection. And his adoption of Catholicism, in St. Evremond's

opinion, was purely political. He saw that Catholicism made much

more than Protestantism for kingly power, and that his Catholic

subjects were the most subservient.

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." [381] 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." [382] In the second part he writes that "Man's personal

interest is an unfit rule and measure of God's goodness"; [383] and,

going on to meet the new argument against Christianity based on the

inference that an infinity of stars are inhabited, he writes:--

Ask any man who knoweth these things whether all this earth be any

more in comparison of the whole creation than one Prison is to a

Kingdom or Empire, or the paring of one nail ... in comparison

of the whole body. And if God should cast off all this earth,

and use all the sinners in it as they deserve, it is no more sign

of a want of benignity or mercy in him than it is for a King to

cast one subject of a million into a jail ... or than it is to

pare a man's nails, or cut off a wart, or a hair, or to pull out

a rotten aking tooth. [384]

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" [385]--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; [386] but when he writes of "that mystery why the

greatest wits are most frequently the greatest atheists," [387] he

must be presumed to refer at least to deists. And other passages show

that he had listened to freethinking arguments. Thus he speaks [388]

of those who "detract from Scripture by attributing the production

of miracles to natural causes"; and again [389] 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." [390] 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 theology [391] is as little acted on in

his later life as his protest against persecution. [392] 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." [393] He further coarsely asperses

all atheists as debauchees, [394] 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" [395]--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; [396] and in 1670 appeared Richard Barthogge's

Divine Goodness Explicated and Vindicated from the Exceptions of the

Atheists. Baxter in 1671 [397] 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." [398]

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. [399] 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. [400] 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, [401] 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." [402] 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. [403]

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." [404]

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. [405] 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 protests [406] 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) [407] of Martin

Clifford, a scholarly man-about-town, [408] 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, [409] 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; [410]

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." [411] Its actual effect seems to have been

to restrain the persecution of dissenters. [412] 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. [413]

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. [414]

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, [415] 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. [416]

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. [417]

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." [418] But the reverend writer's strongest resentment is

aroused by the spectacle of freethinkers asking for liberty of thought.

"It is a fulsome and nauseous thing," he breathlessly protests,

"to see the atheists and infidels of our days to turn great

reformers of religion, to set up a mighty cry for liberty of

conscience. For whatever reformation of religion may be needful

at this time, whatever liberty of conscience may be fit to be

granted, yet what have these men to do to meddle with it; those

who think religion a mere fable, and God to be an Utopian prince,

and conscience a man of clouts set up for a scarecrow to fright

such silly creatures from their beloved enjoyments, and hell and

heaven to be forged in the same mint with the poet's Styx and

Acheron and Elysian Fields? We are like to see blessed times,

if such men had but the reforming of religion." [419]

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, [420] mournfully declares that

"The weakness of our church discipline since its restoration,

whereby it has been scarce able to get any hold on men's

consciences, and much less able to keep it; and the great

prevalence of that atheistical doctrine of the Leviathan; and

the unhappy propagation of Erastianism; these things (I say)

with some others have been the sad and fatal causes that have

loosed the bands of conscience and eaten out the very heart and

sense of Christianity among us, to that degree, that there is now

scarce any religious tye or restraint upon persons, but merely

from those faint remainders of natural conscience, which God

will be sure to keep alive upon the hearts of men, as long as

they are men, for the great ends of his own providence, whether

they will or no. So that, were it not for this sole obstacle,

religion is not now so much in danger of being divided and torn

piecemeal by sects and factions, as of being at once devoured

by atheism. Which being so, let none wonder that irreligion is

accounted policy when it is grown even to a fashion; and passes

for wit, with some, as well as for wisdom with others."

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":--

For some, who have his secret meaning guessed,

Have found our author not too much a priest;

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:

Dim as the borrowed beams of moon and stars,

To lonely, weary, wandering travellers,

Is Reason to the soul,

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:

No supernatural worship can be true,

Because a general law is that alone

Which must to all and everywhere be known:

he confesses that

Of all objections this indeed is chief

To startle reason, stagger frail belief;

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:--

And after hearing what our Church can say,

If still our reason runs another way,

That private reason 'tis more just to curb

Than by disputes the public peace disturb;

For points obscure are of small use to learn,

But common quiet is mankind's concern.

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.

The late Dr. Verrall, a keen but unprejudiced critic, sums up as

regards Dryden's religious poetry in general that "What is clear

is that he had a marked dislike of clergy of all sorts, as such";

that "the main points of Deism are noted in Religio Laici (46-61);

and that "his creed was presumably some sort of Deism" (Lectures

on Dryden, 1914, pp. 148-50). Further, "The State of Innocence is

really deistic and not Christian in tone: in his play of Tyrannic

Love, the religion of St. Catharine may be mere philosophy";

and though the poet in his preface to that play protests that his

"outward conversation shall never be justly taxed with the note of

atheism or profaneness," the disclaimer "proves nothing as to his

positive belief: Deism is not profane." In Absalom and Achitophel,

again, the "coarse satire on Transubstantiation (118 ff.) shows

rather religious insensibility than hostile theology," though

"the poem shows his dislike of liberty and private judgment

(49-50)." Of the Religio Laici the critic asks: "Now in all

this, is there any religion at all?" The poem "might well be

dismissed as mere politics but for its astounding commencement"

(p. 155). The critic unexpectedly fails to note that the admired

commencement is an insoluble confusion of metaphors.

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. [421] 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"; [422] 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?" [423] 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." [424]

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." [425] 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 Blount [426] (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

annotated [427] 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, [428] probably, prevented his being prosecuted. The propaganda,

however, was resumed by Blount and his friends in small tracts, and

after his suicide [429] 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

atheist [430] 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.

Much account was made of one of the most compendious, the Short and

Easy Method with the Deists (1697), by the nonjuror Charles Leslie;

but this handy argument (which is really adopted without acknowledgment

from an apologetic treatise by a French Protestant refugee, published

in 1688 [431]) was not only much bantered by deists, but was sharply

censured as incompetent by the French Protestant Le Clerc; [432]

and many other disputants had to come to the rescue. A partial list

will suffice to show the rate of increase of the ferment:--

1683. Dr. Rust, Discourse on the Use of Reason in ... Religion,

against Enthusiasts and Deists.

1685. Duke of Buckingham, A Short Discourse upon the Reasonableness

of men's having a religion or worship of God.

1685. The Atheist Unmask'd. By a Person of Honour.

1688. Peter Allix, D.D. Reflexions, etc., as above cited.

1691. Archbishop Tenison, The Folly of Atheism.

1691. Discourse of Natural and Revealed Religion.

1691. John Ray, Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of the

Creation. (Many reprints.)

1692. C. Ellis, The Folly of Atheism Demonstrated.

1692. Bentley's Sermons on Atheism. (First Boyle Lectures.)

1693. Archbishop Davies, An Anatomy of Atheism. A poem.

1693. A Conference between an Atheist and his Friend.

1694. J. Goodman, A Winter Evening Conference between Neighbours.

1694. Bishop Kidder, A Demonstration of the Messias. (Boyle Lect.)

1695. John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity.

1695. John Edwards, B.D., Some Thoughts concerning the Several Causes

and occasions of Atheism. (Directed against Locke.)

1696. An Account of the Growth of Deism in England.

1696. Reflections on a Pamphlet, etc. (the last named).

1696. Sir C. Wolseley, The Unreasonableness of Atheism Demonstrated.

(Rep.)

1696. Dr. Nichols' Conference with a Theist. Pt. I. (Answer to

Blount.)

1696. J. Edwards, D.D., A Demonstration of the Evidence and

Providence of God.

1696. E. Pelling, Discourse ... on the Existence of God. (Pt. II in

1705).

1697. Stephen Eye, A Discourse concerning Natural and Revealed

Religion.

1697. Bishop Gastrell, The Certainty and Necessity of Religion.

(Boyle Lect.)

1697. H. Prideaux, Discourse vindicating Christianity, etc.

1697. C. Leslie, A Short and Easy Method with the Deists.

1698. Dr. J. Harris, A Refutation of Atheistical Objections. (Boyle

Lect.)

1698. Thos. Emes, The Atheist turned Deist, and the Deist turned

Christian.

1699. C. Lidgould, Proclamation against Atheism, etc.

1699. J. Bradley, An Impartial View of the Truth of Christianity.

(Answer to Blount.)

1700. Bishop Bradford, The Credibility of the Christian Revelation.

(Boyle Lect.)

1700. Rev. P. Berault, Discourses on the Trinity, Atheism, etc.

1701. T. Knaggs, Against Atheism.

1701. W. Scot, Discourses concerning the wisdom and goodness of God.

1702. A Confutation of Atheism.

1702. Dr. Stanhope, The Truth and Excellency of the Christian

Religion. (Boyle Lect.)

1704. An Antidote of Atheism. (? Reprint of More).

1705. Translation of Herbert's Ancient Religion of the Gentiles.

1705. Charles Gildon, The Deist's Manual (a recantation).

1705. Ed. Pelling, Discourse concerning the existence of God. Part

II.

1705. Dr. Samuel Clarke, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes

of God, etc. (Boyle Lect. of 1704.)

1706. A Preservative against Atheism and Infidelity.

1706. Th. Wise, B.D., A Confutation of the Reason and Philosophy of

Atheism (recast and abridgment of Cudworth).

1706. T. Oldfield, Mille Testes; against the Atheists, Deists, and

Skepticks.

1706. The Case of Deism fully and fairly stated, with Dialogue, etc.

1707. Dr. J. Hancock, Arguments to prove the Being of a God. (Boyle

Lect.)

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. [433]

Blount's famous stratagem of 1693 [434] 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 1697 [435] served

sufficiently to terrorize writers and printers in that regard for the

time being. [436] 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. [437] 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. [438] 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.

§ 3

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 characterized [439] 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, [440] 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." [441] 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," [442] 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"; [443] 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." [444] Yet in his

later treatise on Vulgar Errors (1645) he devotes a chapter [445] 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." [446] 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. [447] 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." [448]

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. [449] 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. [450]

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), [451] 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, [452]

Glanvill also puts the positive view of causation [453] afterwards

fully developed by Hume. [454] 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. [455] 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." [456] He had his due reward in being philosophically assailed

by the Catholic priest Thomas White as a promoter of skepticism,

[457] and by an Anglican clergyman, wroth with the Royal Society and

all its works, as an infidel and an atheist. [458]

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 Religion

[459] 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; [460]

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; [461] 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,

[462] 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. [463] 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. [464]

[It is stated by Sir Leslie Stephen (English Thought in

the Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed. i, 32) that in England the

philosophy of Descartes made no distinguished disciples;

and that John Norris "seems to be the only exception to

the general indifference." This overlooks (1) Glanvill, who

constantly cites and applauds Descartes (Scepsis Scientifica,

passim). (2) In Henry More's Divine Dialogues, again (1668),

one of the disputants is made to speak (Dial. i, ch. xxiv) of

"that admired wit Descartes"; and he later praises him even when

passing censure (above, p. 65). More had been one of the admirers

in his youth, and changed his view (cp. Ward's Life of Dr. Henry

More, pp. 63-64). But his first letter to Descartes begins: "Quanta

voluptate perfusus est animus meus, Vir clarissime, scriptis tuis

legendis, nemo quisquam præter te unum potest conjectare." (3)

There was published in 1670 a translation of Des Fourneillis's

letter in defence of the Cartesian system, with François Bayle's

General System of the Cartesian Philosophy. (4) The continual

objections to the atheistic tendency of Descartes throughout

Cudworth's True Intellectual System imply anything but "general

indifference"; and (5) Barrow's tone in venturing to oppose him

(cit. in Whewell's Philosophy of Discovery, 1860, p. 179) pays

tribute to his great influence. (6) Molyneux, in the preface to

his translation of the Six Metaphysical Meditations of Descartes

in 1680, speaks of him as "this excellent philosopher" and "this

prodigious man." (7) Maxwell, in a note to his translation (1727)

of Bishop Cumberland's Disquisitio de legibus Naturæ, remarks that

the doctrine of a universal plenum was accepted from the Cartesian

philosophy by Cumberland, "in whose time that philosophy prevailed

much" (p. 120). See again (8) Clarke's Answer to Butler's Fifth

Letter (1718) as to the "universal prevalence" of Descartes's

notions in natural philosophy. (9) The Scottish Lord President

Forbes (d. 1747) summed up that "Descartes's romance kept entire

possession of men's belief for fully fifty years" (Works, ii,

132). (10) And his fellow-judge, Sir William Anstruther, in his

"Discourse against Atheism" (Essays, Moral and Divine, 1701,

pp. 6, 8, 9), cites with much approval the theistic argument of

"the celebrated Descartes" as "the last evidences which appeared

upon the stage of learning" in that connection.

Cp. Berkeley, Siris, § 331. Of Berkeley himself, Professor Adamson

writes (Encyc. Brit. iii, 589) that "Descartes and Locke ... are

his real masters in speculation." The Cartesian view of the

eternity and infinity of matter had further become an accepted

ground for "philosophical atheists" in England before the end

of the century (Molyneux, in Familiar Letters of Locke and his

Friends, 1708, p. 46). As to the many writers who charged Descartes

with promoting atheism, see Mosheim's notes in Harrison's ed. of

Cudworth's Intellectual System, i, 275-76; Clarke, as above cited;

Leibnitz's letter to Philip, cited by Latta, Leibnitz, 1898,

p. 8, note; and Brewster's Memoirs of Newton, ii, 315.

Sir Leslie Stephen seems to have followed, under a misapprehension,

Whewell, who contends merely that the Cartesian doctrine

of vortices was never widely accepted in England (Philos. of

Discovery, pp. 177-78; cp. Hist. of the Induct. Sciences, ed. 1857,

ii, 107, 147-48). Buckle was perhaps similarly misled when he

wrote in his note-book: "Descartes was never popular in England"

(Misc. Works, abridged ed. i, 269). Whewell himself mentions that

Clarke, soon after taking his degree at Cambridge, "was actively

engaged in introducing into the academic course of study, first,

the philosophy of Descartes in its best form, and, next, the

philosophy of Newton" (Lectures on Moral Philosophy, ed. 1862,

pp. 97-98). And Professor Fowler, in correcting his first remarks

on the point, decides that "many of the mathematical teachers at

Cambridge continued to teach the Cartesian system for some time

after the publication of Newton's Principia" (ed. of Nov. Org.,

p. xi).

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,

[465] 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." [466] 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;

[467] and Chillingworth, whose Religion of Protestants (1637) was

already a remarkable application of rational tests to ecclesiastical

questions in defiance of patristic authority, [468] seems in his old

age to have turned Socinian. [469] Violent attacks on the Trinity are

noted among the heresies of 1646. [470] 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. [471] It is now certain that Milton was

substantially a Unitarian, [472] and that Locke and Newton were at

heart no less so. [473]

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: [474] "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." [475] This compromise appears to be borrowed from Spinoza,

who had put it with similar vagueness in his great Tractatus, [476]

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." [477] 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; [478] 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.

See the Essay, bk. iv, ch. xviii. Locke's treatment of revelation

may be said to be the last and most attenuated form of the

doctrine of "two-fold truth." On his principle, any proposition

in a professed revelation that was not provable or disprovable by

reason and knowledge must pass as true. His final position, that

"whatever is divine revelation ought to overrule all our opinions"

(bk. iv, ch. xviii, § 10), is tolerably elastic, inasmuch as he

really reserves the question of the actuality of revelation. Thus

he evades the central issue. Naturally he was by critical

foreigners classed as a deist. Cp. Gostwick, German Culture and

Christianity, 1882, p. 36. The German historian Tennemann sums up

that Clarke wrote his apologetic works because "the consequences

of the empiricism of Locke had become so decidedly favourable to

the cause of atheism, skepticism, materialism, and irreligion"

(Manual of the Hist. of Philos. Eng. tr. Bohn ed. § 349).

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, [479] 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; [480] 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; [481] 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." [482] Its effect was, however, to promote rationalism

without doing much to mitigate the fanaticism of belief.

Locke's practical position has been fairly summed up by Prof. Bain:

"Locke proposed, in his Reasonableness of Christianity, to

ascertain the exact meaning of Christianity, by casting aside all

the glosses of commentators and divines, and applying his own

unassisted judgment to spell out its teachings.... The fallacy

of his position obviously was that he could not strip himself

of his education and acquired notions.... He seemed unconscious

of the necessity of trying to make allowance for his unavoidable

prepossessions. In consequence, he simply fell into an old groove

of received doctrines; and these he handled under the set purpose

of simplifying the fundamentals of Christianity to the utmost. Such

purpose was not the result of his Bible study, but of his wish

to overcome the political difficulties of the time. He found, by

keeping close to the Gospels and making proper selections from

the Epistles, that the belief in Christ as the Messiah could

be shown to be the central fact of the Christian faith; that

the other main doctrines followed out of this by a process of

reasoning; and that, as all minds might not perform the process

alike, these doctrines could not be essential to the practice of

Christianity. He got out of the difficulty of framing a creed,

as many others have done, by simply using Scripture language,

without subjecting it to any very strict definition; certainly

without the operation of stripping the meaning of its words,

to see what it amounted to. That his short and easy method was

not very successful the history of the deistical controversy

sufficiently proves" (Practical Essays, pp. 226-27).

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." [483] 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.; [484] 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." [485] 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." [486] This is especially

true of Edwards, a notably ignoble type; [487] 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. [488] Yet Locke

agreed with Law [489] that moral obligation is dependent solely on

the will of God--a doctrine denounced by the deist Shaftesbury as

the negation of morality.

See the Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit, pt. iii, § 2; and the

Letters to a Student, under date June 3, 1709 (p. 403 in Rand's

Life, Letters, etc., of Shaftesbury, 1900). The extraordinary

letter of Newton to Locke, written just after or during a spell

of insanity, first apologizes for having believed that Locke

"endeavoured to embroil me with women and by other means,"

and goes on to beg pardon "for representing that you struck at

the root of morality, in a principle you laid down in your book

of ideas." In his subsequent letter, replying to that of Locke

granting forgiveness and gently asking for details, he writes:

"What I said of your book I remember not." (Letters of September

16 and October 5, 1693, given in Fox Bourne's Life of Locke, ii,

226-27, and Sir D. Brewster's Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton, 1855,

ii, 148-51.) Newton, who had been on very friendly terms with

Locke, must have been repeating, when his mind was disordered,

criticisms otherwise current. After printing in full the letters

above cited, Brewster insists, on his principle of sacrificing

all other considerations to Newton's glory (cp. De Morgan, Newton:

his Friend: and his Niece, 1885, pp. 99-111), that all the while

Newton was "in the full possession of his mental powers." The

whole diction of the first letter tells the contrary. If we are

not to suppose that Newton had been temporarily insane, we must

think of his judgment as even less rational, apart from physics,

than it is seen to be in his dissertations on prophecy. Certainly

Newton was at all times apt to be suspicious of his friends to

the point of moral disease (see his attack on Montague, in his

letter to Locke of January 26, 1691-1692; in Fox Bourne, ii,

218; and cp. De Morgan, as cited, p. 146); but the letter to

Locke indicates a point at which the normal malady had upset the

mental balance. It remains, nevertheless, part of the evidence

as to bitter orthodox criticism of Locke.

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, [490] 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. [491] Locke's position as a believing Christian

was indeed extremely weak, and could easily have been demolished by

a competent deist, such as Collins, [492] 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." [493] 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, [494] appears clearly from his own writings to have

been either that or a Unitarian; [495] and it is not improbable that

the similar gossip concerning Lord Keeper Somers was substantially

true. [496]

That Sir Isaac Newton was "some kind of Unitarian" [497] 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, [498] and wasting much time in vain interpretations of Daniel

and the Apocalypse. [499] 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"

[500]--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 morally [501] 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." [502]

There is therefore more than usual absurdity in the proclamation of

his pious biographer that "the apostle of infidelity cowers beneath

the implied rebuke" [503] of his orthodoxy. The very anxiety shown

by Newton and his friends [504] 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 Athanasius

[505]: 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." [506] 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; [507] 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." [508] 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, [509]

was attacked by Dean South [510] 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, [511] was of course

only a heresy the more. Outside the Church, William Penn, the great

Quaker, held a partially Unitarian attitude; [512] 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. [513] A new impulse had been given to Unitarianism by the

learning and critical energy of the Prussian Dr. Zwicker, who had

settled in Holland; [514] 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. [515] 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. [516] 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,

[517] 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, [518] 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. [519] 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, [520] Theologiæ christianæ principia mathematica (1699),

wherein it is argued that all evidence grows progressively less valid

in course of time; [521] 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; [522]

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, [523]

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"

[524] 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." [525] 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; [526] 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.