BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
§ 1
It appears from our survey that the "deistic movement," commonly
assigned to the eighteenth century, had been abundantly prepared
for in the seventeenth, which, in turn, was but developing ideas
current in the sixteenth. When, in 1696, John Toland published his
Christianity Not Mysterious, the sensation it made was due not so
much to any unheard-of boldness in its thought as to the simple fact
that deistic ideas had thus found their way into print. [684] So far
the deistic position was explicitly represented in English literature
only by the works of Herbert, Hobbes, and Blount; and of these only
the first (who wrote in Latin) and the third had put the case at any
length. Against the deists or atheists of the school of Hobbes, and
the Scriptural Unitarians who thought with Newton and Locke, there
stood arrayed the great mass of orthodox intolerance which clamoured
for the violent suppression of every sort of "infidelity." It was
this feeling, of which the army of ignorant rural clergy were the
spokesmen, that found vent in the Blasphemy Act of 1697. The new
literary growth dating from the time of Toland is the evidence of
the richness of the rationalistic soil already created. Thinking men
craved a new atmosphere. Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity is an
unsuccessful compromise: Toland's book begins a new propagandist era.
Toland's treatise, [685] heretical as it was, professed to be a
defence of the faith, and avowedly founded on Locke's anonymous
Reasonableness of Christianity, its young author being on terms of
acquaintance with the philosopher. [686] He claimed, in fact, to take
for granted "the Divinity of the New Testament," and to "demonstrate
the verity of divine revelation against atheists and all enemies of
revealed religion," from whom, accordingly, he expected to receive no
quarter. Brought up, as he declared, "from my cradle, in the grossest
superstition and idolatry," he had been divinely led to make use of
his own reason; and he assured his Christian readers of his perfect
sincerity in "defending the true religion." [687] Twenty years later,
his primary positions were hardly to be distinguished from those of
ratiocinative champions of the creed, save in respect that he was
challenging orthodoxy where they were replying to unbelievers. Toland,
however, lacked alike the timidity and the prudence which so safely
guided Locke in his latter years; and though his argument was only
a logical and outspoken extension of Locke's position, to the end
of showing that there was nothing supra-rational in Christianity of
Locke's type, it separated him from "respectable" society in England
and Ireland for the rest of his life. The book was "presented" by the
Grand Juries of Middlesex and Dublin; [688] the dissenters in Dublin
being chiefly active in denouncing it--with or without knowledge
of its contents; [689] half-a-dozen answers appeared; and when in
1698 Toland produced another, entitled Amyntor, showing the infirm
foundation of the Christian canon, there was again a speedy crop of
replies. Despite the oversights inevitable to such pioneer work, this
opens, from the side of freethought, the era of documentary criticism
of the New Testament; and in some of his later freethinking books,
as the Nazarenus (1718) and the Pantheisticon (1720), he continues to
show himself in advance of his time in "opening new windows" for his
mind. [690] The latter work represents in particular the influence
of Spinoza, whom he had formerly criticized somewhat forcibly [691]
for his failure to recognize that motion is inherent in matter. On
that head he lays down [692] the doctrine that "motion is but matter
under a certain consideration"--an essentially "materialist" position,
deriving from the pre-Socratic Greeks, and incidentally affirmed by
Bacon. [693] He was not exactly an industrious student or writer;
but he had scholarly knowledge and instinct, and several of his works
show close study of Bayle.
As regards his more original views on Christian origins, he is not
impressive to the modern reader; but theses which to-day stand for
little were in their own day important. Thus in his Hodegus (pt. i of
the Tetradymus, 1720) it is elaborately argued that the "pillar of
fire by night and of cloud by day" was no miracle, but the regular
procedure of guides in deserts, where night marches are the rule;
the "cloud" being simply the smoke of the vanguard's fire, which by
night flared red. Later criticism decides that the whole narrative
of the Exodus is myth. Toland's method, however, was relatively so
advanced that it had not been abandoned by theological "rationalists" a
century later. Of that movement he must be ranked an energetic pioneer:
though he lacked somewhat the strength of character that in his day
was peculiarly needed to sustain a freethinker. Much of his later life
was spent abroad; and his Letters to Serena (1704) show him permitted
to discourse to the Queen of Prussia on such topics as the origin
and force of prejudice, the history of the doctrine of immortality,
and the origin of idolatry. He pays his correspondent the compliment
of treating his topics with much learning; and his manner of assuming
her own orthodoxy in regard to revelation could have served as a model
to Gibbon. [694] But, despite such distinguished patronage, his life
was largely passed in poverty, cheerfully endured, [695] with only
chronic help from well-to-do sympathizers, such as Shaftesbury, who
was not over-sympathetic. When it is noted that down to 1761 there
had appeared no fewer than fifty-four answers to his first book,
[696] his importance as an intellectual influence may be realized.
A certain amount of evasion was forced upon Toland by the Blasphemy
Law of 1697; inferentially, however, he was a thorough deist until
he became pantheist; and the discussion over his books showed that
views essentially deistic were held even among his antagonists. One,
an Irish bishop, got into trouble by setting forth a notion of
deity which squared with that of Hobbes. [697] The whole of our
present subject, indeed, is much complicated by the distribution
of heretical views among the nominally orthodox, and of orthodox
views among heretics. [698] Thus the school of Cudworth, zealous
against atheism, was less truly theistic than that of Blount, [699]
who, following Hobbes, pointed out that to deny to God a continual
personal and providential control of human affairs was to hold to
atheism under the name of theism; [700] whereas Cudworth, the champion
of theism against the atheists, entangled himself hopelessly [701]
in a theory which made deity endow Nature with "plastic" powers and
leave it to its own evolution. The position was serenely demolished
by Bayle, [702] as against Le Clerc, who sought to defend it; and
in England the clerical outcry was so general that Cudworth gave
up authorship. [703] Over the same crux, in Ireland, Bishop Browne
and Bishop Berkeley accused each other of promoting atheism; and
Archbishop King was embroiled in the dispute. [704] On the other hand,
the theistic Descartes had laid down a "mechanical" theory of the
universe which perfectly comported with atheism, and partly promoted
that way of thinking; [705] and a selection from Gassendi's ethical
writings, translated into English [706] (1699), wrought in the same
direction. The Church itself contained Cartesians and Cudworthians,
Socinians and deists. [707] Each group, further, had inner differences
as to free-will [708] and Providence; and the theistic schools of
Newton, Clarke, and Leibnitz rejected each other's philosophies as well
as that of Descartes. Leibnitz complained grimly that Newton and his
followers had "a very odd opinion concerning the Work of God," making
the universe an imperfect machine, which the deity had frequently to
mend; and treating space as an organ by which God perceives things,
which are thus regarded as not produced or maintained by him. [709]
Newton's principles of explanation, he insisted, were those of
the materialists. [710] John Hutchinson, a professor at Cambridge,
in his Treatise of Power, Essential and Mechanical, also bitterly
assailed Newton as a deistical and anti-scriptural sophist. [711]
Clarke, on the other hand, declared that the philosophy of Leibnitz
was "tending to banish God from the world." [712] Alongside of such
internecine strife, it was not surprising that the great astronomer
Halley, who accepted Newton's principles in physics, was commonly
reputed an atheist; and that the freethinkers pitted his name in that
connection against Newton's. [713] As it was he who first suggested
[714] the idea of the total motion of the entire solar system in
space--described by a modern pietist as "this great cosmical truth,
the grandest in astronomy" [715]--they were not ill justified. It can
hardly be doubted that if intellectual England could have been polled
in 1710, under no restraints from economic, social, and legal pressure,
some form of rationalism inconsistent with Christianity would have
been found to be nearly as common as orthodoxy. In outlying provinces,
in Devon and Cornwall, in Ulster, in Edinburgh and Glasgow, as well as
in the metropolis, the pressure of deism on the popular creed evoked
expressions of Arian and Socinian thought among the clergy. [716]
It was, in fact, the various restraints under notice that determined
the outward fortunes of belief and unbelief, and have substantially
determined them since. When the devout Whiston was deposed from
his professorship for his Arianism, and the unbelieving Saunderson
was put in his place, [717] and when Simson was suspended from his
ministerial functions in Glasgow, [718] the lesson was learned that
outward conformity was the sufficient way to income. [719]
Hard as it was, however, to kick against the pricks of law and
prejudice, it is clear that many in the upper and middle classes
privately did so. The clerical and the new popular literature of
the time prove this abundantly. In the Tatler and its successors,
[720] the decorous Addison and the indecorous Steele, neither of
them a competent thinker, frigidly or furiously asperse the new
tribe of freethinkers; while the evangelically pious Berkeley and
the extremely unevangelical Swift rival each other in the malice of
their attacks on those who rejected their creed. Berkeley, a man of
philosophic genius but intense prepossessions, maintained Christianity
on grounds which are the negation of philosophy. [721] Swift, the
genius of neurotic misanthropy, who, in the words of Macaulay, "though
he had no religion, had a great deal of professional spirit," [722]
fought venomously for the creed of salvation. And still the deists
multiplied. In the Earl of Shaftesbury [723] they had a satirist with a
finer and keener weapon than was wielded by either Steele or Addison,
and a much better temper than was owned by Swift or Berkeley. He did
not venture to parade his unbelief: to do so was positively dangerous;
but his thrusts at faith left little doubt as to his theory. He was at
once dealt with by the orthodox as an enemy, and as promptly adopted
by the deists as a champion, important no less for his ability than
for his rank. Nor, indeed, is he lacking in boldness in comparison
with contemporary writers. The anonymous pamphlet entitled The Natural
History of Superstition, by the deist John Trenchard, M.P. (1709),
does not venture on overt heresy. But Shaftesbury's Letter Concerning
Enthusiasm (1708), his Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709),
and his treatise The Moralists (1709), had need be anonymous because
of their essential hostility to the reigning religious ethic.
Such polemic marks a new stage in rationalistic propaganda. Swift,
writing in 1709, angrily proposes to "prevent the publishing of
such pernicious works as under pretence of freethinking endeavour to
overthrow those tenets in religion which have been held inviolable
in almost all ages." [724] But his further protest that "the doctrine
of the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the immortality of the soul,
and even the truth of all revelation, are daily exploded and denied in
books openly printed," points mainly to the Unitarian propaganda. Among
freethinkers he names, in his Argument Against Abolishing Christianity
(1708), Asgill, Coward, Toland, and Tindal. But the first was
an ultra-Christian; the second was a Christian upholder of the
thesis that spirit is not immaterial; and the last, at that date,
had published only his Four Discourses (collected in 1709) and his
Rights of the Christian Church, which are anti-clerical, but not
anti-Christian. Prof. Henry Dodwell, who about 1673 published Two
Letters of Advice, I, For the Susception of Holy Orders; II, For
Studies Theological, especially such as are Rational, and in 1706
an Epistolary Discourse Concerning the Soul's Natural Mortality,
maintaining the doctrine of conditional immortality, [725] which he
made dependent on baptism in the apostolical succession, was a devout
Christian; and no writer of that date went further. Dodwell is in fact
blamed by Bishop Burnet for stirring up fanaticism against lay-baptism
among dissenters. [726] It would appear that Swift spoke mainly from
hearsay, and on the strength of the conversational freethinking so
common in society. [727] But the anonymous essays of Shaftesbury
which were issued in 1709 might be the immediate provocation of his
outbreak. [728]
An official picture of the situation is formally drawn in A
Representation of the Present State of Religion, with regard to the
late excessive growth of infidelity, heresy, and profaneness, drawn
up by the Upper House of Convocation of the province of Canterbury
in 1711. [729] This sets forth, as a result of the disorders of
the Rebellion, a growth of all manner of unbelief and profanity,
including denial of inspiration and the authority of the canon;
the likening of Christian miracles to heathen fables; the treating
of all religious mysteries as absurd speculations; Arianism and
Socinianism and scoffing at the doctrine of the Trinity; denial of
natural immortality; Erastianism; mockery of baptism and the Lord's
Supper; decrying of all priests as impostors; the collecting and
reprinting of infidel works; and publication of mock catechisms. It
is explained that all such printing has greatly increased "since
the expiration of the Act for restraining the press"; and mention
is made of an Arian work just published to which the author has put
his name, and which he has dedicated to the Convocation itself. This
was the first volume of Whiston's Primitive Christianity Revived, the
work of a devout eccentric, who had just before been deprived of his
professorship at Cambridge for his orally avowed heresy. Whiston, whose
cause was championed, and whose clerical opponents were lampooned,
in an indecorous but vigorous sketch, The Tryal of William Whiston,
Clerk, for defaming and denying the Holy Trinity, before the Lord
Chief Justice Reason (1712; 3rd ed. 1740), always remained perfectly
devout in his Arian orthodoxy; but his and his friends' arguments
were rather better fitted to make deists than to persuade Christians;
and Convocation's appeal for a new Act "restraining the present
excessive and scandalous liberty of printing wicked books at home,
and importing the like from abroad" was not responded to. There was
no love lost between Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury; but the government
in which the former, a known deist, was Secretary of State, could
hardly undertake to suppress the works of the latter.
§ 2
Deism had been thus made in a manner fashionable [730] when, in 1713,
Anthony Collins (1676-1729) began a new development by his Discourse
of Freethinking. He had previously published a notably freethinking
Essay Concerning the Use of Reason (1707), albeit without specific
impeachment of the reigning creed; carried on a discussion with
Clarke on the question of the immateriality of the soul; and issued
treatises entitled Priestcraft in Perfection (1709, dealing with the
history of the Thirty-nine Articles) [731] and A Vindication of the
Divine Attributes (1710), exposing the Hobbesian theism of Archbishop
King on lines followed twenty years later by Berkeley in his Minute
Philosopher. But none of these works aroused such a tumult as the
Discourse of Freethinking, which may be said to sum up and unify
the drift not only of previous English freethinking, but of the
great contribution of Bayle, whose learning and temper influence
all English deism from Shaftesbury onwards. [732] Collins's book,
however, was unique in its outspokenness. To the reader of to-day,
indeed, it is no very aggressive performance: the writer was a man
of imperturbable amenity and genuine kindliness of nature; and his
style is the completest possible contrast to that of the furious
replies it elicited. It was to Collins that Locke wrote, in 1703:
"Believe it, my good friend, to love truth for truth's sake is the
principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot
of all other virtues; and, if I mistake not, you have as much of it
as I ever met with in anybody." [733] The Discourse does no discredit
to this uncommon encomium, being a luminous and learned plea for the
conditions under which alone truth can be prosperously studied, and
the habits of mind which alone can attain it. Of the many replies, the
most notorious is that of Bentley writing as Phileleutherus Lipsiensis,
a performance which, on the strength of its author's reputation for
scholarship, has been uncritically applauded by not a few critics,
of whom some of the most eminent do not appear to have read Collins's
treatise. [734] Bentley's is in reality pre-eminent only for insolence
and bad faith, the latter complicated by lapses of scholarship hardly
credible on its author's part.
See the details in Dynamics of Religion, ch. vii. I am compelled
to call attention to the uncritical verdict given on this matter by
the late Sir Leslie Stephen, who asserts (English Thought, i, 206)
that Bentley convicts Collins of "unworthy shuffling" in respect
of his claim that freethinking had "banished the devil." Bentley
affirmed that this had been the work, not of the freethinkers,
but of "the Royal Society, the Boyles and the Newtons"; and
Sir Leslie comments that "nothing could be more true." Nothing
could be more untrue. As we have seen (above p. 82), Boyle was
a convinced believer in demonology; and Newton did absolutely
nothing to disperse it. Glanvill, a Royal Society man, had been
a vehement supporter of the belief in witchcraft; and the Society
as such never meddled with the matter. As to Collins's claim for
the virtue of freethinking, Sir Leslie strangely misses the point
that Collins meant by the word not unbelief, but free inquiry. He
could not have meant to say that Holland was full of deists. In
Collins's sense of the word, the Royal Society's work in general
was freethinking work.
One mistranslation which appears to have been a printer's error,
and one mis-spelling of a Greek name, are the only heads on which
Bentley confutes his author. He had, in fact, neither the kind of
knowledge nor the candour that could fit him to handle the problems
raised. It was Bentley's cue to represent Collins as an atheist,
though he was a very pronounced deist; [735] and in the first uproar
Collins thought it well to fly to Holland to avoid arrest. [736] But
deism was too general to permit of such a representative being exiled;
and he returned to study quietly, leaving Bentley's vituperation and
prevarication unanswered, with the other attacks made upon him. In
1715 he published his brief but masterly Inquiry Concerning Human
Liberty--anonymous, like all his works--which remains unsurpassed as
a statement of the case for Determinism. [737]
The welcome given to Bentley's attack upon Collins by the orthodox
was warm in proportion to their sense of the general inadequacy of the
apologetics on their side. Amid the common swarm of voluble futilities
put forth by Churchmen, the strident vehemence as well as the erudite
repute of the old scholar were fitted at least to attract the attention
of lay readers in general. Most of the contemporary vindications of the
faith, however, were fitted only to move intelligent men to new doubt
or mere contempt. A sample of the current defence against deism is
the treatise of Joseph Smith on The Unreasonableness of Deism, or, the
Certainty of a Divine Revelation, etc. 1720, where deists in general
are called "the Wicked and Unhappy men we have to deal with": [738]
and the argumentation consists in alleging that a good God must reveal
himself, and that if the miracle stories of the New Testament had been
false the Jews would have exposed and discarded them. Against such
nugatory traditionalism, the criticism of Collins shone with the spirit
of science. Not till 1723 did he publish his next work, A Discourse of
the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, a weighty attack on
the argument from prophecy, to which the replies numbered thirty-five;
on which followed in 1727 his Scheme of Literal Prophecy Considered,
a reply to criticisms. The former work was pronounced by Warburton
one of the most plausible ever written against Christianity, and he
might well say so. It faced the argument from prophecy not merely
with the skepticism of the ordinary deist, but with that weapon of
critical analysis of which the use had been briefly shown by Hobbes
and Spinoza. Apparently for the first time, he pointed out that the
"virgin prophecy" in Isaiah had a plain reference to contemporary
and not to future events; he showed that the "out of Egypt" prophecy
referred to the Hebrew past; and he revived the ancient demonstration
of Porphyry that the Book of Daniel is Maccabean. The general dilemma
put by Collins--that either the prophecies must be reduced, textually
and otherwise, to non-prophetic utterances, or Christianity must give
up prophetic claims--has never since been solved.
The deistic movement was now in full flood, the acute Mandeville
[739] having issued in 1720 his Free Thoughts on Religion, and in
1723 a freshly-expanded edition of his very anti-evangelical Fable of
the Bees; while an eccentric ex-clergyman, Thomas Woolston, who had
already lost his fellowship of Sidney-Sussex College, Cambridge, for
vagaries of doctrine and action, contributed in 1726-28 his freshly
reasoned but heedlessly ribald Discourses on Miracles. Voltaire, who
was in England in 1728, tells that thirty thousand copies were sold;
[740] while sixty pamphlets were written in opposition. Woolston's
were indeed well fitted to arouse wrath and rejoinder. The dialectic
against the argument from miracles in general, and the irrelevance
or nullity of certain miracles in particular, is really cogent,
and anticipates at points the thought of the nineteenth century. But
Woolston was of the tribe who can argue no issue without jesting, and
who stamp levity on every cause by force of innate whimsicality. Thus
he could best sway the light-hearted when his cause called for the
winning-over of the earnest. Arguments that might have been made
convincing were made to pass as banter, and serious spirits were
repelled. It was during this debate that Conyers Middleton, Fellow
of Trinity College, Cambridge, produced his Letter from Rome (1729),
wherein the part of paganism in Christianity is so set forth as to
carry inference further than the argument ostensibly goes. In that
year the heads of Oxford University publicly lamented the spread of
open deism among the students; and the proclamation did nothing to
check the contagion. In Fogg's Weekly Journal of July 4, 1730, it is
announced that "one of the principal colleges in Oxford has of late
been infested with deists; and that three deistical students have been
expelled; and a fourth has had his degree deferred two years, during
which he is to be closely confined in college; and, among other things,
is to translate Leslie's Short and Easy Method with the Deists." [741]
It is not hard to divine the effect of such exegetic methods. In 1731,
the author of an apologetic pamphlet in reply to Woolston laments that
even at the universities young men "too often" become tainted with
"infidelity"; and, on the other hand, directing his battery against
those who "causelessly profess to build their skeptical notions"
on the writings of Locke, he complains of Dr. Holdsworth and other
academic polemists who had sought to rob orthodoxy of the credit of
such a champion as Locke by "consigning him over to that class of
freethinkers and skeptics to which he was an adversary." [742]
With the most famous work of Matthew Tindal, [743] Christianity
as Old as Creation (1730), the excitement seems to have reached
high-water mark. Here was vivacity without flippancy, and argument
without irrelevant mirth; and the work elicited from first to last
over a hundred and fifty replies, at home and abroad. Tindal's thesis
is that the idea of a good God involved that of a simple, perfect,
and universal religion, which must always have existed among mankind,
and must have essentially consisted in moral conduct. Christianity,
insofar as it is true, must therefore be a statement of this primordial
religion; and moral reason must be the test, not tradition or
Scripture. One of the first replies was the Vindication of Scripture
by Waterland, to which Middleton promptly offered a biting retort in a
Letter to Dr. Waterland (1731) that serves to show the slightness of
its author's faith. After demolishing Waterland's case as calculated
rather to arouse than to allay skepticism, he undertakes to offer
a better reply of his own. It is to the simple effect that some
religion is necessary to mankind in modern as in ancient times; that
Christianity meets the need very well; and that to set up reason
in its place is "impracticable" and "the attempt therefore foolish
and irrational," in addition to being "criminal and immoral," when
politically considered. [744] Such legalist criticism, if seriously
meant, was hardly likely to discredit Tindal's book. Its directness
and simplicity of appeal to what passed for theistic common-sense were
indeed fitted to give it the widest audience yet won by any deist;
and its anti-clericalism would carry it far among his fellow Whigs
to begin with. [745] One tract of the period, dedicated to the Queen
Regent, complains that "the present raging infidelity threatens an
universal infection," and that it is not confined to the capital, but
"is disseminated even to the confines of your kingdom." [746] Tindal,
like Collins, wrote anonymously, and so escaped prosecution, dying in
1733, when the second part of his book, left ready for publication, was
deliberately destroyed by Bishop Gibson, into whose hands it came. In
1736 he and Shaftesbury are described by an orthodox apologist as the
"two oracles of deism." [747]
Woolston, who put his name to his books, after being arrested in May,
1728, and released on bail, was prosecuted in 1729 on the charge of
blasphemy, in that he had derided the gospel miracles and represented
Jesus alternately as an impostor, a sorcerer, and a magician. His
friendly counsel ingeniously argued that Woolston had aimed at
safeguarding Christianity by returning to the allegorical method of
the early Fathers; and that he had shown his reverence for Jesus and
religion by many specific expressions; but the jury took a simpler
view, and, without leaving the court, found Woolston guilty. He was
sentenced to pay a fine of £100, to suffer a year's imprisonment,
and either to find surety for his future good conduct or pay or give
sureties for £2,000. [748] He is commonly said to have paid the penalty
of imprisonment for the rest of his life (d. 1733), being unable to
pay the fine of £100; but Voltaire positively asserts that "nothing
is more false" than the statement that he died in prison; adding:
"Several of my friends have seen him in his house: he died there, at
liberty." [749] The solution of the conflict seems to be that he lived
in his own house "in the rules of" the King's Bench Prison--that is,
in the precincts, and under technical supervision. [750] In any case,
he was sentenced; and the punishment was the measure of the anger felt
at the continuous advance of deistic opinions, or at least against
hostile criticism of the Scriptures.
§ 3
Unitarianism, formerly a hated heresy, was now in comparison leniently
treated, because of its deference to Scriptural authority. Where
the deists rejected all revelation, Unitarianism held by the Bible,
calling only for a revision of the central Christian dogma. It
had indeed gained much theological ground in the past quarter of
a century. Nothing is more instructive in the culture-history
of the period than the rapidity with which the Presbyterian
succession of clergy passed from violent Calvinism, by way of
"Baxterian" Arminianism, to Arianism, and thence in many cases to
Unitarianism. First they virtually adopted the creed of the detested
Laud, whom their fathers had hated for it; then they passed step by
step to a heresy for which their fathers had slain men. A closely
similar process took place in Geneva, where Servetus after death
triumphed over his slayer. [751] In 1691, after a generation of
common suffering, a precarious union was effected between the English
Presbyterians, now mostly semi-Arminians, and the Independents, still
mostly Calvinists: but in 1694 it was dissolved. [752] Thereafter
the former body, largely endowed by the will of Lady Hewley in 1710,
became as regards its Trust Deeds the freest of all the English sects
in matters of doctrine. [753] The recognition of past changes had made
their clergy chary of a rigid subscription. Naturally the movement did
not gain in popularity as it fell away from fanaticism; but the decline
of Nonconformity in the first half of the eighteenth century was common
to all the sects, and did not specially affect the Presbyterians. Of
the many "free" churches established in England and Wales after the
Act of Toleration (1689), about half were extinct in 1715; [754] and
of the Presbyterian churches the number in Yorkshire alone fell from
fifty-nine in 1715 to a little over forty in 1730. [755] Economic
causes were probably the main ones. The State-endowed parish priest
had an enduring advantage over his rival. But the Hewley endowment
gave a certain economic basis to the Presbyterians; and the concern
for scholarship which had always marked their body kept them more open
to intellectual influences than the ostensibly more free-minded and
certainly more democratic sectaries of the Independent and Baptist
bodies. [756]
The result was that, with free Trust Deeds, the Presbyterians openly
exhibited a tendency which was latent in all the other churches. In
1719, at a special assembly of Presbyterian ministers at Salters'
Hall, it was decided by a majority of 73 to 69 that subscription to
the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity should no longer be demanded of
candidates for the ministry. [757] Of the 73, the majority professed to
be themselves orthodox; but there was no question that antitrinitarian
opinions had become common, especially in Devonshire, where the heresy
case of Mr. Peirce of Exeter had brought the matter to a crisis. [758]
From this date "Arian" opinions spread more rapidly in the dwindling
denomination, shading yet further into Unitarianism, step for step with
the deistic movement in the Church. "In less than half a century the
doctrines of the great founders of Presbyterianism could scarcely be
heard from any Presbyterian pulpit in England." [759] "In the English
Presbyterian ministry the process was from Arian opinions to those
called Unitarian ... by a gradual sliding," even as the transition had
been made from Calvinism to Arminianism in the previous century. [760]
Presbyterianism having thus come pretty much into line with
Anglicanism on the old question of predestination, while still
holding fast by Scriptural standards as against the deists, the
old stress of Anglican dislike had slackened, despite the rise of
the new heretical element. Unitarian arguments were now forthcoming
from quarters not associated with dissent, as in the case of Thomas
Chubb's first treatise, The Supremacy of the Father Asserted (1715),
courteously dedicated "To the Reverend the Clergy, and in particular
to the Right Reverend Gilbert Lord Bishop of Sarum, our vigilant
and laborious Diocesan." Chubb (1679-1747) had been trained to
glove-making, and, as his opponents took care to record, acted
also as a tallow-chandler; [761] and the good literary quality of
his work made some sensation in an England which had not learned to
think respectfully of Bunyan. Chubb's impulse to write had come from
the perusal of Whiston's Primitive Christianity Revived, in 1711,
and that single-minded Arian published his book for him.
The Unitarians would naturally repudiate all connection with such a
performance as A Sober Reply to Mr. Higgs's Merry Arguments from the
Light of Nature for the Tritheistic Doctrine of the Trinity, which was
condemned by the House of Lords on February 12, 1720, to be burnt,
as having "in a daring, impious manner, ridiculed the doctrine of
the Trinity and all revealed religion." Its author, Joseph Hall, a
serjeant-at-arms to the King, seems to have undergone no punishment,
and more decorous antitrinitarians received public countenance. Thus
the Unitarian Edward Elwall, [762] who had published a book called
A True Testimony for God and his Sacred Law (1724), for which he was
prosecuted at Stafford in 1726, was allowed by the judge to argue his
cause fully, and was unconditionally acquitted, to the displeasure
of the clergy.
§ 4
Anti-scriptural writers could not hope for such toleration, being
doubly odious to the Church. Berkeley, in 1721, had complained bitterly
[763] of the general indifference to religion, which his writings had
done nothing to alter; and in 1736 he angrily demanded that blasphemy
should be punished like high treason. [764] His Minute Philosopher
(1732) betrays throughout his angry consciousness of the vogue of
freethinking after twenty years of resistance from his profession;
and that performance is singularly ill fitted to alter the opinions
of unbelievers. In his earlier papers attacking them he had put a
stress of malice that, in a mind of his calibre, is startling even
to the student of religious history. [765] It reveals him as no less
possessed by the passion of creed than the most ignorant priest of
his Church. For him all freethinkers were detested disturbers of his
emotional life; and of the best of them, as Collins, Shaftesbury,
and Spinoza, he speaks with positive fury. In the Minute Philosopher,
half-conscious of the wrongness of his temper, he sets himself to
make the unbelievers figure in dialogue as ignorant, pretentious,
and coarse-natured; while his own mouthpieces are meant to be benign,
urbane, wise, and persuasive. Yet in the very pages so planned he
unwittingly reveals that the freethinkers whom he goes about to
caricature were commonly good-natured in tone, while he becomes as
virulent as ever in his eagerness to discredit them. Not a paragraph in
the book attains to the spirit of judgment or fairness; all is special
pleading, overstrained and embittered sarcasm, rankling animus. Gifted
alike for literature and for philosophy, keen of vision in economic
problems where the mass of men were short-sighted, he was flawed on the
side of his faith by the hysteria to which it always stirred him. No
man was less qualified to write a well-balanced dialogue as between
his own side and its opponents. To candour he never attains, unless
it be in the sense that his passion recoils on his own case. Even
while setting up ninepins of ill-put "infidel" argument to knock down,
he elaborates futilities of rebuttal, indicating to every attentive
reader the slightness of his rational basis.
On the strength of this performance he might fitly be termed the most
ill-conditioned sophist of his age, were it not for the perception
that religious feeling in him has become a pathological phase, and
that he suffers incomparably more from his own passions than he can
inflict on his enemies by his eager thrusts at them. More than almost
any gifted pietist of modern times he sets us wondering at the power
of creed in certain cases to overgrow judgment and turn to naught
the rarest faculties. No man in Berkeley's day had a finer natural
lucidity and suppleness of intelligence; yet perhaps no polemist on
his side did less either to make converts or to establish a sound
intellectual practice. Plain men on the freethinking side he must
either have bewildered by his metaphysic or revolted by his spite;
while to the more efficient minds he stood revealed as a kind of
inspired child, rapt in the construction and manipulation of a set
of brilliant sophisms which availed as much for any other creed as
for his own. To the armoury of Christian apologetic now growing up
in England he contributed a special form of the skeptical argument:
freethinkers, he declared, made certain arbitrary or irrational
assumptions in accepting Newton's doctrine of fluxions, and it was only
their prejudice that prevented them from being similarly accommodating
to Christian mysteries. [766] It is a kind of argument dear to minds
pre-convinced and incapable of a logical revision, but worse than
inept as against opponents; and it availed no more in Berkeley's
hands than it had done in those of Huet. [767] To theosophy, indeed,
Berkeley rendered a more successful service in presenting it with the
no better formula of "existence [i.e., in consciousness] dependent upon
consciousness"--a verbalism which has served the purposes of theology
in the philosophic schools down till our own day. For his, however,
the popular polemic value of such a theorem must have been sufficiently
countervailed by his vehement championship of the doctrine of passive
obedience in its most extreme form--"that loyalty is a virtue or moral
duty; and disloyalty or rebellion, in the most strict and proper sense,
a vice or crime against the law of nature." [768]
It belonged to the overstrung temperament of Berkeley that, like
a nervous artist, he should figure to himself all his freethinking
antagonists as personally odious, himself growing odious under the
obsession; and he solemnly asserts, in his Discourse to Magistrates,
that there had been "lately set up within this city of Dublin" an
"execrable fraternity of blasphemers," calling themselves "blasters,"
and forming "a distinct society, whereof the proper and avowed business
shall be to shock all serious Christians by the most impious and
horrid blasphemies, uttered in the most public manner." [769] There
appears to be not a grain of truth in this astonishing assertion,
to which no subsequent historian has paid the slightest attention. In
a period in which freethinking books had been again and again burned
in Dublin by the public hangman, such a society could be projected
only in a nightmare; and Berkeley's hallucination may serve as a
sign of the extent to which his judgment had been deranged by his
passions. [770] His forensic temper is really on a level with that
of the most incompetent swashbucklers on his side.
When educated Christians could be so habitually envenomed as was
Berkeley, there was doubtless a measure of contrary heat among English
unbelievers; but, apart altogether from what could be described as
blasphemy, unbelief abounded in the most cultured society of the
day. Bolingbroke's rationalism had been privately well known; and so
distinguished a personage as the brilliant and scholarly Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, hated by Pope, is one of the reputed freethinkers
of her time. [771] In the very year of the publication of Berkeley's
Minute Philosopher, the first two epistles of the Essay on Man of
his own friend and admirer, Pope, gave a new currency to the form
of optimistic deism created by Shaftesbury, and later elaborated by
Bolingbroke. Pope was always anxiously hostile in his allusions to the
professed freethinkers [772]--among whom Bolingbroke only posthumously
enrolled himself--and in private he specially aspersed Shaftesbury,
from whom he had taken so much; [773] but his prudential tactic gave
all the more currency to the virtual deism he enunciated. Given out
without any critical allusion to Christianity, and put forward as a
vindication of the ways of God to men, it gave to heresy, albeit in
a philosophically incoherent exposition, the status of a well-bred
piety. A good authority pronounces that "the Essay on Man did more to
spread English deism in France than all the works of Shaftesbury";
[774] and we have explicit testimony that the poet privately avowed
the deistic view of things. [775]
The line of the Essay which now reads:
The soul, uneasy and confined from home,
originally ran "at home"; but, says Warton, "this expression
seeming to exclude a future existence, as, to speak the plain
truth, it was intended to do, it was altered"--presumably
by Warburton. (Warton's Essay on Pope, 4th ed. ii, 67.) The
Spinozistic or pantheistic character of much of the Essay
on Man was noted by various critics, in particular by the
French Academician De Crousaz (Examen de l'Essay de M. Pope sur
l'Homme, 1748, p. 90, etc.) After promising to justify the ways
of God to man, writes Crousaz (p. 33), Pope turns round and
justifies man, leaving God charged with all men's sins. When
the younger Racine, writing to the Chevalier Ramsay in 1742,
charged the Essay with irreligion, Pope wrote him repudiating
alike Spinoza and Leibnitz. (Warton, ii, 121.) In 1755, however,
the Abbé Gauchat renewed the attack, declaring that the Essay
was "neither Christian nor philosophic" (Lettres Critiques, i,
346). Warburton at first charged the poem with rank atheism, and
afterwards vindicated it in his manner. (Warton, i, 125.) But in
Germany, in the youth of Goethe, we find the Essay regarded by
Christians as an unequivocally deistic poem. (Goethe's Wahrheit
und Dichtung, Th. II, B. vii: Werke, ed. 1866, xi, 263.) And
by a modern Christian polemist the Essay is described as "the
best positive result of English deism in the eighteenth century"
(Gostwick, German Culture and Christianity, 1882, p. 31).
In point of fact, deism was the fashionable way of thinking among
cultured people. Though Voltaire testifies from personal knowledge
that there were in England in his day many principled atheists, [776]
there was little overt atheism, [777] whether by reason of the special
odium attaching to that way of thought, or of a real production of
theistic belief by the concurrence of the deistic propaganda on this
head with that of the clergy, themselves in so many cases deists. [778]
Bishop Burnet, in the Conclusion to the History of his Own Time,
pronounces that "there are few atheists, but many infidels, who are
indeed very little better than the atheists." Collins observed that
nobody had doubted the existence of God until the Boyle lecturers
began to prove it; and Clarke had more than justified the jest by
arguing, in his Boyle Lectures for 1705, that all deism logically
leads to atheism. But though the apologists roused much discussion on
the theistic issue, the stress of the apologetic literature passed
from the theme of atheism to that of deism. Shaftesbury's early
Inquiry Concerning Virtue had assumed the existence of a good deal
of atheism; but his later writings, and those of his school, do not
indicate much atheistic opposition. [779] Even the revived discussion
on the immateriality and immortality of the soul--which began with
the Grand Essay of Dr. William Coward, [780] in 1704, and was taken
up, as we have seen, by the non-juror Dodwell [781]--was conducted
on either orthodox or deistic lines. Coward wrote as a professed
Christian, [782] to maintain, "against impostures of philosophy,"
that "matter and motion must be the foundation of thought in men
and brutes." Collins maintained against Clarke the proposition that
matter is capable of thought; and Samuel Strutt ("of the Temple"),
whose Philosophical Inquiry into the Physical Spring of Human Actions,
and the Immediate Cause of Thinking (1732), is a most tersely cogent
sequence of materialistic argument, never raises any question of
deity. The result was that the problem of "materialism" was virtually
dropped, Strutt's essay in particular passing into general oblivion.
It was replied to, however, with the Inquiry of Collins, as late
as 1760, by a Christian controversialist who admits Strutt to
have been "a gentleman of an excellent genius for philosophical
inquiries, and a close reasoner from those principles he laid
down" (An Essay towards demonstrating the Immateriality and Free
Agency of the Soul, 1760, p. 94). The Rev. Mr. Monk, in his Life
of Bentley (2nd ed. 1833, ii, 391), absurdly speaks of Strutt as
having "dressed up the arguments of Lord Herbert of Cherbury and
other enemies of religion in a new shape." The reverend gentleman
cannot have paid any attention to the arguments either of Herbert
or of Strutt, which have no more in common than those of Toland
and Hume. Strutt's book was much too closely reasoned to be
popular. His name was for the time, however, associated with a
famous scandal at Cambridge University. When in 1739 proceedings
were taken against what was described as an "atheistical society"
there, Strutt was spoken of as its "oracle." One of the members
was Paul Whitehead, satirized by Pope. Another, Tinkler Ducket,
a Fellow of Caius College, in holy orders, was prosecuted in the
Vice-Chancellor's Court on the twofold charge of proselytizing for
atheism and of attempting to seduce a "female." In his defence he
explained that he had been for some time "once more a believer in
God and Christianity"; but was nevertheless expelled. See Monk's
Life of Bentley, as cited, ii, 391 sq.
§ 5
No less marked is the failure to develop the "higher criticism" from
the notable start made in 1739 in the very remarkable Inquiry into
the Jewish and Christian Revelations by Samuel Parvish, who made the
vital discovery that Deuteronomy is a product of the seventh century
B.C. [783] His book, which is in the form of a dialogue between a
Christian and a Japanese, went into a second edition (1746); but his
idea struck too deep for the critical faculty of that age, and not
till the nineteenth century was the clue found again by De Wette, in
Germany. [784] Parvish came at the end of the main deistic movement,
[785] and by that time the more open-minded men had come to a point of
view from which it did not greatly matter when Deuteronomy was written,
or precisely how a cultus was built up; while orthodoxy could not dream
of abandoning its view of inspiration. There was thus an arrest alike
of historical criticism and of the higher philosophic thought under
the stress of the concrete disputes over ethics, miracles, prophecy,
and politics; and a habit of taking deity for granted became normal,
with the result that when the weak point was pressed upon by Law and
Butler there was a sense of blankness on both sides. But among men
theistically inclined, the argument of Tindal against revelationism
was extremely telling, and it had more literary impressiveness
than any writing on the orthodox side before Butler. By this time
the philosophic influence of Spinoza--seen as early as 1699 in
Shaftesbury's Inquiry Concerning Virtue, [786] and avowed by Clarke
when he addressed his Demonstration (1705) "more particularly in
answer to Mr. Hobbs, Spinoza, and their followers"--had spread among
the studious class, greatly reinforcing the deistic movement; so that
in 1732 Berkeley, who ranked him among "weak and wicked writers,"
described him as "the great leader of our modern infidels."
See the Minute Philosopher, Dial. vii, § 29. Similarly Leland,
in the Supplement (1756) to his View of the Deistical Writers
(afterwards incorporated as Letter VI), speaks of Spinoza as "the
most applauded doctor of modern atheism." Sir Leslie Stephen's
opinion (English Thought, i, 33), that "few of the deists,
probably," read Spinoza, seems to be thus outweighed. If they
did not in great numbers read the Ethica, they certainly read the
Tractatus and the letters. As early as 1677 we find Stillingfleet,
in the preface to his Letter to a Deist, speaking of Spinoza as
"a late author [who] I hear is mightily in vogue among many who
cry up anything on the atheistical side, though never so weak
and trifling"; and further of a mooted proposal to translate the
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus into English. A translation was
published in 1689. In 1685 the Scotch Professor George Sinclar,
in the "Preface to the Reader" of his Satan's Invisible World
Discovered, writes that "There are a monstrous rabble of men,
who following the Hobbesian and Spinosian principles, slight
religion and undervalue the Scripture," etc. In Gildon's work of
recantation, The Deist's Manual (1705, p. 192), the indifferent
Pleonexus, who "took more delight in bags than in books,"
and demurs to accumulating the latter, avows that he has a few,
among them being Hobbes and Spinoza. Evelyn, writing about 1680-90,
speaks of "that infamous book, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,"
as "a wretched obstacle to the searchers of holy truth" (The
History of Religion, 1850, p. xxvii). Cp. Halyburton, Natural
Religion Insufficient, Edinburgh, 1714, p. 31, as to the "great
vogue among our young Gentry and Students" of Hobbes, Spinoza,
and others.
§ 6
Among the deists of the upper classes was the young William Pitt,
afterwards Lord Chatham, if, as has been alleged, it was he who in
1733, two years before he entered Parliament, contributed to the
London Journal a "Letter on Superstition," the work of a pronounced
freethinker. [787] On the other hand, such deistic writing as that
with which Chubb, in a multitude of tracts, followed up his early
Unitarian essay of 1715, brought an ethical "Christian rationalism"
within the range of the unscholarly many. Thomas Morgan (d. 1741),
a physician, began in the Moral Philosopher, 1739-1740, [788] to
sketch a rationalistic theory of Christian origins, besides putting
the critical case with new completeness. Morgan had been at one time a
dissenting minister at Frome, Somerset, and had been dismissed because
of his deistical opinions. Towards the Jehovah and the ethic of the
Old Testament he holds, however, the attitude rather of an ancient
Gnostic than of a modern rationalist; and in his philosophy he is
either a very "godly" deist or a pantheist miscarried. [789]
At the same time Peter Annet (1693-1769), a schoolmaster and
inventor of a system of shorthand, widened the propaganda in other
directions. He seems to have been the first freethought lecturer, for
his first pamphlet, Judging for Ourselves: or, Freethinking the Great
Duty of Religion, "By P. A., Minister of the Gospel" (1739), consists
of "Two Lectures delivered at Plaisterers' Hall." Through all his
propaganda, of which the more notable portions are his Supernaturals
Examined and a series of controversies on the Resurrection, there runs
a train of shrewd critical sense, put forth in crisp and vivacious
English, which made him a popular force. What he lacked was the
due gravity and dignity for the handling of such a theme as the
reversal of a nation's faith. Like Woolston, he is facetious where
he should be serious; entertaining where he had need be impressive;
provocative where he should have aimed at persuasion. We cannot say
what types he influenced, or how deep his influence went: it appears
only that he swayed many whose suffrages weighed little. At length,
when in 1761 he issued nine numbers of The Free Inquirer, in which
he attacked the Pentateuch with much insight and cogency, but with
a certain want of rational balance (shown also in his treatise,
Social Bliss Considered, 1749), he was made a victim of the then
strengthened spirit of persecution, being sentenced to stand thrice
in the pillory with the label "For Blasphemy," and to suffer a year's
hard labour. Nevertheless, he was popular enough to start a school
on his release.
Such popularity, of course, was alien to the literary and social
traditions of the century; and from the literary point of view the main
line of deistic propaganda, as apart from the essays and treatises of
Hume and the posthumous works of Bolingbroke, ends with the younger
Henry Dodwell's (anonymous) ironical essay, Christianity not Founded
on Argument (1741). So rigorously congruous is the reasoning of that
brilliant treatise that some have not quite unjustifiably taken it
for the work of a dogmatic believer, standing at some such position
as that taken up before him by Huet, and in recent times by Cardinal
Newman. [790] He argues, for instance, not merely that reason can yield
none of the confidence which belongs to true faith, but that it cannot
duly strengthen the moral will against temptations. [791] But the book
at once elicited a number of replies, all treating it unhesitatingly
as an anti-Christian work; and Leland assails it as bitterly as he
does any openly freethinking treatise. [792] Its thesis might have
been seriously supported by reference to the intellectual history
of the preceding thirty years, wherein much argument had certainly
failed to establish the reigning creed or to discredit the unbelievers.
§ 7
Of the work done by English deism thus far, it may suffice to say that
within two generations it had more profoundly altered the intellectual
temper of educated men than any religious movement had ever done in
the same time. This appears above all from the literature produced
by orthodoxy in reply, where the mere defensive resort to reasoning,
apart from the accounts of current rationalism, outgoes anything
in the previous history of literature. The whole evolution is a
remarkable instance of the effect on intellectual progress of the
diversion of a nation's general energy from war and intense political
faction to mental activities. A similar diversion had taken place
at the Restoration, to be followed by a return to civil and foreign
strife, which arrested it. It was in the closing years of Anne, and
in the steady régime of Walpole under the first two Georges, that the
ferment worked at its height. Collins's Discourse of Freethinking was
synchronous with the Peace of Utrecht: the era of war re-opened in
1739, much against the will of Walpole, who resigned in 1742. Home and
foreign wars thereafter became common; and in 1751 Clive opened the
period of imperialistic expansion, determining national developments
on that main line, concurrently with that of the new industry. Could
the discussion have been continuous--could England have remained what
she was in the main deistic period, a workshop of investigation and
a battleground of ideas--all European development might have been
indefinitely hastened. But the deists, for the most part educated
men appealing to educated men or to the shrewdest readers among the
artisans, had not learned to reckon with the greater social forces;
and beyond a certain point they could not affect England's intellectual
destinies.
It is worse than idle to argue that "the true cause of the decay of
deism is to be sought in its internal weakness," in the sense that
"it was not rooted in the deepest convictions, nor associated with
the most powerful emotions of its adherents." [793] No such charge
can be even partially proved. The deists were at least as much in
earnest as two-thirds of the clergy: the determining difference,
in this regard, was the economic basis of the latter, and their
social hold of an ignorant population. The clergy, who could not
argue the deists down in the court of culture, had in their own
jurisdiction the great mass of the uneducated lower classes, and
the great mass of the women of all classes, whom the ideals of the
age kept uneducated, with a difference. And while the more cultured
clergy were themselves in large measure deists, the majority, in
the country parishes, remained uncritical and unreflective, caring
little even to cultivate belief among their flocks. The "contempt of
the clergy" which had subsisted from the middle of the seventeenth
century (if, indeed, it should not be dated from the middle of the
sixteenth) meant among other things that popular culture remained on
a lower plane. With the multitude remaining a ready hotbed for new
"enthusiasm," and the women of the middle and upper orders no less
ready nurturers of new generations of young believers, the work of
emancipation was but begun when deism was made "fashionable." And with
England on the way to a new era at once of industrial and imperial
expansion, in which the energies that for a generation had made her
a leader of European thought were diverted to arms and to commerce,
the critical and rationalizing work of the deistical generation could
not go on as it had begun. That generation left its specific mark
on the statute-book in a complete repeal of the old laws relating to
witchcraft; [794] on literature in a whole library of propaganda and
apology; on moral and historic science in a new movement of humanism,
which was to find its check in the French Revolution.
How it affected the general intelligence for good may be partly
gathered from a comparison of the common English political
attitudes towards Ireland in the first and the last quarters of
the century. Under William was wrought the arrest of Irish industry
and commerce, begun after the Restoration; under Anne were enacted
the penal laws against Catholics--as signal an example of religious
iniquity as can well be found in all history. By the middle of the
century these laws had become anachronisms for all save bigots.
"The wave of freethought that was spreading over Europe and
permeating its literature had not failed to affect Ireland.... An
atmosphere of skepticism was fatal to the Penal Code. What element
of religious persecution there had been in it had long ceased to be
operative" (R. Dunlop, in Camb. Mod. Hist. vi, 489). Macaulay's
testimony on this head is noteworthy: "The philosophy of the
eighteenth century had purified English Whiggism of the deep
taint of intolerance which had been contracted during a long and
close alliance with the Puritanism of the eighteenth century"
(History, ch. xvii, end).
The denunciations of the penal laws by Arthur Young in 1780 [795]
are the outcome of two generations of deistic thinking; the spirit
of religion has been ousted by judgment. [796] Could that spirit have
had freer play, less hindrance from blind passion, later history would
have been a happier record. But for reasons lying in the environment
as well as in its own standpoint, deism was not destined to rise on
continuous stepping-stones to social dominion.
Currency has been given to a misconception of intellectual history
by the authoritative statement that in the deistic controversy
"all that was intellectually venerable in England" appeared
"on the side of Christianity" (Sir Leslie Stephen, English
Thought in the Eighteenth Century, i, 86). The same thing,
in effect, is said by Lecky: "It was to repel these [deistic]
attacks ['upon the miracles'] that the evidential school arose,
and the annals of religious controversy narrate few more complete
victories than they achieved" (Rise and Influence of Rationalism,
pop. ed. i, 175). The proposition seems to be an echo of orthodox
historiography, as Buckle had before written in his note-book:
"In England skepticism made no head. Such men as Toland and
Tindal, Collins, Shaftesbury, Woolston, were no match for Clarke,
Warburton, and Lardner. They could make no head till the time
of Middleton" (Misc. Works, abridged ed. i, 321)--a strain
of assertion which clearly proceeds on no close study of the
period. In the first place, all the writing on the freethinking
side was done under peril of Blasphemy Laws, and under menace of
all the calumny and ostracism that in Christian society follow
on advanced heresy; while the orthodox side could draw on the
entire clerical profession, over ten thousand strong, and trained
for and pledged to defence of the faith. Yet, when all is said,
the ordinary list of deists amply suffices to disprove Sir
L. Stephen's phrase. His "intellectually venerable" list runs:
Bentley, Locke, Berkeley, Clarke, Butler, Waterland, Warburton,
Sherlock, Gibson, Conybeare, Smalbroke, Leslie, Law, Leland,
Lardner, Foster, Doddridge, Lyttelton, Barrington, Addison, Pope,
Swift. He might have added Newton and Boyle. Sykes, [797] Balguy,
Stebbing, and a "host of others," he declares to be "now for the
most part as much forgotten as their victims"; Young and Blackmore
he admits to be in similar case. It is expressly told of Doddridge,
he might have added, that whereas that well-meaning apologist
put before his students at Northampton the ablest writings both
for and against Christianity, leaving them to draw their own
conclusions, many of his pupils, "on leaving his institution,
became confirmed Arians and Socinians" (Nichols in App. P to Life
of Arminius--Works of Arminius, 1825, i, 223-25). This hardly
spells success. [798] All told, the list includes only three or
four men of any permanent interest as thinkers, apart from Newton;
and only three or four more important as writers. The description
of Waterland, [799] Warburton, [800] Smalbroke, [801] Sherlock,
Leslie, and half-a-dozen more as "intellectually venerable"
is grotesque; even Bentley is a strange subject for veneration.
On the other hand, the list of "the despised deists," who "make
but a poor show when compared with this imposing list," runs thus:
Herbert, Hobbes, Blount, Halley (well known to be an unbeliever,
though he did not write on the subject), Toland, Shaftesbury,
Collins, Mandeville, Tindal, Chubb, Morgan, Dodwell, Middleton,
Hume, Bolingbroke, Gibbon. It would be interesting to know on
what principles this group is excluded from the intellectual
veneration so liberally allotted to the other. It is nothing
to the purpose that Shaftesbury and Mandeville wrote "covertly"
and "indirectly." The law and the conditions compelled them to do
so. It is still more beside the case to say that "Hume can scarcely
be reckoned among the deists. He is already [when?] emerging
into a higher atmosphere." Hume wrote explicitly as a deist;
and only in his posthumous Dialogues did he pass on to the
atheistic position. At no time, moreover, was he "on the side of
Christianity." On the other hand, Locke and Clarke and Pope were
clearly "emerging into a higher atmosphere" than Christianity,
since Locke is commonly reckoned by the culture-historians,
and even by Sir Leslie Stephen, as making for deism; Pope was
the pupil of Bolingbroke, and wrote as such; and Clarke was
shunned as an Arian. Newton, again, was a Unitarian, and Leibnitz
accused his system of making for irreligion. It would be hard
to show, further, who are the "forgotten victims" of Balguy and
the rest. Balguy criticized Shaftesbury, whose name is still a
good deal better known than Balguy's. The main line of deists is
pretty well remembered. And if we pair off Hume against Berkeley,
Hobbes against Locke, Middleton (as historical critic) against
Bentley, Shaftesbury against Addison, Mandeville against Swift,
Bolingbroke against Butler, Collins against Clarke, Herbert against
Lyttelton, Tindal against Waterland, and Gibbon against--shall
we say?--Warburton, it hardly appears that the overplus of merit
goes as Sir Leslie Stephen alleges, even if we leave Newton,
with brain unhinged, standing against Halley. The statement that
the deists "are but a ragged regiment," and that "in speculative
ability most of them were children by the side of their ablest
antagonists," is simply unintelligible unless the names of all
the ablest deists are left out. Locke, be it remembered, did not
live to meet the main deistic attack on Christianity; and Sir
Leslie admits the weakness of his pro-Christian performance.
The bases of Sir Leslie Stephen's verdict may be tested by his
remarks that "Collins, a respectable country gentleman, showed
considerable acuteness; Toland, a poor denizen of Grub Street, and
Tindal, a Fellow of All Souls, made a certain display of learning,
and succeeded in planting some effective arguments." Elsewhere
(pp. 217-227) Sir Leslie admits that Collins had the best of the
argument against his "venerable" opponents on Prophecy; and Huxley
credits him with equal success in the argument with Clarke. The
work of Collins on Human Liberty, praised by a long series of
students and experts, and entirely above the capacity of Bentley,
is philosophically as durable as any portion of Locke, who made
Collins his chosen friend and trustee, and who did not live to
meet his anti-Biblical arguments. Tindal, who had also won Locke's
high praise by his political essays, profoundly influenced such
a student as Laukhard (Lechler, p. 451). And Toland, whom even
Mr. A. S. Farrar (Bampton Lectures, p. 179) admitted to possess
"much originality and learning," has struck Lange as a notable
thinker, though he was a poor man. Leibnitz, who answered him,
praises his acuteness, as does Pusey, who further admits the
uncommon ability of Morgan and Collins (Histor. Enq. into German
Rationalism, 1828, p. 126). It is time that the conventional
English standards in these matters should be abandoned by modern
rationalists.
The unfortunate effect of Sir Leslie Stephen's dictum is
seen in the assertion of Prof. Höffding (Hist. of Modern
Philos. Eng. tr. 1900, i, 403), that Sir Leslie "rightly remarks
of the English deists that they were altogether inferior to their
adversaries"; and further (p. 405), that by the later deists,
"Collins, Tindal, Morgan, etc., the dispute as to miracles
was carried on with great violence." It is here evident that
Prof. Höffding has not read the writers he depreciates, for those
he names were far from being violent. Had he known the literature,
he would have named Woolston, not Collins and Tindal and Morgan. He
is merely echoing, without inquiring for himself, a judgment which
he regards as authoritative. In the same passage he declares that
"only one of all the men formerly known as the 'English deists'
[Toland] has rendered contributions of any value to the history
of thought." If this is said with a knowledge of the works of
Collins, Shaftesbury, and Mandeville, it argues a sad lack of
critical judgment. But there is reason to infer here also that
Prof. Höffding writes in ignorance of the literature he discusses.
While some professed rationalists thus belittle a series of
pioneers who did so much to make later rationalism possible, some
eminent theologians do them justice. Thus does Prof. Cheyne begin
his series of lectures on Founders of Old Testament Criticism
(1893): "A well-known and honoured representative of progressive
German orthodoxy (J. A. Dorner) has set a fine example of
historical candour by admitting the obligations of his country to
a much-disliked form of English heterodoxy. He says that English
deism, which found so many apt disciples in Germany, 'by clearing
away dead matter, prepared the way for a reconstruction of theology
from the very depths of the heart's beliefs, and also subjected
man's nature to stricter observation.' [802] This, however, as it
appears to me, is a very inadequate description of the facts. It
was not merely a new constructive stage of German theoretic
theology, and a keener psychological investigation, for which deism
helped to prepare the way, but also a great movement, which has in
our own day become in a strict sense international, concerned with
the literary and historical criticism of the Scriptures. Beyond
all doubt, the Biblical discussions which abound in the works of
the deists and their opponents contributed in no slight degree
to the development of that semi-apologetic criticism of the
Old Testament of which J. D. Michaelis, and in some degree even
Eichhorn, were leading representatives.... It is indeed singular
that deism should have passed away in England without having
produced a great critical movement among ourselves." Not quite
so singular, perhaps, when we note that in our own day Sir Leslie
Stephen and Lecky and Prof. Höffding could sum up the work of the
deists without a glance at what it meant for Biblical criticism.
§ 8
If we were to set up a theory of intellectual possibilities from
what has actually taken place in the history of thought, and without
regard to the economic and political conditions above mentioned, we
might reason that deism failed permanently to overthrow the current
creed because it was not properly preceded by discipline in natural
science. There might well be stagnation in the higher criticism of
the Hebrew Scriptures when all natural science was still coloured
by them. In nothing, perhaps, is the danger of Sacred Books more
fully exemplified than in their influence for the suppression of
true scientific thought. A hundredfold more potently than the faiths
of ancient Greece has that of Christendom blocked the way to all
intellectually vital discovery. If even the fame and the pietism
of Newton could not save him from the charge of promoting atheism,
much less could obscure men hope to set up any view of natural things
which clashed with pulpit prejudice. But the harm lay deeper, inasmuch
as the ground was preoccupied by pseudo-scientific theories which
were at best fanciful modifications of the myths of Genesis. Types
of these performances are the treatise of Sir Matthew Hale on The
Primitive Origination of Mankind (1685); Dr. Thomas Burnet's Sacred
Theory of the Earth (1680-1689); and Whiston's New Theory of the
Earth (1696)--all devoid of scientific value; Hale's work being
pre-Newtonian; Burnet's anti-Newtonian, though partly critical as
regards the sources of the Pentateuch; and Whiston's a combination
of Newton and myth with his own quaint speculations. Even the Natural
History of the Earth of Prof. John Woodward (1695), after recognizing
that fossils were really prehistoric remains, decided that they were
deposited by the Deluge. [803]
Woodward's book is in its own way instructive as regards the history
of opinion. A "Professor of Physick" in Gresham College, F.C.P.,
and F.R.S., he goes about his work in a methodical and ostensibly
scientific fashion, colligates the phenomena, examines temperately
the hypotheses of the many previous inquirers, and shows no violence
of orthodox prepossession. He claims to have considered Moses "only
as an historian," and to give him credit finally because he finds his
narrative "punctually true." [804] He had before him an abundance of
facts irreconcilable with the explanation offered by the Flood story;
yet he actually adds to that myth a thesis of universal decomposition
and dissolution of the earth's strata by the flood's action [805]--a
hypothesis far more extravagant than any of those he dismissed. With
all his method and scrutiny he had remained possessed by the tradition,
and could not cast it off. It would seem as if such a book, reducing
the tradition to an absurdity, was bound at least to put its more
thoughtful readers on the right track. But the legend remained in
possession of the general intelligence as of Woodward's; and beyond
his standpoint science made little advance for many years. Moral and
historical criticism, then, as regards some main issues, had gone
further than scientific; and men's thinking on certain problems of
cosmic philosophy was thus arrested for lack of due basis or discipline
in experiential science.
The final account of the arrest of exact Biblical criticism in the
eighteenth century, however, is that which explains also the arrest
of the sciences. English energy, broadly speaking, was diverted
into other channels. In the age of Chatham it became more and
more military and industrial, imperialist and commercial; and the
scientific work of Newton was considerably less developed by English
hands than was the critical work of the first deists. Long before
the French Revolution, mathematical and astronomical science were
being advanced by French minds, the English doing nothing. Lagrange
and Euler, Clairaut and D'Alembert, carried on the task, till Laplace
consummated it in his great theory, which is to Newton's what Newton's
was to that of Copernicus. It was Frenchmen, freethinkers to a man,
who built up the new astronomy, while England was producing only
eulogies of Newton's greatness. "No British name is ever mentioned
in the list of mathematicians who followed Newton in his brilliant
career and completed the magnificent edifice of which he laid the
foundation." [806] "Scotland contributed her Maclaurin, but England
no European name." [807] Throughout the latter half of the eighteenth
century "there was hardly an individual in this country who possessed
an intimate acquaintance with the methods of investigation which had
conducted the foreign mathematicians to so many sublime results." [808]
"The English mathematicians seem to have been so dazzled with the
splendour of Newton's discoveries that they never conceived them
capable of being extended or improved upon"; [809] and Newton's
name was all the while vaunted, unwarrantably enough, as being on
the side of Christian orthodoxy. Halley's great hypothesis of the
motion of the solar system in space, put forward in 1718, borne out
by Cassini and Le Monnier, was left to be established by Mayer of
Göttingen. [810] There was nothing specially incidental to deism,
then, in the non-development of the higher criticism in England
after Collins and Parvish, or in the lull of critical speculation
in the latter half of the century. It was part of a general social
readjustment in which English attention was turned from the mental
life to the physical, from intension of thought to extension of empire.
Playfair (as cited, p. 39; Brewster, Memoirs of Newton, i,
348, note) puts forward the theory that the progress of the
higher science in France was due to the "small pensions and great
honours" bestowed on scientific men by the Academy of Sciences. The
lack of such an institution in England he traces to "mercantile
prejudices," without explaining these in their turn. They are
to be understood as the consequences of the special expansion
of commercial and industrial life in England in the eighteenth
century, when France, on the contrary, losing India and North
America, had her energies in a proportional degree thrown back on
the life of the mind. French freethought, it will be observed,
expanded with science, while in England there occurred, not
a spontaneous reversion to orthodoxy any more than a surrender
of the doctrine of Newton, but a general turning of attention in
other directions. It is significant that the most important names
in the literature of deism after 1740 are those of Hume and Smith,
late products of the intellectual atmosphere of pre-industrial
Scotland; of Bolingbroke, an aristocrat of the deistic generation,
long an exile in France, who left his works to be published after
his death; and of Gibbon, who also breathed the intellectual air
of France.
§ 9
It has been commonly assumed that after Chubb and Morgan the
deistic movement in England "decayed," or "passed into skepticism"
with Hume; and that the decay was mainly owing to the persuasive
effect of Bishop Butler's Analogy (1736). [811] This appears to be
a complete misconception, arising out of the habit of looking to
the mere succession of books without considering their vogue and the
accompanying social conditions. Butler's book had very little influence
till long after his death, [812] being indeed very ill-fitted to turn
contemporary deists to Christianity. It does but develop one form of
the skeptical argument for faith, as Berkeley had developed another;
and that form of reasoning never does attain to anything better
than a success of despair. The main argument being that natural
religion is open to the same objections as revealed, on the score
(1) of the inconsistency of Nature with divine benevolence, and
(2) that we must be guided in opinion as in conduct by probability,
a Mohammedan could as well use the theorem for the Koran as could
a Christian for the Bible; and the argument against the justice of
Nature tended logically to atheism. But the deists had left to them
the resource of our modern theists--that of surmising a beneficence
above human comprehension; and it is clear that if Butler made any
converts they must have been of a very unenthusiastic kind. It is
therefore safe to say with Pattison that "To whatever causes is
to be attributed the decline of deism from 1750 onwards, the books
polemically written against it cannot be reckoned among them." [813]
On the other hand, even deists who were affected by the plea that the
Bible need not be more consistent and satisfactory than Nature, could
find refuge in Unitarianism, a creed which, as industriously propounded
by Priestley [814] towards the end of the century, made a numerical
progress out of all proportion to that of orthodoxy. The argument
of William Law, [815] again, which insisted on the irreconcilability
of the course of things with human reason, and called for an abject
submission to revelation, could appeal only to minds already thus
prostrate. Both his and Butler's methods, in fact, prepared the way
for Hume. And in the year 1741, five years after the issue of the
Analogy and seven before the issue of Hume's Essay on Miracles, we
find the thesis of that essay tersely affirmed in a note to Book II
of an anonymous translation (ascribed to T. Francklin) of Cicero's
De Natura Deorum.