little credit ought to be paid to facts said to be done out
of the ordinary course of nature. These miracles [cutting the
whetstone, etc., related by Cicero, De Div. i, c. xvii] are well
attested. They were recorded in the annals of a great people,
believed by many learned and otherwise sagacious persons, and
received as religious truths by the populace; but the testimonies
of ancient records, the credulity of some learned men, and the
implicit faith of the vulgar, can never prove that to have been,
which is impossible in the nature of things ever to be." M. Tullius
Cicero Of the Nature of the Gods ... with Notes, London, 1741,
p. 85. It does not appear to have been noted that in regard to
this as to another of his best-known theses, Hume develops a
proposition laid down before him.
What Hume did was to elaborate the skeptical argument with a power
and fullness which forced attention once for all, alike in England
and on the Continent. It is not to be supposed, however, that
Hume's philosophy, insofar as it was strictly skeptical--that is,
suspensory--drew away deists from their former attitude of confidence
to one of absolute doubt. Nor did Hume ever aim at such a result. What
he did was to countermine the mines of Berkeley and others, who,
finding their supra-rational dogmas set aside by rationalism, deistic
or atheistic, sought to discredit at once deistic and atheistic
philosophies based on study of the external world, and to establish
their creed anew on the basis of their subjective consciousness. As
against that method, Hume showed the futility of all apriorism
alike, destroying the sham skepticism of the Christian theists by
forcing their method to its conclusions. If the universe was to be
reduced to a mere contingent of consciousness, he calmly showed,
consciousness itself was as easily reducible, on the same principles,
to a mere series of states. Idealistic skepticism, having disposed
of the universe, must make short work of the hypostatized process
of perception. Hume, knowing that strict skepticism is practically
null in life, counted on leaving the ground cleared for experiential
rationalism. And he did, insofar as he was read. His essay, Of Miracles
(with the rest of the Inquiries of 1748-1751, which recast his early
Treatise of Human Nature, 1739), posits a principle valid against all
supernaturalism whatever; while his Natural History of Religion (1757),
though affirming deism, rejected the theory of a primordial monotheism,
and laid the basis of the science of Comparative Hierology. [816]
Finally, his posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
(1779) admit, though indirectly, the untenableness of deism, and
fall back decisively upon the atheistic or agnostic position. [817]
Like Descartes, he lacked the heroic fibre; but like him he recast
philosophy for modern Europe; and its subsequent course is but a
development of or a reaction against his work.
§ 10
It is remarkable that this development of opinion took place in
that part of the British Islands where religious fanaticism had gone
furthest, and speech and thought were socially least free. Freethought
in Scotland before the middle of the seventeenth century can have
existed only as a thing furtive and accursed; and though, as we have
seen from the Religio Stoici of Sir George Mackenzie, unbelief had
emerged in some abundance at or before the Restoration, only wealthy
men could dare openly to avow their deism. [818] Early in 1697 the
clergy had actually succeeded in getting a lad of eighteen, Thomas
Aikenhead, hanged for professing deism in general, and in particular
for calling the Old Testament "Ezra's Fables," ridiculing the doctrines
of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and expressing the hope and
belief that Christianity would be extinct within a century. [819]
The spirit of the prosecution may be gathered from the facts that
the boy broke down and pleaded penitence, [820] and that the statute
enacted the capital penalty only for obstinately persisting in the
denial of any of the persons of the Trinity. [821] He had talked
recklessly against the current creed among youths about his own age,
one of whom was in Locke's opinion "the decoy who gave him the books
and made him speak as he did." [822] It would appear that a victim
was very much wanted; and Aikenhead was not allowed the help of a
counsel. It is characteristic of the deadening effect of dogmatic
religion on the heart that an act of such brutish cruelty elicited
no cry of horror from any Christian writer. At this date the clergy
were hounding on the Privy Council to new activity in trying witches;
and all works of supposed heretical tendency imported from England
were confiscated in the Edinburgh shops, among them being Thomas
Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth. [823] Scottish intellectual
development had in fact been arrested by the Reformation, so that,
save for Napier's Logarithms (1614) and such a political treatise as
Rutherford's Lex Rex (1644), the nation of Dunbar and Lyndsay produced
for two centuries no secular literature of the least value, and not
even a theology of any enduring interest. Deism, accordingly, seems in
the latter half of the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth
century to have made fully as much progress in Scotland as in England;
and the bigoted clergy could offer little intellectual resistance.
As early as 1696 the Scottish General Assembly, with theological
candour, passed an Act "against the Atheistical opinions of
the Deists." (Abridgment of the Acts of the General Assemblies,
1721, pp. 16, 76; Cunningham, Hist. of the Ch. of Scotland, ii,
313.) The opinions specified were "The denying of all revealed
religion, the grand mysteries of the gospels ... the resurrection
of the dead, and, in a word, the certainty and authority of
Scripture revelation; as also, their asserting that there must
be a mathematical evidence for each purpose ... and that Natural
Light is sufficient to Salvation." All this is deism, pure and
simple. But Sir W. Anstruther (a judge in the Court of Session),
in the preface to his Essays Moral and Divine, Edinburgh, 1710,
speaks of "the spreading contagion of atheism, which threatens the
ruin of our excellent and holy religion." To atheism he devotes
two essays; and neither in these nor in one on the Incarnation
does he discuss deism, the arguments he handles being really
atheistic. Scottish freethought would seem thus to have gone
further than English at the period in question.
As to the prevalence of deism, however, see the posthumous
work of Prof. Halyburton, of St. Andrews, Natural Religion
Insufficient (Edinburgh, 1714), Epist. of Recom.; pref. pp. 25,
27, and pp. 8, 15, 19, 23, 31, etc. Halyburton's treatise is
interesting as showing the psychological state of argumentative
Scotch orthodoxy in his day. He professes to repel the deistical
argument throughout by reason; he follows Huet, and concurs with
Berkeley in contending that mathematics involves anti-rational
assumptions; and he takes entire satisfaction in the execution
of the lad Aikenhead for deism. Yet in a second treatise, An
Essay Concerning the Nature of Faith, he contends, as against
Locke and the "Rationalists," that the power to believe in the
word of God is "expressly deny'd to man in his natural estate,"
and is a supernatural gift. Thus the Calvinists, like Baxter,
were at bottom absolutely insincere in their profession to act
upon reason, while insolently charging insincerity on others.
Even apart from deism there had arisen a widespread aversion to
dogmatic theology and formal creeds, so that an apologist of 1715
speaks of his day as "a time when creeds and Confessions of Faith are
so generally decried, and not only exposed to contempt, as useless
inventions ... but are loaded by many writers of distinguished wit
and learning with the most fatal and dangerous consequences." [824]
This writer admits the intense bitterness of the theological disputes
of the time; [825] and he speaks, on the other hand, of seeing "the
most sacred mysteries of godliness impudently denied and impugned"
by some, while the "distinguishing doctrines of Christianity are by
others treacherously undermined, subtilized into an airy phantom,
or at least doubted, if not disclaimed." [826] His references are
probably to works published in England, notably those of Locke, Toland,
Shaftesbury, and Collins, since in Scotland no such literature could
then be published; but he doubtless has an eye to Scottish opinion.
While, however, the rationalism of the time could not take book
form, there are clear traces of its existence among educated men,
even apart from the general complaints of the apologists. Thus the
Professor of Medicine at Glasgow University in the opening years of
the eighteenth century, John Johnston, was a known freethinker. [827]
In the way of moderate or Christian rationalism, the teaching of the
prosecuted Simson seems to have counted for something, seeing that
Francis Hutcheson at least imbibed from him "liberal" views about
future punishment and the salvation of the heathen, which gave much
offence in the Presbyterian pulpit in Ulster. [828] And Hutcheson's
later vindication of the ethical system of Shaftesbury in his Inquiry
Concerning the Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725) must have tended
to attract attention in Scotland to the Characteristics after his
instalment as a Professor at Glasgow. In an English pamphlet, in 1732,
he was satirized as introducing Shaftesbury's system into a University,
[829] and it was from the Shaftesbury camp that the first literary
expression of freethought in Scotland was sent forth. A young Scotch
deist of that school, William Dudgeon, published in 1732 a dialogue
entitled The State of the Moral World Considered, wherein the
optimistic position was taken up with uncommon explicitness; and in
1739 the same writer printed A Catechism Founded upon Experience and
Reason, prefaced by an Introductory Letter on Natural Religion, which
takes a distinctly anti-clerical attitude. The Catechism answers to
its title, save insofar as it is à priori in its theism and optimistic
in its ethic, as is another work of its author in the same year, A
View of the Necessarian or Best Scheme, defending the Shaftesburyan
doctrine against the criticism of Crousaz on Pope's Essay. Still more
heterodox is his little volume of Philosophical Letters Concerning
the Being and Attributes of God (1737), where the doctrine goes far
towards pantheism. All this propaganda seems to have elicited only
one printed reply--an attack on his first treatise in 1732. In the
letter prefaced to his Catechism, however, he tells that "the bare
suspicion of my not believing the opinions in fashion in our country
hath already caused me sufficient trouble." [830] His case had in fact
been raised in the Church courts, the proceedings going through many
stages in the years 1732-36; but in the end no decision was taken,
[831] and the special stress of his rationalism in 1739 doubtless
owes something alike to the prosecution and to its collapse. Despite
such hostility, he must privately have had fair support. [832]
The prosecution of Hutcheson before the Glasgow Presbytery in 1738
reveals vividly the theological temper of the time. He was indicted
for teaching to his students "the following two false and dangerous
doctrines: first, that the standard of moral goodness was the promotion
of the happiness of others; and, second, that we could have a knowledge
of good and evil without and prior to a knowledge of God." [833] There
has been a natural disposition on the orthodox side to suppress the
fact that such teachings were ever ecclesiastically denounced as false,
dangerous, and irreligious; and the prosecution seems to have had no
effect beyond intensifying the devotion of Hutcheson's students. Among
them was Adam Smith, of whom it has justly been said that, "if he was
any man's disciple, he was Hutcheson's," inasmuch as he derived from
his teacher the bases alike of his moral and political philosophy and
of his deistic optimism. [834] Another prosecution soon afterwards
showed that the new influences were vitally affecting thought within
the Church itself. Hutcheson's friend Leechman, whom he and his party
contrived to elect as professor of theology in Glasgow University,
was in turn proceeded against (1743-44) for a sermon on Prayer, which
Hutcheson and his sympathizers pronounced "noble," [835] but which
"resolved the efficacy of prayer into its reflex influence on the
mind of the worshipper" [836]--a theorem which has chronically made
its appearance in the Scottish Church ever since, still ranking as
a heresy, after having brought a clerical prosecution in the last
century on at least one divine, Prof. William Knight, and rousing a
scandal against another, the late Dr. Robert Wallace. [837]
Leechman in turn held his ground, and later became Principal of
his University; but still the orthodox in Scotland fought bitterly
against every semblance of rationalism. Even the anti-deistic essays
of Lord-President Forbes of Culloden, head of the Court of Session,
when collected [838] and posthumously published, were offensive to the
Church as laying undue stress on reason; as accepting the heterodox
Biblical theories of Dr. John Hutchinson; and as making the awkward
admission that "the freethinkers, with all their perversity, generally
are sensible of the social duties, and act up to them better than
others do who in other respects think more justly than they." [839]
Such an utterance from such a dignitary told of a profound change;
and, largely through the influence of Hutcheson and Leechman on a
generation of students, the educated Scotland of the latter half
of the eighteenth century was in large part either "Moderate" or
deistic. After generations of barren controversy, [840] the very
aridity of the Presbyterian life intensified the recoil among the
educated classes to philosophical and historical interests, leading to
the performances of Hume, Smith, Robertson, Millar, Ferguson, and yet
others, all rationalists in method and sociologists in their interests.
Of these, Millar, one of Smith's favourite pupils, and a table-talker
of "magical vivacity," [841] was known to be rationalistic in a high
degree; [842] while Smith and Ferguson were certainly deists, as was
Henry Home (the judge, Lord Kames), who had the distinction of being
attacked along with his friend Hume in the General Assembly of the
Church of Scotland in 1755-56. Home wrote expressly to controvert Hume,
alike as to utilitarianism and the idea of causation; but his book,
Essays on Morality and Natural Religion (published anonymously,
1751), handled the thorny question of free-will in such fashion
as to give no less offence than Hume had done; and the orthodox
bracketed him with the subject of his criticism. His doctrine was
indeed singular, its purport being that there can be no free-will,
but that the deity has for wise purposes implanted in men the feeling
that their wills are free. The fact of his having been made a judge of
the Court of Session since writing his book had probably something to
do with the rejection of the whole subject by the General Assembly,
and afterwards by the Edinburgh Presbytery; but there had evidently
arisen a certain diffidence in the Church, which would be assiduously
promoted by "moderates" such as Principal Robertson, the historian. It
is noteworthy that, while Home and Hume thus escaped, the other Home,
John, who wrote the then admired tragedy of Douglas, was soon after
forced to resign his position as a minister of the Church for that
authorship, deism having apparently more friends in the fold than
drama. [843] While the theatre was thus being treated as a place of
sin, many of the churches in Scotland were the scenes of repeated
Sunday riots. A new manner of psalm-singing had been introduced, and
it frequently happened that the congregations divided into two parties,
each singing in its own way, till they came to blows. According to one
of Hume's biographers, unbelievers were at this period wont to go to
church to see the fun. [844] Naturally orthodoxy did not gain ground.
In the case of Adam Smith we have one of the leading instances of the
divorce between culture and creed in the Scotland of that age. His
intellectual tendencies, primed by Hutcheson, were already revealing
themselves when, seeking for something worth study in the unstudious
Oxford of his day, he was found by some suspicious supervisor reading
Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. The book was seized and the student
scolded. [845] When, in 1751, he became Professor of Moral Philosophy
in Glasgow University, he aroused orthodox comment by abandoning the
Sunday class on Christian Evidences set up by Hutcheson, and still
further, it is said, by petitioning the Senatus to be allowed to
be relieved of the duty of opening his class with prayer. [846] The
permission was not given; and the compulsory prayers were "thought
to savour strongly of natural religion"; while the lectures on
Natural Theology, which were part of the work of the chair, were
said to lead "presumptuous striplings" to hold that "the great
truths of theology, together with the duties which man owes to
God and his neighbours, may be discovered by the light of nature
without any special revelation." [847] Smith was thus well founded
in rationalism before he became personally acquainted with Voltaire
and the other French freethinkers; and the pious contemporary who
deplores his associations avows that neither before nor after his
French tour was his religious creed ever "properly ascertained." [848]
It is clear, however, that it steadily developed in a rationalistic
direction. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) the prevailing
vein of theistic optimism is sufficiently uncritical; but even there
there emerges an apparent doubt on the doctrine of a future state,
and positive hostility to certain ecclesiastical forms of it. [849]
In the sixth edition, which he prepared for the press in 1790, he
deleted the passage which pronounced the doctrine of the Atonement
to be in harmony with natural ethics. [850] But most noteworthy of
all is his handling of the question of religious establishments in
the Wealth of Nations. [851] It is so completely naturalistic that
only the habit of taking the Christian religion for granted could make
men miss seeing that its account of the conditions of the rise of new
cults applied to that in its origin no less than to the rise of any
of its sects. As a whole, the argument might form part of Gibbon's
fifteenth chapter. And even allowing for the slowness of the average
believer to see the application of a general sociological law to his
own system, there must be inferred a great change in the intellectual
climate of Scottish life before we can account for Smith's general
popularity at home as well as abroad after his handling of "enthusiasm
and superstition" in the Wealth of Nations. The fact stands out that
the two most eminent thinkers in Scotland in the latter half of the
eighteenth century were non-Christians, [852] and that their most
intellectual associates were in general sympathy with them.
§ 11
In Ireland, at least in Dublin, during the earlier part of the
century, there occurred, on a smaller scale, a similar movement of
rationalism, also largely associated with Shaftesbury. In Dublin
towards the close of the seventeenth century we have seen Molyneux,
the friend and correspondent of Locke, interested in "freethought,"
albeit much scared by the imprudence of Toland. At the same period
there germinated a growth of Unitarianism, which was even more fiercely
persecuted than that of Toland's deism. The Rev. Thomas Emlyn, an
Englishman, co-pastor of the Protestant Dissenting Congregation of
Wood Street (now Strand Street), Dublin, was found by a Presbyterian
and a Baptist to be heretical on the subject of the Trinity, and
was indicted in 1702 for blasphemy. He was sentenced to two years'
imprisonment and a fine of £1,000, which was partly commuted on his
release. He protested that South and Sherlock and other writers on the
Trinitarian controversy might have been as justly prosecuted as he;
but Irish Protestant orthodoxy was of a keener scent than English,
and Emlyn was fain, when released, to return to his native land. [853]
His colleague Boyse, like many other Churchmen, wished that the unhappy
trinitarian controversy "were buried in silence," but was careful to
conform doctrinally. More advanced thinkers had double reason to be
reticent. As usual, however, persecution provoked the growth it sought
to stifle; and after the passing of the Irish Toleration Act of 1719,
a more liberal measure than the English, there developed in Ulster,
and even in Dublin, a Unitarian movement akin to that proceeding
in England. [854] In the next generation we find in the same city
a coterie of Shaftesburyans, centring around Lord Molesworth,
the friend of Hutcheson, a man of affairs devoted to intellectual
interests. It was within a few years of his meeting Molesworth that
Hutcheson produced his Inquiry, championing Shaftesbury's ideas;
[855] and other literary men were similarly influenced. It is even
suggested that Hutcheson's clerical friend Synge, whom we have seen
[856] in 1713 attempting a ratiocinative answer to the unbelief
he declared to be abundant around him, was not only influenced by
Shaftesbury through Molesworth, but latterly "avoided publication
lest his opinions should prejudice his career in the Church." [857]
After the death of Molesworth, in 1725, the movement he set up seems
to have languished; [858] but, as we have seen, there were among the
Irish bishops men given to philosophic controversy, and the influence
of Berkeley cannot have been wholly obscurantist. When in 1756 we
read of the Arian Bishop Clayton [859] proposing in the Irish House
of Lords to drop the Nicene and Athanasian creeds, we realize that in
Ireland thought was far from stagnant. The heretic bishop, however,
died (February, 1758) just as he was about to be prosecuted for the
anti-Athanasian heresies of his last book; and thenceforth Ireland
plays no noticeable part in the development of rationalism, political
interests soon taking the place of religious, with the result that
orthodoxy recovered ground.
It cannot be doubted that the spectacle of religious wickedness
presented by the operation of the odious penal laws against Catholics,
and the temper of the Protestant Ascendancy party in religious matters,
had bred rational skepticism in Ireland in the usual way. Molesworth
stands out in Irish history as a founder of a new and saner patriotism;
and his doctrines would specially appeal to men of a secular and
critical way of thinking. Heretical bishops imply heretical laymen. But
the environment was unpropitious to dispassionate thinking. The
very relaxation of the Penal Code favoured a reversion to "moderate"
orthodoxy; and the new political strifes of the last quarter of the
century, destined as they were to be reopened in the next, determined
the course of Irish culture in another way.
§ 12
In England, meanwhile, there was beginning the redistribution of
energies which can be seen to have prepared for the intellectual and
political reaction of the end of the century. There had been no such
victory of faith as is supposed to have been wrought by the forensic
theorem of Butler. An orthodox German observer, making a close inquest
about 1750, cites the British Magazine as stating in 1749 that half
the educated people were then deists; and he, after full inquiry,
agrees. [860] In the same year, Richardson speaks tragically in
the Postscriptum to Clarissa of seeing "skepticism and infidelity
openly avowed, and even endeavoured to be propagated from the press;
the great doctrines of the gospel brought into question"; and he
describes himself as "seeking to steal in with a disguised plea for
religion." Instead of being destroyed by the clerical defence, the
deistic movement had really penetrated the Church, which was become
as rationalistic in its methods as its function would permit, and the
educated classes, which had arrived at a state of compromise. Pope,
the chief poet of the preceding generation, had been visibly deistic
in his thinking; as Dryden had inferribly been before him; and to such
literary prestige was added the prestige of scholarship. The academic
Conyers Middleton, whose Letter from Rome had told so heavily against
Christianity in exposing the pagan derivations of much of Catholicism,
and who had further damaged the doctrine of inspiration in his
anonymous Letter to Dr. Waterland (1731), while professing to refute
Tindal, had carried to yet further lengths his service to the critical
spirit. In his famous Free Inquiry into the miracles of post-apostolic
Christianity (1749), again professing to strike at Rome, he had laid
the foundations of a new structure of comparative criticism, and had
given permanent grounds for rejecting the miracles of the sacred books.
Middleton's book appeared a year after Hume's essay Of Miracles, and
it made out no such philosophic case as Hume's against the concept of
miracle; but it created at once, by its literary brilliance and its
cogent argument, a sensation such as had thus far been made neither
by Hume's philosophic argument nor by Francklin's anticipation of
that. [861] Middleton had duly safeguarded himself by positing the
certainty of the gospel miracles and of those wrought by the Apostles,
on the old principle [862] that prodigies were divinely arranged
so far forth as was necessary to establish Christianity, but no
further. "The history of the gospel," he writes, "I hope may be true,
though the history of the Church be fabulous." [863] But his argument
against post-Apostolic miracles is so strictly naturalistic that no
vigilant reader could fail to realize its fuller bearing upon all
miracles whatsoever. With Hume and Francklin, he insisted that facts
incredible in themselves could not be established by any amount or kind
of testimony; and he suggested no measure of comparative credibility
as between the two orders of miracle. With the deists in general,
he argued that knowledge "either of the ways or will of the Creator"
was to be had only through study of "that revelation which he made of
himself from the beginning in the beautiful fabric of this visible
world." [864] An antagonist accordingly wrote that his theses were:
"First, that there were no miracles wrought in the primitive Church;
Secondly, that all the primitive fathers were fools or knaves, and most
of them both one and the other. And it is easy to observe, the whole
tenor of your argument tends to prove, Thirdly, that no miracles were
wrought by Christ or his apostles; and Fourthly, that these too were
fools or knaves, or both." [865] A more temperate opponent pressed the
same point in less explosive language. Citing Middleton's demand for
an inductive method, this critic asks with much point: "What does he
mean by 'deserting the path of Nature and experience,' but giving in
to the belief of any miracles, and acknowledging the reality of events
contrary to the known effects of the established Laws of Nature?" [866]
No other answer was seriously possible. In the very act of
ostentatiously terming Tindal an "infidel," Middleton describes an
answer made to him by the apologist Chapman as a sample of a kind of
writing which did "more hurt and discredit" to Christianity "than
all the attacks of its open adversaries." [867] In support of the
miracles of the gospel and the apostolic history he offers merely
conventional pleas: against the miracles related by the Fathers he
brings to bear an incessant battery of destructive criticism. We may
sum up that by the middle of the eighteenth century the essentials
of the Christian creed, openly challenged for a generation by avowed
deists, were abandoned by not a few scholars within the pale of the
Church, of whom Middleton was merely the least reticent. After his
death was published his Vindication of the Inquiry (1751); and in his
collected works (1752) was included his Reflections on the Variations
or Inconsistencies which are found among the Four Evangelists, wherein
it is demonstrated that "the belief of the inspiration and absolute
infallibility of the evangelists seems to be more absurd than even that
of transubstantiation itself." [868] The main grounds of orthodoxy were
thus put in doubt in the name of a critical orthodoxy. In short, the
deistic movement had done what it lay in it to do. The old evangelical
or pietistic view of life was discredited among instructed people,
and in this sense it was Christianity that had "decayed." Its later
recovery was economic, not intellectual.
Thus Skelton writes in 1751 that "our modern apologists for
Christianity often defend it on deistical principles" (Deism
Revealed, pref. p. xii. Cp. vol. ii, pp. 234, 237). See also
Sir Leslie Stephen as cited above, p. 149, note; and Gostwick,
German Culture and Christianity, 1882, pp. 33-36.
An interesting instance of liberalizing orthodoxy is furnished
by the Rev. Arthur Ashley Sykes, who contributed many volumes to
the general deistic discussion, some of them anonymously. In the
preface to his Essay on the Truth of the Christian Religion (1732;
2nd ed. enlarged, 1755) Sykes remarks that "since ... systematical
opinions have been received and embraced in such a manner that it
has not been safe to contradict them, the burden of vindicating
Christianity has been very much increased. Its friends have been
much embarrassed through fear of speaking against local truths; and
its adversaries have so successfully attacked those weaknesses that
Christianity itself has been deemed indefensible, when in reality
the follies of Christians alone have been so." Were Christians left
to the simple doctrines of Christ and the Apostles, he contends,
Infidelity could make no converts. And at the close of the book
he writes: "Would to God that Christians would be content with the
plainness and simplicity of the gospel.... That they would not vend
under the name of evangelical truth the absurd and contradictory
schemes of ignorant or wicked men! That they would part with that
load of rubbish which makes thinking men almost sink under the
weight, and gives too great a handle for Infidelity!" Such writing
could not give satisfaction to the ecclesiastical authorities;
and as little could Sykes's remarkable admission (The Principles
and Connection of Natural and Revealed Religion, 1740, p. 242):
"When the advantages of revelation are to be specified, I cannot
conceive that it should be maintained as necessary to fix a rule
of morality. For what one principle of morality is there which
the heathen moralists had not asserted or maintained? Before ever
any revelation is offered to mankind they are supposed to be so
well acquainted with moral truths as from them to judge of the
truth of the revelation itself." Again he writes:--
"Nor can revelation be necessary to ascertain religion. For
religion consisting in nothing but doing our duties from a sense
of the being of God, revelation is not necessary to this end,
unless it be said that we cannot know that there is a God, and what
our duties are, without it. Reason will teach us that there is a
God ... that we are to be just and charitable to our neighbours;
that we are to be temperate and sober in ourselves" (id. p. 244).
This is simple Shaftesburyan deism, and all that the apologist
goes on to contend for is that revelation "contains motives and
reasons for the practice of what is right, more and different
from what natural reason without this help can suggest." He seems,
however, to have believed in miracles, though an anonymous Essay
on the Nature, Design, and Origin of Sacrifices (1748) which
is ascribed to him quietly undermines the whole evangelical
doctrine. Throughout, he is remarkable for the amenity of his
tone towards "infidels."
Balguy, a man of less ability, is notably latitudinarian in
his theology. In the very act of criticizing the deists, he
complains of Locke's arbitrariness in deriving morality from the
will of God. Religion, he argues, is so derived, but morality is
inherent in the whole nature of things, and is the same for God
and men. This position, common to the school of Clarke, is at
bottom that of Shaftesbury and the Naturalists. All that Balguy
says for religion is that a doctrine of rewards and punishments
is necessary to stimulate the average moral sense; and that the
Christian story of the condescension of Omnipotence in coming to
earth and suffering misery for man's sake ought to overwhelm the
imagination! (See A Letter to a Deist, 2nd ed. 1730, pp. 5, 14,
15, 31; Foundation of Moral Goodness, pt. ii, 1729, p. 41 sq.)
The next intellectual step in natural course would have been a
revision of the deistic assumptions, insofar, that is, as certain
positive assumptions were common to the deists. But, as we have seen,
certain fresh issues were raised as among the deists themselves. In
addition to those above noted, there was the profoundly important one
as to ethics. Shaftesbury, who rejected the religious basis, held
a creed of optimism; and this optimism was assailed by Mandeville,
who in consequence was opposed as warmly by the deist Hutcheson
and others as by Law and Berkeley. To grapple with this problem,
and with the underlying cosmic problem, there was needed at least as
much general mental activity as went to the antecedent discussion; and
the main activity of the nation was now being otherwise directed. The
negative process, the impeachment of Christian supernaturalism, had
been accomplished so far as the current arguments went. Toland and
Collins had fought the battle of free discussion, forcing ratiocination
on the Church; Collins had shaken the creed of prophecy; Shaftesbury
had impugned the religious conception of morals; and Mandeville
had done so more profoundly, laying the foundations of scientific
utilitarianism. [869] So effective had been the utilitarian propaganda
in general that the orthodox Brown (author of the once famous Estimate
of the life of his countrymen), in his criticism of Shaftesbury (1751),
wrote as a pure utilitarian against an inconsistent one, and defended
Christianity on strictly utilitarian lines. Woolston, following up
Collins, had shaken the faith in New Testament miracles; Middleton
had done it afresh with all the decorum that Woolston lacked; and
Hume had laid down with masterly clearness the philosophic principle
which rebuts all attempts to prove miracles as such. [870] Tindal
had clinched the case for "natural" theism as against revelationism;
and the later deists, notably Morgan, had to some extent combined
these results. [871] This literature was generally distributed;
and so far the case had been thrashed out.
§ 13
To carry intellectual progress much further there was needed a
general movement of scientific study and a reform in education. The
translation of La Mettrie's Man a Machine (1749) [872] found a public
no better prepared for the problems he raised than that addressed by
Strutt eighteen years before; and the reply of Luzac, Man More than a
Machine, in the preface to which the translator (1752) declared that
"irreligion and infidelity overspread the land," probably satisfied
what appetite there was for such a discussion. There had begun a
change in the prevailing mental life, a diversion of interest from
ideas as such to political and mercantile interests. The middle and
latter part of the eighteenth century is the period of the rise of (1)
the new machine industries, and (2) the new imperialistic policy of
Chatham. [873] Both alike withdrew men from problems of mere belief,
whether theological or scientific. [874] That the reaction was not
one of mere fatigue over deism we have already seen. It was a general
diversion of energy, analogous to what had previously taken place in
France in the reign of Louis XIV. As the poet Gray, himself orthodox,
put the case in 1754, "the mode of freethinking has given place to
the mode of not thinking at all." [875] In Hume's opinion the general
pitch of national intelligence south of the Tweed was lowered. [876]
This state of things of course was favourable to religious revival;
but what took place was rather a new growth of emotional pietism
in the new industrial masses (the population being now on a rapid
increase), under the ministry of the Wesleys and Whitefield, and a
further growth of similar religion in the new provincial middle-class
that grew up on the industrial basis. The universities all the while
were at the lowest ebb of culture, but officially rabid against
philosophic freethinking. [877]
It would be a great mistake, however, to suppose that all this meant
a dying out of deism among the educated classes. The statement of
Goldsmith, about 1760, that deists in general "have been driven
into a confession of the necessity of revelation, or an open
avowal of atheism," [878] is not to be taken seriously. Goldsmith,
whose own orthodoxy is very doubtful, had a whimsical theory that
skepticism, though it might not injure morals, has a "manifest
tendency to subvert the literary merits" of any country; [879]
and argued accordingly. Deism, remaining fashionable, did but fall
partly into the background of living interests, the more concrete
issues of politics and the new imaginative literature occupying the
foreground. It was early in the reign of George III that Sir William
Blackstone, having had the curiosity to listen in succession to
the preaching of every clergyman in London, "did not hear a single
discourse which had more Christianity in it than the writings of
Cicero," and declared that it would have been impossible for him to
discover from what he heard whether the preacher were a follower of
Confucius, of Mahomet, or of Christ. [880] When the Church was thus
deistic, the educated laity can have been no less so. The literary
status of deism after 1750 was really higher than ever. It was now
represented by Hume; by Adam Smith (Moral Sentiments, 1759); by the
scholarship of Conyers Middleton; and by the posthumous works (1752-54)
of Lord Bolingbroke, who, albeit more of a debater than a thinker,
debated often with masterly skill, in a style unmatched for harmony and
energetic grace, which had already won him a great literary prestige,
though the visible insincerity of his character, and the habit of
browbeating, always countervailed his charm. His influence, commonly
belittled, was much greater than writers like Johnson would admit;
and it went deep. Voltaire, who had been his intimate, tells [881]
that he had known some young pupils of Bolingbroke who altogether
denied the historic actuality of the Gospel Jesus--a stretch of
criticism beyond the assimilative power of that age.
His motive to write for posthumous publication, however, seems
rather to have been the venting of his tumultuous feelings than
any philosophic purpose. An overweening deist, he is yet at much
pains to disparage the à priori argument for deism, bestowing some
of his most violent epithets on Dr. Samuel Clarke, who seems to
have exasperated him in politics. But his castigation of "divines"
is tolerably impartial on that side; and he is largely concerned to
deprive them of grounds for their functions, though he finally insists
that churches are necessary for purposes of public moral teaching. His
own teachings represent an effort to rationalize deism. The God
whom he affirms is to be conceived or described only as omnipotent
and omniscient (or all-wise), not as good or benevolent any more
than as vindictive. Thus he had assimilated part of the Spinozistic
and the atheistic case against anthropomorphism, while still using
anthropomorphic language on the score that "we must speak of God after
the manner of men." Beyond this point he compromises to the extent
of denying special while admitting collective or social providences;
though he is positive in his denial of the actuality or the moral
need of a future state. As to morals he takes the ordinary deistic
line, putting the innate "law of nature" as the sufficient and only
revelation by the deity to his creatures. On the basis of that inner
testimony he rejects the Old Testament as utterly unworthy of deity,
but endorses the universal morality found in the gospels, while
rejecting their theology. It was very much the deism of Voltaire,
save that it made more concessions to anti-theistic logic.
The weak side of Bolingbroke's polemic was its inconsistency--a flaw
deriving from his character. In the spirit of a partisan debater he
threw out at any point any criticism that appeared for the moment
plausible; and, having no scientific basis or saving rectitude,
would elsewhere take up another and a contradictory position. Careful
antagonists could thus discredit him by mere collation of his own
utterances. [882] But, the enemy being no more consistent than he,
his influence was not seriously affected in the world of ordinary
readers; and much of his attack on "divines," on dogmas, and on
Old Testament morality must have appealed to many, thus carrying
on the discredit of orthodoxy in general. Leland devoted to him an
entire volume of his View of the Principal Deistical Writers, and in
all bestows more space upon him than on all the others together--a
sufficient indication of his vogue.
In his lifetime, however, Bolingbroke had been extremely careful
to avoid compromising himself. Mr. Arthur Hassall, in his
generally excellent monograph on Bolingbroke (Statesmen Series,
1889, p. 226), writes, in answer to the attack of Johnson,
that "Bolingbroke, during his lifetime, had never scrupled to
publish criticisms, remarkable for their freedom, on religious
subjects." I cannot gather to what he refers; and Mr. Walter
Sichel, in his copious biography (2 vols. 1901-1902), indicates no
such publications. The Letters on the Study and Use of History,
which contain (Lett. iii, sect. 2) a skeptical discussion of
the Pentateuch as history, though written in 1735-36, were only
posthumously published, in 1752. The Examen Important de Milord
Bolingbroke, produced by Voltaire in 1767, but dated 1736,
is Voltaire's own work, based on Bolingbroke. In his letter to
Swift of September 12, 1724 (Swift's Works, Scott's ed. 1824,
xvi, 448-49), Bolingbroke angrily repudiates the title of esprit
fort, declaring, in the very temper in which pious posterity has
aspersed himself, that "such are the pests of society, because
they endeavour to loosen the bands of it.... I therefore not
only disown, but I detest, this character." In this letter he
even affects to believe in "the truth of the divine revelation
of Christianity." He began to write his essays, it is true,
before his withdrawal to France in 1735, but with no intention
of speedily publishing them. In his Letter to Mr. Pope (published
with the Letter to Wyndham, 1753), p. 481, he writes: "I have been
a martyr of faction in politics, and have no vocation to be so
in philosophy." Cp. pp. 485-86. It is thus a complete blunder on
the part of Bagehot to say (Literary Studies, Hutton's ed. iii,
137) that Butler's Analogy, published in 1736, was "designed as
a confutation of Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke." It is even said
(Warton, Essay on Pope, 4th ed. ii, 294-95) that Pope did not
know Bolingbroke's real opinions; but Pope's untruthfulness was
such as to discredit such a statement. Cp. Bolingbroke's Letter
as cited, p. 521, and his Philosophical Works, 8vo-ed. 1754, ii,
405. It is noteworthy that a volume of controversial sermons
entitled A Preservative against unsettled notions and Want of
Principles in Religion, so entirely stupid in its apologetics as
to be at times positively entertaining, was published in 1715
by Joseph Trapp, M.A., "Chaplain to the Right Honble. The Lord
Viscount Bolingbroke."
In seeking to estimate Bolingbroke's posthumous influence we have
to remember that after the publication of his works the orthodox
members of his own party, who otherwise would have forgiven him
all his vices and insincerities, have held him up to hatred. Scott,
for instance, founding on Bolingbroke's own dishonest denunciation
of freethinkers as men seeking to loosen the bands of society,
pronounced his arrangement for the posthumous issue of his works
"an act of wickedness more purely diabolical than any hitherto upon
record in the history of any age or nation" (Note to Bolingbroke's
letter above cited in Swift's Works, xvi, 450). It would be an
error, on the other hand, to class him among either the great
sociologists or the great philosophers. Mr. Sichel undertakes to
show (vol. ii, ch. x) that Bolingbroke had stimulated Gibbon to a
considerable extent in his treatment of early Christianity. This
is in itself quite probable, and some of the parallels cited are
noteworthy; but Mr. Sichel, who always writes as a panegyrist,
makes no attempt to trace the common French sources for both. He
does show that Voltaire manipulated Bolingbroke's opinions
in reproducing them. But he does not critically recognize the
incoherence of Bolingbroke's eloquent treatises. Mr. Hassall's
summary is nearer the truth; but that in turn does not note how
well fitted was Bolingbroke's swift and graceful declamation to
do its work with the general public, which (if it accepted him
at all) would make small account of self-contradiction.
§ 14
In view of such a reinforcement of its propaganda, deism could not
be regarded as in the least degree written down. In 1765, in fact, we
find Diderot recounting, on the authority of d'Holbach, who had just
returned from a visit to this country, that "the Christian religion is
nearly extinct in England. The deists are innumerable; there are almost
no atheists; those who are so conceal it. An atheist and a scoundrel
are almost synonymous terms for them." [883] Nor did the output of
deistic literature end with the posthumous works of Bolingbroke. These
were followed by translations of the new writings of Voltaire, [884]
who had assimilated the whole propaganda of English deism, and gave it
out anew with a wit and brilliancy hitherto unknown in argumentative
and critical literature. The freethinking of the third quarter of
the century, though kept secondary to more pressing questions, was
thus at least as deeply rooted and as convinced as that of the first
quarter; and it was probably not much less common among educated men,
though new social influences caused it to be more decried.
The hapless Chatterton, fatally precocious, a boy in years and
experience of life, a man in understanding at seventeen, incurred
posthumous obloquy more for his "infidelity" than for the harmless
literary forgeries which reveal his poetic affinity to a less prosaic
age. It is a memorable fact that this first recovery of the lost note
of imaginative poetry in that "age of prose and reason" is the exploit
of a boy whose mind was as independently "freethinking" on current
religion as it was original even in its imitative reversion to the
poetics of the past. Turning away from the impossible mythicism and
mysticism of the Tudor and Stuart literatures, as from the fanaticism
of the Puritans, the changing English world after the Restoration had
let fall the artistic possession of imaginative feeling and style
which was the true glory of the time of Renascence. The ill-strung
genius of Chatterton seems to have been the first to reunite the
sense of romantic beauty with the spirit of critical reason. He was a
convinced deist, avowing in his verse, in his pathetic will (1770), in
a late letter, and at times in his talk, that he was "no Christian,"
and contemning the ethic of Scripture history and the absurdity of
literal inspiration. [885] Many there must have been who went as far,
with less courage of avowal.
What was lacking to the age, once more, was a social foundation on
which it could not only endure but develop. In a nation of which the
majority had no intellectual culture, such a foundation could not
exist. Green exaggerates [886] when he writes that "schools there
were none, save the grammar schools of Edward and Elizabeth"; [887]
but by another account only twelve public schools were founded in the
long reign of George III; [888] and, as a result of the indifference
of two generations, masses of the people "were ignorant and brutal
to a degree which it is hard to conceive." [889] A great increase of
population had followed on the growth of towns and the development
of commerce and manufactures even between 1700 and 1760; [890]
and thereafter the multiplication was still more rapid. There was
thus a positive fall in the culture standards of the majority of the
people. According to Massey, "hardly any tradesman in 1760 had more
instruction than qualified him to add up a bill"; and "a labourer,
mechanic, or domestic servant who could read or write possessed a rare
accomplishment." [891] As for the Charity Schools established between
1700 and 1750, their express object was to rear humble tradesmen and
domestics, not to educate in the proper sense of the term.
In the view of life which accepted this state of things the educated
deists seem to have shared; at least, there is no record of any
agitation by them for betterment. The state of political thought was
typified in the struggle over "Wilkes and Liberty," from which cool
temperaments like Hume's turned away in contempt; and it is significant
that poor men were persecuted for freethinking while the better-placed
went free. Jacob Ilive, for denying in a pamphlet (1753) the truth of
revelation, was pilloried thrice, and sent to hard labour for three
years. In 1754 the Grand Jury of Middlesex "presented" the editor and
publisher of Bolingbroke's posthumous works [892]--a distinction that
in the previous generation had been bestowed on Mandeville's Fable of
the Bees; and in 1761, as before noted, Peter Annet, aged seventy, was
pilloried twice and sent to prison for discrediting the Pentateuch;
as if that were a more serious offence than his former attacks on
the gospels and on St. Paul. The personal influence of George III,
further, told everywhere against freethinking; and the revival of
penalties would have checked publishing even if there had been no
withdrawal of interest to politics.
Yet more or less freethinking treatises did appear at intervals
in addition to the works of the better-known writers, such as
Bolingbroke and Hume, after the period commonly marked as that
of the "decline of deism." In the list may be included a few by
Unitarians, who at this stage were doing critical work. Like
a number of the earlier works above mentioned, the following
(save Evanson) are overlooked in Sir Leslie Stephen's survey:--
1746. Essay on Natural Religion. Falsely attributed to Dryden.
1746. Deism fairly stated and fully vindicated, etc. Anon.
1749. J. G. Cooper, Life of Socrates.
1750. John Dove, A Creed founded on Truth and Common Sense.
1750. The British Oracle. (Two numbers only.)
1752. The Pillars of Priestcraft and Orthodoxy Shaken. Four vols.
of freethinking pamphlets, collected (and some written) by
Thomas Gordon, formerly secretary to Trenchard. Edited by
R. Barron. (Rep. 1768.)
1765. W. Dudgeon, Philosophical Works (reprints of those of 1732,
-4, -7, -9, above mentioned). Privately printed--at
Glasgow?
1772. E. Evanson, The Doctrines of a Trinity and the
Incarnation, etc.
1773. ---- Three Discourses (1. Upon the Man after God's own
Heart; 2. Upon the Faith of Abraham; 3. Upon the Seal of
the Foundation of God).
1777. ---- Letter to Bishop Hurd.
1781. W. Nicholson, The Doubts of the Infidels. (Rep. by R.
Carlile.)
1782. W. Turner, Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a
Philosophical Unbeliever.
1785. Dr. G. Hoggart Toulmin, The Antiquity and Duration of the
World.
1789. ---- The Eternity of the Universe. [893] (Rep. 1825.)
1789. Dr. T. Cooper, Tracts, Ethical, Theological, and Political.
1792. E. Evanson, The Dissonance of the Four Evangelists.
(Rep. 1805.)
1795. Dr. J. A. O'Keefe, On the Progress of the Human
Understanding.
1797. John C. Davies, The Scripturian's Creed. Prosecuted and
imprisoned. (Book rep. 1822 and 1839.)
Of the work here noted a considerable amount was done by Unitarians,
Evanson being of that persuasion, though at the time of writing his
earlier Unitarian works he was an Anglican vicar. [894] During the
first half of the eighteenth century, despite the movement at the
end of the seventeenth, specific anti-Trinitarianism was not much in
evidence, the deistic controversy holding the foreground. But gradually
Unitarianism made fresh headway. One dissenting clergyman, Martin
Tomkyns, who had been dismissed by his congregation at Stoke Newington
for his "Arian or Unitarian opinions," published in 1722 A Sober Appeal
to a Turk or an Indian, concerning the plain sense of the Trinity,
in reply to the treatise of Dr. Isaac Watts on The Christian Doctrine
of the Trinity. A second edition of Tomkyns's book appeared in 1748,
with a further reply to Watts's Dissertations of 1724. The result seems
to have been an unsettlement of the orthodoxy of the hymn-writer. There
is express testimony from Dr. Lardner, a very trustworthy witness, that
Watts in his latter years, "before he was seized with an imbecility
of his faculties," was substantially a Unitarian. His special papers
on the subject were suppressed by his executors; but the full text
of his Solemn Address to the Great and Blessed God goes far to bear
out Lardner's express assertion. [895] Other prominent religionists
were more outspoken. The most distinguished names associated with the
position were those of Lardner and Priestley, of whom the former,
trained as a simple "dissenter," avowedly reached his conclusions
without much reference to Socinian literature; [896] and the second,
who was similarly educated, no less independently gave up the doctrines
of the Atonement and the Trinity, passing later from the Arian to the
Socinian position after reading Lardner's Letter on the Logos. [897]
As Priestley derived his determinism from Collins, [898] it would
appear that the deistical movement had set up a general habit of
reasoning which thus wrought even on Christians who, like Lardner and
Priestley, undertook to rebut the objections of unbelievers to their
faith. A generally rationalistic influence is to be noted in the works
of the Unitarian Antipædobaptist Dr. Joshua Toulmin, author of lives
of Socinus (1777) and Biddle (1789), and many other solid works,
including a sermon on "The Injustice of classing Unitarians with
Deists and Infidels" (1797). In his case the "classing" was certainly
inconvenient. In 1791 the effigy of Paine was burned before his door,
and his windows broken. His house was saved by being closely guarded;
but his businesses of schoolkeeping and bookselling had to be given
up. It thus becomes intelligible how, after a period in which Dissent,
contemned by the State Church, learned to criticize that Church's
creed, there emerged in England towards the close of the eighteenth
century a fresh movement of specific Unitarianism.
Evanson and Toulmin were scholarly writers, though without the large
learning of Lardner and the propagandist energy and reputation of
Priestley; and the Unitarian movement, in a quiet fashion, made a
numerical progress out of all proportion to that of orthodoxy. It
owed much of its immunity at this stage, doubtless, to the large
element of tacit deism in the Church; and apart from the scholarly
work of Lardner both Priestley and Evanson did something for New
Testament criticism, as well as towards the clearing-up of Christian
origins. Evanson was actually prosecuted in 1773, on local initiative,
for a sermon of Unitarian character delivered by him in the parish
church of Tewkesbury on Easter-Day of 1771; and, what is much more
remarkable, members of his congregation, at a single defence-meeting
in an inn, collected £150 to meet his costs. [899] Five years later he
had given up the belief in eternal punishment, though continuing to
believe in "long protracted" misery for sinners. [900] Still later,
after producing his Dissonance, he became uncommonly drastic in his
handling of the Canon. He lived well into the nineteenth century,
and published in 1805 a vigorous tractate, Second Thoughts on
the Trinity, recommended to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of
Gloucester. In that he treats the First Gospel as a forgery of the
second century. The method is indiscriminating, and the author lays
much uncritical stress upon prophecy. On the whole, the Unitarian
contribution to rational thought, then as later, was secondary
or ancillary, though on the side of historical investigation it
was important. Lardner's candour is as uncommon as his learning;
and Priestley [901] and Evanson have a solvent virtue. [902] In all
three the limitation lies in the fixed adherence to the concept of
revelation, which withheld them from radical rationalism even as it did
from Arianism. Evanson's ultra-orthodox acceptance of the Apocalypse is
significant of his limitations; and Priestley's calibre is indicated
by his life-long refusal to accept the true scientific inference from
his own discovery of oxygen. A more pronounced evolution was that of
the Welsh deist David Williams, who, after publishing two volumes of
Sermons on Religious Hypocrisy (1774), gave up his post as a dissenting
preacher, and, in conjunction with Franklin and other freethinkers,
opened a short-lived deistic chapel in Margaret Street, London (1776),
where there was used a "Liturgy on the Universal Principles of Religion
and Morality." [903]
§ 15
On the other hand, apart from the revival of popular religion under
Whitefield and Wesley, which won multitudes of the people whom no
higher culture could reach, there was no recovery of educated belief
upon intellectual lines; though there was a steady detachment of
energy to the new activities of conquest and commerce which mark the
second half of the eighteenth century in England. On this state of
things supervened the massive performance of the greatest historical
writer England had yet produced. Gibbon, educated not by Oxford but
by the recent scholarly literature of France, had as a mere boy seen,
on reading Bossuet, the theoretic weakness of Protestantism, and
had straightway professed Romanism. Shaken as to that by a skilled
Swiss Protestant, he speedily became a rationalist pure and simple,
with as little of the dregs of deism in him as any writer of his
age; and his great work begins, or rather signalizes (since Hume
and Robertson preceded him), a new era of historical writing, not
merely by its sociological treatment of the rise of Christianity,
but by its absolutely anti-theological handling of all things.
The importance of the new approach may be at once measured by the
zeal of the opposition. In no case, perhaps, has the essentially
passional character of religious resistance to new thought been more
vividly shown than in that of the contemporary attacks upon Gibbon's
History. There is not to be found in controversial literature such
another annihilating rejoinder as was made by Gibbon to the clerical
zealots who undertook to confound him on points of scholarship,
history, and ratiocination. The contrast between the mostly spiteful
incompetence of the attack and the finished mastery of the reply
put the faith at a disadvantage from which it never intellectually
recovered, though other forces reinstated it socially. By the admission
of Macaulay, who thought Gibbon "most unfair" to religion, the whole
troup of his assailants are now "utterly forgotten"; and those orthodox
commentators who later sought to improve on their criticism have in
turn, with a notable uniformity, been rebutted by their successors;
till Gibbon's critical section ranks as the first systematically
scientific handling of the problem of the rise of Christianity. He
can be seen to have profited by all the relevant deistic work done
before him, learning alike from Toland, from Middleton, and from
Bolingbroke; though his acknowledgments are mostly paid to respectable
Protestants and Catholics, as Basnage, Beausobre, Lardner, Mosheim,
and Tillemont; and the sheer solidity of the work has sustained it
against a hundred years of hostile comment. [904] While Gibbon was
thus earning for his country a new literary distinction, the orthodox
interest was concerned above all things to convict him of ignorance,
incompetence, and dishonesty; and Davis, the one of his assailants
who most fully manifested all of these qualities, and who will long
be remembered solely from Gibbon's deadly exposure, was rewarded
with a royal pension. Another, Apthorp, received an archiepiscopal
living; while Chelsum, the one who almost alone wrote against him
like a gentleman, got nothing. But no cabal could avail to prevent
the instant recognition, at home and abroad, of the advent of a new
master in history; and in the worst times of reaction which followed,
the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire impassively
defied the claims of the ruling creed.
In a literary world which was eagerly reading Gibbon [905] and
Voltaire, [906] there was a peculiar absurdity in Burke's famous
question (1790) as to "Who now reads Bolingbroke" and the rest of
the older deists. [907] The fashionable public was actually reading
Bolingbroke even then; [908] and the work of the older deists was being
done with new incisiveness and thoroughness by their successors. [909]
In the unstudious world of politics, if the readers were few the
indifferentists were many. Evanson could truthfully write to Bishop
Hurd in 1777 that "That general unbelief of revealed religion among
the higher orders of our countrymen, which, however your Lordship and I
might differ in our manner of accounting for it, is too notorious for
either of us to doubt of, hath, by a necessary consequence, produced
in the majority of our present legislators an absolute indifference
towards religious questions of every kind." [910] Beside Burke in
Parliament, all the while, was the Prime Minister, William Pitt the
younger, an agnostic deist.
Whether or not the elder Pitt was a deist, the younger gave
very plain signs of being at least no more. Gladstone (Studies
subsidiary to the Works of Bishop Butler, ed. 1896, pp. 30-33) has
sought to discredit the recorded testimony of Wilberforce (Life of
Wilberforce, 1838, i, 98) that Pitt told him "Bishop Butler's work
raised in his mind more doubts than it had answered." Gladstone
points to another passage in Wilberforce's diary which states that
Pitt "commended Butler's Analogy" (Life, i, 90). But the context
shows that Pitt had commended the book for the express purpose of
turning Wilberforce's mind from its evangelical bias. Wilberforce
was never a deist, and the purpose accordingly could not have
been to make him orthodox. The two testimonies are thus perfectly
consistent; especially when we note the further statement credibly
reported to have been made by Wilberforce (Life, i, 95), that
Pitt later "tried to reason me out of my convictions." We have
yet further the emphatic declaration of Pitt's niece, Lady Hester
Stanhope, that he "never went to church in his life ... never even
talked about religion" (Memoirs of Lady Hester Stanhope, 1845, iii,
166-67). This was said in emphatic denial of the genuineness of
the unctuous death-bed speech put in Pitt's mouth by Gifford. Lady
Hester's high veracity is accredited by her physician (Travels
of Lady Hester Stanhope, 1846, i, pref. p. 11). No such character
can be given to the conventional English biography of the period.
We have further to note the circumstantial account by Wilberforce
in his letter to the Rev. S. Gisborne immediately after Pitt's
death (Correspondence, 1840, ii, 69-70), giving the details he
had had in confidence from the Bishop of Lincoln. They are to
the effect that, after some demur on Pitt's part ("that he was
not worthy to offer up any prayer, or was too weak,") the Bishop
prayed with him once. Wilberforce adds his "fear" that "no further
religious intercourse took place before or after, and I own I
thought what was inserted in the papers impossible to be true."
There is clear testimony that Charles James Fox, Pitt's illustrious
rival, was no more of a believer than he, [911] though equally careful
to make no profession of unbelief. And it was Fox who, above all the
English statesmen of his day, fought the battle of religious toleration
[912]--a service which finally puts him above Burke, and atones for
many levities of political action.
Among thinking men too the nascent science of geology was setting up
a new criticism of "revelation"--this twenty years before the issue of
the epoch-making works of Hutton. [913] In England the impulse seems to
have come from the writings of the Abbé Langlet du Fresnoy, De Maillet,
and Mirabaud, challenging the Biblical account of the antiquity of the
earth. The new phase of "infidelity" was of course furiously denounced,
one of the most angry and most absurd of its opponents being the poet
Cowper. [914] Still rationalism persisted. Paley, writing in 1786,
protests that "Infidelity is now served up in every shape that is
likely to allure, surprise, or beguile the imagination, in a fable,
a tale, a novel, or a poem, in interspersed or broken hints, remote
and oblique surmises, in books of travel, of philosophy, of natural
history--in a word, in any form rather than that of a professed
and regular disquisition." [915] The orthodox Dr. J. Ogilvie, in
the introduction to his Inquiry into the Causes of the Infidelity
and Skepticism of the Times (1783), begins: "That the opinions of
the deists and skeptics have spread more universally during a part
of the last century and in the present than at any former æra since
the resurrection of letters, is a truth to which the friends and the
enemies of religion will give their suffrage without hesitation." In
short, until the general reversal of all progress which followed on
the French Revolution, there had been no such change of opinion as
Burke alleged.
One of the most popular poets and writers of the day was the
celebrated Erasmus Darwin, a deist, whose Zoonomia (1794) brought on
him the charge of atheism, as it well might. However he might poetize
about the Creator, Dr. Darwin in his verse and prose alike laid the
foundations of the doctrines of the transmutation of species and
the aqueous origin of simple forms of life which evolved into higher
forms; though the idea of the descent of man from a simian species
had been broached before him by Buffon and Helvétius in France, and
Lords Kames and Monboddo in Scotland. The idea of a Natura naturans
was indeed ancient; but it has been authoritatively said of Erasmus
Darwin that "he was the first who proposed and consistently carried
out a well-rounded theory with regard to the development of the living
world--a merit which shines forth more brilliantly when we compare it
with the vacillating and confused attempts of Buffon, Linnæus, and
Goethe. It is the idea of a power working from within the organisms
to improve their natural position" [916]--the idea which, developed
by Lamarck, was modified by the great Darwin of the nineteenth century
into the doctrine of natural selection.
And in the closing years of the century there arose a new promise of
higher life in the apparition of Mary Wollstonecraft, ill-starred but
noble, whose Letters on Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) show her
to have been a freethinking deist of remarkable original faculty,
[917] and whose Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was the
first great plea for the emancipation of her sex.
§ 16
Even in rural Scotland, the vogue of the poetry of Burns told of
germinal doubt. To say nothing of his mordant satires on pietistic
types--notably Holy Willie's Prayer, his masterpiece in that
line--Burns even in his avowed poems [918] shows small regard for
orthodox beliefs; and his letters reveal him as substantially a deist,
shading into a Unitarian. Such pieces as A Prayer in the prospect of
Death, and A Prayer under the pressure of Violent Anguish, are plainly
unevangelical; [919] and the allusions to Jesus in his letters, even
when writing to Mrs. Maclehose, who desired to bring him to confession,
exclude orthodox belief, [920] though they suggest Unitarianism. He
frequently refers to religion in his letters, yet so constantly
restricts himself to the affirmation of a belief in a benevolent God
and in a future state that he cannot be supposed to have held the
further beliefs which his orthodox correspondents would wish him to
express. A rationalistic habit is shown even in his professions of
belief, as here: "Still I am a very sincere believer in the Bible;
but I am drawn by the conviction of a man, not the halter of an ass";
[921] and in the passage: "Though I have no objection to what the
Christian system tells us of another world, yet I own I am partial to
those proofs and ideas of it which we have wrought out of our own heads
and hearts." [922] Withal, Burns always claimed to be "religious,"
and was so even in a somewhat conventional sense. The lines:
An atheist-laugh's a poor exchange
For Deity offended [923]
exhibit a sufficiently commonplace conception of Omnipotence; and
there is no sign that the poet ever did any hard thinking on the
problem. But, emotionalist of genius as he was, his influence as
a satirist and mitigator of the crudities and barbarities of Scots
religion has been incalculably great, and underlies all popular culture
progress in Scotland since his time. Constantly aspersed in his own
day and world as an "infidel," he yet from the first conquered the
devotion of the mass of his countrymen; though he would have been
more potent for intellectual liberation if he had been by them more
intelligently read. Few of them now, probably, realize that their
adored poet was either a deist or a Unitarian--presumably the former.
§ 17
With the infelicity in prediction which is so much commoner with him
than the "prescience" for which he is praised, Burke had announced that
the whole deist school "repose in lasting oblivion." The proposition
would be much more true of 999 out of every thousand writers on behalf
of Christianity. It is characteristic of Burke, however, that he does
not name Shaftesbury, a Whig nobleman of the sacred period. [924] A
seeming justice was given to Burke's phrase by the undoubted reaction
which took place immediately afterwards. In the vast panic which
followed on the French Revolution, the multitude of mediocre minds
in the middle and upper classes, formerly deistic or indifferent,
took fright at unbelief as something now visibly connected with
democracy and regicide; new money endowments were rapidly bestowed
on the Church; and orthodoxy became fashionable on political grounds
just as skepticism had become fashionable at the Restoration. Class
interest and political prejudice wrought much in both cases; only
in opposite directions. Democracy was no longer Bibliolatrous,
therefore aristocracy was fain to became so, or at least to grow
respectful towards the Church as a means of social control. Gibbon,
in his closing years, went with the stream. And as religious wars
have always tended to discredit religion, so a war partly associated
with the freethinking of the French revolutionists tended to discredit
freethought. The brutish wrecking of Priestley's house and library and
chapel by a mob at Birmingham in 1791 was but an extreme manifestation
of a reaction which affected every form of mental life. But while
Priestley went to die in the United States, another English exile,
temporarily returned thence to his native land, was opening a new era
of popular rationalism. Even in the height of the revolutionary tumult,
and while Burke was blustering about the disappearance of unbelief,
Thomas Paine was laying deep and wide the English foundations of a new
democratic freethought; and the upper-class reaction in the nature of
the case was doomed to impermanency, though it was to arrest English
intellectual progress for over a generation. The French Revolution
had re-introduced freethought as a vital issue, even in causing it
to be banned as a danger.
That freethought at the end of the century was rather driven
inwards and downwards than expelled is made clear by the multitude
of fresh treatises on Christian evidences. Growing numerous
after 1790, they positively swarm for a generation after Paley
(1794). Cp. Essays on the Evidence and Influence of Christianity,
Bath, 1790, pref.; Andrew Fuller, The Gospel its own Witness,
1799, pref. and concluding address to deists; Watson's sermon
of 1795, in Two Apologies, ed. 1806, p. 399; Priestley's Memoirs
(written in 1795), 1806, pp. 127-28; Wilberforce's Practical View,
1797, passim (e.g., pp. 366-69, 8th ed. 1841); Rev. D. Simpson,
A Plea for Religion ... addressed to the Disciples of Thomas Paine,
1797. The latter writer states (2nd ed. p. 126) that "infidelity is
at this moment running like wildfire among the common people"; and
Fuller (2nd ed. p. 128) speaks of the Monthly Magazine as "pretty
evidently devoted to the cause of infidelity." A pamphlet on The
Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in this Metropolis
(London, 1800), by W. Hamilton Reid, describes the period as the
first "in which the doctrines of infidelity have been extensively
circulated among the lower orders"; and a Summary of Christian
Evidences, by Bishop Porteous (1800; 16th ed. 1826), affirms,
in agreement with the 1799 Report of the Lords' Committee on
Treasonable Societies, that "new compendiums of infidelity,
and new libels on Christianity, are dispersed continually,
with indefatigable industry, through every part of the kingdom,
and every class of the community." Freethought, in short, was
becoming democratized.
As regards England, Paine is the great popular factor; and it is the
bare truth to say that he brought into the old debate a new earnestness
and a new moral impetus. The first part of the Age of Reason, hastily
put together in expectation of speedy death in 1793, and including
some astronomic matter that apparently antedates 1781, [925] is
a swift outline of the position of the rationalizing deist, newly
conscious of firm standing-ground in astronomic science. That is the
special note of Paine's gospel. He was no scholar; and the champions
of the "religion of Galilee" have always been prompt to disparage
any unlearned person who meddles with religion as an antagonist;
but in the second part of his book Paine put hard criticism enough
to keep a world of popular readers interested for well over a hundred
years. The many replies are forgotten: the Biblical criticism of Paine
will continue to do its work till popular orthodoxy follows the lead
of professional scholarship and gives up at once the acceptance and
the circulation of things incredible and indefensible as sacrosanct.
Mr. Benn (Hist. of Eng. Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century, i,
217) remarks that Paine's New Testament criticisms are "such as at
all times would naturally occur to a reader of independent mind and
strong common sense." If so, these had been up to Paine's time,
and remained long afterwards, rare characteristics. And there
is some mistake about Mr. Benn's criticism that "the repeated
charges of fraud and imposture brought against the Apostles and
Evangelists ... jar painfully on a modern ear. But they are
largely due to the mistaken notion, shared by Paine with his
orthodox contemporaries, that the Gospels and Acts were written
by contemporaries and eye-witnesses of the events related." Many
times over, Paine argues that the documents could not have been
so written. E.g. in Conway's ed. of Works, pp. 157, 158, 159,
160, 164, 167, 168, etc. The reiterated proposition is "that the
writers cannot have been eye-witnesses and ear-witnesses of what
they relate; ... and consequently that the books have not been
written by the persons called apostles" (p. 168). And there is some
exaggeration even in Mr. Benn's remark that, "strangely enough, he
accepts the Book of Daniel as genuine." Paine (ed. p. 144) merely
puts a balance of probability in favour of the genuineness. It may
be sometimes--it is certainly not always--true that Paine "cannot
distinguish between legendary or [? and] mythical narratives"
(Benn, p. 216); but it is to be feared that the disability subsists
to-day in more scholarly quarters.
Despite his deadly directness, Paine, in virtue of his strong
sincerity, probably jars much less on the modern ear than
he did on that of his own, which was so ready to make felony
of any opinion hostile to reigning prejudices. But if it be
otherwise, it is to be feared that no less offence will be given
by Mr. Benn's own account of the Hexateuch as "the records kept
by a lying and bloodthirsty priesthood"; even if that estimate be
followed by the very challengeable admission that "priesthoods
are generally distinguished for their superior humanity" (Benn,
p. 350, and note).
Henceforth there is a vital difference in the fortunes of freethought
and religion alike. Always in the past the institutional strength
of religion and the social weakness of freethought had lain in the
credulity of the ignorant mass, which had turned to naught an infinity
of rational effort. After the French Revolution, when over a large area
the critical spirit began simultaneously to play on faith and life,
politics and religion, its doubled activity gave it a new breadth of
outlook as of energy, and the slow enlightenment of the mass opened
up a new promise for the ultimate reign of reason.