[695] Sir Henry Craik (cited by Temple Scott, Bohn ed. of Swift's

Works, iii, 9) speaks of Toland as "a man of utterly worthless

character." This is mere malignant abuse. Toland is described by Pope

in a note to the Dunciad (ii, 399) as a spy to Lord Oxford. There

could hardly be a worse authority for such a charge.

[696] Gostwick, German Culture and Christianity, 1882, p. 26.

[697] Cp. Stephen, as cited, p. 115.

[698] "The Christianity of many writers consisted simply in expressing

deist opinions in the old-fashioned phraseology" (Stephen, i, 91).

[699] Cp. Pünjer, Christ. Philos. of Religion, i, 289-90; and

Dynamics of Religion, pp. 94-98. Lord Morley's reference to "the

godless deism of the English school" (Voltaire, 4th ed. p. 69) is

puzzling. Cp. Rosenkranz (Diderot's Leben und Werke, 1866, ii, 421) on

"den ungöttlichen Gott der Jesuiten and Jansenisten, dies monströse

Zerrbild des alten Jehovah, diesen apotheosirten Tyrannen, diesen

Moloch." The latter application of the term seems the more plausible.

[700] Macaulay's description of Blount as an atheist is therefore

doubly unwarranted.

[701] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 94-98.

[702] Continuation des Pensées Diverses ... à l'occasion de la Comète

... de 1680, Amsterdam, 1705, i, 91.

[703] Warburton, Divine Legation, vol. ii, preface.

[704] Stephen, English Thought, i, 114-18.

[705] This, according to John Craig, was Newton's opinion. "The

reason of his [Newton's] showing the errors of Cartes's philosophy

was because he thought it made on purpose to be the foundation of

infidelity." Letter to Conduitt, April 7, 1727, in Brewster's Memoirs

of Newton, ii, 315. Clarke, in his Answer to Butler's Fifth Letter,

expresses a similar view.

[706] "Three Discourses of Happiness, Virtue, and Liberty, Collected

from the Works of the Learn'd Gassendi by Monsieur Bernier. Translated

out of the French, 1699."

[707] Cp. W. Sichel, Bolingbroke and His Times, 1901, i, 175.

[708] Sir Leslie Stephen (i, 33) makes the surprising statement that a

"dogmatic assertion of free-will became a mark of the whole deist and

semi-deist school." On the contrary, Hobbes and Anthony Collins, not

to speak of Locke, wrote with uncommon power against the conception

of free-will, and had many disciples on that head.

[709] Letter to the Princess of Wales, November, 1715, in Brewster,

ii, 284-85.

[710] Second Letter to Clarke, par. 1.

[711] Abstract from the Works of John Hutchinson, 1755, pp. 149-63.

[712] Clarke's Answer to Leibnitz's First Letter, end.

[713] Berkeley, Defence of Freethinking in Mathematics, par. vii; and

Stock's Memoir of Berkeley. Cp. Brewster, Memoirs of Newton, ii, 408.

[714] In the Philosophical Transactions, 1718, No. 355, i, v, vi.

[715] Brewster, More Worlds than One, 1854, p. 110.

[716] Lecky, Hist. of England in the Eighteenth Cent. ed. 1892,

iii, 22-24.

[717] The tradition of Saunderson's unbelief is constant. In the

memoir prefixed to his Elements of Algebra (1740) no word is said of

his creed, though at death he received the sacrament.

[718] See The State of the Process depending against Mr. John Simson,

Edinburgh, 1728. Simson always expressed himself piously, but had

thrown out such expressions as Ratio est principium et fundamentum

theologiæ, which "contravened the Act of Assembly, 1717" (vol. cited,

p. 316). The "process" against him began in 1714, and dragged on for

nearly twenty years, with the result of his resigning his professorship

of theology at Glasgow in 1729, and seceding from the Associate

Presbytery in 1733. Burton, History of Scotland, viii, 399-400.

[719] Cp. the pamphlet by "A Presbyter of the Church of England,"

attributed to Bishop Hare, cited in Dynamics of Religion, pp. 177-78,

and by Lecky, iii, 25.

[720] Tatler, Nos. 12, 111, 135; Spectator, Nos. 231, 381, 389, 599;

Guardian, Nos. 3, 9, 27, 35, 39, 55, 62, 70, 77, 83, 88, 120, 130,

169. Most of the Guardian papers cited are by Berkeley. They are

extremely virulent; but Steele's run them hard.

[721] Analyst, Queries 60 and 62: Defence of Freethinking in

Mathematics, §§ 5, 6, 50. Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 141-42.

[722] Letter in De Morgan's Newton: his Friend: and his Niece, 1885,

p. 69.

[723] The essays in the Characteristics (excepting the Inquiry

Concerning Virtue and Merit, which was published by Toland, without

permission, in 1699) appeared between 1708 and 1711, being collected

in the latter year. Shaftesbury died in 1713, in which year appeared

his paper on The Judgment of Hercules.

[724] A Project for the Advancement of Religion. Bohn ed. of Works,

iii, 44. In this paper Swift reveals his moral standards by the avowal

(p. 40) that "hypocrisy is much more eligible than open infidelity

and vice: it wears the livery of religion ... and is cautious of

giving scandal."

[725] Sir Leslie Stephen (English Thought, i, 283) speaks of Dodwell's

thesis as deserving only "pity or contempt." Cp. Macaulay, Student's

ed. ii, 107-108. But a doctrine of conditional immortality had been

explicitly put by Locke in his Reasonableness of Christianity, 1695,

p. 13. Cp. Prof. Fraser's Locke, 1890, pp. 259-60, and Fox Bourne's

Life of Locke, ii, 287. The difference was that Dodwell elaborately

gave his reasons, which, as Dr. Clarke put it, made "all good men

sorry, and all profane men rejoice."

[726] History of his Own Time, ed. 1838, p. 887.

[727] Compare his ironical Argument Against Abolishing Christianity,

1708.

[728] He had, however, hailed the anonymous Letter Concerning

Enthusiasm as "very well writ," believing it to be by a friend of his

own--(Robert Hunter, to whom, accordingly, it has since been mistakenly

attributed by various bibliographers, including Barbier). "Enthusiasm,"

as meaning "popular fanaticism," was of course as repellent to a

Churchman as to the deists.

[729] Printed in folio 1711. Rep. in vol. xi of the Harleian

Miscellany, p. 168 sq. (2nd ed. p. 163 sq.).

[730] Dr. E. Synge, of Dublin (afterwards Archbishop of Tuam), in his

Religion Tryed by the Test of Sober and Impartial Reason, published

in 1713, seems to be writing before the issue of Collins's book when

he says (Dedication, p. 11) that the spread of the "disease not only

of Heterodoxy but of Infidelity" is "too plain to be either denied

or dissembled."

[731] Leslie affirms in his Truth of Christianity Demonstrated (1711,

p. 14) that the satirical Detection of his Short Method with the

Deists, to which the Truth is a reply, was by the author of Priestcraft

in Perfection; but, while the Detection has some of Collins's humour,

it lacks his amenity, and is evidently not by him.

[732] An English translation of the Dictionary, in 5 vols. folio,

with "many passages restored," appeared in 1734.

[733] A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke, 1720, p. 271.

[734] E.g. Mark Pattison, who calls Collins's book of 178 pages a

"small tract."

[735] "Ignorance," Collins writes, "is the foundation of Atheism, and

Freethinking the cure of it" (Discourse of Freethinking, p. 105). Like

Newton, he contemplated only an impossible atheism, never formulated

by any writer. The Philosophical Principles of Religion, Natural

and Reveal'd, of Dr. George Cheyne (1705, 2nd ed. 1715), similarly

declares (pref. end) that "if the modern [i.e. Newtonian] philosophy

demonstrates nothing else, yet it infallibly proves Atheism to be the

most gross ignorance." Thus the vindicator of "religion" was writing

in the key of the deist.

[736] Mr. Temple Scott, in his Bohn ed. of Swift's Works (iii, 166),

asserts that Swift's satire "frightened Collins into Holland." For

this statement there is no evidence whatever, and as it stands it is

unintelligible. The assertion that Collins had had to fly to Holland

in 1711 (Dr. Conybeare, Hist. of N. T. Crit. R. P. A. 1910, p. 38)

is also astray.

[737] Second ed. 1717. Another writer, William Lyons, was on the same

track, publishing The Infallibility of Human Judgment, its Dignity

and Excellence (2nd ed. 1720), and A Discourse of the Necessity of

Human Actions (1730).

[738] Work cited, p. 13.

[739] As to whose positions see a paper in the writer's Pioneer

Humanists, 1907.

[740] There were six separate Discourses. Voltaire speaks of "three

editions coup sur coup of ten thousand each" (Lettre sur les auteurs

Anglais--in OEuvres, ed. 1792. lxviii, 359). This seems extremely

unlikely as to any one Discourse; and even 5,000 copies of each

Discourse is a hardly credible sale, though the writer of the sketch

of his life (1733) says that "the sale of Mr. Woolston's works was

very great." In any case, Woolston's Discourses are now seldomer

met with than Collins's Discourse of Freethinking. Alberti (Briefe

betreffend den Zustand der Religion in Gross-Brittannien) wrote in 1752

that the Discourses were even in that day somewhat rare, and seldom

found together. Many copies were probably destroyed by the orthodox,

and many would doubtless be thrown away, as tracts so often are.

[741] Tyerman's Life of Wesley, ed. 1871, i, 65-66.

[742] The Infidel Convicted, 1731, pp. 33, 62.

[743] Tindal (1653-1733) was the son of a clergyman, and in 1678 was

elected a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford. From 1685 to 1688 he was a

Roman Catholic. Under William III he wrote three works on points of

political freedom--one, 1698, on The Liberty of the Press. His Rights

of the Christian Church, anonymously published in 1706, a defence

of Erastianism, made a great sensation, and was prosecuted--only

to be reprinted. His later Defence of the Rights of the Christian

Church was in 1710, by order of the House of Commons, burned by the

common hangman.

[744] Middleton's Works, 2nd ed. 1755, iii, 50-56.

[745] Tindal (Voltaire tells) regarded Pope as devoid of genius and

imagination, and so trebly earned his place in the Dunciad.

[746] A Layman's Faith.... "By a Freethinker and a Christian," 1732.

[747] Title-page of Rev. Elisha Smith's Cure of Deism, 1st ed. 1736;

3rd ed. 1740.

[748] Le Moine, Dissertation historique sur les écrits de Woolston,

sa condemnation, etc. pp. 29-31, cited by Salchi, Lettres sur le

Déisme, 1759, p. 67 sq.

[749] Lettre sur les auteurs Anglais, as cited. Voltaire tells that,

when a she-bigot one day spat in Woolston's face, he calmly remarked:

"It was so that the Jews treated your God." Another story reads like

a carefully-improved version of the foregoing. A woman is said to

have accosted him as a scoundrel, and asked him why he was not yet

hanged. On his asking her grounds for such an accost, she replied:

"You have writ against my Saviour. What would become of my poor sinful

soul if it was not for my dear Saviour--my Saviour who died for such

wicked sinners as I am." Life of Mr. Woolston, prefixed to a reprint

of his collected Discourses, 1733, p. 27. Cp. Salchi, p. 78.

[750] Life cited, pp. 22, 26, 29.

[751] An Historical Defence of the Trustees of Lady Hewley's

Foundations, by the Rev. Joseph Hunter, 1834, pp. 17, 35; The History,

Opinions, and present legal position of the English Presbyterians,

1834, pp. 18, 29; Skeats, History of the Free Churches of England,

ed. Miall, p. 240.

[752] Hunter, as cited, p. 17; History of the Presbyterians, as cited,

p. 19; Fletcher, History of Independency, 1862, iv, 266-67.

[753] Hunter, pp. 37, 39.

[754] Skeats, as cited, p. 226.

[755] Hunter, pp. 24-25.

[756] Skeats (pp.239-40) sums up that while the Baptists had

probably "never been entirely free from the taint" of Unitarianism,

the Particular Baptists and the Congregationalists were saved from

it by their lack of men of "eminently speculative mind"; while the

Presbyterians "were men, for the most part, of larger reading than

other Nonconformists, and the writings of Whiston and Clarke had

found their way among them." But the tendency existed before Whiston

and Clarke.

[757] History, cited, p. 22; Hunter, pp. 44-45; Skeats, pp. 243-44.

[758] Skeats, pp. 240-43, 245 sq.

[759] Skeats, p. 248.

[760] Hunter, p. 50.

[761] As Sir Leslie Stephen has observed (English Thought, i, 164),

Chubb "deserves the praise of Malthusians." Having a sufficiency of

means for himself, but not more, he "lived a single life, judging

it greatly improper to introduce a family into the world without a

prospect of maintaining them." The proverb as to mouths and meat, he

drily observes, had not been verified in his experience. (The Author's

Account of Himself, pref. to Posthumous Works, 1748, i, p. iv.)

[762] One of the then numerous tribe of eccentrics. He held by

Judaic Sabbatarianism, and affected a Rabinnical costume. He made a

competence, however, as an ironmonger.

[763] Essay Towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain.

[764] Discourse to Magistrates.

[765] Guardian, Nos. 3, 55, 88.

[766] The Analyst, Queries, 55-67.

[767] See above, pp. 126-28.

[768] Discourse of Passive Obedience, § 26.

[769] Works, ed. 1837, p. 352.

[770] See the whole context, which palpitates with excitement.

[771] Mr. Walter Sichel (Bolingbroke and his Times, 1901, i, 175)

thinks fit to dispose of her attitude as "her aversion to the Church

and to everything that transcended her own faculties." So far as the

evidence goes, her faculties were much superior to those of most of

her orthodox contemporaries. For her tone see her letters.

[772] E.g. Dunciad, ii, 399; iii, 212; iv, 492.

[773] Voltaire commented pointedly on Pope's omission to make any

reference to Shaftesbury, while vending his doctrine. (Lettres

Philosophiques, xxii.) As a matter of fact Pope does in the Dunciad

(iv, 488) refer maliciously to the Theocles of Shaftesbury's Moralists

as maintaining a Lucretian theism or virtual atheism. The explanation

is that Shaftesbury had sharply criticized the political course of

Bolingbroke, who in turn ignored him as a thinker. See the present

writer's introd. to Shaftesbury's Characteristics, ed. 1900 (rep. in

Pioneer Humanists); and cp. W. R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson, 1900,

p. 101.

[774] Texte, Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature,

Eng. tr. pp. 117-18.

[775] Chesterfield in his Characters (app. to the Letters)

testifies that Pope "was a deist believing in a future state;

this he has often owned himself to me." (Bradshaw's ed. of Letters,

iii, 1410.) Chesterfield makes a similar statement concerning Queen

Caroline:--"After puzzling herself in all the whimsies and fantastical

speculations of different sects, she fixed herself ultimately in Deism,

believing in a future state." (Id. p. 1406.)

[776] Dict. Philos. art. Athée, § 2.

[777] Wise, in his adaptation of Cudworth, A Confutation of the

Reason and Philosophy of Atheism (1706), writes (i, 5) that "the

philosophical atheists are but few in number," and their objections

so weak "as that they deserve not a hearing but rather neglect"; but

confusedly goes on to admit that "one or two broachers of 'em maybe

thought able to infect a whole nation, as ... sad experience tells us."

[778] Complaint to this effect was made by orthodox writers. The Scotch

Professor Halyburton, for instance, complains that in many sermons

in his day "Heathen Morality has been substituted in the room of

Gospel Holiness. And Ethicks by some have been preached instead of the

Gospels of Christ." Natural Religion Insufficient (Edinburgh), 1714,

p. 25. Cp. pp. 23, 26-27, 59, etc. Bishop Burnet, in the Conclusion to

his History of his Own Time, declares, "I must own that the main body

of our clergy has always seemed dead and lifeless to me," and ascribes

much more zeal to Catholics and dissenters. (Ed. 1838, pp. 907-910.)

[779] The Moralists deals rather with strict skepticism than with

substantive atheism.

[780] The Grand Essay: or, a Vindication of Reason and Religion

against Impostures of Philosophy. The book was, on March 18, 1704,

condemned by the House of Commons to be burned in Palace Yard,

along with its author's Second Thoughts Concerning the Human Soul

(1702). A second ed. of the latter appeared soon after.

[781] Above, p. 153.

[782] Mr. Herbert Paul, in his essay on Swift (Men and Letters,

1901, p. 267), lumps as deists the four writers named by Swift in his

Argument. Not having read them, he thinks fit to asperse all four as

bad writers. Asgill, as was noted by Coleridge (Table Talk, July 30,

1831; April 30, 1832), was one of the best writers of his time. He

was, in fact, a master of the staccato style, practised by Mr. Paul

with less success.

[783] Work cited, p. 324. The book is now rare.

[784] Cp. Cheyne, Founders of Old Testament Criticism, 1893, p. 2.

[785] Dr. Cheyne expresses surprise that a "theological writer" who

got no far should not have been "prompted by his good genius to follow

up his advantage." It is, however, rather remarkable that Parvish,

who was a bookseller at Guildford (Alberti, Briefe, p. 426), should

have achieved what he did. It was through not being a theological

writer that he went so far, no theologian of his day following him.

[786] See the author's introduction to ed. of the Characteristics,

1900, rep. in Pioneer Humanists.

[787] The question remains obscure. Cp. the Letter cited, reprinted at

end of Carver's 1830 ed. of Paine's Works (New York); F. Thackeray's

Life of Chatham, ii, 405; and Chatham's "scalping-knife" speech.

[788] A Vindication of the Moral Philosopher appeared in 1741.

[789] Cp. Lechler, pp. 371, 386.

[790] Cp. Cairns, Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century, 1881, p. 101.

[791] Ed. 1741, p. 30 sq.

[792] View of the Deistical Writers, Letter XI (X in 1st ed.).

[793] Sir Leslie Stephen, English Thought, i, 169.

[794] Act 9th, Geo. II (1736), ch. 5.

[795] A Tour in Ireland, ed. 1892, ii, 59-72.

[796] Young at this period was entirely secular in his

thinking. Telling of his recovery from a fever in 1790, he writes:

"I fear that not one thought of God ever occurred to me at that time"

(Autobiography, 1898, p. 188). Afterwards he fell into religious

melancholia (Introd. note of editor).

[797] Really an abler man than half the others in the list, but himself

a good deal of a heretic. So far from attempting to make "victims,"

he pleaded for a more candid treatment of deistic objections.

[798] Doddridge himself was not theologically orthodox, but was an

evangelical Christian. Dr. Stoughton, Religion in England under Queen

Anne and the Georges, 1878, i, 344-46.

[799] Whose doctrine Sir Leslie Stephen elsewhere (p. 258) calls a

"brutal theology which gloried in trampling on the best instincts of

its opponents," and a "most unlovely product of eighteenth-century

speculation."

[800] Of Warburton Sir Leslie writes elsewhere (p. 353) that "this

colossus was built up of rubbish." See p. 352 for samples. Again he

speaks (p. 368) of the bishop's pretensions as "colossal impudence." It

should be noted, further, that Warburton's teaching in the Divine

Legation was a gross heresy in the eyes of William Law, who in his

Short but Sufficient Confutation pronounced its main thesis a "most

horrible doctrine." Ed. 1768, as cited, i, 217.

[801] As to whose "senile incompetence" see same vol. p. 234.

[802] History of Protestant Theology, Eng. tr. ii, 77. For the

influence of deism on Germany, see Tholuck (Vermischte Schriften,

Bd. ii) and Lechler (Gesch. des englischen Deismus).--Note by

Dr. Cheyne.

[803] An Essay towards a Natural History of the Earth, 3rd ed. 1723,

pref. and pp. 16 sq., 77 sq. Cp. White, Warfare of Science with

Theology, i. 227.

[804] End of pref.

[805] Work cited, p. 85.

[806] Playfair, in the Edinburgh Review, January, 1808, cited by

Brewster, Memoirs of Newton, 1855. i, 347.

[807] Brewster, as last cited.

[808] Grant, History of Physical Astronomy, 1852, p. 108.

[809] Baden Powell, Hist. of Nat. Philos. 1834, p. 363.

[810] Brewster, More Worlds than One, 1854, p. 111.

[811] Sir James Stephen, Horæ Sabbaticæ, ii, 281; Lechler, p. 451.

[812] See details in Dynamics of Religion, ch. viii.

[813] Essay on "Tendencies of Religious Thought in England: 1688-1750,"

in Essays and Reviews, 9th ed. p. 304.

[814] In criticizing whom Sir Leslie Stephen barely notices his

scientific work, but dwells much on his religious fallacies--a course

which would make short work of the fame of Newton.

[815] In his Case of Reason; or, Natural Religion Fully and Fairly

Stated, in answer to Tindal (1732). See the argument set forth by

Sir Leslie Stephen, i, 158-63. It is noteworthy, however, that in his

Spirit of Prayer (1750), pt. ii, dial. i, Law expressly argues that

"No other religion can be right but that which has its foundation in

Nature. For the God of Nature can require nothing of his creatures but

what the state of their nature calls them to." Like Baxter, Berkeley,

Butler, and so many other orthodox polemists, Law uses the argument

from ignorance when it suits him, and ignores or rejects it when used

by others.

[816] The general reader should take note that in A. Murray's issue

of Hume's Essays (afterwards published by Ward, Lock, and Co.),

which omits altogether the essays on Miracles and a Future State,

the Natural History of Religion is much mutilated, though the book

professes to be a verbatim reprint.

[817] Even before his death he was suspected of that view. When

his coffin was being carried from his house for interment, one of

"the refuse of the rabble" is said to have remarked, "Ah, he was

an atheist." "No matter," replied another, "he was an honest man"

(Curious Particulars, etc., respecting Chesterfield and Hume, 1788,

p. 15).

[818] See Burton, Hist. of Scotland, viii, 549-50, as to the case

of Pitcairne.

[819] Howell's State Trials, xiii (1812), coll. 917-38.

[820] Macaulay, History, ch. xxii; student's ed. ii, 620-21; Burton,

History of Scotland, viii, 76-77. Aikenhead seems to have been a

boy of unusual if unbalanced capacity, even by the bullying account

of Macaulay, who missed no opportunity to cover himself by stoning

heretics. See the boy's arguments on the bases of ethics, set forth

in his "dying speech," as cited by Halyburton, Natural Religion

Insufficient, 1714, pp. 119-23, 131, and the version in the State

Trials, xiii, 930-34.

[821] Macaulay ascribes the savagery of the prosecution to the Lord

Advocate, Sir James Stewart, "as cruel as he was base"; but a letter

printed in the State Trials, from a member of the Privy Council,

says the sentence would have been commuted if "the ministers would

intercede." They, however, "spoke and preached for cutting him

off." Trials, xiii, 930; Burton, viii, 77.

[822] Letter to Sir Francis Masham, printed in the State Trials, xiii,

928-29--evidently written by Locke, who seems to have preserved all

the papers printed by Howell.

[823] Macaulay, as cited. In 1681 one Francis Borthwick, who had

gone abroad at the age of fourteen and turned Jew, was accused of

blaspheming Jesus, and had to fly for his life, being outlawed. State

Trials, as cited, col. 939.

[824] A Full Account of the Several Ends and Uses of Confessions

of Faith, first published in 1719 as a preface to a Collection of

Confessions of Faith, by Prof. W. Dunbar, of Edinburgh University,

3rd ed. 1775, p. 1.

[825] Work cited, p. 48.

[826] Id. p. 198.

[827] Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century. From the MSS. of

John Ramsay, of Ochtertyre, 1888, i, 277. Ramsay describes Johnston as

a "joyous, manly, honourable man," of whom Kames "was exceedingly fond"

(p. 278).

[828] W. R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson, 1900, pp. 15, 20-21.

[829] Id. p. 52.

[830] Cp. Alberti, Briefe betreffende den Zustand der Religion in

Gross-Brittannien, 1752, pp. 430-31.

[831] See Dr. McCosh's Scottish Philosophy, 1875,

pp. 111-13. Dr. McCosh notes that at some points Dudgeon anticipated

Hume.

[832] Dr. McCosh, however, admits that the absence of the printer's

name on the 1765 edition of Dudgeon's works shows that there was then

no thorough freedom of thought in Scotland.

[833] Rae, Life of Adam Smith, 1895, p. 13. Prof. Fowler shows

no knowledge of this prosecution in his monograph on Hutcheson

(Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, 1882); and Mr. W. R. Scott, in his,

seems to rely for the wording of the indictment solely on Mr. Rae,

who gives no references, drawing apparently on unpublished MSS.

[834] Rae, as cited, pp. 11-15.

[835] Scott, as cited, p. 87.

[836] Dr. James Orr, David Hume and his Influence, etc.,

1903. pp. 36-37.

[837] Also for a time a theological professor in Edinburgh University.

[838] The Thoughts Concerning Religion, Natural and Revealed,

appeared in 1735; the Letter to a Bishop in 1732; and the Reflections

on the Sources of Incredulity (left unfinished) posthumously about

1750. Forbes in his youth had been famed as one of the hardest drinkers

of his day.

[839] Reflections on Incredulity, in Works, undated, ii, 141-42. Yet

the works of Forbes were translated for orthodox purposes into German,

and later into French by Père Houbigant (1769), who preserves the

passage on freethinkers' morals, though curtailing the Reflections

as a whole.

[840] As to which see A Sober Enquiry into the Grounds of the Present

Differences in the Church of Scotland, 1723.

[841] Cockburn's Life of Jeffrey, ed. 1872, p. 10.

[842] See the Autobiography of the Rev. Dr. A. Carlyle, 1860,

pp. 492-93. Millar's Historical View of the English Government

(censured by Hallam) was once much esteemed; and his Origin of Ranks

is still worth the attention of sociologists.

[843] Ritchie's Life of Hume, 1807, pp. 52-81; Tytler's Life of Lord

Kames, 2nd ed. 1814, i, ch. v; Burton's Life of Hume, i, 425-30.

[844] Ritchie, as cited, p. 57.

[845] McCulloch, Life of Smith prefixed to ed. of Wealth of Nations,

ed. 1839, p. ii.

[846] Ramsay of Ochtertyre, Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth

Century, 1888, i, 462-63. Mr. Rae doubts the story, Life of Adam Smith,

1895, p. 60.

[847] Ramsay, as last cited.

[848] Ramsay, passage cited.

[849] Theory of Moral Sentiments, pt. iii, ch. ii, end.

[850] Cp. Rae, pp. 427-30. Mr. Rae thinks the deletion stood for

no change of opinion, and cites Smith's own private explanation

(Sinclair's Life of Sir John Sinclair, i, 40) that he thought the

passage "unnecessary and misplaced." But this expression must be read

in the light of Smith's general reticence concerning established

dogmas. Certainly he adhered to his argument--which does not claim

to be a demonstration--for the doctrine of a future state.

[851] Bk. v, ch. i, pt. iii, art. 3.

[852] Smith's admiration for Voltaire might alone indicate his mental

attitude. As to that see F. W. Hirst, Adam Smith (Eng. Men of Letters

ser.), pp. 127-28. But the assertion of Skarzinski, that Smith, after

being an Idealist under the influence of Hume, "returned a materialist"

from his intercourse with Voltaire and other French freethinkers,

is an exhibition of learned ignorance. See Hirst, p. 181.

[853] An Explanation and Defence of the Principles of Protestant

Dissent, by the Rev. Dr. W. Hamilton Drummond, 1842, pp. 5-6. 47;

Skeats, Hist. of the Free Churches of England, ed. Miall, pp. 238-39;

Wallace, Anti-Trinitarian Biography, iii, art. 360.

[854] Cp. Drummond, as cited, pp. 29-30; History, Opinions, etc.,

of the English Presbyterians, 1834, p. 29.

[855] W. R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson, p. 31.

[856] Above, p. 154, note.

[857] Scott, pp. 28-29, 35-36. The suggestion is not quite

convincing. Synge, after becoming Archbishop of Tuam, continued to

publish his propagandist tracts, among them An Essay towards making

the Knowledge of Religion Easy to the Meanest Capacity (6th ed. 1734),

which is quite orthodox, and which argues (p. 3) that the doctrine

of the Trinity is to be believed, and not pried into, "because it is

above our understanding to comprehend." All the while there was being

sold also his early treatise, "A Gentleman's Religion: in Three Parts

... with an Appendix, wherein it is proved that nothing contrary to

our Reason can possibly be the object of our belief, but that it is

no just exception against some of the doctrines of Christianity that

they are above our reason."

[858] Scott, p. 36.

[859] All that is told of this prelate by Lecky (Hist. of Ireland

in the 18th Cent. 1892. i, 207) is that at Killala he patronized

horse-races. He was industrious on more episcopal lines. He wrote an

Introduction to the History of the Jews; a Vindication of Biblical

Chronology; two treatises on prophecy; an anti-Athanasian Essay on

Spirit (1751), which aroused much controversy; A Vindication of the

Histories of the Old and New Testament, in answer to Bolingbroke (2

vols. 1752-1754; 2nd ed. 1757; rep. with the Essay on Spirit, Dublin,

1759), which led to his being prosecuted; and other works. The offence

given by the Vindication lay in his denunciation of the Athanasian

creed, and of the bigotry of those who supported it. See pt. iii,

letters i and ii. The Essay on Spirit is no less heterodox. In other

respects, however, Clayton is ultra-orthodox.

[860] Dr. G. W. Alberti, Briefe betreffende den Zustand der Religion

in Gross-Brittannien, Hannover, 1752, p. 440.

[861] Above, p. 180.

[862] Put by Huarte in 1575. Above, i, 472.

[863] Inquiry, p. 162.

[864] Inquiry, pref. pp. x, xxii.

[865] A Letter to the Rev. Dr. Conyers Middleton, occasioned by his

late "Free Inquiry," 1749, pp. 3-4.

[866] A Free Answer to Dr. Middleton's "Free Inquiry," by William

Dodwell [son of the elder and brother of the younger Henry], Rector

of Shottesbrook, 1749, pp. 14-15.

[867] Inquiry, p. 162.

[868] Works, 2nd ed. 1755, ii, 348.

[869] Cp. essay on Mandeville, in the author's Pioneer Humanists, 1907.

[870] As against the objections of Mr. Lang, see the author's paper

in Studies in Religious Fallacy.

[871] Cp. the summary of Farrar, Crit. Hist. of Freethought,

pp. 177-78, which is founded on that of Pusey's early Historical

Enquiry concerning German Rationalism, pp. 124-26.

[872] Rep. same year at Dublin: 2nd ed. 1750. The first ed. was

ascribed to D'Argens--an error caused though not justified by the

publisher's notice.

[873] The point is further discussed in Dynamics of Religion,

pp. 175-76.

[874] Cp. G. B. Hertz, The Old Colonial System, 1905, pp. 4, 22,

93, 157.

[875] Letter xxxi, in Mason's Memoir.

[876] Hill Burton's Life of Hume, ii, 433, 434, 484-85, 487.

[877] Compare the verdicts of Gibbon in his Autobiography, and of

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. v, ch. i, art. 2; and see the

memoir of Smith in 1831 ed. and McCulloch's ed., and Rae's Life of

Adam Smith, p. 24. It appears that about 1764 many English people

sent their sons to Edinburgh University on account of the better

education there. Letter of Blair, in Burton's Life of Hume, ii, 229.

[878] Essays, iv, end.

[879] Present State of Polite Learning, 1765, ch. vi. His story of how

the father of St. Foix cured the youth of the desire to rationalize

his creed is not suggestive of conviction. The father pointed to a

crucifix, saying, "Behold the fate of a reformer." The story has been

often plagiarized since--e.g., in Galt's Annals of the Parish.

[880] Abbey and Overton, The English Church in the Eighteenth Century,

1878, ii, 37.

[881] Dieu et les Hommes, ch. xxxix.

[882] Cp. Bishop Law, Considerations on the Theory of Religion, 6th

ed. 1774, p. 65, note, and the Analysis of Bolingbroke's writings

(1755) there cited. Mr. Sichel's reply to Sir L. Stephen's criticism

may or may not be successful; but he does not deal with Bishop Law's.

[883] Mémoires de Diderot, ed. 1841, ii, 25.

[884] These had begun as early as 1753 (Micromégas).

[885] Works, ed. 1842, i, pp. cix, 445; ii, 628, 728. Cp. the poem

Kew Gardens, left in MS.

[886] I here take a few sentences from my paper, The Church and

Education, 1903.

[887] Short History, p. 717. The Concise Description of the Endowed

Grammar Schools, by Nicholas Carlisle, 1818, shows that schools were

founded in all parts of the country by private bequest or public

action during the eighteenth century.

[888] Collis, in Transactions of the Social Science Association,

1857, p. 126. According to Collis, 48 had been founded by James I,

28 under Charles I, 16 under the Commonwealth, 36 under Charles II,

4 under James II, 7 under William and Mary, 11 under Anne, 17 under

George I, and 7 under George II. He does not indicate their size.

[889] Green, as last cited.

[890] Gibbins, Industrial History of England, 1894, p. 151.

[891] Hist. of England under George III, ed. 1865, ii, 83.

[892] The document is given in Ritchie's Life of Hume, 1807, pp. 53-55.

[893] A reply, The World proved to be not eternal nor mechanical,

appeared in 1790.

[894] The Doctrines of a Trinity and the Incarnation of God was

published anonymously.

[895] See the Biographical Introduction to the Unitarian reprint of

Watts's Solemn Address, 1840, which gives the letters of Lardner. And

cp. Skeats, Hist. of the English Free Churches, ed. Miall, p. 240.

[896] Life of Lardner, by Dr. Kippis, prefixed to Works, ed. 1835,

i, p. xxxii.

[897] Memoirs of Priestley, 1806, pp. 30-32, 35, 37. The Letter on

the Logos was addressed by Lardner to the first Lord Barrington,

and was first published anonymously, in 1759.

[898] Memoirs of Priestley, p. 19.

[899] Pamphlet of 1778, printing the sermon, with reply to a local

attack.

[900] MS. alteration in print. See also p. 1 of Epistle Dedicatory.

[901] In criticizing whom Sir Leslie Stephen barely notices his

scientific work, but dwells much on his religious fallacies--a course

which would make short work of the fame of Newton.

[902] A Church dignitary has described Evanson's Dissonance as "the

commencement of the destructive criticism of the Fourth Gospel"

(Archdeacon Watkins's Bampton Lectures, 1890, p. 174).

[903] Williams (d. 1816), who published 3 vols. of "Lectures on

Education" and other works, has a longer claim on remembrance as the

founder of the "Literary Fund."

[904] The subject is discussed at length in the essay on Gibbon in

the author's Pioneer Humanists.

[905] Cp. Bishop Watson's Apology for Christianity (1776) as to

the vogue of unbelief at that date. (Two Apologies, ed. 1806,

p. 121. Cp. pp. 179, 399.)

[906] The panegyric on Voltaire delivered at his death by Frederick

the Great (Nov. 26, 1778) was promptly translated into English (1779).

[907] Reflections on the French Revolution, 1790, p. 131.

[908] See Hannah More's letter of April, 1777, in her Life, abridged

16mo-ed. p. 36. An edition of Shaftesbury, apparently, appeared in

1773, and another in 1790.

[909] The essays of Hume, including the Dialogues concerning Natural

Religion (1779), were now circulated in repeated editions. Mr. Rae,

in his valuable Life of Adam Smith, p. 311, cites a German observer,

Wendeborn, as writing in 1785 that the Dialogues, though a good deal

discussed in Germany, had made no sensation in England, and were at

that date entirely forgotten. But a second edition had been called

for in 1779, and they were added to a fresh edition of the essays

in 1788. Any "forgetting" is to be set down to preoccupation with

other interests.

[910] Letter to the Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, 1777, p. 3.

[911] Dr. Parr, Characters of C. J. Fox, i, 220; cited in Charles

James Fox, a Commentary, by W. S. Landor, ed. by S. Wheeler, 1907,

p. 147. Fox's secretary and biographer, Trotter, while anxious

to discredit the statement of Parr, gives such a qualified account

(Memoirs of the Latter Years of C. J. Fox, 1811, pp. 470-71) of Fox's

views on immortality as to throw much doubt on the stronger testimony

of B. C. Walpole (Recollections of C. J. Fox, 1806, p. 242).

[912] See J. L. Le B. Hammond, Charles James Fox, 1903, ch. xiii.

[913] See a letter in Bishop Watson's Life, i, 402; and cp. Buckle,

ch. vii, note 218.

[914] See his Task, bk. iii, 150-90 (1783-1784), for the prevailing

religious tone.

[915] Princ. of Moral Philos. bk. v, ch. ix. The chapter tells of

widespread freethinking.

[916] Ernest Krause, Erasmus Darwin, Eng. tr. 1879,

p. 211. Cp. pp. 193, 194.

[917] Letters vii, viii, ix, xix, xxii.

[918] E.g., The Ordination, the Address to the Deil, A Dedication to

Gavin Hamilton, The Kirk's Alarm, etc.

[919] See also the pieces printed between these in the Globe edition,

pp. 66-68.

[920] The benevolent Supreme Being, he writes, "has put the immediate

administration of all this into the hands of Jesus Christ--a great

personage, whose relation to Him we cannot fathom, but whose relation

to us is [that of] a guide and Saviour." Letter 86 in Globe ed. Letters

189 and 197, to Mrs. Dunlop, similarly fail to meet the requirements

of the orthodox correspondent. The poem Look up and See, latterly

printed several times apart from Burns's works, and extremely likely

to be his, is a quite Voltairean criticism of David. If the poem be

ungenuine, it is certainly by far the ablest of the unacknowledged

pieces ascribed to him, alike in diction and in purport.

[921] Letter to Mrs. Dunlop, Jan. 1, 1789, in Robert Burns and

Mrs. Dunlop, ed. by W. Wallace, 1898, p. 129. The passage is omitted

from Letter 168 in the Globe ed., and presumably from other reprints.

[922] Letter to Mrs. Dunlop, July 9, 1790. Published for the first

time in vol. cited, p. 266.

[923] Epistle to a Young Friend.

[924] Lecky, writing in 1865, and advancing on Burke, has said of

the whole school, including Shaftesbury, that "the shadow of the tomb

rests on all: a deep, unbroken silence, the chill of death, surrounds

them. They have long ceased to wake any interest" (Rationalism in

Europe, i, 116). As a matter of fact, they had been discussed by Taylor

in 1853; by Pattison in 1860; and by Farrar in 1862; and they have

since been discussed at length by Dr. Hunt, by Dr. Cairns, by Lange,

by Gyzicki, by M. Sayous, by Sir Leslie Stephen, by Prof. Höffding,

and by many others.

[925] Conway, introd. to Age of Reason, in his ed. of Paine's Works,

iv, 3.

[926] Lemontey, Hist. de la régence et de la minorité de Louis XV,

1835, ii, 358, note. In 1731 there was published under the name of

Boulainvilliers (d. 1722) a so-called Réfutation de Spinoza, which was

"really a popular exposition." Pollock, Spinoza, 2nd ed. p. 363. Sir

F. Pollock assents to Voltaire's remark that Boulainvilliers "gave

the poison and forgot to give the antidote."

[927] For a brief view of the facts, usually misconceived, see Lanson,

pp. 610-11. Fénelon seems to have been uncandid, while Bossuet, by

common consent, was malevolent. There is probably truth, however,

in the view of Shaftesbury (Characteristics, ed. 1900, ii, 214),

that the real grievance of Fénelon's ecclesiastical opponents was the

tendency of his mysticism to withdraw devotees from ceremonial duties.

[928] Now remembered chiefly through the account of his intercourse

with Fénelon (repr. in Didot ed. of Fénelon's misc. works), and

Hume's long extract from his Philosophical Principles of Natural and

Revealed Religion in the concluding note to the Essays. Cp. M. Matter,

Le Mysticisme en France au temps de Fénelon, 1865, pp. 352-54.

[929] Tyssot de Patot was Professor of Mathematics at Deventer. In

his Lettres choisies, published in 1726, there is an avowal that

"he might be charged with having different notions from those of the

vulgar in point of religion" (New Memoirs of Literature, iv (1726),

267); and his accounts of pietists and unbelieving and other priests

sufficiently convey that impression (id. pp. 268-84).

[930] Towards the close of his "poem" Polignac speaks of a defence of

Christianity as a future task. He died without even completing the

Anti-Lucretius, begun half a century before. Of him are related two

classic anecdotes. Sent at the age of twenty-seven to discuss Church

questions with the Pope, he earned from His Holiness the compliment:

"You seem always to be of my opinion; and in the end it is yours that

prevails." Louis XIV gave him a long audience, after which the King

said: "I have had an interview with a young man who has constantly

contradicted me without my being able to be angry for a moment." (Éloge

prefixed to Bougainville's trans., L'Anti-Lucrèce, 1767, i. 131.)

[931] Cp. Duvernet, Vie de Voltaire, ch. i. Rivarol (Lettres à Necker,

in OEuvres, ed. 1852, p. 138) wrote that under Louis XV there began a

"general insurrection" of discussion, and that everybody then talked

"only of religion and philosophy during half a century." But this

exaggerates the beginnings, of which Rivarol could have no exact

knowledge.

[932] La verité de la religion chrétienne prouvée par les faits:

précédée d'un discours historique et critique sur la méthode des

principaux auteurs qui ont écrit pour et contre le christianisme

depuis son origine, 1722. Rep. 1741, 3 vols. 4to., 4 vols. 12mo.

[933] Nouveau Dictionnaire historique portatif, 1771, art. Houteville,

tom. ii.

[934] Whose Considérations sur les Moeurs (1751) does not seem to

contain a single religious sentiment. Historiographer of France,

he had not escaped the suppression of his Histoire de Louis XI, 1745.

[935] See above, p. 130. Buffier seems to have begun an attempt at

spelling reform (by dropping doubled letters), followed in 1725 by

Huard and later by Prémontval.

[936] 7 vols. 4to., 10 vols. 12mo. Rep. with corrections 1733. Seconde

partie, 1753, 8 vols. 12mo.

[937] A reprint in 1735 bears the imprint of London, with the note

"Aux dépens de la Compagnie."

[938] Lanson, p. 702. The Persian Letters, like the Provincial Letters

of Pascal, had to be printed at Rouen and published at Amsterdam. Their

freethinking expressions put considerable difficulties in the way

of his election (1727) to the Academy. See E. Edwards, Chapters

of the Biog. Hist. of the French Academy, 1864, pp. 34-35, and

D. M. Robertson, Hist. of the French Academy, 1910, p. 92, as to the

mystification about the alleged reprint without the obnoxious passages.

[939] Lettre 86.

[940] "Au point de vue religieux, Montesquieu tirait poliment son coup

de chapeau au christianisme" (Lanson, p. 714). E.g. in the Esprit

des Lois, liv. xxiv, chs. i, ii, iii, iv, vi, and the footnote to

ch. x of liv. xxv. Montesquieu's letter to Warburton (16 mai, 1754),

in acknowledgment of that prelate's attack on the posthumous works of

Bolingbroke, is a sample of his social make-believe. But no religious

reader could suppose it to come from a religious man.

[941] Also of E. Edwards, as cited above.

[942] See the notes cited on pp. 405, 407 of Garnier's variorum ed. of

the Esprit des Lois, 1871. La Harpe and Villemain seem blind to irony.

[943] The flings at Bayle (liv. xxiv, chs. ii, vi) are part of a subtly

ironical vindication of ideal as against ecclesiastical Christianity,

and they have no note of faith.

[944] Paul Mesnard, Hist. de l'académie française, 1857, pp. 61-63.

[945] Pensées Diverses: De la religion.

[946] Lanson, p. 714, note.

[947] Tr. in English, 1753. It is noteworthy that Cataneo formally

accepts Montesquieu's professions of orthodoxy.

[948] Correspondance littéraire de Grimm et Diderot, ed. 1829-31,

i, 273. See the footnote for an account of the indecent efforts of

the Jesuits to get at the dying philosopher. The curé of the parish

who was allowed entry began his exhortation with: "Vous savez,

M. le Président, combien Dieu est grand." "Oui, monsieur," returned

Montesquieu, "et combien les hommes sont petits."

[949] Mesnard, Hist. de l'académie française, p. 63.

[950] A full analysis is given by Strauss in the second Appendix to

his Voltaire: Sechs Vorträge, 2te Aufl. 1870.

[951] The details are dubious. See the memoir compiled by "Rudolf

Charles" (R. C. D'Ablaing van Giessenburg), the editor of the

Testament, Amsterdam, 3 tom. 1861-64. It draws chiefly on the Mémoires

secrets de Bachaumont, under date Sept. 30, 1764.

[952] Testament, as cited, i, 25.

[953] iii, 396.

[954] First published in 1762 [or 1764? See Bachaumont, Oct. 30],

with the date 1742; and reprinted in the Évangile de la Raison,

1764. It was no fewer than four times ordered to be destroyed in the

Restoration period.

[955] Probably Diderot did the most of the adaptation. "Il y a

plus que du bon sens dans ce livre," writes Voltaire to D'Alembert;

"il est terrible. S'il sort de la boutique du Système de la Nature,

l'auteur s'est bien perfectionné" (Lettre de 27 Juillet, 1775).

[956] "Il leur faut un Être à ces messieurs; pour moi, je m'en

passe." Grimm, Correspondance Littéraire, ed. 1829-31, iv, 186.

[957] Grimm, as cited, i, 235. Grimm tells a delightful story of his

reception of the confessor.

[958] "Cet ouvrage, dont les vers sont grands et bien tournés,

est une satire des plus licencieuses contre les moeurs de nos

évêques." Bachaumont, Mémoires Secrets, Juin 15, 1762.

[959] Bonet-Maury, Hist. de la lib. de conscience en France, 1900,

p. 68.

[960] Nouveau dictionnaire historique-portatif ... par une Société

de Gens de Lettres, ed. 1771, i, 314.

[961] Marmontel does not relate this in his Mémoires, where he insists

on the decorum of the talk, even at d'Holbach's table.

[962] Chamfort, Caractères et Anecdotes.

[963] Nouveau dictionnaire, above cited, i, 315.

[964] Name assumed for literary purposes, and probably composed by

anagram from the real name Arouet, with "le jeune" (junior) added,

thus: A. R. O. V. E. T. L(e). I(eune).

[965] Not to be confounded with the greater and later Jean Jacques

Rousseau. J. B. Rousseau became Voltaire's bitter enemy--on the score,

it is said, of the young man's epigram on the elder poet's "Ode to

Posterity," which, he said, would not reach its address. Himself a

rather ribald freethinker, Rousseau professed to be outraged by the

irreligion of Voltaire.

[966] See the poem in note 4 to ch. ii of Duvernet's Vie de

Voltaire. Duvernet calls it "one of the first attacks on which

philosophy in France had ventured against superstition" (Vie de

Voltaire, ed. 1797, p. 19).

[967] Duvernet, ch. ii. The free-hearted Ninon de l'Enclos,

brightest of old ladies, is to be numbered among the pre-Voltairean

freethinkers, and to be remembered as leaving young Voltaire a legacy

to buy books. She refused to "sell her soul" by turning dévote on the

invitation of her old friend Madame de Maintenon. Madame D'Épinay,

Voltaire's "belle philosophe et aimable Habacuc," Madame du Deffand,

and Madame Geoffrin were among the later freethinking grandes dames of

the Voltairean period; and so, presumably, was the Madame de Créquí,

quoted by Rivarol, who remarked that "Providence" is "the baptismal

name of Chance." As to Madame Geoffrin see the OEuvres Posthumes de

D'Alembert, 1799, i, 240, 271; and the Mémoires de Marmontel, 1804,

ii, 102 sq. If Marmontel is accurate, she went secretly at times to

mass (p. 104).

[968] Deslandes wrote some new chapters of his Réflexions in London,

for the English translation. Eng. tr. 1713, p. 99.

[969] Pour et Contre, ou Épitre à Uranie. It was of course not printed

till long afterwards. Diderot, writing his Promenade du Sceptique

in 1747, says: "C'est, je crois, dans l'allée des fleurs [of his

allegory] entre le champagne et le tokay, que l'épitre à Uranie prit

naissance." (L'Allée des Marronniers, ad init.) This seems unjust.

[970] He has been alternately represented as owing everything and

owing very little to England. Cp. Texte, Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan

Spirit, Eng. tr. p. 58. Neither view is just.

[971] In his Essay upon the Civil Wars of France, and ... upon

Epick Poetry (2nd ed. 1728, "corrected by himself"), written and

published in English, he begins his "Advertisement" with the remark:

"It has the appearance of too great a presumption in a traveller

who hath been but eighteen months in England, to attempt to write

in a language which he cannot pronounce at all, and which he hardly

understands in conversation." As the book is remarkably well written,

he must have read much English.

[972] Lord Morley (Voltaire, 4th ed. p. 40) speaks of the English

people as having then won "a full liberty of thought and speech and

person." This, as we have seen, somewhat overstates the case. But

discussion was much more nearly free than in France.

[973] Probably as much on political as on religious grounds. The 8th

letter, Sur le Parlement, must have been very offensive to the French

Government; and in 1739, moved by angry criticisms, Voltaire saw fit to

modify its language. See Lanson's ed. of the Lettres, 1909, i, 92, 110.

[974] Condorcet, Vie de Voltaire, ed. 1792, p. 92. In reprints the

poem was entitled Sur la religion naturelle, and was so commonly cited.

[975] Condorcet, p. 99.

[976] See above, pp. 213-14, as to the works of Boulainvilliers,

Tyssot de Patot, Deslandes, and others who wrote between 1700 and 1715.

[977] Cited by Schlosser, Hist. of the Eighteenth Century, Eng. tr. i,

146-7.

[978] Traité de la verité de la religion chrétienne, tiré en partie

du latin de M. J. Alphonse Turrettin, professeur ... en l'académie

de Génève, par M. J. Vernet, professeur de belles-lettres en la

même Académie. Revue et corrigé par un Théologien Catholique. 1e

éd. Génève, 1730. Rep. in 2 tom. 1753. Ecclesiastical approbation

given 15 janv. 1749; privilège, juillet, 1751.

[979] Dom Remi Desmonts, according to Barbier.

[980] "Par Panage" (=Toussaint?). Rep. 1755 and 1767 (Berlin).

[981] Work cited, ed. 1755, p. 252.

[982] A glimpse of old Paris before or about 1750 is afforded by

Fontenelle's remark that the prevailing diseases might be known from

the affiches. At every street corner were to be seen two, of which one

advertised a Traité sur l'incrédulité. (Grimm, Corr. litt. iii, 373.)

[983] Thus Duruy had said in his Histoire de France (1st ed. 1852)

that in the work of the Jansenists of Port Royal "l'esprit d'opposition

politique se cacha sous l'opposition religieuse" (ed. 1880, ii, 298).

[984] The case has been thus correctly put by M. Rocquain, who,

however, decides that "de religieuse qu'elle était, l'opposition

devient politique" as early as about 1724-1733. L'Esprit

révolutionnaire avant la révolution, 1878; table des matières,

liv. 2e. Duruy (last note) puts the tendency still earlier.

[985] "Cette hardiesse étonna Voltaire, et excita son émulation"

(ed. cited, p. 118).

[986] Avertissement des éditeurs, in Basle ed. of 1792, vol. xlv,

p. 92.

[987] It has been counted that he used no fewer than a hundred

and thirty different pseudonyms; and the perpetual prosecution and

confiscation of his books explains the procedure. As we have seen,

the Lettres philosophiques (otherwise the Lettres anglaises) were

burned on their appearance, in 1734, and the bookseller put in the

Bastille; the Recueil des pièces fugitives was suppressed in 1739;

the Voix du Sage et du Peuple was officially and clerically condemned

in 1751; the poem on Natural Law was burned at Paris in 1758; Candide

at Geneva in 1759; the Dictionnaire philosophique at Geneva in 1764,

and at Paris in 1765; and many of his minor pseudonymous performances

had the same advertisement. But even the Henriade, the Charles XII,

and the first chapters of the Siècle de Louis XIV were prohibited;

and in 1785 the thirty volumes published of the 1784 edition of his

works were condemned en masse.

[988] Diderot, critique of Le philosophe ignorant in Grimm's

Corr. Litt. 1 juin 1766; Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Stück

10-12, 15; Gibbon, ch. i, note near end; ch. li, note on siege of

Damascus. Rousseau was as hostile as any (see Morley's Rousseau,

ch. ix, § 1). But Rousseau's verdict is the least important, and the

least judicial. He had himself earned the detestation of Voltaire, as

of many other men. In a moment of pique, Diderot wrote of Voltaire:

"Cet homme n'est que le second dans tous les genres" (Lettre 71 à

Mdlle. Voland, 12 août, 1762). He forgot wit and humour!

[989] Prof. Jowett, of Balliol College. See L. A. Tollemache, Benjamin

Jowett, Master of Balliol, 4th ed. pp. 27-28.

[990] See details in Lord Morley's Voltaire, 4th ed. pp. 165-70,

257-58. The erection by the French freethinkers of a monument to La

Barre in 1905, opposite the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Montmartre,

Paris, is an expression at once of the old feud with the Church and

the French appreciation of high personal courage. La Barre was in

truth something of a scapegrace, but his execution was an infamy,

and he went to his death as to a bridal. The erection of the monument

has been the occasion of a futile pretence on the clerical side that

for La Barre's death the Church had no responsibility, the movers

in the case being laymen. Nothing, apparently, can teach Catholic

Churchmen that the Church's past sins ought to be confessed like

those of individuals. It is quite true that it was a Parlement that

condemned La Barre. But what a religious training was it that turned

laymen into murderous fanatics!

[991] M. Lanson seems to overlook it when he writes (p. 747) that

"the affirmation of God, the denial of Providence and miracles,

is the whole metaphysic of Voltaire."

[992] Lord Morley writes (p. 209): "We do not know how far he ever

seriously approached the question ... whether a society can exist

without a religion." This overlooks both the Homélie sur l'Athéisme

and the article Athéisme in the Dictionnaire Philosophique, where

the question is discussed seriously and explicitly.

[993] Horace Walpole, Letter to Gray, Nov. 19, 1765. Compare the

mordant criticism of Grimm (Corr. litt. vii, 54 sq.) on his tract

Dieu in reply to d'Holbach. "Il raisonne là-dessus comme un enfant,"

writes Grimm, "mais comme un joli enfant qu'il est."

[994] Browning, The Two Poets of Croisic, st. cvii.

[995] Cp. Ständlin, Gesch. des Rationalismus und Supernaturalismus,

1826, pp. 287-90. Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte des 18. und

19. Jahrhunderts, 2te Aufl. 1848, i, 218-20.

[996] Zimmerman, De causis magis magisque invalescentis incredulitatis,

et medela huic malo adhibenda, Tiguri, 1739, 4to. Prof. Breitinger

of Zurich wrote a criticism afterwards tr. (1741) as Examen des

Lettres sur la religion essentielle. De Roches, pastor at Geneva,

published in letter-form 2 vols. entitled Défense du Christianisme, as

"préservatif contre" the Lettres of Mdlle. Huber (1740); and Bouillier

of Amsterdam also 2 vols. of Lettres (1741).

[997] Cp. Bouillier, Hist. de la philos. cartés, ii, 624-25;

D'Argenson, Mémoires, ed. Jannet, iv. 63.

[998] See the thesis (Jerusalem Coelesti) as printed in the Apologie

de M. l'Abbé De Prades, "Amsterdam," 1752, pp. 4, 6.

[999] Id. p. 10.

[1000] Mémoires sur la vie et les ouvrages de Diderot, 1821, p. 160.

[1001] Cp. Bachaumont, Mémoires secrets, 4 fév. 1762; 22 avril,

1768. Tn the latter entry, Yvon is described as "poursuivi comme

infidèle, quoique le plus croyant de France." In 1768, after the

Bélisaire scandal, he was refused permission to proceed with the

publication of his Histoire ecclésiastique.

[1002] This was de Prades's own view of the matter (Apologie, as cited,

p. v); and D'Argenson repeatedly says as much. Mémoires, iv, 57, 65,

66, 74, 77.

[1003] Rocquain, L'esprit revolutionnaire avant la révolution, 1878,

pp. 149-51; Morley, Diderot, ch. v; D'Argenson, iv, 78. The decree

of suppression was dated 13 fév. 1752.

[1004] Mémoires, iv, 64, 74.

[1005] Id. iv, 129, 140.

[1006] Id. iv, 92-93.

[1007] Maury, Hist. de l'ancienne Académie des Inscriptions, 1864,

pp. 312-13.

[1008] Journal historique de Barbier, 1847-56, iv, 304.

[1009] Astruc, we learn from D'Alembert, connected their decline with

the influence of the new opinions. "Ce ne sont pas les jansenistes

qui tuent les jésuites, c'est l'Encyclopédie." "Le maroufle Astruc,"

adds D'Alembert, "est comme Pasquin, il parle quelquefois d'assez

bon sens." Lettre à Voltaire. 4 mai, 1762.

[1010] Cp. pref. (La Vie de Salvien) to French tr. of Salvian, 1734,

p. lxix. I have seen MS. translations of Toland and Woolston.

[1011] MS. statement, in eighteenth-century hand, on flyleaf of a

copy of 1755 ed. of the Grands hommes, in the writer's possession.

[1012] Lettre à D'Alembert, 16 Octobre, 1765.

[1013] Of the works noted below, the majority appear or profess to have

been printed at Amsterdam, though many bore the imprint Londres. All

the freethinking books and translations ascribed to d'Holbach bore

it. The Arétin of Abbé Dulaurens bore the imprint: "Rome, aux dépens

de la Congrégation de l'Index." Mystifications concerning authorship

have been as far as possible cleared up in the present edition.

[1014] Given by Brunet, who is followed by Wheeler, as appearing in

1732, and as translated into English, under the title Dying Merrily,

in 1745. But I possess an English translation of 1713 (pref. dated

March 25), entitled A Philological Essay: or, Reflections on the

Death of Freethinkers.... By Monsieur D----, of the Royal Academy of

Sciences in France, and author of the Poetae Rusticantis Literatum

Otium. Translated from the French by Mr. B----, with additions by the

author, now in London, and the translator. [A note in a contemporary

hand makes "B" Boyer.] Barbier gives 1712 for the first edition,

1732 for the second. Rep. 1755 and 1776.

[1015] There is no sign of any such excitement in France over the

translation as was aroused in England by the original; but an Examen

du traité de la liberté de penser, by De Crousaz, was published at

Amsterdam in 1718.

[1016] This was probably meant to point to the Abbé de Marsy, who

died in 1763.

[1017] The Abbé Sepher ascribed this book to one Dupuis, a Royal

Guardsman.

[1018] This "prose poem" was not an intentional burlesque, as

the ecclesiastical authorities alleged; but it did not stand for

orthodoxy. See Grimm's Correspondance, i, 113.

[1019] "A eu les honneurs de la brûlure, et toutes les censures

cumulées des Facultés de Théologie, de la Sorbonne et des

évêques." Bachaumont, déc. 23, 1763. Marsy, who was expelled from

the Order of Jesuits, was of bad character, and was hotly denounced

by Voltaire.

[1020] See Grimm, Corr. v. 15.

[1021] A second edition appeared within the year. "Quoique proscrit

presque partout, et même en Hollande, c'est de là qu'il nous

arrive." Bachaumont, déc. 27, 1764.

[1022] Bachaumont, mai 7, 1767.

[1023] "Se repand à Paris avec la permission de la police." Bachaumont,

13 fév. 1766.

[1024] "Il est facile de se convaincre que les parties les plus

importantes et les plus solides de cet ouvrage sont empruntées aux

travaux de Burigny." L.-F. Alfred Maury, L'ancienne Académie des

Incriptions et bellet-lettres, 1864, p. 316. Maury leaves it open

question whether the compilation was made by Burigny or by Naigeon. The

Abbé Bergier accepted it without hesitation as the work of Fréret,

who was known to hold some heretical views. (Maury, p. 317.) Barbier

confidently ascribes the work to Burigny.

[1025] The mystification in regard to this work is elaborate. It

purports to be translated from an English version, declared in turn

by its translator to be made "from the Greek." It is now commonly

ascribed to Naigeon. (Maury, as cited, p. 317.) Its machinery, and

its definite atheism, mark it as of the school of d'Holbach, though

it is alleged to have been written by Fréret as early as 1722. It

is however reprinted, with the Examen critique des Apologistes, in

the 1796 edition of Fréret's works without comment; and Barbier was

satisfied that it was the one genuine "philosophic" work ascribed to

Fréret, but that it was redacted by Naigeon from imperfect MSS.

[1026] Notice sur Henri Meister, pref. to Lettres inédites de Madame

de Staël à Henri Meister, 1903, p. 17.

[1027] "Deux nouveaux livres infernaux ... connus comme

manuscrits depuis longtemps et gardés dans l'obscurité des

portefeuilles...." Bachaumont, 22 mars, 1769.

[1028] Bachaumont, Mémoires Secrets, déc. 20, 1767.

[1029] Id. Jan. 18, 1768.

[1030] So Pidansat de Mairobert in his preface to the first ed. (1777)

of the Mémoires Secrets of Bachaumont, continued by him. See pref. to

the abridged ed. by Bibliophile Jacob.

[1031] As to the authorship see above, p. 241.

[1032] La Certitude des preuves du Christianisme (1767). 2e édit. 1768,

Avertissement.

[1033] In the short essay Le Philosophe, which appeared in the

Nouvelles Libertés de Penser, 1743 and 1750, and in the Recueil

Philosophique, 1770. In the 1793 rep. of the Essai sur les préjugés

(again rep. in 1822) it is unhesitatingly affirmed, on the strength

of its title-page and the prefixed letter of Dumarsais, dated 1750,

that that book is an expansion of the essay Le Philosophe, and that

this was published in 1760. But Le Philosophe is an entirely different

production, which to a certain extent criticizes les philosophes

so-called. The Essai sur les préjugés published in 1770 is not the

work of Dumarsais; it is a new work by d'Holbach. This was apparently

known to Frederick, who in his rather angry criticism of the book

writes that, whereas Dumarsais had always respected constituted

authorities, others had "put out in his name, two years after he was

dead and buried, a libel of which the veritable author could only be

a schoolboy as new to the world as he was puzzle-headed." (Mélanges

en vers et en prose de Frederic II, 1792, ii, 215). Dumarsais died in

1754, but I can find no good evidence that the Essai sur les préjugés

was ever printed before 1770. As to d'Holbach's authorship see the

OEuvres de Diderot, ed. 1821, xii, 115 sq.--passage copied in the

1829-31 ed. of the Correspondance littéraire of Grimm and Diderot, xiv,

293 sq. In a letter to D'Alembert dated Mars 27, 1773, Voltaire writes

that in a newly-printed collection of treatises containing his own

Lois de Minos is included "le philosophe de Dumarsais, qui n'a jamais

été imprimé jusqu'à present." This seems to be a complete mistake.

[1034] Grimm (iv, 86) has some good stories of him. He announced

one day that he had ound twenty-five fatal flaws in the story of

the resurrection of Lazarus, the first being that the dead do not

rise. His scholarly friend Nicolas Boindin (see above, p. 222) said:

"Dumarsais is a Jansenist atheist; as for me, I am a Molinist atheist."

[1035] On two successive pages the title Messiah is declared to mean

"simply one sent" and simply "anointed."

[1036] Like Buffier and Huard, however, he strives for a reform in

spelling, dropping many doubled letters, and writing home, bone,

acuse, fole, apelle, honête, afreux, etc.

[1037] Abriss einer Geschichte der Umwälzung welche seit 1750 auf dem

Gebiete der Theologie in Deutschland statt gefunden, in Tholuck's

Vermischte Schriften, 1839, ii, 5. The proposition is repeated

pp. 24, 33.

[1038] The exceptions were books published outside of France.

[1039] Madame de Sévigné, for instance, declared that she would not

let pass a year of her life without re-reading the second volume

of Abbadie.

[1040] Le Déisme refuté par lui-même (largely a reply to Rousseau),

1765; 1770, Apologie de la religion chrétienne; 1773, La certitude

des preuves du christianisme. In 1759 had appeared the Lettres sur le

Déisme of the younger Salchi, professor at Lausanne. It deals chiefly

with the English deists, and with D'Argens. As before noted, the Abbé

Gauchat began in 1751 his Lettres Critiques, which in time ran to 15

volumes (1751-61). There were also two journals, Jesuit and Jansenist,

which fought the philosophes (Lanson, p. 721); and sometimes even a

manuscript was answered--e.g. the Réfutation du Celse moderne of the

Abbé Gautier (1752), a reply to Mirabaud's unpublished Examen critique.

[1041] Alison, History of Europe, ed. 1849, i, 180-81.

[1042] The Jesuits were expelled from Portugal in 1759; from Bohemia

and Denmark in 1766; from the whole dominions of Spain in 1767; from

Genoa and Venice in the same year; and from Naples, Malta, and Parma

in 1768. Officially suppressed in France in 1764, they were expelled

thence in 1767. Pope Clement XIII strove to defend them; but in 1773

the Society was suppressed by papal bull by Clement XIV; whereafter

they took refuge in Prussia and Russia, ruled by the freethinking

Frederick and Catherine.

[1043] See the Correspondance de Grimm, ed. 1829-31, vii, 51 sq.

[1044] This apologetic work, after having been praised by the

censor and registered with privilège du roi in November, 1772,

was officially suppressed on Jan. 17, 1773, and, it would appear,

reissued in that year.

[1045] Liv. i. ch. viii.

[1046] Bachaumont, juin 22; juillet 9, 20, 27; novembre 14, 1762.

[1047] Grimm notices Astruc's Dissertations sur l'immortalité,

l'immaterialité, et la liberté de l'âme, published in 1755 (Corr. i,

438), but not his Conjectures. At his death (1766) he pronounces him

"un des hommes les plus decriés de Paris," "Il passait pour fripon,

fourbe, méchant, en un mot pour un très-malhonnête homme." "Il était

violent et emporté, et d'une avarice sordide." Finally, he died

"sans sacremens" after having "fait le dévot" and attached himself

to the Jesuits in their day of power. Corr. v, 98. But Grimm was a

man of many hates, and not the best of historians.

[1048] Cp. Maury, L'ancienne Académie des inscriptions et

belles-lettres, 1864, pp. 55-56.

[1049] Voltaire's various stratagems to secure election are not

to his credit. See Paul Mesnard, Histoire de l'académie française,

1857, pp. 68-74. But even Montesquieu is said to have resorted to

some questionable devices for the same end. Id. p. 62.

[1050] Maury, L'ancienne Académie des inscriptions, pp. 54-55, 94, 308.

[1051] Id. p. 93.

[1052] Id. pp. 116-20.

[1053] Where he was lieutenant-général, and died in 1750.

[1054] Maury, pp. 53, 86-87.

[1055] Mémoires, ed. Jannet, iv, 181.

[1056] Cp. Mesnard, as cited, pp. 79-80.

[1057] Maury, p. 315.

[1058] Id. pp. 82-84. It is noteworthy that the orthodox Thomas, and

not any of the philosophes, was the first to impeach the Government

in academic discourses. Mesnard, pp. 82-84, 100 sq.

[1059] "L'excellent Pompignan," M. Lanson calls him, p. 723.

[1060] "Les provisions de sa charge pendant six mois en

1736." Voltaire, Lettre à Mme. D'Épinay, 13 juin, 1760. "Je le servis

dans cette affaire," adds Voltaire.

[1061] Mesnard, pp. 67, 71, 73, 89.

[1062] Le Pauvre Diable, ouvrage en vers aisés de feu M. Vadé,

mis en lumière par Catherine Vadé, sa cousine (falsely dated 1758);

La Vanité; and Le Russe à Paris.

[1063] Mesnard, pp. 86-92.

[1064] Id. pp. 93-94.

[1065] Id. pp. 95-96.

[1066] Lanson, Hist. de la litt. française, p. 725.

[1067] The formal approval of a Sorbonnist was necessary. One refused

it; another gave it. Marmontel, Mémoires, 1804, iii, 35-36.

[1068] Marmontel mentions that while he was still discussing a

compromise with the syndic of the Sorbonne, 40,000 copies had been

sold throughout Europe. Mémoires, iii, 39.

[1069] This satire was taken by the German freethinker Eberhard,

in his New Apology for Socrates, as the actual publication of the

Sorbonne. Barbier, Dict. des Ouvr. anon et Pseud., 2e édit., i, 468.

[1070] Published pseudonymously as a translation from the English:

Histoire naturelle de l'âme, traduite de l'Anglais de M. Charp, par

feu M. H----, de l'Académie des Sciences. À La Haye, 1745. Republished

under the title Traité de l'Âme.

[1071] By Elie Luzac, to whom is ascribed the reply entitled

L'Homme plus que Machine (1748 also). This is printed in the OEuvres

philosophiques of La Mettrie as if it were his: and Lange (i, 420)

seems to think it was. But the bibliographers ascribe it to Luzac,

who was a man of culture and ability.

[1072] L'Homme Machine, ed. Assézat, 1865, p. 97;

OEuv. philos. ed. 1774, iii, 51.

[1073] Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, i, 362 sq. (Eng. tr. ii,

78-80); Soury, Bréviare de l'hist. du matérialisme, pp. 663, 666-68;

Voltaire, Homélie sur l'athéisme, end. Frederick the Great, who gave

La Mettrie harbourage, support, and friendship, and who was not a

bad judge of men, wrote and read in the Berlin Academy the funeral

éloge of La Mettrie, and pronounced him "une âme pure et un coeur

serviable." By "pure" he meant sincere.

[1074] Salchi, Lettres sur le Déisme, 1759, pp. 177, 197, 239, 283 sq.

[1075] Huxley, essay on Darwin on the Origin of Species;

R. P. A. ed. of Twelve Lectures and Essays, p. 94.

[1076] See the parallel passages in the Lettres Critiques of the Abbé

Gauchat, vol. xv (1761), p. 192 sq.

[1077] See his essay Des Singularités de la Nature, ch. xii, and his

Dissertation sur les changements arrivés dans notre globe.

[1078] Eng. tr. 1750.

[1079] Essay cited, p. 96. The criticism ignores the greater

comprehensiveness of Robinet's survey of nature.

[1080] George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, 1707-1788.

[1081] Lyell, Principles of Geology, 12th ed. 1875, i, 57-58.

[1082] Suite de l'Apologie de M. l'Abbé De Prades, 1752, p. 37 sq.

[1083] Dissertatio inauguralis metaphysica de universali naturæ

systemate, published at Göttingen as the doctoral thesis of an

imaginary Dr. Baumann, 1751. In French, 1753.

[1084] Soury, p. 579. The later speculations of Maupertuis by their

extravagance discredited the earlier.

[1085] "Scheinbar bekämpft er Maupertuis desswegen, aber im geheimen

stimmt er ihm bei"(Rosenkranz, i, 144).

[1086] It should be noted that by Condillac's avowal he was much

aided by his friend Mdlle. Ferrand.

[1087] Cp. Réthoré, Condillac, ou l'empirisme et le rationalisme,

1864, ch. i.

[1088] Lange, ii, 27, 29; Soury, pp. 603-44.

[1089] Soury, pp. 596-600; Lange, ii, 27.

[1090] Oddly enough he became ultimately press censor! He lived till

1820, dying at Rennes at the age of 85.

[1091] This may best be translated Treatise on the Mind. The English

translation of 1759 (rep. 1807) is entitled De l'Esprit: or, Essays

on the Mind, etc.

[1092] Correspondance, ii, 262.

[1093] Id. p. 263.

[1094] Id. p. 293.

[1095] At the time the pietists declared that Diderot had collaborated

in De l'Esprit. This was denied by Grimm, who affirmed that Diderot and

Helvétius were little acquainted, and rarely met; but his Secretary,

Meister, wrote in 1786 that the finest pages in the book were

Diderot's. Id. p. 294, note. In his sketch À la mémoire de Diderot

(1786, app. to Naigeon's Mémoires, 1821, p. 425, note), Meister speaks

of a number of "belles pages," but does not particularize.

[1096] De l'Esprit, Disc, iii, ch. 30.

[1097] Cp. Morley's criticism. Diderot, ed. 1884, pp. 331-32.

[1098] Beccaria's Letter to Morellet, cited in ch. i of J. A. Farrer's

ed. of the Crimes and Punishments, p. 6. It is noteworthy that the

partial reform effected earlier in England by Oglethorpe, on behalf

of imprisoned debtors (1730-32), belongs to the time of propagandist

deism there.

[1099] Morley, Diderot, p. 329.

[1100] Lettre à d'Alembert, 9 janvier, 1773.

[1101] Cp. Rosenkranz, Vorbericht, p. vi.

[1102] Cp. Morley, Diderot, ed. 1834, p. 32.

[1103] E.g. § 21.

[1104] A police agent seized the MS. in Diderot's library, and Diderot

could not get it back. Malesherbes, the censor, kept it safe for him!

[1105] According to Naigeon (Mémoires, 1821, p. 131), three months

and ten days.

[1106] The Lettre purports, like so many other books of that and the

next generation, to be published "A Londres."

[1107] Diderot's daughter, in her memoir of him, speaks of his

imprisonment in the Bastille as brought about through the resentment

of a lady of whom he had spoken slightingly; and her husband left

a statement in MS. to the same effect (printed at the end of the

Mémoires by Naigeon). The lady is named as Madame Dupré de Saint-Maur,

a mistress of the King, and the offence is said to have been committed

in the story entitled Le Pigeon blanc. Howsoever this may have been,

the prosecution was quite in the spirit of the period, and the earlier

Pensées were made part of the case against him. See Delort, Hist. de

la détention des philosophes, 1829, ii, 208-16. M. de Vandeul-Diderot

testifies that the Marquis Du Chatelet, Governor of Vincennes, treated

his prisoner very kindly. Buckle (1-vol. ed. p. 425) does not seem to

have fully read the Lettre, which he describes as merely discussing

the differentiation of thought and sensation among the blind.

[1108] His friend Meister (À la mémoire de Diderot, 1786, app. to

Naigeon's Mémoires de Diderot, 1821, p. 424) writes as if Diderot had

written the whole Apologie "in a few days." The third part, a reply

to the pastoral of the Bishop of Auxerre, appeared separately as a

Suite to the others.

[1109] Apologie, as cited, 2e partie, p. 87 sq.

[1110] Observations sur l'instruction pastorale de Mons. l'Évêque

d'Auxerre, Berlin, 1752, p. 17.

[1111] Id. p. 102 sq.

[1112] Cp. Morley, Diderot, pp. 98-99.

[1113] Carlyle, Frederick, bk. xviii, ch. ix, end.

[1114] D'Argenson, Mémoires, iv, 188.

[1115] Carlyle, as cited.

[1116] "Quelle abominable homme!" he writes to Mdlle. Voland

(15 juillet, 1759); and Lord Morley pronounces de Prades a rascal

(Diderot, p. 98). Carlyle is inarticulate with disgust--but as much

against the original heresy as against the treason to Frederick. As

to that, Thiébault was convinced that de Prades was innocent and

calumniated. Everybody at court, he declares, held the same view. Mes

Souvenirs de vingt ans de séjour à Berlin, 2e édit. 1805, v, 402-404.

[1117] It is not clear how these are to be distinguished from the

mutilations of the later volumes by his treacherous publisher

Le Breton. Of this treachery the details are given by Grimm,

Corr. litt. ed. 1829. vii, 144 sq.

[1118] Buckle's account of him (1-vol. ed. p. 426) as "burning with

hatred against his persecutors" after his imprisonment is overdrawn. He

was a poor hater.

[1119] Madame Diderot, says her daughter, was very upright as well

as very religious, but her temper, "éternellement grondeur, faisait

de notre intérieur un enfer, dont mon père était l'ange consolateur"

(Letter to Meister, in Notice pref. to Lettres Inédites de Mme. de

Staël à Henri Meister, 1903, p. 62).

[1120] "Hélas! disait mon excellent grand-père, j'ai deux fils:

l'un sera sûrement un saint, et je crains bien que l'autre ne soit

damné; mais je ne puis vivre avec le saint, et je suis très heureux

du temps que je passe avec le damné" (Letter of Mme. de Vandeul,

last cited). Freethinker as he was, his fellow-townsmen officially

requested in 1780 to be allowed to pay for a portrait of him for

public exhibition, and the bronze bust he sent them was placed in

the hôtel de ville (MS. of M. de Vandeul-Diderot, as cited).

[1121] Madame de Vandeul states that this story was motived by the

case of Diderot's sister, who died mad at the age of 27 or 28 (Letter

above cited; Rosenkranz, i, 9).

[1122] Lettre de Voltaire à D'Alembert, 27 août, 1774.

[1123] Lettre de 2 décembre, 1757.

[1124] OEuvres posthumes de D'Alembert, 1799, i, 240.

[1125] D'Holbach was the original of the character of Wolmar in

Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse, of whom Julie says that he "does good

without recompense." "I never saw a man more simply simple" was the

verdict of Madame Geoffrin. Corr. litt. de Grimm (notice probably by

Meister), ed. 1829-31, xiv, 291.

[1126] Marmontel says of him that he "avoit tout lu et n'avoit jamais

rien oublié d'interessant." Mémoires, 1804, ii, 312.

[1127] See a full list of his works (compiled by Julian Hibbert

after the list given in the 1821 ed. of Diderot's Works, xii, 115,

and rep. in the 1829-31 ed. of Grimm and Diderot's Correspondance,

xiv, 293), prefixed to Watson's ed. (1834 and later) of the English

translation of the System of Nature.

[1128] Morley, Diderot, p. 341. The chapter gives a good account of

the book. Cp. Lange, i, 364 sq. (Eng. trans, ii, 26 sq.) as to its

materialism. The best pages were said to be by Diderot (Corr. de Grimm,

as cited, p. 289; the statement of Meister, who makes it also in his

Éloge). Naigeon denied that Diderot had any part in the Système, but

in 1820 there was published an edition with "notes and corrections"

by Diderot.

[1129] It is to be noted that the English translation (3 vols. 3rd

ed. 1817; 4th ed. 1820) deliberately tampers with the language of the

original to the extent of making it deistic. This perversion has been

by oversight preserved in all the reprints.

[1130] Mirabeau spoke of the Essai as "le livre le moins connu,

et celui qui mérite le plus l'être." Even the reprint of 1793 had

become "extremely rare" in 1822. The book seems to have been specially

disquieting to orthodoxy, and was hunted down accordingly.

[1131] So Morley, p. 347. It does not occur to Lord Morley, and to

the Comtists who take a similar tone, that in thus disparaging past

thinkers they are really doing the thing they blame.

[1132] Lettres de Memmius à Cicéron (1771); Histoire de Jenni

(1775). In the earlier article, Athée, in the Dictionnaire

Philosophique, he speaks of having met in France very good physicists

who were atheists. In his letter of September 26, 1770, to Madame

Necker, he writes concerning the Système de la Nature: "Il est un

peu honteux à notre nation que tant de gens aient embrassé si vite

une opinion si ridicule." And yet Prof. W. M. Sloane, of Columbia

University, still writes of Voltaire, in the manner of English bishops,

as "atheistical" (The French Revolution and Religious Reform, 1901,

p. 26).

[1133] Though in 1797 we have Maréchal's Code d'une Société d'hommes

sans Dieu, and in 1798 his Pensées libres sur les prêtres.

[1134] Thus Dr. Cairns (Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century, p. 165)

gravely argues that the French Revolution proves the inefficacy

of theism without a Trinity to control conduct. He has omitted to

compare the theistic bloodshed of the Revolution with the Trinitarian

bloodshed of the Crusades, the papal suppression of the Albigenses,

the Hussite wars, and other orthodox undertakings.

[1135] The book was accorded the Monthyon prize by the French

Academy. In translation (1788) it found a welcome in England among

Churchmen by reason of its pro-Christian tone and its general

vindication of religious institutions. The translation was the work

of Mary Wollstonecraft. See Kegan Paul's William Godwin, 1876, i,

193. Mrs. Dunlop, the friend of Burns, recommending its perusal to

the poet, paid it a curious compliment: "He does not write like a

sectary, hardly like a Christian, but yet while I read him, I like

better my God, my neighbour, Monsieur Necker, and myself." Robert

Burns and Mrs. Dunlop, ed. by W. Wallace, 1898, p. 258.

[1136] See Voltaire's letters to Madame Necker, Corr. de Grimm,

ed. 1829, vii, 23, 118. Of the lady, Grimm writes (p. 118): "Hypathie

Necker passe sa vie avec des systématiques, mais elle est devote à

sa manière. Elle voudrait être sincèrement hugenote, ou socinienne,

ou déistique, ou plutôt, pour être quelque chose, elle prend le

parti de ne se rendre compte sur rien." "Hypathie" was Voltaire's

complimentary name for her.

[1137] Cp. Aulard, Le Culte de la Raison et le Culte de l'Être Suprême,

1892, pp. 17-19. M. Gazier (Études sur l'histoire religieuse de la

révolution française, 1877, pp. 48, 173, 189 sq.) speaks somewhat

loosely of a prevailing anti-Christian feeling when actually citing

only isolated instances, and giving proofs of a general orthodoxy. Yet

he points out the complete misconception of Thiers on the subject

(p. 202).

[1138] Cp. Prof. W. M. Sloane, The French Revolution and Religious

Reform, p. 43.

[1139] Gazier, as cited, pp. 2, 4, 12, 19-21, 71, etc.

[1140] Les Assemblées Provinciales sous Louis XVI, 1864,

pref. pp. viii-ix.

[1141] Gazier, L. ii, ch. i.

[1142] Id. p. 67.

[1143] Id. p. 69.

[1144] Léonce de Lavergne, as cited.

[1145] The authority of Turgot himself could be cited for the

demand that the State clergy should accept the constitution of the

State. Cp. Aulard, Le Culte de la Raison, p. 12; Tissot, Étude sur

Turgot, 1878, p. 160.

[1146] Gazier, p. 113.

[1147] Aulard, Culte, pp. 19-20.

[1148] Michelet, Hist. de la révolution française, ed. 8vo 1868 and

later, i, 16. Cp. Proudhon's De la justice, 1858.

[1149] "Tout jugement religieux ou politique est une contradiction

flagrante dans une religion uniquement fondée sur un dogme étranger

à la justice." Ed. cited, introd. p. 60.

[1150] The grave misstatement of Michelet on this head is exposed by

Aulard, Culte, p. 60.

[1151] Yet it is customary among Christians to speak of this lady

in the most opprobrious terms. The royalist (but malcontent) Marquis

de Villeneuve, who had seen the Revolution in his youth, claimed in

his old age to have afterwards "conversed with the Goddess Reason

of Paris and with the Goddess Reason of Bourges" (where he became

governor); but, though he twice alludes to those women, he says

nothing whatever against their characters (De l'Agonie de la France,

1835, i, 3, 19). Prof. W. M. Sloane, with all his religious prejudice,

is satisfied that the women chosen as Goddesses of Reason outside of

Paris were "noted for their spotless character." Work cited, p. 198.

[1152] Mémoires, ed. 1841, ii, 166.

[1153] Père F.-J.-F. Fortin, Souvenirs, Auxerre, 1867, ii, 41.

[1154] See the speech in Aulard, Culte, p. 240; and cp. pp. 79-85.

[1155] "Le peuple aura des fêtes dans lesquelles il offrira de l'encens

à l'Être Suprême, au maître de la nature, car nous n'avons pas voulu

anéantir la superstition pour établir le règne de l'athéisme." Speech

of Nov. 26, 1793, in the Moniteur. (Discours de Danton, ed. André

Fribourg, 1910, p. 599.)

[1156] Aulard, Culte, pp. 81-82.

[1157] Concerning whom see Aulard, Culte, pp. 86-96.

[1158] The Source, the Strength, and the True Spirit of Laws,

Eng. tr. 1753, p. 6.

[1159] E.g., in the Arrêt du Parlement of 9 juin, 1762, denouncing

Rousseau's Émile as tending to make the royal authority odious and to

destroy the principle of obedience; and in the Examen du Béllisaire de

M. Marmontel, by Coger (Nouv. éd. augm. 1767, p. 45 sq. Cp. Marmontel's

Mémoires, 1804, iii, 46, as to his being called ennemi du trône et de

l'autel). This kind of invective was kept up against the philosophes

to the moment of the Revolution. See for instance Le vrai religieux,

Discours dédié à Madame Louise de France, par le R. P. C. A. 1787,

p. 4: "Une philosophie orgueilleuse a renversé les limites sacrées que

la main du Très-Haut avoit elle-même élevées. La raison de l'homme

a osé sonder les décrets de Dieu.... Dans les accès de son ivresse,

n'a-t-elle pas sapé les fondemens du trône et des lois," etc.

[1160] Cp. the admissions of Curnier (Rivarol, sa vie et ses oeuvres,

1858, p. 149) in deprecation of Burke's wild likening of Rivarol's

journalism to the Annals of Tacitus.

[1161] OEuvres, ed. cited, pp. 136-40, 147-55.

[1162] Cp. the critique of Sainte-Beuve, prefixed to ed. cited,

pp. 14-17, and that of Arsène Houssaye, id. pp. 31-33. Mr. Saintsbury,

though biassed to the side of the royalist, admits that "Rivarol

hardly knows what sincerity is" (Miscellaneous Essays, 1892, p. 67).

[1163] Charles Comte is thus partly inaccurate in saying (Traité de

Législation, 1835, i, 72) that the charge against the philosophers

began "on the day on which there was set up a government in France

that sought to re-establish the abuses of which they had sought the

destruction." What is true is that the charge, framed at once by the

backers of the Old Régime, has always since done duty for reaction.

[1164] Mémoires, ed. Jannet, iii, 313; iv, 70; v, 346, 348.

[1165] Id. iii, 346-47.

[1166] D'Argenson, noting in his old age how "on n'a jamais autant

parlé de nation et d'État qu'aujourd'hui," how no such talk had been

heard under Louis XIV, and how he himself had developed on the subject,

adds, "cela vient du parlement et des Anglois." He goes on to speak of

a reissue of the translation of Locke on Civil Government, originally

made by the Jansenists (Mémoires, iv, 189-90).

[1167] Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ed. 1872, iii, 160-63.

[1168] OEuvres diverses de Pierre Bayle, La Haye, 4 vols. fol. 1737,

ii, 564 sq.

[1169] This Critique appears in the very volume to which Coger refers

for the Avis aux Réfugiéz. See Lett. viii, xiii, xvii, etc., vol. and

ed. cited, pp. 36, 54, 71, etc.

[1170] Cp. the survey of Aulard, Hist. polit. de la rév. française,

2e édit. 1903, pp. 2-23.

[1171] Probably the work of a Jansenist.

[1172] On the whole question of the growth of abstract revolutionary

doctrine in politics cp. W. S. McKechnie on the De Jure Regni apud

Scotos in the "George Buchanan" vol. of Glasgow Quatercentenary

Studies, 1906, pp. 256-76; Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle

Ages, Maitland's tr. 1900, p. 37 sq.

[1173] Mallet actually reproaches the philosophes in the mass--while

admitting the hostility of many of them to the Revolution--with "having

accelerated French degeneration and depravation ... by rendering

the conscience argumentative (raisonneuse), by substituting for

duties inculcated by sentiment, tradition, and habit, the uncertain

rules of the human reason and sophisms adapted to passions," etc.,

etc. (B. Mallet, as cited, p. 360). With all his natural vigour of

mind, Mallet du Pan thus came to talk the language of the ordinary

irrationalist of the Reaction. Certainly, if the stimulation of the

habit of reasoning be a destructive course, the philosophes stand

condemned. But as Christians had been reasoning as best they could, in

an eternal series of vain disputes, for a millennium and a-half before

the Revolution, with habitual appeal to the passions, the argument

only proves how vacuous a Christian champion's reasoning can be.

[1174] Art. in Mercure Britannique, No. 13, Feb. 21, 1799; cited

by B. Mallet in Mallet du Pan and the French Revolution, 1902,

App. p. 357.

[1175] Id. p. 359.

[1176] Tableau littéraire du dix-huitième siècle, 8e édit. pp. 112,

113.

[1177] Id. p. 72.

[1178] Work cited, p. 358.

[1179] Id. p. 359.

[1180] Cp. Morley, Diderot, p. 407. Lord Morley points to the phrase in

another form in a letter of Voltaire's in 1761. It really derives from

Jean Meslier, who quotes it from an unlettered man (Testament, i. 19).

[1181] Rosenkranz, Diderot's Leben und Werke, 1866, ii, 380-81.

[1182] As Lord Morley points out, Henri Martin absolutely reverses

the purport of a passage in order to convict Diderot of justifying

regicide.

[1183] Mémoires, ed. Jannet, iv, 44, 51, 68, 69, 74, 91, 93, 101, 103.

[1184] Mallet du Pan says he saw the MS., and knew Diderot to have

received 10,000 livres tournois for his additions. This statement

is incredible. But Meister is explicit, in his éloge, as to Diderot

having written for the book much that he thought nobody would sign,

whereas Raynal was ready to sign anything.

[1185] Memoirs of Sir Samuel Romilly, 3rd ed. 1841, i, 46.

[1186] When D'Argenson writes in 1752 (Mémoires, éd. Jannet, iv,

103) that he hears "only philosophes say, as if convinced, that even

anarchy would be better" than the existing misgovernment, he makes

no suggestion that they teach this. And he declares for his own part

that everything is drifting to ruin: "nulle réformation ... nulle

amélioration.... Tout tombe, par lambeaux."

[1187] Aulard, Hist. polit. de la révol. p. 24.

[1188] This is the sufficient comment on a perplexing page of Lord

Morley's second monograph on Burke (pp. 110-11), which I have never

been able to reconcile with the rest of his writing.

[1189] Lecky, Hist. of England in the Eighteenth Century, small

ed. vi, 263.

[1190] D'Argenson notes this repeatedly, though in one passage he

praises the Parlement as having alone made head against absolutism

(déc. 1752; ed. cited, iv, 116).

[1191] Maximes et Pensées, ed. 1856, p. 72.

[1192] Id. pp. 73-74.

[1193] Chamfort in another passage maintains against Soulavie that

the Academy did much to develop the spirit of freedom in thought and

politics. Id. p. 107. And this too is arguable, as we have seen.

[1194] On this complicated issue, which cannot be here handled at

any further length, see Prof. P. A. Wadia's essay The Philosophers

and the French Revolution (Social Science Series, 1904), which,

however, needs revision; and compare the argument of Nourrisson,

J.-J. Rousseau et le Rousseauisme, 1903, ch. xx.

[1195] Correspondance de Grimm, ed. cited, xiv, 5-6. Lettre de

janv. 1788.

[1196] Lettre de Voltaire à D'Alembert, 27 août, 1774.

[1197] Histoire du mariage des prêtres en France, par M. Grégoire,

ancien évêque de Blois, 1826, p. v. Compare the details in the

Appendice to the Etudes of M. Gazier, before cited. That writer's

account is the more decisive seeing that his bias is clerical,

and that, writing before M. Aulard, he had to a considerable extent

retained the old illusion as to the "decreeing of atheism" by the

Convention (p. 313). See pp. 230-260 as to the readjustment effected

by Grégoire, while the conservative clergy were still striving to

undo the Revolution.

[1198] Heroes and Hero-Worship: Napoleon.

[1199] See the Sentiments de Napoléon sur le Christianisme:

conversations recueillies à Sainte-Hélène par le Comte de Montholon,

1841. Many of the utterances here set forth are irreconcilable with

Napoleon's general tone.

[1200] O'Meara, Napoléon en Exil, ed. Lacroix, 1897, ii, 39.

[1201] Ph. Gonnard, Les origines de la légende Napoléonienne, 1906,

p. 258.

[1202] Id. p. 260.

[1203] Pasquier, cited by Rose, Life of Napoleon, ed. 1913, i,

282. The Concordat was bitterly resented by the freethinkers in the

army. Id. p. 281.

[1204] See Jules Barni's Napoléon Ier. ed. 1870, p. 83, as to the

amazing Catechism imposed by Napoleon on France in 1811. For the

history of its preparation and imposition see De Labone, Paris sous

Napoléon: La Religion, 1907, p. 100 sq.

[1205] As to the Napoleonic censorship of literature, cp. Madame de

Staël, Considérations sur la révolution française, ptie. iv, ch. 16;

Dix Années d'Exil, préf.; Welschinger, La Censure sous le premier

Empire, 1882.

[1206] Las Cases, Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, 19 août, 1816.

[1207] Mignet, Hist. de la révolution française, 4e édit. ii, 340.

[1208] Cp. Pusey, Histor. Enquiry into the Probable Causes of the

Rationalist Character ... of the Theology of Germany, 1828, p. 79.

[1209] Bishop Hurst, History of Rationalism, ed. 1867, p. 56.

[1210] Id. pp. 57-58 (last ed. pp. 74-76), citing Tholuck, Deutsche

Universitäten, i, 145-48, and Dowding, Life of Calixtus, pp. 132-33.

[1211] Pusey, p. 113.

[1212] Hurst, p. 59.

[1213] Cp. Buckle, 1-vol. ed. pp. 303-309. "The result of the

Thirty Years' War was indifference, not only to the Confession, but

to religion in general. Ever since that period, secular interests

decidedly occupy the foreground" (Kahnis, Internal History of German

Protestantism, Eng. tr. 1856, p. 21).

[1214] Quoted by Bishop Hurst, ed. cited, p. 60 (78).

[1215] Preservatio wider die Pest der heutigen Atheisten.

[1216] Dated from Rome; but this was a mystification.

[1217] Kahnis, p. 125; La Croze, Entretiens, 1711, p. 401.

[1218] Even Knutzen seems to have been influenced by Spinoza. Pünjer,

Hist. of the Christ. Philos. of Religion, Eng. tr. i, 437. Pünjer,

however, seems to have exaggerated the connection.

[1219] Cp. Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, 3te Aufl. i, 318

(Eng. tr. ii, 35).

[1220] Epistolæ ad Spinozam et Responsiones, in Gfrörer, liii.

[1221] Colerus, Vie de Spinoza, in Gfrörer's ed. of the Opera, 1830,

pp. lv, lvi.

[1222] Pünjer, as cited, i, 434-30: Lange, last cit. Lange notes

that Genthe's Compendium de impostura religionum, which has been

erroneously assigned to the sixteenth century, must belong to the

period of Kortholt's work.

[1223] Pünjer, p. 439; Lange, last cit.; Tholuck, Kirch. Leben,

2 Abth. pp. 57-58.

[1224] It was nominally issued at Amsterdam, really at Berlin.

[1225] This writer gives (p. 12) a notable list of the forms of

atheism: Atheismus directus, indirectus, formalis, virtualis,

theoreticus, practicus, inchoatus, consummatus, subtilis, crassus,

privativus, negativus, and so on, ad lib.

[1226] Cp. Buckle and his Critics, pp. 171-72; Pünjer, i, 515.

[1227] Letter cited by Dr. Latta. Leibniz, 1898, p. 2, note.

[1228] Philos. Schriften, ed. Gerhardt, i, 26; Martineau, Study of

Spinoza, p. 77.

[1229] Letter to Thomas, December 23, 1670.

[1230] Quoted by Tholuck, as last cited, p. 61. Spener took the

same tone.

[1231] Philos. Schriften, ed. Gerhardt, i, 34; ii, 563; Latta,

p. 24; Martineau, p. 75. Cp. Refutation of Spinoza by Leibnitz,

ed. by Foucher de Careil. Eng. tr. 1855.

[1232] His notable surmise as to gradation of species (see Latta,

pp. 38-39) was taken up among the French materialists, but did not

then modify current science.

[1233] The only lengthy treatise published by him in his lifetime.

[1234] M. A. Jacques, intr. to OEuvres de Leibniz, 1846, i, 54-57.

[1235] Cp. Tholuck, Das kirchliche Leben, as cited, 2

Abth. pp. 52-55. Kahnis, coinciding with Erdmann, pronounces that,

although Leibnitz "acknowledges the God of the Christian faith,

yet his system assigned to Him a very uncertain position only"

(Int. Hist. of Ger. Protestantism, p. 26).

[1236] Cp. Pünjer, i, 509, as to his attitude on ritual.

[1237] Latta, as cited, p. 16; Vie de Leibnitz, par De Jaucourt,

in ed. 1747 of the Essais de Théodicée, i, 235-39.

[1238] As to his virtual deism see Pünjer, i, 513-15. But he proposed

to send Christian missionaries to the heathen. Tholuck, as last cited,

p. 55.

[1239] Lettres entre Leibnitz et Clarke.

[1240] Discours de la conformité de la foi avec la raison, §§ 68-70;

Essais sur la bonté de Dieu, etc., §§ 50, 61, 164, 180, 292-93.

[1241] The Nouveaux Essais sur l'Entendement humain, refuting Locke,

appeared posthumously in 1765. Locke had treated his theistic critic

with contempt. (Latta, p. 13.)

[1242] Amand Saintes, Hist. crit. du Rationalisme en Allemagne, 1841,

ch. vi; Heinrich Schmid, Die Geschichte des Pietismus, 1863, ch. ii.

[1243] Saintes, p. 51; cp. Pusey, p. 105, as to "the want of resistance

from the school of Pietists to the subsequent invasion of unbelief."

[1244] Hagenbach, German Rationalism, Eng. tr. 1865, p. 9.

[1245] Id. p. 39; Pusey, Histor. Enquiry into the Causes of German

Rationalism, 1828, pp. 88, 97; Tholuck, Abriss einer Geschichte des

Umwälzung ... seit 1750 auf dem Gebiete der Theologie in Deutschland,

in Vermischte Schriften, 1839, ii, 5.

[1246] Pusey, pp. 86, 87, 98.

[1247] Cp. Pusey, pp. 37-38, 45, 48, 49, 53-54, 79, 101-109; Saintes,

pp. 28, 79-80; Hagenbach, pp. 41, 72, 105.

[1248] Pusey, p. 110. Cp. Saintes, ch. vi.

[1249] Das kirchliche Leben, as cited, 2 Abth. p. 58.

[1250] Id. pp. 56-57.

[1251] Vol. i, p. 6.

[1252] H. Luden, Christian Thomasius nach seinen Schicksalen und

Schriften dargestellt, 1805, p. 7.

[1253] Cp. Schmid, Geschichte des Pietismus, pp. 486-88.

[1254] Pufendorf's bulky treatise De Jure Naturæ et Gentium was

published at Lund, where he was professor, in 1672. The shorter De

Officio hominis et civis (also Lund, 1673) is a condensation and

partly a vindication of the other, and this it was that convinced

Thomasius. As to Pufendorf's part in the transition from theological to

rational moral philosophy, see Hallam, Lit. of Europe, iv, 171-78. He

is fairly to be bracketed with Cumberland; but Hallam hardly recognizes

that it was the challenge of Hobbes that forced the change.

[1255] Freimüthige, lustige und ernsthafte, jedoch vernunft- und

gesetzmässige Gedanken, oder Monatgespräche über allerhand, vornehmlich

über neue Bücher. There had been an earlier Acta Eruditorum, in Latin,

published at Leipzig, and a French Ephemerides savantes, Hamburg,

1686. Other German and French periodicals soon followed that of

Thomasius. Luden, p. 162.

[1256] Schmid, pp. 488-92, gives a sketch of some of the contents.

[1257] Pusey, p. 86, note. It is surprising that Pusey does not make

more account of Thomasius's naturalistic treatment of polygamy and

suicide, which he showed to be not criminal in terms of natural law.

[1258] Compare Weber, Gesch. der deutschen Lit. § 81 (ed. 1880,

pp. 90-91); Pusey, as cited, p. 114. note; Enfield's Hist. of

Philos. (abst. of Brucker's Hist. crit. philos.), 1840. pp. 610-612;

Ueberweg, ii, 115; and Schlegel's note in Reid's Mosheim, p. 790,

with Karl Hillebrand, Six Lect. on the Hist. of German Thought, 1880,

pp. 64-65. There is a modern monograph by A. Nicoladoni, Christian

Thomasius; ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Aufklärung, 1888.

[1259] Baron de Bielfeld, Progrès des Allemands, 3e éd. 1767, i,

24. "Before Thomasius," writes Bielfeld, "an old woman could not have

red eyes without running the risk of being accused of witchcraft and

burned at the stake."

[1260] Schmid, pp. 493-97. Thomasius's principal writings on this

theme were: Vom Recht evangelischen Fürsten in Mitteldingen (1692);

Vom Recht evangelischen Fürsten in theologischen Streitigkeiten

(1696); Vom Recht evangelischen Fürsten gegen Ketzer (1697).

[1261] Ec. Hist. 17 Cent. sect. ii, pt. ii, ch. i, §§ 11, 14. It

is noteworthy that the Pietists at Halle did not scruple to ally

themselves for a time with Thomasius, he being opposed to the orthodox

party. Kahnis, Internal Hist. of Ger. Protestantism, p. 114.

[1262] Pusey, as cited, p. 121. Cp. p. 113.

[1263] Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte des 18. und 19. Jahrh., 2te

Aufl. i, 164. (This matter is not in the abridged translation.)

[1264] See the furious account of him by Mosheim, 17 C. sec. ii,

pt. ii, ch. i, § 33.

[1265] Hagenbach, last cit. p. 169.

[1266] Noack, Die Freidenker in der Religion, Th. iii, Kap. 1; Bruno

Bauer, Einfluss des englischen Quäkerthums auf die deutsche Cultur und

auf das englisch-russische Projekt einer Weltkirche, 1878, pp. 41-44.

[1267] Pref. to French tr. of the Meditationes, 1770, pp. xii-xvii. Lau

died in 1740.

[1268] Tholuck, Abriss, as cited, p. 10.

[1269] Trans. in English, 1750.

[1270] Hagenbach, tr. pp. 35-36; Saintes, p. 61; Kahnis, as cited,

p. 114.

[1271] Hagenbach, pp. 37-39. It is to be observed (Tholuck, Abriss,

p. 23) that the Wolffian philosophy was reinstated in Prussia by

royal mandate in 1739, a year before the accession of Frederick the

Great. But we know that Frederick championed him.

[1272] Tholuck, Abriss, as cited, p. 5.

[1273] Tholuck, Abriss, as cited, p. 6.

[1274] Kahnis, p. 55.

[1275] Pünjer, i, 544. Cp. Tholuck, Abriss, pp. 19-22.

[1276] Tholuck, Abriss, p. 22. Schmid was for a time supposed to be

the author of the Wolfenbüttel Fragments of Reimarus (below, p. 327).

[1277] Unpartheyische Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie, 1699-1700, 2

tom. fol.--fuller ed. 3 tom. fol. 1740. Compare Mosheim's angry account

of it with Murdock's note in defence: Reid's ed. p. 804. Bruno Bauer

describes it as epoch-making (Einfluss des englischen Quäkerthums,

p. 42). This history had a great influence on Goethe in his teens,

leading him, he says, to the conviction that he, like so many

other men, should have a religion of his own, which he goes on to

describe. It was a re-hash of Gnosticism. (Wahrheit und Dichtung,

B. viii; Werke, ed. 1866, xi, 344 sq.)

[1278] Cp. Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte, i, 171: Pünjer, i, 279.

[1279] Die Göttlichkeit der Vernunft.

[1280] Noack, Th. iii, Kap. 2: Saintes, pp. 85-86; Pünjer, p. 442. It

is interesting to find Edelmann supplying a formula latterly utilized

by the so-called "New Theology" in England--the thesis that "the

reality of everything which exists is God," and that there can

therefore be no atheists, since he who recognizes the universe

recognizes God.

[1281] Naigeon, by altering the words of Diderot, caused him to appear

one of the exceptions; but he was not. See Rosenkranz, Diderot's

Leben und Werke. Vorb. p. vii.

[1282] Kahnis, pp. 128-29. Edelmann's Life was written by

Pratje. Historische Nachrichten von Edelmann's Leben, 1755. It gives

a list of replies to his writings (p. 205 sq.). Apropos of the first

issue of Strauss's Leben Jesu, a volume of Erinnerungen of Edelmann

was published at Clausthal in 1839 by W. Elster; and Strauss in his

Dogmatik avowed the pleasure with which he had made the acquaintance

of so interesting a writer. A collection of extracts from Edelmann's

works, entitled Der neu eröffnete Edelmann, was published at Bern

in 1847; and the Unschuldige Wahrheiten was reprinted in 1846. His

Autobiography, written in 1752, was published in 1849.

[1283] Betrachtungen über die vornehmsten Wahrheiten der

Religion. Another apologetic work of the period marked by rational

moderation and tolerance was the Vertheidigten Glauben der Christen

of the Berlin court-preacher A. W. F. Sack (1754).

[1284] Art. by Wagenmann in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie.

[1285] Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte, i, 355.

[1286] Pünjer, i, 542.

[1287] Kurz, Hist. of the Christian Church from the Reformation,

Eng. tr. ii, 274. A Jesuit, A. Merz, wrote four replies to

Jerusalem. One was entitled Frag ob durch die biblische Simplicität

allein ein Freydenker oder Deist bekehret ... werden könne ("Can a

Freethinker or Deist be converted by Biblical Simplicity alone?"),

1775.

[1288] Cp. Hagenbach, i, 353; tr. p. 120. Jerusalem was the father

of the gifted youth whose suicide (1775) moved Goethe to write The

Sorrows of Werther, a false presentment of the real personality,

which stirred Lessing (his affectionate friend) to publish a volume of

the dead youth's essays, in vindication of his character. The father

had considerable influence in purifying German style. Cp. Goethe,

Wahrheit und Dichtung, Th. ii, B. vii; Werke, ed. 1866. xi, 272;

and Hagenbach, i, 354.

[1289] Goethe, as last cited, pp. 268-69.

[1290] Lechler, Gesch. des englischen Deismus, pp. 447-52. The

translations began with that of Tindal (1741), which made a great

sensation.

[1291] Pusey, pp. 125, 127, citing Twesten; Gostwick, German Culture

and Christianity, p. 36, citing Ernesti. Thorschmid's Freidenker

Bibliothek, issued in 1765-67, collected both translations and

refutations. Lechler, p. 451.

[1292] Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, i. 405 (Eng. tr. ii, 146-47).

[1293] Lange, i, 347, 399 (Eng. tr. ii, 76, 137).

[1294] Lange, i, 396-97 (ii, 134-35).

[1295] Goethe tells of having seen in his boyhood, at Frankfort, an

irreligious French romance publicly burned, and of having his interest

in the book thereby awakened. But this seems to have been during the

French occupation. (Wahrheit und Dichtung, B. iv; Werke, xi, 146.)

[1296] Id. B. iv, end.