CHAPTER XVI

BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY § 1 It appears from our survey that the "deistic movement," commonly assigned to the eighteenth century, had been abundantly prepared for in the seventeenth, which, in turn, was but developing ideas current in the sixteenth. When, in 1696, John Toland published his Christianity Not Mysterious, the sensation it made was due not so much to any unheard-of boldness in its thought as to the simple fact that deistic ideas had thus found their way into print. [684] So far the deistic position was explicitly represented in English literature only by the works of Herbert, Hobbes, and Blount; and of these only the first (who wrote in Latin) and the third had put the case at any length. Against the deists or atheists of the school of Hobbes, and the Scriptural Unitarians who thought with Newton and Locke, there stood arrayed the great mass of orthodox intolerance which clamoured for the violent suppression of every sort of "infidelity." It was this feeling, of which the army of ignorant rural clergy were the spokesmen, that found vent in the Blasphemy Act of 1697. The new literary growth dating from the time of Toland is the evidence of the richness of the rationalistic soil already created. Thinking men craved a new atmosphere. Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity is an unsuccessful compromise: Toland's book begins a new propagandist era. Toland's treatise, [685] heretical as it was, professed to be a defence of the faith, and avowedly founded on Locke's anonymous Reasonableness of Christianity, its young author being on terms of acquaintance with the philosopher. [686] He claimed, in fact, to take for granted "the Divinity of the New Testament," and to "demonstrate the verity of divine revelation against atheists and all enemies of revealed religion," from whom, accordingly, he expected to receive no quarter. Brought up, as he declared, "from my cradle, in the grossest superstition and idolatry," he had been divinely led to make use of his own reason; and he assured his Christian readers of his perfect sincerity in "defending the true religion." [687] Twenty years later, his primary positions were hardly to be distinguished from those of ratiocinative champions of the creed, save in respect that he was challenging orthodoxy where they were replying to unbelievers. Toland, however, lacked alike the timidity and the prudence which so safely guided Locke in his latter years; and though his argument was only a logical and outspoken extension of Locke's position, to the end of showing that there was nothing supra-rational in Christianity of Locke's type, it separated him from "respectable" society in England and Ireland for the rest of his life. The book was "presented" by the Grand Juries of Middlesex and Dublin; [688] the dissenters in Dublin being chiefly active in denouncing it--with or without knowledge of its contents; [689] half-a-dozen answers appeared; and when in 1698 Toland produced another, entitled Amyntor, showing the infirm foundation of the Christian canon, there was again a speedy crop of replies. Despite the oversights inevitable to such pioneer work, this opens, from the side of freethought, the era of documentary criticism of the New Testament; and in some of his later freethinking books, as the Nazarenus (1718) and the Pantheisticon (1720), he continues to show himself in advance of his time in "opening new windows" for his mind. [690] The latter work represents in particular the influence of Spinoza, whom he had formerly criticized somewhat forcibly [691] for his failure to recognize that motion is inherent in matter. On that head he lays down [692] the doctrine that "motion is but matter under a certain consideration"--an essentially "materialist" position, deriving from the pre-Socratic Greeks, and incidentally affirmed by Bacon. [693] He was not exactly an industrious student or writer; but he had scholarly knowledge and instinct, and several of his works show close study of Bayle. As regards his more original views on Christian origins, he is not impressive to the modern reader; but theses which to-day stand for little were in their own day important. Thus in his Hodegus (pt. i of the Tetradymus, 1720) it is elaborately argued that the "pillar of fire by night and of cloud by day" was no miracle, but the regular procedure of guides in deserts, where night marches are the rule; the "cloud" being simply the smoke of the vanguard's fire, which by night flared red. Later criticism decides that the whole narrative of the Exodus is myth. Toland's method, however, was relatively so advanced that it had not been abandoned by theological "rationalists" a century later. Of that movement he must be ranked an energetic pioneer: though he lacked somewhat the strength of character that in his day was peculiarly needed to sustain a freethinker. Much of his later life was spent abroad; and his Letters to Serena (1704) show him permitted to discourse to the Queen of Prussia on such topics as the origin and force of prejudice, the history of the doctrine of immortality, and the origin of idolatry. He pays his correspondent the compliment of treating his topics with much learning; and his manner of assuming her own orthodoxy in regard to revelation could have served as a model to Gibbon. [694] But, despite such distinguished patronage, his life was largely passed in poverty, cheerfully endured, [695] with only chronic help from well-to-do sympathizers, such as Shaftesbury, who was not over-sympathetic. When it is noted that down to 1761 there had appeared no fewer than fifty-four answers to his first book, [696] his importance as an intellectual influence may be realized. A certain amount of evasion was forced upon Toland by the Blasphemy Law of 1697; inferentially, however, he was a thorough deist until he became pantheist; and the discussion over his books showed that views essentially deistic were held even among his antagonists. One, an Irish bishop, got into trouble by setting forth a notion of deity which squared with that of Hobbes. [697] The whole of our present subject, indeed, is much complicated by the distribution of heretical views among the nominally orthodox, and of orthodox views among heretics. [698] Thus the school of Cudworth, zealous against atheism, was less truly theistic than that of Blount, [699] who, following Hobbes, pointed out that to deny to God a continual personal and providential control of human affairs was to hold to atheism under the name of theism; [700] whereas Cudworth, the champion of theism against the atheists, entangled himself hopelessly [701] in a theory which made deity endow Nature with "plastic" powers and leave it to its own evolution. The position was serenely demolished by Bayle, [702] as against Le Clerc, who sought to defend it; and in England the clerical outcry was so general that Cudworth gave up authorship. [703] Over the same crux, in Ireland, Bishop Browne and Bishop Berkeley accused each other of promoting atheism; and Archbishop King was embroiled in the dispute. [704] On the other hand, the theistic Descartes had laid down a "mechanical" theory of the universe which perfectly comported with atheism, and partly promoted that way of thinking; [705] and a selection from Gassendi's ethical writings, translated into English [706] (1699), wrought in the same direction. The Church itself contained Cartesians and Cudworthians, Socinians and deists. [707] Each group, further, had inner differences as to free-will [708] and Providence; and the theistic schools of Newton, Clarke, and Leibnitz rejected each other's philosophies as well as that of Descartes. Leibnitz complained grimly that Newton and his followers had "a very odd opinion concerning the Work of God," making the universe an imperfect machine, which the deity had frequently to mend; and treating space as an organ by which God perceives things, which are thus regarded as not produced or maintained by him. [709] Newton's principles of explanation, he insisted, were those of the materialists. [710] John Hutchinson, a professor at Cambridge, in his Treatise of Power, Essential and Mechanical, also bitterly assailed Newton as a deistical and anti-scriptural sophist. [711] Clarke, on the other hand, declared that the philosophy of Leibnitz was "tending to banish God from the world." [712] Alongside of such internecine strife, it was not surprising that the great astronomer Halley, who accepted Newton's principles in physics, was commonly reputed an atheist; and that the freethinkers pitted his name in that connection against Newton's. [713] As it was he who first suggested [714] the idea of the total motion of the entire solar system in space--described by a modern pietist as "this great cosmical truth, the grandest in astronomy" [715]--they were not ill justified. It can hardly be doubted that if intellectual England could have been polled in 1710, under no restraints from economic, social, and legal pressure, some form of rationalism inconsistent with Christianity would have been found to be nearly as common as orthodoxy. In outlying provinces, in Devon and Cornwall, in Ulster, in Edinburgh and Glasgow, as well as in the metropolis, the pressure of deism on the popular creed evoked expressions of Arian and Socinian thought among the clergy. [716] It was, in fact, the various restraints under notice that determined the outward fortunes of belief and unbelief, and have substantially determined them since. When the devout Whiston was deposed from his professorship for his Arianism, and the unbelieving Saunderson was put in his place, [717] and when Simson was suspended from his ministerial functions in Glasgow, [718] the lesson was learned that outward conformity was the sufficient way to income. [719] Hard as it was, however, to kick against the pricks of law and prejudice, it is clear that many in the upper and middle classes privately did so. The clerical and the new popular literature of the time prove this abundantly. In the Tatler and its successors, [720] the decorous Addison and the indecorous Steele, neither of them a competent thinker, frigidly or furiously asperse the new tribe of freethinkers; while the evangelically pious Berkeley and the extremely unevangelical Swift rival each other in the malice of their attacks on those who rejected their creed. Berkeley, a man of philosophic genius but intense prepossessions, maintained Christianity on grounds which are the negation of philosophy. [721] Swift, the genius of neurotic misanthropy, who, in the words of Macaulay, "though he had no religion, had a great deal of professional spirit," [722] fought venomously for the creed of salvation. And still the deists multiplied. In the Earl of Shaftesbury [723] they had a satirist with a finer and keener weapon than was wielded by either Steele or Addison, and a much better temper than was owned by Swift or Berkeley. He did not venture to parade his unbelief: to do so was positively dangerous; but his thrusts at faith left little doubt as to his theory. He was at once dealt with by the orthodox as an enemy, and as promptly adopted by the deists as a champion, important no less for his ability than for his rank. Nor, indeed, is he lacking in boldness in comparison with contemporary writers. The anonymous pamphlet entitled The Natural History of Superstition, by the deist John Trenchard, M.P. (1709), does not venture on overt heresy. But Shaftesbury's Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (1708), his Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709), and his treatise The Moralists (1709), had need be anonymous because of their essential hostility to the reigning religious ethic. Such polemic marks a new stage in rationalistic propaganda. Swift, writing in 1709, angrily proposes to "prevent the publishing of such pernicious works as under pretence of freethinking endeavour to overthrow those tenets in religion which have been held inviolable in almost all ages." [724] But his further protest that "the doctrine of the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the immortality of the soul, and even the truth of all revelation, are daily exploded and denied in books openly printed," points mainly to the Unitarian propaganda. Among freethinkers he names, in his Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), Asgill, Coward, Toland, and Tindal. But the first was an ultra-Christian; the second was a Christian upholder of the thesis that spirit is not immaterial; and the last, at that date, had published only his Four Discourses (collected in 1709) and his Rights of the Christian Church, which are anti-clerical, but not anti-Christian. Prof. Henry Dodwell, who about 1673 published Two Letters of Advice, I, For the Susception of Holy Orders; II, For Studies Theological, especially such as are Rational, and in 1706 an Epistolary Discourse Concerning the Soul's Natural Mortality, maintaining the doctrine of conditional immortality, [725] which he made dependent on baptism in the apostolical succession, was a devout Christian; and no writer of that date went further. Dodwell is in fact blamed by Bishop Burnet for stirring up fanaticism against lay-baptism among dissenters. [726] It would appear that Swift spoke mainly from hearsay, and on the strength of the conversational freethinking so common in society. [727] But the anonymous essays of Shaftesbury which were issued in 1709 might be the immediate provocation of his outbreak. [728] An official picture of the situation is formally drawn in A Representation of the Present State of Religion, with regard to the late excessive growth of infidelity, heresy, and profaneness, drawn up by the Upper House of Convocation of the province of Canterbury in 1711. [729] This sets forth, as a result of the disorders of the Rebellion, a growth of all manner of unbelief and profanity, including denial of inspiration and the authority of the canon; the likening of Christian miracles to heathen fables; the treating of all religious mysteries as absurd speculations; Arianism and Socinianism and scoffing at the doctrine of the Trinity; denial of natural immortality; Erastianism; mockery of baptism and the Lord's Supper; decrying of all priests as impostors; the collecting and reprinting of infidel works; and publication of mock catechisms. It is explained that all such printing has greatly increased "since the expiration of the Act for restraining the press"; and mention is made of an Arian work just published to which the author has put his name, and which he has dedicated to the Convocation itself. This was the first volume of Whiston's Primitive Christianity Revived, the work of a devout eccentric, who had just before been deprived of his professorship at Cambridge for his orally avowed heresy. Whiston, whose cause was championed, and whose clerical opponents were lampooned, in an indecorous but vigorous sketch, The Tryal of William Whiston, Clerk, for defaming and denying the Holy Trinity, before the Lord Chief Justice Reason (1712; 3rd ed. 1740), always remained perfectly devout in his Arian orthodoxy; but his and his friends' arguments were rather better fitted to make deists than to persuade Christians; and Convocation's appeal for a new Act "restraining the present excessive and scandalous liberty of printing wicked books at home, and importing the like from abroad" was not responded to. There was no love lost between Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury; but the government in which the former, a known deist, was Secretary of State, could hardly undertake to suppress the works of the latter. § 2 Deism had been thus made in a manner fashionable [730] when, in 1713, Anthony Collins (1676-1729) began a new development by his Discourse of Freethinking. He had previously published a notably freethinking Essay Concerning the Use of Reason (1707), albeit without specific impeachment of the reigning creed; carried on a discussion with Clarke on the question of the immateriality of the soul; and issued treatises entitled Priestcraft in Perfection (1709, dealing with the history of the Thirty-nine Articles) [731] and A Vindication of the Divine Attributes (1710), exposing the Hobbesian theism of Archbishop King on lines followed twenty years later by Berkeley in his Minute Philosopher. But none of these works aroused such a tumult as the Discourse of Freethinking, which may be said to sum up and unify the drift not only of previous English freethinking, but of the great contribution of Bayle, whose learning and temper influence all English deism from Shaftesbury onwards. [732] Collins's book, however, was unique in its outspokenness. To the reader of to-day, indeed, it is no very aggressive performance: the writer was a man of imperturbable amenity and genuine kindliness of nature; and his style is the completest possible contrast to that of the furious replies it elicited. It was to Collins that Locke wrote, in 1703: "Believe it, my good friend, to love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues; and, if I mistake not, you have as much of it as I ever met with in anybody." [733] The Discourse does no discredit to this uncommon encomium, being a luminous and learned plea for the conditions under which alone truth can be prosperously studied, and the habits of mind which alone can attain it. Of the many replies, the most notorious is that of Bentley writing as Phileleutherus Lipsiensis, a performance which, on the strength of its author's reputation for scholarship, has been uncritically applauded by not a few critics, of whom some of the most eminent do not appear to have read Collins's treatise. [734] Bentley's is in reality pre-eminent only for insolence and bad faith, the latter complicated by lapses of scholarship hardly credible on its author's part. See the details in Dynamics of Religion, ch. vii. I am compelled to call attention to the uncritical verdict given on this matter by the late Sir Leslie Stephen, who asserts (English Thought, i, 206) that Bentley convicts Collins of "unworthy shuffling" in respect of his claim that freethinking had "banished the devil." Bentley affirmed that this had been the work, not of the freethinkers, but of "the Royal Society, the Boyles and the Newtons"; and Sir Leslie comments that "nothing could be more true." Nothing could be more untrue. As we have seen (above p. 82), Boyle was a convinced believer in demonology; and Newton did absolutely nothing to disperse it. Glanvill, a Royal Society man, had been a vehement supporter of the belief in witchcraft; and the Society as such never meddled with the matter. As to Collins's claim for the virtue of freethinking, Sir Leslie strangely misses the point that Collins meant by the word not unbelief, but free inquiry. He could not have meant to say that Holland was full of deists. In Collins's sense of the word, the Royal Society's work in general was freethinking work. One mistranslation which appears to have been a printer's error, and one mis-spelling of a Greek name, are the only heads on which Bentley confutes his author. He had, in fact, neither the kind of knowledge nor the candour that could fit him to handle the problems raised. It was Bentley's cue to represent Collins as an atheist, though he was a very pronounced deist; [735] and in the first uproar Collins thought it well to fly to Holland to avoid arrest. [736] But deism was too general to permit of such a representative being exiled; and he returned to study quietly, leaving Bentley's vituperation and prevarication unanswered, with the other attacks made upon him. In 1715 he published his brief but masterly Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty--anonymous, like all his works--which remains unsurpassed as a statement of the case for Determinism. [737] The welcome given to Bentley's attack upon Collins by the orthodox was warm in proportion to their sense of the general inadequacy of the apologetics on their side. Amid the common swarm of voluble futilities put forth by Churchmen, the strident vehemence as well as the erudite repute of the old scholar were fitted at least to attract the attention of lay readers in general. Most of the contemporary vindications of the faith, however, were fitted only to move intelligent men to new doubt or mere contempt. A sample of the current defence against deism is the treatise of Joseph Smith on The Unreasonableness of Deism, or, the Certainty of a Divine Revelation, etc. 1720, where deists in general are called "the Wicked and Unhappy men we have to deal with": [738] and the argumentation consists in alleging that a good God must reveal himself, and that if the miracle stories of the New Testament had been false the Jews would have exposed and discarded them. Against such nugatory traditionalism, the criticism of Collins shone with the spirit of science. Not till 1723 did he publish his next work, A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, a weighty attack on the argument from prophecy, to which the replies numbered thirty-five; on which followed in 1727 his Scheme of Literal Prophecy Considered, a reply to criticisms. The former work was pronounced by Warburton one of the most plausible ever written against Christianity, and he might well say so. It faced the argument from prophecy not merely with the skepticism of the ordinary deist, but with that weapon of critical analysis of which the use had been briefly shown by Hobbes and Spinoza. Apparently for the first time, he pointed out that the "virgin prophecy" in Isaiah had a plain reference to contemporary and not to future events; he showed that the "out of Egypt" prophecy referred to the Hebrew past; and he revived the ancient demonstration of Porphyry that the Book of Daniel is Maccabean. The general dilemma put by Collins--that either the prophecies must be reduced, textually and otherwise, to non-prophetic utterances, or Christianity must give up prophetic claims--has never since been solved. The deistic movement was now in full flood, the acute Mandeville [739] having issued in 1720 his Free Thoughts on Religion, and in 1723 a freshly-expanded edition of his very anti-evangelical Fable of the Bees; while an eccentric ex-clergyman, Thomas Woolston, who had already lost his fellowship of Sidney-Sussex College, Cambridge, for vagaries of doctrine and action, contributed in 1726-28 his freshly reasoned but heedlessly ribald Discourses on Miracles. Voltaire, who was in England in 1728, tells that thirty thousand copies were sold; [740] while sixty pamphlets were written in opposition. Woolston's were indeed well fitted to arouse wrath and rejoinder. The dialectic against the argument from miracles in general, and the irrelevance or nullity of certain miracles in particular, is really cogent, and anticipates at points the thought of the nineteenth century. But Woolston was of the tribe who can argue no issue without jesting, and who stamp levity on every cause by force of innate whimsicality. Thus he could best sway the light-hearted when his cause called for the winning-over of the earnest. Arguments that might have been made convincing were made to pass as banter, and serious spirits were repelled. It was during this debate that Conyers Middleton, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, produced his Letter from Rome (1729), wherein the part of paganism in Christianity is so set forth as to carry inference further than the argument ostensibly goes. In that year the heads of Oxford University publicly lamented the spread of open deism among the students; and the proclamation did nothing to check the contagion. In Fogg's Weekly Journal of July 4, 1730, it is announced that "one of the principal colleges in Oxford has of late been infested with deists; and that three deistical students have been expelled; and a fourth has had his degree deferred two years, during which he is to be closely confined in college; and, among other things, is to translate Leslie's Short and Easy Method with the Deists." [741] It is not hard to divine the effect of such exegetic methods. In 1731, the author of an apologetic pamphlet in reply to Woolston laments that even at the universities young men "too often" become tainted with "infidelity"; and, on the other hand, directing his battery against those who "causelessly profess to build their skeptical notions" on the writings of Locke, he complains of Dr. Holdsworth and other academic polemists who had sought to rob orthodoxy of the credit of such a champion as Locke by "consigning him over to that class of freethinkers and skeptics to which he was an adversary." [742] With the most famous work of Matthew Tindal, [743] Christianity as Old as Creation (1730), the excitement seems to have reached high-water mark. Here was vivacity without flippancy, and argument without irrelevant mirth; and the work elicited from first to last over a hundred and fifty replies, at home and abroad. Tindal's thesis is that the idea of a good God involved that of a simple, perfect, and universal religion, which must always have existed among mankind, and must have essentially consisted in moral conduct. Christianity, insofar as it is true, must therefore be a statement of this primordial religion; and moral reason must be the test, not tradition or Scripture. One of the first replies was the Vindication of Scripture by Waterland, to which Middleton promptly offered a biting retort in a Letter to Dr. Waterland (1731) that serves to show the slightness of its author's faith. After demolishing Waterland's case as calculated rather to arouse than to allay skepticism, he undertakes to offer a better reply of his own. It is to the simple effect that some religion is necessary to mankind in modern as in ancient times; that Christianity meets the need very well; and that to set up reason in its place is "impracticable" and "the attempt therefore foolish and irrational," in addition to being "criminal and immoral," when politically considered. [744] Such legalist criticism, if seriously meant, was hardly likely to discredit Tindal's book. Its directness and simplicity of appeal to what passed for theistic common-sense were indeed fitted to give it the widest audience yet won by any deist; and its anti-clericalism would carry it far among his fellow Whigs to begin with. [745] One tract of the period, dedicated to the Queen Regent, complains that "the present raging infidelity threatens an universal infection," and that it is not confined to the capital, but "is disseminated even to the confines of your kingdom." [746] Tindal, like Collins, wrote anonymously, and so escaped prosecution, dying in 1733, when the second part of his book, left ready for publication, was deliberately destroyed by Bishop Gibson, into whose hands it came. In 1736 he and Shaftesbury are described by an orthodox apologist as the "two oracles of deism." [747] Woolston, who put his name to his books, after being arrested in May, 1728, and released on bail, was prosecuted in 1729 on the charge of blasphemy, in that he had derided the gospel miracles and represented Jesus alternately as an impostor, a sorcerer, and a magician. His friendly counsel ingeniously argued that Woolston had aimed at safeguarding Christianity by returning to the allegorical method of the early Fathers; and that he had shown his reverence for Jesus and religion by many specific expressions; but the jury took a simpler view, and, without leaving the court, found Woolston guilty. He was sentenced to pay a fine of £100, to suffer a year's imprisonment, and either to find surety for his future good conduct or pay or give sureties for £2,000. [748] He is commonly said to have paid the penalty of imprisonment for the rest of his life (d. 1733), being unable to pay the fine of £100; but Voltaire positively asserts that "nothing is more false" than the statement that he died in prison; adding: "Several of my friends have seen him in his house: he died there, at liberty." [749] The solution of the conflict seems to be that he lived in his own house "in the rules of" the King's Bench Prison--that is, in the precincts, and under technical supervision. [750] In any case, he was sentenced; and the punishment was the measure of the anger felt at the continuous advance of deistic opinions, or at least against hostile criticism of the Scriptures. § 3 Unitarianism, formerly a hated heresy, was now in comparison leniently treated, because of its deference to Scriptural authority. Where the deists rejected all revelation, Unitarianism held by the Bible, calling only for a revision of the central Christian dogma. It had indeed gained much theological ground in the past quarter of a century. Nothing is more instructive in the culture-history of the period than the rapidity with which the Presbyterian succession of clergy passed from violent Calvinism, by way of "Baxterian" Arminianism, to Arianism, and thence in many cases to Unitarianism. First they virtually adopted the creed of the detested Laud, whom their fathers had hated for it; then they passed step by step to a heresy for which their fathers had slain men. A closely similar process took place in Geneva, where Servetus after death triumphed over his slayer. [751] In 1691, after a generation of common suffering, a precarious union was effected between the English Presbyterians, now mostly semi-Arminians, and the Independents, still mostly Calvinists: but in 1694 it was dissolved. [752] Thereafter the former body, largely endowed by the will of Lady Hewley in 1710, became as regards its Trust Deeds the freest of all the English sects in matters of doctrine. [753] The recognition of past changes had made their clergy chary of a rigid subscription. Naturally the movement did not gain in popularity as it fell away from fanaticism; but the decline of Nonconformity in the first half of the eighteenth century was common to all the sects, and did not specially affect the Presbyterians. Of the many "free" churches established in England and Wales after the Act of Toleration (1689), about half were extinct in 1715; [754] and of the Presbyterian churches the number in Yorkshire alone fell from fifty-nine in 1715 to a little over forty in 1730. [755] Economic causes were probably the main ones. The State-endowed parish priest had an enduring advantage over his rival. But the Hewley endowment gave a certain economic basis to the Presbyterians; and the concern for scholarship which had always marked their body kept them more open to intellectual influences than the ostensibly more free-minded and certainly more democratic sectaries of the Independent and Baptist bodies. [756] The result was that, with free Trust Deeds, the Presbyterians openly exhibited a tendency which was latent in all the other churches. In 1719, at a special assembly of Presbyterian ministers at Salters' Hall, it was decided by a majority of 73 to 69 that subscription to the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity should no longer be demanded of candidates for the ministry. [757] Of the 73, the majority professed to be themselves orthodox; but there was no question that antitrinitarian opinions had become common, especially in Devonshire, where the heresy case of Mr. Peirce of Exeter had brought the matter to a crisis. [758] From this date "Arian" opinions spread more rapidly in the dwindling denomination, shading yet further into Unitarianism, step for step with the deistic movement in the Church. "In less than half a century the doctrines of the great founders of Presbyterianism could scarcely be heard from any Presbyterian pulpit in England." [759] "In the English Presbyterian ministry the process was from Arian opinions to those called Unitarian ... by a gradual sliding," even as the transition had been made from Calvinism to Arminianism in the previous century. [760] Presbyterianism having thus come pretty much into line with Anglicanism on the old question of predestination, while still holding fast by Scriptural standards as against the deists, the old stress of Anglican dislike had slackened, despite the rise of the new heretical element. Unitarian arguments were now forthcoming from quarters not associated with dissent, as in the case of Thomas Chubb's first treatise, The Supremacy of the Father Asserted (1715), courteously dedicated "To the Reverend the Clergy, and in particular to the Right Reverend Gilbert Lord Bishop of Sarum, our vigilant and laborious Diocesan." Chubb (1679-1747) had been trained to glove-making, and, as his opponents took care to record, acted also as a tallow-chandler; [761] and the good literary quality of his work made some sensation in an England which had not learned to think respectfully of Bunyan. Chubb's impulse to write had come from the perusal of Whiston's Primitive Christianity Revived, in 1711, and that single-minded Arian published his book for him. The Unitarians would naturally repudiate all connection with such a performance as A Sober Reply to Mr. Higgs's Merry Arguments from the Light of Nature for the Tritheistic Doctrine of the Trinity, which was condemned by the House of Lords on February 12, 1720, to be burnt, as having "in a daring, impious manner, ridiculed the doctrine of the Trinity and all revealed religion." Its author, Joseph Hall, a serjeant-at-arms to the King, seems to have undergone no punishment, and more decorous antitrinitarians received public countenance. Thus the Unitarian Edward Elwall, [762] who had published a book called A True Testimony for God and his Sacred Law (1724), for which he was prosecuted at Stafford in 1726, was allowed by the judge to argue his cause fully, and was unconditionally acquitted, to the displeasure of the clergy. § 4 Anti-scriptural writers could not hope for such toleration, being doubly odious to the Church. Berkeley, in 1721, had complained bitterly [763] of the general indifference to religion, which his writings had done nothing to alter; and in 1736 he angrily demanded that blasphemy should be punished like high treason. [764] His Minute Philosopher (1732) betrays throughout his angry consciousness of the vogue of freethinking after twenty years of resistance from his profession; and that performance is singularly ill fitted to alter the opinions of unbelievers. In his earlier papers attacking them he had put a stress of malice that, in a mind of his calibre, is startling even to the student of religious history. [765] It reveals him as no less possessed by the passion of creed than the most ignorant priest of his Church. For him all freethinkers were detested disturbers of his emotional life; and of the best of them, as Collins, Shaftesbury, and Spinoza, he speaks with positive fury. In the Minute Philosopher, half-conscious of the wrongness of his temper, he sets himself to make the unbelievers figure in dialogue as ignorant, pretentious, and coarse-natured; while his own mouthpieces are meant to be benign, urbane, wise, and persuasive. Yet in the very pages so planned he unwittingly reveals that the freethinkers whom he goes about to caricature were commonly good-natured in tone, while he becomes as virulent as ever in his eagerness to discredit them. Not a paragraph in the book attains to the spirit of judgment or fairness; all is special pleading, overstrained and embittered sarcasm, rankling animus. Gifted alike for literature and for philosophy, keen of vision in economic problems where the mass of men were short-sighted, he was flawed on the side of his faith by the hysteria to which it always stirred him. No man was less qualified to write a well-balanced dialogue as between his own side and its opponents. To candour he never attains, unless it be in the sense that his passion recoils on his own case. Even while setting up ninepins of ill-put "infidel" argument to knock down, he elaborates futilities of rebuttal, indicating to every attentive reader the slightness of his rational basis. On the strength of this performance he might fitly be termed the most ill-conditioned sophist of his age, were it not for the perception that religious feeling in him has become a pathological phase, and that he suffers incomparably more from his own passions than he can inflict on his enemies by his eager thrusts at them. More than almost any gifted pietist of modern times he sets us wondering at the power of creed in certain cases to overgrow judgment and turn to naught the rarest faculties. No man in Berkeley's day had a finer natural lucidity and suppleness of intelligence; yet perhaps no polemist on his side did less either to make converts or to establish a sound intellectual practice. Plain men on the freethinking side he must either have bewildered by his metaphysic or revolted by his spite; while to the more efficient minds he stood revealed as a kind of inspired child, rapt in the construction and manipulation of a set of brilliant sophisms which availed as much for any other creed as for his own. To the armoury of Christian apologetic now growing up in England he contributed a special form of the skeptical argument: freethinkers, he declared, made certain arbitrary or irrational assumptions in accepting Newton's doctrine of fluxions, and it was only their prejudice that prevented them from being similarly accommodating to Christian mysteries. [766] It is a kind of argument dear to minds pre-convinced and incapable of a logical revision, but worse than inept as against opponents; and it availed no more in Berkeley's hands than it had done in those of Huet. [767] To theosophy, indeed, Berkeley rendered a more successful service in presenting it with the no better formula of "existence [i.e., in consciousness] dependent upon consciousness"--a verbalism which has served the purposes of theology in the philosophic schools down till our own day. For his, however, the popular polemic value of such a theorem must have been sufficiently countervailed by his vehement championship of the doctrine of passive obedience in its most extreme form--"that loyalty is a virtue or moral duty; and disloyalty or rebellion, in the most strict and proper sense, a vice or crime against the law of nature." [768] It belonged to the overstrung temperament of Berkeley that, like a nervous artist, he should figure to himself all his freethinking antagonists as personally odious, himself growing odious under the obsession; and he solemnly asserts, in his Discourse to Magistrates, that there had been "lately set up within this city of Dublin" an "execrable fraternity of blasphemers," calling themselves "blasters," and forming "a distinct society, whereof the proper and avowed business shall be to shock all serious Christians by the most impious and horrid blasphemies, uttered in the most public manner." [769] There appears to be not a grain of truth in this astonishing assertion, to which no subsequent historian has paid the slightest attention. In a period in which freethinking books had been again and again burned in Dublin by the public hangman, such a society could be projected only in a nightmare; and Berkeley's hallucination may serve as a sign of the extent to which his judgment had been deranged by his passions. [770] His forensic temper is really on a level with that of the most incompetent swashbucklers on his side. When educated Christians could be so habitually envenomed as was Berkeley, there was doubtless a measure of contrary heat among English unbelievers; but, apart altogether from what could be described as blasphemy, unbelief abounded in the most cultured society of the day. Bolingbroke's rationalism had been privately well known; and so distinguished a personage as the brilliant and scholarly Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, hated by Pope, is one of the reputed freethinkers of her time. [771] In the very year of the publication of Berkeley's Minute Philosopher, the first two epistles of the Essay on Man of his own friend and admirer, Pope, gave a new currency to the form of optimistic deism created by Shaftesbury, and later elaborated by Bolingbroke. Pope was always anxiously hostile in his allusions to the professed freethinkers [772]--among whom Bolingbroke only posthumously enrolled himself--and in private he specially aspersed Shaftesbury, from whom he had taken so much; [773] but his prudential tactic gave all the more currency to the virtual deism he enunciated. Given out without any critical allusion to Christianity, and put forward as a vindication of the ways of God to men, it gave to heresy, albeit in a philosophically incoherent exposition, the status of a well-bred piety. A good authority pronounces that "the Essay on Man did more to spread English deism in France than all the works of Shaftesbury"; [774] and we have explicit testimony that the poet privately avowed the deistic view of things. [775] The line of the Essay which now reads: The soul, uneasy and confined from home, originally ran "at home"; but, says Warton, "this expression seeming to exclude a future existence, as, to speak the plain truth, it was intended to do, it was altered"--presumably by Warburton. (Warton's Essay on Pope, 4th ed. ii, 67.) The Spinozistic or pantheistic character of much of the Essay on Man was noted by various critics, in particular by the French Academician De Crousaz (Examen de l'Essay de M. Pope sur l'Homme, 1748, p. 90, etc.) After promising to justify the ways of God to man, writes Crousaz (p. 33), Pope turns round and justifies man, leaving God charged with all men's sins. When the younger Racine, writing to the Chevalier Ramsay in 1742, charged the Essay with irreligion, Pope wrote him repudiating alike Spinoza and Leibnitz. (Warton, ii, 121.) In 1755, however, the Abbé Gauchat renewed the attack, declaring that the Essay was "neither Christian nor philosophic" (Lettres Critiques, i, 346). Warburton at first charged the poem with rank atheism, and afterwards vindicated it in his manner. (Warton, i, 125.) But in Germany, in the youth of Goethe, we find the Essay regarded by Christians as an unequivocally deistic poem. (Goethe's Wahrheit und Dichtung, Th. II, B. vii: Werke, ed. 1866, xi, 263.) And by a modern Christian polemist the Essay is described as "the best positive result of English deism in the eighteenth century" (Gostwick, German Culture and Christianity, 1882, p. 31). In point of fact, deism was the fashionable way of thinking among cultured people. Though Voltaire testifies from personal knowledge that there were in England in his day many principled atheists, [776] there was little overt atheism, [777] whether by reason of the special odium attaching to that way of thought, or of a real production of theistic belief by the concurrence of the deistic propaganda on this head with that of the clergy, themselves in so many cases deists. [778] Bishop Burnet, in the Conclusion to the History of his Own Time, pronounces that "there are few atheists, but many infidels, who are indeed very little better than the atheists." Collins observed that nobody had doubted the existence of God until the Boyle lecturers began to prove it; and Clarke had more than justified the jest by arguing, in his Boyle Lectures for 1705, that all deism logically leads to atheism. But though the apologists roused much discussion on the theistic issue, the stress of the apologetic literature passed from the theme of atheism to that of deism. Shaftesbury's early Inquiry Concerning Virtue had assumed the existence of a good deal of atheism; but his later writings, and those of his school, do not indicate much atheistic opposition. [779] Even the revived discussion on the immateriality and immortality of the soul--which began with the Grand Essay of Dr. William Coward, [780] in 1704, and was taken up, as we have seen, by the non-juror Dodwell [781]--was conducted on either orthodox or deistic lines. Coward wrote as a professed Christian, [782] to maintain, "against impostures of philosophy," that "matter and motion must be the foundation of thought in men and brutes." Collins maintained against Clarke the proposition that matter is capable of thought; and Samuel Strutt ("of the Temple"), whose Philosophical Inquiry into the Physical Spring of Human Actions, and the Immediate Cause of Thinking (1732), is a most tersely cogent sequence of materialistic argument, never raises any question of deity. The result was that the problem of "materialism" was virtually dropped, Strutt's essay in particular passing into general oblivion. It was replied to, however, with the Inquiry of Collins, as late as 1760, by a Christian controversialist who admits Strutt to have been "a gentleman of an excellent genius for philosophical inquiries, and a close reasoner from those principles he laid down" (An Essay towards demonstrating the Immateriality and Free Agency of the Soul, 1760, p. 94). The Rev. Mr. Monk, in his Life of Bentley (2nd ed. 1833, ii, 391), absurdly speaks of Strutt as having "dressed up the arguments of Lord Herbert of Cherbury and other enemies of religion in a new shape." The reverend gentleman cannot have paid any attention to the arguments either of Herbert or of Strutt, which have no more in common than those of Toland and Hume. Strutt's book was much too closely reasoned to be popular. His name was for the time, however, associated with a famous scandal at Cambridge University. When in 1739 proceedings were taken against what was described as an "atheistical society" there, Strutt was spoken of as its "oracle." One of the members was Paul Whitehead, satirized by Pope. Another, Tinkler Ducket, a Fellow of Caius College, in holy orders, was prosecuted in the Vice-Chancellor's Court on the twofold charge of proselytizing for atheism and of attempting to seduce a "female." In his defence he explained that he had been for some time "once more a believer in God and Christianity"; but was nevertheless expelled. See Monk's Life of Bentley, as cited, ii, 391 sq. § 5 No less marked is the failure to develop the "higher criticism" from the notable start made in 1739 in the very remarkable Inquiry into the Jewish and Christian Revelations by Samuel Parvish, who made the vital discovery that Deuteronomy is a product of the seventh century B.C. [783] His book, which is in the form of a dialogue between a Christian and a Japanese, went into a second edition (1746); but his idea struck too deep for the critical faculty of that age, and not till the nineteenth century was the clue found again by De Wette, in Germany. [784] Parvish came at the end of the main deistic movement, [785] and by that time the more open-minded men had come to a point of view from which it did not greatly matter when Deuteronomy was written, or precisely how a cultus was built up; while orthodoxy could not dream of abandoning its view of inspiration. There was thus an arrest alike of historical criticism and of the higher philosophic thought under the stress of the concrete disputes over ethics, miracles, prophecy, and politics; and a habit of taking deity for granted became normal, with the result that when the weak point was pressed upon by Law and Butler there was a sense of blankness on both sides. But among men theistically inclined, the argument of Tindal against revelationism was extremely telling, and it had more literary impressiveness than any writing on the orthodox side before Butler. By this time the philosophic influence of Spinoza--seen as early as 1699 in Shaftesbury's Inquiry Concerning Virtue, [786] and avowed by Clarke when he addressed his Demonstration (1705) "more particularly in answer to Mr. Hobbs, Spinoza, and their followers"--had spread among the studious class, greatly reinforcing the deistic movement; so that in 1732 Berkeley, who ranked him among "weak and wicked writers," described him as "the great leader of our modern infidels." See the Minute Philosopher, Dial. vii, § 29. Similarly Leland, in the Supplement (1756) to his View of the Deistical Writers (afterwards incorporated as Letter VI), speaks of Spinoza as "the most applauded doctor of modern atheism." Sir Leslie Stephen's opinion (English Thought, i, 33), that "few of the deists, probably," read Spinoza, seems to be thus outweighed. If they did not in great numbers read the Ethica, they certainly read the Tractatus and the letters. As early as 1677 we find Stillingfleet, in the preface to his Letter to a Deist, speaking of Spinoza as "a late author [who] I hear is mightily in vogue among many who cry up anything on the atheistical side, though never so weak and trifling"; and further of a mooted proposal to translate the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus into English. A translation was published in 1689. In 1685 the Scotch Professor George Sinclar, in the "Preface to the Reader" of his Satan's Invisible World Discovered, writes that "There are a monstrous rabble of men, who following the Hobbesian and Spinosian principles, slight religion and undervalue the Scripture," etc. In Gildon's work of recantation, The Deist's Manual (1705, p. 192), the indifferent Pleonexus, who "took more delight in bags than in books," and demurs to accumulating the latter, avows that he has a few, among them being Hobbes and Spinoza. Evelyn, writing about 1680-90, speaks of "that infamous book, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus," as "a wretched obstacle to the searchers of holy truth" (The History of Religion, 1850, p. xxvii). Cp. Halyburton, Natural Religion Insufficient, Edinburgh, 1714, p. 31, as to the "great vogue among our young Gentry and Students" of Hobbes, Spinoza, and others. § 6 Among the deists of the upper classes was the young William Pitt, afterwards Lord Chatham, if, as has been alleged, it was he who in 1733, two years before he entered Parliament, contributed to the London Journal a "Letter on Superstition," the work of a pronounced freethinker. [787] On the other hand, such deistic writing as that with which Chubb, in a multitude of tracts, followed up his early Unitarian essay of 1715, brought an ethical "Christian rationalism" within the range of the unscholarly many. Thomas Morgan (d. 1741), a physician, began in the Moral Philosopher, 1739-1740, [788] to sketch a rationalistic theory of Christian origins, besides putting the critical case with new completeness. Morgan had been at one time a dissenting minister at Frome, Somerset, and had been dismissed because of his deistical opinions. Towards the Jehovah and the ethic of the Old Testament he holds, however, the attitude rather of an ancient Gnostic than of a modern rationalist; and in his philosophy he is either a very "godly" deist or a pantheist miscarried. [789] At the same time Peter Annet (1693-1769), a schoolmaster and inventor of a system of shorthand, widened the propaganda in other directions. He seems to have been the first freethought lecturer, for his first pamphlet, Judging for Ourselves: or, Freethinking the Great Duty of Religion, "By P. A., Minister of the Gospel" (1739), consists of "Two Lectures delivered at Plaisterers' Hall." Through all his propaganda, of which the more notable portions are his Supernaturals Examined and a series of controversies on the Resurrection, there runs a train of shrewd critical sense, put forth in crisp and vivacious English, which made him a popular force. What he lacked was the due gravity and dignity for the handling of such a theme as the reversal of a nation's faith. Like Woolston, he is facetious where he should be serious; entertaining where he had need be impressive; provocative where he should have aimed at persuasion. We cannot say what types he influenced, or how deep his influence went: it appears only that he swayed many whose suffrages weighed little. At length, when in 1761 he issued nine numbers of The Free Inquirer, in which he attacked the Pentateuch with much insight and cogency, but with a certain want of rational balance (shown also in his treatise, Social Bliss Considered, 1749), he was made a victim of the then strengthened spirit of persecution, being sentenced to stand thrice in the pillory with the label "For Blasphemy," and to suffer a year's hard labour. Nevertheless, he was popular enough to start a school on his release. Such popularity, of course, was alien to the literary and social traditions of the century; and from the literary point of view the main line of deistic propaganda, as apart from the essays and treatises of Hume and the posthumous works of Bolingbroke, ends with the younger Henry Dodwell's (anonymous) ironical essay, Christianity not Founded on Argument (1741). So rigorously congruous is the reasoning of that brilliant treatise that some have not quite unjustifiably taken it for the work of a dogmatic believer, standing at some such position as that taken up before him by Huet, and in recent times by Cardinal Newman. [790] He argues, for instance, not merely that reason can yield none of the confidence which belongs to true faith, but that it cannot duly strengthen the moral will against temptations. [791] But the book at once elicited a number of replies, all treating it unhesitatingly as an anti-Christian work; and Leland assails it as bitterly as he does any openly freethinking treatise. [792] Its thesis might have been seriously supported by reference to the intellectual history of the preceding thirty years, wherein much argument had certainly failed to establish the reigning creed or to discredit the unbelievers. § 7 Of the work done by English deism thus far, it may suffice to say that within two generations it had more profoundly altered the intellectual temper of educated men than any religious movement had ever done in the same time. This appears above all from the literature produced by orthodoxy in reply, where the mere defensive resort to reasoning, apart from the accounts of current rationalism, outgoes anything in the previous history of literature. The whole evolution is a remarkable instance of the effect on intellectual progress of the diversion of a nation's general energy from war and intense political faction to mental activities. A similar diversion had taken place at the Restoration, to be followed by a return to civil and foreign strife, which arrested it. It was in the closing years of Anne, and in the steady régime of Walpole under the first two Georges, that the ferment worked at its height. Collins's Discourse of Freethinking was synchronous with the Peace of Utrecht: the era of war re-opened in 1739, much against the will of Walpole, who resigned in 1742. Home and foreign wars thereafter became common; and in 1751 Clive opened the period of imperialistic expansion, determining national developments on that main line, concurrently with that of the new industry. Could the discussion have been continuous--could England have remained what she was in the main deistic period, a workshop of investigation and a battleground of ideas--all European development might have been indefinitely hastened. But the deists, for the most part educated men appealing to educated men or to the shrewdest readers among the artisans, had not learned to reckon with the greater social forces; and beyond a certain point they could not affect England's intellectual destinies. It is worse than idle to argue that "the true cause of the decay of deism is to be sought in its internal weakness," in the sense that "it was not rooted in the deepest convictions, nor associated with the most powerful emotions of its adherents." [793] No such charge can be even partially proved. The deists were at least as much in earnest as two-thirds of the clergy: the determining difference, in this regard, was the economic basis of the latter, and their social hold of an ignorant population. The clergy, who could not argue the deists down in the court of culture, had in their own jurisdiction the great mass of the uneducated lower classes, and the great mass of the women of all classes, whom the ideals of the age kept uneducated, with a difference. And while the more cultured clergy were themselves in large measure deists, the majority, in the country parishes, remained uncritical and unreflective, caring little even to cultivate belief among their flocks. The "contempt of the clergy" which had subsisted from the middle of the seventeenth century (if, indeed, it should not be dated from the middle of the sixteenth) meant among other things that popular culture remained on a lower plane. With the multitude remaining a ready hotbed for new "enthusiasm," and the women of the middle and upper orders no less ready nurturers of new generations of young believers, the work of emancipation was but begun when deism was made "fashionable." And with England on the way to a new era at once of industrial and imperial expansion, in which the energies that for a generation had made her a leader of European thought were diverted to arms and to commerce, the critical and rationalizing work of the deistical generation could not go on as it had begun. That generation left its specific mark on the statute-book in a complete repeal of the old laws relating to witchcraft; [794] on literature in a whole library of propaganda and apology; on moral and historic science in a new movement of humanism, which was to find its check in the French Revolution. How it affected the general intelligence for good may be partly gathered from a comparison of the common English political attitudes towards Ireland in the first and the last quarters of the century. Under William was wrought the arrest of Irish industry and commerce, begun after the Restoration; under Anne were enacted the penal laws against Catholics--as signal an example of religious iniquity as can well be found in all history. By the middle of the century these laws had become anachronisms for all save bigots. "The wave of freethought that was spreading over Europe and permeating its literature had not failed to affect Ireland.... An atmosphere of skepticism was fatal to the Penal Code. What element of religious persecution there had been in it had long ceased to be operative" (R. Dunlop, in Camb. Mod. Hist. vi, 489). Macaulay's testimony on this head is noteworthy: "The philosophy of the eighteenth century had purified English Whiggism of the deep taint of intolerance which had been contracted during a long and close alliance with the Puritanism of the eighteenth century" (History, ch. xvii, end). The denunciations of the penal laws by Arthur Young in 1780 [795] are the outcome of two generations of deistic thinking; the spirit of religion has been ousted by judgment. [796] Could that spirit have had freer play, less hindrance from blind passion, later history would have been a happier record. But for reasons lying in the environment as well as in its own standpoint, deism was not destined to rise on continuous stepping-stones to social dominion. Currency has been given to a misconception of intellectual history by the authoritative statement that in the deistic controversy "all that was intellectually venerable in England" appeared "on the side of Christianity" (Sir Leslie Stephen, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, i, 86). The same thing, in effect, is said by Lecky: "It was to repel these [deistic] attacks ['upon the miracles'] that the evidential school arose, and the annals of religious controversy narrate few more complete victories than they achieved" (Rise and Influence of Rationalism, pop. ed. i, 175). The proposition seems to be an echo of orthodox historiography, as Buckle had before written in his note-book: "In England skepticism made no head. Such men as Toland and Tindal, Collins, Shaftesbury, Woolston, were no match for Clarke, Warburton, and Lardner. They could make no head till the time of Middleton" (Misc. Works, abridged ed. i, 321)--a strain of assertion which clearly proceeds on no close study of the period. In the first place, all the writing on the freethinking side was done under peril of Blasphemy Laws, and under menace of all the calumny and ostracism that in Christian society follow on advanced heresy; while the orthodox side could draw on the entire clerical profession, over ten thousand strong, and trained for and pledged to defence of the faith. Yet, when all is said, the ordinary list of deists amply suffices to disprove Sir L. Stephen's phrase. His "intellectually venerable" list runs: Bentley, Locke, Berkeley, Clarke, Butler, Waterland, Warburton, Sherlock, Gibson, Conybeare, Smalbroke, Leslie, Law, Leland, Lardner, Foster, Doddridge, Lyttelton, Barrington, Addison, Pope, Swift. He might have added Newton and Boyle. Sykes, [797] Balguy, Stebbing, and a "host of others," he declares to be "now for the most part as much forgotten as their victims"; Young and Blackmore he admits to be in similar case. It is expressly told of Doddridge, he might have added, that whereas that well-meaning apologist put before his students at Northampton the ablest writings both for and against Christianity, leaving them to draw their own conclusions, many of his pupils, "on leaving his institution, became confirmed Arians and Socinians" (Nichols in App. P to Life of Arminius--Works of Arminius, 1825, i, 223-25). This hardly spells success. [798] All told, the list includes only three or four men of any permanent interest as thinkers, apart from Newton; and only three or four more important as writers. The description of Waterland, [799] Warburton, [800] Smalbroke, [801] Sherlock, Leslie, and half-a-dozen more as "intellectually venerable" is grotesque; even Bentley is a strange subject for veneration. On the other hand, the list of "the despised deists," who "make but a poor show when compared with this imposing list," runs thus: Herbert, Hobbes, Blount, Halley (well known to be an unbeliever, though he did not write on the subject), Toland, Shaftesbury, Collins, Mandeville, Tindal, Chubb, Morgan, Dodwell, Middleton, Hume, Bolingbroke, Gibbon. It would be interesting to know on what principles this group is excluded from the intellectual veneration so liberally allotted to the other. It is nothing to the purpose that Shaftesbury and Mandeville wrote "covertly" and "indirectly." The law and the conditions compelled them to do so. It is still more beside the case to say that "Hume can scarcely be reckoned among the deists. He is already [when?] emerging into a higher atmosphere." Hume wrote explicitly as a deist; and only in his posthumous Dialogues did he pass on to the atheistic position. At no time, moreover, was he "on the side of Christianity." On the other hand, Locke and Clarke and Pope were clearly "emerging into a higher atmosphere" than Christianity, since Locke is commonly reckoned by the culture-historians, and even by Sir Leslie Stephen, as making for deism; Pope was the pupil of Bolingbroke, and wrote as such; and Clarke was shunned as an Arian. Newton, again, was a Unitarian, and Leibnitz accused his system of making for irreligion. It would be hard to show, further, who are the "forgotten victims" of Balguy and the rest. Balguy criticized Shaftesbury, whose name is still a good deal better known than Balguy's. The main line of deists is pretty well remembered. And if we pair off Hume against Berkeley, Hobbes against Locke, Middleton (as historical critic) against Bentley, Shaftesbury against Addison, Mandeville against Swift, Bolingbroke against Butler, Collins against Clarke, Herbert against Lyttelton, Tindal against Waterland, and Gibbon against--shall we say?--Warburton, it hardly appears that the overplus of merit goes as Sir Leslie Stephen alleges, even if we leave Newton, with brain unhinged, standing against Halley. The statement that the deists "are but a ragged regiment," and that "in speculative ability most of them were children by the side of their ablest antagonists," is simply unintelligible unless the names of all the ablest deists are left out. Locke, be it remembered, did not live to meet the main deistic attack on Christianity; and Sir Leslie admits the weakness of his pro-Christian performance. The bases of Sir Leslie Stephen's verdict may be tested by his remarks that "Collins, a respectable country gentleman, showed considerable acuteness; Toland, a poor denizen of Grub Street, and Tindal, a Fellow of All Souls, made a certain display of learning, and succeeded in planting some effective arguments." Elsewhere (pp. 217-227) Sir Leslie admits that Collins had the best of the argument against his "venerable" opponents on Prophecy; and Huxley credits him with equal success in the argument with Clarke. The work of Collins on Human Liberty, praised by a long series of students and experts, and entirely above the capacity of Bentley, is philosophically as durable as any portion of Locke, who made Collins his chosen friend and trustee, and who did not live to meet his anti-Biblical arguments. Tindal, who had also won Locke's high praise by his political essays, profoundly influenced such a student as Laukhard (Lechler, p. 451). And Toland, whom even Mr. A. S. Farrar (Bampton Lectures, p. 179) admitted to possess "much originality and learning," has struck Lange as a notable thinker, though he was a poor man. Leibnitz, who answered him, praises his acuteness, as does Pusey, who further admits the uncommon ability of Morgan and Collins (Histor. Enq. into German Rationalism, 1828, p. 126). It is time that the conventional English standards in these matters should be abandoned by modern rationalists. The unfortunate effect of Sir Leslie Stephen's dictum is seen in the assertion of Prof. Höffding (Hist. of Modern Philos. Eng. tr. 1900, i, 403), that Sir Leslie "rightly remarks of the English deists that they were altogether inferior to their adversaries"; and further (p. 405), that by the later deists, "Collins, Tindal, Morgan, etc., the dispute as to miracles was carried on with great violence." It is here evident that Prof. Höffding has not read the writers he depreciates, for those he names were far from being violent. Had he known the literature, he would have named Woolston, not Collins and Tindal and Morgan. He is merely echoing, without inquiring for himself, a judgment which he regards as authoritative. In the same passage he declares that "only one of all the men formerly known as the 'English deists' [Toland] has rendered contributions of any value to the history of thought." If this is said with a knowledge of the works of Collins, Shaftesbury, and Mandeville, it argues a sad lack of critical judgment. But there is reason to infer here also that Prof. Höffding writes in ignorance of the literature he discusses. While some professed rationalists thus belittle a series of pioneers who did so much to make later rationalism possible, some eminent theologians do them justice. Thus does Prof. Cheyne begin his series of lectures on Founders of Old Testament Criticism (1893): "A well-known and honoured representative of progressive German orthodoxy (J. A. Dorner) has set a fine example of historical candour by admitting the obligations of his country to a much-disliked form of English heterodoxy. He says that English deism, which found so many apt disciples in Germany, 'by clearing away dead matter, prepared the way for a reconstruction of theology from the very depths of the heart's beliefs, and also subjected man's nature to stricter observation.' [802] This, however, as it appears to me, is a very inadequate description of the facts. It was not merely a new constructive stage of German theoretic theology, and a keener psychological investigation, for which deism helped to prepare the way, but also a great movement, which has in our own day become in a strict sense international, concerned with the literary and historical criticism of the Scriptures. Beyond all doubt, the Biblical discussions which abound in the works of the deists and their opponents contributed in no slight degree to the development of that semi-apologetic criticism of the Old Testament of which J. D. Michaelis, and in some degree even Eichhorn, were leading representatives.... It is indeed singular that deism should have passed away in England without having produced a great critical movement among ourselves." Not quite so singular, perhaps, when we note that in our own day Sir Leslie Stephen and Lecky and Prof. Höffding could sum up the work of the deists without a glance at what it meant for Biblical criticism. § 8 If we were to set up a theory of intellectual possibilities from what has actually taken place in the history of thought, and without regard to the economic and political conditions above mentioned, we might reason that deism failed permanently to overthrow the current creed because it was not properly preceded by discipline in natural science. There might well be stagnation in the higher criticism of the Hebrew Scriptures when all natural science was still coloured by them. In nothing, perhaps, is the danger of Sacred Books more fully exemplified than in their influence for the suppression of true scientific thought. A hundredfold more potently than the faiths of ancient Greece has that of Christendom blocked the way to all intellectually vital discovery. If even the fame and the pietism of Newton could not save him from the charge of promoting atheism, much less could obscure men hope to set up any view of natural things which clashed with pulpit prejudice. But the harm lay deeper, inasmuch as the ground was preoccupied by pseudo-scientific theories which were at best fanciful modifications of the myths of Genesis. Types of these performances are the treatise of Sir Matthew Hale on The Primitive Origination of Mankind (1685); Dr. Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth (1680-1689); and Whiston's New Theory of the Earth (1696)--all devoid of scientific value; Hale's work being pre-Newtonian; Burnet's anti-Newtonian, though partly critical as regards the sources of the Pentateuch; and Whiston's a combination of Newton and myth with his own quaint speculations. Even the Natural History of the Earth of Prof. John Woodward (1695), after recognizing that fossils were really prehistoric remains, decided that they were deposited by the Deluge. [803] Woodward's book is in its own way instructive as regards the history of opinion. A "Professor of Physick" in Gresham College, F.C.P., and F.R.S., he goes about his work in a methodical and ostensibly scientific fashion, colligates the phenomena, examines temperately the hypotheses of the many previous inquirers, and shows no violence of orthodox prepossession. He claims to have considered Moses "only as an historian," and to give him credit finally because he finds his narrative "punctually true." [804] He had before him an abundance of facts irreconcilable with the explanation offered by the Flood story; yet he actually adds to that myth a thesis of universal decomposition and dissolution of the earth's strata by the flood's action [805]--a hypothesis far more extravagant than any of those he dismissed. With all his method and scrutiny he had remained possessed by the tradition, and could not cast it off. It would seem as if such a book, reducing the tradition to an absurdity, was bound at least to put its more thoughtful readers on the right track. But the legend remained in possession of the general intelligence as of Woodward's; and beyond his standpoint science made little advance for many years. Moral and historical criticism, then, as regards some main issues, had gone further than scientific; and men's thinking on certain problems of cosmic philosophy was thus arrested for lack of due basis or discipline in experiential science. The final account of the arrest of exact Biblical criticism in the eighteenth century, however, is that which explains also the arrest of the sciences. English energy, broadly speaking, was diverted into other channels. In the age of Chatham it became more and more military and industrial, imperialist and commercial; and the scientific work of Newton was considerably less developed by English hands than was the critical work of the first deists. Long before the French Revolution, mathematical and astronomical science were being advanced by French minds, the English doing nothing. Lagrange and Euler, Clairaut and D'Alembert, carried on the task, till Laplace consummated it in his great theory, which is to Newton's what Newton's was to that of Copernicus. It was Frenchmen, freethinkers to a man, who built up the new astronomy, while England was producing only eulogies of Newton's greatness. "No British name is ever mentioned in the list of mathematicians who followed Newton in his brilliant career and completed the magnificent edifice of which he laid the foundation." [806] "Scotland contributed her Maclaurin, but England no European name." [807] Throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century "there was hardly an individual in this country who possessed an intimate acquaintance with the methods of investigation which had conducted the foreign mathematicians to so many sublime results." [808] "The English mathematicians seem to have been so dazzled with the splendour of Newton's discoveries that they never conceived them capable of being extended or improved upon"; [809] and Newton's name was all the while vaunted, unwarrantably enough, as being on the side of Christian orthodoxy. Halley's great hypothesis of the motion of the solar system in space, put forward in 1718, borne out by Cassini and Le Monnier, was left to be established by Mayer of Göttingen. [810] There was nothing specially incidental to deism, then, in the non-development of the higher criticism in England after Collins and Parvish, or in the lull of critical speculation in the latter half of the century. It was part of a general social readjustment in which English attention was turned from the mental life to the physical, from intension of thought to extension of empire. Playfair (as cited, p. 39; Brewster, Memoirs of Newton, i, 348, note) puts forward the theory that the progress of the higher science in France was due to the "small pensions and great honours" bestowed on scientific men by the Academy of Sciences. The lack of such an institution in England he traces to "mercantile prejudices," without explaining these in their turn. They are to be understood as the consequences of the special expansion of commercial and industrial life in England in the eighteenth century, when France, on the contrary, losing India and North America, had her energies in a proportional degree thrown back on the life of the mind. French freethought, it will be observed, expanded with science, while in England there occurred, not a spontaneous reversion to orthodoxy any more than a surrender of the doctrine of Newton, but a general turning of attention in other directions. It is significant that the most important names in the literature of deism after 1740 are those of Hume and Smith, late products of the intellectual atmosphere of pre-industrial Scotland; of Bolingbroke, an aristocrat of the deistic generation, long an exile in France, who left his works to be published after his death; and of Gibbon, who also breathed the intellectual air of France. § 9 It has been commonly assumed that after Chubb and Morgan the deistic movement in England "decayed," or "passed into skepticism" with Hume; and that the decay was mainly owing to the persuasive effect of Bishop Butler's Analogy (1736). [811] This appears to be a complete misconception, arising out of the habit of looking to the mere succession of books without considering their vogue and the accompanying social conditions. Butler's book had very little influence till long after his death, [812] being indeed very ill-fitted to turn contemporary deists to Christianity. It does but develop one form of the skeptical argument for faith, as Berkeley had developed another; and that form of reasoning never does attain to anything better than a success of despair. The main argument being that natural religion is open to the same objections as revealed, on the score (1) of the inconsistency of Nature with divine benevolence, and (2) that we must be guided in opinion as in conduct by probability, a Mohammedan could as well use the theorem for the Koran as could a Christian for the Bible; and the argument against the justice of Nature tended logically to atheism. But the deists had left to them the resource of our modern theists--that of surmising a beneficence above human comprehension; and it is clear that if Butler made any converts they must have been of a very unenthusiastic kind. It is therefore safe to say with Pattison that "To whatever causes is to be attributed the decline of deism from 1750 onwards, the books polemically written against it cannot be reckoned among them." [813] On the other hand, even deists who were affected by the plea that the Bible need not be more consistent and satisfactory than Nature, could find refuge in Unitarianism, a creed which, as industriously propounded by Priestley [814] towards the end of the century, made a numerical progress out of all proportion to that of orthodoxy. The argument of William Law, [815] again, which insisted on the irreconcilability of the course of things with human reason, and called for an abject submission to revelation, could appeal only to minds already thus prostrate. Both his and Butler's methods, in fact, prepared the way for Hume. And in the year 1741, five years after the issue of the Analogy and seven before the issue of Hume's Essay on Miracles, we find the thesis of that essay tersely affirmed in a note to Book II of an anonymous translation (ascribed to T. Francklin) of Cicero's De Natura Deorum. The passage is worth comparing with Hume: "Hence we see what little credit ought to be paid to facts said to be done out of the ordinary course of nature. These miracles [cutting the whetstone, etc., related by Cicero, De Div. i, c. xvii] are well attested. They were recorded in the annals of a great people, believed by many learned and otherwise sagacious persons, and received as religious truths by the populace; but the testimonies of ancient records, the credulity of some learned men, and the implicit faith of the vulgar, can never prove that to have been, which is impossible in the nature of things ever to be." M. Tullius Cicero Of the Nature of the Gods ... with Notes, London, 1741, p. 85. It does not appear to have been noted that in regard to this as to another of his best-known theses, Hume develops a proposition laid down before him. What Hume did was to elaborate the skeptical argument with a power and fullness which forced attention once for all, alike in England and on the Continent. It is not to be supposed, however, that Hume's philosophy, insofar as it was strictly skeptical--that is, suspensory--drew away deists from their former attitude of confidence to one of absolute doubt. Nor did Hume ever aim at such a result. What he did was to countermine the mines of Berkeley and others, who, finding their supra-rational dogmas set aside by rationalism, deistic or atheistic, sought to discredit at once deistic and atheistic philosophies based on study of the external world, and to establish their creed anew on the basis of their subjective consciousness. As against that method, Hume showed the futility of all apriorism alike, destroying the sham skepticism of the Christian theists by forcing their method to its conclusions. If the universe was to be reduced to a mere contingent of consciousness, he calmly showed, consciousness itself was as easily reducible, on the same principles, to a mere series of states. Idealistic skepticism, having disposed of the universe, must make short work of the hypostatized process of perception. Hume, knowing that strict skepticism is practically null in life, counted on leaving the ground cleared for experiential rationalism. And he did, insofar as he was read. His essay, Of Miracles (with the rest of the Inquiries of 1748-1751, which recast his early Treatise of Human Nature, 1739), posits a principle valid against all supernaturalism whatever; while his Natural History of Religion (1757), though affirming deism, rejected the theory of a primordial monotheism, and laid the basis of the science of Comparative Hierology. [816] Finally, his posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) admit, though indirectly, the untenableness of deism, and fall back decisively upon the atheistic or agnostic position. [817] Like Descartes, he lacked the heroic fibre; but like him he recast philosophy for modern Europe; and its subsequent course is but a development of or a reaction against his work. § 10 It is remarkable that this development of opinion took place in that part of the British Islands where religious fanaticism had gone furthest, and speech and thought were socially least free. Freethought in Scotland before the middle of the seventeenth century can have existed only as a thing furtive and accursed; and though, as we have seen from the Religio Stoici of Sir George Mackenzie, unbelief had emerged in some abundance at or before the Restoration, only wealthy men could dare openly to avow their deism. [818] Early in 1697 the clergy had actually succeeded in getting a lad of eighteen, Thomas Aikenhead, hanged for professing deism in general, and in particular for calling the Old Testament "Ezra's Fables," ridiculing the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and expressing the hope and belief that Christianity would be extinct within a century. [819] The spirit of the prosecution may be gathered from the facts that the boy broke down and pleaded penitence, [820] and that the statute enacted the capital penalty only for obstinately persisting in the denial of any of the persons of the Trinity. [821] He had talked recklessly against the current creed among youths about his own age, one of whom was in Locke's opinion "the decoy who gave him the books and made him speak as he did." [822] It would appear that a victim was very much wanted; and Aikenhead was not allowed the help of a counsel. It is characteristic of the deadening effect of dogmatic religion on the heart that an act of such brutish cruelty elicited no cry of horror from any Christian writer. At this date the clergy were hounding on the Privy Council to new activity in trying witches; and all works of supposed heretical tendency imported from England were confiscated in the Edinburgh shops, among them being Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth. [823] Scottish intellectual development had in fact been arrested by the Reformation, so that, save for Napier's Logarithms (1614) and such a political treatise as Rutherford's Lex Rex (1644), the nation of Dunbar and Lyndsay produced for two centuries no secular literature of the least value, and not even a theology of any enduring interest. Deism, accordingly, seems in the latter half of the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth century to have made fully as much progress in Scotland as in England; and the bigoted clergy could offer little intellectual resistance. As early as 1696 the Scottish General Assembly, with theological candour, passed an Act "against the Atheistical opinions of the Deists." (Abridgment of the Acts of the General Assemblies, 1721, pp. 16, 76; Cunningham, Hist. of the Ch. of Scotland, ii, 313.) The opinions specified were "The denying of all revealed religion, the grand mysteries of the gospels ... the resurrection of the dead, and, in a word, the certainty and authority of Scripture revelation; as also, their asserting that there must be a mathematical evidence for each purpose ... and that Natural Light is sufficient to Salvation." All this is deism, pure and simple. But Sir W. Anstruther (a judge in the Court of Session), in the preface to his Essays Moral and Divine, Edinburgh, 1710, speaks of "the spreading contagion of atheism, which threatens the ruin of our excellent and holy religion." To atheism he devotes two essays; and neither in these nor in one on the Incarnation does he discuss deism, the arguments he handles being really atheistic. Scottish freethought would seem thus to have gone further than English at the period in question. As to the prevalence of deism, however, see the posthumous work of Prof. Halyburton, of St. Andrews, Natural Religion Insufficient (Edinburgh, 1714), Epist. of Recom.; pref. pp. 25, 27, and pp. 8, 15, 19, 23, 31, etc. Halyburton's treatise is interesting as showing the psychological state of argumentative Scotch orthodoxy in his day. He professes to repel the deistical argument throughout by reason; he follows Huet, and concurs with Berkeley in contending that mathematics involves anti-rational assumptions; and he takes entire satisfaction in the execution of the lad Aikenhead for deism. Yet in a second treatise, An Essay Concerning the Nature of Faith, he contends, as against Locke and the "Rationalists," that the power to believe in the word of God is "expressly deny'd to man in his natural estate," and is a supernatural gift. Thus the Calvinists, like Baxter, were at bottom absolutely insincere in their profession to act upon reason, while insolently charging insincerity on others. Even apart from deism there had arisen a widespread aversion to dogmatic theology and formal creeds, so that an apologist of 1715 speaks of his day as "a time when creeds and Confessions of Faith are so generally decried, and not only exposed to contempt, as useless inventions ... but are loaded by many writers of distinguished wit and learning with the most fatal and dangerous consequences." [824] This writer admits the intense bitterness of the theological disputes of the time; [825] and he speaks, on the other hand, of seeing "the most sacred mysteries of godliness impudently denied and impugned" by some, while the "distinguishing doctrines of Christianity are by others treacherously undermined, subtilized into an airy phantom, or at least doubted, if not disclaimed." [826] His references are probably to works published in England, notably those of Locke, Toland, Shaftesbury, and Collins, since in Scotland no such literature could then be published; but he doubtless has an eye to Scottish opinion. While, however, the rationalism of the time could not take book form, there are clear traces of its existence among educated men, even apart from the general complaints of the apologists. Thus the Professor of Medicine at Glasgow University in the opening years of the eighteenth century, John Johnston, was a known freethinker. [827] In the way of moderate or Christian rationalism, the teaching of the prosecuted Simson seems to have counted for something, seeing that Francis Hutcheson at least imbibed from him "liberal" views about future punishment and the salvation of the heathen, which gave much offence in the Presbyterian pulpit in Ulster. [828] And Hutcheson's later vindication of the ethical system of Shaftesbury in his Inquiry Concerning the Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725) must have tended to attract attention in Scotland to the Characteristics after his instalment as a Professor at Glasgow. In an English pamphlet, in 1732, he was satirized as introducing Shaftesbury's system into a University, [829] and it was from the Shaftesbury camp that the first literary expression of freethought in Scotland was sent forth. A young Scotch deist of that school, William Dudgeon, published in 1732 a dialogue entitled The State of the Moral World Considered, wherein the optimistic position was taken up with uncommon explicitness; and in 1739 the same writer printed A Catechism Founded upon Experience and Reason, prefaced by an Introductory Letter on Natural Religion, which takes a distinctly anti-clerical attitude. The Catechism answers to its title, save insofar as it is à priori in its theism and optimistic in its ethic, as is another work of its author in the same year, A View of the Necessarian or Best Scheme, defending the Shaftesburyan doctrine against the criticism of Crousaz on Pope's Essay. Still more heterodox is his little volume of Philosophical Letters Concerning the Being and Attributes of God (1737), where the doctrine goes far towards pantheism. All this propaganda seems to have elicited only one printed reply--an attack on his first treatise in 1732. In the letter prefaced to his Catechism, however, he tells that "the bare suspicion of my not believing the opinions in fashion in our country hath already caused me sufficient trouble." [830] His case had in fact been raised in the Church courts, the proceedings going through many stages in the years 1732-36; but in the end no decision was taken, [831] and the special stress of his rationalism in 1739 doubtless owes something alike to the prosecution and to its collapse. Despite such hostility, he must privately have had fair support. [832] The prosecution of Hutcheson before the Glasgow Presbytery in 1738 reveals vividly the theological temper of the time. He was indicted for teaching to his students "the following two false and dangerous doctrines: first, that the standard of moral goodness was the promotion of the happiness of others; and, second, that we could have a knowledge of good and evil without and prior to a knowledge of God." [833] There has been a natural disposition on the orthodox side to suppress the fact that such teachings were ever ecclesiastically denounced as false, dangerous, and irreligious; and the prosecution seems to have had no effect beyond intensifying the devotion of Hutcheson's students. Among them was Adam Smith, of whom it has justly been said that, "if he was any man's disciple, he was Hutcheson's," inasmuch as he derived from his teacher the bases alike of his moral and political philosophy and of his deistic optimism. [834] Another prosecution soon afterwards showed that the new influences were vitally affecting thought within the Church itself. Hutcheson's friend Leechman, whom he and his party contrived to elect as professor of theology in Glasgow University, was in turn proceeded against (1743-44) for a sermon on Prayer, which Hutcheson and his sympathizers pronounced "noble," [835] but which "resolved the efficacy of prayer into its reflex influence on the mind of the worshipper" [836]--a theorem which has chronically made its appearance in the Scottish Church ever since, still ranking as a heresy, after having brought a clerical prosecution in the last century on at least one divine, Prof. William Knight, and rousing a scandal against another, the late Dr. Robert Wallace. [837] Leechman in turn held his ground, and later became Principal of his University; but still the orthodox in Scotland fought bitterly against every semblance of rationalism. Even the anti-deistic essays of Lord-President Forbes of Culloden, head of the Court of Session, when collected [838] and posthumously published, were offensive to the Church as laying undue stress on reason; as accepting the heterodox Biblical theories of Dr. John Hutchinson; and as making the awkward admission that "the freethinkers, with all their perversity, generally are sensible of the social duties, and act up to them better than others do who in other respects think more justly than they." [839] Such an utterance from such a dignitary told of a profound change; and, largely through the influence of Hutcheson and Leechman on a generation of students, the educated Scotland of the latter half of the eighteenth century was in large part either "Moderate" or deistic. After generations of barren controversy, [840] the very aridity of the Presbyterian life intensified the recoil among the educated classes to philosophical and historical interests, leading to the performances of Hume, Smith, Robertson, Millar, Ferguson, and yet others, all rationalists in method and sociologists in their interests. Of these, Millar, one of Smith's favourite pupils, and a table-talker of "magical vivacity," [841] was known to be rationalistic in a high degree; [842] while Smith and Ferguson were certainly deists, as was Henry Home (the judge, Lord Kames), who had the distinction of being attacked along with his friend Hume in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1755-56. Home wrote expressly to controvert Hume, alike as to utilitarianism and the idea of causation; but his book, Essays on Morality and Natural Religion (published anonymously, 1751), handled the thorny question of free-will in such fashion as to give no less offence than Hume had done; and the orthodox bracketed him with the subject of his criticism. His doctrine was indeed singular, its purport being that there can be no free-will, but that the deity has for wise purposes implanted in men the feeling that their wills are free. The fact of his having been made a judge of the Court of Session since writing his book had probably something to do with the rejection of the whole subject by the General Assembly, and afterwards by the Edinburgh Presbytery; but there had evidently arisen a certain diffidence in the Church, which would be assiduously promoted by "moderates" such as Principal Robertson, the historian. It is noteworthy that, while Home and Hume thus escaped, the other Home, John, who wrote the then admired tragedy of Douglas, was soon after forced to resign his position as a minister of the Church for that authorship, deism having apparently more friends in the fold than drama. [843] While the theatre was thus being treated as a place of sin, many of the churches in Scotland were the scenes of repeated Sunday riots. A new manner of psalm-singing had been introduced, and it frequently happened that the congregations divided into two parties, each singing in its own way, till they came to blows. According to one of Hume's biographers, unbelievers were at this period wont to go to church to see the fun. [844] Naturally orthodoxy did not gain ground. In the case of Adam Smith we have one of the leading instances of the divorce between culture and creed in the Scotland of that age. His intellectual tendencies, primed by Hutcheson, were already revealing themselves when, seeking for something worth study in the unstudious Oxford of his day, he was found by some suspicious supervisor reading Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. The book was seized and the student scolded. [845] When, in 1751, he became Professor of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow University, he aroused orthodox comment by abandoning the Sunday class on Christian Evidences set up by Hutcheson, and still further, it is said, by petitioning the Senatus to be allowed to be relieved of the duty of opening his class with prayer. [846] The permission was not given; and the compulsory prayers were "thought to savour strongly of natural religion"; while the lectures on Natural Theology, which were part of the work of the chair, were said to lead "presumptuous striplings" to hold that "the great truths of theology, together with the duties which man owes to God and his neighbours, may be discovered by the light of nature without any special revelation." [847] Smith was thus well founded in rationalism before he became personally acquainted with Voltaire and the other French freethinkers; and the pious contemporary who deplores his associations avows that neither before nor after his French tour was his religious creed ever "properly ascertained." [848] It is clear, however, that it steadily developed in a rationalistic direction. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) the prevailing vein of theistic optimism is sufficiently uncritical; but even there there emerges an apparent doubt on the doctrine of a future state, and positive hostility to certain ecclesiastical forms of it. [849] In the sixth edition, which he prepared for the press in 1790, he deleted the passage which pronounced the doctrine of the Atonement to be in harmony with natural ethics. [850] But most noteworthy of all is his handling of the question of religious establishments in the Wealth of Nations. [851] It is so completely naturalistic that only the habit of taking the Christian religion for granted could make men miss seeing that its account of the conditions of the rise of new cults applied to that in its origin no less than to the rise of any of its sects. As a whole, the argument might form part of Gibbon's fifteenth chapter. And even allowing for the slowness of the average believer to see the application of a general sociological law to his own system, there must be inferred a great change in the intellectual climate of Scottish life before we can account for Smith's general popularity at home as well as abroad after his handling of "enthusiasm and superstition" in the Wealth of Nations. The fact stands out that the two most eminent thinkers in Scotland in the latter half of the eighteenth century were non-Christians, [852] and that their most intellectual associates were in general sympathy with them. § 11 In Ireland, at least in Dublin, during the earlier part of the century, there occurred, on a smaller scale, a similar movement of rationalism, also largely associated with Shaftesbury. In Dublin towards the close of the seventeenth century we have seen Molyneux, the friend and correspondent of Locke, interested in "freethought," albeit much scared by the imprudence of Toland. At the same period there germinated a growth of Unitarianism, which was even more fiercely persecuted than that of Toland's deism. The Rev. Thomas Emlyn, an Englishman, co-pastor of the Protestant Dissenting Congregation of Wood Street (now Strand Street), Dublin, was found by a Presbyterian and a Baptist to be heretical on the subject of the Trinity, and was indicted in 1702 for blasphemy. He was sentenced to two years' imprisonment and a fine of £1,000, which was partly commuted on his release. He protested that South and Sherlock and other writers on the Trinitarian controversy might have been as justly prosecuted as he; but Irish Protestant orthodoxy was of a keener scent than English, and Emlyn was fain, when released, to return to his native land. [853] His colleague Boyse, like many other Churchmen, wished that the unhappy trinitarian controversy "were buried in silence," but was careful to conform doctrinally. More advanced thinkers had double reason to be reticent. As usual, however, persecution provoked the growth it sought to stifle; and after the passing of the Irish Toleration Act of 1719, a more liberal measure than the English, there developed in Ulster, and even in Dublin, a Unitarian movement akin to that proceeding in England. [854] In the next generation we find in the same city a coterie of Shaftesburyans, centring around Lord Molesworth, the friend of Hutcheson, a man of affairs devoted to intellectual interests. It was within a few years of his meeting Molesworth that Hutcheson produced his Inquiry, championing Shaftesbury's ideas; [855] and other literary men were similarly influenced. It is even suggested that Hutcheson's clerical friend Synge, whom we have seen [856] in 1713 attempting a ratiocinative answer to the unbelief he declared to be abundant around him, was not only influenced by Shaftesbury through Molesworth, but latterly "avoided publication lest his opinions should prejudice his career in the Church." [857] After the death of Molesworth, in 1725, the movement he set up seems to have languished; [858] but, as we have seen, there were among the Irish bishops men given to philosophic controversy, and the influence of Berkeley cannot have been wholly obscurantist. When in 1756 we read of the Arian Bishop Clayton [859] proposing in the Irish House of Lords to drop the Nicene and Athanasian creeds, we realize that in Ireland thought was far from stagnant. The heretic bishop, however, died (February, 1758) just as he was about to be prosecuted for the anti-Athanasian heresies of his last book; and thenceforth Ireland plays no noticeable part in the development of rationalism, political interests soon taking the place of religious, with the result that orthodoxy recovered ground. It cannot be doubted that the spectacle of religious wickedness presented by the operation of the odious penal laws against Catholics, and the temper of the Protestant Ascendancy party in religious matters, had bred rational skepticism in Ireland in the usual way. Molesworth stands out in Irish history as a founder of a new and saner patriotism; and his doctrines would specially appeal to men of a secular and critical way of thinking. Heretical bishops imply heretical laymen. But the environment was unpropitious to dispassionate thinking. The very relaxation of the Penal Code favoured a reversion to "moderate" orthodoxy; and the new political strifes of the last quarter of the century, destined as they were to be reopened in the next, determined the course of Irish culture in another way. § 12 In England, meanwhile, there was beginning the redistribution of energies which can be seen to have prepared for the intellectual and political reaction of the end of the century. There had been no such victory of faith as is supposed to have been wrought by the forensic theorem of Butler. An orthodox German observer, making a close inquest about 1750, cites the British Magazine as stating in 1749 that half the educated people were then deists; and he, after full inquiry, agrees. [860] In the same year, Richardson speaks tragically in the Postscriptum to Clarissa of seeing "skepticism and infidelity openly avowed, and even endeavoured to be propagated from the press; the great doctrines of the gospel brought into question"; and he describes himself as "seeking to steal in with a disguised plea for religion." Instead of being destroyed by the clerical defence, the deistic movement had really penetrated the Church, which was become as rationalistic in its methods as its function would permit, and the educated classes, which had arrived at a state of compromise. Pope, the chief poet of the preceding generation, had been visibly deistic in his thinking; as Dryden had inferribly been before him; and to such literary prestige was added the prestige of scholarship. The academic Conyers Middleton, whose Letter from Rome had told so heavily against Christianity in exposing the pagan derivations of much of Catholicism, and who had further damaged the doctrine of inspiration in his anonymous Letter to Dr. Waterland (1731), while professing to refute Tindal, had carried to yet further lengths his service to the critical spirit. In his famous Free Inquiry into the miracles of post-apostolic Christianity (1749), again professing to strike at Rome, he had laid the foundations of a new structure of comparative criticism, and had given permanent grounds for rejecting the miracles of the sacred books. Middleton's book appeared a year after Hume's essay Of Miracles, and it made out no such philosophic case as Hume's against the concept of miracle; but it created at once, by its literary brilliance and its cogent argument, a sensation such as had thus far been made neither by Hume's philosophic argument nor by Francklin's anticipation of that. [861] Middleton had duly safeguarded himself by positing the certainty of the gospel miracles and of those wrought by the Apostles, on the old principle [862] that prodigies were divinely arranged so far forth as was necessary to establish Christianity, but no further. "The history of the gospel," he writes, "I hope may be true, though the history of the Church be fabulous." [863] But his argument against post-Apostolic miracles is so strictly naturalistic that no vigilant reader could fail to realize its fuller bearing upon all miracles whatsoever. With Hume and Francklin, he insisted that facts incredible in themselves could not be established by any amount or kind of testimony; and he suggested no measure of comparative credibility as between the two orders of miracle. With the deists in general, he argued that knowledge "either of the ways or will of the Creator" was to be had only through study of "that revelation which he made of himself from the beginning in the beautiful fabric of this visible world." [864] An antagonist accordingly wrote that his theses were: "First, that there were no miracles wrought in the primitive Church; Secondly, that all the primitive fathers were fools or knaves, and most of them both one and the other. And it is easy to observe, the whole tenor of your argument tends to prove, Thirdly, that no miracles were wrought by Christ or his apostles; and Fourthly, that these too were fools or knaves, or both." [865] A more temperate opponent pressed the same point in less explosive language. Citing Middleton's demand for an inductive method, this critic asks with much point: "What does he mean by 'deserting the path of Nature and experience,' but giving in to the belief of any miracles, and acknowledging the reality of events contrary to the known effects of the established Laws of Nature?" [866] No other answer was seriously possible. In the very act of ostentatiously terming Tindal an "infidel," Middleton describes an answer made to him by the apologist Chapman as a sample of a kind of writing which did "more hurt and discredit" to Christianity "than all the attacks of its open adversaries." [867] In support of the miracles of the gospel and the apostolic history he offers merely conventional pleas: against the miracles related by the Fathers he brings to bear an incessant battery of destructive criticism. We may sum up that by the middle of the eighteenth century the essentials of the Christian creed, openly challenged for a generation by avowed deists, were abandoned by not a few scholars within the pale of the Church, of whom Middleton was merely the least reticent. After his death was published his Vindication of the Inquiry (1751); and in his collected works (1752) was included his Reflections on the Variations or Inconsistencies which are found among the Four Evangelists, wherein it is demonstrated that "the belief of the inspiration and absolute infallibility of the evangelists seems to be more absurd than even that of transubstantiation itself." [868] The main grounds of orthodoxy were thus put in doubt in the name of a critical orthodoxy. In short, the deistic movement had done what it lay in it to do. The old evangelical or pietistic view of life was discredited among instructed people, and in this sense it was Christianity that had "decayed." Its later recovery was economic, not intellectual. Thus Skelton writes in 1751 that "our modern apologists for Christianity often defend it on deistical principles" (Deism Revealed, pref. p. xii. Cp. vol. ii, pp. 234, 237). See also Sir Leslie Stephen as cited above, p. 149, note; and Gostwick, German Culture and Christianity, 1882, pp. 33-36. An interesting instance of liberalizing orthodoxy is furnished by the Rev. Arthur Ashley Sykes, who contributed many volumes to the general deistic discussion, some of them anonymously. In the preface to his Essay on the Truth of the Christian Religion (1732; 2nd ed. enlarged, 1755) Sykes remarks that "since ... systematical opinions have been received and embraced in such a manner that it has not been safe to contradict them, the burden of vindicating Christianity has been very much increased. Its friends have been much embarrassed through fear of speaking against local truths; and its adversaries have so successfully attacked those weaknesses that Christianity itself has been deemed indefensible, when in reality the follies of Christians alone have been so." Were Christians left to the simple doctrines of Christ and the Apostles, he contends, Infidelity could make no converts. And at the close of the book he writes: "Would to God that Christians would be content with the plainness and simplicity of the gospel.... That they would not vend under the name of evangelical truth the absurd and contradictory schemes of ignorant or wicked men! That they would part with that load of rubbish which makes thinking men almost sink under the weight, and gives too great a handle for Infidelity!" Such writing could not give satisfaction to the ecclesiastical authorities; and as little could Sykes's remarkable admission (The Principles and Connection of Natural and Revealed Religion, 1740, p. 242): "When the advantages of revelation are to be specified, I cannot conceive that it should be maintained as necessary to fix a rule of morality. For what one principle of morality is there which the heathen moralists had not asserted or maintained? Before ever any revelation is offered to mankind they are supposed to be so well acquainted with moral truths as from them to judge of the truth of the revelation itself." Again he writes:-- "Nor can revelation be necessary to ascertain religion. For religion consisting in nothing but doing our duties from a sense of the being of God, revelation is not necessary to this end, unless it be said that we cannot know that there is a God, and what our duties are, without it. Reason will teach us that there is a God ... that we are to be just and charitable to our neighbours; that we are to be temperate and sober in ourselves" (id. p. 244). This is simple Shaftesburyan deism, and all that the apologist goes on to contend for is that revelation "contains motives and reasons for the practice of what is right, more and different from what natural reason without this help can suggest." He seems, however, to have believed in miracles, though an anonymous Essay on the Nature, Design, and Origin of Sacrifices (1748) which is ascribed to him quietly undermines the whole evangelical doctrine. Throughout, he is remarkable for the amenity of his tone towards "infidels." Balguy, a man of less ability, is notably latitudinarian in his theology. In the very act of criticizing the deists, he complains of Locke's arbitrariness in deriving morality from the will of God. Religion, he argues, is so derived, but morality is inherent in the whole nature of things, and is the same for God and men. This position, common to the school of Clarke, is at bottom that of Shaftesbury and the Naturalists. All that Balguy says for religion is that a doctrine of rewards and punishments is necessary to stimulate the average moral sense; and that the Christian story of the condescension of Omnipotence in coming to earth and suffering misery for man's sake ought to overwhelm the imagination! (See A Letter to a Deist, 2nd ed. 1730, pp. 5, 14, 15, 31; Foundation of Moral Goodness, pt. ii, 1729, p. 41 sq.) The next intellectual step in natural course would have been a revision of the deistic assumptions, insofar, that is, as certain positive assumptions were common to the deists. But, as we have seen, certain fresh issues were raised as among the deists themselves. In addition to those above noted, there was the profoundly important one as to ethics. Shaftesbury, who rejected the religious basis, held a creed of optimism; and this optimism was assailed by Mandeville, who in consequence was opposed as warmly by the deist Hutcheson and others as by Law and Berkeley. To grapple with this problem, and with the underlying cosmic problem, there was needed at least as much general mental activity as went to the antecedent discussion; and the main activity of the nation was now being otherwise directed. The negative process, the impeachment of Christian supernaturalism, had been accomplished so far as the current arguments went. Toland and Collins had fought the battle of free discussion, forcing ratiocination on the Church; Collins had shaken the creed of prophecy; Shaftesbury had impugned the religious conception of morals; and Mandeville had done so more profoundly, laying the foundations of scientific utilitarianism. [869] So effective had been the utilitarian propaganda in general that the orthodox Brown (author of the once famous Estimate of the life of his countrymen), in his criticism of Shaftesbury (1751), wrote as a pure utilitarian against an inconsistent one, and defended Christianity on strictly utilitarian lines. Woolston, following up Collins, had shaken the faith in New Testament miracles; Middleton had done it afresh with all the decorum that Woolston lacked; and Hume had laid down with masterly clearness the philosophic principle which rebuts all attempts to prove miracles as such. [870] Tindal had clinched the case for "natural" theism as against revelationism; and the later deists, notably Morgan, had to some extent combined these results. [871] This literature was generally distributed; and so far the case had been thrashed out. § 13 To carry intellectual progress much further there was needed a general movement of scientific study and a reform in education. The translation of La Mettrie's Man a Machine (1749) [872] found a public no better prepared for the problems he raised than that addressed by Strutt eighteen years before; and the reply of Luzac, Man More than a Machine, in the preface to which the translator (1752) declared that "irreligion and infidelity overspread the land," probably satisfied what appetite there was for such a discussion. There had begun a change in the prevailing mental life, a diversion of interest from ideas as such to political and mercantile interests. The middle and latter part of the eighteenth century is the period of the rise of (1) the new machine industries, and (2) the new imperialistic policy of Chatham. [873] Both alike withdrew men from problems of mere belief, whether theological or scientific. [874] That the reaction was not one of mere fatigue over deism we have already seen. It was a general diversion of energy, analogous to what had previously taken place in France in the reign of Louis XIV. As the poet Gray, himself orthodox, put the case in 1754, "the mode of freethinking has given place to the mode of not thinking at all." [875] In Hume's opinion the general pitch of national intelligence south of the Tweed was lowered. [876] This state of things of course was favourable to religious revival; but what took place was rather a new growth of emotional pietism in the new industrial masses (the population being now on a rapid increase), under the ministry of the Wesleys and Whitefield, and a further growth of similar religion in the new provincial middle-class that grew up on the industrial basis. The universities all the while were at the lowest ebb of culture, but officially rabid against philosophic freethinking. [877] It would be a great mistake, however, to suppose that all this meant a dying out of deism among the educated classes. The statement of Goldsmith, about 1760, that deists in general "have been driven into a confession of the necessity of revelation, or an open avowal of atheism," [878] is not to be taken seriously. Goldsmith, whose own orthodoxy is very doubtful, had a whimsical theory that skepticism, though it might not injure morals, has a "manifest tendency to subvert the literary merits" of any country; [879] and argued accordingly. Deism, remaining fashionable, did but fall partly into the background of living interests, the more concrete issues of politics and the new imaginative literature occupying the foreground. It was early in the reign of George III that Sir William Blackstone, having had the curiosity to listen in succession to the preaching of every clergyman in London, "did not hear a single discourse which had more Christianity in it than the writings of Cicero," and declared that it would have been impossible for him to discover from what he heard whether the preacher were a follower of Confucius, of Mahomet, or of Christ. [880] When the Church was thus deistic, the educated laity can have been no less so. The literary status of deism after 1750 was really higher than ever. It was now represented by Hume; by Adam Smith (Moral Sentiments, 1759); by the scholarship of Conyers Middleton; and by the posthumous works (1752-54) of Lord Bolingbroke, who, albeit more of a debater than a thinker, debated often with masterly skill, in a style unmatched for harmony and energetic grace, which had already won him a great literary prestige, though the visible insincerity of his character, and the habit of browbeating, always countervailed his charm. His influence, commonly belittled, was much greater than writers like Johnson would admit; and it went deep. Voltaire, who had been his intimate, tells [881] that he had known some young pupils of Bolingbroke who altogether denied the historic actuality of the Gospel Jesus--a stretch of criticism beyond the assimilative power of that age. His motive to write for posthumous publication, however, seems rather to have been the venting of his tumultuous feelings than any philosophic purpose. An overweening deist, he is yet at much pains to disparage the à priori argument for deism, bestowing some of his most violent epithets on Dr. Samuel Clarke, who seems to have exasperated him in politics. But his castigation of "divines" is tolerably impartial on that side; and he is largely concerned to deprive them of grounds for their functions, though he finally insists that churches are necessary for purposes of public moral teaching. His own teachings represent an effort to rationalize deism. The God whom he affirms is to be conceived or described only as omnipotent and omniscient (or all-wise), not as good or benevolent any more than as vindictive. Thus he had assimilated part of the Spinozistic and the atheistic case against anthropomorphism, while still using anthropomorphic language on the score that "we must speak of God after the manner of men." Beyond this point he compromises to the extent of denying special while admitting collective or social providences; though he is positive in his denial of the actuality or the moral need of a future state. As to morals he takes the ordinary deistic line, putting the innate "law of nature" as the sufficient and only revelation by the deity to his creatures. On the basis of that inner testimony he rejects the Old Testament as utterly unworthy of deity, but endorses the universal morality found in the gospels, while rejecting their theology. It was very much the deism of Voltaire, save that it made more concessions to anti-theistic logic. The weak side of Bolingbroke's polemic was its inconsistency--a flaw deriving from his character. In the spirit of a partisan debater he threw out at any point any criticism that appeared for the moment plausible; and, having no scientific basis or saving rectitude, would elsewhere take up another and a contradictory position. Careful antagonists could thus discredit him by mere collation of his own utterances. [882] But, the enemy being no more consistent than he, his influence was not seriously affected in the world of ordinary readers; and much of his attack on "divines," on dogmas, and on Old Testament morality must have appealed to many, thus carrying on the discredit of orthodoxy in general. Leland devoted to him an entire volume of his View of the Principal Deistical Writers, and in all bestows more space upon him than on all the others together--a sufficient indication of his vogue. In his lifetime, however, Bolingbroke had been extremely careful to avoid compromising himself. Mr. Arthur Hassall, in his generally excellent monograph on Bolingbroke (Statesmen Series, 1889, p. 226), writes, in answer to the attack of Johnson, that "Bolingbroke, during his lifetime, had never scrupled to publish criticisms, remarkable for their freedom, on religious subjects." I cannot gather to what he refers; and Mr. Walter Sichel, in his copious biography (2 vols. 1901-1902), indicates no such publications. The Letters on the Study and Use of History, which contain (Lett. iii, sect. 2) a skeptical discussion of the Pentateuch as history, though written in 1735-36, were only posthumously published, in 1752. The Examen Important de Milord Bolingbroke, produced by Voltaire in 1767, but dated 1736, is Voltaire's own work, based on Bolingbroke. In his letter to Swift of September 12, 1724 (Swift's Works, Scott's ed. 1824, xvi, 448-49), Bolingbroke angrily repudiates the title of esprit fort, declaring, in the very temper in which pious posterity has aspersed himself, that "such are the pests of society, because they endeavour to loosen the bands of it.... I therefore not only disown, but I detest, this character." In this letter he even affects to believe in "the truth of the divine revelation of Christianity." He began to write his essays, it is true, before his withdrawal to France in 1735, but with no intention of speedily publishing them. In his Letter to Mr. Pope (published with the Letter to Wyndham, 1753), p. 481, he writes: "I have been a martyr of faction in politics, and have no vocation to be so in philosophy." Cp. pp. 485-86. It is thus a complete blunder on the part of Bagehot to say (Literary Studies, Hutton's ed. iii, 137) that Butler's Analogy, published in 1736, was "designed as a confutation of Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke." It is even said (Warton, Essay on Pope, 4th ed. ii, 294-95) that Pope did not know Bolingbroke's real opinions; but Pope's untruthfulness was such as to discredit such a statement. Cp. Bolingbroke's Letter as cited, p. 521, and his Philosophical Works, 8vo-ed. 1754, ii,