A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 / Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumes

by J. M. Robertson

Section 1.—Popular Propaganda and Culture

1. If any one circumstance more than another differentiates the life of to-day from that of older civilizations, or from that of previous centuries of the modern era, it is the diffusion of rationalistic views among the “common people.” In no other era is to be found the phenomenon of widespread critical skepticism among the labouring masses: in all previous ages, though chronic complaint is made of some unbelief among the uneducated, the constant and abject ignorance of the mass of the people has been the sure foothold of superstitious systems. Within the last century the area of the recognizably civilized world has grown far vaster; and in the immense populations that have thus arisen there is a relative degree of enlightenment, coupled with a degree of political power never before attained. Merely to survey, then, the broad movement of popular culture in the period in question will yield a useful notion of the dynamic change in the balance of thought in modern times, and will make more intelligible the special aspects of the culture process.

This vital change in the distribution of knowledge is largely to be attributed to the written and spoken teaching of a line of men who made popular enlightenment their great aim. Their leading type among the English-speaking races is Thomas Paine, whom we have seen combining a gospel of democracy with a gospel of critical reason in the midst of the French Revolution. Never before had rationalism been made widely popular. The English and French deists had written for the middle and upper classes. Peter Annet was practically the first who sought to reach the multitude; and his punishment expressed the special resentment aroused in the governing classes by such a policy. Of all the English freethinkers of the earlier deistical period he alone was selected for reprinting by the propagandists of the Paine period. Paine was to Annet, however, as a cannon to a musket, and through the democratic ferment of his day he won an audience a hundredfold wider than Annet could have dreamt of reaching. The anger of the governing classes, in a time of anti-democratic panic, was proportional. Paine would have been at least imprisoned for his Rights of Man had he not fled from England in time; and the sale of all his books was furiously prohibited and ferociously punished. Yet they circulated everywhere, even in Protestant Ireland,[12] hitherto affected only under the surface of upper-class life by deism. The circulation of Bishop Watson’s Apology in reply only served to spread the contagion, as it brought the issues before multitudes who would not otherwise have heard of them.[13] All the while, direct propaganda was carried on by translations and reprints as well as by fresh English tractates. Diderot’s Thoughts on Religion, and Fréret’s Letter from Thrasybulus to Leucippus, seem to have been great favourites among the Painites, as was Elihu Palmer’s Principles of Nature; and Volney’s Ruins of Empires had a large vogue. Condorcet’s Esquisse had been promptly translated in 1795; the translation of d’Holbach’s System of Nature reached a third edition in 1817;[14] that of Raynal’s History had been reprinted in 1804; and that of Helvétius On the Mind in 1810; while an English abridgment of Bayle in four volumes, on freethinking lines, appeared in 1826.

2. Meantime, new writers arose to carry into fuller detail the attacks of Paine, sharpening their weapons on those of the more scholarly French deists. A Life of Jesus, including his Apocryphal History,[15] was published in 1818, with such astute avoidance of all comment that it escaped prosecution. Others, taking a more daring course, fared accordingly. George Houston translated the Ecce Homo of d’Holbach, first publishing it at Edinburgh in 1799, and reprinting it in London in 1813. For the second issue he was prosecuted, fined £200, and imprisoned for two years in Newgate. Robert Wedderburn, a mulatto calling himself “the Rev.,” in reality a superannuated journeyman tailor who officiated in Hopkins Street Unitarian Chapel, London, was in 1820 sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in Dorchester Jail for a “blasphemous libel” contained in one of his pulpit discourses. His Letters to the Rev. Solomon Herschell (the Jewish Chief Rabbi) and to the Archbishop of Canterbury show a happy vein of orderly irony and not a little learning, despite his profession of apostolic ignorance; and at the trial the judge admitted his defence to be “exceedingly well drawn up.” His publications naturally received a new impetus, and passed to a more drastic order of mockery.

3. As the years went on, the persecution in England grew still fiercer; but it was met with a stubborn hardihood which wore out even the bitter malice of piety. One of the worst features of the religious crusade was that it affected to attack not unbelief but “vice,” such being the plea on which Wilberforce and others prosecuted, during a period of more than twenty years, the publishers and booksellers who issued the works of Paine.[16] But even that dissembling device did not ultimately avail. A name not to be forgotten by those who value obscure service to human freedom is that of Richard Carlile, who between 1819 and 1835 underwent nine years’ imprisonment in his unyielding struggle for the freedom of the Press, of thought, and of speech.[17] John Clarke, an ex-Methodist, became one of Carlile’s shopmen, was tried in 1824 for selling one of his publications, and “after a spirited defence, in which he read many of the worst passages of the Bible,” was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, and to find securities for good behaviour during life. The latter disability he effectively anticipated by writing, while in prison, A Critical Review of the Life, Character, and Miracles of Jesus, wherein Christian feelings were treated as Christians had treated the feelings of freethinkers, with a much more destructive result. Published first, strangely enough, in the Newgate Magazine, it was republished in 1825 and 1839, with impunity. Thus did a brutal bigotry bring upon itself ever a deadlier retaliation, till it sickened of the contest. Those who threw up the struggle on the orthodox side declaimed as before about the tone of the unbeliever’s attack, failing to read the plain lesson that, while noisy fanaticism, doing its own worst and vilest, deterred from utterance all the gentler and more sympathetic spirits on the side of reason, the work of reason could be done only by the harder natures, which gave back blow for blow and insult for insult, rejoicing in the encounter. Thus championed, freethought could not be crushed. The propagandist and publishing work done by Carlile was carried on diversely by such free lances as Robert Taylor (ex-clergyman, author of the Diegesis, 1829, and The Devil’s Pulpit, 1830), Charles Southwell (1814–1860), and William Hone,[18] who ultimately became an independent preacher. Southwell, a disciple of Robert Owen, who edited The Oracle of Reason, was imprisoned for a year in 1840 for publishing in that journal an article entitled “The Jew Book”; and was succeeded in the editorship by George Jacob Holyoake (1817–1906), another Owenite missionary, who met a similar sentence; whereafter George Adams and his wife, who continued to publish the journal, were imprisoned in turn. Matilda Roalfe and Mrs. Emma Martin about the same period underwent imprisonment for like causes.[19] In this fashion, by the steady courage of a much-enduring band of men and women, was set on foot a systematic Secularist propaganda—the name having relation to the term “Secularism,” coined by Holyoake.

4. In this evolution political activities played an important part. Henry Hetherington (1792–1849), the strenuous democrat who in 1830 began the trade union movement, and so became the founder of Chartism, fought for the right of publication in matters of freethought as in politics. After undergoing two imprisonments of six months each (1832), and carrying on for three and a half years the struggle for an untaxed Press, which ended in his victory (1834), he was in 1840 indicted for publishing Haslam’s Letters to the Clergy of all Denominations, a freethinking criticism of Old Testament morality. He defended himself so ably that Lord Denman, the judge, confessed to have “listened with feelings of great interest and sentiments of respect too”; and Justice Talfourd later spoke of the defence as marked by “great propriety and talent.” Nevertheless, he was punished by four months’ imprisonment.[20] In the following year, on the advice of Francis Place, he brought a test prosecution for blasphemy against Moxon, the poet-publisher, for issuing Shelley’s complete works, including Queen Mab. Talfourd, then Serjeant, defended Moxon, and pleaded that there “must be some alteration of the law, or some restriction of the right to put it in action”; but the jury were impartial enough to find the publisher guilty, though he received no punishment.[21] Among other works published by Hetherington was one entitled A Hunt after the Devil, “by Dr. P. Y.” (really by Lieutenant Lecount), in which the story of Noah’s ark was subjected to a destructive criticism.[22]

5. Holyoake had been a missionary and martyr in the movement of Socialism set up by Robert Owen, whose teaching, essentially scientific on its psychological or philosophical side, was the first effort to give systematic effect to democratic ideals by organizing industry. It was in the discussions of the “Association of all Classes of all Nations,” formed by Owen in 1835, that the word “Socialism” first became current.[23] Owen was a freethinker in all things;[24] and his whole movement was so penetrated by an anti-theological spirit that the clergy as a rule became its bitter enemies, though such publicists as Macaulay and John Mill also combined with them in scouting it on political and economic grounds.[25] Up till the middle of 1817 he had on his side a large body of “respectable” and highly-placed philanthropists, his notable success in his own social and commercial undertakings being his main recommendation. His early Essays on the Formation of Character, indeed, were sufficient to reveal his heterodoxy; but not until, at his memorable public meeting on August 21, 1817, he began to expatiate on “the gross errors that have been combined with the fundamental notions of every religion that has hitherto been taught to men”[26] did he rank as an aggressive freethinker. It was in his own view the turning-point of his life. He was not prosecuted; though Brougham declared that if any politician had said half as much he would have been “burned alive”; but the alienation of “moderate” opinion at once began; and Owen, always more fervid than prudent, never recovered his influence among the upper classes. Nonetheless, “his secularistic teaching gained such influence among the working classes as to give occasion for the statement in the Westminster Review (1839) that his principles were the actual creed of a great portion of them.”[27]

Owen’s polemic method—if it could properly be so called—was not so much a criticism of dogma as a calm impeachment of religion in a spirit of philanthropy. No reformer was ever more entirely free from the spirit of wrath: on this side Owen towers above comparison. “There is no place found in him for scorn or indignation. He cannot bring himself to speak or think evil of any man. He carried out in his daily life his own teaching that man is not the proper object of praise or blame. Throughout his numerous works there is hardly a sentence of indignation—of personal denunciation never. He loves the sinner, and can hardly bring himself to hate the sin.”[28] He had come by his rationalism through the influence rather of Rousseau than of Voltaire; and he had assimilated the philosophic doctrine of determinism—of all ideals the most difficult to realize in conduct—with a thoroughness of which the flawed Rousseau was incapable. There was thus presented to the world the curious case of a man who on the side of character carried rationalism to the perfection of ideal “saintliness,” while in the general application of rational thought to concrete problems he was virtually unteachable. For an absolute and immovable conviction in his own practical rightness was in Owen as essential a constituent as his absolute benevolence.[29] These were the two poles of his personality. He was, in short, a fair embodiment of the ideal formed by many people—doctrine and dogma apart—of the Gospel Jesus. And most Christians accordingly shunned and feared or hated him.

Such a personality was evidently a formidable force as against the reinforced English orthodoxy of the first generation of the nineteenth century. The nature of Owen’s propaganda as against religion may be best sampled from his lecture, “The New Religion: or, Religion founded on the Immutable Laws of the Universe, contrasted with all Religions founded on Human Testimony,” delivered at the London Tavern on October 20, 1830:[30]—

“Under the arrangements which have hitherto existed for educating and governing man, four general characters have been produced among the human race. These four characters appear to be formed, under the past and present arrangements of society, from four different original organizations at birth....

“No. 1. May be termed the conscientious religious in all countries.

No. 2. Unbelievers in the truth of any religion, but who strenuously support the religion of their country, under the conviction that, although religion is not necessary to insure their own good conduct, it is eminently required to compel others to act right.

No. 3. Unbelievers who openly avow their disbelief in the truth of any religion, such as Deists, Atheists, Skeptics, etc., etc., but who do not perceive the laws of nature relative to man as an individual, or when united in a social state.

No. 4. Disbelievers in all past and present religions, but believers in the eternal unchanging laws of the universe, as developed by facts derived from all past experience; and who, by a careful study of these facts, deduce from them the religion of nature.

Class No. 1 is formed, under certain circumstances, from those original organizations which possess at birth strong moral and weak intellectual faculties.... Class No. 2 is composed of those individuals who by nature possess a smaller quantity of moral and a larger quantity of intellectual faculty.... Class No. 3 is composed of men of strong moral and moderate intellectual faculty.... Class No. 4 comprises those who, by nature, possess a high degree of intellectual and moral faculty....”

Thus all forms of opinion were shown to proceed either from intellectual or moral defect, save the opinions of Owen. Such propositions, tranquilly elaborated, were probably as effective in producing irritation as any frontal attack upon any dogmas, narratives, or polities. But, though not even consistent (inasmuch as the fundamental thesis that “character is formed by circumstances” is undermined by the datum of four varieties of organization), they were potent to influence serious men otherwise broadly instructed as to the nature of religious history and the irrationality of dogma; and Owen for a generation, despite the inevitable failure and frustration of his social schemes, exercised by his movement a very wide influence on popular life. To a considerable extent it was furthered by the popular deistic philosophy of George and Andrew Combe—a kind of deistic positivism—which then had a great vogue;[31] and by the implications of phrenology, then also in its most scientific and progressive stage. When, for various reasons, Owen’s movement dissolved, the freethinking element seems to have been absorbed in the secular party, while the others appear to have gone in large part to build up the movement of Co-operation. On the whole, the movement of popular freethought in England could be described as poor, struggling, and persecuted, only the most hardy and zealous venturing to associate themselves with it. The imprisonment of Holyoake (1842) for six months, on a trifling charge of blasphemy, is an illustration of the brutal spirit of public orthodoxy at the time.[32] Where bigotry could thus only injure and oppress without suppressing heresy, it stimulated resistance; and the result of the stimulus was a revival of popular propaganda which led to the founding of a Secular Society in 1852.

6. This date broadly coincides with the maximum domination of conventional orthodoxy in English life. From about the middle of the century the balance gradually changes. In 1852 we find the publisher Henry Bohn reissuing the worthless apologetic works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, with a “publisher’s preface” in which they are said to “maintain an acknowledged pre-eminence,” though written “at a period of our national history when the writings of Volney and Gibbon, and especially of Thomas Paine, fostered by the political effects of the French Revolution, had deteriorated the morals of the people, and infused the poison of infidelity into the disaffected portion of the public.” We have here still the note of early-nineteenth-century Anglican respectability, not easily to be matched in human history for hollowness and blatancy. Fuller is at once one of the most rabid and one of the most futile of the thousand and one defenders of the faith. A sample of his mind and method is the verdict that “If the light that is gone abroad on earth would permit the rearing of temples to Venus, or Bacchus, or any of the rabble of heathen deities, there is little doubt but that modern unbelievers would in great numbers become their devotees; but, seeing they cannot have a God whose worship shall accord with their inclinations, they seem determined not to worship at all.”[33] In the very next year the same publisher began the issue of a reprint of Gibbon, with variorum notes, edited by “An English Churchman,” who for the most part defended Gibbon against his orthodox critics. This enterprise in turn brought upon the pious publisher a fair share of odium. But the second half of the century, albeit soon darkened by new wars in Europe, Asia, and America, was to be for England one of Liberalism alike in politics and in thought, free trade, and relatively free publication, with progress in enlightenment for both the populace and the “educated” classes.

7. In 1858 there was elected to the presidency of the London Secular Society the young Charles Bradlaugh, one of the greatest orators of his age, and one of the most powerful personalities ever associated with a progressive movement. Early experience of clerical persecution, which even drove the boy from his father’s roof, helped to make him a fighter, but never infirmed his humanity. In the main self-taught, he acquired a large measure of culture in French and English, and his rare natural gift for debate was sharpened by a legal training. A personal admirer of Owen, he never accepted his social polity, but was at all times the most zealous of democratic reformers. Thenceforward the working masses in England were in large part kept in touch with a freethought which drew on the results of the scientific and scholarly research of the time, and wielded a dialectic of which trained opponents confessed the power.[34] In the place of the bland dogmatism of Owen, and the calm assumption that all mankind could and should be schoolmastered into happiness and order, there came the alert recognition of the absoluteness of individualism as regards conviction, and its present pre-potency as regards social arrangements. Every thesis was brought to the test of argument and evidence; and in due course many who had complained that Owen would not argue, complained that the new school argued everything. The essential thing was that the people were receiving vitally needed instruction; and were being taught with a new power to think for themselves. Incidentally they were freed from an old burden by Bradlaugh’s successful resistance to the demand of suretyship from newspapers, and by his no less successful battle for the right of non-theistic witnesses to make affirmation instead of taking the oath in the law courts.[35]

The inspiration and the instruction of the popular movement thus maintained were at once literary, scientific, ethical, historical, scholarly, and philosophic. Shelley was its poet; Voltaire its first story-teller; and Gibbon its favourite historian. In philosophy, Bradlaugh learned less from Hume than from Spinoza; in Biblical criticism—himself possessing a working knowledge of Hebrew—he collated the work of English and French specialists, down to and including Colenso, applying all the while to the consecrated record the merciless tests of a consistent ethic. At the same time, the whole battery of argument from the natural sciences was turned against traditionalism and supernaturalism, alike in the lectures of Bradlaugh and the other speakers of his party, and in the pages of his journal, The National Reformer. The general outcome was an unprecedented diffusion of critical thought among the English masses, and a proportionate antagonism to those who had wrought such a result. When, therefore, Bradlaugh, as deeply concerned for political as for intellectual righteousness, set himself to the task of entering Parliament, he commenced a struggle which shortened his life, though it promoted his main objects. Not till after a series of electoral contests extending over twelve years was he elected for Northampton in 1880; and the House of Commons in a manner enacted afresh the long resistance made to him in that city.[36] When, however, on his election in 1880, the Conservative Opposition began the historic proceedings over the Oath question, they probably did even more to deepen and diffuse the popular freethought movement than Bradlaugh himself had done in the whole of his previous career. The process was furthered by the policy of prosecuting and imprisoning (1883) Mr. G. W. Foote, editor of the Freethinker, under the Blasphemy Laws—a course not directly ventured on as against Bradlaugh, though it was sought to connect him with the publication of Mr. Foote’s journal.

To this day it is common to give a false account of the origin of the episode, representing Bradlaugh as having “forced” his opinions on the attention of the House. Rather he strove unduly to avoid wounding religious feeling. Wont to make affirmation by law in the courts of justice, he held that the same law applied to the “oath of allegiance,” and felt that it would be unseemly on his part to use the words of adjuration if he could legally affirm. On this point he expressly consulted the law officers of the Crown, and they gave the opinion that he had the legal right, which was his own belief as a lawyer. The faction called the “fourth party,” however, saw an opportunity to embarrass the Gladstone Government by challenging the act of affirmation, and thus arose the protracted struggle. Only when a committee of the House decided that he could not properly affirm did Bradlaugh propose to take the oath, in order to take his seat.

The pretence of zeal for religion, made by the politicians who had raised the issue, was known by all men to be the merest hypocrisy. Lord Randolph Churchill, who distinguished himself by insisting on the moral necessity for a belief in “some divinity or other,” is recorded to have professed a special esteem for Mr. (now Lord) Morley, the most distinguished Positivist of his time.[37] The whole procedure, in Parliament and out, was so visibly that of the lowest political malice, exploiting the crudest religious intolerance, that it turned into active freethinkers many who had before been only passive doubters, and raised the secularist party to an intensity of zeal never before seen. At no period in modern British history had there been so constant and so keen a platform propaganda of unbelief; so unsparing an indictment of Christian doctrine, history, and practice; such contemptuous rebuttal of every Christian pretension; such asperity of spirit against the creed which was once more being championed by chicanery, calumny, and injustice. In those five years of indignant warfare were sown the seeds of a more abundant growth of rationalism than had ever before been known in the British Islands. With invincible determination Bradlaugh fought his case through Parliament and the law courts, incurring debts which forced upon him further toils that clearly shortened his life, but never yielding for an instant in his battle with the bigotry of half the nation. Liberalism was shamed by many defections; Conservatism, with the assent of Mr. Balfour, was solid for injustice;[38] and in the entire Church of England less than a dozen priests stood for tolerance. But the cause at stake was indestructible. When Bradlaugh at length took the oath and his seat in 1886, under a ruling of the new Speaker (Peel) which stultified the whole action of the Speaker and majorities of the previous Parliament, and no less that of the law courts, straightforward freethought stood three-fold stronger in England than in any previous generation. Apart from their educative work, the struggles and sufferings of the secularist leaders won for Great Britain the abolition within one generation of the old burden of suretyship on newspapers, and of the disabilities of non-theistic witnesses; the freedom of public meeting in the London parks; the right of avowed atheists to sit in Parliament (Bradlaugh having secured in 1888 their title to make affirmation instead of oath); and the virtual discredit of the Blasphemy Laws as such. It is probable also that the treatment meted out to Mrs. Besant—then associated with Bradlaugh in freethought propaganda—marked the end of another form of tyrannous outrage, already made historic in the case of Shelley. Secured the custody of her children under a marital deed of separation, she was deprived of it at law (1879) on her avowal of atheistic opinions, with the result that her influence as a propagandist was immensely increased.

8. The special energy of the English secularist movement in the ninth decade was partly due to the fact that by that time there had appeared a remarkable amount of modern freethinking literature of high literary and intellectual quality, and good “social” status. Down to 1870 the new literary names committed to the rejection of Christianity, apart from the men of science who kept to their own work, were the theists Hennell, F. W. Newman, W. E. Greg, R. W. Mackay, Buckle, and W. E. H. Lecky, all of them influential, but none of them at once recognized as a first-rate force. But with the appearance of Lecky’s History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (1865), lacking though it was in clearness of thought, a new tone began to prevail; and his History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869), equally readable and not more uncompromising, was soon followed by a series of powerful pronouncements of a more explicit kind. One of the first of the literary class to come forward with an express impeachment of Christianity was Moncure Daniel Conway, whose Earthward Pilgrimage (1870) was the artistic record of a gifted preacher’s progress from Wesleyan Methodism, through Unitarianism, to a theism which was soon to pass into agnosticism. In 1871 appeared the remarkable work of Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man, wherein a rapid survey of ancient and medieval history, and of the growth of religion from savage beginnings, leads up to a definitely anti-theistic presentment of the future of human life with the claim to have shown “that the destruction of Christianity is essential to the interests of civilization.”[39] Some eighteen editions tell of the acceptance won by the book. Less vogue, but some startled notice, was won by the Duke of Somerset’s Christian Theology and Modern Scepticism (1872), a work of moderate rationalism, but by a peer. In 1873 appeared Herbert Spencer’s Introduction to the Study of Sociology, wherein the implicit anti-supernaturalism of that philosopher’s First Principles was advanced upon, in the chapter on “The Theological Bias,” by a mordant attack on that Christian creed.

That attack had been preceded by Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma (1872), wherein the publicist who had censured Colenso for not writing in Latin described the Christian doctrine of the Trinity as “the fairy-tale of three Lord Shaftesburys.” Much pleading for the recognition by unbelievers of the value of the Bible failed to convince Christians of the value of such a thinker’s Christianity. A more important sensation was provided in 1873 by the posthumous publication of Mill’s Autobiography, and, in the following year, by his Three Essays on Religion, which exhibited its esteemed author as not only not a Christian but as never having been one, although he formulated a species of limited liability theism, as unsatisfactory to the rationalists as to the orthodox. Still the fresh manifestations of freethinking multiplied. On the one hand the massive treatise entitled Supernatural Religion (1874), and on the other the freethinking essays of Prof. W. K. Clifford in the Fortnightly Review, the most vigorously outspoken ever yet written by an English academic, showed that the whole field of debate was being reopened with a new power and confidence. The History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, by Leslie Stephen (1876), set up the same impression from another side; yet another social sensation was created by the appearance of Viscount Amberley’s Analysis of Religious Belief (1877); and all the while the “Higher Criticism” proceeded within the pale of the Church.

The literary situation was now so changed that, whereas from 1850 to 1880 the “sensations” in the religious world were those made by rationalistic attacks, thereafter they were those made by new defences. H. Drummond’s Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883), Mr. Balfour’s Defence of Philosophic Doubt (1879) and Foundations of Belief (1895), and Mr. Kidd’s Social Evolution (1894), were successively welcomed as being declared to render such a service. It is doubtful whether they are to-day valued upon that score in any quarter.

9. In the first half of the century popular forms of freethought propaganda were hardly possible in other European countries. France had been too long used to regulation alike under the monarchy and under the empire to permit of open promotion of unbelief in the early years of the Restoration. Yet as early as 1828 we find the Protestant Coquerel avowing that in his day the Bourbonism of the Catholic clergy had revived the old anti-clericalism, and that it was common to find the most high-minded patriots unbelievers and materialists.[40] But still more remarkable was the persistence of deep freethinking currents in the Catholic world throughout the century. About 1830 rationalism had become normal among the younger students at Paris;[41] and the revolution of that year elicited a charter putting all religions on an equality.[42] Soon the throne and the chambers were on a footing of practical hostility to the Church.[43] Under Louis Philippe men dared to teach in the Collège de France that “the Christian dispensation is but one link in the chain of divine revelations to man.”[44] Even during the first period of reaction after the restoration numerous editions of Volney’s Ruines and of the Abrégé[45] of Dupuis’s Origine de tous les Cultes served to maintain among the more intelligent of the proletariat an almost scientific rationalism, which can hardly be said to have been improved on by such historiography as that of Renan’s Vie de Jésus. And there were other forces, over and above freemasonry, which in France and other Latin countries has since the Revolution been steadily anti-clerical. The would-be social reconstructor Charles Fourier (1772–1837) was an independent and non-Christian though not an anti-clerical theist, and his system may have counted for something as organizing the secular spirit among the workers in the period of the monarchic and Catholic reaction. Fourier approximated to Christianity inasmuch as he believed in a divine Providence; but like Owen he had an unbounded and heterodox faith in human goodness and perfectibility; and he claimed to have discovered the “plan of God” for men. But Fourier was never, like Owen, a popular force; and popular rationalism went on other lines. At no time was the proletariat of Paris otherwise than largely Voltairean after the Revolution, of which one of the great services (carried on by Napoleon) was an improvement in popular education. The rival non-Christian systems of Saint-Simon (1760–1823) and Auguste Comte (1798–1857) also never took any practical hold among them; but throughout the century they have been fully the most freethinking working-class population in the world.

As to Fourier see the Œuvres Choisies de Fourier, ed. Ch. Gide, pp. 1–3, 9. Cp. Solidarité: Vue Synthétique sur la doctrine de Ch. Fourier, par Hippolyte Renaud, 3e édit. 1846, ch. i: “Pour ramener l’homme à la foi” [en Dieu], writes Renaud, “il faut lui offrir aujourd’hui une foi complète et composée, une foi solidement assise sur le témoignage de la raison. Pour cela il faut que la flambeau de la science dissipe toutes les obscurités” (p. 9). This is not propitious to dogma; but Fourier planned and promised to leave priests and ministers undisturbed in his new world, and even declared religions to be “much superior to uncertain sciences.” Gide, introd. to Œuvres Choisies, pp. xxii–xxiii, citing Manuscrits, vol. de 1853–1856, p. 293. Cp. Dr. Ch. Pellarin, Fourier, sa vie et sa théorie, 5e édit. p. 143.

Saint-Simon, who proposed a “new Christianity,” expressly guarded against direct appeals to the people. See Weil, Saint-Simon et son Œuvre, 1894, p. 193. As to the Saint-Simonian sect, see an interesting testimony by Renan, Les Apôtres, p. 148.

The generation after the fall of Napoleon was pre-eminently the period of new schemes of society; and it is noteworthy that they were all non-Christian, though all, including even Owen’s, claimed to provide a “religion,” and the French may seem all to have been convinced by Napoleon’s practice that some kind of cult must be provided for the peoples. Owen alone rejected alike supernaturalism and cultus; and his movement left the most definite rationalistic traces. All seem to have been generated by the double influence of (1) the social failure of the French Revolution, which left so many anxious for another and better effort at reconstruction, and (2) of the spectacle of the rule of Napoleon, which seems to have elicited new ideals of beneficent autocracy. Owen, Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Comte were all alike would-be founders of a new society or social religion. It seems probable that this proclivity to systematic reconstruction, in a world which still carried a panic-memory of one great social overturn, helped to lengthen the rule of orthodoxy. Considerably more progress was made when freethought became detached from special plans of polity, and grew up anew by way of sheer truth-seeking on all the lines of inquiry.

In France, however, the freethinking tradition from the eighteenth century never passed away, at least as regards the life of the great towns. And while Napoleon III made it his business to conciliate the Church, which in the person of the somewhat latitudinarian Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, had endorsed his coup d’état of 1851,[46] even under his rule the irreversible movement of freethought revealed itself among his own ministers. Victor Duruy, the eminent historian, his energetic Minister of Education, was a freethinker, non-aggressive towards the Church, but perfectly determined not to permit aggression by it.[47] And when the Church, in its immemorial way, declaimed against all forms of rationalistic teaching in the colleges, and insisted on controlling the instruction in all the schools,[48] his firm resistance made him one of its most hated antagonists. Even in the Senate, then the asylum of all forms of antiquated thought and prejudice, Duruy was able to carry his point against the prelates, Sainte-Beuve strongly and skilfully supporting him.[49] Thus in the France of the Third Empire, on the open field of the educational battle-ground between faith and reason, the rationalistic advance was apparent in administration no less than in the teaching of the professed men of science and the polemic of the professed critics of religion.

10. In other Catholic countries the course of popular culture in the first half of the century was not greatly dissimilar to that seen in France, though less rapid and expansive. Thus we find the Spanish Inquisitor-General in 1815 declaring that “all the world sees with horror the rapid progress of unbelief,” and denouncing “the errors and the new and dangerous doctrines” which have passed from other countries to Spain.[50] This evolution was to some extent checked; but in the latter half of the century, especially in the last thirty years, all the Catholic countries of Europe were more or less permeated with demotic freethought, usually going hand in hand with republican or socialistic propaganda in politics. It is indeed a significant fact that freethought propaganda is often most active in countries where the Catholic Church is most powerful. Thus in Belgium there are at least three separate federations, standing for hundreds of freethinking “groups”; in Spain, a few years ago, there were freethought societies in all the large towns, and at least half-a-dozen freethought journals; in Portugal there have been a number of societies—a weekly journal, O Secolo, of Lisbon, and a monthly review, O Livre Exame. In France and Italy, where educated society is in large measure rationalistic, the Masonic lodges do most of the personal and social propaganda; but there are federations of freethought societies in both countries. In Switzerland freethought is more aggressive in the Catholic than in the Protestant cantons.[51] In the South American republics, again, as in Italy and France, the Masonic lodges are predominantly freethinking; and in Peru there was, a few years ago, a Freethought League, with a weekly organ. As long ago as 1856 the American diplomatist and archæologist, Squier, wrote that, “Although the people of Honduras, in common with those of Central America in general, are nominally Catholics, yet, among those capable of reflection or possessed of education, there are more who are destitute of any fixed creed—Rationalists or, as they are sometimes called, Freethinkers, than adherents of any form of religion.”[52] That the movement is also active in the other republics of the southern continent may be inferred from the facts that a Positivist organization has long subsisted in Brazil; that its members were active in the peaceful revolution which there substituted a republic for a monarchy; and that at the Freethought Congresses of Rome and Paris in 1904 and 1905 there was an energetic demand for a Congress at Buenos Aires, which was finally agreed to for 1906.

While popular propaganda is hardly possible save on political lines, freethinking journalism has counted for much in the most Catholic parts of Southern Europe. The influence of such journals is to be measured not by their circulation, which is never great, but by their keeping up a habit of more or less instructed freethinking among readers, to many of whom the instruction is not otherwise easily accessible. Probably the least ambitious of them is an intellectual force of a higher order than the highest grade of popular religious journalism; while some of the stronger, as De Dageraad of Amsterdam, have ranked as high-class serious reviews. In the more free and progressive countries, however, freethought affects all periodical literature; and in France it partly permeates the ordinary newspapers. In England, where a series of monthly or weekly publications of an emphatically freethinking sort has been nearly continuous from about 1840,[53] new ones rising in place of those which succumbed to the commercial difficulties, such periodicals suffer an economic pinch in that they cannot hope for much income from advertisements, which are the chief sustenance of popular journals and magazines. The same law holds elsewhere; but in England and America the high-priced reviews have been gradually opened to rationalistic articles, the way being led by the English Westminster Review[54] and Fortnightly Review, both founded with an eye to freer discussion.

Among the earlier freethinking periodicals may be noted The Republican, 1819–26 (edited by Carlile); The Deist’s Magazine, 1820; The Lion, 1828 (Carlile); The Prompter, 1830 (Carlile); The Gauntlet, 1833 (Carlile); The Atheist and Republican, 1841–42; The Blasphemer, 1842; The Oracle of Reason (founded by Southwell), 1842, etc.; The Reasoner and Herald of Progress (largely conducted by Holyoake), 1846–1861; Cooper’s Journal; or, unfettered Thinker, etc., 1850, etc.; The Movement, 1843; The Freethinker’s Information for the People (undated: after 1840); Freethinker’s Magazine, 1850, etc.; London Investigator, 1854, etc. Bradlaugh’s National Reformer, begun in 1860, lasted till 1893. Mr. Foote’s Freethinker, begun in 1881, still subsists. Various freethinking monthlies have risen and fallen since 1880—e.g., Our Corner, edited by Mrs. Besant, 1883–88; The Liberal and Progress, edited by Mr. Foote, 1879–87; the Free Review, transformed into the University Magazine, 1893–1898. The Reformer, a monthly, edited by Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner, subsisted from 1897 to 1904. The Literary Guide, which began as a small sheet in 1885, flourishes. Since 1900, a popular Socialist journal, The Clarion, has declared for rationalism through the pen of its editor, Mr. R. Blatchford (“Nunquam”), whose polemic has caused much controversy. For a generation back, further, rationalistic essays have appeared from time to time not only in the Fortnightly Review (founded by G. H. Lewes, and long edited by Mr. John (now Lord) Morley, much of whose writing on the French philosophes appeared in its pages), but in the Nineteenth Century, wherein was carried on, for instance, the famous controversy between Mr. Gladstone and Prof. Huxley. In the early ‘seventies, the Cornhill Magazine, under the editorship of Leslie Stephen, issued serially Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma and St. Paul and Protestantism. In the latter years of the century quite a number of reviews, some of them short-lived, gave space to advanced opinions. But propaganda has latterly become more and more a matter of all-pervading literary influence, the immense circulation of the sixpenny reprints of the R. P. A. having put the advanced literature of the last generation within the reach of all.

11. In Germany, as we have seen, the relative selectness of culture, the comparative aloofness of the “enlightened” from the mass of the people, made possible after the War of Independence a certain pietistic reaction, in the absence of any popular propagandist machinery or purpose on the side of the rationalists. In the opinion of an evangelical authority, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, “through modern enlightenment (Aufklärung) the people had become indifferent to the Church; the Bible was regarded as a merely human book, the Saviour merely as a person who had lived and taught long ago, not as one whose almighty presence is with his people still.”[55] According to the same authority, “before the war, the indifference to the word of God which prevailed among the upper classes had penetrated to the lower; but after it, a desire for the Scriptures was everywhere felt.”[56] This involves an admission that the “religion of the heart” propounded by Schleiermacher in his addresses On Religion “to the educated among its despisers”[57] (1799) was not really a Christian revival at all. Schleiermacher himself in 1803 declared that in Prussia there was almost no attendance on public worship, and the clergy had fallen into profound discredit.[58] A pietistic movement had, however, begun during the period of the French ascendancy;[59] and seeing that the freethinking of the previous generation had been in part associated with French opinion, it was natural that on this side anti-French feeling should promote a reversion to older and more “national” forms of feeling. Thus after the fall of Napoleon the tone of the students who had fought in the war seems to have been more religious than that of previous years.[60] Inasmuch, however, as the “enlightenment” of the scholarly class was maintained, and applied anew to critical problems, the religious revival did not turn back the course of progress. “When the third centenary commemoration, in 1817, of the Reformation approached, the Prussian people were in a state of stolid indifference, apparently, on religious matters.”[61] Alongside of the pietistic reaction of the Liberation period there went on an open ecclesiastical strife, dating from an anti-rationalist declaration by the Court preacher Reinhard at Dresden in 1811,[62] between the rationalists or “Friends of Light” and the Scripturalists of the old school; and the effect was a general disintegration of orthodoxy, despite, or it may be largely in virtue of, the governmental policy of rewarding the Pietists and discouraging their opponents in the way of official appointments.[63] The Prussian measure (1817) of forcibly uniting the Lutheran and Calvinistic Churches, with a neutral sacramental ritual in which the eucharist was treated as a historical commemoration, tended to the same consequences, though it also revived old Lutheran zeal;[64] and when the new revolutionary movement broke out in 1848, popular feeling was substantially non-religious. “In the south of Germany especially the conflict of political opinions and revolutionary tendencies produced, in the first instance, an entire prostration of religious sentiment.” The bulk of society showed entire indifference to worship, the churches being everywhere deserted; and “atheism was openly avowed, and Christianity ridiculed as the invention of priestcraft.”[65] One result was a desperate effort of the clergy to “effect a union among all who retained any measure of Christian belief, in order to raise up their national religion and faith from the lowest state into which it has ever fallen since the French Revolution.”

But the clerical effort evoked a counter effort. Already, in 1846, official interference with freedom of utterance led to the formation of a “free religious” society by Dr. Rupp, of Königsberg, one of the “Friends of Light” in the State Church; and he was followed by Wislicenus of Halle, a Hegelian, and by Uhlich of Magdeburg.[66] As a result of the determined pressure, social and official, which ensued on the collapse of the revolution of 1848, these societies failed to develop on the scale of their beginnings; and that of Magdeburg, which at the outset had 7,000 members, has latterly only 500; though that of Berlin has nearly 4,000.[67] There is further a Freidenker Bund, with branches in many towns; and the two organizations, with their total membership of some fifty thousand, may be held to represent the militant side of popular freethought in Germany. This, however, constitutes only a fraction of the total amount of passive rationalism. There is a large measure of enlightenment in both the working and the middle classes; and the ostensible force of orthodoxy among the official and conformist middle class is in many respects illusory. The German police laws put a rigid check on all manner of platform and press propaganda which could be indicted as hurting the feelings of religious people; so that a jest at the Holy Coat of Trèves could even in recent years send a journalist to jail, and the platform work of the militant societies is closely trammelled. Yet there are, or have been, over a dozen journals which so far as may be take the freethought side;[68] and the whole stress of Bismarckian reaction and of official orthodoxy under the present Kaiser has never availed to make the tone of popular thought pietistic. Karl Marx, the prophet of the German Socialist movement (1818–1883), laid it down as part of its mission “to free consciousness from the religious spectre”; and his two most influential followers in Germany, Bebel and Liebknecht, were avowed atheists, the former even going so far as to avow officially in the Reichstag that “the aim of our party is on the political plane the republican form of State; on the economic, Socialism; and on the plane which we term the religious, atheism”;[69] though the party attempts no propaganda of the latter order. “Christianity and Social-Democracy,” said Bebel again, “are opposed as fire and water.”[70]

Some index to the amount of popular freethought that normally exists under the surface in Germany is furnished, further, by the strength of the German freethought movement in the United States, where, despite the tendency to the adoption of the common speech, there grew up in the last quarter of the nineteenth century many German freethinking societies, a German federation of atheists, and a vigorous popular organ, Der Freidenker.

Thus, under the sounder moral and economic conditions of the life of the proletariate in Germany, straightforward rationalism, as apart from propaganda, is becoming among them more and more the rule. The bureaucratic control of education forces religious teaching in the common schools; and there is no “conscience clause” for unbelieving parents.[71] A Protestant pastor at the end of the century made an investigation into the state of religious opinion among the working Socialists of some provincial towns and rural districts, and found everywhere a determined attitude of rationalism. The formula of the Social Democrats, “Religion is a private matter,” he bitterly perceives to carry the implication “a private matter for the fools”; and while he holds that the belief in a speedy collapse of the Christian religion is latterly less common than formerly among the upper and middle classes, he complains that the Socialists are not similarly enlightened.[72] Bebel’s drastic teaching as to the economic and social conditions of the rise of Christianity,[73] and the materialistic theory of history set forth by Marx and Engels, he finds generally accepted. Not only do most of the party leaders declare themselves to be without religion, but those who do not so declare themselves are so no less.[74] Nor is the unbelief a mere sequel to the Socialism: often the development is the other way.[75] The opinion is almost universal, further, that the clergy in general do not believe what they teach.[76] Atheists are numerous among the peasantry; more numerous among the workers in the provincial towns; and still more numerous in the large towns;[77] and while many take a sympathetic view of Jesus as a man and teacher, not a few deny his historic existence[78]—a view set forth in non-Socialist circles also.[79]

12. Under the widely-different political conditions in Russia and the Scandinavian States it is the more significant that in all alike rationalism is latterly common among the educated classes. In Norway the latter perhaps include a larger proportion of working people than can be so classed even in Germany; and rationalism is relatively hopeful, though social freedom is still far from perfect. It is the old story of toleration for a dangerously well-placed freethought, and intolerance for that which reaches the common people. In Russia rationalism has before it the task of transmuting a system of autocracy into one of self-government. In no European country, perhaps, is rationalism more general among the educated classes; and in none is there a greater mass of popular ignorance.[80] The popular icon-worship in Moscow can hardly be paralleled outside of Asia. On the other hand, the aristocracy became Voltairean in the eighteenth century, and has remained more or less incredulous since, though it now joins hands with the Church; while the democratic movement, in its various phases of socialism, constitutionalism, and Nihilism, has been markedly anti-religious since the second quarter of the century.[81] Subsidiary revivals of mysticism, such as are chronicled in other countries, are of course to be seen in Russia; but the instructed class, the intelliguentia, is essentially naturalistic in its cast of thought. This state of things subsists despite the readiness of the government to suppress the slightest sign of official heterodoxy in the universities.[82] The struggle is thus substantially between the spirit of freedom and that of arbitrary rule; and the fortunes of freethought go with the former.

13. “Free-religious” societies, such as have been noted in Germany, may be rated as forms of moderate freethought propaganda, and are to be found in all Protestant countries, with all shades of development. A movement of the kind has existed for a number of years back in America, in the New England States and elsewhere, and may be held to represent a theistic or agnostic thought too advanced to adhere even to the Unitarianism which during the two middle quarters of the century was perhaps the predominant creed in New England. The Theistic Church conducted by the Rev. Charles Voysey after his expulsion from the Church of England in 1871 to his death in 1912, and since then by the Rev. Dr. Walter Walsh, is an example. Another type of such a gradual and peaceful evolution is the South Place Institute (formerly “Chapel”) of London, where, under the famous orator W. J. Fox, nominally a Unitarian, there was preached between 1824 and 1852 a theism tending to pantheism, perhaps traceable to elements in the doctrine of Priestley, and passed on by Mr. Fox to Robert Browning.[83] In 1864 the charge passed to Moncure D. Conway, under whom the congregation quietly advanced during twenty years from Unitarianism to a non-scriptural rationalism, embracing the shades of philosophic theism, agnosticism, and anti-theism. In Conway’s Lessons for the Day will be found a series of peculiarly vivid mementos of that period, a kind of itinerary, more intimate than any retrospective record. The latter part of his life, partly preserved in one of the most interesting autobiographies of the century, was spent between England and the United States and in travel. After his first withdrawal to the States in 1884 the Institute became an open platform for rationalist and non-theological ethics and social and historical teaching, and it now stands as an “Ethical Society” in touch with the numerous groups so named which have come into existence in England in the last dozen years on lines originally laid down by Dr. Felix Adler in New York. At the time of the present writing the English societies of this kind number between twenty and thirty, the majority being in London and its environs. Their open adherents, who are some thousands strong, are in most cases non-theistic rationalists, and include many former members of the Secularist movement, of which the organization has latterly dwindled. On partly similar lines there were developed in provincial towns about the end of the century a small number of “Labour Churches,” in which the tendency was to substitute a rationalist humanitarian ethic for supernaturalism; and the same lecturers frequently spoke from their platforms and from those of Ethical and Secularist societies. Of late, however, the Labour Churches have tended to disappear. All this means no resumption of church-going, but, by the confession of the Churches, a completer secularization of the Sunday.

14. Alongside of the lines of movement before sketched, there has subsisted in England during the greater part of the nineteenth century a considerable organization of Unitarianism. In the early years of the nineteenth century it was strong enough to obtain the repeal (1813) of the penal laws against anti-Trinitarianism, whereafter the use of the name “Unitarian” became more common, and a sect so called was founded formally in 1825. When the heretical preachers of the Presbyterian sect began openly to declare themselves as Unitarians, there naturally arose a protest from the orthodox, and an attempt was made in 1833 to save from its new destination the property owned by the heretical congregations.[84] This was frustrated by the Dissenters’ Chapels Act of 1844, which gave to each group singly the power to interpret its trust in its own fashion. Thenceforward the sect prospered considerably, albeit not so greatly as in the United States. During the century English Unitarianism has been associated with scholarship through such names as John Kenrick and Samuel Sharpe, the historians of Egypt, and J. J. Tayler; and, less directly, with philosophy in the person of Dr. James Martineau, who, however, was rather a coadjutor than a champion of the sect. In the United States the movement, greatly aided to popularity by the eloquent humanism of the two Channings, lost the prestige of the name of Emerson, who had been one of its ministers, by the inability of his congregation to go the whole way with him in his opinions. In 1853 Emerson told the young Moncure Conway that “the Unitarian Churches were stated to be no longer producing ministers equal to their forerunners, but were more and more finding their best men in those coming from orthodox Churches,” who “would, of course, have some enthusiasm for their new faith.”[85] Latterly Unitarians have been entitled to say that the Trinitarian Churches are approximating to their position.[86] Such an approach, however, involves rather a weakening than a strengthening of the smaller body; though some of its teachers are to the full as bigoted and embittered in their propaganda as the bulk of the traditionally orthodox. Others adhere to their ritual practices in the spirit of use and wont, as Emerson found when he sought to rationalize in his own Church the usage of the eucharist.[87] On the other hand, numbers have passed from Unitarianism to thoroughgoing rationalism; and some whole congregations, following more or less the example of that of South Place Chapel, have latterly reached a position scarcely distinguishable from that of the Ethical Societies.

15. A partly similar evolution has taken place among the Protestant Churches of France, Switzerland, Hungary, and Holland. French Protestantism could not but be intellectually moved by the intense ferment of the Revolution; and, when finally secured against active oppression from the Catholic side, could not but develop an intellectual opposition to the Catholic Reaction after 1815. In Switzerland, always in intellectual touch with France and Germany, the tendencies which had been stamped as Socinian in the days of Voltaire soon reasserted themselves so strongly as to provoke fanatical reaction.[88] The nomination of Strauss to a chair of theology at Zürich by a Radical Government in 1839 actually gave rise to a violent revolt, inflamed and led by Protestant clergymen. The Executive Council were expelled, and a number of persons killed in the strife.[89] In the canton of Aargau in 1841, again, the cry of “religion in danger” sufficed to bring about a Catholic insurrection against a Liberal Council; and yet again in 1844 it led, among the Catholics of the Valais canton, to the bloodiest insurrection of all. Since these disgraceful outbreaks the progress of Rationalism in Switzerland has been steady. In 1847 a chair was given at Berne to the rationalistic scholar Zeller, without any such resistance as was made to Strauss at Zürich. In 1892, out of a total number of 3,151 students in the five universities of Switzerland and in the academies of Fribourg and Neuchâtel, the number of theological students was only 374, positively less than that of the teaching staff, which was 431. Leaving out the academies named, which had no medical faculty, the number of theological students stood at 275 out of 2,917. The Church in Switzerland has thus undergone the relative restriction in power and prestige seen in the other European countries of long-established culture. The evolution, however, remains negative rather than positive. Though a number of pastors latterly call themselves libres penseurs or penseurs libres, and a movement of ethical culture (morale sociale) has made progress, the forces of positive freethought are not numerically strong. An economic basis still supports the Churches, and the lack of it leaves rationalism non-aggressive.[90]

A somewhat similar state of things exists in Holland, where the “higher criticism” of both the Old and New Testaments made notable progress in the middle decades of the century. There then resulted not only an extensive decay of orthodoxy within the Protestant Church, but a movement of aggressive popular freethought, which was for a number of years well represented in journalism. To-day, orthodoxy and freethought are alike less demonstrative; the broad explanation being that the Dutch people in the mass has ceased to be pietistic, and has secularized its life. Even in the Bible-loving Boer Republic of South Africa (Transvaal), in its time one of the most orthodox of the civilized communities of the world, there was seen in the past generation the phenomenon of an agnostic ex-clergyman’s election to the post of president, in the person of T. F. Burgers, who succeeded Pretorius in 1871. His election was of course on political and not on religious grounds; and panic fear on the score of his heresy, besides driving some fanatics to emigrate, is said to have disorganized a Boer expedition under his command;[91] but his views were known when he was elected. In the years 1899–1902 the terrible experience of the last Boer War, in South Africa as in Britain, perhaps did more to turn critical minds against supernaturalism than was accomplished by almost any other agency in the same period. In Britain the overturn was by way of the revolt of many ethically-minded Christians against the attitude of the orthodox churches, which were so generally and so unscrupulously belligerent as to astonish many even of their freethinking opponents.[92] As regards the Boers and the Cape Dutch the resultant unbelief was among the younger men, who harassed their elders with challenges as to the justice or the activity of a God who permitted the liberties of his most devoted worshippers to be wantonly destroyed. Among the more educated burghers in the Orange Free State commandos unbelief asserted itself with increasing force and frequency.[93] An ethical rationalism thus motived is not likely to be displaced; and the Christian churches of Britain have thus the sobering knowledge that the war which they so vociferously glorified[94] has wrought to the discredit of their creed alike in their own country and among the vanquished.

16. The history of popular freethought in Sweden yields a good illustration, in a compact form,[95] of the normal play of forces and counter-forces. Since the day of Christina, as we saw, though there have been many evidences of passive unbelief, active rationalism has been little known in her kingdom down till modern times, Sweden as a whole having been little touched by the great ferment of the eighteenth century. The French Revolution, however, stirred the waters there as elsewhere. Tegnér, the poet-bishop, author of the once-famous Frithiof’s Saga, was notable in his day for a determined rejection of the evangelical doctrine of salvation; and his letters contain much criticism of the ruling system. But the first recognizable champion of freethought in Sweden is the thinker and historian E. G. Geijer (d. 1847), whose history of his native land is one of the best European performances of his generation. In 1820 he was prosecuted for his attack upon the dogmas of the Trinity and redemption—long the special themes of discussion in Sweden—in his book Thorild; but was acquitted by the jury. Thenceforth Sweden follows the general development of Europe. In 1841 Strauss’s Leben Jesu was translated in Swedish, and wrought its usual effect. On the popular side the poet Wilhelm von Braun carried on an anti-Biblical warfare; and a blacksmith in a provincial town contrived to print in 1850 a translation of Paine’s Age of Reason. Once more the spirit of persecution blazed forth, and he was prosecuted and imprisoned. H. B. Palmaer (d. 1854) was likewise prosecuted for his satire, The Last Judgment in Cocaigne (Kräkwinkel), with the result that his defence extended his influence. In the same period the Stockholm curate Nils Ignell (d. 1864) produced a whole series of critical pamphlets and a naturalistic History of the Development of Man, besides supplying a preface to the Swedish translation of Renan’s Vie de Jésus. Meantime translations of the works of Theodore Parker, by V. Pfeiff and A. F. Akerberg, had a large circulation and a wide influence; and the courage of the gymnasium rector N. J. Cramer (d. 1893), author of The Farewell to the Church, gave an edge to the movement. The partly rationalistic doctrine of Victor Rydberg (d. 1895) was in comparison uncritical, and was proportionally popular.

On another line the books of Dr. Nils Lilja (d. 1870), written for working people, created a current of rationalism among the masses; and in the next generation G. J. Leufstedt maintained it by popular lectures and by the issue of translations of Colenso, Ingersoll, Büchner, and Renan. Hjalmar Stromer (d. 1886) did similar platform work. Meantime the followers of Parker and Rydberg founded in 1877 a monthly review, The Truthseeker, which lasted till 1894, and an association of “Believers in Reason,” closely resembling the British Ethical Societies of our own day. Among its leading adherents has been K. P. Arnoldson, the well-known peace advocate. Liberal clerics were now fairly numerous; Positivism, represented by Dr. Anton Nyström’s General History of Civilization, played its part; and the more radical freethinking movement, nourished by new translations, became specially active, with the usual effect on orthodox feeling. August Strindberg, author and lecturer, was prosecuted in 1884 on a charge of ridiculing the eucharist, but was declared not guilty. The strenuous Victor Lennstrand, lecturer and journalist, prosecuted in 1888 and later for his anti-Christian propaganda, was twice fined and imprisoned, with the result of extending his influence and discrediting his opponents. “Utilitarian Associations,” created by his activity, were set up in many parts of the country; and his movement survives his death.

17. Only in the United States has the public lecture platform been made a means of propaganda to anything like the extent seen in Britain; and the greatest part of the work in the States has thus far been done by the late Colonel Ingersoll, the leading American orator of the last generation, and the most widely influential platform propagandist of the last century. No other single freethinker, it is believed, has reached such an audience by public speech; and between his propaganda and that of the freethought journals there has been maintained for a generation back a large body of vigorous freethinking opinion in all parts of the States. Before the Civil War this could hardly be said. In the middle decades of the century the conditions had been so little changed that after the death of President Lincoln, who was certainly a non-Christian deist, and an agnostic deist at that,[96] it was sought to be established that he was latterly orthodox. In his presidential campaign of 1860 he escaped attack on his opinions simply because his opponent, Stephen A. Douglas, was likewise an unbeliever.[97] The great negro orator, Frederick Douglas, was as heterodox as Lincoln.[98] It is even alleged that President Grant[99] was of the same cast of opinion. Such is the general drift of intelligent thought in the United States, from Washington onwards; and still the social conditions impose on public men the burden of concealment, while popular history is garbled for the same reasons. Despite the great propagandist power of the late Colonel Ingersoll, therefore, American freethought remains dependent largely on struggling organizations and journals,[100] and its special literature is rather of the popularizing than of the scholarly order. Nowhere else has every new advance of rationalistic science been more angrily opposed by the priesthood; because nowhere is the ordinary prejudice of the priest more voluble or better-bottomed in self-complacency. As late as 1891 the Methodist Bishop Keener delivered a ridiculous attack on the evolution theory before the Œcumenical Council of Methodism at Washington, declaring that it had been utterly refuted by a certain “wonderful deposit of the Ashley beds.”[101] Various professors in ecclesiastical colleges have been driven from their posts for accepting in turn the discoveries of geology, biology, and the “higher criticism”—for instance, Woodrow of Columbia, South Carolina; Toy of Louisville; Winchell of Vanderbilt University; and more than one professor in the American college at Beyrout.[102] In every one of the three former cases, it is true, the denounced professor has been called to a better chair; and latterly some of the more liberal clergy have even commercially exploited the higher criticism by producing the “Rainbow Bible.” Generally speaking, however, in the United States sheer preoccupation with business, and lack of leisure, counteract in a measure the relative advantage of social freedom; and while culture is more widely diffused than in England, it remains on the whole less radical in the “educated” classes so-called. So far as it is possible to make a quantitative estimate, it may be said that in the more densely populated parts of the States there is latterly less of studious freethinking because there is less leisure than in England; but that in the Western States there is a relative superiority, class for class, because of the special freedom of the conditions and the independent character of many of the immigrants who constitute the new populations.[103]