§ 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.[177] 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.[178] Middleton had duly safeguarded himself by positing the certainty of the gospel miracles and of those wrought by the Apostles, on the old principle[179] 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.”[180] 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.”[181] 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.”[182] 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?”[183]
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.”[184] 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.”[185] 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.[186] 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.[187] Tindal had clinched the case for “natural” theism as against revelationism; and the later deists, notably Morgan, had to some extent combined these results.[188] This literature was generally distributed; and so far the case had been thrashed out.