§ 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)[189] 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.[190] Both alike withdrew men from problems of mere belief, whether theological or scientific.[191] 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.”[192] In Hume’s opinion the general pitch of national intelligence south of the Tweed was lowered.[193] 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.[194]
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,”[195] 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;[196] 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.[197] 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[198] 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.[199] But, the enemy being no more consistent than he, his influence was not seriously affected in the world of ordinary readers; and much of his attack on “divines,” on dogmas, and on Old Testament morality must have appealed to many, thus carrying on the discredit of orthodoxy in general. Leland devoted to him an entire volume of his View of the Principal Deistical Writers, and in all bestows more space upon him than on all the others together—a sufficient indication of his vogue.
In his lifetime, however, Bolingbroke had been extremely careful to avoid compromising himself. Mr. Arthur Hassall, in his generally excellent monograph on Bolingbroke (Statesmen Series, 1889, p. 226), writes, in answer to the attack of Johnson, that “Bolingbroke, during his lifetime, had never scrupled to publish criticisms, remarkable for their freedom, on religious subjects.” I cannot gather to what he refers; and Mr. Walter Sichel, in his copious biography (2 vols. 1901–1902), indicates no such publications. The Letters on the Study and Use of History, which contain (Lett. iii, sect. 2) a skeptical discussion of the Pentateuch as history, though written in 1735–36, were only posthumously published, in 1752. The Examen Important de Milord Bolingbroke, produced by Voltaire in 1767, but dated 1736, is Voltaire’s own work, based on Bolingbroke. In his letter to Swift of September 12, 1724 (Swift’s Works, Scott’s ed. 1824, xvi, 448–49), Bolingbroke angrily repudiates the title of esprit fort, declaring, in the very temper in which pious posterity has aspersed himself, that “such are the pests of society, because they endeavour to loosen the bands of it.... I therefore not only disown, but I detest, this character.” In this letter he even affects to believe in “the truth of the divine revelation of Christianity.” He began to write his essays, it is true, before his withdrawal to France in 1735, but with no intention of speedily publishing them. In his Letter to Mr. Pope (published with the Letter to Wyndham, 1753), p. 481, he writes: “I have been a martyr of faction in politics, and have no vocation to be so in philosophy.” Cp. pp. 485–86. It is thus a complete blunder on the part of Bagehot to say (Literary Studies, Hutton’s ed. iii, 137) that Butler’s Analogy, published in 1736, was “designed as a confutation of Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke.” It is even said (Warton, Essay on Pope, 4th ed. ii, 294–95) that Pope did not know Bolingbroke’s real opinions; but Pope’s untruthfulness was such as to discredit such a statement. Cp. Bolingbroke’s Letter as cited, p. 521, and his Philosophical Works, 8vo-ed. 1754, ii, 405. It is noteworthy that a volume of controversial sermons entitled A Preservative against unsettled notions and Want of Principles in Religion, so entirely stupid in its apologetics as to be at times positively entertaining, was published in 1715 by Joseph Trapp, M.A., “Chaplain to the Right Honble. The Lord Viscount Bolingbroke.”
In seeking to estimate Bolingbroke’s posthumous influence we have to remember that after the publication of his works the orthodox members of his own party, who otherwise would have forgiven him all his vices and insincerities, have held him up to hatred. Scott, for instance, founding on Bolingbroke’s own dishonest denunciation of freethinkers as men seeking to loosen the bands of society, pronounced his arrangement for the posthumous issue of his works “an act of wickedness more purely diabolical than any hitherto upon record in the history of any age or nation” (Note to Bolingbroke’s letter above cited in Swift’s Works, xvi, 450). It would be an error, on the other hand, to class him among either the great sociologists or the great philosophers. Mr. Sichel undertakes to show (vol. ii, ch. x) that Bolingbroke had stimulated Gibbon to a considerable extent in his treatment of early Christianity. This is in itself quite probable, and some of the parallels cited are noteworthy; but Mr. Sichel, who always writes as a panegyrist, makes no attempt to trace the common French sources for both. He does show that Voltaire manipulated Bolingbroke’s opinions in reproducing them. But he does not critically recognize the incoherence of Bolingbroke’s eloquent treatises. Mr. Hassall’s summary is nearer the truth; but that in turn does not note how well fitted was Bolingbroke’s swift and graceful declamation to do its work with the general public, which (if it accepted him at all) would make small account of self-contradiction.