§ 14
In view of such a reinforcement of its propaganda, deism could not be regarded as in the least degree written down. In 1765, in fact, we find Diderot recounting, on the authority of d’Holbach, who had just returned from a visit to this country, that “the Christian religion is nearly extinct in England. The deists are innumerable; there are almost no atheists; those who are so conceal it. An atheist and a scoundrel are almost synonymous terms for them.”[200] Nor did the output of deistic literature end with the posthumous works of Bolingbroke. These were followed by translations of the new writings of Voltaire,[201] who had assimilated the whole propaganda of English deism, and gave it out anew with a wit and brilliancy hitherto unknown in argumentative and critical literature. The freethinking of the third quarter of the century, though kept secondary to more pressing questions, was thus at least as deeply rooted and as convinced as that of the first quarter; and it was probably not much less common among educated men, though new social influences caused it to be more decried.
The hapless Chatterton, fatally precocious, a boy in years and experience of life, a man in understanding at seventeen, incurred posthumous obloquy more for his “infidelity” than for the harmless literary forgeries which reveal his poetic affinity to a less prosaic age. It is a memorable fact that this first recovery of the lost note of imaginative poetry in that “age of prose and reason” is the exploit of a boy whose mind was as independently “freethinking” on current religion as it was original even in its imitative reversion to the poetics of the past. Turning away from the impossible mythicism and mysticism of the Tudor and Stuart literatures, as from the fanaticism of the Puritans, the changing English world after the Restoration had let fall the artistic possession of imaginative feeling and style which was the true glory of the time of Renascence. The ill-strung genius of Chatterton seems to have been the first to reunite the sense of romantic beauty with the spirit of critical reason. He was a convinced deist, avowing in his verse, in his pathetic will (1770), in a late letter, and at times in his talk, that he was “no Christian,” and contemning the ethic of Scripture history and the absurdity of literal inspiration.[202] Many there must have been who went as far, with less courage of avowal.
What was lacking to the age, once more, was a social foundation on which it could not only endure but develop. In a nation of which the majority had no intellectual culture, such a foundation could not exist. Green exaggerates[203] when he writes that “schools there were none, save the grammar schools of Edward and Elizabeth”;[204] but by another account only twelve public schools were founded in the long reign of George III;[205] and, as a result of the indifference of two generations, masses of the people “were ignorant and brutal to a degree which it is hard to conceive.”[206] A great increase of population had followed on the growth of towns and the development of commerce and manufactures even between 1700 and 1760;[207] and thereafter the multiplication was still more rapid. There was thus a positive fall in the culture standards of the majority of the people. According to Massey, “hardly any tradesman in 1760 had more instruction than qualified him to add up a bill”; and “a labourer, mechanic, or domestic servant who could read or write possessed a rare accomplishment.”[208] As for the Charity Schools established between 1700 and 1750, their express object was to rear humble tradesmen and domestics, not to educate in the proper sense of the term.
In the view of life which accepted this state of things the educated deists seem to have shared; at least, there is no record of any agitation by them for betterment. The state of political thought was typified in the struggle over “Wilkes and Liberty,” from which cool temperaments like Hume’s turned away in contempt; and it is significant that poor men were persecuted for freethinking while the better-placed went free. Jacob Ilive, for denying in a pamphlet (1753) the truth of revelation, was pilloried thrice, and sent to hard labour for three years. In 1754 the Grand Jury of Middlesex “presented” the editor and publisher of Bolingbroke’s posthumous works[209]—a distinction that in the previous generation had been bestowed on Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees; and in 1761, as before noted, Peter Annet, aged seventy, was pilloried twice and sent to prison for discrediting the Pentateuch; as if that were a more serious offence than his former attacks on the gospels and on St. Paul. The personal influence of George III, further, told everywhere against freethinking; and the revival of penalties would have checked publishing even if there had been no withdrawal of interest to politics.
Yet more or less freethinking treatises did appear at intervals in addition to the works of the better-known writers, such as Bolingbroke and Hume, after the period commonly marked as that of the “decline of deism.” In the list may be included a few by Unitarians, who at this stage were doing critical work. Like a number of the earlier works above mentioned, the following (save Evanson) are overlooked in Sir Leslie Stephen’s survey:—
| 1746. | Essay on Natural Religion. Falselyattributed to Dryden. | ||
| Deism fairly stated and fully vindicated,etc. Anon. | ||
| 1749. | J. G. Cooper, Life of Socrates. | ||
| 1750. | John Dove, A Creed founded on Truth and CommonSense. | ||
| The British Oracle. (Two numbersonly.) | ||
| 1752. | The Pillars of Priestcraft and OrthodoxyShaken. Four vols. of freethinking pamphlets, collected (and somewritten) by Thomas Gordon, formerly secretary to Trenchard. Edited byR. Barron. (Rep. 1768.) | ||
| 1765. | W. Dudgeon, Philosophical Works (reprintsof those of 1732, –4, –7, –9, above mentioned).Privately printed—at Glasgow? | ||
| 1772. | E. Evanson, The Doctrines of a Trinity and theIncarnation, etc. | ||
| 1773. | —— Three Discourses (1. Uponthe Man after God’s own Heart; 2. Upon the Faith of Abraham; 3.Upon the Seal of the Foundation of God). | ||
| 1777. | —— Letter to Bishop Hurd. | ||
| 1781. | W. Nicholson, The Doubts of the Infidels.(Rep. by R. Carlile.) | ||
| 1782. | W. Turner, Answer to Dr. Priestley’sLetters to a Philosophical Unbeliever. | ||
| 1785. | Dr. G. Hoggart Toulmin, The Antiquity andDuration of the World. | ||
| 1789. | —— The Eternity of theUniverse.[210] (Rep. 1825.) | ||
| Dr. T. Cooper, Tracts, Ethical, Theological,and Political. | ||
| 1792. | E. Evanson, The Dissonance of the FourEvangelists. (Rep. 1805.) | ||
| 1795. | Dr. J. A. O’Keefe, On the Progress ofthe Human Understanding. | ||
| 1797. | John C. Davies, TheScripturian’s Creed. Prosecuted and imprisoned. (Book rep.1822 and 1839.) |
Of the work here noted a considerable amount was done by Unitarians, Evanson being of that persuasion, though at the time of writing his earlier Unitarian works he was an Anglican vicar.[211] During the first half of the eighteenth century, despite the movement at the end of the seventeenth, specific anti-Trinitarianism was not much in evidence, the deistic controversy holding the foreground. But gradually Unitarianism made fresh headway. One dissenting clergyman, Martin Tomkyns, who had been dismissed by his congregation at Stoke Newington for his “Arian or Unitarian opinions,” published in 1722 A Sober Appeal to a Turk or an Indian, concerning the plain sense of the Trinity, in reply to the treatise of Dr. Isaac Watts on The Christian Doctrine of the Trinity. A second edition of Tomkyns’s book appeared in 1748, with a further reply to Watts’s Dissertations of 1724. The result seems to have been an unsettlement of the orthodoxy of the hymn-writer. There is express testimony from Dr. Lardner, a very trustworthy witness, that Watts in his latter years, “before he was seized with an imbecility of his faculties,” was substantially a Unitarian. His special papers on the subject were suppressed by his executors; but the full text of his Solemn Address to the Great and Blessed God goes far to bear out Lardner’s express assertion.[212] Other prominent religionists were more outspoken. The most distinguished names associated with the position were those of Lardner and Priestley, of whom the former, trained as a simple “dissenter,” avowedly reached his conclusions without much reference to Socinian literature;[213] and the second, who was similarly educated, no less independently gave up the doctrines of the Atonement and the Trinity, passing later from the Arian to the Socinian position after reading Lardner’s Letter on the Logos.[214] As Priestley derived his determinism from Collins,[215] it would appear that the deistical movement had set up a general habit of reasoning which thus wrought even on Christians who, like Lardner and Priestley, undertook to rebut the objections of unbelievers to their faith. A generally rationalistic influence is to be noted in the works of the Unitarian Antipædobaptist Dr. Joshua Toulmin, author of lives of Socinus (1777) and Biddle (1789), and many other solid works, including a sermon on “The Injustice of classing Unitarians with Deists and Infidels” (1797). In his case the “classing” was certainly inconvenient. In 1791 the effigy of Paine was burned before his door, and his windows broken. His house was saved by being closely guarded; but his businesses of schoolkeeping and bookselling had to be given up. It thus becomes intelligible how, after a period in which Dissent, contemned by the State Church, learned to criticize that Church’s creed, there emerged in England towards the close of the eighteenth century a fresh movement of specific Unitarianism.
Evanson and Toulmin were scholarly writers, though without the large learning of Lardner and the propagandist energy and reputation of Priestley; and the Unitarian movement, in a quiet fashion, made a numerical progress out of all proportion to that of orthodoxy. It owed much of its immunity at this stage, doubtless, to the large element of tacit deism in the Church; and apart from the scholarly work of Lardner both Priestley and Evanson did something for New Testament criticism, as well as towards the clearing-up of Christian origins. Evanson was actually prosecuted in 1773, on local initiative, for a sermon of Unitarian character delivered by him in the parish church of Tewkesbury on Easter-Day of 1771; and, what is much more remarkable, members of his congregation, at a single defence-meeting in an inn, collected £150 to meet his costs.[216] Five years later he had given up the belief in eternal punishment, though continuing to believe in “long protracted” misery for sinners.[217] Still later, after producing his Dissonance, he became uncommonly drastic in his handling of the Canon. He lived well into the nineteenth century, and published in 1805 a vigorous tractate, Second Thoughts on the Trinity, recommended to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Gloucester. In that he treats the First Gospel as a forgery of the second century. The method is indiscriminating, and the author lays much uncritical stress upon prophecy. On the whole, the Unitarian contribution to rational thought, then as later, was secondary or ancillary, though on the side of historical investigation it was important. Lardner’s candour is as uncommon as his learning; and Priestley[218] and Evanson have a solvent virtue.[219] In all three the limitation lies in the fixed adherence to the concept of revelation, which withheld them from radical rationalism even as it did from Arianism. Evanson’s ultra-orthodox acceptance of the Apocalypse is significant of his limitations; and Priestley’s calibre is indicated by his life-long refusal to accept the true scientific inference from his own discovery of oxygen. A more pronounced evolution was that of the Welsh deist David Williams, who, after publishing two volumes of Sermons on Religious Hypocrisy (1774), gave up his post as a dissenting preacher, and, in conjunction with Franklin and other freethinkers, opened a short-lived deistic chapel in Margaret Street, London (1776), where there was used a “Liturgy on the Universal Principles of Religion and Morality.”[220]