§ 2
When, however, we turn from the higher literary propaganda to the verbal and other transitory debates of the period of the Rebellion, we realize how much partial rationalism had hitherto subsisted without notice. In that immense ferment some very advanced opinions, such as quasi-Anarchism in politics[38] and anti-Scripturalism in religion, were more or less directly professed. In January, 1646 (N.S.), the authorities of the City of London, alarmed at the unheard-of amount of discussion, petitioned Parliament to put down all private meetings;[39] and on February 6, 1646 (N.S.), a solemn fast, or “day of publique humiliation,” was proclaimed on the score of the increase of “errors, heresies, and blasphemies.” On the same grounds, the Presbyterian party in Parliament pressed an “Ordinance for the suppression of Blasphemies and Heresies,” which, long held back by Vane and Cromwell, was carried in their despite in 1648, by large majorities, when the royalists renewed hostilities. It enacted the death penalty against all who should deny the doctrine of the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the inspiration of the Bible, a day of judgment, or a future state; and prescribed imprisonment for Arminianism, rejection of infant baptism, anti-Sabbatarianism, anti-Presbyterianism, or defence of the doctrine of Purgatory or the use of images.[40] And of aggressive heresy there are some noteworthy traces. In a pamphlet entitled “Hell Broke Loose: a Catalogue of the many spreading Errors, Heresies, and Blasphemies of these Times, for which we are to be humbled” (March 9, 1646, N.S.), the first entry—and in the similar Catalogue in Edwards’s Gangræna, the second entry—is a citation of the notable thesis, “That the Scripture, whether a true manuscript or no, whether Hebrew, Greek, or English, is but humane, and not able to discover a divine God.”[41] This is cited from “The Pilgrimage of the Saints, by Lawrence Clarkson,” presumably the Lawrence Clarkson who for his book The Single Eye was sentenced by resolution of Parliament on September 27, 1650, to be imprisoned, the book being burned by the common hangman.[42] He is further cited as teaching that even unbaptized persons may preach and baptize. Of the other heresies cited the principal is the old denial of a future life, and especially of a physical and future hell. In general the heresy is pietistic or antinomian; but we have also the declaration “that right Reason is the rule of Faith, and that we are to believe the Scriptures and the doctrine of the Trinity, Incarnation, Resurrection, so far as we see them to be agreeable to reason and no further.” Concerning Jesus there are various heresies, from simple Unitarianism to contemptuous disparagement, with the stipulation for a “Christ formed in us.” But though there are cases of unquotable or ribald blasphemy there is little trace of scholarly criticism of the Bible, of reasoning against miracles or the inconsistencies of Scripture, as apart from the doctrine of deity. Nonetheless, it is very credible that “multitudes, unsettled ... have changed their faith, either to Scepticisme, to doubt of everything, or Atheisme, to believe nothing.”[43]
Against the furious intolerance of the Puritan legislature some pleaded with new zeal for tolerance all round; arguing that certainty on articles of faith and points of religion was impossible—a doctrine promptly classed as a bad heresy.[44] The plea that toleration would mean concord was met by the confident and not unfounded retort that the “sectaries” would themselves persecute if they could.[45] But this could hardly have been true of all. Notable among the new parties were the Levellers, who insisted that the State should leave religion entirely alone, tolerating all creeds, including even atheism; and who put forward a new and striking ethic, grounding on “universal reason” the right of all men to the soil.[46] In the strictly theological field the most striking innovation, apart from simple Unitarianism, is the denial of the eternity or even the existence of future torments—a position first taken up, as we have seen, either by the continental Socinians or by the unnamed English heretics of the Tudor period, who passed on their heresy to the time of Marlowe.[47] In this connection the learned booklet[48] entitled Of the Torments of Hell: the foundations and pillars thereof discover’d, search’d, shaken, and removed (1658) was rightly thought worth translating into French by d’Holbach over a century later.[49] It is an argument on scriptural lines, denying that the conception of a place of eternal torment is either scriptural or credible; and pointing out that many had explained it in a “spiritual” sense.
Humane feeling of this kind counted for much in the ferment; but a contrary hate was no less abundant. The Presbyterian Thomas Edwards, who in a vociferous passion of fear and zeal set himself to catalogue the host of heresies that threatened to overwhelm the times, speaks of “monsters” unheard-of theretofore, “now common among us—as denying the Scriptures, pleading for a toleration of all religions and worships, yea, for blasphemy, and denying there is a God.”[50] “A Toleration,” he declares, “is the grand design of the Devil, his masterpiece and chief engine”; “every day now brings forth books for a Toleration.”[51] Among the 180 sects named by him[52] there were “Libertines,” “Antiscripturists,” “Skeptics and Questionists,”[53] who held nothing save the doctrine of free speech and liberty of conscience;[54] as well as Socinians, Arians, and Anti-trinitarians; and he speaks of serious men who had not only abandoned their religious beliefs, but sought to persuade others to do the same.[55] Under the rule of Cromwell, tolerant as he was of Christian sectarianism, and even of Unitarianism as represented by Biddle, the more advanced heresies would get small liberty; though that of Thomas Muggleton and John Reeve, which took shape about 1651 as the Muggletonian sect, does not seem to have been molested. Muggleton, a mystic, could teach that there was no devil or evil spirit, save in “man’s spirit of unclean reason and cursed imagination”;[56] but it was only privately that such men as Henry Marten and Thomas Chaloner, the regicides, could avow themselves to be of “the natural religion.” The statement of Bishop Burnet, following Clarendon, that “many of the republicans began to profess deism,” cannot be taken literally, though it is broadly intelligible that “almost all of them were for destroying all clergymen ... and for leaving religion free, as they called it, without either encouragement or restraint.”
See Burnet’s History of His Own Time, bk. i, ed. 1838, p. 43. The phrase, “They were for pulling down the churches,” again, cannot be taken literally. Of those who “pretended to little or no religion and acted only upon the principles of civil liberty,” Burnet goes on to name Sidney, Henry Nevill, Marten, Wildman, and Harrington. The last was certainly of Hobbes’s way of thinking in philosophy (Croom Robertson, Hobbes, p. 223, note); but Wildman was one of the signers of the Anabaptist petition to Charles II in 1658 (Clarendon, Hist. of the Rebellion, bk. xv, ed. 1843, p. 855). As to Marten and Chaloner, see Carlyle’s Cromwell, iii, 194; and articles in Nat. Dict. of Biog. Vaughan (Hist. of England, 1840, ii, 477, note) speaks of Walwyn and Overton as “among the freethinkers of the times of the Commonwealth.” They were, however, Biblicists, not unbelievers. Prof. Gardiner (Hist. of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii, 253, citing a News-letter in the Clarendon MSS.) finds record in 1653 of “a man [who] preached flat atheism in Westminster Hall, uninterrupted by the soldiers of the guard”; but this obviously counts for little.
Between the advance in speculation forced on by the disputes themselves, and the usual revolt against the theological spirit after a long and ferocious display of it, there spread even under the Commonwealth a new temper of secularity. On the one hand, the temperamental distaste for theology, antinomian or other, took form in the private associations for scientific research which were the antecedents of the Royal Society. On the other hand, the spirit of religious doubt spread widely in the middle and upper classes; and between the dislike of the Roundheads for the established clergy and the anger of the Cavaliers against all Puritanism there was fostered that “contempt of the clergy” which had become a clerical scandal at the Restoration and was to remain so for about a century.[57] Their social status was in general low, and their financial position bad; and these circumstances, possible only in a time of weakened religious belief, necessarily tended to further the process of mental change. Within the sphere of orthodoxy, it operated openly. It is noteworthy that the term “rationalist” emerges as the label of a sect of Independents or Presbyterians who declare that “What their reason dictates to them in church or State stands for good, until they be convinced with better.”[58] The “rationalism,” so-called, of that generation remained ostensibly scriptural; but on other lines thought went further. Of atheism there are at this stage only dubious biographical and controversial traces, such as Mrs. Hutchinson’s characterization of a Nottingham physician, possibly a deist, as a “horrible atheist,”[59] and the Rev. John Dove’s Confutation of Atheism (1640), which does not bear out its title. Ephraim Pagitt, in his Heresiography (1644), speaks loosely of an “atheistical sect who affirm that men’s soules sleep with them until the day of judgment”; and tells of some alleged atheist merely that he “mocked and jeared at Christ’s Incarnation.”[60] Similarly a work, entitled Dispute betwixt an Atheist and a Christian (1646), shows the existence not of atheists but of deists, and the deist in the dialogue is a Fleming.
More trustworthy is the allusion in Nathaniel Culverwel’s Discourse of the Light of Nature (written in 1646, published posthumously in 1652) to “those lumps and dunghills of all sects ... that young and upstart generation of gross anti-scripturalists, that have a powder-plot against the Gospel, that would very compendiously behead all Christian religion at one blow, a device which old and ordinary heretics were never acquainted withal.”[61] The reference is presumably to the followers of Lawrence Clarkson. Yet even here we have no mention of atheism, which is treated as something almost impossible. Indeed, the very course of arguing in favour of a “Light of Nature” seems to have brought suspicion on Culverwel himself, who shows a noticeable liking for Herbert of Cherbury.[62] He is, however, as may be inferred from his angry tone towards anti-scripturalists, substantially orthodox, and not very important.
It is contended for Culverwel by modern admirers (ed. cited, p. xxi) that he deserves the praise given by Hallam to the later Bishop Cumberland as “the first Christian writer who sought to establish systematically the principle of moral right independent of revelation.” [See above, p. 74, the similar tribute of Mosheim to Ames.] But Culverwel does not really make this attempt. His proposition is that reason, “the candle of the Lord,” discovers “that all the moral law is founded in natural and common light, in the light of reason, and that there is nothing in the mysteries of the Gospel contrary to the light of reason” (Introd. end); yet he contends not only that faith transcends reason, but that Abraham’s attempt to slay his son was a dutiful obeying of “the God of nature” (pp. 225–26). He does not achieve the simple step of noting that the recognition of revelation as such must be performed by reason, and thus makes no advance on the position of Bacon, much less on those of Pecock and Hooker. His object, indeed, was not to justify orthodoxy by reason against rationalistic unbelief, but to make a case for reason in theology against the Lutherans and others who, “because Socinus has burnt his wings at this candle of the Lord,” scouted all use of it (Introd.). Culverwel, however, was one of the learned group in Emanuel College, Cambridge, whose tradition developed in the next generation into Latitudinarianism; and he may be taken as a learned type of a number of the clergy who were led by the abundant discussion all around them into professing and encouraging a ratiocinative habit of mind. Thus we find Dean Stuart, Clerk of the Closet to Charles I, devoting one of his short homilies to Jerome’s text, Tentemus animas quæ deficiunt a fide naturalibus rationibus adjurare. “It is not enough,” he writes, “for you to rest in an imaginary faith, and easiness in beleeving, except yee know also what and why and how you come to that beleef. Implicite beleevers, ignorant beleevers, the adversary may swallow, but the understanding beleever hee must chaw, and pick bones before hee come to assimilate him, and make him like himself. The implicite beleever stands in an open field, and the enemy will ride over him easily: the understanding beleever is in a fenced town.” (Catholique Divinity, 1657, pp. 133–34—a work written many years earlier.)
The discourse on Atheism, again, in the posthumous works of John Smith of Cambridge (d. 1652), is entirely retrospective; but soon another note is sounded. As early as 1652, the year after the issue of Hobbes’s Leviathan, the prolific Walter Charleton, who had been physician to the king, published a book entitled The Darkness of Atheism Expelled by the Light of Nature, wherein he asserted that England “hath of late produced and doth ... foster more swarms of atheistical monsters ... than any age, than any Nation hath been infested withal.” In the following year Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, published his Antidote against Atheism. The flamboyant dedication to Viscountess Conway affirms that the existence of God is “as clearly demonstrable as any theorem in mathematicks”; but, the reverend author adds, “considering the state of things as they are, I cannot but pronounce that there is more necessity of this my Antidote than I could wish there were.” At the close of the preface he pleasantly explains that he will use no Biblical arguments, but talk to the atheist as a “mere Naturalist”; inasmuch as “he that converses with a barbarian must discourse to him in his own language,” and “he that would gain upon the more weak and sunk minds of sensual mortals is to accommodate himself to their capacity, who, like the bat and owl, can see nowhere so well as in the shady glimmerings of their twilight.” Then, after some elementary play with the design argument, the entire Third Book of forty-six folio pages is devoted to a parade of old wives’ tales of witches and witchcraft, witches’ sabbaths, apparitions, commotions by devils, ghosts, incubi, polter-geists—the whole vulgar medley of the peasant superstitions of Europe.
It is not that the Platonist does violence to his own philosophic tastes by way of influencing the “bats and owls” of atheism. This mass of superstition is his own special pabulum. In the preface he has announced that, while he may abstain from the use of the Scriptures, nothing shall restrain him from telling what he knows of spirits. “I am so cautious and circumspect,” he claims, “that I make use of no narrations that either the avarice of the priest or the credulity and fancifulness of the melancholist may render suspected.” As for the unbelievers, “their confident ignorance shall never dash me out of confidence with my well-grounded knowledge; for I have been no careless inquirer into these things.” It is after a polter-geist tale of the crassest description that he announces that it was strictly investigated and attested by “that excellently-learned and noble gentleman, Mr. E. Boyle,” who avowed “that all his settled indisposedness to believe strange things was overcome by this special conviction.”[63] And the section ends with the proposition: “Assuredly that saying is not more true in politick, No Bishop, no King, than this in metaphysicks, No Spirit, no God.” Such was the mentality of some of the most eminent and scholarly Christian apologists of the time. It seems safe to conclude that the Platonist made few converts.
More avowed that he wrote without having read previous apologists; and others were similarly spontaneous in the defence of the faith. In 1654 there is noted[64] a treatise called Atheismus Vapulans, by William Towers, whose message can in part be inferred from his title;[65] and in 1657 Charleton issued his Immortality of the Human Soul demonstrated by the Light of Nature, wherein the argument, which says nothing of revelation, is so singularly unconfident, and so much broken in upon by excursus, as to leave it doubtful whether the author was more lacking in dialectic skill or in conviction. And still the traces of unbelief multiply. Baxter and Howe were agreed, in 1658, that there were both “infidels and papists” at work around them; and in 1659 Howe writes: “I know some leading men are not Christians.”[66] “Seekers, Vanists, and Behmenists” are specified as groups to which both infidels and papists attach themselves. And Howe, recognizing how religious strifes promote unbelief, bears witness “What a cloudy, wavering, uncertain, lank, spiritless thing is the faith of Christians in this age become!... Most content themselves to profess it only as the religion of their country.”[67]
Alongside of all this vindication of Christianity there was going on constant and cruel persecution of heretic Christians. The Unitarian John Biddle, master of the Gloucester Grammar School, was dismissed for his denial of the Trinity; and in 1647 he was imprisoned, and his book burned by the hangman. In 1654 he was again imprisoned; and in 1655 he was banished to the Scilly Islands. Returning to London after the Restoration, he was again arrested, and died in gaol in 1662.[68] Under the Commonwealth (1656) James Naylor, the Quaker, narrowly escaped death for blasphemy, but was whipped through the streets, pilloried, bored through the tongue with a hot iron, branded in the forehead, and sent to hard labour in prison. Many hundreds of Quakers were imprisoned and more or less cruelly handled.
From the Origines Sacræ (1662) of Stillingfleet, nevertheless, it would appear that both deism and atheism were becoming more and more common.[69] He states that “the most popular pretences of the atheists of our age have been the irreconcilableness of the account of times in Scripture with that of the learned and ancient heathen nations, the inconsistency of the belief of the Scriptures with the principles of reason; and the account which may be given of the origin of things from the principles of philosophy without the Scriptures.” These positions are at least as natural to deists as to atheists; and Stillingfleet is later found protesting against the policy of some professed Christians who give up the argument from miracles as valueless.[70] His whole treatise, in short, assumes the need for meeting a very widespread unbelief in the Bible, though it rarely deals with the atheism of which it so constantly speaks. After the Restoration, naturally, all the new tendencies were greatly reinforced,[71] alike by the attitude of the king and his companions, all influenced by French culture, and by the general reaction against Puritanism. Whatever ways of thought had been characteristic of the Puritans were now in more or less complete disfavour; the belief in witchcraft was scouted as much on this ground as on any other;[72] and the deistic doctrines found a ready audience among royalists, whose enemies had been above all things Bibliolaters.
There is evidence that Charles II, at least up to the time of his becoming a Catholic, and probably even to the end, was at heart a deist. See Burnet’s History of his Own Time, ed. 1838, pp. 61, 175, and notes; and cp. refs. in Buckle, 3-vol. ed. i, 362, note; 1-vol. ed. p. 205. St. Evremond, who knew him and many of his associates, affirmed expressly that Charles’s creed “étoit seulement ce qui passe vulgairement, quoiqu’ injustement, pour une extinction totale de Religion: je veux dire le Déisme” (Œuvres mélées: t. viii of Œuvres, ed. 1714, p. 354). His opinion, St. Evremond admits, was the result of simple recognition of the actualities of religious life, not of reading, or of much reflection. And his adoption of Catholicism, in St. Evremond’s opinion, was purely political. He saw that Catholicism made much more than Protestantism for kingly power, and that his Catholic subjects were the most subservient.
We gather this, however, still from the apologetic treatises and the historians, not from new deistic literature; for in virtue of the Press Licensing Act, passed on behalf of the Church in 1662, no heretical book could be printed; so that Herbert was thus far the only professed deistic writer in the field, and Hobbes the only other of similar influence. Baxter, writing in 1655 on The Unreasonableness of Infidelity, handles chiefly Anabaptists; and in his Reformed Pastor (1656), though he avows that “the common ignorant people,” seeing the endless strifes of the clergy, “are hardened by us against all religion,” the only specific unbelief he mentions is that of “the devil’s own agents, the unhappy Socinians,” who had written “so many treatises for ... unity and peace.”[73] But in his Reasons of the Christian Religion, issued in 1667, he thinks fit to prove the existence of God and a future state, and the truth and the supernatural character of the Christian religion. Any deist or atheist who took the trouble to read through it would have been rewarded by the discovery that the learned author has annihilated his own case. In his first part he affirms: “If there were no life of Retribution after this, Obedience to God would be finally men’s loss and ruine: But Obedience to God shall not be finally men’s loss and ruine: Ergo, there is another life.”[74] In the second part he writes that “Man’s personal interest is an unfit rule and measure of God’s goodness”;[75] and, going on to meet the new argument against Christianity based on the inference that an infinity of stars are inhabited, he writes:—
Ask any man who knoweth these things whether all this earth be any more in comparison of the whole creation than one Prison is to a Kingdom or Empire, or the paring of one nail ... in comparison of the whole body. And if God should cast off all this earth, and use all the sinners in it as they deserve, it is no more sign of a want of benignity or mercy in him than it is for a King to cast one subject of a million into a jail ... or than it is to pare a man’s nails, or cut off a wart, or a hair, or to pull out a rotten aking tooth.[76]
Thus the second part absolutely destroys one of the fundamental positions of the first. No semblance of levity on the part of the freethinkers could compare with the profound intellectual insincerity of such a propaganda as this; and that deism and atheism continued to gain ground is proved by the multitude of apologetic treatises. Even in church-ridden Scotland they were found necessary; at least the young advocate George Mackenzie, afterwards to be famous as the “bluidy Mackenzie” of the time of persecution, thought it expedient to make his first appearance in literature with a Religio Stoici (1663), wherein he sets out with a refutation of atheism. It is difficult to believe that his counsel to Christians to watch the “horror-creating beds of dying atheists”[77]—a false pretence as it stands—represented any knowledge whatever of professed atheism in his own country; and his discussion of the subject is wholly on the conventional lines—notably so when he uses the customary plea, later associated with Pascal, that the theist runs no risk even if there is no future life, whereas the atheist runs a tremendous risk if there is one;[78] but when he writes of “that mystery why the greatest wits are most frequently the greatest atheists,”[79] he must be presumed to refer at least to deists. And other passages show that he had listened to freethinking arguments. Thus he speaks[80] of those who “detract from Scripture by attributing the production of miracles to natural causes”; and again[81] of those who “contend that the Scriptures are written in a mean and low style; are in some places too mysterious, in others too obscure; contain many things incredible, many repetitions, and many contradictions.” His own answers are conspicuously weak. In the latter passage he continues: “But those miscreants should consider that much of the Scripture’s native splendour is impaired by its translators”; and as to miracles he makes the inept answer that if secondary causes were in operation they acted by God’s will; going on later to suggest on his own part that prophecy may be not a miraculous gift, but “a natural (though the highest) perfection of our human nature.”[82] Apart from his weak dialectic, he writes in general with cleverness and literary finish, but without any note of sincerity; and his profession of concern that reason should be respected in theology[83] is as little acted on in his later life as his protest against persecution.[84] The inference from the whole essay is that in Scotland, as in England, the civil war had brought up a considerable crop of reasoned unbelief; and that Mackenzie, professed defender of the faith as he was at twenty-five, and official persecutor of nonconformists as he afterwards became, met with a good deal of it in his cultured circle. In his later booklet, Reason: an Essay (1690), he speaks of the “ridiculous and impudent extravagance of some who ... take pains to persuade themselves and others that there is not a God.”[85] He further coarsely asperses all atheists as debauchees,[86] though he avows that “Infidelity is not the cause of false reasoning, because such as are not atheists reason falsely.”
When anti-theistic thought could subsist in the ecclesiastical climate of Puritan Scotland, it must have flourished somewhat in England. In 1667 appeared A Philosophicall Essay towards an eviction of the Being and Attributes of God, etc., of which the preface proclaims “the bold and horrid pride of Atheists and Epicures” who “have laboured to introduce into the world a general Atheism, or at least a doubtful Skepticisme in matters of Religion.” In 1668 was published Meric Casaubon’s treatise, Of Credulity and Incredulity in things Natural, Civil, and Divine, assailing not only “the Sadducism of these times in denying spirits, witches,” etc., but “Epicurus ... and the juggling and false dealing lately used to bring Atheism into Credit”—a thrust at Gassendi. A similar polemic is entombed in a ponderous folio “romance” entitled Bentivolio and Urania, by Nathaniel Ingelo, D.D., a fellow first of Emanuel College, and afterwards of Queen’s College, Cambridge (1660; 4th ed. amended, 1682). The second part, edifyingly dedicated to the Earl of Lauderdale, one of the worst men of his day, undertakes to handle the “Atheists, Epicureans, and Skepticks”; and in the preface the atheists are duly vituperated; while Epicurus is described as a gross sensualist, in terms of the legend, and the skeptics as “resigned to the slavery of vice.” In the sixth book the atheists are allowed a momentary hearing in defence of their “horrid absurdities,” from which it appears that there were current arguments alike anthropological and metaphysical against theism. The most competent part of the author’s own argument, which is unlimited as to space, is that which controverts the thesis of the invention of religious beliefs by “politicians”[87]—a notion first put in currency, as we have seen, by those who insisted on the expediency and value of such inventions; as, Polybius among the ancients, and Machiavelli among the moderns; and further by Christian priests, who described all non-Christian religions as human inventions.
Dr. Ingelo’s folio seems to have had many readers; but he avowedly did not look for converts; and defences of the faith on a less formidable scale were multiplied. A “Person of Honour” (Sir Charles Wolseley) produced in 1669 an essay on The Unreasonableness of Atheism made Manifest, which, without supplying any valid arguments, gives some explanation of the growth of unbelief in terms of the political and other antecedents;[88] and in 1670 appeared Richard Barthogge’s Divine Goodness Explicated and Vindicated from the Exceptions of the Atheists. Baxter in 1671[89] complains that “infidels are grown so numerous and so audacious, and look so big and talk so loud”; and still the process continues. In 1672 Sir William Temple writes indignantly of “those who would pass for wits in our age by saying things which, David tells us, the fool said in his heart.”[90] In the same year appeared The Reasonableness of Scripture-Belief, by Sir Charles Wolseley, and The Atheist Silenced, by one J. M.; in 1674, Dr. Thomas Good’s Firmianus et Dubitantius, or Dialogues concerning Atheism, Infidelity, and Popery; in 1675, the posthumous treatise of Bishop Wilkins (d. 1672), Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion, with a preface by Tillotson; and a Brevis Demonstratio, with the modest sub-title, “The Truth of Christian Religion Demonstrated by Reasons the best that have yet been out in English”; in 1677, Bishop Stillingfleet’s Letter to a Deist; and in 1678 the massive work of Cudworth on The True Intellectual System of the Universe attacking atheism (not deism) on philosophic lines which sadly compromised the learned author.[91] English dialectic being found insufficient, there was even produced in 1679 a translation by the Rev. Joshua Bonhome of the French L’Athéisme Convaincu of David Dersdon, published twenty years before.
All of these works explicitly avow the abundance of unbelief; Tillotson, himself accused of it, pronounces the age “miserably overrun with Skepticism and Infidelity”; and Wilkins, avowing that these tendencies are common “not only among sensual men of the vulgar sort, but even among those who pretend to a more than ordinary measure of wit and learning,” attempts to meet them by a purely deistic argument, with a claim for Christianity appended, as if he were concerned chiefly to rebut atheism, and held his own Christianity on a very rationalistic tenure. The fact was that the orthodox clergy were as hard put to it to repel religious antinomianism on the one hand as to repel atheism on the other; and no small part of the deistic movement seems to have been set up by the reaction against pious lawlessness.[92] Thus we have Tillotson, writing as Dean of Canterbury, driven to plead in his preface to the work of Wilkins that “it is a great mistake” to think the obligation of moral duties “doth solely depend upon the revelation of God’s will made to us in the Holy Scriptures.” It was such reasoning that brought upon him the charge of freethinking.
If it be now possible to form any accurate picture of the state of belief in the latter part of the seventeenth century, it may perhaps be done by recognizing three categories of temperament or mental proclivity. First we have to reckon with the great mass of people held to religious observance by hebetude,[93] devoid of the deeper mystical impulse or psychic bias which exhibited itself on the one hand among the dissenters who partly preserved the “enthusiasms” of the Commonwealth period, and on the other among the more cultured pietists of the Church who, banning “enthusiasm” in its stronger forms, cultivated a certain “enthusiasm” of their own. Religionists of the latter type were ministered to by superstitious mystics like Henry More, who, even when undertaking to “prove” the existence of God and the separate existence of the soul by argument and by demonology, taught them to cultivate a “warranted enthusiasm,” and to “endeavour after a certain principle more noble and inward than reason itself, and without which reason will falter, or at least reach but to mean and frivolous things” ... “something in me while I thus speak, which I must confess is of so retruse a nature that I want a name for it, unless I should adventure to term it divine sagacity, which is the first rise of successful reason, especially in matters of great comprehension and moment.”[94] There was small psychic difference between this dubiously draped affirmation of the “inner light” and the more orotund proclamations of it by the dissenters who, for a considerable section of the people, still carried on the tradition of rapturous pietism; and the dissenters were not always at a disadvantage in that faculty for rhetoric which has generally been a main factor in doctrinal religion.[95]
From the popular and the eclectic pietist alike the generality of the Anglican clergy stood aloof; and among them, in turn, a rationalistic and anti-mythical habit of mind in a manner joined men who were divided in their beliefs. The clergymen who wrote lawyer-like treatises against schism were akin in psychosis to those who, in their distaste for the parade of inspiration, veered towards deism. Tillotson was not the only man reputed to have done so: fervid dissenters declared that many of the established clergy paid “more respect to the light of reason than to the light of the Scriptures,” and further “left Christ out of their religion, disowned imputed righteousness, derided the operations of the holy spirit as the empty pretences of enthusiasts.”[96] Of men of this temperament, some would open dialectic batteries against dissent; while others, of a more searching proclivity, would tend to construct for themselves a rationalistic creed out of the current medley of theological and philosophic doctrine. The great mass of course maintained an allegiance of habit to the main formulas of the faith, putting quasi-rational aspects on the trinity, providence, redemption, and the future life, very much as the adherents of political parties normally vindicate their supposed principles; and there was a good deal of surviving temperamental piety even in the Restoration period.[97] But the outstanding feature of the age, as contrasted with previous periods, was the increasing commonness of the skeptical or rationalistic attitude in general society. Sir Charles Wolseley protests[98] that “Irreligion, ’tis true, in its practice hath still been the companion of every age, but its open and public defence seems the peculiar of this”; adding that “most of the bad principles of this age are of no earlier a date than one very ill book, and indeed but the spawn of the Leviathan.” This, as we have seen, is a delusion; but the influence of Hobbes was a potent factor.
All the while, the censorship of the press, which was one of the means by which the clerical party under Charles combated heresy, prevented any new and outspoken writing on the deistic side. The Treatise of Humane [i.e. Human] Reason (1674)[99] of Martin Clifford, a scholarly man-about-town,[100] who was made Master of the Charterhouse, went indeed to the bottom of the question of authority by showing, as Spinoza had done shortly before,[101] that the acceptance of authority is itself in the last resort grounded in reason. The author makes no overt attack on religion, and professes Christian belief, but points out that many modern wars had been on subjects of religion, and elaborates a skilful argument on the gain to be derived from toleration. Reason alone, fairly used, will bring a man to the Christian faith: he who denies this cannot be a Christian. As for schism, it is created not by variation in belief, but by the refusal to tolerate it. This ingenious and well-written treatise speedily elicited three replies, all pronouncing it a pernicious work. Dr. Laney, Bishop of Ely, is reported to have declared that book and author might fitly be burned together;[102] and Dr. Isaac Watts, while praising it for “many useful notions,” found it “exalt reason as the rule of religion as well as the guide, to a degree very dangerous.”[103] Its actual effect seems to have been to restrain the persecution of dissenters.[104] In 1680, three years after Clifford’s death, there appeared An Apology for a Treatise of Humane Reason, by Albertus Warren, wherein one of the attacks, entitled Plain Dealing, by a Cambridge scholar, is specially answered.[105] This helped to evoke the anonymous Discourse of Things above Reason (1681), by Robert Boyle, the distinguished author of The Sceptical Chemist, whom we have seen backing up Henry More in acceptance of the grossest of ignorant superstitions. The most notable thing about the Discourse is that it anticipates Berkeley’s argument against freethinking mathematicians.[106]
The stress of new discussion is further to be gathered from the work of Howe, On the Reconcilableness of God’s Prescience of the Sins of Men with the Wisdom and Sincerity of his Counsels and Exhortations, produced in 1677 at Boyle’s request. As a modern admirer admits that the thesis was a hopeless one,[107] it is not to be supposed that it did much to lessen doubt in its own day. The preface to Stillingfleet’s Letter to a Deist (1677), which for the first time brings that appellation into prominence in English controversy, tacitly abandoning the usual ascription of atheism to all unbelievers, avows that “a mean esteem of the Scriptures and the Christian Religion” has become very common “among the Skepticks of this Age,” and complains very much, as Butler did sixty years later, of the spirit of “Raillery and Buffoonery” in which the matter was too commonly approached. The “Letter” shows that a multitude of the inconsistencies and other blemishes of the Old Testament were being keenly discussed; and it cannot be said that the Bishop’s vindication was well calculated to check the tendency. Indeed, we have the angry and reiterated declaration of Archdeacon Parker, writing in 1681, that “the ignorant and the unlearned among ourselves are become the greatest pretenders to skepticism; and it is the common people that nowadays set up for Skepticism and Infidelity”; that “Atheism and Irreligion are at length become as common as Vice and Debauchery”; and that “Plebeans and Mechanicks have philosophized themselves into Principles of Impiety, and read their Lectures of Atheism in the Streets and Highways. And they are able to demonstrate out of the Leviathan that there is no God nor Providence,” and so on.[108] As the Archdeacon’s method of refutation consists mainly in abuse, he doubtless had the usual measure of success. A similar order of dialectic is employed by Dr. Sherlock in his Practical Discourse of Religious Assemblies (1681). The opening section is addressed to the “speculative atheists,” here described as receding from the principles of their “great Master, Mr. Hobbs,” who, “though he had no great opinion of religion in itself, yet thought it something considerable when it became the law of the nation.” Such atheists, the reverend writer notes, when it is urged on them that all mankind worship “some God or other,” reply that such an argument is as good for polytheism and idolatry as for monotheism; so, after formally inviting them to “cure their souls of that fatal and mortal disease, which makes them beasts here and devils hereafter,” and lamenting that he is not dealing with “reasonable men,” he bethinks him that “the laws of conversation require us to treat all men with just respects,” and admits that there have been “some few wise and cautious atheists.” To such, accordingly, he suggests that the atheist has already a great advantage in a world morally restrained by religion, where he is under no such restraint, and that, “if he should by his wit and learning proselyte a whole nation to atheism, Hell would break loose on Earth, and he might soon find himself exposed to all those violences and injuries which he now securely practises.” For the rest, they had better not affront God, who may after all exist, and be able to revenge himself.[109] And so forth.
Of deists as such, Sherlock has nothing to say beyond treating as “practical atheists” men who admit the existence of God, yet never go to church, though “religious worship is nothing else but a public acknowledgment of God.” Their non-attendance “is as great, if not a greater affront to God, and contempt of him, than atheism itself.”[110] But the reverend writer’s strongest resentment is aroused by the spectacle of freethinkers asking for liberty of thought.
“It is a fulsome and nauseous thing,” he breathlessly protests, “to see the atheists and infidels of our days to turn great reformers of religion, to set up a mighty cry for liberty of conscience. For whatever reformation of religion may be needful at this time, whatever liberty of conscience may be fit to be granted, yet what have these men to do to meddle with it; those who think religion a mere fable, and God to be an Utopian prince, and conscience a man of clouts set up for a scarecrow to fright such silly creatures from their beloved enjoyments, and hell and heaven to be forged in the same mint with the poet’s Styx and Acheron and Elysian Fields? We are like to see blessed times, if such men had but the reforming of religion.”[111]
Dr Sherlock was not going to do good if the devil bade him.
The faith had a wittier champion in South; but he, in a Westminster Abbey sermon of 1684–5,[112] mournfully declares that
“The weakness of our church discipline since its restoration, whereby it has been scarce able to get any hold on men’s consciences, and much less able to keep it; and the great prevalence of that atheistical doctrine of the Leviathan; and the unhappy propagation of Erastianism; these things (I say) with some others have been the sad and fatal causes that have loosed the bands of conscience and eaten out the very heart and sense of Christianity among us, to that degree, that there is now scarce any religious tye or restraint upon persons, but merely from those faint remainders of natural conscience, which God will be sure to keep alive upon the hearts of men, as long as they are men, for the great ends of his own providence, whether they will or no. So that, were it not for this sole obstacle, religion is not now so much in danger of being divided and torn piecemeal by sects and factions, as of being at once devoured by atheism. Which being so, let none wonder that irreligion is accounted policy when it is grown even to a fashion; and passes for wit, with some, as well as for wisdom with others.”
How general was the ferment of discussion may be gathered from Dryden’s Religio Laici (1682), addressed to the youthful Henry Dickinson, translator of Père Richard Simon’s Critical History of the Old Testament (Fr. 1678). The French scholar was suspect to begin with; and Bishop Burnet tells that Richard Hampden (grandson of the patriot), who was connected with the Rye House Plot and committed suicide in the reign of William and Mary, had been “much corrupted” in his religious principles by Simon’s conversation at Paris. In the poem, Dryden recognizes the upsetting tendency of the treatise, albeit he terms it “matchless”:—
For some, who have his secret meaning guessed,
Have found our author not too much a priest;
and his flowing disquisition, which starts from poetic contempt of reason and ends in prosaic advice to keep quiet about its findings, leaves the matter at that. The hopelessly confused but musical passage:
Dim as the borrowed beams of moon and stars,
To lonely, weary, wandering travellers,
Is Reason to the soul,
begins the poem; but the poet thinks it necessary both in his preface and in his piece to argue with the deists in a fashion which must have entertained them as much as it embarrassed the more thoughtful orthodox, his simple thesis being that all ideas of deity were débris from the primeval revelation to Noah, and that natural reason could never have attained to a God-idea at all. And even at that, as regards the Herbertian argument:
No supernatural worship can be true,
Because a general law is that alone
Which must to all and everywhere be known:
he confesses that
Of all objections this indeed is chief
To startle reason, stagger frail belief;
and feebly proceeds to argue away the worst meaning of the creed of “the good old man” Athanasius. Finally, we have a fatherly appeal for peace and quietness among the sects:—
And after hearing what our Church can say,
If still our reason runs another way,
That private reason ’tis more just to curb
Than by disputes the public peace disturb;
For points obscure are of small use to learn,
But common quiet is mankind’s concern.
It must have been the general disbelief in Dryden’s sincerity on religious matters that caused the ascription to him of various freethinking treatises, for there is no decisive evidence that he was ever pronouncedly heterodox. His attitude to rationalism in the Religio Laici is indeed that of one who either could not see the scope of the problem or was determined not to indicate his recognition of it; and on the latter view the insincerity of both poem and preface would be exorbitant. By his nominal hostility to deism, however, Dryden did freethought a service of some importance. After his antagonism had been proclaimed, no one could plausibly associate freethinking with licentiousness, in which Dryden so far exceeded nearly every poet and dramatist of his age that the non-juror Jeremy Collier was free to single him out as the representative of theatrical lubricity. But in simple justice it must also be avowed that of all the opponents of deism in that day he is one of the least embittered, and that his amiable superficiality of argument must have tended to stimulate the claims of reason.
The late Dr. Verrall, a keen but unprejudiced critic, sums up as regards Dryden’s religious poetry in general that “What is clear is that he had a marked dislike of clergy of all sorts, as such”; that “the main points of Deism are noted in Religio Laici (46–61); and that “his creed was presumably some sort of Deism” (Lectures on Dryden, 1914, pp. 148–50). Further, “The State of Innocence is really deistic and not Christian in tone: in his play of Tyrannic Love, the religion of St. Catharine may be mere philosophy”; and though the poet in his preface to that play protests that his “outward conversation shall never be justly taxed with the note of atheism or profaneness,” the disclaimer “proves nothing as to his positive belief: Deism is not profane.” In Absalom and Achitophel, again, the “coarse satire on Transubstantiation (118 ff.) shows rather religious insensibility than hostile theology,” though “the poem shows his dislike of liberty and private judgment (49–50).” Of the Religio Laici the critic asks: “Now in all this, is there any religion at all?” The poem “might well be dismissed as mere politics but for its astounding commencement” (p. 155). The critic unexpectedly fails to note that the admired commencement is an insoluble confusion of metaphors.
How far the process of reasoning had gone among quiet thinking people before the Revolution may be gathered from the essay entitled Miracles no Violations of the Laws of Nature, published in 1683.[113] Its thesis is that put explicitly by Montaigne and implicitly by Bacon, that Ignorance is the only worker of miracles; in other words, “that the power of God and the power of Nature are one and the same”—a simple and straightforward way of putting a conception which Cudworth had put circuitously and less courageously a few years before. No Scriptural miracle is challenged qua event. “Among the many miracles related to be done in favour of the Israelites,” says the writer, “there is (I think) no one that can be apodictically demonstrated to be repugnant to th’ establisht Order of Nature”;[114] and he calmly accepts the Biblical account of the first rainbow, explaining it as passing for a miracle merely because it was the first. He takes his motto from Pliny: “Quid non miraculo est, cum primum in notitiam venit?”[115] This is, however, a preliminary strategy; as is the opening reminder that “most of the ancient Fathers ... and of the most learned Theologues among the moderns” hold that the Scriptures as regards natural things do not design to instruct men in physics but “aim only to excite pious affections in their breasts.”
We accordingly reach the position that the Scripture “many times speaks of natural things, yea even of God himself, very improperly, as aiming to affect and occupy the imagination of men, not to convince their reason.” Many Scriptural narratives, therefore, “are either delivered poetically or related according to the preconceived opinions and prejudices of the writer.” “Wherefore we here absolutely conclude that all the events that are truly related in the Scripture to have come to pass, proceeded necessarily ... according to the immutable Laws of Nature; and that if anything be found which can be apodictically demonstrated to be repugnant to those laws ... we may safely and piously believe the same not to have been dictated by divine inspiration, but impiously added to the sacred volume by sacrilegious men; for whatever is against Nature is against Reason; and whatever is against Reason is absurd, and therefore also to be rejected and refuted.”[116]
Lest this should be found too hard a doctrine there is added, àpropos of Joshua’s staying of the sun and moon, a literary solution which has often done duty in later times. “To interpret Scripture-miracles, and to understand from the narrations of them how they really happened, ’tis necessary to know the opinions of those who first reported them ... otherwise we shall confound ... things which have really happen’d with things purely imaginary, and which were only prophetic representations. For in Scripture many things are related as real, and which were also believ’d to be real even by the relators themselves, that notwithstanding were only representations form’d in the brain, and merely imaginary—as that God, the Supreme Being, descended from heaven ... upon Mount Sinai...; that Elias ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot ... which were only representations accommodated to their opinions who deliver’d them down to us.”[117] Such argumentation had to prepare the way for Hume’s Essay Of Miracles, half a century later; and concerning both reasoners it is to be remembered that their thought was to be “infidelity” for centuries after them. It needed real freethinking, then, to produce such doctrine in the days of the Rye House Plot.
Meanwhile, during an accidental lapse of the press laws, the deist Charles Blount[118] (1654–1693) had produced with his father’s help his Anima Mundi (1679), in which there is set forth a measure of cautious unbelief; following it up (1680) by his much more pronounced essay, Great is Diana of the Ephesians, a keen attack on the principle of revelation and clericalism in general, and his translation [from the Latin version] of Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana, so annotated[119] as to be an ingenious counterblast to the Christian claims, and so prefaced as to be an open challenge to orthodoxy. The book was condemned to be burnt; and only the influence of Blount’s family,[120] probably, prevented his being prosecuted. The propaganda, however, was resumed by Blount and his friends in small tracts, and after his suicide[121] in 1693 these were collected as the Oracles of Reason (1693), his collected works (without the Apollonius) appearing in 1695. By this time the political tension of the Revolution of 1688 was over; Le Clerc’s work on the inspiration of the Old Testament, raising many doubts as to the authorship of the Pentateuch, had been translated in 1690; Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) had been translated into English in 1689, and had impressed in a similar sense a number of scholars; his Ethica had given a new direction to the theistic controversy; the Boyle Lecture had been established for the confutation of unbelievers; and after the political convulsion of 1688 has subsided it rains refutations. Atheism is now so fiercely attacked, and with such specific arguments—as in Bentley’s Boyle Lectures (1692), Edwards’s Thoughts concerning the Causes of Atheism (1695), and many other treatises—that there can be no question as to the private vogue of atheistic or agnostic opinions. If we are to judge solely from the apologetic literature, it was more common than deism. Yet it seems impossible to doubt that there were ten deists for one atheist. Bentley’s admission that he never met an explicit atheist[122] suggests that much of the atheism warred against was tentative. It was only the deists who could venture on open avowals; and the replies to them were most discussed.
Much account was made of one of the most compendious, the Short and Easy Method with the Deists (1697), by the nonjuror Charles Leslie; but this handy argument (which is really adopted without acknowledgment from an apologetic treatise by a French Protestant refugee, published in 1688[123]) was not only much bantered by deists, but was sharply censured as incompetent by the French Protestant Le Clerc;[124] and many other disputants had to come to the rescue. A partial list will suffice to show the rate of increase of the ferment:—
Still there was no new deistic literature apart from Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious (1696) and his unauthorized issue (of course without author’s name) of Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue in 1699; and in that there is little direct conflict with orthodoxy, though it plainly enough implied that scripturalism would injuriously affect morals. It seems at that date, perhaps through the author’s objection to its circulation, to have attracted little attention; but he tells that it incurred hostility.[125] Blount’s famous stratagem of 1693[126] had led to the dropping of the official censorship of the press, the Licensing Act having been renewed for only two years in 1693 and dropped in 1695; but after the prompt issue of Blount’s collected works in that year, and the appearance of Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious in the next, the new and comprehensive Blasphemy Law of 1697[127] served sufficiently to terrorize writers and printers in that regard for the time being.[128] Bare denial of the Trinity, of the truth of the Christian religion, or of the divine authority of the Scriptures, was made punishable by disability for any civil office; and on a second offence by three years’ imprisonment, with withdrawal of all legal rights. The first clear gain from the freedom of the press was thus simply a cheapening of books in general. By the Licensing Act of Charles II, and by a separate patent, the Stationers’ Company had a monopoly of printing and selling all classical authors; and while their editions were disgracefully bad, the importers of the excellent editions printed in Holland had to pay them a penalty of 6s. 8d. on each copy.[129] By the same Act, passed under clerical influence, the number even of master printers and letter-founders had been reduced, and the number of presses and apprentices strictly limited; and the total effect of the monopolies was that when Dutch-printed books were imported in exchange for English, the latter sold more cheaply at Amsterdam than they did in London, the English consumer, of course, bearing the burden.[130] The immediate effect, therefore, of the lapse of the Licensing Act must have been to cheapen greatly all foreign books by removal of duties, and at the same time to cheapen English books by leaving printing free. It will be seen above that the output of treatises against freethought at once increases in 1696. But the revolution of 1688, like the Great Rebellion, had doubtless given a new stimulus to freethinking; and the total effect of freer trade in books, even with a veto on “blasphemy,” could only be to further it. This was ere long to be made plain.