And again: "Whatever appellations imply celestial power and energy, may be justly applied to God; his names may properly be as numerous as his offices," The term nature, when it is at all distinguished in the Stoic system from God, denotes not a separate agent, but that order of things which is necessarily produced by his perpetual agency. Since the active principle of nature is comprehended within the world, and with matter makes one whole, it necessarily follows that God penetrates, pervades, and animates matter, and the things which are formed from it; or, in other words, that he is the soul of the universe.
The universe is, according to Zeno and his followers, "a sentient and animated being." Nor was this a new tenet, but, in some sort, the doctrine of all antiquity. Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and after these, Zeno, taking it for granted that there is no real existence which is not corporeal, conceived nature to be one whole, consisting of a subtle ether and gross matter, the former the active, the latter the passive principle, as essentially united as the soul and body of man that is, they supposed God, with respect to nature, to be, not a co-existing, but an informing principle.
Concerning the second principle in the universe, matter, and concerning the visible world, the doctrine of the Stoics is briefly this:—Matter is the first essence of all things, destitute of, but capable of receiving, qualities. Considered universally, it is an eternal whole, which neither increases nor decreases. Considérée! with respect to its parts, it is capable of increase or diminution, of collision and separation, and is perpetually changing. Bodies are continually tending towards dissolution; matter always remains the same. Matter is not infinite, but finite, being circumscribed by the limits of the world; but its parts are infinitely divisible. The world is spherical in its form; and is surrounded by an infinite vacuum. The action of the divine nature upon matter first produced the element of moisture, and then the other elements, fire, air, and earth, of which all bodies are composed. Air and fire have essential levity, or tend towards the exterior surface of the world; earth and water have essential gravity, or tend towards the centre. All the elements are capable of reciprocal conversion; air passing into fire, or into water; earth into air and water; but there is this essential difference among the elements, that fire and air have within themselves a principle of motion, while water and earth are merely passive.... The world, including the whole of nature, God and matter, subsisted from eternity, and will for ever subsist; but the present regular frame of nature had a beginning, and will have an end. The parts tend towards a dissolution, but the whole remains immutably the same. The world is liable to destruction from the prevalence of moisture, or of dryness; the former producing a universal inundation, the latter a universal conflagration. These succeed each other in nature as regularly as winter and summer. When the universal inundation takes place, the whole surface of the earth is covered with water, and all animal life is destroyed; after which, nature is renewed and subsists as before, till the element of fire, becoming prevalent in its turn, dries up all the moisture, converts every substance into its own nature, and at last, by a universal conflagration, reduces the world to its pristine state. At this period, all material forms are lost in one chaotic mass: all animated nature is re-united to the Deity, and nature again exists in its original form, as one whole, consisting of God and matter. From this chaotic state, however, it again emerges, by the energy of the efficient principle, and gods, and men, and all the forms of regulated nature, are renewed, and to be dissolved and renewed in endless succession. The above is collated from Ritter, Enfield, and Lewes, as a specimen of one of the earlier phases of Freethought. Freethought as then expressed had many faults and flaws, but it has grown better every day, extending and widening its circle of utterance, and we hope that it will continue to do so.
MATTHEW TINDAL.
It is easy to mark the progress of the age by recurring to the history of past Freethinkers. Bishops, established and dissenting, are now repeating the parts the old Deiste played. They were sadly treated for setting the example, modern divines follow with applause.
Matthew Tindal was an example of this. He labored to establish religion on the foundation of Reason and Nature. It was to be expected that Christians would be pleased at efforts which would have no effect but to strengthen its foundations. The effort was met by reprobation, and resented as an injury. It is but a just retaliation that believers should now have to establish in vain that evidence they once denounced.
Matthew Tindal was an English Deistical writer, who was born at Beer-Terres, in Devonshire, 1656.—His father, it appears, was a clergyman, who held the living of Beer-Terres, presented to him by the University of Cambridge, in the time of the Civil Wars.—Young Matthew was educated at Oxford, where at twenty-eight he took the degree of LL.D. Matthew Tindal, LL. D., was early tossed about by the winds of doctrine. First he embraced Romanism: afterwards he became a Protestant. Then politics interested him, and he engaged in controversy on the side of William III. He was appointed Commissioner of a Court for Trying Foreigners. In 1693 he published an essay on the Law of Nations When fifty-four, in 1710, he entered so vigorously into theological controversy, arising out of Trinitarian criticism, that his marked satire led to his books being condemned by the House of Commons, and burnt by the hangman. He resented this indignity by a spirited attack on the dominant priestly party in his "High Church Catechism," and he also wrote in defence of philosophical necessity. But his most notable work was the performance of his old age, his "Christianity as Old as the Creation: or, the Gospel, a Republication of the Religion of Nature." This was produced in his seventy-third year. He was attacked in Reply by Bishop Waterland. It is generally agreed that in point of good spirit and good temper the Bishop was far inferior to the Deist. Dr. Conyers Middleton, says Thomas Cooper, in his brief sketch of Tindal, appeared in defence of Tindal in a "Letter to Dr. Waterland," whom he condemned for the shallowness of his answer to Tindal, and boldly and frankly admitted that the Freethinker was right in asserting that the Jews borrowed some of their ceremonies and customs from Egypt; that allegory was, in some cases, employed in the Scriptures, where common readers took the relation for fact; and, that the Scriptures are not of "absolute and universal inspiration." The following sentence, which will be found in this "Letter" of Dr. Conyers Middleton, does honor to his name:—"If religion consists in depreciating moral duties and depressing natural reason; if the duty of it be to hate and persecute for a different way of thinking where the best and wisest have never agreed—then. I declare myself an Infidel, and to have no share in that religion." Matthew Tindal died at his house in Coldbath Fields, of the stone, 1773, aged seventy-seven. * Rysbrach, the famous statuary, took a model of him.
* Julian Hibbert gives 1656-7: Dr. Beard, 1556; Thomas
Cooper, 1657, as the year of Tindal's birth. All agree that
he died 1733—he was therefore seventy-six or seventy-seven
at the time of his death.
Tindal opens his great work thus:—"The author makes no apology for writing on a subject of the last importance; and which, as far as I can find, has no where been so fully treated: he builds nothing on a thing so uncertain as tradition, which differs in most countries; and of which, in all countries, the bulk of mankind are incapable of judging; but thinks he has laid down such plain and evident rules, as may enable men of the meanest capacity, to distinguish between religion and superstition; and has represented the former in every part so beautiful, so amiable, and so strongly affecting, that they, who in the least reflect, must be highly in love with it; and easily perceive, that their duty and happiness are inseparable."