[43] Cp. Johnson on A. Philips in Lives of the Poets. Swift, too, issued his Free Thoughts upon the Present State of Affairs in 1714. [↑]
[44] Thus Bentley, writing as Phileleutherus Lipsiensis against Collins, claims to have been “train’d up and exercis’d in Free Thought from my youth.” Dr. Samuel Clarke somewhere makes a similar statement; and the point is raised by Berkeley in his Minute Philosopher, Dial. i, § 10. One of the first replies to Collins, A Letter to the Free-thinkers, By a Layman, dated February 24, 1712–13, likewise insists on the right of believers to the title, declaring that “a free-thinker may be the best or worst of men.” Shaftesbury on the other side protests that the passion of orthodoxy “holds up the intended chains and fetters and declares its resolution to enslave” (Characteristics, iii. 305; ed. 1900, ii, 345). Later, the claim of Bentley and Clarke became common; and one tract on Christian evidences, A Layman’s Faith, 1732, whose author shows not a grain of the critical spirit, professes to be written “by a Freethinker and a Christian.” [↑]
[46] Cp. Hauréau, Histoire de la philosophie scolastique, ed. 1870–1872, i, 543–46. [↑]
[47] Second ed. with enlarged Appendix (of authorities and references), 1808, 2 vols. [↑]
[48] Farrar, pref., p. x; Riddle, p. 99; Van Mildert, i, 105, etc. [↑]
[49] Van Mildert even recast his first manuscript. See the Memoir of Joshua Watson, 1863, p. 35. [↑]
[50] Cp. W. A. Schmidt, Geschichte der Denk- und Glaubensfreiheit im ersten Jahrhundert der Kaiserherrschaft und des Christenthums, 1847, pp. 12–13. [↑]
[51] Its legitimacy on that side is expressly contended for by Professor William James in his volume The Will to Believe (1897), the positions of which were criticized by the present writer in the University Magazine, April and June, 1897. [↑]