A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 / Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumes

by J. M. Robertson

§ 1

It appears from our survey that the “deistic movement,” commonly assigned to the eighteenth century, had been abundantly prepared for in the seventeenth, which, in turn, was but developing ideas current in the sixteenth. When, in 1696, John Toland published his Christianity Not Mysterious, the sensation it made was due not so much to any unheard-of boldness in its thought as to the simple fact that deistic ideas had thus found their way into print.[1] So far the deistic position was explicitly represented in English literature only by the works of Herbert, Hobbes, and Blount; and of these only the first (who wrote in Latin) and the third had put the case at any length. Against the deists or atheists of the school of Hobbes, and the Scriptural Unitarians who thought with Newton and Locke, there stood arrayed the great mass of orthodox intolerance which clamoured for the violent suppression of every sort of “infidelity.” It was this feeling, of which the army of ignorant rural clergy were the spokesmen, that found vent in the Blasphemy Act of 1697. The new literary growth dating from the time of Toland is the evidence of the richness of the rationalistic soil already created. Thinking men craved a new atmosphere. Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity is an unsuccessful compromise: Toland’s book begins a new propagandist era.

Toland’s treatise,[2] heretical as it was, professed to be a defence of the faith, and avowedly founded on Locke’s anonymous Reasonableness of Christianity, its young author being on terms of acquaintance with the philosopher.[3] He claimed, in fact, to take for granted “the Divinity of the New Testament,” and to “demonstrate the verity of divine revelation against atheists and all enemies of revealed religion,” from whom, accordingly, he expected to receive no quarter. Brought up, as he declared, “from my cradle, in the grossest superstition and idolatry,” he had been divinely led to make use of his own reason; and he assured his Christian readers of his perfect sincerity in “defending the true religion.”[4] Twenty years later, his primary positions were hardly to be distinguished from those of ratiocinative champions of the creed, save in respect that he was challenging orthodoxy where they were replying to unbelievers. Toland, however, lacked alike the timidity and the prudence which so safely guided Locke in his latter years; and though his argument was only a logical and outspoken extension of Locke’s position, to the end of showing that there was nothing supra-rational in Christianity of Locke’s type, it separated him from “respectable” society in England and Ireland for the rest of his life. The book was “presented” by the Grand Juries of Middlesex and Dublin;[5] the dissenters in Dublin being chiefly active in denouncing it—with or without knowledge of its contents;[6] half-a-dozen answers appeared; and when in 1698 Toland produced another, entitled Amyntor, showing the infirm foundation of the Christian canon, there was again a speedy crop of replies. Despite the oversights inevitable to such pioneer work, this opens, from the side of freethought, the era of documentary criticism of the New Testament; and in some of his later freethinking books, as the Nazarenus (1718) and the Pantheisticon (1720), he continues to show himself in advance of his time in “opening new windows” for his mind.[7] The latter work represents in particular the influence of Spinoza, whom he had formerly criticized somewhat forcibly[8] for his failure to recognize that motion is inherent in matter. On that head he lays down[9] the doctrine that “motion is but matter under a certain consideration”—an essentially “materialist” position, deriving from the pre-Socratic Greeks, and incidentally affirmed by Bacon.[10] He was not exactly an industrious student or writer; but he had scholarly knowledge and instinct, and several of his works show close study of Bayle.

As regards his more original views on Christian origins, he is not impressive to the modern reader; but theses which to-day stand for little were in their own day important. Thus in his Hodegus (pt. i of the Tetradymus, 1720) it is elaborately argued that the “pillar of fire by night and of cloud by day” was no miracle, but the regular procedure of guides in deserts, where night marches are the rule; the “cloud” being simply the smoke of the vanguard’s fire, which by night flared red. Later criticism decides that the whole narrative of the Exodus is myth. Toland’s method, however, was relatively so advanced that it had not been abandoned by theological “rationalists” a century later. Of that movement he must be ranked an energetic pioneer: though he lacked somewhat the strength of character that in his day was peculiarly needed to sustain a freethinker. Much of his later life was spent abroad; and his Letters to Serena (1704) show him permitted to discourse to the Queen of Prussia on such topics as the origin and force of prejudice, the history of the doctrine of immortality, and the origin of idolatry. He pays his correspondent the compliment of treating his topics with much learning; and his manner of assuming her own orthodoxy in regard to revelation could have served as a model to Gibbon.[11] But, despite such distinguished patronage, his life was largely passed in poverty, cheerfully endured,[12] with only chronic help from well-to-do sympathizers, such as Shaftesbury, who was not over-sympathetic. When it is noted that down to 1761 there had appeared no fewer than fifty-four answers to his first book,[13] his importance as an intellectual influence may be realized.

A certain amount of evasion was forced upon Toland by the Blasphemy Law of 1697; inferentially, however, he was a thorough deist until he became pantheist; and the discussion over his books showed that views essentially deistic were held even among his antagonists. One, an Irish bishop, got into trouble by setting forth a notion of deity which squared with that of Hobbes.[14] The whole of our present subject, indeed, is much complicated by the distribution of heretical views among the nominally orthodox, and of orthodox views among heretics.[15] Thus the school of Cudworth, zealous against atheism, was less truly theistic than that of Blount,[16] who, following Hobbes, pointed out that to deny to God a continual personal and providential control of human affairs was to hold to atheism under the name of theism;[17] whereas Cudworth, the champion of theism against the atheists, entangled himself hopelessly[18] in a theory which made deity endow Nature with “plastic” powers and leave it to its own evolution. The position was serenely demolished by Bayle,[19] as against Le Clerc, who sought to defend it; and in England the clerical outcry was so general that Cudworth gave up authorship.[20] Over the same crux, in Ireland, Bishop Browne and Bishop Berkeley accused each other of promoting atheism; and Archbishop King was embroiled in the dispute.[21] On the other hand, the theistic Descartes had laid down a “mechanical” theory of the universe which perfectly comported with atheism, and partly promoted that way of thinking;[22] and a selection from Gassendi’s ethical writings, translated into English[23] (1699), wrought in the same direction. The Church itself contained Cartesians and Cudworthians, Socinians and deists.[24] Each group, further, had inner differences as to free-will[25] and Providence; and the theistic schools of Newton, Clarke, and Leibnitz rejected each other’s philosophies as well as that of Descartes. Leibnitz complained grimly that Newton and his followers had “a very odd opinion concerning the Work of God,” making the universe an imperfect machine, which the deity had frequently to mend; and treating space as an organ by which God perceives things, which are thus regarded as not produced or maintained by him.[26] Newton’s principles of explanation, he insisted, were those of the materialists.[27] John Hutchinson, a professor at Cambridge, in his Treatise of Power, Essential and Mechanical, also bitterly assailed Newton as a deistical and anti-scriptural sophist.[28] Clarke, on the other hand, declared that the philosophy of Leibnitz was “tending to banish God from the world.”[29] Alongside of such internecine strife, it was not surprising that the great astronomer Halley, who accepted Newton’s principles in physics, was commonly reputed an atheist; and that the freethinkers pitted his name in that connection against Newton’s.[30] As it was he who first suggested[31] the idea of the total motion of the entire solar system in space—described by a modern pietist as “this great cosmical truth, the grandest in astronomy”[32]—they were not ill justified. It can hardly be doubted that if intellectual England could have been polled in 1710, under no restraints from economic, social, and legal pressure, some form of rationalism inconsistent with Christianity would have been found to be nearly as common as orthodoxy. In outlying provinces, in Devon and Cornwall, in Ulster, in Edinburgh and Glasgow, as well as in the metropolis, the pressure of deism on the popular creed evoked expressions of Arian and Socinian thought among the clergy.[33] It was, in fact, the various restraints under notice that determined the outward fortunes of belief and unbelief, and have substantially determined them since. When the devout Whiston was deposed from his professorship for his Arianism, and the unbelieving Saunderson was put in his place,[34] and when Simson was suspended from his ministerial functions in Glasgow,[35] the lesson was learned that outward conformity was the sufficient way to income.[36]

Hard as it was, however, to kick against the pricks of law and prejudice, it is clear that many in the upper and middle classes privately did so. The clerical and the new popular literature of the time prove this abundantly. In the Tatler and its successors,[37] the decorous Addison and the indecorous Steele, neither of them a competent thinker, frigidly or furiously asperse the new tribe of freethinkers; while the evangelically pious Berkeley and the extremely unevangelical Swift rival each other in the malice of their attacks on those who rejected their creed. Berkeley, a man of philosophic genius but intense prepossessions, maintained Christianity on grounds which are the negation of philosophy.[38] Swift, the genius of neurotic misanthropy, who, in the words of Macaulay, “though he had no religion, had a great deal of professional spirit,”[39] fought venomously for the creed of salvation. And still the deists multiplied. In the Earl of Shaftesbury[40] they had a satirist with a finer and keener weapon than was wielded by either Steele or Addison, and a much better temper than was owned by Swift or Berkeley. He did not venture to parade his unbelief: to do so was positively dangerous; but his thrusts at faith left little doubt as to his theory. He was at once dealt with by the orthodox as an enemy, and as promptly adopted by the deists as a champion, important no less for his ability than for his rank. Nor, indeed, is he lacking in boldness in comparison with contemporary writers. The anonymous pamphlet entitled The Natural History of Superstition, by the deist John Trenchard, M.P. (1709), does not venture on overt heresy. But Shaftesbury’s Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (1708), his Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709), and his treatise The Moralists (1709), had need be anonymous because of their essential hostility to the reigning religious ethic.

Such polemic marks a new stage in rationalistic propaganda. Swift, writing in 1709, angrily proposes to “prevent the publishing of such pernicious works as under pretence of freethinking endeavour to overthrow those tenets in religion which have been held inviolable in almost all ages.”[41] But his further protest that “the doctrine of the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the immortality of the soul, and even the truth of all revelation, are daily exploded and denied in books openly printed,” points mainly to the Unitarian propaganda. Among freethinkers he names, in his Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), Asgill, Coward, Toland, and Tindal. But the first was an ultra-Christian; the second was a Christian upholder of the thesis that spirit is not immaterial; and the last, at that date, had published only his Four Discourses (collected in 1709) and his Rights of the Christian Church, which are anti-clerical, but not anti-Christian. Prof. Henry Dodwell, who about 1673 published Two Letters of Advice, I, For the Susception of Holy Orders; II, For Studies Theological, especially such as are Rational, and in 1706 an Epistolary Discourse Concerning the Soul’s Natural Mortality, maintaining the doctrine of conditional immortality,[42] which he made dependent on baptism in the apostolical succession, was a devout Christian; and no writer of that date went further. Dodwell is in fact blamed by Bishop Burnet for stirring up fanaticism against lay-baptism among dissenters.[43] It would appear that Swift spoke mainly from hearsay, and on the strength of the conversational freethinking so common in society.[44] But the anonymous essays of Shaftesbury which were issued in 1709 might be the immediate provocation of his outbreak.[45]

An official picture of the situation is formally drawn in A Representation of the Present State of Religion, with regard to the late excessive growth of infidelity, heresy, and profaneness, drawn up by the Upper House of Convocation of the province of Canterbury in 1711.[46] This sets forth, as a result of the disorders of the Rebellion, a growth of all manner of unbelief and profanity, including denial of inspiration and the authority of the canon; the likening of Christian miracles to heathen fables; the treating of all religious mysteries as absurd speculations; Arianism and Socinianism and scoffing at the doctrine of the Trinity; denial of natural immortality; Erastianism; mockery of baptism and the Lord’s Supper; decrying of all priests as impostors; the collecting and reprinting of infidel works; and publication of mock catechisms. It is explained that all such printing has greatly increased “since the expiration of the Act for restraining the press”; and mention is made of an Arian work just published to which the author has put his name, and which he has dedicated to the Convocation itself. This was the first volume of Whiston’s Primitive Christianity Revived, the work of a devout eccentric, who had just before been deprived of his professorship at Cambridge for his orally avowed heresy. Whiston, whose cause was championed, and whose clerical opponents were lampooned, in an indecorous but vigorous sketch, The Tryal of William Whiston, Clerk, for defaming and denying the Holy Trinity, before the Lord Chief Justice Reason (1712; 3rd ed. 1740), always remained perfectly devout in his Arian orthodoxy; but his and his friends’ arguments were rather better fitted to make deists than to persuade Christians; and Convocation’s appeal for a new Act “restraining the present excessive and scandalous liberty of printing wicked books at home, and importing the like from abroad” was not responded to. There was no love lost between Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury; but the government in which the former, a known deist, was Secretary of State, could hardly undertake to suppress the works of the latter.