§ 2
Deism had been thus made in a manner fashionable[47] when, in 1713, Anthony Collins (1676–1729) began a new development by his Discourse of Freethinking. He had previously published a notably freethinking Essay Concerning the Use of Reason (1707), albeit without specific impeachment of the reigning creed; carried on a discussion with Clarke on the question of the immateriality of the soul; and issued treatises entitled Priestcraft in Perfection (1709, dealing with the history of the Thirty-nine Articles)[48] and A Vindication of the Divine Attributes (1710), exposing the Hobbesian theism of Archbishop King on lines followed twenty years later by Berkeley in his Minute Philosopher. But none of these works aroused such a tumult as the Discourse of Freethinking, which may be said to sum up and unify the drift not only of previous English freethinking, but of the great contribution of Bayle, whose learning and temper influence all English deism from Shaftesbury onwards.[49] Collins’s book, however, was unique in its outspokenness. To the reader of to-day, indeed, it is no very aggressive performance: the writer was a man of imperturbable amenity and genuine kindliness of nature; and his style is the completest possible contrast to that of the furious replies it elicited. It was to Collins that Locke wrote, in 1703: “Believe it, my good friend, to love truth for truth’s sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues; and, if I mistake not, you have as much of it as I ever met with in anybody.”[50] The Discourse does no discredit to this uncommon encomium, being a luminous and learned plea for the conditions under which alone truth can be prosperously studied, and the habits of mind which alone can attain it. Of the many replies, the most notorious is that of Bentley writing as Phileleutherus Lipsiensis, a performance which, on the strength of its author’s reputation for scholarship, has been uncritically applauded by not a few critics, of whom some of the most eminent do not appear to have read Collins’s treatise.[51] Bentley’s is in reality pre-eminent only for insolence and bad faith, the latter complicated by lapses of scholarship hardly credible on its author’s part.
See the details in Dynamics of Religion, ch. vii. I am compelled to call attention to the uncritical verdict given on this matter by the late Sir Leslie Stephen, who asserts (English Thought, i, 206) that Bentley convicts Collins of “unworthy shuffling” in respect of his claim that freethinking had “banished the devil.” Bentley affirmed that this had been the work, not of the freethinkers, but of “the Royal Society, the Boyles and the Newtons”; and Sir Leslie comments that “nothing could be more true.” Nothing could be more untrue. As we have seen (above p. 82), Boyle was a convinced believer in demonology; and Newton did absolutely nothing to disperse it. Glanvill, a Royal Society man, had been a vehement supporter of the belief in witchcraft; and the Society as such never meddled with the matter. As to Collins’s claim for the virtue of freethinking, Sir Leslie strangely misses the point that Collins meant by the word not unbelief, but free inquiry. He could not have meant to say that Holland was full of deists. In Collins’s sense of the word, the Royal Society’s work in general was freethinking work.
One mistranslation which appears to have been a printer’s error, and one mis-spelling of a Greek name, are the only heads on which Bentley confutes his author. He had, in fact, neither the kind of knowledge nor the candour that could fit him to handle the problems raised. It was Bentley’s cue to represent Collins as an atheist, though he was a very pronounced deist;[52] and in the first uproar Collins thought it well to fly to Holland to avoid arrest.[53] But deism was too general to permit of such a representative being exiled; and he returned to study quietly, leaving Bentley’s vituperation and prevarication unanswered, with the other attacks made upon him. In 1715 he published his brief but masterly Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty—anonymous, like all his works—which remains unsurpassed as a statement of the case for Determinism.[54]
The welcome given to Bentley’s attack upon Collins by the orthodox was warm in proportion to their sense of the general inadequacy of the apologetics on their side. Amid the common swarm of voluble futilities put forth by Churchmen, the strident vehemence as well as the erudite repute of the old scholar were fitted at least to attract the attention of lay readers in general. Most of the contemporary vindications of the faith, however, were fitted only to move intelligent men to new doubt or mere contempt. A sample of the current defence against deism is the treatise of Joseph Smith on The Unreasonableness of Deism, or, the Certainty of a Divine Revelation, etc. 1720, where deists in general are called “the Wicked and Unhappy men we have to deal with”:[55] and the argumentation consists in alleging that a good God must reveal himself, and that if the miracle stories of the New Testament had been false the Jews would have exposed and discarded them. Against such nugatory traditionalism, the criticism of Collins shone with the spirit of science. Not till 1723 did he publish his next work, A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, a weighty attack on the argument from prophecy, to which the replies numbered thirty-five; on which followed in 1727 his Scheme of Literal Prophecy Considered, a reply to criticisms. The former work was pronounced by Warburton one of the most plausible ever written against Christianity, and he might well say so. It faced the argument from prophecy not merely with the skepticism of the ordinary deist, but with that weapon of critical analysis of which the use had been briefly shown by Hobbes and Spinoza. Apparently for the first time, he pointed out that the “virgin prophecy” in Isaiah had a plain reference to contemporary and not to future events; he showed that the “out of Egypt” prophecy referred to the Hebrew past; and he revived the ancient demonstration of Porphyry that the Book of Daniel is Maccabean. The general dilemma put by Collins—that either the prophecies must be reduced, textually and otherwise, to non-prophetic utterances, or Christianity must give up prophetic claims—has never since been solved.
The deistic movement was now in full flood, the acute Mandeville[56] having issued in 1720 his Free Thoughts on Religion, and in 1723 a freshly-expanded edition of his very anti-evangelical Fable of the Bees; while an eccentric ex-clergyman, Thomas Woolston, who had already lost his fellowship of Sidney-Sussex College, Cambridge, for vagaries of doctrine and action, contributed in 1726–28 his freshly reasoned but heedlessly ribald Discourses on Miracles. Voltaire, who was in England in 1728, tells that thirty thousand copies were sold;[57] while sixty pamphlets were written in opposition. Woolston’s were indeed well fitted to arouse wrath and rejoinder. The dialectic against the argument from miracles in general, and the irrelevance or nullity of certain miracles in particular, is really cogent, and anticipates at points the thought of the nineteenth century. But Woolston was of the tribe who can argue no issue without jesting, and who stamp levity on every cause by force of innate whimsicality. Thus he could best sway the light-hearted when his cause called for the winning-over of the earnest. Arguments that might have been made convincing were made to pass as banter, and serious spirits were repelled. It was during this debate that Conyers Middleton, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, produced his Letter from Rome (1729), wherein the part of paganism in Christianity is so set forth as to carry inference further than the argument ostensibly goes. In that year the heads of Oxford University publicly lamented the spread of open deism among the students; and the proclamation did nothing to check the contagion. In Fogg’s Weekly Journal of July 4, 1730, it is announced that “one of the principal colleges in Oxford has of late been infested with deists; and that three deistical students have been expelled; and a fourth has had his degree deferred two years, during which he is to be closely confined in college; and, among other things, is to translate Leslie’s Short and Easy Method with the Deists.”[58] It is not hard to divine the effect of such exegetic methods. In 1731, the author of an apologetic pamphlet in reply to Woolston laments that even at the universities young men “too often” become tainted with “infidelity”; and, on the other hand, directing his battery against those who “causelessly profess to build their skeptical notions” on the writings of Locke, he complains of Dr. Holdsworth and other academic polemists who had sought to rob orthodoxy of the credit of such a champion as Locke by “consigning him over to that class of freethinkers and skeptics to which he was an adversary.”[59]
With the most famous work of Matthew Tindal,[60] Christianity as Old as Creation (1730), the excitement seems to have reached high-water mark. Here was vivacity without flippancy, and argument without irrelevant mirth; and the work elicited from first to last over a hundred and fifty replies, at home and abroad. Tindal’s thesis is that the idea of a good God involved that of a simple, perfect, and universal religion, which must always have existed among mankind, and must have essentially consisted in moral conduct. Christianity, insofar as it is true, must therefore be a statement of this primordial religion; and moral reason must be the test, not tradition or Scripture. One of the first replies was the Vindication of Scripture by Waterland, to which Middleton promptly offered a biting retort in a Letter to Dr. Waterland (1731) that serves to show the slightness of its author’s faith. After demolishing Waterland’s case as calculated rather to arouse than to allay skepticism, he undertakes to offer a better reply of his own. It is to the simple effect that some religion is necessary to mankind in modern as in ancient times; that Christianity meets the need very well; and that to set up reason in its place is “impracticable” and “the attempt therefore foolish and irrational,” in addition to being “criminal and immoral,” when politically considered.[61] Such legalist criticism, if seriously meant, was hardly likely to discredit Tindal’s book. Its directness and simplicity of appeal to what passed for theistic common-sense were indeed fitted to give it the widest audience yet won by any deist; and its anti-clericalism would carry it far among his fellow Whigs to begin with.[62] One tract of the period, dedicated to the Queen Regent, complains that “the present raging infidelity threatens an universal infection,” and that it is not confined to the capital, but “is disseminated even to the confines of your kingdom.”[63] Tindal, like Collins, wrote anonymously, and so escaped prosecution, dying in 1733, when the second part of his book, left ready for publication, was deliberately destroyed by Bishop Gibson, into whose hands it came. In 1736 he and Shaftesbury are described by an orthodox apologist as the “two oracles of deism.”[64]
Woolston, who put his name to his books, after being arrested in May, 1728, and released on bail, was prosecuted in 1729 on the charge of blasphemy, in that he had derided the gospel miracles and represented Jesus alternately as an impostor, a sorcerer, and a magician. His friendly counsel ingeniously argued that Woolston had aimed at safeguarding Christianity by returning to the allegorical method of the early Fathers; and that he had shown his reverence for Jesus and religion by many specific expressions; but the jury took a simpler view, and, without leaving the court, found Woolston guilty. He was sentenced to pay a fine of £100, to suffer a year’s imprisonment, and either to find surety for his future good conduct or pay or give sureties for £2,000.[65] He is commonly said to have paid the penalty of imprisonment for the rest of his life (d. 1733), being unable to pay the fine of £100; but Voltaire positively asserts that “nothing is more false” than the statement that he died in prison; adding: “Several of my friends have seen him in his house: he died there, at liberty.”[66] The solution of the conflict seems to be that he lived in his own house “in the rules of” the King’s Bench Prison—that is, in the precincts, and under technical supervision.[67] In any case, he was sentenced; and the punishment was the measure of the anger felt at the continuous advance of deistic opinions, or at least against hostile criticism of the Scriptures.