The line of the Essay which now reads:
The soul, uneasy and confined from home,
originally ran “at home”; but, says Warton, “this expression seeming to exclude a future existence, as, to speak the plain truth, it was intended to do, it was altered”—presumably by Warburton. (Warton’s Essay on Pope, 4th ed. ii, 67.) The Spinozistic or pantheistic character of much of the Essay on Man was noted by various critics, in particular by the French Academician De Crousaz (Examen de l’Essay de M. Pope sur l’Homme, 1748, p. 90, etc.) After promising to justify the ways of God to man, writes Crousaz (p. 33), Pope turns round and justifies man, leaving God charged with all men’s sins. When the younger Racine, writing to the Chevalier Ramsay in 1742, charged the Essay with irreligion, Pope wrote him repudiating alike Spinoza and Leibnitz. (Warton, ii, 121.) In 1755, however, the Abbé Gauchat renewed the attack, declaring that the Essay was “neither Christian nor philosophic” (Lettres Critiques, i, 346). Warburton at first charged the poem with rank atheism, and afterwards vindicated it in his manner. (Warton, i, 125.) But in Germany, in the youth of Goethe, we find the Essay regarded by Christians as an unequivocally deistic poem. (Goethe’s Wahrheit und Dichtung, Th. II, B. vii: Werke, ed. 1866, xi, 263.) And by a modern Christian polemist the Essay is described as “the best positive result of English deism in the eighteenth century” (Gostwick, German Culture and Christianity, 1882, p. 31).
In point of fact, deism was the fashionable way of thinking among cultured people. Though Voltaire testifies from personal knowledge that there were in England in his day many principled atheists,[93] there was little overt atheism,[94] whether by reason of the special odium attaching to that way of thought, or of a real production of theistic belief by the concurrence of the deistic propaganda on this head with that of the clergy, themselves in so many cases deists.[95] Bishop Burnet, in the Conclusion to the History of his Own Time, pronounces that “there are few atheists, but many infidels, who are indeed very little better than the atheists.” Collins observed that nobody had doubted the existence of God until the Boyle lecturers began to prove it; and Clarke had more than justified the jest by arguing, in his Boyle Lectures for 1705, that all deism logically leads to atheism. But though the apologists roused much discussion on the theistic issue, the stress of the apologetic literature passed from the theme of atheism to that of deism. Shaftesbury’s early Inquiry Concerning Virtue had assumed the existence of a good deal of atheism; but his later writings, and those of his school, do not indicate much atheistic opposition.[96] Even the revived discussion on the immateriality and immortality of the soul—which began with the Grand Essay of Dr. William Coward,[97] in 1704, and was taken up, as we have seen, by the non-juror Dodwell[98]—was conducted on either orthodox or deistic lines. Coward wrote as a professed Christian,[99] to maintain, “against impostures of philosophy,” that “matter and motion must be the foundation of thought in men and brutes.” Collins maintained against Clarke the proposition that matter is capable of thought; and Samuel Strutt (“of the Temple”), whose Philosophical Inquiry into the Physical Spring of Human Actions, and the Immediate Cause of Thinking (1732), is a most tersely cogent sequence of materialistic argument, never raises any question of deity. The result was that the problem of “materialism” was virtually dropped, Strutt’s essay in particular passing into general oblivion.
It was replied to, however, with the Inquiry of Collins, as late as 1760, by a Christian controversialist who admits Strutt to have been “a gentleman of an excellent genius for philosophical inquiries, and a close reasoner from those principles he laid down” (An Essay towards demonstrating the Immateriality and Free Agency of the Soul, 1760, p. 94). The Rev. Mr. Monk, in his Life of Bentley (2nd ed. 1833, ii, 391), absurdly speaks of Strutt as having “dressed up the arguments of Lord Herbert of Cherbury and other enemies of religion in a new shape.” The reverend gentleman cannot have paid any attention to the arguments either of Herbert or of Strutt, which have no more in common than those of Toland and Hume. Strutt’s book was much too closely reasoned to be popular. His name was for the time, however, associated with a famous scandal at Cambridge University. When in 1739 proceedings were taken against what was described as an “atheistical society” there, Strutt was spoken of as its “oracle.” One of the members was Paul Whitehead, satirized by Pope. Another, Tinkler Ducket, a Fellow of Caius College, in holy orders, was prosecuted in the Vice-Chancellor’s Court on the twofold charge of proselytizing for atheism and of attempting to seduce a “female.” In his defence he explained that he had been for some time “once more a believer in God and Christianity”; but was nevertheless expelled. See Monk’s Life of Bentley, as cited, ii, 391 sq.
§ 5
No less marked is the failure to develop the “higher criticism” from the notable start made in 1739 in the very remarkable Inquiry into the Jewish and Christian Revelations by Samuel Parvish, who made the vital discovery that Deuteronomy is a product of the seventh century B.C.[100] His book, which is in the form of a dialogue between a Christian and a Japanese, went into a second edition (1746); but his idea struck too deep for the critical faculty of that age, and not till the nineteenth century was the clue found again by De Wette, in Germany.[101] Parvish came at the end of the main deistic movement,[102] and by that time the more open-minded men had come to a point of view from which it did not greatly matter when Deuteronomy was written, or precisely how a cultus was built up; while orthodoxy could not dream of abandoning its view of inspiration. There was thus an arrest alike of historical criticism and of the higher philosophic thought under the stress of the concrete disputes over ethics, miracles, prophecy, and politics; and a habit of taking deity for granted became normal, with the result that when the weak point was pressed upon by Law and Butler there was a sense of blankness on both sides. But among men theistically inclined, the argument of Tindal against revelationism was extremely telling, and it had more literary impressiveness than any writing on the orthodox side before Butler. By this time the philosophic influence of Spinoza—seen as early as 1699 in Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue,[103] and avowed by Clarke when he addressed his Demonstration (1705) “more particularly in answer to Mr. Hobbs, Spinoza, and their followers”—had spread among the studious class, greatly reinforcing the deistic movement; so that in 1732 Berkeley, who ranked him among “weak and wicked writers,” described him as “the great leader of our modern infidels.”
See the Minute Philosopher, Dial. vii, § 29. Similarly Leland, in the Supplement (1756) to his View of the Deistical Writers (afterwards incorporated as Letter VI), speaks of Spinoza as “the most applauded doctor of modern atheism.” Sir Leslie Stephen’s opinion (English Thought, i, 33), that “few of the deists, probably,” read Spinoza, seems to be thus outweighed. If they did not in great numbers read the Ethica, they certainly read the Tractatus and the letters. As early as 1677 we find Stillingfleet, in the preface to his Letter to a Deist, speaking of Spinoza as “a late author [who] I hear is mightily in vogue among many who cry up anything on the atheistical side, though never so weak and trifling”; and further of a mooted proposal to translate the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus into English. A translation was published in 1689. In 1685 the Scotch Professor George Sinclar, in the “Preface to the Reader” of his Satan’s Invisible World Discovered, writes that “There are a monstrous rabble of men, who following the Hobbesian and Spinosian principles, slight religion and undervalue the Scripture,” etc. In Gildon’s work of recantation, The Deist’s Manual (1705, p. 192), the indifferent Pleonexus, who “took more delight in bags than in books,” and demurs to accumulating the latter, avows that he has a few, among them being Hobbes and Spinoza. Evelyn, writing about 1680–90, speaks of “that infamous book, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,” as “a wretched obstacle to the searchers of holy truth” (The History of Religion, 1850, p. xxvii). Cp. Halyburton, Natural Religion Insufficient, Edinburgh, 1714, p. 31, as to the “great vogue among our young Gentry and Students” of Hobbes, Spinoza, and others.