§ 10
It is remarkable that this development of opinion took place in that part of the British Islands where religious fanaticism had gone furthest, and speech and thought were socially least free. Freethought in Scotland before the middle of the seventeenth century can have existed only as a thing furtive and accursed; and though, as we have seen from the Religio Stoici of Sir George Mackenzie, unbelief had emerged in some abundance at or before the Restoration, only wealthy men could dare openly to avow their deism.[135] Early in 1697 the clergy had actually succeeded in getting a lad of eighteen, Thomas Aikenhead, hanged for professing deism in general, and in particular for calling the Old Testament “Ezra’s Fables,” ridiculing the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and expressing the hope and belief that Christianity would be extinct within a century.[136] The spirit of the prosecution may be gathered from the facts that the boy broke down and pleaded penitence,[137] and that the statute enacted the capital penalty only for obstinately persisting in the denial of any of the persons of the Trinity.[138] He had talked recklessly against the current creed among youths about his own age, one of whom was in Locke’s opinion “the decoy who gave him the books and made him speak as he did.”[139] It would appear that a victim was very much wanted; and Aikenhead was not allowed the help of a counsel. It is characteristic of the deadening effect of dogmatic religion on the heart that an act of such brutish cruelty elicited no cry of horror from any Christian writer. At this date the clergy were hounding on the Privy Council to new activity in trying witches; and all works of supposed heretical tendency imported from England were confiscated in the Edinburgh shops, among them being Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth.[140] Scottish intellectual development had in fact been arrested by the Reformation, so that, save for Napier’s Logarithms (1614) and such a political treatise as Rutherford’s Lex Rex (1644), the nation of Dunbar and Lyndsay produced for two centuries no secular literature of the least value, and not even a theology of any enduring interest. Deism, accordingly, seems in the latter half of the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth century to have made fully as much progress in Scotland as in England; and the bigoted clergy could offer little intellectual resistance.
As early as 1696 the Scottish General Assembly, with theological candour, passed an Act “against the Atheistical opinions of the Deists.” (Abridgment of the Acts of the General Assemblies, 1721, pp. 16, 76; Cunningham, Hist. of the Ch. of Scotland, ii, 313.) The opinions specified were “The denying of all revealed religion, the grand mysteries of the gospels ... the resurrection of the dead, and, in a word, the certainty and authority of Scripture revelation; as also, their asserting that there must be a mathematical evidence for each purpose ... and that Natural Light is sufficient to Salvation.” All this is deism, pure and simple. But Sir W. Anstruther (a judge in the Court of Session), in the preface to his Essays Moral and Divine, Edinburgh, 1710, speaks of “the spreading contagion of atheism, which threatens the ruin of our excellent and holy religion.” To atheism he devotes two essays; and neither in these nor in one on the Incarnation does he discuss deism, the arguments he handles being really atheistic. Scottish freethought would seem thus to have gone further than English at the period in question.
As to the prevalence of deism, however, see the posthumous work of Prof. Halyburton, of St. Andrews, Natural Religion Insufficient (Edinburgh, 1714), Epist. of Recom.; pref. pp. 25, 27, and pp. 8, 15, 19, 23, 31, etc. Halyburton’s treatise is interesting as showing the psychological state of argumentative Scotch orthodoxy in his day. He professes to repel the deistical argument throughout by reason; he follows Huet, and concurs with Berkeley in contending that mathematics involves anti-rational assumptions; and he takes entire satisfaction in the execution of the lad Aikenhead for deism. Yet in a second treatise, An Essay Concerning the Nature of Faith, he contends, as against Locke and the “Rationalists,” that the power to believe in the word of God is “expressly deny’d to man in his natural estate,” and is a supernatural gift. Thus the Calvinists, like Baxter, were at bottom absolutely insincere in their profession to act upon reason, while insolently charging insincerity on others.
Even apart from deism there had arisen a widespread aversion to dogmatic theology and formal creeds, so that an apologist of 1715 speaks of his day as “a time when creeds and Confessions of Faith are so generally decried, and not only exposed to contempt, as useless inventions ... but are loaded by many writers of distinguished wit and learning with the most fatal and dangerous consequences.”[141] This writer admits the intense bitterness of the theological disputes of the time;[142] and he speaks, on the other hand, of seeing “the most sacred mysteries of godliness impudently denied and impugned” by some, while the “distinguishing doctrines of Christianity are by others treacherously undermined, subtilized into an airy phantom, or at least doubted, if not disclaimed.”[143] His references are probably to works published in England, notably those of Locke, Toland, Shaftesbury, and Collins, since in Scotland no such literature could then be published; but he doubtless has an eye to Scottish opinion.
While, however, the rationalism of the time could not take book form, there are clear traces of its existence among educated men, even apart from the general complaints of the apologists. Thus the Professor of Medicine at Glasgow University in the opening years of the eighteenth century, John Johnston, was a known freethinker.[144] In the way of moderate or Christian rationalism, the teaching of the prosecuted Simson seems to have counted for something, seeing that Francis Hutcheson at least imbibed from him “liberal” views about future punishment and the salvation of the heathen, which gave much offence in the Presbyterian pulpit in Ulster.[145] And Hutcheson’s later vindication of the ethical system of Shaftesbury in his Inquiry Concerning the Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725) must have tended to attract attention in Scotland to the Characteristics after his instalment as a Professor at Glasgow. In an English pamphlet, in 1732, he was satirized as introducing Shaftesbury’s system into a University,[146] and it was from the Shaftesbury camp that the first literary expression of freethought in Scotland was sent forth. A young Scotch deist of that school, William Dudgeon, published in 1732 a dialogue entitled The State of the Moral World Considered, wherein the optimistic position was taken up with uncommon explicitness; and in 1739 the same writer printed A Catechism Founded upon Experience and Reason, prefaced by an Introductory Letter on Natural Religion, which takes a distinctly anti-clerical attitude. The Catechism answers to its title, save insofar as it is à priori in its theism and optimistic in its ethic, as is another work of its author in the same year, A View of the Necessarian or Best Scheme, defending the Shaftesburyan doctrine against the criticism of Crousaz on Pope’s Essay. Still more heterodox is his little volume of Philosophical Letters Concerning the Being and Attributes of God (1737), where the doctrine goes far towards pantheism. All this propaganda seems to have elicited only one printed reply—an attack on his first treatise in 1732. In the letter prefaced to his Catechism, however, he tells that “the bare suspicion of my not believing the opinions in fashion in our country hath already caused me sufficient trouble.”[147] His case had in fact been raised in the Church courts, the proceedings going through many stages in the years 1732–36; but in the end no decision was taken,[148] and the special stress of his rationalism in 1739 doubtless owes something alike to the prosecution and to its collapse. Despite such hostility, he must privately have had fair support.[149]
The prosecution of Hutcheson before the Glasgow Presbytery in 1738 reveals vividly the theological temper of the time. He was indicted for teaching to his students “the following two false and dangerous doctrines: first, that the standard of moral goodness was the promotion of the happiness of others; and, second, that we could have a knowledge of good and evil without and prior to a knowledge of God.”[150] There has been a natural disposition on the orthodox side to suppress the fact that such teachings were ever ecclesiastically denounced as false, dangerous, and irreligious; and the prosecution seems to have had no effect beyond intensifying the devotion of Hutcheson’s students. Among them was Adam Smith, of whom it has justly been said that, “if he was any man’s disciple, he was Hutcheson’s,” inasmuch as he derived from his teacher the bases alike of his moral and political philosophy and of his deistic optimism.[151] Another prosecution soon afterwards showed that the new influences were vitally affecting thought within the Church itself. Hutcheson’s friend Leechman, whom he and his party contrived to elect as professor of theology in Glasgow University, was in turn proceeded against (1743–44) for a sermon on Prayer, which Hutcheson and his sympathizers pronounced “noble,”[152] but which “resolved the efficacy of prayer into its reflex influence on the mind of the worshipper”[153]—a theorem which has chronically made its appearance in the Scottish Church ever since, still ranking as a heresy, after having brought a clerical prosecution in the last century on at least one divine, Prof. William Knight, and rousing a scandal against another, the late Dr. Robert Wallace.[154]
Leechman in turn held his ground, and later became Principal of his University; but still the orthodox in Scotland fought bitterly against every semblance of rationalism. Even the anti-deistic essays of Lord-President Forbes of Culloden, head of the Court of Session, when collected[155] and posthumously published, were offensive to the Church as laying undue stress on reason; as accepting the heterodox Biblical theories of Dr. John Hutchinson; and as making the awkward admission that “the freethinkers, with all their perversity, generally are sensible of the social duties, and act up to them better than others do who in other respects think more justly than they.”[156] Such an utterance from such a dignitary told of a profound change; and, largely through the influence of Hutcheson and Leechman on a generation of students, the educated Scotland of the latter half of the eighteenth century was in large part either “Moderate” or deistic. After generations of barren controversy,[157] the very aridity of the Presbyterian life intensified the recoil among the educated classes to philosophical and historical interests, leading to the performances of Hume, Smith, Robertson, Millar, Ferguson, and yet others, all rationalists in method and sociologists in their interests.
Of these, Millar, one of Smith’s favourite pupils, and a table-talker of “magical vivacity,”[158] was known to be rationalistic in a high degree;[159] while Smith and Ferguson were certainly deists, as was Henry Home (the judge, Lord Kames), who had the distinction of being attacked along with his friend Hume in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1755–56. Home wrote expressly to controvert Hume, alike as to utilitarianism and the idea of causation; but his book, Essays on Morality and Natural Religion (published anonymously, 1751), handled the thorny question of free-will in such fashion as to give no less offence than Hume had done; and the orthodox bracketed him with the subject of his criticism. His doctrine was indeed singular, its purport being that there can be no free-will, but that the deity has for wise purposes implanted in men the feeling that their wills are free. The fact of his having been made a judge of the Court of Session since writing his book had probably something to do with the rejection of the whole subject by the General Assembly, and afterwards by the Edinburgh Presbytery; but there had evidently arisen a certain diffidence in the Church, which would be assiduously promoted by “moderates” such as Principal Robertson, the historian. It is noteworthy that, while Home and Hume thus escaped, the other Home, John, who wrote the then admired tragedy of Douglas, was soon after forced to resign his position as a minister of the Church for that authorship, deism having apparently more friends in the fold than drama.[160] While the theatre was thus being treated as a place of sin, many of the churches in Scotland were the scenes of repeated Sunday riots. A new manner of psalm-singing had been introduced, and it frequently happened that the congregations divided into two parties, each singing in its own way, till they came to blows. According to one of Hume’s biographers, unbelievers were at this period wont to go to church to see the fun.[161] Naturally orthodoxy did not gain ground.