Thus Skelton writes in 1751 that “our modern apologists for Christianity often defend it on deistical principles” (Deism Revealed, pref. p. xii. Cp. vol. ii, pp. 234, 237). See also Sir Leslie Stephen as cited above, p. 149, note; and Gostwick, German Culture and Christianity, 1882, pp. 33–36.
An interesting instance of liberalizing orthodoxy is furnished by the Rev. Arthur Ashley Sykes, who contributed many volumes to the general deistic discussion, some of them anonymously. In the preface to his Essay on the Truth of the Christian Religion (1732; 2nd ed. enlarged, 1755) Sykes remarks that “since ... systematical opinions have been received and embraced in such a manner that it has not been safe to contradict them, the burden of vindicating Christianity has been very much increased. Its friends have been much embarrassed through fear of speaking against local truths; and its adversaries have so successfully attacked those weaknesses that Christianity itself has been deemed indefensible, when in reality the follies of Christians alone have been so.” Were Christians left to the simple doctrines of Christ and the Apostles, he contends, Infidelity could make no converts. And at the close of the book he writes: “Would to God that Christians would be content with the plainness and simplicity of the gospel.... That they would not vend under the name of evangelical truth the absurd and contradictory schemes of ignorant or wicked men! That they would part with that load of rubbish which makes thinking men almost sink under the weight, and gives too great a handle for Infidelity!” Such writing could not give satisfaction to the ecclesiastical authorities; and as little could Sykes’s remarkable admission (The Principles and Connection of Natural and Revealed Religion, 1740, p. 242): “When the advantages of revelation are to be specified, I cannot conceive that it should be maintained as necessary to fix a rule of morality. For what one principle of morality is there which the heathen moralists had not asserted or maintained? Before ever any revelation is offered to mankind they are supposed to be so well acquainted with moral truths as from them to judge of the truth of the revelation itself.” Again he writes:—
“Nor can revelation be necessary to ascertain religion. For religion consisting in nothing but doing our duties from a sense of the being of God, revelation is not necessary to this end, unless it be said that we cannot know that there is a God, and what our duties are, without it. Reason will teach us that there is a God ... that we are to be just and charitable to our neighbours; that we are to be temperate and sober in ourselves” (id. p. 244).
This is simple Shaftesburyan deism, and all that the apologist goes on to contend for is that revelation “contains motives and reasons for the practice of what is right, more and different from what natural reason without this help can suggest.” He seems, however, to have believed in miracles, though an anonymous Essay on the Nature, Design, and Origin of Sacrifices (1748) which is ascribed to him quietly undermines the whole evangelical doctrine. Throughout, he is remarkable for the amenity of his tone towards “infidels.”
Balguy, a man of less ability, is notably latitudinarian in his theology. In the very act of criticizing the deists, he complains of Locke’s arbitrariness in deriving morality from the will of God. Religion, he argues, is so derived, but morality is inherent in the whole nature of things, and is the same for God and men. This position, common to the school of Clarke, is at bottom that of Shaftesbury and the Naturalists. All that Balguy says for religion is that a doctrine of rewards and punishments is necessary to stimulate the average moral sense; and that the Christian story of the condescension of Omnipotence in coming to earth and suffering misery for man’s sake ought to overwhelm the imagination! (See A Letter to a Deist, 2nd ed. 1730, pp. 5, 14, 15, 31; Foundation of Moral Goodness, pt. ii, 1729, p. 41 sq.)
The next intellectual step in natural course would have been a revision of the deistic assumptions, insofar, that is, as certain positive assumptions were common to the deists. But, as we have seen, certain fresh issues were raised as among the deists themselves. In addition to those above noted, there was the profoundly important one as to ethics. Shaftesbury, who rejected the religious basis, held a creed of optimism; and this optimism was assailed by Mandeville, who in consequence was opposed as warmly by the deist Hutcheson and others as by Law and Berkeley. To grapple with this problem, and with the underlying cosmic problem, there was needed at least as much general mental activity as went to the antecedent discussion; and the main activity of the nation was now being otherwise directed. The negative process, the impeachment of Christian supernaturalism, had been accomplished so far as the current arguments went. Toland and Collins had fought the battle of free discussion, forcing ratiocination on the Church; Collins had shaken the creed of prophecy; Shaftesbury had impugned the religious conception of morals; and Mandeville had done so more profoundly, laying the foundations of scientific utilitarianism.[186] So effective had been the utilitarian propaganda in general that the orthodox Brown (author of the once famous Estimate of the life of his countrymen), in his criticism of Shaftesbury (1751), wrote as a pure utilitarian against an inconsistent one, and defended Christianity on strictly utilitarian lines. Woolston, following up Collins, had shaken the faith in New Testament miracles; Middleton had done it afresh with all the decorum that Woolston lacked; and Hume had laid down with masterly clearness the philosophic principle which rebuts all attempts to prove miracles as such.[187] Tindal had clinched the case for “natural” theism as against revelationism; and the later deists, notably Morgan, had to some extent combined these results.[188] This literature was generally distributed; and so far the case had been thrashed out.
§ 13
To carry intellectual progress much further there was needed a general movement of scientific study and a reform in education. The translation of La Mettrie’s Man a Machine (1749)[189] found a public no better prepared for the problems he raised than that addressed by Strutt eighteen years before; and the reply of Luzac, Man More than a Machine, in the preface to which the translator (1752) declared that “irreligion and infidelity overspread the land,” probably satisfied what appetite there was for such a discussion. There had begun a change in the prevailing mental life, a diversion of interest from ideas as such to political and mercantile interests. The middle and latter part of the eighteenth century is the period of the rise of (1) the new machine industries, and (2) the new imperialistic policy of Chatham.[190] Both alike withdrew men from problems of mere belief, whether theological or scientific.[191] That the reaction was not one of mere fatigue over deism we have already seen. It was a general diversion of energy, analogous to what had previously taken place in France in the reign of Louis XIV. As the poet Gray, himself orthodox, put the case in 1754, “the mode of freethinking has given place to the mode of not thinking at all.”[192] In Hume’s opinion the general pitch of national intelligence south of the Tweed was lowered.[193] This state of things of course was favourable to religious revival; but what took place was rather a new growth of emotional pietism in the new industrial masses (the population being now on a rapid increase), under the ministry of the Wesleys and Whitefield, and a further growth of similar religion in the new provincial middle-class that grew up on the industrial basis. The universities all the while were at the lowest ebb of culture, but officially rabid against philosophic freethinking.[194]
It would be a great mistake, however, to suppose that all this meant a dying out of deism among the educated classes. The statement of Goldsmith, about 1760, that deists in general “have been driven into a confession of the necessity of revelation, or an open avowal of atheism,”[195] is not to be taken seriously. Goldsmith, whose own orthodoxy is very doubtful, had a whimsical theory that skepticism, though it might not injure morals, has a “manifest tendency to subvert the literary merits” of any country;[196] and argued accordingly. Deism, remaining fashionable, did but fall partly into the background of living interests, the more concrete issues of politics and the new imaginative literature occupying the foreground. It was early in the reign of George III that Sir William Blackstone, having had the curiosity to listen in succession to the preaching of every clergyman in London, “did not hear a single discourse which had more Christianity in it than the writings of Cicero,” and declared that it would have been impossible for him to discover from what he heard whether the preacher were a follower of Confucius, of Mahomet, or of Christ.[197] When the Church was thus deistic, the educated laity can have been no less so. The literary status of deism after 1750 was really higher than ever. It was now represented by Hume; by Adam Smith (Moral Sentiments, 1759); by the scholarship of Conyers Middleton; and by the posthumous works (1752–54) of Lord Bolingbroke, who, albeit more of a debater than a thinker, debated often with masterly skill, in a style unmatched for harmony and energetic grace, which had already won him a great literary prestige, though the visible insincerity of his character, and the habit of browbeating, always countervailed his charm. His influence, commonly belittled, was much greater than writers like Johnson would admit; and it went deep. Voltaire, who had been his intimate, tells[198] that he had known some young pupils of Bolingbroke who altogether denied the historic actuality of the Gospel Jesus—a stretch of criticism beyond the assimilative power of that age.