Yet more or less freethinking treatises did appear at intervals in addition to the works of the better-known writers, such as Bolingbroke and Hume, after the period commonly marked as that of the “decline of deism.” In the list may be included a few by Unitarians, who at this stage were doing critical work. Like a number of the earlier works above mentioned, the following (save Evanson) are overlooked in Sir Leslie Stephen’s survey:—
| 1746. | Essay on Natural Religion. Falselyattributed to Dryden. | ||
| Deism fairly stated and fully vindicated,etc. Anon. | ||
| 1749. | J. G. Cooper, Life of Socrates. | ||
| 1750. | John Dove, A Creed founded on Truth and CommonSense. | ||
| The British Oracle. (Two numbersonly.) | ||
| 1752. | The Pillars of Priestcraft and OrthodoxyShaken. Four vols. of freethinking pamphlets, collected (and somewritten) by Thomas Gordon, formerly secretary to Trenchard. Edited byR. Barron. (Rep. 1768.) | ||
| 1765. | W. Dudgeon, Philosophical Works (reprintsof those of 1732, –4, –7, –9, above mentioned).Privately printed—at Glasgow? | ||
| 1772. | E. Evanson, The Doctrines of a Trinity and theIncarnation, etc. | ||
| 1773. | —— Three Discourses (1. Uponthe Man after God’s own Heart; 2. Upon the Faith of Abraham; 3.Upon the Seal of the Foundation of God). | ||
| 1777. | —— Letter to Bishop Hurd. | ||
| 1781. | W. Nicholson, The Doubts of the Infidels.(Rep. by R. Carlile.) | ||
| 1782. | W. Turner, Answer to Dr. Priestley’sLetters to a Philosophical Unbeliever. | ||
| 1785. | Dr. G. Hoggart Toulmin, The Antiquity andDuration of the World. | ||
| 1789. | —— The Eternity of theUniverse.[210] (Rep. 1825.) | ||
| Dr. T. Cooper, Tracts, Ethical, Theological,and Political. | ||
| 1792. | E. Evanson, The Dissonance of the FourEvangelists. (Rep. 1805.) | ||
| 1795. | Dr. J. A. O’Keefe, On the Progress ofthe Human Understanding. | ||
| 1797. | John C. Davies, TheScripturian’s Creed. Prosecuted and imprisoned. (Book rep.1822 and 1839.) |
Of the work here noted a considerable amount was done by Unitarians, Evanson being of that persuasion, though at the time of writing his earlier Unitarian works he was an Anglican vicar.[211] During the first half of the eighteenth century, despite the movement at the end of the seventeenth, specific anti-Trinitarianism was not much in evidence, the deistic controversy holding the foreground. But gradually Unitarianism made fresh headway. One dissenting clergyman, Martin Tomkyns, who had been dismissed by his congregation at Stoke Newington for his “Arian or Unitarian opinions,” published in 1722 A Sober Appeal to a Turk or an Indian, concerning the plain sense of the Trinity, in reply to the treatise of Dr. Isaac Watts on The Christian Doctrine of the Trinity. A second edition of Tomkyns’s book appeared in 1748, with a further reply to Watts’s Dissertations of 1724. The result seems to have been an unsettlement of the orthodoxy of the hymn-writer. There is express testimony from Dr. Lardner, a very trustworthy witness, that Watts in his latter years, “before he was seized with an imbecility of his faculties,” was substantially a Unitarian. His special papers on the subject were suppressed by his executors; but the full text of his Solemn Address to the Great and Blessed God goes far to bear out Lardner’s express assertion.[212] Other prominent religionists were more outspoken. The most distinguished names associated with the position were those of Lardner and Priestley, of whom the former, trained as a simple “dissenter,” avowedly reached his conclusions without much reference to Socinian literature;[213] and the second, who was similarly educated, no less independently gave up the doctrines of the Atonement and the Trinity, passing later from the Arian to the Socinian position after reading Lardner’s Letter on the Logos.[214] As Priestley derived his determinism from Collins,[215] it would appear that the deistical movement had set up a general habit of reasoning which thus wrought even on Christians who, like Lardner and Priestley, undertook to rebut the objections of unbelievers to their faith. A generally rationalistic influence is to be noted in the works of the Unitarian Antipædobaptist Dr. Joshua Toulmin, author of lives of Socinus (1777) and Biddle (1789), and many other solid works, including a sermon on “The Injustice of classing Unitarians with Deists and Infidels” (1797). In his case the “classing” was certainly inconvenient. In 1791 the effigy of Paine was burned before his door, and his windows broken. His house was saved by being closely guarded; but his businesses of schoolkeeping and bookselling had to be given up. It thus becomes intelligible how, after a period in which Dissent, contemned by the State Church, learned to criticize that Church’s creed, there emerged in England towards the close of the eighteenth century a fresh movement of specific Unitarianism.
Evanson and Toulmin were scholarly writers, though without the large learning of Lardner and the propagandist energy and reputation of Priestley; and the Unitarian movement, in a quiet fashion, made a numerical progress out of all proportion to that of orthodoxy. It owed much of its immunity at this stage, doubtless, to the large element of tacit deism in the Church; and apart from the scholarly work of Lardner both Priestley and Evanson did something for New Testament criticism, as well as towards the clearing-up of Christian origins. Evanson was actually prosecuted in 1773, on local initiative, for a sermon of Unitarian character delivered by him in the parish church of Tewkesbury on Easter-Day of 1771; and, what is much more remarkable, members of his congregation, at a single defence-meeting in an inn, collected £150 to meet his costs.[216] Five years later he had given up the belief in eternal punishment, though continuing to believe in “long protracted” misery for sinners.[217] Still later, after producing his Dissonance, he became uncommonly drastic in his handling of the Canon. He lived well into the nineteenth century, and published in 1805 a vigorous tractate, Second Thoughts on the Trinity, recommended to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Gloucester. In that he treats the First Gospel as a forgery of the second century. The method is indiscriminating, and the author lays much uncritical stress upon prophecy. On the whole, the Unitarian contribution to rational thought, then as later, was secondary or ancillary, though on the side of historical investigation it was important. Lardner’s candour is as uncommon as his learning; and Priestley[218] and Evanson have a solvent virtue.[219] In all three the limitation lies in the fixed adherence to the concept of revelation, which withheld them from radical rationalism even as it did from Arianism. Evanson’s ultra-orthodox acceptance of the Apocalypse is significant of his limitations; and Priestley’s calibre is indicated by his life-long refusal to accept the true scientific inference from his own discovery of oxygen. A more pronounced evolution was that of the Welsh deist David Williams, who, after publishing two volumes of Sermons on Religious Hypocrisy (1774), gave up his post as a dissenting preacher, and, in conjunction with Franklin and other freethinkers, opened a short-lived deistic chapel in Margaret Street, London (1776), where there was used a “Liturgy on the Universal Principles of Religion and Morality.”[220]
§ 15
On the other hand, apart from the revival of popular religion under Whitefield and Wesley, which won multitudes of the people whom no higher culture could reach, there was no recovery of educated belief upon intellectual lines; though there was a steady detachment of energy to the new activities of conquest and commerce which mark the second half of the eighteenth century in England. On this state of things supervened the massive performance of the greatest historical writer England had yet produced. Gibbon, educated not by Oxford but by the recent scholarly literature of France, had as a mere boy seen, on reading Bossuet, the theoretic weakness of Protestantism, and had straightway professed Romanism. Shaken as to that by a skilled Swiss Protestant, he speedily became a rationalist pure and simple, with as little of the dregs of deism in him as any writer of his age; and his great work begins, or rather signalizes (since Hume and Robertson preceded him), a new era of historical writing, not merely by its sociological treatment of the rise of Christianity, but by its absolutely anti-theological handling of all things.
The importance of the new approach may be at once measured by the zeal of the opposition. In no case, perhaps, has the essentially passional character of religious resistance to new thought been more vividly shown than in that of the contemporary attacks upon Gibbon’s History. There is not to be found in controversial literature such another annihilating rejoinder as was made by Gibbon to the clerical zealots who undertook to confound him on points of scholarship, history, and ratiocination. The contrast between the mostly spiteful incompetence of the attack and the finished mastery of the reply put the faith at a disadvantage from which it never intellectually recovered, though other forces reinstated it socially. By the admission of Macaulay, who thought Gibbon “most unfair” to religion, the whole troup of his assailants are now “utterly forgotten”; and those orthodox commentators who later sought to improve on their criticism have in turn, with a notable uniformity, been rebutted by their successors; till Gibbon’s critical section ranks as the first systematically scientific handling of the problem of the rise of Christianity. He can be seen to have profited by all the relevant deistic work done before him, learning alike from Toland, from Middleton, and from Bolingbroke; though his acknowledgments are mostly paid to respectable Protestants and Catholics, as Basnage, Beausobre, Lardner, Mosheim, and Tillemont; and the sheer solidity of the work has sustained it against a hundred years of hostile comment.[221] While Gibbon was thus earning for his country a new literary distinction, the orthodox interest was concerned above all things to convict him of ignorance, incompetence, and dishonesty; and Davis, the one of his assailants who most fully manifested all of these qualities, and who will long be remembered solely from Gibbon’s deadly exposure, was rewarded with a royal pension. Another, Apthorp, received an archiepiscopal living; while Chelsum, the one who almost alone wrote against him like a gentleman, got nothing. But no cabal could avail to prevent the instant recognition, at home and abroad, of the advent of a new master in history; and in the worst times of reaction which followed, the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire impassively defied the claims of the ruling creed.
In a literary world which was eagerly reading Gibbon[222] and Voltaire,[223] there was a peculiar absurdity in Burke’s famous question (1790) as to “Who now reads Bolingbroke” and the rest of the older deists.[224] The fashionable public was actually reading Bolingbroke even then;[225] and the work of the older deists was being done with new incisiveness and thoroughness by their successors.[226] In the unstudious world of politics, if the readers were few the indifferentists were many. Evanson could truthfully write to Bishop Hurd in 1777 that “That general unbelief of revealed religion among the higher orders of our countrymen, which, however your Lordship and I might differ in our manner of accounting for it, is too notorious for either of us to doubt of, hath, by a necessary consequence, produced in the majority of our present legislators an absolute indifference towards religious questions of every kind.”[227] Beside Burke in Parliament, all the while, was the Prime Minister, William Pitt the younger, an agnostic deist.
Whether or not the elder Pitt was a deist, the younger gave very plain signs of being at least no more. Gladstone (Studies subsidiary to the Works of Bishop Butler, ed. 1896, pp. 30–33) has sought to discredit the recorded testimony of Wilberforce (Life of Wilberforce, 1838, i, 98) that Pitt told him “Bishop Butler’s work raised in his mind more doubts than it had answered.” Gladstone points to another passage in Wilberforce’s diary which states that Pitt “commended Butler’s Analogy” (Life, i, 90). But the context shows that Pitt had commended the book for the express purpose of turning Wilberforce’s mind from its evangelical bias. Wilberforce was never a deist, and the purpose accordingly could not have been to make him orthodox. The two testimonies are thus perfectly consistent; especially when we note the further statement credibly reported to have been made by Wilberforce (Life, i, 95), that Pitt later “tried to reason me out of my convictions.” We have yet further the emphatic declaration of Pitt’s niece, Lady Hester Stanhope, that he “never went to church in his life ... never even talked about religion” (Memoirs of Lady Hester Stanhope, 1845, iii, 166–67). This was said in emphatic denial of the genuineness of the unctuous death-bed speech put in Pitt’s mouth by Gifford. Lady Hester’s high veracity is accredited by her physician (Travels of Lady Hester Stanhope, 1846, i, pref. p. 11). No such character can be given to the conventional English biography of the period.