We have further to note the circumstantial account by Wilberforce in his letter to the Rev. S. Gisborne immediately after Pitt’s death (Correspondence, 1840, ii, 69–70), giving the details he had had in confidence from the Bishop of Lincoln. They are to the effect that, after some demur on Pitt’s part (“that he was not worthy to offer up any prayer, or was too weak,”) the Bishop prayed with him once. Wilberforce adds his “fear” that “no further religious intercourse took place before or after, and I own I thought what was inserted in the papers impossible to be true.”
There is clear testimony that Charles James Fox, Pitt’s illustrious rival, was no more of a believer than he,[228] though equally careful to make no profession of unbelief. And it was Fox who, above all the English statesmen of his day, fought the battle of religious toleration[229]—a service which finally puts him above Burke, and atones for many levities of political action.
Among thinking men too the nascent science of geology was setting up a new criticism of “revelation”—this twenty years before the issue of the epoch-making works of Hutton.[230] In England the impulse seems to have come from the writings of the Abbé Langlet du Fresnoy, De Maillet, and Mirabaud, challenging the Biblical account of the antiquity of the earth. The new phase of “infidelity” was of course furiously denounced, one of the most angry and most absurd of its opponents being the poet Cowper.[231] Still rationalism persisted. Paley, writing in 1786, protests that “Infidelity is now served up in every shape that is likely to allure, surprise, or beguile the imagination, in a fable, a tale, a novel, or a poem, in interspersed or broken hints, remote and oblique surmises, in books of travel, of philosophy, of natural history—in a word, in any form rather than that of a professed and regular disquisition.”[232] The orthodox Dr. J. Ogilvie, in the introduction to his Inquiry into the Causes of the Infidelity and Skepticism of the Times (1783), begins: “That the opinions of the deists and skeptics have spread more universally during a part of the last century and in the present than at any former æra since the resurrection of letters, is a truth to which the friends and the enemies of religion will give their suffrage without hesitation.” In short, until the general reversal of all progress which followed on the French Revolution, there had been no such change of opinion as Burke alleged.
One of the most popular poets and writers of the day was the celebrated Erasmus Darwin, a deist, whose Zoonomia (1794) brought on him the charge of atheism, as it well might. However he might poetize about the Creator, Dr. Darwin in his verse and prose alike laid the foundations of the doctrines of the transmutation of species and the aqueous origin of simple forms of life which evolved into higher forms; though the idea of the descent of man from a simian species had been broached before him by Buffon and Helvétius in France, and Lords Kames and Monboddo in Scotland. The idea of a Natura naturans was indeed ancient; but it has been authoritatively said of Erasmus Darwin that “he was the first who proposed and consistently carried out a well-rounded theory with regard to the development of the living world—a merit which shines forth more brilliantly when we compare it with the vacillating and confused attempts of Buffon, Linnæus, and Goethe. It is the idea of a power working from within the organisms to improve their natural position”[233]—the idea which, developed by Lamarck, was modified by the great Darwin of the nineteenth century into the doctrine of natural selection.
And in the closing years of the century there arose a new promise of higher life in the apparition of Mary Wollstonecraft, ill-starred but noble, whose Letters on Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) show her to have been a freethinking deist of remarkable original faculty,[234] and whose Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was the first great plea for the emancipation of her sex.
§ 16
Even in rural Scotland, the vogue of the poetry of Burns told of germinal doubt. To say nothing of his mordant satires on pietistic types—notably Holy Willie’s Prayer, his masterpiece in that line—Burns even in his avowed poems[235] shows small regard for orthodox beliefs; and his letters reveal him as substantially a deist, shading into a Unitarian. Such pieces as A Prayer in the prospect of Death, and A Prayer under the pressure of Violent Anguish, are plainly unevangelical;[236] and the allusions to Jesus in his letters, even when writing to Mrs. Maclehose, who desired to bring him to confession, exclude orthodox belief,[237] though they suggest Unitarianism. He frequently refers to religion in his letters, yet so constantly restricts himself to the affirmation of a belief in a benevolent God and in a future state that he cannot be supposed to have held the further beliefs which his orthodox correspondents would wish him to express. A rationalistic habit is shown even in his professions of belief, as here: “Still I am a very sincere believer in the Bible; but I am drawn by the conviction of a man, not the halter of an ass”;[238] and in the passage: “Though I have no objection to what the Christian system tells us of another world, yet I own I am partial to those proofs and ideas of it which we have wrought out of our own heads and hearts.”[239] Withal, Burns always claimed to be “religious,” and was so even in a somewhat conventional sense. The lines:
An atheist-laugh’s a poor exchange
For Deity offended[240]