exhibit a sufficiently commonplace conception of Omnipotence; and there is no sign that the poet ever did any hard thinking on the problem. But, emotionalist of genius as he was, his influence as a satirist and mitigator of the crudities and barbarities of Scots religion has been incalculably great, and underlies all popular culture progress in Scotland since his time. Constantly aspersed in his own day and world as an “infidel,” he yet from the first conquered the devotion of the mass of his countrymen; though he would have been more potent for intellectual liberation if he had been by them more intelligently read. Few of them now, probably, realize that their adored poet was either a deist or a Unitarian—presumably the former.
§ 17
With the infelicity in prediction which is so much commoner with him than the “prescience” for which he is praised, Burke had announced that the whole deist school “repose in lasting oblivion.” The proposition would be much more true of 999 out of every thousand writers on behalf of Christianity. It is characteristic of Burke, however, that he does not name Shaftesbury, a Whig nobleman of the sacred period.[241] A seeming justice was given to Burke’s phrase by the undoubted reaction which took place immediately afterwards. In the vast panic which followed on the French Revolution, the multitude of mediocre minds in the middle and upper classes, formerly deistic or indifferent, took fright at unbelief as something now visibly connected with democracy and regicide; new money endowments were rapidly bestowed on the Church; and orthodoxy became fashionable on political grounds just as skepticism had become fashionable at the Restoration. Class interest and political prejudice wrought much in both cases; only in opposite directions. Democracy was no longer Bibliolatrous, therefore aristocracy was fain to became so, or at least to grow respectful towards the Church as a means of social control. Gibbon, in his closing years, went with the stream. And as religious wars have always tended to discredit religion, so a war partly associated with the freethinking of the French revolutionists tended to discredit freethought. The brutish wrecking of Priestley’s house and library and chapel by a mob at Birmingham in 1791 was but an extreme manifestation of a reaction which affected every form of mental life. But while Priestley went to die in the United States, another English exile, temporarily returned thence to his native land, was opening a new era of popular rationalism. Even in the height of the revolutionary tumult, and while Burke was blustering about the disappearance of unbelief, Thomas Paine was laying deep and wide the English foundations of a new democratic freethought; and the upper-class reaction in the nature of the case was doomed to impermanency, though it was to arrest English intellectual progress for over a generation. The French Revolution had re-introduced freethought as a vital issue, even in causing it to be banned as a danger.
That freethought at the end of the century was rather driven inwards and downwards than expelled is made clear by the multitude of fresh treatises on Christian evidences. Growing numerous after 1790, they positively swarm for a generation after Paley (1794). Cp. Essays on the Evidence and Influence of Christianity, Bath, 1790, pref.; Andrew Fuller, The Gospel its own Witness, 1799, pref. and concluding address to deists; Watson’s sermon of 1795, in Two Apologies, ed. 1806, p. 399; Priestley’s Memoirs (written in 1795), 1806, pp. 127–28; Wilberforce’s Practical View, 1797, passim (e.g., pp. 366–69, 8th ed. 1841); Rev. D. Simpson, A Plea for Religion ... addressed to the Disciples of Thomas Paine, 1797. The latter writer states (2nd ed. p. 126) that “infidelity is at this moment running like wildfire among the common people”; and Fuller (2nd ed. p. 128) speaks of the Monthly Magazine as “pretty evidently devoted to the cause of infidelity.” A pamphlet on The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in this Metropolis (London, 1800), by W. Hamilton Reid, describes the period as the first “in which the doctrines of infidelity have been extensively circulated among the lower orders”; and a Summary of Christian Evidences, by Bishop Porteous (1800; 16th ed. 1826), affirms, in agreement with the 1799 Report of the Lords’ Committee on Treasonable Societies, that “new compendiums of infidelity, and new libels on Christianity, are dispersed continually, with indefatigable industry, through every part of the kingdom, and every class of the community.” Freethought, in short, was becoming democratized.
As regards England, Paine is the great popular factor; and it is the bare truth to say that he brought into the old debate a new earnestness and a new moral impetus. The first part of the Age of Reason, hastily put together in expectation of speedy death in 1793, and including some astronomic matter that apparently antedates 1781,[242] is a swift outline of the position of the rationalizing deist, newly conscious of firm standing-ground in astronomic science. That is the special note of Paine’s gospel. He was no scholar; and the champions of the “religion of Galilee” have always been prompt to disparage any unlearned person who meddles with religion as an antagonist; but in the second part of his book Paine put hard criticism enough to keep a world of popular readers interested for well over a hundred years. The many replies are forgotten: the Biblical criticism of Paine will continue to do its work till popular orthodoxy follows the lead of professional scholarship and gives up at once the acceptance and the circulation of things incredible and indefensible as sacrosanct.
Mr. Benn (Hist. of Eng. Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century, i, 217) remarks that Paine’s New Testament criticisms are “such as at all times would naturally occur to a reader of independent mind and strong common sense.” If so, these had been up to Paine’s time, and remained long afterwards, rare characteristics. And there is some mistake about Mr. Benn’s criticism that “the repeated charges of fraud and imposture brought against the Apostles and Evangelists ... jar painfully on a modern ear. But they are largely due to the mistaken notion, shared by Paine with his orthodox contemporaries, that the Gospels and Acts were written by contemporaries and eye-witnesses of the events related.” Many times over, Paine argues that the documents could not have been so written. E.g. in Conway’s ed. of Works, pp. 157, 158, 159, 160, 164, 167, 168, etc. The reiterated proposition is “that the writers cannot have been eye-witnesses and ear-witnesses of what they relate; ... and consequently that the books have not been written by the persons called apostles” (p. 168). And there is some exaggeration even in Mr. Benn’s remark that, “strangely enough, he accepts the Book of Daniel as genuine.” Paine (ed. p. 144) merely puts a balance of probability in favour of the genuineness. It may be sometimes—it is certainly not always—true that Paine “cannot distinguish between legendary or [? and] mythical narratives” (Benn, p. 216); but it is to be feared that the disability subsists to-day in more scholarly quarters.
Despite his deadly directness, Paine, in virtue of his strong sincerity, probably jars much less on the modern ear than he did on that of his own, which was so ready to make felony of any opinion hostile to reigning prejudices. But if it be otherwise, it is to be feared that no less offence will be given by Mr. Benn’s own account of the Hexateuch as “the records kept by a lying and bloodthirsty priesthood”; even if that estimate be followed by the very challengeable admission that “priesthoods are generally distinguished for their superior humanity” (Benn, p. 350, and note).
Henceforth there is a vital difference in the fortunes of freethought and religion alike. Always in the past the institutional strength of religion and the social weakness of freethought had lain in the credulity of the ignorant mass, which had turned to naught an infinity of rational effort. After the French Revolution, when over a large area the critical spirit began simultaneously to play on faith and life, politics and religion, its doubled activity gave it a new breadth of outlook as of energy, and the slow enlightenment of the mass opened up a new promise for the ultimate reign of reason.