[40] The essays in the Characteristics (excepting the Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit, which was published by Toland, without permission, in 1699) appeared between 1708 and 1711, being collected in the latter year. Shaftesbury died in 1713, in which year appeared his paper on The Judgment of Hercules. [↑]
[41] A Project for the Advancement of Religion. Bohn ed. of Works, iii, 44. In this paper Swift reveals his moral standards by the avowal (p. 40) that “hypocrisy is much more eligible than open infidelity and vice: it wears the livery of religion ... and is cautious of giving scandal.” [↑]
[42] Sir Leslie Stephen (English Thought, i, 283) speaks of Dodwell’s thesis as deserving only “pity or contempt.” Cp. Macaulay, Student’s ed. ii, 107–108. But a doctrine of conditional immortality had been explicitly put by Locke in his Reasonableness of Christianity, 1695, p. 13. Cp. Prof. Fraser’s Locke, 1890, pp. 259–60, and Fox Bourne’s Life of Locke, ii, 287. The difference was that Dodwell elaborately gave his reasons, which, as Dr. Clarke put it, made “all good men sorry, and all profane men rejoice.” [↑]
[43] History of his Own Time, ed. 1838, p. 887. [↑]
[44] Compare his ironical Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, 1708. [↑]
[45] He had, however, hailed the anonymous Letter Concerning Enthusiasm as “very well writ,” believing it to be by a friend of his own—(Robert Hunter, to whom, accordingly, it has since been mistakenly attributed by various bibliographers, including Barbier). “Enthusiasm,” as meaning “popular fanaticism,” was of course as repellent to a Churchman as to the deists. [↑]
[46] Printed in folio 1711. Rep. in vol. xi of the Harleian Miscellany, p. 168 sq. (2nd ed. p. 163 sq.). [↑]
[47] Dr. E. Synge, of Dublin (afterwards Archbishop of Tuam), in his Religion Tryed by the Test of Sober and Impartial Reason, published in 1713, seems to be writing before the issue of Collins’s book when he says (Dedication, p. 11) that the spread of the “disease not only of Heterodoxy but of Infidelity” is “too plain to be either denied or dissembled.” [↑]
[48] Leslie affirms in his Truth of Christianity Demonstrated (1711, p. 14) that the satirical Detection of his Short Method with the Deists, to which the Truth is a reply, was by the author of Priestcraft in Perfection; but, while the Detection has some of Collins’s humour, it lacks his amenity, and is evidently not by him. [↑]
[49] An English translation of the Dictionary, in 5 vols. folio, with “many passages restored,” appeared in 1734. [↑]