Humane feeling of this kind counted for much in the ferment; but a contrary hate was no less abundant. The Presbyterian Thomas Edwards, who in a vociferous passion of fear and zeal set himself to catalogue the host of heresies that threatened to overwhelm the times, speaks of “monsters” unheard-of theretofore, “now common among us—as denying the Scriptures, pleading for a toleration of all religions and worships, yea, for blasphemy, and denying there is a God.”[50] “A Toleration,” he declares, “is the grand design of the Devil, his masterpiece and chief engine”; “every day now brings forth books for a Toleration.”[51] Among the 180 sects named by him[52] there were “Libertines,” “Antiscripturists,” “Skeptics and Questionists,”[53] who held nothing save the doctrine of free speech and liberty of conscience;[54] as well as Socinians, Arians, and Anti-trinitarians; and he speaks of serious men who had not only abandoned their religious beliefs, but sought to persuade others to do the same.[55] Under the rule of Cromwell, tolerant as he was of Christian sectarianism, and even of Unitarianism as represented by Biddle, the more advanced heresies would get small liberty; though that of Thomas Muggleton and John Reeve, which took shape about 1651 as the Muggletonian sect, does not seem to have been molested. Muggleton, a mystic, could teach that there was no devil or evil spirit, save in “man’s spirit of unclean reason and cursed imagination”;[56] but it was only privately that such men as Henry Marten and Thomas Chaloner, the regicides, could avow themselves to be of “the natural religion.” The statement of Bishop Burnet, following Clarendon, that “many of the republicans began to profess deism,” cannot be taken literally, though it is broadly intelligible that “almost all of them were for destroying all clergymen ... and for leaving religion free, as they called it, without either encouragement or restraint.”
See Burnet’s History of His Own Time, bk. i, ed. 1838, p. 43. The phrase, “They were for pulling down the churches,” again, cannot be taken literally. Of those who “pretended to little or no religion and acted only upon the principles of civil liberty,” Burnet goes on to name Sidney, Henry Nevill, Marten, Wildman, and Harrington. The last was certainly of Hobbes’s way of thinking in philosophy (Croom Robertson, Hobbes, p. 223, note); but Wildman was one of the signers of the Anabaptist petition to Charles II in 1658 (Clarendon, Hist. of the Rebellion, bk. xv, ed. 1843, p. 855). As to Marten and Chaloner, see Carlyle’s Cromwell, iii, 194; and articles in Nat. Dict. of Biog. Vaughan (Hist. of England, 1840, ii, 477, note) speaks of Walwyn and Overton as “among the freethinkers of the times of the Commonwealth.” They were, however, Biblicists, not unbelievers. Prof. Gardiner (Hist. of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii, 253, citing a News-letter in the Clarendon MSS.) finds record in 1653 of “a man [who] preached flat atheism in Westminster Hall, uninterrupted by the soldiers of the guard”; but this obviously counts for little.
Between the advance in speculation forced on by the disputes themselves, and the usual revolt against the theological spirit after a long and ferocious display of it, there spread even under the Commonwealth a new temper of secularity. On the one hand, the temperamental distaste for theology, antinomian or other, took form in the private associations for scientific research which were the antecedents of the Royal Society. On the other hand, the spirit of religious doubt spread widely in the middle and upper classes; and between the dislike of the Roundheads for the established clergy and the anger of the Cavaliers against all Puritanism there was fostered that “contempt of the clergy” which had become a clerical scandal at the Restoration and was to remain so for about a century.[57] Their social status was in general low, and their financial position bad; and these circumstances, possible only in a time of weakened religious belief, necessarily tended to further the process of mental change. Within the sphere of orthodoxy, it operated openly. It is noteworthy that the term “rationalist” emerges as the label of a sect of Independents or Presbyterians who declare that “What their reason dictates to them in church or State stands for good, until they be convinced with better.”[58] The “rationalism,” so-called, of that generation remained ostensibly scriptural; but on other lines thought went further. Of atheism there are at this stage only dubious biographical and controversial traces, such as Mrs. Hutchinson’s characterization of a Nottingham physician, possibly a deist, as a “horrible atheist,”[59] and the Rev. John Dove’s Confutation of Atheism (1640), which does not bear out its title. Ephraim Pagitt, in his Heresiography (1644), speaks loosely of an “atheistical sect who affirm that men’s soules sleep with them until the day of judgment”; and tells of some alleged atheist merely that he “mocked and jeared at Christ’s Incarnation.”[60] Similarly a work, entitled Dispute betwixt an Atheist and a Christian (1646), shows the existence not of atheists but of deists, and the deist in the dialogue is a Fleming.
More trustworthy is the allusion in Nathaniel Culverwel’s Discourse of the Light of Nature (written in 1646, published posthumously in 1652) to “those lumps and dunghills of all sects ... that young and upstart generation of gross anti-scripturalists, that have a powder-plot against the Gospel, that would very compendiously behead all Christian religion at one blow, a device which old and ordinary heretics were never acquainted withal.”[61] The reference is presumably to the followers of Lawrence Clarkson. Yet even here we have no mention of atheism, which is treated as something almost impossible. Indeed, the very course of arguing in favour of a “Light of Nature” seems to have brought suspicion on Culverwel himself, who shows a noticeable liking for Herbert of Cherbury.[62] He is, however, as may be inferred from his angry tone towards anti-scripturalists, substantially orthodox, and not very important.
It is contended for Culverwel by modern admirers (ed. cited, p. xxi) that he deserves the praise given by Hallam to the later Bishop Cumberland as “the first Christian writer who sought to establish systematically the principle of moral right independent of revelation.” [See above, p. 74, the similar tribute of Mosheim to Ames.] But Culverwel does not really make this attempt. His proposition is that reason, “the candle of the Lord,” discovers “that all the moral law is founded in natural and common light, in the light of reason, and that there is nothing in the mysteries of the Gospel contrary to the light of reason” (Introd. end); yet he contends not only that faith transcends reason, but that Abraham’s attempt to slay his son was a dutiful obeying of “the God of nature” (pp. 225–26). He does not achieve the simple step of noting that the recognition of revelation as such must be performed by reason, and thus makes no advance on the position of Bacon, much less on those of Pecock and Hooker. His object, indeed, was not to justify orthodoxy by reason against rationalistic unbelief, but to make a case for reason in theology against the Lutherans and others who, “because Socinus has burnt his wings at this candle of the Lord,” scouted all use of it (Introd.). Culverwel, however, was one of the learned group in Emanuel College, Cambridge, whose tradition developed in the next generation into Latitudinarianism; and he may be taken as a learned type of a number of the clergy who were led by the abundant discussion all around them into professing and encouraging a ratiocinative habit of mind. Thus we find Dean Stuart, Clerk of the Closet to Charles I, devoting one of his short homilies to Jerome’s text, Tentemus animas quæ deficiunt a fide naturalibus rationibus adjurare. “It is not enough,” he writes, “for you to rest in an imaginary faith, and easiness in beleeving, except yee know also what and why and how you come to that beleef. Implicite beleevers, ignorant beleevers, the adversary may swallow, but the understanding beleever hee must chaw, and pick bones before hee come to assimilate him, and make him like himself. The implicite beleever stands in an open field, and the enemy will ride over him easily: the understanding beleever is in a fenced town.” (Catholique Divinity, 1657, pp. 133–34—a work written many years earlier.)
The discourse on Atheism, again, in the posthumous works of John Smith of Cambridge (d. 1652), is entirely retrospective; but soon another note is sounded. As early as 1652, the year after the issue of Hobbes’s Leviathan, the prolific Walter Charleton, who had been physician to the king, published a book entitled The Darkness of Atheism Expelled by the Light of Nature, wherein he asserted that England “hath of late produced and doth ... foster more swarms of atheistical monsters ... than any age, than any Nation hath been infested withal.” In the following year Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, published his Antidote against Atheism. The flamboyant dedication to Viscountess Conway affirms that the existence of God is “as clearly demonstrable as any theorem in mathematicks”; but, the reverend author adds, “considering the state of things as they are, I cannot but pronounce that there is more necessity of this my Antidote than I could wish there were.” At the close of the preface he pleasantly explains that he will use no Biblical arguments, but talk to the atheist as a “mere Naturalist”; inasmuch as “he that converses with a barbarian must discourse to him in his own language,” and “he that would gain upon the more weak and sunk minds of sensual mortals is to accommodate himself to their capacity, who, like the bat and owl, can see nowhere so well as in the shady glimmerings of their twilight.” Then, after some elementary play with the design argument, the entire Third Book of forty-six folio pages is devoted to a parade of old wives’ tales of witches and witchcraft, witches’ sabbaths, apparitions, commotions by devils, ghosts, incubi, polter-geists—the whole vulgar medley of the peasant superstitions of Europe.
It is not that the Platonist does violence to his own philosophic tastes by way of influencing the “bats and owls” of atheism. This mass of superstition is his own special pabulum. In the preface he has announced that, while he may abstain from the use of the Scriptures, nothing shall restrain him from telling what he knows of spirits. “I am so cautious and circumspect,” he claims, “that I make use of no narrations that either the avarice of the priest or the credulity and fancifulness of the melancholist may render suspected.” As for the unbelievers, “their confident ignorance shall never dash me out of confidence with my well-grounded knowledge; for I have been no careless inquirer into these things.” It is after a polter-geist tale of the crassest description that he announces that it was strictly investigated and attested by “that excellently-learned and noble gentleman, Mr. E. Boyle,” who avowed “that all his settled indisposedness to believe strange things was overcome by this special conviction.”[63] And the section ends with the proposition: “Assuredly that saying is not more true in politick, No Bishop, no King, than this in metaphysicks, No Spirit, no God.” Such was the mentality of some of the most eminent and scholarly Christian apologists of the time. It seems safe to conclude that the Platonist made few converts.
More avowed that he wrote without having read previous apologists; and others were similarly spontaneous in the defence of the faith. In 1654 there is noted[64] a treatise called Atheismus Vapulans, by William Towers, whose message can in part be inferred from his title;[65] and in 1657 Charleton issued his Immortality of the Human Soul demonstrated by the Light of Nature, wherein the argument, which says nothing of revelation, is so singularly unconfident, and so much broken in upon by excursus, as to leave it doubtful whether the author was more lacking in dialectic skill or in conviction. And still the traces of unbelief multiply. Baxter and Howe were agreed, in 1658, that there were both “infidels and papists” at work around them; and in 1659 Howe writes: “I know some leading men are not Christians.”[66] “Seekers, Vanists, and Behmenists” are specified as groups to which both infidels and papists attach themselves. And Howe, recognizing how religious strifes promote unbelief, bears witness “What a cloudy, wavering, uncertain, lank, spiritless thing is the faith of Christians in this age become!... Most content themselves to profess it only as the religion of their country.”[67]
Alongside of all this vindication of Christianity there was going on constant and cruel persecution of heretic Christians. The Unitarian John Biddle, master of the Gloucester Grammar School, was dismissed for his denial of the Trinity; and in 1647 he was imprisoned, and his book burned by the hangman. In 1654 he was again imprisoned; and in 1655 he was banished to the Scilly Islands. Returning to London after the Restoration, he was again arrested, and died in gaol in 1662.[68] Under the Commonwealth (1656) James Naylor, the Quaker, narrowly escaped death for blasphemy, but was whipped through the streets, pilloried, bored through the tongue with a hot iron, branded in the forehead, and sent to hard labour in prison. Many hundreds of Quakers were imprisoned and more or less cruelly handled.
From the Origines Sacræ (1662) of Stillingfleet, nevertheless, it would appear that both deism and atheism were becoming more and more common.[69] He states that “the most popular pretences of the atheists of our age have been the irreconcilableness of the account of times in Scripture with that of the learned and ancient heathen nations, the inconsistency of the belief of the Scriptures with the principles of reason; and the account which may be given of the origin of things from the principles of philosophy without the Scriptures.” These positions are at least as natural to deists as to atheists; and Stillingfleet is later found protesting against the policy of some professed Christians who give up the argument from miracles as valueless.[70] His whole treatise, in short, assumes the need for meeting a very widespread unbelief in the Bible, though it rarely deals with the atheism of which it so constantly speaks. After the Restoration, naturally, all the new tendencies were greatly reinforced,[71] alike by the attitude of the king and his companions, all influenced by French culture, and by the general reaction against Puritanism. Whatever ways of thought had been characteristic of the Puritans were now in more or less complete disfavour; the belief in witchcraft was scouted as much on this ground as on any other;[72] and the deistic doctrines found a ready audience among royalists, whose enemies had been above all things Bibliolaters.