There is evidence that Charles II, at least up to the time of his becoming a Catholic, and probably even to the end, was at heart a deist. See Burnet’s History of his Own Time, ed. 1838, pp. 61, 175, and notes; and cp. refs. in Buckle, 3-vol. ed. i, 362, note; 1-vol. ed. p. 205. St. Evremond, who knew him and many of his associates, affirmed expressly that Charles’s creed “étoit seulement ce qui passe vulgairement, quoiqu’ injustement, pour une extinction totale de Religion: je veux dire le Déisme” (Œuvres mélées: t. viii of Œuvres, ed. 1714, p. 354). His opinion, St. Evremond admits, was the result of simple recognition of the actualities of religious life, not of reading, or of much reflection. And his adoption of Catholicism, in St. Evremond’s opinion, was purely political. He saw that Catholicism made much more than Protestantism for kingly power, and that his Catholic subjects were the most subservient.
We gather this, however, still from the apologetic treatises and the historians, not from new deistic literature; for in virtue of the Press Licensing Act, passed on behalf of the Church in 1662, no heretical book could be printed; so that Herbert was thus far the only professed deistic writer in the field, and Hobbes the only other of similar influence. Baxter, writing in 1655 on The Unreasonableness of Infidelity, handles chiefly Anabaptists; and in his Reformed Pastor (1656), though he avows that “the common ignorant people,” seeing the endless strifes of the clergy, “are hardened by us against all religion,” the only specific unbelief he mentions is that of “the devil’s own agents, the unhappy Socinians,” who had written “so many treatises for ... unity and peace.”[73] But in his Reasons of the Christian Religion, issued in 1667, he thinks fit to prove the existence of God and a future state, and the truth and the supernatural character of the Christian religion. Any deist or atheist who took the trouble to read through it would have been rewarded by the discovery that the learned author has annihilated his own case. In his first part he affirms: “If there were no life of Retribution after this, Obedience to God would be finally men’s loss and ruine: But Obedience to God shall not be finally men’s loss and ruine: Ergo, there is another life.”[74] In the second part he writes that “Man’s personal interest is an unfit rule and measure of God’s goodness”;[75] and, going on to meet the new argument against Christianity based on the inference that an infinity of stars are inhabited, he writes:—
Ask any man who knoweth these things whether all this earth be any more in comparison of the whole creation than one Prison is to a Kingdom or Empire, or the paring of one nail ... in comparison of the whole body. And if God should cast off all this earth, and use all the sinners in it as they deserve, it is no more sign of a want of benignity or mercy in him than it is for a King to cast one subject of a million into a jail ... or than it is to pare a man’s nails, or cut off a wart, or a hair, or to pull out a rotten aking tooth.[76]
Thus the second part absolutely destroys one of the fundamental positions of the first. No semblance of levity on the part of the freethinkers could compare with the profound intellectual insincerity of such a propaganda as this; and that deism and atheism continued to gain ground is proved by the multitude of apologetic treatises. Even in church-ridden Scotland they were found necessary; at least the young advocate George Mackenzie, afterwards to be famous as the “bluidy Mackenzie” of the time of persecution, thought it expedient to make his first appearance in literature with a Religio Stoici (1663), wherein he sets out with a refutation of atheism. It is difficult to believe that his counsel to Christians to watch the “horror-creating beds of dying atheists”[77]—a false pretence as it stands—represented any knowledge whatever of professed atheism in his own country; and his discussion of the subject is wholly on the conventional lines—notably so when he uses the customary plea, later associated with Pascal, that the theist runs no risk even if there is no future life, whereas the atheist runs a tremendous risk if there is one;[78] but when he writes of “that mystery why the greatest wits are most frequently the greatest atheists,”[79] he must be presumed to refer at least to deists. And other passages show that he had listened to freethinking arguments. Thus he speaks[80] of those who “detract from Scripture by attributing the production of miracles to natural causes”; and again[81] of those who “contend that the Scriptures are written in a mean and low style; are in some places too mysterious, in others too obscure; contain many things incredible, many repetitions, and many contradictions.” His own answers are conspicuously weak. In the latter passage he continues: “But those miscreants should consider that much of the Scripture’s native splendour is impaired by its translators”; and as to miracles he makes the inept answer that if secondary causes were in operation they acted by God’s will; going on later to suggest on his own part that prophecy may be not a miraculous gift, but “a natural (though the highest) perfection of our human nature.”[82] Apart from his weak dialectic, he writes in general with cleverness and literary finish, but without any note of sincerity; and his profession of concern that reason should be respected in theology[83] is as little acted on in his later life as his protest against persecution.[84] The inference from the whole essay is that in Scotland, as in England, the civil war had brought up a considerable crop of reasoned unbelief; and that Mackenzie, professed defender of the faith as he was at twenty-five, and official persecutor of nonconformists as he afterwards became, met with a good deal of it in his cultured circle. In his later booklet, Reason: an Essay (1690), he speaks of the “ridiculous and impudent extravagance of some who ... take pains to persuade themselves and others that there is not a God.”[85] He further coarsely asperses all atheists as debauchees,[86] though he avows that “Infidelity is not the cause of false reasoning, because such as are not atheists reason falsely.”
When anti-theistic thought could subsist in the ecclesiastical climate of Puritan Scotland, it must have flourished somewhat in England. In 1667 appeared A Philosophicall Essay towards an eviction of the Being and Attributes of God, etc., of which the preface proclaims “the bold and horrid pride of Atheists and Epicures” who “have laboured to introduce into the world a general Atheism, or at least a doubtful Skepticisme in matters of Religion.” In 1668 was published Meric Casaubon’s treatise, Of Credulity and Incredulity in things Natural, Civil, and Divine, assailing not only “the Sadducism of these times in denying spirits, witches,” etc., but “Epicurus ... and the juggling and false dealing lately used to bring Atheism into Credit”—a thrust at Gassendi. A similar polemic is entombed in a ponderous folio “romance” entitled Bentivolio and Urania, by Nathaniel Ingelo, D.D., a fellow first of Emanuel College, and afterwards of Queen’s College, Cambridge (1660; 4th ed. amended, 1682). The second part, edifyingly dedicated to the Earl of Lauderdale, one of the worst men of his day, undertakes to handle the “Atheists, Epicureans, and Skepticks”; and in the preface the atheists are duly vituperated; while Epicurus is described as a gross sensualist, in terms of the legend, and the skeptics as “resigned to the slavery of vice.” In the sixth book the atheists are allowed a momentary hearing in defence of their “horrid absurdities,” from which it appears that there were current arguments alike anthropological and metaphysical against theism. The most competent part of the author’s own argument, which is unlimited as to space, is that which controverts the thesis of the invention of religious beliefs by “politicians”[87]—a notion first put in currency, as we have seen, by those who insisted on the expediency and value of such inventions; as, Polybius among the ancients, and Machiavelli among the moderns; and further by Christian priests, who described all non-Christian religions as human inventions.
Dr. Ingelo’s folio seems to have had many readers; but he avowedly did not look for converts; and defences of the faith on a less formidable scale were multiplied. A “Person of Honour” (Sir Charles Wolseley) produced in 1669 an essay on The Unreasonableness of Atheism made Manifest, which, without supplying any valid arguments, gives some explanation of the growth of unbelief in terms of the political and other antecedents;[88] and in 1670 appeared Richard Barthogge’s Divine Goodness Explicated and Vindicated from the Exceptions of the Atheists. Baxter in 1671[89] complains that “infidels are grown so numerous and so audacious, and look so big and talk so loud”; and still the process continues. In 1672 Sir William Temple writes indignantly of “those who would pass for wits in our age by saying things which, David tells us, the fool said in his heart.”[90] In the same year appeared The Reasonableness of Scripture-Belief, by Sir Charles Wolseley, and The Atheist Silenced, by one J. M.; in 1674, Dr. Thomas Good’s Firmianus et Dubitantius, or Dialogues concerning Atheism, Infidelity, and Popery; in 1675, the posthumous treatise of Bishop Wilkins (d. 1672), Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion, with a preface by Tillotson; and a Brevis Demonstratio, with the modest sub-title, “The Truth of Christian Religion Demonstrated by Reasons the best that have yet been out in English”; in 1677, Bishop Stillingfleet’s Letter to a Deist; and in 1678 the massive work of Cudworth on The True Intellectual System of the Universe attacking atheism (not deism) on philosophic lines which sadly compromised the learned author.[91] English dialectic being found insufficient, there was even produced in 1679 a translation by the Rev. Joshua Bonhome of the French L’Athéisme Convaincu of David Dersdon, published twenty years before.
All of these works explicitly avow the abundance of unbelief; Tillotson, himself accused of it, pronounces the age “miserably overrun with Skepticism and Infidelity”; and Wilkins, avowing that these tendencies are common “not only among sensual men of the vulgar sort, but even among those who pretend to a more than ordinary measure of wit and learning,” attempts to meet them by a purely deistic argument, with a claim for Christianity appended, as if he were concerned chiefly to rebut atheism, and held his own Christianity on a very rationalistic tenure. The fact was that the orthodox clergy were as hard put to it to repel religious antinomianism on the one hand as to repel atheism on the other; and no small part of the deistic movement seems to have been set up by the reaction against pious lawlessness.[92] Thus we have Tillotson, writing as Dean of Canterbury, driven to plead in his preface to the work of Wilkins that “it is a great mistake” to think the obligation of moral duties “doth solely depend upon the revelation of God’s will made to us in the Holy Scriptures.” It was such reasoning that brought upon him the charge of freethinking.
If it be now possible to form any accurate picture of the state of belief in the latter part of the seventeenth century, it may perhaps be done by recognizing three categories of temperament or mental proclivity. First we have to reckon with the great mass of people held to religious observance by hebetude,[93] devoid of the deeper mystical impulse or psychic bias which exhibited itself on the one hand among the dissenters who partly preserved the “enthusiasms” of the Commonwealth period, and on the other among the more cultured pietists of the Church who, banning “enthusiasm” in its stronger forms, cultivated a certain “enthusiasm” of their own. Religionists of the latter type were ministered to by superstitious mystics like Henry More, who, even when undertaking to “prove” the existence of God and the separate existence of the soul by argument and by demonology, taught them to cultivate a “warranted enthusiasm,” and to “endeavour after a certain principle more noble and inward than reason itself, and without which reason will falter, or at least reach but to mean and frivolous things” ... “something in me while I thus speak, which I must confess is of so retruse a nature that I want a name for it, unless I should adventure to term it divine sagacity, which is the first rise of successful reason, especially in matters of great comprehension and moment.”[94] There was small psychic difference between this dubiously draped affirmation of the “inner light” and the more orotund proclamations of it by the dissenters who, for a considerable section of the people, still carried on the tradition of rapturous pietism; and the dissenters were not always at a disadvantage in that faculty for rhetoric which has generally been a main factor in doctrinal religion.[95]
From the popular and the eclectic pietist alike the generality of the Anglican clergy stood aloof; and among them, in turn, a rationalistic and anti-mythical habit of mind in a manner joined men who were divided in their beliefs. The clergymen who wrote lawyer-like treatises against schism were akin in psychosis to those who, in their distaste for the parade of inspiration, veered towards deism. Tillotson was not the only man reputed to have done so: fervid dissenters declared that many of the established clergy paid “more respect to the light of reason than to the light of the Scriptures,” and further “left Christ out of their religion, disowned imputed righteousness, derided the operations of the holy spirit as the empty pretences of enthusiasts.”[96] Of men of this temperament, some would open dialectic batteries against dissent; while others, of a more searching proclivity, would tend to construct for themselves a rationalistic creed out of the current medley of theological and philosophic doctrine. The great mass of course maintained an allegiance of habit to the main formulas of the faith, putting quasi-rational aspects on the trinity, providence, redemption, and the future life, very much as the adherents of political parties normally vindicate their supposed principles; and there was a good deal of surviving temperamental piety even in the Restoration period.[97] But the outstanding feature of the age, as contrasted with previous periods, was the increasing commonness of the skeptical or rationalistic attitude in general society. Sir Charles Wolseley protests[98] that “Irreligion, ’tis true, in its practice hath still been the companion of every age, but its open and public defence seems the peculiar of this”; adding that “most of the bad principles of this age are of no earlier a date than one very ill book, and indeed but the spawn of the Leviathan.” This, as we have seen, is a delusion; but the influence of Hobbes was a potent factor.
All the while, the censorship of the press, which was one of the means by which the clerical party under Charles combated heresy, prevented any new and outspoken writing on the deistic side. The Treatise of Humane [i.e. Human] Reason (1674)[99] of Martin Clifford, a scholarly man-about-town,[100] who was made Master of the Charterhouse, went indeed to the bottom of the question of authority by showing, as Spinoza had done shortly before,[101] that the acceptance of authority is itself in the last resort grounded in reason. The author makes no overt attack on religion, and professes Christian belief, but points out that many modern wars had been on subjects of religion, and elaborates a skilful argument on the gain to be derived from toleration. Reason alone, fairly used, will bring a man to the Christian faith: he who denies this cannot be a Christian. As for schism, it is created not by variation in belief, but by the refusal to tolerate it. This ingenious and well-written treatise speedily elicited three replies, all pronouncing it a pernicious work. Dr. Laney, Bishop of Ely, is reported to have declared that book and author might fitly be burned together;[102] and Dr. Isaac Watts, while praising it for “many useful notions,” found it “exalt reason as the rule of religion as well as the guide, to a degree very dangerous.”[103] Its actual effect seems to have been to restrain the persecution of dissenters.[104] In 1680, three years after Clifford’s death, there appeared An Apology for a Treatise of Humane Reason, by Albertus Warren, wherein one of the attacks, entitled Plain Dealing, by a Cambridge scholar, is specially answered.[105] This helped to evoke the anonymous Discourse of Things above Reason (1681), by Robert Boyle, the distinguished author of The Sceptical Chemist, whom we have seen backing up Henry More in acceptance of the grossest of ignorant superstitions. The most notable thing about the Discourse is that it anticipates Berkeley’s argument against freethinking mathematicians.[106]