The stress of new discussion is further to be gathered from the work of Howe, On the Reconcilableness of God’s Prescience of the Sins of Men with the Wisdom and Sincerity of his Counsels and Exhortations, produced in 1677 at Boyle’s request. As a modern admirer admits that the thesis was a hopeless one,[107] it is not to be supposed that it did much to lessen doubt in its own day. The preface to Stillingfleet’s Letter to a Deist (1677), which for the first time brings that appellation into prominence in English controversy, tacitly abandoning the usual ascription of atheism to all unbelievers, avows that “a mean esteem of the Scriptures and the Christian Religion” has become very common “among the Skepticks of this Age,” and complains very much, as Butler did sixty years later, of the spirit of “Raillery and Buffoonery” in which the matter was too commonly approached. The “Letter” shows that a multitude of the inconsistencies and other blemishes of the Old Testament were being keenly discussed; and it cannot be said that the Bishop’s vindication was well calculated to check the tendency. Indeed, we have the angry and reiterated declaration of Archdeacon Parker, writing in 1681, that “the ignorant and the unlearned among ourselves are become the greatest pretenders to skepticism; and it is the common people that nowadays set up for Skepticism and Infidelity”; that “Atheism and Irreligion are at length become as common as Vice and Debauchery”; and that “Plebeans and Mechanicks have philosophized themselves into Principles of Impiety, and read their Lectures of Atheism in the Streets and Highways. And they are able to demonstrate out of the Leviathan that there is no God nor Providence,” and so on.[108] As the Archdeacon’s method of refutation consists mainly in abuse, he doubtless had the usual measure of success. A similar order of dialectic is employed by Dr. Sherlock in his Practical Discourse of Religious Assemblies (1681). The opening section is addressed to the “speculative atheists,” here described as receding from the principles of their “great Master, Mr. Hobbs,” who, “though he had no great opinion of religion in itself, yet thought it something considerable when it became the law of the nation.” Such atheists, the reverend writer notes, when it is urged on them that all mankind worship “some God or other,” reply that such an argument is as good for polytheism and idolatry as for monotheism; so, after formally inviting them to “cure their souls of that fatal and mortal disease, which makes them beasts here and devils hereafter,” and lamenting that he is not dealing with “reasonable men,” he bethinks him that “the laws of conversation require us to treat all men with just respects,” and admits that there have been “some few wise and cautious atheists.” To such, accordingly, he suggests that the atheist has already a great advantage in a world morally restrained by religion, where he is under no such restraint, and that, “if he should by his wit and learning proselyte a whole nation to atheism, Hell would break loose on Earth, and he might soon find himself exposed to all those violences and injuries which he now securely practises.” For the rest, they had better not affront God, who may after all exist, and be able to revenge himself.[109] And so forth.
Of deists as such, Sherlock has nothing to say beyond treating as “practical atheists” men who admit the existence of God, yet never go to church, though “religious worship is nothing else but a public acknowledgment of God.” Their non-attendance “is as great, if not a greater affront to God, and contempt of him, than atheism itself.”[110] But the reverend writer’s strongest resentment is aroused by the spectacle of freethinkers asking for liberty of thought.
“It is a fulsome and nauseous thing,” he breathlessly protests, “to see the atheists and infidels of our days to turn great reformers of religion, to set up a mighty cry for liberty of conscience. For whatever reformation of religion may be needful at this time, whatever liberty of conscience may be fit to be granted, yet what have these men to do to meddle with it; those who think religion a mere fable, and God to be an Utopian prince, and conscience a man of clouts set up for a scarecrow to fright such silly creatures from their beloved enjoyments, and hell and heaven to be forged in the same mint with the poet’s Styx and Acheron and Elysian Fields? We are like to see blessed times, if such men had but the reforming of religion.”[111]
Dr Sherlock was not going to do good if the devil bade him.
The faith had a wittier champion in South; but he, in a Westminster Abbey sermon of 1684–5,[112] mournfully declares that
“The weakness of our church discipline since its restoration, whereby it has been scarce able to get any hold on men’s consciences, and much less able to keep it; and the great prevalence of that atheistical doctrine of the Leviathan; and the unhappy propagation of Erastianism; these things (I say) with some others have been the sad and fatal causes that have loosed the bands of conscience and eaten out the very heart and sense of Christianity among us, to that degree, that there is now scarce any religious tye or restraint upon persons, but merely from those faint remainders of natural conscience, which God will be sure to keep alive upon the hearts of men, as long as they are men, for the great ends of his own providence, whether they will or no. So that, were it not for this sole obstacle, religion is not now so much in danger of being divided and torn piecemeal by sects and factions, as of being at once devoured by atheism. Which being so, let none wonder that irreligion is accounted policy when it is grown even to a fashion; and passes for wit, with some, as well as for wisdom with others.”
How general was the ferment of discussion may be gathered from Dryden’s Religio Laici (1682), addressed to the youthful Henry Dickinson, translator of Père Richard Simon’s Critical History of the Old Testament (Fr. 1678). The French scholar was suspect to begin with; and Bishop Burnet tells that Richard Hampden (grandson of the patriot), who was connected with the Rye House Plot and committed suicide in the reign of William and Mary, had been “much corrupted” in his religious principles by Simon’s conversation at Paris. In the poem, Dryden recognizes the upsetting tendency of the treatise, albeit he terms it “matchless”:—
For some, who have his secret meaning guessed,
Have found our author not too much a priest;
and his flowing disquisition, which starts from poetic contempt of reason and ends in prosaic advice to keep quiet about its findings, leaves the matter at that. The hopelessly confused but musical passage: