How far the process of reasoning had gone among quiet thinking people before the Revolution may be gathered from the essay entitled Miracles no Violations of the Laws of Nature, published in 1683.[113] Its thesis is that put explicitly by Montaigne and implicitly by Bacon, that Ignorance is the only worker of miracles; in other words, “that the power of God and the power of Nature are one and the same”—a simple and straightforward way of putting a conception which Cudworth had put circuitously and less courageously a few years before. No Scriptural miracle is challenged qua event. “Among the many miracles related to be done in favour of the Israelites,” says the writer, “there is (I think) no one that can be apodictically demonstrated to be repugnant to th’ establisht Order of Nature”;[114] and he calmly accepts the Biblical account of the first rainbow, explaining it as passing for a miracle merely because it was the first. He takes his motto from Pliny: “Quid non miraculo est, cum primum in notitiam venit?”[115] This is, however, a preliminary strategy; as is the opening reminder that “most of the ancient Fathers ... and of the most learned Theologues among the moderns” hold that the Scriptures as regards natural things do not design to instruct men in physics but “aim only to excite pious affections in their breasts.”
We accordingly reach the position that the Scripture “many times speaks of natural things, yea even of God himself, very improperly, as aiming to affect and occupy the imagination of men, not to convince their reason.” Many Scriptural narratives, therefore, “are either delivered poetically or related according to the preconceived opinions and prejudices of the writer.” “Wherefore we here absolutely conclude that all the events that are truly related in the Scripture to have come to pass, proceeded necessarily ... according to the immutable Laws of Nature; and that if anything be found which can be apodictically demonstrated to be repugnant to those laws ... we may safely and piously believe the same not to have been dictated by divine inspiration, but impiously added to the sacred volume by sacrilegious men; for whatever is against Nature is against Reason; and whatever is against Reason is absurd, and therefore also to be rejected and refuted.”[116]
Lest this should be found too hard a doctrine there is added, àpropos of Joshua’s staying of the sun and moon, a literary solution which has often done duty in later times. “To interpret Scripture-miracles, and to understand from the narrations of them how they really happened, ’tis necessary to know the opinions of those who first reported them ... otherwise we shall confound ... things which have really happen’d with things purely imaginary, and which were only prophetic representations. For in Scripture many things are related as real, and which were also believ’d to be real even by the relators themselves, that notwithstanding were only representations form’d in the brain, and merely imaginary—as that God, the Supreme Being, descended from heaven ... upon Mount Sinai...; that Elias ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot ... which were only representations accommodated to their opinions who deliver’d them down to us.”[117] Such argumentation had to prepare the way for Hume’s Essay Of Miracles, half a century later; and concerning both reasoners it is to be remembered that their thought was to be “infidelity” for centuries after them. It needed real freethinking, then, to produce such doctrine in the days of the Rye House Plot.
Meanwhile, during an accidental lapse of the press laws, the deist Charles Blount[118] (1654–1693) had produced with his father’s help his Anima Mundi (1679), in which there is set forth a measure of cautious unbelief; following it up (1680) by his much more pronounced essay, Great is Diana of the Ephesians, a keen attack on the principle of revelation and clericalism in general, and his translation [from the Latin version] of Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana, so annotated[119] as to be an ingenious counterblast to the Christian claims, and so prefaced as to be an open challenge to orthodoxy. The book was condemned to be burnt; and only the influence of Blount’s family,[120] probably, prevented his being prosecuted. The propaganda, however, was resumed by Blount and his friends in small tracts, and after his suicide[121] in 1693 these were collected as the Oracles of Reason (1693), his collected works (without the Apollonius) appearing in 1695. By this time the political tension of the Revolution of 1688 was over; Le Clerc’s work on the inspiration of the Old Testament, raising many doubts as to the authorship of the Pentateuch, had been translated in 1690; Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) had been translated into English in 1689, and had impressed in a similar sense a number of scholars; his Ethica had given a new direction to the theistic controversy; the Boyle Lecture had been established for the confutation of unbelievers; and after the political convulsion of 1688 has subsided it rains refutations. Atheism is now so fiercely attacked, and with such specific arguments—as in Bentley’s Boyle Lectures (1692), Edwards’s Thoughts concerning the Causes of Atheism (1695), and many other treatises—that there can be no question as to the private vogue of atheistic or agnostic opinions. If we are to judge solely from the apologetic literature, it was more common than deism. Yet it seems impossible to doubt that there were ten deists for one atheist. Bentley’s admission that he never met an explicit atheist[122] suggests that much of the atheism warred against was tentative. It was only the deists who could venture on open avowals; and the replies to them were most discussed.
Much account was made of one of the most compendious, the Short and Easy Method with the Deists (1697), by the nonjuror Charles Leslie; but this handy argument (which is really adopted without acknowledgment from an apologetic treatise by a French Protestant refugee, published in 1688[123]) was not only much bantered by deists, but was sharply censured as incompetent by the French Protestant Le Clerc;[124] and many other disputants had to come to the rescue. A partial list will suffice to show the rate of increase of the ferment:—
Still there was no new deistic literature apart from Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious (1696) and his unauthorized issue (of course without author’s name) of Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue in 1699; and in that there is little direct conflict with orthodoxy, though it plainly enough implied that scripturalism would injuriously affect morals. It seems at that date, perhaps through the author’s objection to its circulation, to have attracted little attention; but he tells that it incurred hostility.[125] Blount’s famous stratagem of 1693[126] had led to the dropping of the official censorship of the press, the Licensing Act having been renewed for only two years in 1693 and dropped in 1695; but after the prompt issue of Blount’s collected works in that year, and the appearance of Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious in the next, the new and comprehensive Blasphemy Law of 1697[127] served sufficiently to terrorize writers and printers in that regard for the time being.[128] Bare denial of the Trinity, of the truth of the Christian religion, or of the divine authority of the Scriptures, was made punishable by disability for any civil office; and on a second offence by three years’ imprisonment, with withdrawal of all legal rights. The first clear gain from the freedom of the press was thus simply a cheapening of books in general. By the Licensing Act of Charles II, and by a separate patent, the Stationers’ Company had a monopoly of printing and selling all classical authors; and while their editions were disgracefully bad, the importers of the excellent editions printed in Holland had to pay them a penalty of 6s. 8d. on each copy.[129] By the same Act, passed under clerical influence, the number even of master printers and letter-founders had been reduced, and the number of presses and apprentices strictly limited; and the total effect of the monopolies was that when Dutch-printed books were imported in exchange for English, the latter sold more cheaply at Amsterdam than they did in London, the English consumer, of course, bearing the burden.[130] The immediate effect, therefore, of the lapse of the Licensing Act must have been to cheapen greatly all foreign books by removal of duties, and at the same time to cheapen English books by leaving printing free. It will be seen above that the output of treatises against freethought at once increases in 1696. But the revolution of 1688, like the Great Rebellion, had doubtless given a new stimulus to freethinking; and the total effect of freer trade in books, even with a veto on “blasphemy,” could only be to further it. This was ere long to be made plain.
§ 3
Alongside of the more popular and native influences, there were at work others, foreign and more academic; and even in professedly orthodox writers there are signs of the influence of deistic thought. Thus Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (written about 1634, published 1642) has been repeatedly characterized[131] as tending to promote deism by its tone and method; and there can be no question that it assumes a great prevalence of critical unbelief, to which its attitude is an odd combination of humorous cynicism and tranquil dogmatism, often recalling Montaigne,[132] and at times anticipating Emerson. There is little savour of confident belief in the smiling maxim that “to confirm and establish our belief ’tis best to argue with judgments below our own”; or in the avowal, “In divinity I love to keep the road; and though not in an implicit yet an humble faith, follow the great wheel of the Church, by which I move.”[133] The pose of the typical believer: “I can answer all the objections of Satan and my rebellious reason with that odd resolution I learned of Tertullian, Certum est quia impossibile est,”[134] tells in his case of no anxious hours; and such smiling incuriousness is not conducive to conviction in others, especially when followed by a recital of some of the many insoluble dilemmas of Scripture. When he reasons he is merely self-subversive, as in the saying, “’Tis not a ridiculous devotion to say a prayer before a game at tables; for even in sortileges and matters of greatest uncertainty there is a settled and pre-ordered course of effects”;[135] and after remarking that the notions of Fortune and astral influence “have perverted the devotion of many into atheism,” he proceeds to avow that his many doubts never inclined him “to any point of infidelity or desperate positions of atheism; for I have been these many years of opinion there never was any.”[136] Yet in his later treatise on Vulgar Errors (1645) he devotes a chapter[137] to the activities of Satan in instilling the belief that “there is no God at all ... that the necessity of his entity dependeth upon ours...; that the natural truth of God is an artificial erection of Man, and the Creator himself but a subtile invention of the Creature.” He further notes as coming from the same source “a secondary and deductive Atheism—that although men concede there is a God, yet should they deny his providence. And therefore assertions have flown about, that he intendeth only the care of the species or common natures, but letteth loose the guard of individuals, and single existences therein.”[138] Browne now asserts merely that “many there are who cannot conceive that there was ever any absolute Atheist,” and does not clearly affirm that Satan labours wholly in vain. The broad fact remains that he avows “reason is a rebel unto faith”; and in the Vulgar Errors he shows in his own reasoning much of the practical play of the new skepticism.[139] Yet it is finally on record that in 1664, on the trial of two women for witchcraft, Browne declared that the fits suffered from by the children said to have been bewitched “were natural, but heightened by the devil’s co-operating with the malice of the witches, at whose instance he did the villainies.”[140] This amazing deliverance is believed to have “turned the scale” in the minds of the jury against the poor women, and they were sentenced by the sitting judge, Sir Matthew Hale, to be hanged. It would seem that in Browne’s latter years the irrational element in him, never long dormant, overpowered the rational. The judgment is a sad one to have to pass on one of the greatest masters of prose in any language. In other men, happily, the progression was different.