“That the newe Testament and Gospell of Christe are but mere foolishnesse, a storie of menne, or rather a mere fable.
“Item, that man is restored to grace by the meere mercy of God, wythout the meane of Christ’s bloud, death, and passion.
“Item, that Christe is not God, nor the Saviour of the world, but a meere man, a sinfull man, and an abhominable Idoll.
“Item, that al they that worshippe him are abhominable Idolaters; And that Christe did not rise agayne from death to life by the power of his Godhead, neither, that hee did ascende into Heaven.
“Item, that the holy Ghoste is not God, neither that there is any suche holy Ghoste.
“Item, that Baptisme is not necessarie in the Churche of God, neither the use of the sacrament of the body and bloude of Christ.”
There is record also of a freethinker named John Lewes burned at the same place in 1583 for “denying the Godhead of Christ, and holding other detestable heresies,” in the manner of Hamond.[22] In the same year Elias Thacker and John Coping were hanged at St. Edmonsbury “for spreading certaine bookes, seditiously penned by one Robert Browne against the Booke of Common Prayer”; and “their bookes so many as could be found were burnt before them.”[23] Further, one Peter Cole, an Ipswich tanner, was burned in 1587 (also at Norwich) for similar doctrine; and Francis Kett, a young clergyman, ex-fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, was burned at the same place in 1589 for heresy of the Unitarian order.[24] Hamond and Cole seem, however, to have been in their own way religious men,[25] and Kett a devout mystic, with ideas of a Second Advent.[26] All founded on the Bible.
Most surprising of all perhaps is the record of the trial of one John Hilton, clerk in holy orders, before the Upper House of Convocation on December 22, 1584, on the charge of having “said in a sermon at St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields that the Old and New Testaments are but fables.” (Lansdowne MSS. British Museum, No. 982, fol. 46, cited by Prof. Storojenko, Life of Robert Greene, Eng. tr. in Grosart’s “Huth Library” ed. of Greene’s Works, i, 39, note.) As Hilton confessed to the charge and made abjuration, it may be surmised that he had spoken under the influence of liquor. Even on that view, however, such an episode tells of a considerable currency of unbelieving criticism.
Apart from constructive heresy, the perpetual religious dissensions of the time were sure to stimulate doubt; and there appeared quite a number of treatises directed wholly or partly against explicit unbelief, as: The Faith of the Church Militant, translated from the Latin of the Danish divine Hemming (1581), and addressed “to the confutation of the Jewes, Turks, Atheists, Papists, Hereticks, and all other adversaries of the truth whatsoever”; “The Touchstone of True Religion ... against the impietie of Atheists, Epicures, Libertines, Hippocrites, and Temporisours of these times” (1590); An Enemie to Atheisme, translated by T. Rogers from the Latin of Avenar (1591); the preacher Henry Smith’s God’s Arrow against Atheists (1593, rep. 1611); an English translation of the second volume of La Primaudaye’s L’Académie Française, containing a refutation of atheistic doctrine; and no fewer than three “Treatises of the Nature of God”—all anonymous, the third known to be by Bishop Thomas Morton—all appearing in the year 1599.
All this smoke—eight apologetic treatises in eighteen years—implies some fire; and the translator of La Primaudaye, one “T. B.,” declares in his dedication that there has been a general growth of atheism in England and on the continent, which he traces to “that Monster Machiavell.” Among English atheists of that school he ranks the dramatist Robert Greene, who had died in 1592; and it has been argued, not quite convincingly, that it was to Machiavelli that Greene had pointed, in his death-bed recantation A Groatsworth of Wit (1592), as the atheistic instructor of his friend Marlowe,[27] who introduces “Machiavel” as cynical prologist to his Jew of Malta. Greene’s own “atheism” had been for the most part a matter of bluster and disorderly living; and we find his zealously orthodox friend Thomas Nashe, in his Strange News (1592), calling the Puritan zealot who used the pseudonym of Martin Marprelate “a mighty platformer of atheism”; even as his own and Greene’s enemy, Gabriel Harvey, called Nashe an atheist.[28] But Nashe in his Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem (1592), though he speaks characteristically of the “atheistical Julian,” discusses contemporary atheism in a fashion descriptive of an actual growth of the opinion, concerning which he alleges that there is no “sect now in England so scattered [i.e., so widely spread] as atheisme.” The “outward atheist,” he declares, “establishes reason as his God”; and he offers some sufficiently primitive arguments by way of confutation. “They follow the Pironicks [i.e., Pyrrhonists], whose position and opinion it is that there is no hell or misery but opinion. Impudently they persist in it, that the late discovered Indians show antiquities thousands before Adam.” For the rest, they not only reject the miracles of Moses as mere natural expedients misrepresented, but treat the whole Bible as “some late writers of our side” treat the Apocrypha. And Nashe complains feelingly that while the atheists “are special men of wit,” and that “the Romish seminaries have not allured unto them so many good wits as atheism,” the preachers who reply to them are men of dull understanding, the product of a system under which preferment is given to graduates on the score not of capacity but of mere gravity and solemnity. “It is the superabundance of wit,” declares Nashe, “that makes atheists: will you then hope to beat them down with fusty brown-bread dorbellism?”[29] There had arisen, in short, a ferment of rationalism which was henceforth never to disappear from English life.