Outside France, Germany and England, there were no great schools of thought distinctively deistic, though in most countries there is to be found a rationalistic anti-clerical movement which partakes of the character of deism. It seems probable, for example, that in Portugal the marquis de Pombal was in reality a deist, and both in Italy and in Spain there were signs of the same rationalistic revolt. More certain, and also more striking, is the fact that the leading statesmen in the American War of Independence were emphatically deists; Benjamin Franklin (who attributes his position to the study of Shaftesbury and Collins), Thomas Paine, Washington and Jefferson, although they all had the greatest admiration for the New Testament story, denied that it was based on any supernatural revelation. For various reasons the movement in America did not appear on the surface to any great extent, and after the comparative failure of Elihu Palmer’s Principles of Nature it expressed itself chiefly in the spread of Unitarianism.
In England, though the deists were forgotten, their spirit was not wholly dead. For men like Hume and Gibbon the standpoint of deism was long left behind; yet Gibbon’s famous two chapters might well have been written by a deist. Even now many undoubtedly cling to a theology nearly allied to deism. Rejecting miracles and denying the infallibility of Scripture, protesting against Calvinistic views of sovereign grace and having no interest in evangelical Arminianism, the faith of such inquirers seems fairly to coincide with that of the deists. Even some cultured theologians, the historical representatives of latitudinarianism, seem to accept the great body of what was contended for by the deists. Moreover, the influence of the deistic writers had an incalculable influence in the gradual progress towards tolerance, and in the spread of a broader attitude towards intellectual problems, and this too, though, as we have seen, the original deists devoted themselves mainly to a crusade against the doctrine of revelation.
The original deists displayed a singular incapacity to understand the true conditions of history; yet amongst them there were some who pointed the way to the truer, more generous interpretation of the past. When Shaftesbury wrote that “religion is still a discipline, and progress of the soul towards perfection,” he gave birth to the same thought that was afterwards hailed in Lessing’s Erziehung des Menschengeschlechtes as the dawn of a fuller and a purer light on the history of religion and on the development of the spiritual life of mankind.
Authorities.—See John Leland, A View of the Principal Deistical Writers (2 vols., 1754-1756; ed. 1837); G. V. Lechler, Geschichte des englischen Deismus (2 vols., 1841); L. Noack, Die Freidenker in der Religion (Bern, 1853-1855); John Hunt, Religious Thought in England (3 vols., 1870-1872); Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the 18th Century (2 vols., 1876); A. S. Farrar, A Critical History of Free Thought (1862, Bampton Lectures); J. H. Overton and F. Relton, The English Church from the Accession of George I. to the end of the 18th Century (1906; especially chap. iv., “The Answer to Deism”); A. W. Benn, History of English Rationalism in the 19th Century (1906); i. 111 ff.; J. M. Robertson, Short History of Free Thought (1906); G. Ch. B. Pünjer, Geschichte der christlichen Religionsphilosophie seit der Reformation (Brunswick, 1880); M. W. Wiseman, Dynamics of Religion (London, 1897), pt. ii.; article “Deismus” in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopädie (vol. iv., 1898).
[1] The right of the orthodox party to use this name was asserted by the publication in 1715 of a journal called The Freethinker, conducted by anti-deistic clergymen. The term libertin appears to have been used first as a hostile epithet of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, a 13th-century sect which was accused not only of free-thought but also of licentious living.
[2] See the separate biographies of these writers. The three most significant names after Lord Herbert are those of Toland, Wollaston and Tindal.
DEISTER, a chain of hills in Germany, in the Prussian province of Hanover, about 15 m. S.W. of the city of Hanover. It runs in a north-westerly direction from Springe in the S. to Rodenberg in the N. It has a total length of 14 m., and rises in the Höfeler to a height of 1250 ft. The chain is well-wooded and abounds in game. There are some coal mines and sandstone quarries.