Note 2 — Chapter I · INTRODUCTORY

The title of “atheist” had been from time immemorial applied to every shade of serious heresy by the orthodox, as when the early Christians were so described by the image-adoring polytheists around them; and in Latin Christendom the term infidelis, translating the ἀπίστος of the New Testament, which primarily applied to Jews and pagans,2 was easily extensible, as in the writings of Augustine, to all who challenged or doubted articles of ordinary Christian belief, all alike being regarded as consigned to perdition.3 It is by this line of descent that the term “infidelity,” applied to doubt on such doctrines as that of the future state, comes up in England in the fifteenth century.4 It implied no systematic or critical thinking. The label of “deist,” presumably self-applied by the bearers, begins to come into use in French about the middle of the sixteenth century;5 and that of “naturalist,” also presumably chosen by those who bore it, came into currency about the same time. Lechler traces the latter term in the Latin form as far back as the MS. of the Heptaplomeres of Bodin, dated 1588; but it was common before that date, as De Mornay in the preface to his De la Vérité de la religion chrétienne (1581) declaims “against the false naturalists (that is to say, professors of the knowledge of nature and natural things)”; and Montaigne in one of his later essays (1588) has the phrase “nous autres naturalistes.”6 Apart from these terms, those commonly used in French in the seventeenth century were bel esprit (sometimes, though not necessarily, connoting unbelief), esprit fort and libertin, the latter being used in the sense of a religious doubter by Corneille, Molière, and Bayle.7