Note 15 — Chapter I · INTRODUCTORY

One or two earlier writers,15 indeed, use “infidel” in the modern sense; and it was at times so used by early Elizabethans.16 But Foxe brackets together “Jews, Turks, or infidels”;17 and Hooper, writing in 1547, speaks, like Jewel, of the heathen as “the infidels.”18 Hooker (1553–1600), in his Fifth Sermon, § 9,19 uses the word somewhat indefinitely, but in his margin makes “Pagans and Infidels” equivalent to “Pagans and Turks.” So also, in the Ecclesiastical Polity,20 “infidels” means men of another religion. On the title-page of Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1574), on the other hand, we have “the infidelitie of atheists”; but so late as 1600 we find “J. H.” [John Healy], the translator of Augustine’s City of God, rendering infideles and homines infideles by “unbelievers.”21 “Infidelity,” in the modern sense, occurs in Sir T. Browne.22