Note 104 — Chapter XII · THE REFORMATION AND FREETHOUGHT

The Elizabethan archbishops and the Puritans were equally intolerant; and the idea of free inquiry was undreamt of. That there had been much private discussion in clerical circles, however, is plain from the 13th and 18th of the Thirty-nine Articles (1562), which repudiate natural morality and hold “accursed” those who say that men can be saved under any creed.104 This fulmination would not have occurred had the heresy not been pressing; but the “curse” would thenceforth set the key of clerical and public utterance. The Reformation, in fact, speedily over-clouded with fanaticism what new light of freethought had been glimmering before; turning into Bibliolaters those who had rationally doubted some of the Catholic mysteries, and forcing back, either into silence or, by reaction, into Catholic bigotry, those more refined spirits who, like Sir Thomas More, had before been really in advance of their age intellectually and morally, and desired a transmutation of the old system rather than its overthrow. Nothing so nearly rational as the Utopia (1515–16) appeared again in English literature for a century; it is indeed, in some respects, a lead to social science in our own day. More, with all his spontaneous turn for pietism, had evidently drunk in his youth or prime105 at some freethinking source, for his book recognizes the existence of unbelievers in deity and immortality; and though he pronounces them unfit for political power, as did Milton, Locke, and Voltaire long after him, he stipulates that they be tolerated.106 Broadly speaking, the book is simply deistic. “From a world,” says a popular historian, clerically trained—“from a world where fifteen hundred years of Christian teaching had produced social injustice, religious intolerance, and political tyranny, the humorist philosopher turns to a ‘Nowhere’ in which the efforts of mere natural human virtue realized those ends of security, equality, brotherhood, and freedom, for which the very institution of society seems to have been framed.”107 In his own case, however, we see the Nemesis of the sway of feeling over judgment, for, beginning by keeping his prejudice above the reason of whose teaching he is conscious, he ends by becoming a blind religious polemist and a bitter persecutor.