Note 1 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT

The negative bearing of the Reformation on freethought is made clear by the historic fact that the new currents of thought which broadly mark the beginning of the “modern spirit” arose in its despite, and derive originally from outside its sphere. It is to Italy, where the political and social conditions thus far tended to frustrate the Inquisition, that we trace the rise alike of modern deism, modern Unitarianism, modern pantheism, modern physics, and the tendency to rational atheism. The deistic way of thinking, of course, prevailed long before it got that name; and besides the vogue of Averroïsm we have noted the virtual deism of More’s Utopia (1516). The first explicit mention of deism noted by Bayle, however, is in the epistle dedicatory to the second and expanded edition of the Instruction Chrétienne of the Swiss Protestant Viret (1563), where professed deists are spoken of as a new species bearing a new name. On the admission of Viret, who was the friend and bitter disciple of Calvin, they rejected all revealed religion, but called themselves deists by way of repudiating atheism; some keeping a belief in immortality, some rejecting it. In the theological manner he goes on to call them all execrable atheists, and to say that he has added to his treatise on their account an exposition of natural religion grounded on the “Book of Nature”; stultifying himself by going on to say that he has also dealt with the professed atheists.1 Of the deists he admits that among them were men of the highest repute for science and learning. Thus within ten years of the burning of Servetus we find privately avowed deism and atheism in the area of French-speaking Protestantism.