Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

§ 1

§ 2

See the details in Dynamics of Religion, ch. vii. I am compelled to call attention to the uncritical verdict given on this matter by the late Sir Leslie Stephen, who asserts (English Thought, i, 206) that Bentley convicts Collins of “unworthy shuffling” in respect of his claim that freethinking had “banished the devil.” Bentley affirmed that this had been the work, not of the freethinkers, but of “the Royal Society, the Boyles and the Newtons”; and Sir Leslie comments that “nothing could be more true.” Nothing could be more untrue. As we have seen (above p. 82), Boyle was a convinced believer in demonology; and Newton did absolutely nothing to disperse it. Glanvill, a Royal Society man, had been a vehement supporter of the belief in witchcraft; and the Society as such never meddled with the matter. As to Collins’s claim for the virtue of freethinking, Sir Leslie strangely misses the point that Collins meant by the word not unbelief, but free inquiry. He could not have meant to say that Holland was full of deists. In Collins’s sense of the word, the Royal Society’s work in general was freethinking work.

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§ 4

The line of the Essay which now reads:

The soul, uneasy and confined from home,

originally ran “at home”; but, says Warton, “this expression seeming to exclude a future existence, as, to speak the plain truth, it was intended to do, it was altered”—presumably by Warburton. (Warton’s Essay on Pope, 4th ed. ii, 67.) The Spinozistic or pantheistic character of much of the Essay on Man was noted by various critics, in particular by the French Academician De Crousaz (Examen de l’Essay de M. Pope sur l’Homme, 1748, p. 90, etc.) After promising to justify the ways of God to man, writes Crousaz (p. 33), Pope turns round and justifies man, leaving God charged with all men’s sins. When the younger Racine, writing to the Chevalier Ramsay in 1742, charged the Essay with irreligion, Pope wrote him repudiating alike Spinoza and Leibnitz. (Warton, ii, 121.) In 1755, however, the Abbé Gauchat renewed the attack, declaring that the Essay was “neither Christian nor philosophic” (Lettres Critiques, i, 346). Warburton at first charged the poem with rank atheism, and afterwards vindicated it in his manner. (Warton, i, 125.) But in Germany, in the youth of Goethe, we find the Essay regarded by Christians as an unequivocally deistic poem. (Goethe’s Wahrheit und Dichtung, Th. II, B. vii: Werke, ed. 1866, xi, 263.) And by a modern Christian polemist the Essay is described as “the best positive result of English deism in the eighteenth century” (Gostwick, German Culture and Christianity, 1882, p. 31).

It was replied to, however, with the Inquiry of Collins, as late as 1760, by a Christian controversialist who admits Strutt to have been “a gentleman of an excellent genius for philosophical inquiries, and a close reasoner from those principles he laid down” (An Essay towards demonstrating the Immateriality and Free Agency of the Soul, 1760, p. 94). The Rev. Mr. Monk, in his Life of Bentley (2nd ed. 1833, ii, 391), absurdly speaks of Strutt as having “dressed up the arguments of Lord Herbert of Cherbury and other enemies of religion in a new shape.” The reverend gentleman cannot have paid any attention to the arguments either of Herbert or of Strutt, which have no more in common than those of Toland and Hume. Strutt’s book was much too closely reasoned to be popular. His name was for the time, however, associated with a famous scandal at Cambridge University. When in 1739 proceedings were taken against what was described as an “atheistical society” there, Strutt was spoken of as its “oracle.” One of the members was Paul Whitehead, satirized by Pope. Another, Tinkler Ducket, a Fellow of Caius College, in holy orders, was prosecuted in the Vice-Chancellor’s Court on the twofold charge of proselytizing for atheism and of attempting to seduce a “female.” In his defence he explained that he had been for some time “once more a believer in God and Christianity”; but was nevertheless expelled. See Monk’s Life of Bentley, as cited, ii, 391 sq.

§ 5

See the Minute Philosopher, Dial. vii, § 29. Similarly Leland, in the Supplement (1756) to his View of the Deistical Writers (afterwards incorporated as Letter VI), speaks of Spinoza as “the most applauded doctor of modern atheism.” Sir Leslie Stephen’s opinion (English Thought, i, 33), that “few of the deists, probably,” read Spinoza, seems to be thus outweighed. If they did not in great numbers read the Ethica, they certainly read the Tractatus and the letters. As early as 1677 we find Stillingfleet, in the preface to his Letter to a Deist, speaking of Spinoza as “a late author [who] I hear is mightily in vogue among many who cry up anything on the atheistical side, though never so weak and trifling”; and further of a mooted proposal to translate the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus into English. A translation was published in 1689. In 1685 the Scotch Professor George Sinclar, in the “Preface to the Reader” of his Satan’s Invisible World Discovered, writes that “There are a monstrous rabble of men, who following the Hobbesian and Spinosian principles, slight religion and undervalue the Scripture,” etc. In Gildon’s work of recantation, The Deist’s Manual (1705, p. 192), the indifferent Pleonexus, who “took more delight in bags than in books,” and demurs to accumulating the latter, avows that he has a few, among them being Hobbes and Spinoza. Evelyn, writing about 1680–90, speaks of “that infamous book, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,” as “a wretched obstacle to the searchers of holy truth” (The History of Religion, 1850, p. xxvii). Cp. Halyburton, Natural Religion Insufficient, Edinburgh, 1714, p. 31, as to the “great vogue among our young Gentry and Students” of Hobbes, Spinoza, and others.

§ 6

At the same time Peter Annet (1693–1769), a schoolmaster and inventor of a system of shorthand, widened the propaganda in other directions. He seems to have been the first freethought lecturer, for his first pamphlet, Judging for Ourselves: or, Freethinking the Great Duty of Religion, “By P. A., Minister of the Gospel” (1739), consists of “Two Lectures delivered at Plaisterers’ Hall.” Through all his propaganda, of which the more notable portions are his Supernaturals Examined and a series of controversies on the Resurrection, there runs a train of shrewd critical sense, put forth in crisp and vivacious English, which made him a popular force. What he lacked was the due gravity and dignity for the handling of such a theme as the reversal of a nation’s faith. Like Woolston, he is facetious where he should be serious; entertaining where he had need be impressive; provocative where he should have aimed at persuasion. We cannot say what types he influenced, or how deep his influence went: it appears only that he swayed many whose suffrages weighed little. At length, when in 1761 he issued nine numbers of The Free Inquirer, in which he attacked the Pentateuch with much insight and cogency, but with a certain want of rational balance (shown also in his treatise, Social Bliss Considered, 1749), he was made a victim of the then strengthened spirit of persecution, being sentenced to stand thrice in the pillory with the label “For Blasphemy,” and to suffer a year’s hard labour. Nevertheless, he was popular enough to start a school on his release.

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Of the work done by English deism thus far, it may suffice to say that within two generations it had more profoundly altered the intellectual temper of educated men than any religious movement had ever done in the same time. This appears above all from the literature produced by orthodoxy in reply, where the mere defensive resort to reasoning, apart from the accounts of current rationalism, outgoes anything in the previous history of literature. The whole evolution is a remarkable instance of the effect on intellectual progress of the diversion of a nation’s general energy from war and intense political faction to mental activities. A similar diversion had taken place at the Restoration, to be followed by a return to civil and foreign strife, which arrested it. It was in the closing years of Anne, and in the steady régime of Walpole under the first two Georges, that the ferment worked at its height. Collins’s Discourse of Freethinking was synchronous with the Peace of Utrecht: the era of war re-opened in 1739, much against the will of Walpole, who resigned in 1742. Home and foreign wars thereafter became common; and in 1751 Clive opened the period of imperialistic expansion, determining national developments on that main line, concurrently with that of the new industry. Could the discussion have been continuous—could England have remained what she was in the main deistic period, a workshop of investigation and a battleground of ideas—all European development might have been indefinitely hastened. But the deists, for the most part educated men appealing to educated men or to the shrewdest readers among the artisans, had not learned to reckon with the greater social forces; and beyond a certain point they could not affect England’s intellectual destinies.

How it affected the general intelligence for good may be partly gathered from a comparison of the common English political attitudes towards Ireland in the first and the last quarters of the century. Under William was wrought the arrest of Irish industry and commerce, begun after the Restoration; under Anne were enacted the penal laws against Catholics—as signal an example of religious iniquity as can well be found in all history. By the middle of the century these laws had become anachronisms for all save bigots.

“The wave of freethought that was spreading over Europe and permeating its literature had not failed to affect Ireland.... An atmosphere of skepticism was fatal to the Penal Code. What element of religious persecution there had been in it had long ceased to be operative” (R. Dunlop, in Camb. Mod. Hist. vi, 489). Macaulay’s testimony on this head is noteworthy: “The philosophy of the eighteenth century had purified English Whiggism of the deep taint of intolerance which had been contracted during a long and close alliance with the Puritanism of the eighteenth century” (History, ch. xvii, end).

On the other hand, the list of “the despised deists,” who “make but a poor show when compared with this imposing list,” runs thus: Herbert, Hobbes, Blount, Halley (well known to be an unbeliever, though he did not write on the subject), Toland, Shaftesbury, Collins, Mandeville, Tindal, Chubb, Morgan, Dodwell, Middleton, Hume, Bolingbroke, Gibbon. It would be interesting to know on what principles this group is excluded from the intellectual veneration so liberally allotted to the other. It is nothing to the purpose that Shaftesbury and Mandeville wrote “covertly” and “indirectly.” The law and the conditions compelled them to do so. It is still more beside the case to say that “Hume can scarcely be reckoned among the deists. He is already [when?] emerging into a higher atmosphere.” Hume wrote explicitly as a deist; and only in his posthumous Dialogues did he pass on to the atheistic position. At no time, moreover, was he “on the side of Christianity.” On the other hand, Locke and Clarke and Pope were clearly “emerging into a higher atmosphere” than Christianity, since Locke is commonly reckoned by the culture-historians, and even by Sir Leslie Stephen, as making for deism; Pope was the pupil of Bolingbroke, and wrote as such; and Clarke was shunned as an Arian. Newton, again, was a Unitarian, and Leibnitz accused his system of making for irreligion. It would be hard to show, further, who are the “forgotten victims” of Balguy and the rest. Balguy criticized Shaftesbury, whose name is still a good deal better known than Balguy’s. The main line of deists is pretty well remembered. And if we pair off Hume against Berkeley, Hobbes against Locke, Middleton (as historical critic) against Bentley, Shaftesbury against Addison, Mandeville against Swift, Bolingbroke against Butler, Collins against Clarke, Herbert against Lyttelton, Tindal against Waterland, and Gibbon against—shall we say?—Warburton, it hardly appears that the overplus of merit goes as Sir Leslie Stephen alleges, even if we leave Newton, with brain unhinged, standing against Halley. The statement that the deists “are but a ragged regiment,” and that “in speculative ability most of them were children by the side of their ablest antagonists,” is simply unintelligible unless the names of all the ablest deists are left out. Locke, be it remembered, did not live to meet the main deistic attack on Christianity; and Sir Leslie admits the weakness of his pro-Christian performance.

The bases of Sir Leslie Stephen’s verdict may be tested by his remarks that “Collins, a respectable country gentleman, showed considerable acuteness; Toland, a poor denizen of Grub Street, and Tindal, a Fellow of All Souls, made a certain display of learning, and succeeded in planting some effective arguments.” Elsewhere (pp. 217–227) Sir Leslie admits that Collins had the best of the argument against his “venerable” opponents on Prophecy; and Huxley credits him with equal success in the argument with Clarke. The work of Collins on Human Liberty, praised by a long series of students and experts, and entirely above the capacity of Bentley, is philosophically as durable as any portion of Locke, who made Collins his chosen friend and trustee, and who did not live to meet his anti-Biblical arguments. Tindal, who had also won Locke’s high praise by his political essays, profoundly influenced such a student as Laukhard (Lechler, p. 451). And Toland, whom even Mr. A. S. Farrar (Bampton Lectures, p. 179) admitted to possess “much originality and learning,” has struck Lange as a notable thinker, though he was a poor man. Leibnitz, who answered him, praises his acuteness, as does Pusey, who further admits the uncommon ability of Morgan and Collins (Histor. Enq. into German Rationalism, 1828, p. 126). It is time that the conventional English standards in these matters should be abandoned by modern rationalists.

The unfortunate effect of Sir Leslie Stephen’s dictum is seen in the assertion of Prof. Höffding (Hist. of Modern Philos. Eng. tr. 1900, i, 403), that Sir Leslie “rightly remarks of the English deists that they were altogether inferior to their adversaries”; and further (p. 405), that by the later deists, “Collins, Tindal, Morgan, etc., the dispute as to miracles was carried on with great violence.” It is here evident that Prof. Höffding has not read the writers he depreciates, for those he names were far from being violent. Had he known the literature, he would have named Woolston, not Collins and Tindal and Morgan. He is merely echoing, without inquiring for himself, a judgment which he regards as authoritative. In the same passage he declares that “only one of all the men formerly known as the ‘English deists’ [Toland] has rendered contributions of any value to the history of thought.” If this is said with a knowledge of the works of Collins, Shaftesbury, and Mandeville, it argues a sad lack of critical judgment. But there is reason to infer here also that Prof. Höffding writes in ignorance of the literature he discusses.

§ 8

Playfair (as cited, p. 39; Brewster, Memoirs of Newton, i, 348, note) puts forward the theory that the progress of the higher science in France was due to the “small pensions and great honours” bestowed on scientific men by the Academy of Sciences. The lack of such an institution in England he traces to “mercantile prejudices,” without explaining these in their turn. They are to be understood as the consequences of the special expansion of commercial and industrial life in England in the eighteenth century, when France, on the contrary, losing India and North America, had her energies in a proportional degree thrown back on the life of the mind. French freethought, it will be observed, expanded with science, while in England there occurred, not a spontaneous reversion to orthodoxy any more than a surrender of the doctrine of Newton, but a general turning of attention in other directions. It is significant that the most important names in the literature of deism after 1740 are those of Hume and Smith, late products of the intellectual atmosphere of pre-industrial Scotland; of Bolingbroke, an aristocrat of the deistic generation, long an exile in France, who left his works to be published after his death; and of Gibbon, who also breathed the intellectual air of France.

§ 9

The passage is worth comparing with Hume: “Hence we see what little credit ought to be paid to facts said to be done out of the ordinary course of nature. These miracles [cutting the whetstone, etc., related by Cicero, De Div. i, c. xvii] are well attested. They were recorded in the annals of a great people, believed by many learned and otherwise sagacious persons, and received as religious truths by the populace; but the testimonies of ancient records, the credulity of some learned men, and the implicit faith of the vulgar, can never prove that to have been, which is impossible in the nature of things ever to be.” M. Tullius Cicero Of the Nature of the Gods ... with Notes, London, 1741, p. 85. It does not appear to have been noted that in regard to this as to another of his best-known theses, Hume develops a proposition laid down before him.

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As early as 1696 the Scottish General Assembly, with theological candour, passed an Act “against the Atheistical opinions of the Deists.” (Abridgment of the Acts of the General Assemblies, 1721, pp. 16, 76; Cunningham, Hist. of the Ch. of Scotland, ii, 313.) The opinions specified were “The denying of all revealed religion, the grand mysteries of the gospels ... the resurrection of the dead, and, in a word, the certainty and authority of Scripture revelation; as also, their asserting that there must be a mathematical evidence for each purpose ... and that Natural Light is sufficient to Salvation.” All this is deism, pure and simple. But Sir W. Anstruther (a judge in the Court of Session), in the preface to his Essays Moral and Divine, Edinburgh, 1710, speaks of “the spreading contagion of atheism, which threatens the ruin of our excellent and holy religion.” To atheism he devotes two essays; and neither in these nor in one on the Incarnation does he discuss deism, the arguments he handles being really atheistic. Scottish freethought would seem thus to have gone further than English at the period in question.

As to the prevalence of deism, however, see the posthumous work of Prof. Halyburton, of St. Andrews, Natural Religion Insufficient (Edinburgh, 1714), Epist. of Recom.; pref. pp. 25, 27, and pp. 8, 15, 19, 23, 31, etc. Halyburton’s treatise is interesting as showing the psychological state of argumentative Scotch orthodoxy in his day. He professes to repel the deistical argument throughout by reason; he follows Huet, and concurs with Berkeley in contending that mathematics involves anti-rational assumptions; and he takes entire satisfaction in the execution of the lad Aikenhead for deism. Yet in a second treatise, An Essay Concerning the Nature of Faith, he contends, as against Locke and the “Rationalists,” that the power to believe in the word of God is “expressly deny’d to man in his natural estate,” and is a supernatural gift. Thus the Calvinists, like Baxter, were at bottom absolutely insincere in their profession to act upon reason, while insolently charging insincerity on others.

§ 11

It cannot be doubted that the spectacle of religious wickedness presented by the operation of the odious penal laws against Catholics, and the temper of the Protestant Ascendancy party in religious matters, had bred rational skepticism in Ireland in the usual way. Molesworth stands out in Irish history as a founder of a new and saner patriotism; and his doctrines would specially appeal to men of a secular and critical way of thinking. Heretical bishops imply heretical laymen. But the environment was unpropitious to dispassionate thinking. The very relaxation of the Penal Code favoured a reversion to “moderate” orthodoxy; and the new political strifes of the last quarter of the century, destined as they were to be reopened in the next, determined the course of Irish culture in another way.

§ 12

Thus Skelton writes in 1751 that “our modern apologists for Christianity often defend it on deistical principles” (Deism Revealed, pref. p. xii. Cp. vol. ii, pp. 234, 237). See also Sir Leslie Stephen as cited above, p. 149, note; and Gostwick, German Culture and Christianity, 1882, pp. 33–36.

An interesting instance of liberalizing orthodoxy is furnished by the Rev. Arthur Ashley Sykes, who contributed many volumes to the general deistic discussion, some of them anonymously. In the preface to his Essay on the Truth of the Christian Religion (1732; 2nd ed. enlarged, 1755) Sykes remarks that “since ... systematical opinions have been received and embraced in such a manner that it has not been safe to contradict them, the burden of vindicating Christianity has been very much increased. Its friends have been much embarrassed through fear of speaking against local truths; and its adversaries have so successfully attacked those weaknesses that Christianity itself has been deemed indefensible, when in reality the follies of Christians alone have been so.” Were Christians left to the simple doctrines of Christ and the Apostles, he contends, Infidelity could make no converts. And at the close of the book he writes: “Would to God that Christians would be content with the plainness and simplicity of the gospel.... That they would not vend under the name of evangelical truth the absurd and contradictory schemes of ignorant or wicked men! That they would part with that load of rubbish which makes thinking men almost sink under the weight, and gives too great a handle for Infidelity!” Such writing could not give satisfaction to the ecclesiastical authorities; and as little could Sykes’s remarkable admission (The Principles and Connection of Natural and Revealed Religion, 1740, p. 242): “When the advantages of revelation are to be specified, I cannot conceive that it should be maintained as necessary to fix a rule of morality. For what one principle of morality is there which the heathen moralists had not asserted or maintained? Before ever any revelation is offered to mankind they are supposed to be so well acquainted with moral truths as from them to judge of the truth of the revelation itself.” Again he writes:—

“Nor can revelation be necessary to ascertain religion. For religion consisting in nothing but doing our duties from a sense of the being of God, revelation is not necessary to this end, unless it be said that we cannot know that there is a God, and what our duties are, without it. Reason will teach us that there is a God ... that we are to be just and charitable to our neighbours; that we are to be temperate and sober in ourselves” (id. p. 244).

This is simple Shaftesburyan deism, and all that the apologist goes on to contend for is that revelation “contains motives and reasons for the practice of what is right, more and different from what natural reason without this help can suggest.” He seems, however, to have believed in miracles, though an anonymous Essay on the Nature, Design, and Origin of Sacrifices (1748) which is ascribed to him quietly undermines the whole evangelical doctrine. Throughout, he is remarkable for the amenity of his tone towards “infidels.”

Balguy, a man of less ability, is notably latitudinarian in his theology. In the very act of criticizing the deists, he complains of Locke’s arbitrariness in deriving morality from the will of God. Religion, he argues, is so derived, but morality is inherent in the whole nature of things, and is the same for God and men. This position, common to the school of Clarke, is at bottom that of Shaftesbury and the Naturalists. All that Balguy says for religion is that a doctrine of rewards and punishments is necessary to stimulate the average moral sense; and that the Christian story of the condescension of Omnipotence in coming to earth and suffering misery for man’s sake ought to overwhelm the imagination! (See A Letter to a Deist, 2nd ed. 1730, pp. 5, 14, 15, 31; Foundation of Moral Goodness, pt. ii, 1729, p. 41 sq.)

§ 13

His motive to write for posthumous publication, however, seems rather to have been the venting of his tumultuous feelings than any philosophic purpose. An overweening deist, he is yet at much pains to disparage the à priori argument for deism, bestowing some of his most violent epithets on Dr. Samuel Clarke, who seems to have exasperated him in politics. But his castigation of “divines” is tolerably impartial on that side; and he is largely concerned to deprive them of grounds for their functions, though he finally insists that churches are necessary for purposes of public moral teaching. His own teachings represent an effort to rationalize deism. The God whom he affirms is to be conceived or described only as omnipotent and omniscient (or all-wise), not as good or benevolent any more than as vindictive. Thus he had assimilated part of the Spinozistic and the atheistic case against anthropomorphism, while still using anthropomorphic language on the score that “we must speak of God after the manner of men.” Beyond this point he compromises to the extent of denying special while admitting collective or social providences; though he is positive in his denial of the actuality or the moral need of a future state. As to morals he takes the ordinary deistic line, putting the innate “law of nature” as the sufficient and only revelation by the deity to his creatures. On the basis of that inner testimony he rejects the Old Testament as utterly unworthy of deity, but endorses the universal morality found in the gospels, while rejecting their theology. It was very much the deism of Voltaire, save that it made more concessions to anti-theistic logic.

In his lifetime, however, Bolingbroke had been extremely careful to avoid compromising himself. Mr. Arthur Hassall, in his generally excellent monograph on Bolingbroke (Statesmen Series, 1889, p. 226), writes, in answer to the attack of Johnson, that “Bolingbroke, during his lifetime, had never scrupled to publish criticisms, remarkable for their freedom, on religious subjects.” I cannot gather to what he refers; and Mr. Walter Sichel, in his copious biography (2 vols. 1901–1902), indicates no such publications. The Letters on the Study and Use of History, which contain (Lett. iii, sect. 2) a skeptical discussion of the Pentateuch as history, though written in 1735–36, were only posthumously published, in 1752. The Examen Important de Milord Bolingbroke, produced by Voltaire in 1767, but dated 1736, is Voltaire’s own work, based on Bolingbroke. In his letter to Swift of September 12, 1724 (Swift’s Works, Scott’s ed. 1824, xvi, 448–49), Bolingbroke angrily repudiates the title of esprit fort, declaring, in the very temper in which pious posterity has aspersed himself, that “such are the pests of society, because they endeavour to loosen the bands of it.... I therefore not only disown, but I detest, this character.” In this letter he even affects to believe in “the truth of the divine revelation of Christianity.” He began to write his essays, it is true, before his withdrawal to France in 1735, but with no intention of speedily publishing them. In his Letter to Mr. Pope (published with the Letter to Wyndham, 1753), p. 481, he writes: “I have been a martyr of faction in politics, and have no vocation to be so in philosophy.” Cp. pp. 485–86. It is thus a complete blunder on the part of Bagehot to say (Literary Studies, Hutton’s ed. iii, 137) that Butler’s Analogy, published in 1736, was “designed as a confutation of Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke.” It is even said (Warton, Essay on Pope, 4th ed. ii, 294–95) that Pope did not know Bolingbroke’s real opinions; but Pope’s untruthfulness was such as to discredit such a statement. Cp. Bolingbroke’s Letter as cited, p. 521, and his Philosophical Works, 8vo-ed. 1754, ii, 405. It is noteworthy that a volume of controversial sermons entitled A Preservative against unsettled notions and Want of Principles in Religion, so entirely stupid in its apologetics as to be at times positively entertaining, was published in 1715 by Joseph Trapp, M.A., “Chaplain to the Right Honble. The Lord Viscount Bolingbroke.”

In seeking to estimate Bolingbroke’s posthumous influence we have to remember that after the publication of his works the orthodox members of his own party, who otherwise would have forgiven him all his vices and insincerities, have held him up to hatred. Scott, for instance, founding on Bolingbroke’s own dishonest denunciation of freethinkers as men seeking to loosen the bands of society, pronounced his arrangement for the posthumous issue of his works “an act of wickedness more purely diabolical than any hitherto upon record in the history of any age or nation” (Note to Bolingbroke’s letter above cited in Swift’s Works, xvi, 450). It would be an error, on the other hand, to class him among either the great sociologists or the great philosophers. Mr. Sichel undertakes to show (vol. ii, ch. x) that Bolingbroke had stimulated Gibbon to a considerable extent in his treatment of early Christianity. This is in itself quite probable, and some of the parallels cited are noteworthy; but Mr. Sichel, who always writes as a panegyrist, makes no attempt to trace the common French sources for both. He does show that Voltaire manipulated Bolingbroke’s opinions in reproducing them. But he does not critically recognize the incoherence of Bolingbroke’s eloquent treatises. Mr. Hassall’s summary is nearer the truth; but that in turn does not note how well fitted was Bolingbroke’s swift and graceful declamation to do its work with the general public, which (if it accepted him at all) would make small account of self-contradiction.

§ 14

§ 15

On the other hand, apart from the revival of popular religion under Whitefield and Wesley, which won multitudes of the people whom no higher culture could reach, there was no recovery of educated belief upon intellectual lines; though there was a steady detachment of energy to the new activities of conquest and commerce which mark the second half of the eighteenth century in England. On this state of things supervened the massive performance of the greatest historical writer England had yet produced. Gibbon, educated not by Oxford but by the recent scholarly literature of France, had as a mere boy seen, on reading Bossuet, the theoretic weakness of Protestantism, and had straightway professed Romanism. Shaken as to that by a skilled Swiss Protestant, he speedily became a rationalist pure and simple, with as little of the dregs of deism in him as any writer of his age; and his great work begins, or rather signalizes (since Hume and Robertson preceded him), a new era of historical writing, not merely by its sociological treatment of the rise of Christianity, but by its absolutely anti-theological handling of all things.

Whether or not the elder Pitt was a deist, the younger gave very plain signs of being at least no more. Gladstone (Studies subsidiary to the Works of Bishop Butler, ed. 1896, pp. 30–33) has sought to discredit the recorded testimony of Wilberforce (Life of Wilberforce, 1838, i, 98) that Pitt told him “Bishop Butler’s work raised in his mind more doubts than it had answered.” Gladstone points to another passage in Wilberforce’s diary which states that Pitt “commended Butler’s Analogy” (Life, i, 90). But the context shows that Pitt had commended the book for the express purpose of turning Wilberforce’s mind from its evangelical bias. Wilberforce was never a deist, and the purpose accordingly could not have been to make him orthodox. The two testimonies are thus perfectly consistent; especially when we note the further statement credibly reported to have been made by Wilberforce (Life, i, 95), that Pitt later “tried to reason me out of my convictions.” We have yet further the emphatic declaration of Pitt’s niece, Lady Hester Stanhope, that he “never went to church in his life ... never even talked about religion” (Memoirs of Lady Hester Stanhope, 1845, iii, 166–67). This was said in emphatic denial of the genuineness of the unctuous death-bed speech put in Pitt’s mouth by Gifford. Lady Hester’s high veracity is accredited by her physician (Travels of Lady Hester Stanhope, 1846, i, pref. p. 11). No such character can be given to the conventional English biography of the period.

We have further to note the circumstantial account by Wilberforce in his letter to the Rev. S. Gisborne immediately after Pitt’s death (Correspondence, 1840, ii, 69–70), giving the details he had had in confidence from the Bishop of Lincoln. They are to the effect that, after some demur on Pitt’s part (“that he was not worthy to offer up any prayer, or was too weak,”) the Bishop prayed with him once. Wilberforce adds his “fear” that “no further religious intercourse took place before or after, and I own I thought what was inserted in the papers impossible to be true.”

§ 16

An atheist-laugh’s a poor exchange

exhibit a sufficiently commonplace conception of Omnipotence; and there is no sign that the poet ever did any hard thinking on the problem. But, emotionalist of genius as he was, his influence as a satirist and mitigator of the crudities and barbarities of Scots religion has been incalculably great, and underlies all popular culture progress in Scotland since his time. Constantly aspersed in his own day and world as an “infidel,” he yet from the first conquered the devotion of the mass of his countrymen; though he would have been more potent for intellectual liberation if he had been by them more intelligently read. Few of them now, probably, realize that their adored poet was either a deist or a Unitarian—presumably the former.

§ 17

That freethought at the end of the century was rather driven inwards and downwards than expelled is made clear by the multitude of fresh treatises on Christian evidences. Growing numerous after 1790, they positively swarm for a generation after Paley (1794). Cp. Essays on the Evidence and Influence of Christianity, Bath, 1790, pref.; Andrew Fuller, The Gospel its own Witness, 1799, pref. and concluding address to deists; Watson’s sermon of 1795, in Two Apologies, ed. 1806, p. 399; Priestley’s Memoirs (written in 1795), 1806, pp. 127–28; Wilberforce’s Practical View, 1797, passim (e.g., pp. 366–69, 8th ed. 1841); Rev. D. Simpson, A Plea for Religion ... addressed to the Disciples of Thomas Paine, 1797. The latter writer states (2nd ed. p. 126) that “infidelity is at this moment running like wildfire among the common people”; and Fuller (2nd ed. p. 128) speaks of the Monthly Magazine as “pretty evidently devoted to the cause of infidelity.” A pamphlet on The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in this Metropolis (London, 1800), by W. Hamilton Reid, describes the period as the first “in which the doctrines of infidelity have been extensively circulated among the lower orders”; and a Summary of Christian Evidences, by Bishop Porteous (1800; 16th ed. 1826), affirms, in agreement with the 1799 Report of the Lords’ Committee on Treasonable Societies, that “new compendiums of infidelity, and new libels on Christianity, are dispersed continually, with indefatigable industry, through every part of the kingdom, and every class of the community.” Freethought, in short, was becoming democratized.

Mr. Benn (Hist. of Eng. Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century, i, 217) remarks that Paine’s New Testament criticisms are “such as at all times would naturally occur to a reader of independent mind and strong common sense.” If so, these had been up to Paine’s time, and remained long afterwards, rare characteristics. And there is some mistake about Mr. Benn’s criticism that “the repeated charges of fraud and imposture brought against the Apostles and Evangelists ... jar painfully on a modern ear. But they are largely due to the mistaken notion, shared by Paine with his orthodox contemporaries, that the Gospels and Acts were written by contemporaries and eye-witnesses of the events related.” Many times over, Paine argues that the documents could not have been so written. E.g. in Conway’s ed. of Works, pp. 157, 158, 159, 160, 164, 167, 168, etc. The reiterated proposition is “that the writers cannot have been eye-witnesses and ear-witnesses of what they relate; ... and consequently that the books have not been written by the persons called apostles” (p. 168). And there is some exaggeration even in Mr. Benn’s remark that, “strangely enough, he accepts the Book of Daniel as genuine.” Paine (ed. p. 144) merely puts a balance of probability in favour of the genuineness. It may be sometimes—it is certainly not always—true that Paine “cannot distinguish between legendary or [? and] mythical narratives” (Benn, p. 216); but it is to be feared that the disability subsists to-day in more scholarly quarters.

Despite his deadly directness, Paine, in virtue of his strong sincerity, probably jars much less on the modern ear than he did on that of his own, which was so ready to make felony of any opinion hostile to reigning prejudices. But if it be otherwise, it is to be feared that no less offence will be given by Mr. Benn’s own account of the Hexateuch as “the records kept by a lying and bloodthirsty priesthood”; even if that estimate be followed by the very challengeable admission that “priesthoods are generally distinguished for their superior humanity” (Benn, p. 350, and note).

Henceforth there is a vital difference in the fortunes of freethought and religion alike. Always in the past the institutional strength of religion and the social weakness of freethought had lain in the credulity of the ignorant mass, which had turned to naught an infinity of rational effort. After the French Revolution, when over a large area the critical spirit began simultaneously to play on faith and life, politics and religion, its doubled activity gave it a new breadth of outlook as of energy, and the slow enlightenment of the mass opened up a new promise for the ultimate reign of reason.