Note 11 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT—(Continued)

Private discussion, indeed, there must have been, if there be any truth in Bacon’s phrase that “atheists will ever be talking of that opinion, as if they ... would be glad to be strengthened by the consent of others”11—an argument which would make short work of the vast literature of apologetic theism—but even private talk had need be cautious, and there could be no publication of atheistic opinions. Printed rationalism could go no further than such a protest against superstition as Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), which, however, is a sufficiently remarkable expression of reason in an age in which a Bodin held angrily by the delusion.12 Elizabeth was herself substantially irreligious,13 and preferred to keep the clergy few in number and subordinate in influence;14 but her Ministers regarded the Church as part of the State system, and punished all open or at least aggressive heresy in the manner of the Inquisition. Yet the imported doctrine of the subjective character of hell and heaven,15 taken up by Marlowe, held its ground, and is denounced by Stubbes in his Anatomie of Abuses16 (1583); and other foreign philosophy of the same order found religious acceptance. A sect called the “Family of Love,” deriving from Holland (already “a country fruitfull of heretics”),17 went so far as to hold that “Christ doth not signify any one person, but a quality whereof many are partakers”—a doctrine which we have seen ascribed by Calvin to the libertins of Geneva a generation before;18 but it does not appear that they were persecuted.19 Some isolated propagandists, however, paid the last penalty. One Matthew Hamont or Hamond, a ploughwright, of Hetherset, was in 1579 tried by the Bishop and Consistory of Norwich “for that he denyed Christe,” and, being found guilty, was burned, after having had his ears cut off, “because he spake wordes of blasphemie against the Queen’s Maiistie and others of her Counsell.”20 The victim would thus seem to have been given to violence of speech; but the record of his negations, which suggest developments from the Anabaptist movement, is none the less notable. In Stow’s wording,21 they run:—