Note 27 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT—(Continued)

All this smoke—eight apologetic treatises in eighteen years—implies some fire; and the translator of La Primaudaye, one “T. B.,” declares in his dedication that there has been a general growth of atheism in England and on the continent, which he traces to “that Monster Machiavell.” Among English atheists of that school he ranks the dramatist Robert Greene, who had died in 1592; and it has been argued, not quite convincingly, that it was to Machiavelli that Greene had pointed, in his death-bed recantation A Groatsworth of Wit (1592), as the atheistic instructor of his friend Marlowe,27 who introduces “Machiavel” as cynical prologist to his Jew of Malta. Greene’s own “atheism” had been for the most part a matter of bluster and disorderly living; and we find his zealously orthodox friend Thomas Nashe, in his Strange News (1592), calling the Puritan zealot who used the pseudonym of Martin Marprelate “a mighty platformer of atheism”; even as his own and Greene’s enemy, Gabriel Harvey, called Nashe an atheist.28 But Nashe in his Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem (1592), though he speaks characteristically of the “atheistical Julian,” discusses contemporary atheism in a fashion descriptive of an actual growth of the opinion, concerning which he alleges that there is no “sect now in England so scattered [i.e., so widely spread] as atheisme.” The “outward atheist,” he declares, “establishes reason as his God”; and he offers some sufficiently primitive arguments by way of confutation. “They follow the Pironicks [i.e., Pyrrhonists], whose position and opinion it is that there is no hell or misery but opinion. Impudently they persist in it, that the late discovered Indians show antiquities thousands before Adam.” For the rest, they not only reject the miracles of Moses as mere natural expedients misrepresented, but treat the whole Bible as “some late writers of our side” treat the Apocrypha. And Nashe complains feelingly that while the atheists “are special men of wit,” and that “the Romish seminaries have not allured unto them so many good wits as atheism,” the preachers who reply to them are men of dull understanding, the product of a system under which preferment is given to graduates on the score not of capacity but of mere gravity and solemnity. “It is the superabundance of wit,” declares Nashe, “that makes atheists: will you then hope to beat them down with fusty brown-bread dorbellism?”29 There had arisen, in short, a ferment of rationalism which was henceforth never to disappear from English life.