Note 78 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT—(Continued)

It is natural to suspect that the author of such lines was less orthodox than his own day had reputed him; and yet the whole of his work shows him much pre-occupied with religion, though perhaps in a deistic spirit. But Brooke’s introspective and undramatic poetry is an exception: the prevailing colour of the whole drama of the Shakespearean period is pre-Puritan and semi-pagan; and the theological spirit of the next generation, intensified by King James, was recognized by cultured foreigners as a change for the worse.78 The spirit of free learning for the time was gone, expelled by theological rancours; and when Selden ventured in his History of Tythes (1618) to apply the method of dispassionate historical criticism to ecclesiastical matters he was compelled to make a formal retractation.79 Early Protestants had attacked, as a papal superstition, the doctrine that tithes were levied jure divino: Protestants had now come to regard as atheistic the hint that tithes were levied otherwise.80