Note 133 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT—(Continued)

Certain it is that alongside of his doctrine there persisted in England, apart from all printed utterance, a movement of deistic rationalism, of which the eighteenth century saw only the fuller development. Sir John Suckling (1609–1641), rewriting about 1637 his letter to the Earl of Dorset, An Account of Religion by Reason, tells how in a first sketch it “had like to have made me an Atheist at Court,” and how “the fear of Socinianism at this time renders every man that offers to give an account of religion by reason, suspected to have none at all”;133 but he also mentions that he knows it “still to be the opinion of good wits that the particular religion of Christians has added little to the general religion of the world.”134 Himself a young man of talent, he offers quasi-rational reconciliations of faith with reason which can have satisfied no real doubter, and can hardly have failed to introduce doubt into the minds of some of his readers.