Note 185 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Burnet, History of his Own Time, ed. 1838, p. 251. Burnet adds that Temple “was a corrupter of all that came near him.” The 1838 editor protests against the whole attack as the “most unfair and exaggerated” of Burnet’s portraits; and a writer in The Present State of the Republick of Letters, Jan., 1736, p. 26, carries the defence to claiming orthodoxy for Temple. But the whole cast of his thought is deistic. Cp. the Essay upon the Origin and Nature of Government, and ch. v of the Observations upon the United Provinces (Works, ed. 1770, i, 29, 36, 170–74). ↑