Note 44 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Against the furious intolerance of the Puritan legislature some pleaded with new zeal for tolerance all round; arguing that certainty on articles of faith and points of religion was impossible—a doctrine promptly classed as a bad heresy.44 The plea that toleration would mean concord was met by the confident and not unfounded retort that the “sectaries” would themselves persecute if they could.45 But this could hardly have been true of all. Notable among the new parties were the Levellers, who insisted that the State should leave religion entirely alone, tolerating all creeds, including even atheism; and who put forward a new and striking ethic, grounding on “universal reason” the right of all men to the soil.46 In the strictly theological field the most striking innovation, apart from simple Unitarianism, is the denial of the eternity or even the existence of future torments—a position first taken up, as we have seen, either by the continental Socinians or by the unnamed English heretics of the Tudor period, who passed on their heresy to the time of Marlowe.47 In this connection the learned booklet48 entitled Of the Torments of Hell: the foundations and pillars thereof discover’d, search’d, shaken, and removed (1658) was rightly thought worth translating into French by d’Holbach over a century later.49 It is an argument on scriptural lines, denying that the conception of a place of eternal torment is either scriptural or credible; and pointing out that many had explained it in a “spiritual” sense.