Note 57 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Between the advance in speculation forced on by the disputes themselves, and the usual revolt against the theological spirit after a long and ferocious display of it, there spread even under the Commonwealth a new temper of secularity. On the one hand, the temperamental distaste for theology, antinomian or other, took form in the private associations for scientific research which were the antecedents of the Royal Society. On the other hand, the spirit of religious doubt spread widely in the middle and upper classes; and between the dislike of the Roundheads for the established clergy and the anger of the Cavaliers against all Puritanism there was fostered that “contempt of the clergy” which had become a clerical scandal at the Restoration and was to remain so for about a century.57 Their social status was in general low, and their financial position bad; and these circumstances, possible only in a time of weakened religious belief, necessarily tended to further the process of mental change. Within the sphere of orthodoxy, it operated openly. It is noteworthy that the term “rationalist” emerges as the label of a sect of Independents or Presbyterians who declare that “What their reason dictates to them in church or State stands for good, until they be convinced with better.”58 The “rationalism,” so-called, of that generation remained ostensibly scriptural; but on other lines thought went further. Of atheism there are at this stage only dubious biographical and controversial traces, such as Mrs. Hutchinson’s characterization of a Nottingham physician, possibly a deist, as a “horrible atheist,”59 and the Rev. John Dove’s Confutation of Atheism (1640), which does not bear out its title. Ephraim Pagitt, in his Heresiography (1644), speaks loosely of an “atheistical sect who affirm that men’s soules sleep with them until the day of judgment”; and tells of some alleged atheist merely that he “mocked and jeared at Christ’s Incarnation.”60 Similarly a work, entitled Dispute betwixt an Atheist and a Christian (1646), shows the existence not of atheists but of deists, and the deist in the dialogue is a Fleming.