Note 63 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

It is not that the Platonist does violence to his own philosophic tastes by way of influencing the “bats and owls” of atheism. This mass of superstition is his own special pabulum. In the preface he has announced that, while he may abstain from the use of the Scriptures, nothing shall restrain him from telling what he knows of spirits. “I am so cautious and circumspect,” he claims, “that I make use of no narrations that either the avarice of the priest or the credulity and fancifulness of the melancholist may render suspected.” As for the unbelievers, “their confident ignorance shall never dash me out of confidence with my well-grounded knowledge; for I have been no careless inquirer into these things.” It is after a polter-geist tale of the crassest description that he announces that it was strictly investigated and attested by “that excellently-learned and noble gentleman, Mr. E. Boyle,” who avowed “that all his settled indisposedness to believe strange things was overcome by this special conviction.”63 And the section ends with the proposition: “Assuredly that saying is not more true in politick, No Bishop, no King, than this in metaphysicks, No Spirit, no God.” Such was the mentality of some of the most eminent and scholarly Christian apologists of the time. It seems safe to conclude that the Platonist made few converts.