Note 73 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

We gather this, however, still from the apologetic treatises and the historians, not from new deistic literature; for in virtue of the Press Licensing Act, passed on behalf of the Church in 1662, no heretical book could be printed; so that Herbert was thus far the only professed deistic writer in the field, and Hobbes the only other of similar influence. Baxter, writing in 1655 on The Unreasonableness of Infidelity, handles chiefly Anabaptists; and in his Reformed Pastor (1656), though he avows that “the common ignorant people,” seeing the endless strifes of the clergy, “are hardened by us against all religion,” the only specific unbelief he mentions is that of “the devil’s own agents, the unhappy Socinians,” who had written “so many treatises for ... unity and peace.”73 But in his Reasons of the Christian Religion, issued in 1667, he thinks fit to prove the existence of God and a future state, and the truth and the supernatural character of the Christian religion. Any deist or atheist who took the trouble to read through it would have been rewarded by the discovery that the learned author has annihilated his own case. In his first part he affirms: “If there were no life of Retribution after this, Obedience to God would be finally men’s loss and ruine: But Obedience to God shall not be finally men’s loss and ruine: Ergo, there is another life.”74 In the second part he writes that “Man’s personal interest is an unfit rule and measure of God’s goodness”;75 and, going on to meet the new argument against Christianity based on the inference that an infinity of stars are inhabited, he writes:—