Note 77 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Thus the second part absolutely destroys one of the fundamental positions of the first. No semblance of levity on the part of the freethinkers could compare with the profound intellectual insincerity of such a propaganda as this; and that deism and atheism continued to gain ground is proved by the multitude of apologetic treatises. Even in church-ridden Scotland they were found necessary; at least the young advocate George Mackenzie, afterwards to be famous as the “bluidy Mackenzie” of the time of persecution, thought it expedient to make his first appearance in literature with a Religio Stoici (1663), wherein he sets out with a refutation of atheism. It is difficult to believe that his counsel to Christians to watch the “horror-creating beds of dying atheists”77—a false pretence as it stands—represented any knowledge whatever of professed atheism in his own country; and his discussion of the subject is wholly on the conventional lines—notably so when he uses the customary plea, later associated with Pascal, that the theist runs no risk even if there is no future life, whereas the atheist runs a tremendous risk if there is one;78 but when he writes of “that mystery why the greatest wits are most frequently the greatest atheists,”79 he must be presumed to refer at least to deists. And other passages show that he had listened to freethinking arguments. Thus he speaks80 of those who “detract from Scripture by attributing the production of miracles to natural causes”; and again81 of those who “contend that the Scriptures are written in a mean and low style; are in some places too mysterious, in others too obscure; contain many things incredible, many repetitions, and many contradictions.” His own answers are conspicuously weak. In the latter passage he continues: “But those miscreants should consider that much of the Scripture’s native splendour is impaired by its translators”; and as to miracles he makes the inept answer that if secondary causes were in operation they acted by God’s will; going on later to suggest on his own part that prophecy may be not a miraculous gift, but “a natural (though the highest) perfection of our human nature.”82 Apart from his weak dialectic, he writes in general with cleverness and literary finish, but without any note of sincerity; and his profession of concern that reason should be respected in theology83 is as little acted on in his later life as his protest against persecution.84 The inference from the whole essay is that in Scotland, as in England, the civil war had brought up a considerable crop of reasoned unbelief; and that Mackenzie, professed defender of the faith as he was at twenty-five, and official persecutor of nonconformists as he afterwards became, met with a good deal of it in his cultured circle. In his later booklet, Reason: an Essay (1690), he speaks of the “ridiculous and impudent extravagance of some who ... take pains to persuade themselves and others that there is not a God.”85 He further coarsely asperses all atheists as debauchees,86 though he avows that “Infidelity is not the cause of false reasoning, because such as are not atheists reason falsely.”