Note 92 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

All of these works explicitly avow the abundance of unbelief; Tillotson, himself accused of it, pronounces the age “miserably overrun with Skepticism and Infidelity”; and Wilkins, avowing that these tendencies are common “not only among sensual men of the vulgar sort, but even among those who pretend to a more than ordinary measure of wit and learning,” attempts to meet them by a purely deistic argument, with a claim for Christianity appended, as if he were concerned chiefly to rebut atheism, and held his own Christianity on a very rationalistic tenure. The fact was that the orthodox clergy were as hard put to it to repel religious antinomianism on the one hand as to repel atheism on the other; and no small part of the deistic movement seems to have been set up by the reaction against pious lawlessness.92 Thus we have Tillotson, writing as Dean of Canterbury, driven to plead in his preface to the work of Wilkins that “it is a great mistake” to think the obligation of moral duties “doth solely depend upon the revelation of God’s will made to us in the Holy Scriptures.” It was such reasoning that brought upon him the charge of freethinking.