Note 93 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

If it be now possible to form any accurate picture of the state of belief in the latter part of the seventeenth century, it may perhaps be done by recognizing three categories of temperament or mental proclivity. First we have to reckon with the great mass of people held to religious observance by hebetude,93 devoid of the deeper mystical impulse or psychic bias which exhibited itself on the one hand among the dissenters who partly preserved the “enthusiasms” of the Commonwealth period, and on the other among the more cultured pietists of the Church who, banning “enthusiasm” in its stronger forms, cultivated a certain “enthusiasm” of their own. Religionists of the latter type were ministered to by superstitious mystics like Henry More, who, even when undertaking to “prove” the existence of God and the separate existence of the soul by argument and by demonology, taught them to cultivate a “warranted enthusiasm,” and to “endeavour after a certain principle more noble and inward than reason itself, and without which reason will falter, or at least reach but to mean and frivolous things” ... “something in me while I thus speak, which I must confess is of so retruse a nature that I want a name for it, unless I should adventure to term it divine sagacity, which is the first rise of successful reason, especially in matters of great comprehension and moment.”94 There was small psychic difference between this dubiously draped affirmation of the “inner light” and the more orotund proclamations of it by the dissenters who, for a considerable section of the people, still carried on the tradition of rapturous pietism; and the dissenters were not always at a disadvantage in that faculty for rhetoric which has generally been a main factor in doctrinal religion.95