Note 99 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

All the while, the censorship of the press, which was one of the means by which the clerical party under Charles combated heresy, prevented any new and outspoken writing on the deistic side. The Treatise of Humane [i.e. Human] Reason (1674)99 of Martin Clifford, a scholarly man-about-town,100 who was made Master of the Charterhouse, went indeed to the bottom of the question of authority by showing, as Spinoza had done shortly before,101 that the acceptance of authority is itself in the last resort grounded in reason. The author makes no overt attack on religion, and professes Christian belief, but points out that many modern wars had been on subjects of religion, and elaborates a skilful argument on the gain to be derived from toleration. Reason alone, fairly used, will bring a man to the Christian faith: he who denies this cannot be a Christian. As for schism, it is created not by variation in belief, but by the refusal to tolerate it. This ingenious and well-written treatise speedily elicited three replies, all pronouncing it a pernicious work. Dr. Laney, Bishop of Ely, is reported to have declared that book and author might fitly be burned together;102 and Dr. Isaac Watts, while praising it for “many useful notions,” found it “exalt reason as the rule of religion as well as the guide, to a degree very dangerous.”103 Its actual effect seems to have been to restrain the persecution of dissenters.104 In 1680, three years after Clifford’s death, there appeared An Apology for a Treatise of Humane Reason, by Albertus Warren, wherein one of the attacks, entitled Plain Dealing, by a Cambridge scholar, is specially answered.105 This helped to evoke the anonymous Discourse of Things above Reason (1681), by Robert Boyle, the distinguished author of The Sceptical Chemist, whom we have seen backing up Henry More in acceptance of the grossest of ignorant superstitions. The most notable thing about the Discourse is that it anticipates Berkeley’s argument against freethinking mathematicians.106