Note 107 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

The stress of new discussion is further to be gathered from the work of Howe, On the Reconcilableness of God’s Prescience of the Sins of Men with the Wisdom and Sincerity of his Counsels and Exhortations, produced in 1677 at Boyle’s request. As a modern admirer admits that the thesis was a hopeless one,107 it is not to be supposed that it did much to lessen doubt in its own day. The preface to Stillingfleet’s Letter to a Deist (1677), which for the first time brings that appellation into prominence in English controversy, tacitly abandoning the usual ascription of atheism to all unbelievers, avows that “a mean esteem of the Scriptures and the Christian Religion” has become very common “among the Skepticks of this Age,” and complains very much, as Butler did sixty years later, of the spirit of “Raillery and Buffoonery” in which the matter was too commonly approached. The “Letter” shows that a multitude of the inconsistencies and other blemishes of the Old Testament were being keenly discussed; and it cannot be said that the Bishop’s vindication was well calculated to check the tendency. Indeed, we have the angry and reiterated declaration of Archdeacon Parker, writing in 1681, that “the ignorant and the unlearned among ourselves are become the greatest pretenders to skepticism; and it is the common people that nowadays set up for Skepticism and Infidelity”; that “Atheism and Irreligion are at length become as common as Vice and Debauchery”; and that “Plebeans and Mechanicks have philosophized themselves into Principles of Impiety, and read their Lectures of Atheism in the Streets and Highways. And they are able to demonstrate out of the Leviathan that there is no God nor Providence,” and so on.108 As the Archdeacon’s method of refutation consists mainly in abuse, he doubtless had the usual measure of success. A similar order of dialectic is employed by Dr. Sherlock in his Practical Discourse of Religious Assemblies (1681). The opening section is addressed to the “speculative atheists,” here described as receding from the principles of their “great Master, Mr. Hobbs,” who, “though he had no great opinion of religion in itself, yet thought it something considerable when it became the law of the nation.” Such atheists, the reverend writer notes, when it is urged on them that all mankind worship “some God or other,” reply that such an argument is as good for polytheism and idolatry as for monotheism; so, after formally inviting them to “cure their souls of that fatal and mortal disease, which makes them beasts here and devils hereafter,” and lamenting that he is not dealing with “reasonable men,” he bethinks him that “the laws of conversation require us to treat all men with just respects,” and admits that there have been “some few wise and cautious atheists.” To such, accordingly, he suggests that the atheist has already a great advantage in a world morally restrained by religion, where he is under no such restraint, and that, “if he should by his wit and learning proselyte a whole nation to atheism, Hell would break loose on Earth, and he might soon find himself exposed to all those violences and injuries which he now securely practises.” For the rest, they had better not affront God, who may after all exist, and be able to revenge himself.109 And so forth.