Note 131 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Alongside of the more popular and native influences, there were at work others, foreign and more academic; and even in professedly orthodox writers there are signs of the influence of deistic thought. Thus Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (written about 1634, published 1642) has been repeatedly characterized131 as tending to promote deism by its tone and method; and there can be no question that it assumes a great prevalence of critical unbelief, to which its attitude is an odd combination of humorous cynicism and tranquil dogmatism, often recalling Montaigne,132 and at times anticipating Emerson. There is little savour of confident belief in the smiling maxim that “to confirm and establish our belief ’tis best to argue with judgments below our own”; or in the avowal, “In divinity I love to keep the road; and though not in an implicit yet an humble faith, follow the great wheel of the Church, by which I move.”133 The pose of the typical believer: “I can answer all the objections of Satan and my rebellious reason with that odd resolution I learned of Tertullian, Certum est quia impossibile est,”134 tells in his case of no anxious hours; and such smiling incuriousness is not conducive to conviction in others, especially when followed by a recital of some of the many insoluble dilemmas of Scripture. When he reasons he is merely self-subversive, as in the saying, “’Tis not a ridiculous devotion to say a prayer before a game at tables; for even in sortileges and matters of greatest uncertainty there is a settled and pre-ordered course of effects”;135 and after remarking that the notions of Fortune and astral influence “have perverted the devotion of many into atheism,” he proceeds to avow that his many doubts never inclined him “to any point of infidelity or desperate positions of atheism; for I have been these many years of opinion there never was any.”136 Yet in his later treatise on Vulgar Errors (1645) he devotes a chapter137 to the activities of Satan in instilling the belief that “there is no God at all ... that the necessity of his entity dependeth upon ours...; that the natural truth of God is an artificial erection of Man, and the Creator himself but a subtile invention of the Creature.” He further notes as coming from the same source “a secondary and deductive Atheism—that although men concede there is a God, yet should they deny his providence. And therefore assertions have flown about, that he intendeth only the care of the species or common natures, but letteth loose the guard of individuals, and single existences therein.”138 Browne now asserts merely that “many there are who cannot conceive that there was ever any absolute Atheist,” and does not clearly affirm that Satan labours wholly in vain. The broad fact remains that he avows “reason is a rebel unto faith”; and in the Vulgar Errors he shows in his own reasoning much of the practical play of the new skepticism.139 Yet it is finally on record that in 1664, on the trial of two women for witchcraft, Browne declared that the fits suffered from by the children said to have been bewitched “were natural, but heightened by the devil’s co-operating with the malice of the witches, at whose instance he did the villainies.”140 This amazing deliverance is believed to have “turned the scale” in the minds of the jury against the poor women, and they were sentenced by the sitting judge, Sir Matthew Hale, to be hanged. It would seem that in Browne’s latter years the irrational element in him, never long dormant, overpowered the rational. The judgment is a sad one to have to pass on one of the greatest masters of prose in any language. In other men, happily, the progression was different.