Note 151 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

This was as true as clerical charges of the kind usually were in the period. But without any animus or violence of interpretation, a reader of Glanvill’s visitation sermon on The Agreement of Reason and Religion151 might have inferred that he was a deist. It sets forth that “religion primarily and mainly consists in worship and vertue,” and that it “in a secondary sense consists in some principles relating to the worship of God, and of his Son, in the ways of devout and vertuous living”; Christianity having “superadded” baptism and the Lord’s Supper to “the religion of mankind.” Apart from his obsession as to witchcraft—and perhaps even as to that—Glanvill seems to have grown more and more rationalistic in his later years. The Scepsis omits some of the credulous flights of the Vanity of Dogmatizing;152 the re-written version in the collected Essays omits such dithyrambs as that above quoted; and the sermon in its revised form sets out with the emphatic declaration: “There is not anything that I know which hath done more mischief to religion than the disparaging of reason under pretence of respect and favour to it; for hereby the very foundations of Christian faith have been undermined, and the world prepared for atheism. And if reason must not be heard, the Being of a God and the authority of Scripture can neither be proved nor defended; and so our faith drops to the ground like an house that hath no foundation.” Such reasoning could not but be suspect to the orthodoxy of the age.