Note 119 — Chapter XV · FRENCH AND DUTCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

13. The appearance in 1678 of a Dutch treatise “against all sorts of atheists,”119 and in 1681, at Amsterdam, of an attack in French on Spinoza’s Scriptural criticism,120 points to a movement outside of the clerical and scholarly class. All along, indeed, the atmosphere of the Arminian or “Remonstrant” School in Holland must have been fairly liberal.121 Already in 1685 Locke’s friend Le Clerc had taken up the position of Hobbes and Spinoza and Simon on the Pentateuch in his Sentimens de quelques théologiens de Hollande (translated into English and published in 1690 as “Five Letters Concerning the Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures”).122 And although Le Clerc always remained something of a Scripturalist, and refused to go the way of Spinoza, he had courage enough to revive an ancient heresy by urging, in his commentary on the fourth Gospel (1701), that “the Logos” should be rendered “Reason”—an idea which he probably derived from the Unitarian Zwicker without realizing how far it could take him. His ultimate recantation, on the subject of the authorship of the Pentateuch, served only to weaken his credit with freethinkers, and came too late to arrest the intellectual movement which he had forwarded.