Note 2 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Toland’s treatise,2 heretical as it was, professed to be a defence of the faith, and avowedly founded on Locke’s anonymous Reasonableness of Christianity, its young author being on terms of acquaintance with the philosopher.3 He claimed, in fact, to take for granted “the Divinity of the New Testament,” and to “demonstrate the verity of divine revelation against atheists and all enemies of revealed religion,” from whom, accordingly, he expected to receive no quarter. Brought up, as he declared, “from my cradle, in the grossest superstition and idolatry,” he had been divinely led to make use of his own reason; and he assured his Christian readers of his perfect sincerity in “defending the true religion.”4 Twenty years later, his primary positions were hardly to be distinguished from those of ratiocinative champions of the creed, save in respect that he was challenging orthodoxy where they were replying to unbelievers. Toland, however, lacked alike the timidity and the prudence which so safely guided Locke in his latter years; and though his argument was only a logical and outspoken extension of Locke’s position, to the end of showing that there was nothing supra-rational in Christianity of Locke’s type, it separated him from “respectable” society in England and Ireland for the rest of his life. The book was “presented” by the Grand Juries of Middlesex and Dublin;5 the dissenters in Dublin being chiefly active in denouncing it—with or without knowledge of its contents;6 half-a-dozen answers appeared; and when in 1698 Toland produced another, entitled Amyntor, showing the infirm foundation of the Christian canon, there was again a speedy crop of replies. Despite the oversights inevitable to such pioneer work, this opens, from the side of freethought, the era of documentary criticism of the New Testament; and in some of his later freethinking books, as the Nazarenus (1718) and the Pantheisticon (1720), he continues to show himself in advance of his time in “opening new windows” for his mind.7 The latter work represents in particular the influence of Spinoza, whom he had formerly criticized somewhat forcibly8 for his failure to recognize that motion is inherent in matter. On that head he lays down9 the doctrine that “motion is but matter under a certain consideration”—an essentially “materialist” position, deriving from the pre-Socratic Greeks, and incidentally affirmed by Bacon.10 He was not exactly an industrious student or writer; but he had scholarly knowledge and instinct, and several of his works show close study of Bayle.