Note 14 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

A certain amount of evasion was forced upon Toland by the Blasphemy Law of 1697; inferentially, however, he was a thorough deist until he became pantheist; and the discussion over his books showed that views essentially deistic were held even among his antagonists. One, an Irish bishop, got into trouble by setting forth a notion of deity which squared with that of Hobbes.14 The whole of our present subject, indeed, is much complicated by the distribution of heretical views among the nominally orthodox, and of orthodox views among heretics.15 Thus the school of Cudworth, zealous against atheism, was less truly theistic than that of Blount,16 who, following Hobbes, pointed out that to deny to God a continual personal and providential control of human affairs was to hold to atheism under the name of theism;17 whereas Cudworth, the champion of theism against the atheists, entangled himself hopelessly18 in a theory which made deity endow Nature with “plastic” powers and leave it to its own evolution. The position was serenely demolished by Bayle,19 as against Le Clerc, who sought to defend it; and in England the clerical outcry was so general that Cudworth gave up authorship.20 Over the same crux, in Ireland, Bishop Browne and Bishop Berkeley accused each other of promoting atheism; and Archbishop King was embroiled in the dispute.21 On the other hand, the theistic Descartes had laid down a “mechanical” theory of the universe which perfectly comported with atheism, and partly promoted that way of thinking;22 and a selection from Gassendi’s ethical writings, translated into English23 (1699), wrought in the same direction. The Church itself contained Cartesians and Cudworthians, Socinians and deists.24 Each group, further, had inner differences as to free-will25 and Providence; and the theistic schools of Newton, Clarke, and Leibnitz rejected each other’s philosophies as well as that of Descartes. Leibnitz complained grimly that Newton and his followers had “a very odd opinion concerning the Work of God,” making the universe an imperfect machine, which the deity had frequently to mend; and treating space as an organ by which God perceives things, which are thus regarded as not produced or maintained by him.26 Newton’s principles of explanation, he insisted, were those of the materialists.27 John Hutchinson, a professor at Cambridge, in his Treatise of Power, Essential and Mechanical, also bitterly assailed Newton as a deistical and anti-scriptural sophist.28 Clarke, on the other hand, declared that the philosophy of Leibnitz was “tending to banish God from the world.”29 Alongside of such internecine strife, it was not surprising that the great astronomer Halley, who accepted Newton’s principles in physics, was commonly reputed an atheist; and that the freethinkers pitted his name in that connection against Newton’s.30 As it was he who first suggested31 the idea of the total motion of the entire solar system in space—described by a modern pietist as “this great cosmical truth, the grandest in astronomy”32—they were not ill justified. It can hardly be doubted that if intellectual England could have been polled in 1710, under no restraints from economic, social, and legal pressure, some form of rationalism inconsistent with Christianity would have been found to be nearly as common as orthodoxy. In outlying provinces, in Devon and Cornwall, in Ulster, in Edinburgh and Glasgow, as well as in the metropolis, the pressure of deism on the popular creed evoked expressions of Arian and Socinian thought among the clergy.33 It was, in fact, the various restraints under notice that determined the outward fortunes of belief and unbelief, and have substantially determined them since. When the devout Whiston was deposed from his professorship for his Arianism, and the unbelieving Saunderson was put in his place,34 and when Simson was suspended from his ministerial functions in Glasgow,35 the lesson was learned that outward conformity was the sufficient way to income.36