Note 46 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

An official picture of the situation is formally drawn in A Representation of the Present State of Religion, with regard to the late excessive growth of infidelity, heresy, and profaneness, drawn up by the Upper House of Convocation of the province of Canterbury in 1711.46 This sets forth, as a result of the disorders of the Rebellion, a growth of all manner of unbelief and profanity, including denial of inspiration and the authority of the canon; the likening of Christian miracles to heathen fables; the treating of all religious mysteries as absurd speculations; Arianism and Socinianism and scoffing at the doctrine of the Trinity; denial of natural immortality; Erastianism; mockery of baptism and the Lord’s Supper; decrying of all priests as impostors; the collecting and reprinting of infidel works; and publication of mock catechisms. It is explained that all such printing has greatly increased “since the expiration of the Act for restraining the press”; and mention is made of an Arian work just published to which the author has put his name, and which he has dedicated to the Convocation itself. This was the first volume of Whiston’s Primitive Christianity Revived, the work of a devout eccentric, who had just before been deprived of his professorship at Cambridge for his orally avowed heresy. Whiston, whose cause was championed, and whose clerical opponents were lampooned, in an indecorous but vigorous sketch, The Tryal of William Whiston, Clerk, for defaming and denying the Holy Trinity, before the Lord Chief Justice Reason (1712; 3rd ed. 1740), always remained perfectly devout in his Arian orthodoxy; but his and his friends’ arguments were rather better fitted to make deists than to persuade Christians; and Convocation’s appeal for a new Act “restraining the present excessive and scandalous liberty of printing wicked books at home, and importing the like from abroad” was not responded to. There was no love lost between Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury; but the government in which the former, a known deist, was Secretary of State, could hardly undertake to suppress the works of the latter.