Note 100 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

No less marked is the failure to develop the “higher criticism” from the notable start made in 1739 in the very remarkable Inquiry into the Jewish and Christian Revelations by Samuel Parvish, who made the vital discovery that Deuteronomy is a product of the seventh century B.C.100 His book, which is in the form of a dialogue between a Christian and a Japanese, went into a second edition (1746); but his idea struck too deep for the critical faculty of that age, and not till the nineteenth century was the clue found again by De Wette, in Germany.101 Parvish came at the end of the main deistic movement,102 and by that time the more open-minded men had come to a point of view from which it did not greatly matter when Deuteronomy was written, or precisely how a cultus was built up; while orthodoxy could not dream of abandoning its view of inspiration. There was thus an arrest alike of historical criticism and of the higher philosophic thought under the stress of the concrete disputes over ethics, miracles, prophecy, and politics; and a habit of taking deity for granted became normal, with the result that when the weak point was pressed upon by Law and Butler there was a sense of blankness on both sides. But among men theistically inclined, the argument of Tindal against revelationism was extremely telling, and it had more literary impressiveness than any writing on the orthodox side before Butler. By this time the philosophic influence of Spinoza—seen as early as 1699 in Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue,103 and avowed by Clarke when he addressed his Demonstration (1705) “more particularly in answer to Mr. Hobbs, Spinoza, and their followers”—had spread among the studious class, greatly reinforcing the deistic movement; so that in 1732 Berkeley, who ranked him among “weak and wicked writers,” described him as “the great leader of our modern infidels.”