Note 104 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Among the deists of the upper classes was the young William Pitt, afterwards Lord Chatham, if, as has been alleged, it was he who in 1733, two years before he entered Parliament, contributed to the London Journal a “Letter on Superstition,” the work of a pronounced freethinker.104 On the other hand, such deistic writing as that with which Chubb, in a multitude of tracts, followed up his early Unitarian essay of 1715, brought an ethical “Christian rationalism” within the range of the unscholarly many. Thomas Morgan (d. 1741), a physician, began in the Moral Philosopher, 1739–1740,105 to sketch a rationalistic theory of Christian origins, besides putting the critical case with new completeness. Morgan had been at one time a dissenting minister at Frome, Somerset, and had been dismissed because of his deistical opinions. Towards the Jehovah and the ethic of the Old Testament he holds, however, the attitude rather of an ancient Gnostic than of a modern rationalist; and in his philosophy he is either a very “godly” deist or a pantheist miscarried.106