Note 112 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The denunciations of the penal laws by Arthur Young in 1780112 are the outcome of two generations of deistic thinking; the spirit of religion has been ousted by judgment.113 Could that spirit have had freer play, less hindrance from blind passion, later history would have been a happier record. But for reasons lying in the environment as well as in its own standpoint, deism was not destined to rise on continuous stepping-stones to social dominion.