Note 114 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Currency has been given to a misconception of intellectual history by the authoritative statement that in the deistic controversy “all that was intellectually venerable in England” appeared “on the side of Christianity” (Sir Leslie Stephen, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, i, 86). The same thing, in effect, is said by Lecky: “It was to repel these [deistic] attacks [‘upon the miracles’] that the evidential school arose, and the annals of religious controversy narrate few more complete victories than they achieved” (Rise and Influence of Rationalism, pop. ed. i, 175). The proposition seems to be an echo of orthodox historiography, as Buckle had before written in his note-book: “In England skepticism made no head. Such men as Toland and Tindal, Collins, Shaftesbury, Woolston, were no match for Clarke, Warburton, and Lardner. They could make no head till the time of Middleton” (Misc. Works, abridged ed. i, 321)—a strain of assertion which clearly proceeds on no close study of the period. In the first place, all the writing on the freethinking side was done under peril of Blasphemy Laws, and under menace of all the calumny and ostracism that in Christian society follow on advanced heresy; while the orthodox side could draw on the entire clerical profession, over ten thousand strong, and trained for and pledged to defence of the faith. Yet, when all is said, the ordinary list of deists amply suffices to disprove Sir L. Stephen’s phrase. His “intellectually venerable” list runs: Bentley, Locke, Berkeley, Clarke, Butler, Waterland, Warburton, Sherlock, Gibson, Conybeare, Smalbroke, Leslie, Law, Leland, Lardner, Foster, Doddridge, Lyttelton, Barrington, Addison, Pope, Swift. He might have added Newton and Boyle. Sykes,114 Balguy, Stebbing, and a “host of others,” he declares to be “now for the most part as much forgotten as their victims”; Young and Blackmore he admits to be in similar case. It is expressly told of Doddridge, he might have added, that whereas that well-meaning apologist put before his students at Northampton the ablest writings both for and against Christianity, leaving them to draw their own conclusions, many of his pupils, “on leaving his institution, became confirmed Arians and Socinians” (Nichols in App. P to Life of Arminius—Works of Arminius, 1825, i, 223–25). This hardly spells success.115 All told, the list includes only three or four men of any permanent interest as thinkers, apart from Newton; and only three or four more important as writers. The description of Waterland,116 Warburton,117 Smalbroke,118 Sherlock, Leslie, and half-a-dozen more as “intellectually venerable” is grotesque; even Bentley is a strange subject for veneration.