Note 135 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

It is remarkable that this development of opinion took place in that part of the British Islands where religious fanaticism had gone furthest, and speech and thought were socially least free. Freethought in Scotland before the middle of the seventeenth century can have existed only as a thing furtive and accursed; and though, as we have seen from the Religio Stoici of Sir George Mackenzie, unbelief had emerged in some abundance at or before the Restoration, only wealthy men could dare openly to avow their deism.135 Early in 1697 the clergy had actually succeeded in getting a lad of eighteen, Thomas Aikenhead, hanged for professing deism in general, and in particular for calling the Old Testament “Ezra’s Fables,” ridiculing the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and expressing the hope and belief that Christianity would be extinct within a century.136 The spirit of the prosecution may be gathered from the facts that the boy broke down and pleaded penitence,137 and that the statute enacted the capital penalty only for obstinately persisting in the denial of any of the persons of the Trinity.138 He had talked recklessly against the current creed among youths about his own age, one of whom was in Locke’s opinion “the decoy who gave him the books and made him speak as he did.”139 It would appear that a victim was very much wanted; and Aikenhead was not allowed the help of a counsel. It is characteristic of the deadening effect of dogmatic religion on the heart that an act of such brutish cruelty elicited no cry of horror from any Christian writer. At this date the clergy were hounding on the Privy Council to new activity in trying witches; and all works of supposed heretical tendency imported from England were confiscated in the Edinburgh shops, among them being Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth.140 Scottish intellectual development had in fact been arrested by the Reformation, so that, save for Napier’s Logarithms (1614) and such a political treatise as Rutherford’s Lex Rex (1644), the nation of Dunbar and Lyndsay produced for two centuries no secular literature of the least value, and not even a theology of any enduring interest. Deism, accordingly, seems in the latter half of the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth century to have made fully as much progress in Scotland as in England; and the bigoted clergy could offer little intellectual resistance.