Note 144 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

While, however, the rationalism of the time could not take book form, there are clear traces of its existence among educated men, even apart from the general complaints of the apologists. Thus the Professor of Medicine at Glasgow University in the opening years of the eighteenth century, John Johnston, was a known freethinker.144 In the way of moderate or Christian rationalism, the teaching of the prosecuted Simson seems to have counted for something, seeing that Francis Hutcheson at least imbibed from him “liberal” views about future punishment and the salvation of the heathen, which gave much offence in the Presbyterian pulpit in Ulster.145 And Hutcheson’s later vindication of the ethical system of Shaftesbury in his Inquiry Concerning the Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725) must have tended to attract attention in Scotland to the Characteristics after his instalment as a Professor at Glasgow. In an English pamphlet, in 1732, he was satirized as introducing Shaftesbury’s system into a University,146 and it was from the Shaftesbury camp that the first literary expression of freethought in Scotland was sent forth. A young Scotch deist of that school, William Dudgeon, published in 1732 a dialogue entitled The State of the Moral World Considered, wherein the optimistic position was taken up with uncommon explicitness; and in 1739 the same writer printed A Catechism Founded upon Experience and Reason, prefaced by an Introductory Letter on Natural Religion, which takes a distinctly anti-clerical attitude. The Catechism answers to its title, save insofar as it is à priori in its theism and optimistic in its ethic, as is another work of its author in the same year, A View of the Necessarian or Best Scheme, defending the Shaftesburyan doctrine against the criticism of Crousaz on Pope’s Essay. Still more heterodox is his little volume of Philosophical Letters Concerning the Being and Attributes of God (1737), where the doctrine goes far towards pantheism. All this propaganda seems to have elicited only one printed reply—an attack on his first treatise in 1732. In the letter prefaced to his Catechism, however, he tells that “the bare suspicion of my not believing the opinions in fashion in our country hath already caused me sufficient trouble.”147 His case had in fact been raised in the Church courts, the proceedings going through many stages in the years 1732–36; but in the end no decision was taken,148 and the special stress of his rationalism in 1739 doubtless owes something alike to the prosecution and to its collapse. Despite such hostility, he must privately have had fair support.149