Note 150 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The prosecution of Hutcheson before the Glasgow Presbytery in 1738 reveals vividly the theological temper of the time. He was indicted for teaching to his students “the following two false and dangerous doctrines: first, that the standard of moral goodness was the promotion of the happiness of others; and, second, that we could have a knowledge of good and evil without and prior to a knowledge of God.”150 There has been a natural disposition on the orthodox side to suppress the fact that such teachings were ever ecclesiastically denounced as false, dangerous, and irreligious; and the prosecution seems to have had no effect beyond intensifying the devotion of Hutcheson’s students. Among them was Adam Smith, of whom it has justly been said that, “if he was any man’s disciple, he was Hutcheson’s,” inasmuch as he derived from his teacher the bases alike of his moral and political philosophy and of his deistic optimism.151 Another prosecution soon afterwards showed that the new influences were vitally affecting thought within the Church itself. Hutcheson’s friend Leechman, whom he and his party contrived to elect as professor of theology in Glasgow University, was in turn proceeded against (1743–44) for a sermon on Prayer, which Hutcheson and his sympathizers pronounced “noble,”152 but which “resolved the efficacy of prayer into its reflex influence on the mind of the worshipper”153—a theorem which has chronically made its appearance in the Scottish Church ever since, still ranking as a heresy, after having brought a clerical prosecution in the last century on at least one divine, Prof. William Knight, and rousing a scandal against another, the late Dr. Robert Wallace.154