Note 177 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

In England, meanwhile, there was beginning the redistribution of energies which can be seen to have prepared for the intellectual and political reaction of the end of the century. There had been no such victory of faith as is supposed to have been wrought by the forensic theorem of Butler. An orthodox German observer, making a close inquest about 1750, cites the British Magazine as stating in 1749 that half the educated people were then deists; and he, after full inquiry, agrees.177 In the same year, Richardson speaks tragically in the Postscriptum to Clarissa of seeing “skepticism and infidelity openly avowed, and even endeavoured to be propagated from the press; the great doctrines of the gospel brought into question”; and he describes himself as “seeking to steal in with a disguised plea for religion.” Instead of being destroyed by the clerical defence, the deistic movement had really penetrated the Church, which was become as rationalistic in its methods as its function would permit, and the educated classes, which had arrived at a state of compromise. Pope, the chief poet of the preceding generation, had been visibly deistic in his thinking; as Dryden had inferribly been before him; and to such literary prestige was added the prestige of scholarship. The academic Conyers Middleton, whose Letter from Rome had told so heavily against Christianity in exposing the pagan derivations of much of Catholicism, and who had further damaged the doctrine of inspiration in his anonymous Letter to Dr. Waterland (1731), while professing to refute Tindal, had carried to yet further lengths his service to the critical spirit. In his famous Free Inquiry into the miracles of post-apostolic Christianity (1749), again professing to strike at Rome, he had laid the foundations of a new structure of comparative criticism, and had given permanent grounds for rejecting the miracles of the sacred books.