Note 209 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
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In the view of life which accepted this state of things the educated deists seem to have shared; at least, there is no record of any agitation by them for betterment. The state of political thought was typified in the struggle over “Wilkes and Liberty,” from which cool temperaments like Hume’s turned away in contempt; and it is significant that poor men were persecuted for freethinking while the better-placed went free.
Jacob Ilive
, for denying in a pamphlet (1753) the truth of revelation, was pilloried thrice, and sent to hard labour for three years. In 1754 the Grand Jury of Middlesex “presented” the editor and publisher of Bolingbroke’s posthumous works
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—a distinction that in the previous generation had been bestowed on Mandeville’s
Fable of the Bees
; and in 1761, as before noted, Peter Annet, aged seventy, was pilloried twice and sent to prison for discrediting the Pentateuch; as if that were a more serious offence than his former attacks on the gospels and on St. Paul. The personal influence of George III, further, told everywhere against freethinking; and the revival of penalties would have checked publishing even if there had been no withdrawal of interest to politics.
Yet more or less freethinking treatises did appear at intervals in addition to the works of the better-known writers, such as Bolingbroke and Hume, after the period commonly marked as that of the “decline of deism.” In the list may be included a few by Unitarians, who at this stage were doing critical work. Like a number of the earlier works above mentioned, the following (save Evanson) are overlooked in Sir Leslie Stephen’s survey:—
1746. Essay on Natural Religion. Falsely attributed to Dryden.
1746. ,, Deism fairly stated and fully vindicated, etc. Anon.
1749. J. G. Cooper, Life of Socrates.
1750. John Dove, A Creed founded on Truth and Common Sense.
1750. ,, The British Oracle. (Two numbers only.)
1752. The Pillars of Priestcraft and Orthodoxy Shaken. Four vols. of freethinking pamphlets, collected (and some written) by Thomas Gordon, formerly secretary to Trenchard. Edited by R. Barron. (Rep. 1768.)
1765. W. Dudgeon, Philosophical Works (reprints of those of 1732, –4, –7, –9, above mentioned). Privately printed—at Glasgow?
1772. E. Evanson, The Doctrines of a Trinity and the Incarnation, etc.
1773. —— Three Discourses (1. Upon the Man after God’s own Heart; 2. Upon the Faith of Abraham; 3. Upon the Seal of the Foundation of God).
1777. —— Letter to Bishop Hurd.
1781. W. Nicholson, The Doubts of the Infidels. (Rep. by R. Carlile.)
1782. W. Turner, Answer to Dr. Priestley’s Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever.
1785. Dr. G. Hoggart Toulmin, The Antiquity and Duration of the World.
1789. —— The Eternity of the Universe.210 (Rep. 1825.)
1789. ,, Dr. T. Cooper, Tracts, Ethical, Theological, and Political.
1792. E. Evanson, The Dissonance of the Four Evangelists. (Rep. 1805.)
1795. Dr. J. A. O’Keefe, On the Progress of the Human Understanding.
1797. John C. Davies, The Scripturian’s Creed. Prosecuted and imprisoned. (Book rep. 1822 and 1839.)