Note 222 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

In a literary world which was eagerly reading Gibbon222 and Voltaire,223 there was a peculiar absurdity in Burke’s famous question (1790) as to “Who now reads Bolingbroke” and the rest of the older deists.224 The fashionable public was actually reading Bolingbroke even then;225 and the work of the older deists was being done with new incisiveness and thoroughness by their successors.226 In the unstudious world of politics, if the readers were few the indifferentists were many. Evanson could truthfully write to Bishop Hurd in 1777 that “That general unbelief of revealed religion among the higher orders of our countrymen, which, however your Lordship and I might differ in our manner of accounting for it, is too notorious for either of us to doubt of, hath, by a necessary consequence, produced in the majority of our present legislators an absolute indifference towards religious questions of every kind.”227 Beside Burke in Parliament, all the while, was the Prime Minister, William Pitt the younger, an agnostic deist.