Note 230 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Among thinking men too the nascent science of geology was setting up a new criticism of “revelation”—this twenty years before the issue of the epoch-making works of Hutton.230 In England the impulse seems to have come from the writings of the Abbé Langlet du Fresnoy, De Maillet, and Mirabaud, challenging the Biblical account of the antiquity of the earth. The new phase of “infidelity” was of course furiously denounced, one of the most angry and most absurd of its opponents being the poet Cowper.231 Still rationalism persisted. Paley, writing in 1786, protests that “Infidelity is now served up in every shape that is likely to allure, surprise, or beguile the imagination, in a fable, a tale, a novel, or a poem, in interspersed or broken hints, remote and oblique surmises, in books of travel, of philosophy, of natural history—in a word, in any form rather than that of a professed and regular disquisition.”232 The orthodox Dr. J. Ogilvie, in the introduction to his Inquiry into the Causes of the Infidelity and Skepticism of the Times (1783), begins: “That the opinions of the deists and skeptics have spread more universally during a part of the last century and in the present than at any former æra since the resurrection of letters, is a truth to which the friends and the enemies of religion will give their suffrage without hesitation.” In short, until the general reversal of all progress which followed on the French Revolution, there had been no such change of opinion as Burke alleged.