Note 1 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The average tone in England in the first quarter of the century may be gathered from the language held by a man so enlightened, comparatively speaking, as Sydney Smith, wit, humourist, Whig, and clergyman. In 1801 we find him, in a preface never reprinted, prescribing various measures of religious strategy in addition “to the just, necessary, and innumerable invectives which have been levelled against Rousseau, Voltaire, D’Alembert, and the whole pandemonium of those martyrs to atheism, who toiled with such laborious malice, and suffered odium with such inflexible profligacy, for the wretchedness and despair of their fellow creatures.”1 That this was not jesting may be gathered from his daughter’s account of his indignation when a publisher sent him “a work of irreligious tendency,” and when Jeffrey admitted “irreligious opinions” to the Edinburgh Review. To the former he writes that every principle of suspicion and fear would be excited in me by a man who professed himself an infidel”; and to Jeffrey: “Do you mean to take care that the Review shall not profess infidel principles? Unless this is the case I must absolutely give up all connection with it.”2 All the while any semblance of “infidelity” in any article in the Review must have been of the most cautious kind.