Note 185 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

6. While a semi-Bohemian like Lamb could thus dare to challenge the reigning bigotry, the graver English writers of the first half of the century who had abandoned or never accepted orthodoxy felt themselves for the most part compelled to silence or ostensible compliance. It was made clear by Carlyle’s posthumous Reminiscences that he had early turned away from Christian dogma, having in fact given up a clerical career because of unbelief. Later evidence abounds. At the age of fifteen, by his own account, he had horrified his mother with the question: “Did God Almighty come down and make wheel-barrows in a shop?”185 Of his college life he told: “I studied the evidences of Christianity for several years, with the greatest desire to be convinced, but in vain. I read Gibbon, and then first clearly saw that Christianity was not true. Then came the most trying time of my life.”186 Goethe, he claimed, led him to peace; but philosophic peace he never attained. “He was contemptuous to those who held to Christian dogmas; he was angry with those who gave them up; he was furious with those who attacked them. If equanimity be the mark of a Philosopher, he was of all great-minded men the least of a Philosopher.”187 To all freethinking work, scholarly or other, he was hostile with the hostility of a man consciously in a false position. Strauss’s Leben Jesu he pronounced, quite late in life, “a revolutionary and ill-advised enterprise, setting forth in words what all wise men had in their minds for fifty years past, and thought it fittest to hold their peace about.”188 He was, in fact, so false to his own doctrine of veracity as to disparage all who spoke out; while privately agreeing with Mill as to the need for speaking out.189 Even Mill did so only partially in his lifetime, as in his address to the St. Andrews students (1867), when, “in the reception given to the Address, he was most struck by the vociferous applause of the divinity students at the freethought passage.”190 In the first half of the century such displays of courage were rare indeed. Only after the death of Romilly was it tacitly avowed, by the publication of a deistic prayer found among his papers, that he had had no belief in revelation.191 Much later in the century, Harriet Martineau, for openly avowing her unbelief, incurred the angry public censure of her own brother.