Chapter XVI: British Freethought in the Eighteenth Century (2)

Of the work done by English deism thus far, it may suffice to say that within two generations it had more profoundly altered the intellectual temper of educated men than any religious movement had ever done in the same time. This appears above all from the literature produced by orthodoxy in reply, where the mere defensive resort to reasoning, apart from the accounts of current rationalism, outgoes anything in the previous history of literature. The whole evolution is a remarkable instance of the effect on intellectual progress of the diversion of a nation's general energy from war and intense political faction to mental activities. A similar diversion had taken place at the Restoration, to be followed by a return to civil and foreign strife, which arrested it. It was in the closing years of Anne, and in the steady régime of Walpole under the first two Georges, that the ferment worked at its height. Collins's Discourse of Freethinking was synchronous with the Peace of Utrecht: the era of war re-opened in 1739, much against the will of Walpole, who resigned in 1742. Home and foreign wars thereafter became common; and in 1751 Clive opened the period of imperialistic expansion, determining national developments on that main line, concurrently with that of the new industry. Could the discussion have been continuous--could England have remained what she was in the main deistic period, a workshop of investigation and a battleground of ideas--all European development might have been indefinitely hastened. But the deists, for the most part educated men appealing to educated men or to the shrewdest readers among the artisans, had not learned to reckon with the greater social forces; and beyond a certain point they could not affect England's intellectual destinies.

It is worse than idle to argue that "the true cause of the decay of deism is to be sought in its internal weakness," in the sense that "it was not rooted in the deepest convictions, nor associated with the most powerful emotions of its adherents." [793] No such charge can be even partially proved. The deists were at least as much in earnest as two-thirds of the clergy: the determining difference, in this regard, was the economic basis of the latter, and their social hold of an ignorant population. The clergy, who could not argue the deists down in the court of culture, had in their own jurisdiction the great mass of the uneducated lower classes, and the great mass of the women of all classes, whom the ideals of the age kept uneducated, with a difference. And while the more cultured clergy were themselves in large measure deists, the majority, in the country parishes, remained uncritical and unreflective, caring little even to cultivate belief among their flocks. The "contempt of the clergy" which had subsisted from the middle of the seventeenth century (if, indeed, it should not be dated from the middle of the sixteenth) meant among other things that popular culture remained on a lower plane. With the multitude remaining a ready hotbed for new "enthusiasm," and the women of the middle and upper orders no less ready nurturers of new generations of young believers, the work of emancipation was but begun when deism was made "fashionable." And with England on the way to a new era at once of industrial and imperial expansion, in which the energies that for a generation had made her a leader of European thought were diverted to arms and to commerce, the critical and rationalizing work of the deistical generation could not go on as it had begun. That generation left its specific mark on the statute-book in a complete repeal of the old laws relating to witchcraft; [794] on literature in a whole library of propaganda and apology; on moral and historic science in a new movement of humanism, which was to find its check in the French Revolution.

How it affected the general intelligence for good may be partly gathered from a comparison of the common English political attitudes towards Ireland in the first and the last quarters of the century. Under William was wrought the arrest of Irish industry and commerce, begun after the Restoration; under Anne were enacted the penal laws against Catholics--as signal an example of religious iniquity as can well be found in all history. By the middle of the century these laws had become anachronisms for all save bigots.

"The wave of freethought that was spreading over Europe and
permeating its literature had not failed to affect Ireland.... An
atmosphere of skepticism was fatal to the Penal Code. What element
of religious persecution there had been in it had long ceased to be
operative" (R. Dunlop, in Camb. Mod. Hist. vi, 489). Macaulay's
testimony on this head is noteworthy: "The philosophy of the
eighteenth century had purified English Whiggism of the deep
taint of intolerance which had been contracted during a long and
close alliance with the Puritanism of the eighteenth century"
(History, ch. xvii, end).

The denunciations of the penal laws by Arthur Young in 1780 [795] are the outcome of two generations of deistic thinking; the spirit of religion has been ousted by judgment. [796] Could that spirit have had freer play, less hindrance from blind passion, later history would have been a happier record. But for reasons lying in the environment as well as in its own standpoint, deism was not destined to rise on continuous stepping-stones to social dominion.

Currency has been given to a misconception of intellectual history
by the authoritative statement that in the deistic controversy
"all that was intellectually venerable in England" appeared
"on the side of Christianity" (Sir Leslie Stephen, English
Thought in the Eighteenth Century, i, 86). The same thing,
in effect, is said by Lecky: "It was to repel these [deistic]
attacks ['upon the miracles'] that the evidential school arose,
and the annals of religious controversy narrate few more complete
victories than they achieved" (Rise and Influence of Rationalism,
pop. ed. i, 175). The proposition seems to be an echo of orthodox
historiography, as Buckle had before written in his note-book:
"In England skepticism made no head. Such men as Toland and
Tindal, Collins, Shaftesbury, Woolston, were no match for Clarke,
Warburton, and Lardner. They could make no head till the time
of Middleton" (Misc. Works, abridged ed. i, 321)--a strain
of assertion which clearly proceeds on no close study of the
period. In the first place, all the writing on the freethinking
side was done under peril of Blasphemy Laws, and under menace of
all the calumny and ostracism that in Christian society follow
on advanced heresy; while the orthodox side could draw on the
entire clerical profession, over ten thousand strong, and trained
for and pledged to defence of the faith. Yet, when all is said,
the ordinary list of deists amply suffices to disprove Sir
L. Stephen's phrase. His "intellectually venerable" list runs:
Bentley, Locke, Berkeley, Clarke, Butler, Waterland, Warburton,
Sherlock, Gibson, Conybeare, Smalbroke, Leslie, Law, Leland,
Lardner, Foster, Doddridge, Lyttelton, Barrington, Addison, Pope,
Swift. He might have added Newton and Boyle. Sykes, [797] Balguy,
Stebbing, and a "host of others," he declares to be "now for the
most part as much forgotten as their victims"; Young and Blackmore
he admits to be in similar case. It is expressly told of Doddridge,
he might have added, that whereas that well-meaning apologist
put before his students at Northampton the ablest writings both
for and against Christianity, leaving them to draw their own
conclusions, many of his pupils, "on leaving his institution,
became confirmed Arians and Socinians" (Nichols in App. P to Life
of Arminius--Works of Arminius, 1825, i, 223-25). This hardly
spells success. [798] All told, the list includes only three or
four men of any permanent interest as thinkers, apart from Newton;
and only three or four more important as writers. The description
of Waterland, [799] Warburton, [800] Smalbroke, [801] Sherlock,
Leslie, and half-a-dozen more as "intellectually venerable"
is grotesque; even Bentley is a strange subject for veneration.

On the other hand, the list of "the despised deists," who "make
but a poor show when compared with this imposing list," runs thus:
Herbert, Hobbes, Blount, Halley (well known to be an unbeliever,
though he did not write on the subject), Toland, Shaftesbury,
Collins, Mandeville, Tindal, Chubb, Morgan, Dodwell, Middleton,
Hume, Bolingbroke, Gibbon. It would be interesting to know on
what principles this group is excluded from the intellectual
veneration so liberally allotted to the other. It is nothing
to the purpose that Shaftesbury and Mandeville wrote "covertly"
and "indirectly." The law and the conditions compelled them to do
so. It is still more beside the case to say that "Hume can scarcely
be reckoned among the deists. He is already [when?] emerging
into a higher atmosphere." Hume wrote explicitly as a deist;
and only in his posthumous Dialogues did he pass on to the
atheistic position. At no time, moreover, was he "on the side of
Christianity." On the other hand, Locke and Clarke and Pope were
clearly "emerging into a higher atmosphere" than Christianity,
since Locke is commonly reckoned by the culture-historians,
and even by Sir Leslie Stephen, as making for deism; Pope was
the pupil of Bolingbroke, and wrote as such; and Clarke was
shunned as an Arian. Newton, again, was a Unitarian, and Leibnitz
accused his system of making for irreligion. It would be hard
to show, further, who are the "forgotten victims" of Balguy and
the rest. Balguy criticized Shaftesbury, whose name is still a
good deal better known than Balguy's. The main line of deists is
pretty well remembered. And if we pair off Hume against Berkeley,
Hobbes against Locke, Middleton (as historical critic) against
Bentley, Shaftesbury against Addison, Mandeville against Swift,
Bolingbroke against Butler, Collins against Clarke, Herbert against
Lyttelton, Tindal against Waterland, and Gibbon against--shall
we say?--Warburton, it hardly appears that the overplus of merit
goes as Sir Leslie Stephen alleges, even if we leave Newton,
with brain unhinged, standing against Halley. The statement that
the deists "are but a ragged regiment," and that "in speculative
ability most of them were children by the side of their ablest
antagonists," is simply unintelligible unless the names of all
the ablest deists are left out. Locke, be it remembered, did not
live to meet the main deistic attack on Christianity; and Sir
Leslie admits the weakness of his pro-Christian performance.

The bases of Sir Leslie Stephen's verdict may be tested by his
remarks that "Collins, a respectable country gentleman, showed
considerable acuteness; Toland, a poor denizen of Grub Street, and
Tindal, a Fellow of All Souls, made a certain display of learning,
and succeeded in planting some effective arguments." Elsewhere
(pp. 217-227) Sir Leslie admits that Collins had the best of the
argument against his "venerable" opponents on Prophecy; and Huxley
credits him with equal success in the argument with Clarke. The
work of Collins on Human Liberty, praised by a long series of
students and experts, and entirely above the capacity of Bentley,
is philosophically as durable as any portion of Locke, who made
Collins his chosen friend and trustee, and who did not live to
meet his anti-Biblical arguments. Tindal, who had also won Locke's
high praise by his political essays, profoundly influenced such
a student as Laukhard (Lechler, p. 451). And Toland, whom even
Mr. A. S. Farrar (Bampton Lectures, p. 179) admitted to possess
"much originality and learning," has struck Lange as a notable
thinker, though he was a poor man. Leibnitz, who answered him,
praises his acuteness, as does Pusey, who further admits the
uncommon ability of Morgan and Collins (Histor. Enq. into German
Rationalism, 1828, p. 126). It is time that the conventional
English standards in these matters should be abandoned by modern
rationalists.

The unfortunate effect of Sir Leslie Stephen's dictum is
seen in the assertion of Prof. Höffding (Hist. of Modern
Philos. Eng. tr. 1900, i, 403), that Sir Leslie "rightly remarks
of the English deists that they were altogether inferior to their
adversaries"; and further (p. 405), that by the later deists,
"Collins, Tindal, Morgan, etc., the dispute as to miracles
was carried on with great violence." It is here evident that
Prof. Höffding has not read the writers he depreciates, for those
he names were far from being violent. Had he known the literature,
he would have named Woolston, not Collins and Tindal and Morgan. He
is merely echoing, without inquiring for himself, a judgment which
he regards as authoritative. In the same passage he declares that
"only one of all the men formerly known as the 'English deists'
[Toland] has rendered contributions of any value to the history
of thought." If this is said with a knowledge of the works of
Collins, Shaftesbury, and Mandeville, it argues a sad lack of
critical judgment. But there is reason to infer here also that
Prof. Höffding writes in ignorance of the literature he discusses.

While some professed rationalists thus belittle a series of
pioneers who did so much to make later rationalism possible, some
eminent theologians do them justice. Thus does Prof. Cheyne begin
his series of lectures on Founders of Old Testament Criticism
(1893): "A well-known and honoured representative of progressive
German orthodoxy (J. A. Dorner) has set a fine example of
historical candour by admitting the obligations of his country to
a much-disliked form of English heterodoxy. He says that English
deism, which found so many apt disciples in Germany, 'by clearing
away dead matter, prepared the way for a reconstruction of theology
from the very depths of the heart's beliefs, and also subjected
man's nature to stricter observation.' [802] This, however, as it
appears to me, is a very inadequate description of the facts. It
was not merely a new constructive stage of German theoretic
theology, and a keener psychological investigation, for which deism
helped to prepare the way, but also a great movement, which has in
our own day become in a strict sense international, concerned with
the literary and historical criticism of the Scriptures. Beyond
all doubt, the Biblical discussions which abound in the works of
the deists and their opponents contributed in no slight degree
to the development of that semi-apologetic criticism of the
Old Testament of which J. D. Michaelis, and in some degree even
Eichhorn, were leading representatives.... It is indeed singular
that deism should have passed away in England without having
produced a great critical movement among ourselves." Not quite
so singular, perhaps, when we note that in our own day Sir Leslie
Stephen and Lecky and Prof. Höffding could sum up the work of the
deists without a glance at what it meant for Biblical criticism.

§ 8

If we were to set up a theory of intellectual possibilities from what has actually taken place in the history of thought, and without regard to the economic and political conditions above mentioned, we might reason that deism failed permanently to overthrow the current creed because it was not properly preceded by discipline in natural science. There might well be stagnation in the higher criticism of the Hebrew Scriptures when all natural science was still coloured by them. In nothing, perhaps, is the danger of Sacred Books more fully exemplified than in their influence for the suppression of true scientific thought. A hundredfold more potently than the faiths of ancient Greece has that of Christendom blocked the way to all intellectually vital discovery. If even the fame and the pietism of Newton could not save him from the charge of promoting atheism, much less could obscure men hope to set up any view of natural things which clashed with pulpit prejudice. But the harm lay deeper, inasmuch as the ground was preoccupied by pseudo-scientific theories which were at best fanciful modifications of the myths of Genesis. Types of these performances are the treatise of Sir Matthew Hale on The Primitive Origination of Mankind (1685); Dr. Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth (1680-1689); and Whiston's New Theory of the Earth (1696)--all devoid of scientific value; Hale's work being pre-Newtonian; Burnet's anti-Newtonian, though partly critical as regards the sources of the Pentateuch; and Whiston's a combination of Newton and myth with his own quaint speculations. Even the Natural History of the Earth of Prof. John Woodward (1695), after recognizing that fossils were really prehistoric remains, decided that they were deposited by the Deluge. [803]

Woodward's book is in its own way instructive as regards the history of opinion. A "Professor of Physick" in Gresham College, F.C.P., and F.R.S., he goes about his work in a methodical and ostensibly scientific fashion, colligates the phenomena, examines temperately the hypotheses of the many previous inquirers, and shows no violence of orthodox prepossession. He claims to have considered Moses "only as an historian," and to give him credit finally because he finds his narrative "punctually true." [804] He had before him an abundance of facts irreconcilable with the explanation offered by the Flood story; yet he actually adds to that myth a thesis of universal decomposition and dissolution of the earth's strata by the flood's action [805]--a hypothesis far more extravagant than any of those he dismissed. With all his method and scrutiny he had remained possessed by the tradition, and could not cast it off. It would seem as if such a book, reducing the tradition to an absurdity, was bound at least to put its more thoughtful readers on the right track. But the legend remained in possession of the general intelligence as of Woodward's; and beyond his standpoint science made little advance for many years. Moral and historical criticism, then, as regards some main issues, had gone further than scientific; and men's thinking on certain problems of cosmic philosophy was thus arrested for lack of due basis or discipline in experiential science.

The final account of the arrest of exact Biblical criticism in the eighteenth century, however, is that which explains also the arrest of the sciences. English energy, broadly speaking, was diverted into other channels. In the age of Chatham it became more and more military and industrial, imperialist and commercial; and the scientific work of Newton was considerably less developed by English hands than was the critical work of the first deists. Long before the French Revolution, mathematical and astronomical science were being advanced by French minds, the English doing nothing. Lagrange and Euler, Clairaut and D'Alembert, carried on the task, till Laplace consummated it in his great theory, which is to Newton's what Newton's was to that of Copernicus. It was Frenchmen, freethinkers to a man, who built up the new astronomy, while England was producing only eulogies of Newton's greatness. "No British name is ever mentioned in the list of mathematicians who followed Newton in his brilliant career and completed the magnificent edifice of which he laid the foundation." [806] "Scotland contributed her Maclaurin, but England no European name." [807] Throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century "there was hardly an individual in this country who possessed an intimate acquaintance with the methods of investigation which had conducted the foreign mathematicians to so many sublime results." [808] "The English mathematicians seem to have been so dazzled with the splendour of Newton's discoveries that they never conceived them capable of being extended or improved upon"; [809] and Newton's name was all the while vaunted, unwarrantably enough, as being on the side of Christian orthodoxy. Halley's great hypothesis of the motion of the solar system in space, put forward in 1718, borne out by Cassini and Le Monnier, was left to be established by Mayer of Göttingen. [810] There was nothing specially incidental to deism, then, in the non-development of the higher criticism in England after Collins and Parvish, or in the lull of critical speculation in the latter half of the century. It was part of a general social readjustment in which English attention was turned from the mental life to the physical, from intension of thought to extension of empire.

Playfair (as cited, p. 39; Brewster, Memoirs of Newton, i,
348, note) puts forward the theory that the progress of the
higher science in France was due to the "small pensions and great
honours" bestowed on scientific men by the Academy of Sciences. The
lack of such an institution in England he traces to "mercantile
prejudices," without explaining these in their turn. They are
to be understood as the consequences of the special expansion
of commercial and industrial life in England in the eighteenth
century, when France, on the contrary, losing India and North
America, had her energies in a proportional degree thrown back on
the life of the mind. French freethought, it will be observed,
expanded with science, while in England there occurred, not
a spontaneous reversion to orthodoxy any more than a surrender
of the doctrine of Newton, but a general turning of attention in
other directions. It is significant that the most important names
in the literature of deism after 1740 are those of Hume and Smith,
late products of the intellectual atmosphere of pre-industrial
Scotland; of Bolingbroke, an aristocrat of the deistic generation,
long an exile in France, who left his works to be published after
his death; and of Gibbon, who also breathed the intellectual air
of France.

§ 9

It has been commonly assumed that after Chubb and Morgan the deistic movement in England "decayed," or "passed into skepticism" with Hume; and that the decay was mainly owing to the persuasive effect of Bishop Butler's Analogy (1736). [811] This appears to be a complete misconception, arising out of the habit of looking to the mere succession of books without considering their vogue and the accompanying social conditions. Butler's book had very little influence till long after his death, [812] being indeed very ill-fitted to turn contemporary deists to Christianity. It does but develop one form of the skeptical argument for faith, as Berkeley had developed another; and that form of reasoning never does attain to anything better than a success of despair. The main argument being that natural religion is open to the same objections as revealed, on the score (1) of the inconsistency of Nature with divine benevolence, and (2) that we must be guided in opinion as in conduct by probability, a Mohammedan could as well use the theorem for the Koran as could a Christian for the Bible; and the argument against the justice of Nature tended logically to atheism. But the deists had left to them the resource of our modern theists--that of surmising a beneficence above human comprehension; and it is clear that if Butler made any converts they must have been of a very unenthusiastic kind. It is therefore safe to say with Pattison that "To whatever causes is to be attributed the decline of deism from 1750 onwards, the books polemically written against it cannot be reckoned among them." [813]

On the other hand, even deists who were affected by the plea that the Bible need not be more consistent and satisfactory than Nature, could find refuge in Unitarianism, a creed which, as industriously propounded by Priestley [814] towards the end of the century, made a numerical progress out of all proportion to that of orthodoxy. The argument of William Law, [815] again, which insisted on the irreconcilability of the course of things with human reason, and called for an abject submission to revelation, could appeal only to minds already thus prostrate. Both his and Butler's methods, in fact, prepared the way for Hume. And in the year 1741, five years after the issue of the Analogy and seven before the issue of Hume's Essay on Miracles, we find the thesis of that essay tersely affirmed in a note to Book II of an anonymous translation (ascribed to T. Francklin) of Cicero's De Natura Deorum.

The passage is worth comparing with Hume: "Hence we see what
little credit ought to be paid to facts said to be done out
of the ordinary course of nature. These miracles [cutting the
whetstone, etc., related by Cicero, De Div. i, c. xvii] are well
attested. They were recorded in the annals of a great people,
believed by many learned and otherwise sagacious persons, and
received as religious truths by the populace; but the testimonies
of ancient records, the credulity of some learned men, and the
implicit faith of the vulgar, can never prove that to have been,
which is impossible in the nature of things ever to be." M. Tullius
Cicero Of the Nature of the Gods ... with Notes, London, 1741,
p. 85. It does not appear to have been noted that in regard to
this as to another of his best-known theses, Hume develops a
proposition laid down before him.

What Hume did was to elaborate the skeptical argument with a power and fullness which forced attention once for all, alike in England and on the Continent. It is not to be supposed, however, that Hume's philosophy, insofar as it was strictly skeptical--that is, suspensory--drew away deists from their former attitude of confidence to one of absolute doubt. Nor did Hume ever aim at such a result. What he did was to countermine the mines of Berkeley and others, who, finding their supra-rational dogmas set aside by rationalism, deistic or atheistic, sought to discredit at once deistic and atheistic philosophies based on study of the external world, and to establish their creed anew on the basis of their subjective consciousness. As against that method, Hume showed the futility of all apriorism alike, destroying the sham skepticism of the Christian theists by forcing their method to its conclusions. If the universe was to be reduced to a mere contingent of consciousness, he calmly showed, consciousness itself was as easily reducible, on the same principles, to a mere series of states. Idealistic skepticism, having disposed of the universe, must make short work of the hypostatized process of perception. Hume, knowing that strict skepticism is practically null in life, counted on leaving the ground cleared for experiential rationalism. And he did, insofar as he was read. His essay, Of Miracles (with the rest of the Inquiries of 1748-1751, which recast his early Treatise of Human Nature, 1739), posits a principle valid against all supernaturalism whatever; while his Natural History of Religion (1757), though affirming deism, rejected the theory of a primordial monotheism, and laid the basis of the science of Comparative Hierology. [816] Finally, his posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) admit, though indirectly, the untenableness of deism, and fall back decisively upon the atheistic or agnostic position. [817] Like Descartes, he lacked the heroic fibre; but like him he recast philosophy for modern Europe; and its subsequent course is but a development of or a reaction against his work.

§ 10

It is remarkable that this development of opinion took place in that part of the British Islands where religious fanaticism had gone furthest, and speech and thought were socially least free. Freethought in Scotland before the middle of the seventeenth century can have existed only as a thing furtive and accursed; and though, as we have seen from the Religio Stoici of Sir George Mackenzie, unbelief had emerged in some abundance at or before the Restoration, only wealthy men could dare openly to avow their deism. [818] Early in 1697 the clergy had actually succeeded in getting a lad of eighteen, Thomas Aikenhead, hanged for professing deism in general, and in particular for calling the Old Testament "Ezra's Fables," ridiculing the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and expressing the hope and belief that Christianity would be extinct within a century. [819] The spirit of the prosecution may be gathered from the facts that the boy broke down and pleaded penitence, [820] and that the statute enacted the capital penalty only for obstinately persisting in the denial of any of the persons of the Trinity. [821] He had talked recklessly against the current creed among youths about his own age, one of whom was in Locke's opinion "the decoy who gave him the books and made him speak as he did." [822] It would appear that a victim was very much wanted; and Aikenhead was not allowed the help of a counsel. It is characteristic of the deadening effect of dogmatic religion on the heart that an act of such brutish cruelty elicited no cry of horror from any Christian writer. At this date the clergy were hounding on the Privy Council to new activity in trying witches; and all works of supposed heretical tendency imported from England were confiscated in the Edinburgh shops, among them being Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth. [823] Scottish intellectual development had in fact been arrested by the Reformation, so that, save for Napier's Logarithms (1614) and such a political treatise as Rutherford's Lex Rex (1644), the nation of Dunbar and Lyndsay produced for two centuries no secular literature of the least value, and not even a theology of any enduring interest. Deism, accordingly, seems in the latter half of the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth century to have made fully as much progress in Scotland as in England; and the bigoted clergy could offer little intellectual resistance.

As early as 1696 the Scottish General Assembly, with theological
candour, passed an Act "against the Atheistical opinions of
the Deists." (Abridgment of the Acts of the General Assemblies,
1721, pp. 16, 76; Cunningham, Hist. of the Ch. of Scotland, ii,
313.) The opinions specified were "The denying of all revealed
religion, the grand mysteries of the gospels ... the resurrection
of the dead, and, in a word, the certainty and authority of
Scripture revelation; as also, their asserting that there must
be a mathematical evidence for each purpose ... and that Natural
Light is sufficient to Salvation." All this is deism, pure and
simple. But Sir W. Anstruther (a judge in the Court of Session),
in the preface to his Essays Moral and Divine, Edinburgh, 1710,
speaks of "the spreading contagion of atheism, which threatens the
ruin of our excellent and holy religion." To atheism he devotes
two essays; and neither in these nor in one on the Incarnation
does he discuss deism, the arguments he handles being really
atheistic. Scottish freethought would seem thus to have gone
further than English at the period in question.

As to the prevalence of deism, however, see the posthumous
work of Prof. Halyburton, of St. Andrews, Natural Religion
Insufficient (Edinburgh, 1714), Epist. of Recom.; pref. pp. 25,
27, and pp. 8, 15, 19, 23, 31, etc. Halyburton's treatise is
interesting as showing the psychological state of argumentative
Scotch orthodoxy in his day. He professes to repel the deistical
argument throughout by reason; he follows Huet, and concurs with
Berkeley in contending that mathematics involves anti-rational
assumptions; and he takes entire satisfaction in the execution
of the lad Aikenhead for deism. Yet in a second treatise, An
Essay Concerning the Nature of Faith, he contends, as against
Locke and the "Rationalists," that the power to believe in the
word of God is "expressly deny'd to man in his natural estate,"
and is a supernatural gift. Thus the Calvinists, like Baxter,
were at bottom absolutely insincere in their profession to act
upon reason, while insolently charging insincerity on others.

Even apart from deism there had arisen a widespread aversion to dogmatic theology and formal creeds, so that an apologist of 1715 speaks of his day as "a time when creeds and Confessions of Faith are so generally decried, and not only exposed to contempt, as useless inventions ... but are loaded by many writers of distinguished wit and learning with the most fatal and dangerous consequences." [824] This writer admits the intense bitterness of the theological disputes of the time; [825] and he speaks, on the other hand, of seeing "the most sacred mysteries of godliness impudently denied and impugned" by some, while the "distinguishing doctrines of Christianity are by others treacherously undermined, subtilized into an airy phantom, or at least doubted, if not disclaimed." [826] His references are probably to works published in England, notably those of Locke, Toland, Shaftesbury, and Collins, since in Scotland no such literature could then be published; but he doubtless has an eye to Scottish opinion.

While, however, the rationalism of the time could not take book form, there are clear traces of its existence among educated men, even apart from the general complaints of the apologists. Thus the Professor of Medicine at Glasgow University in the opening years of the eighteenth century, John Johnston, was a known freethinker. [827] In the way of moderate or Christian rationalism, the teaching of the prosecuted Simson seems to have counted for something, seeing that Francis Hutcheson at least imbibed from him "liberal" views about future punishment and the salvation of the heathen, which gave much offence in the Presbyterian pulpit in Ulster. [828] And Hutcheson's later vindication of the ethical system of Shaftesbury in his Inquiry Concerning the Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725) must have tended to attract attention in Scotland to the Characteristics after his instalment as a Professor at Glasgow. In an English pamphlet, in 1732, he was satirized as introducing Shaftesbury's system into a University, [829] and it was from the Shaftesbury camp that the first literary expression of freethought in Scotland was sent forth. A young Scotch deist of that school, William Dudgeon, published in 1732 a dialogue entitled The State of the Moral World Considered, wherein the optimistic position was taken up with uncommon explicitness; and in 1739 the same writer printed A Catechism Founded upon Experience and Reason, prefaced by an Introductory Letter on Natural Religion, which takes a distinctly anti-clerical attitude. The Catechism answers to its title, save insofar as it is à priori in its theism and optimistic in its ethic, as is another work of its author in the same year, A View of the Necessarian or Best Scheme, defending the Shaftesburyan doctrine against the criticism of Crousaz on Pope's Essay. Still more heterodox is his little volume of Philosophical Letters Concerning the Being and Attributes of God (1737), where the doctrine goes far towards pantheism. All this propaganda seems to have elicited only one printed reply--an attack on his first treatise in 1732. In the letter prefaced to his Catechism, however, he tells that "the bare suspicion of my not believing the opinions in fashion in our country hath already caused me sufficient trouble." [830] His case had in fact been raised in the Church courts, the proceedings going through many stages in the years 1732-36; but in the end no decision was taken, [831] and the special stress of his rationalism in 1739 doubtless owes something alike to the prosecution and to its collapse. Despite such hostility, he must privately have had fair support. [832]

The prosecution of Hutcheson before the Glasgow Presbytery in 1738 reveals vividly the theological temper of the time. He was indicted for teaching to his students "the following two false and dangerous doctrines: first, that the standard of moral goodness was the promotion of the happiness of others; and, second, that we could have a knowledge of good and evil without and prior to a knowledge of God." [833] There has been a natural disposition on the orthodox side to suppress the fact that such teachings were ever ecclesiastically denounced as false, dangerous, and irreligious; and the prosecution seems to have had no effect beyond intensifying the devotion of Hutcheson's students. Among them was Adam Smith, of whom it has justly been said that, "if he was any man's disciple, he was Hutcheson's," inasmuch as he derived from his teacher the bases alike of his moral and political philosophy and of his deistic optimism. [834] Another prosecution soon afterwards showed that the new influences were vitally affecting thought within the Church itself. Hutcheson's friend Leechman, whom he and his party contrived to elect as professor of theology in Glasgow University, was in turn proceeded against (1743-44) for a sermon on Prayer, which Hutcheson and his sympathizers pronounced "noble," [835] but which "resolved the efficacy of prayer into its reflex influence on the mind of the worshipper" [836]--a theorem which has chronically made its appearance in the Scottish Church ever since, still ranking as a heresy, after having brought a clerical prosecution in the last century on at least one divine, Prof. William Knight, and rousing a scandal against another, the late Dr. Robert Wallace. [837]

Leechman in turn held his ground, and later became Principal of his University; but still the orthodox in Scotland fought bitterly against every semblance of rationalism. Even the anti-deistic essays of Lord-President Forbes of Culloden, head of the Court of Session, when collected [838] and posthumously published, were offensive to the Church as laying undue stress on reason; as accepting the heterodox Biblical theories of Dr. John Hutchinson; and as making the awkward admission that "the freethinkers, with all their perversity, generally are sensible of the social duties, and act up to them better than others do who in other respects think more justly than they." [839] Such an utterance from such a dignitary told of a profound change; and, largely through the influence of Hutcheson and Leechman on a generation of students, the educated Scotland of the latter half of the eighteenth century was in large part either "Moderate" or deistic. After generations of barren controversy, [840] the very aridity of the Presbyterian life intensified the recoil among the educated classes to philosophical and historical interests, leading to the performances of Hume, Smith, Robertson, Millar, Ferguson, and yet others, all rationalists in method and sociologists in their interests.

Of these, Millar, one of Smith's favourite pupils, and a table-talker of "magical vivacity," [841] was known to be rationalistic in a high degree; [842] while Smith and Ferguson were certainly deists, as was Henry Home (the judge, Lord Kames), who had the distinction of being attacked along with his friend Hume in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1755-56. Home wrote expressly to controvert Hume, alike as to utilitarianism and the idea of causation; but his book, Essays on Morality and Natural Religion (published anonymously, 1751), handled the thorny question of free-will in such fashion as to give no less offence than Hume had done; and the orthodox bracketed him with the subject of his criticism. His doctrine was indeed singular, its purport being that there can be no free-will, but that the deity has for wise purposes implanted in men the feeling that their wills are free. The fact of his having been made a judge of the Court of Session since writing his book had probably something to do with the rejection of the whole subject by the General Assembly, and afterwards by the Edinburgh Presbytery; but there had evidently arisen a certain diffidence in the Church, which would be assiduously promoted by "moderates" such as Principal Robertson, the historian. It is noteworthy that, while Home and Hume thus escaped, the other Home, John, who wrote the then admired tragedy of Douglas, was soon after forced to resign his position as a minister of the Church for that authorship, deism having apparently more friends in the fold than drama. [843] While the theatre was thus being treated as a place of sin, many of the churches in Scotland were the scenes of repeated Sunday riots. A new manner of psalm-singing had been introduced, and it frequently happened that the congregations divided into two parties, each singing in its own way, till they came to blows. According to one of Hume's biographers, unbelievers were at this period wont to go to church to see the fun. [844] Naturally orthodoxy did not gain ground.

In the case of Adam Smith we have one of the leading instances of the divorce between culture and creed in the Scotland of that age. His intellectual tendencies, primed by Hutcheson, were already revealing themselves when, seeking for something worth study in the unstudious Oxford of his day, he was found by some suspicious supervisor reading Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. The book was seized and the student scolded. [845] When, in 1751, he became Professor of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow University, he aroused orthodox comment by abandoning the Sunday class on Christian Evidences set up by Hutcheson, and still further, it is said, by petitioning the Senatus to be allowed to be relieved of the duty of opening his class with prayer. [846] The permission was not given; and the compulsory prayers were "thought to savour strongly of natural religion"; while the lectures on Natural Theology, which were part of the work of the chair, were said to lead "presumptuous striplings" to hold that "the great truths of theology, together with the duties which man owes to God and his neighbours, may be discovered by the light of nature without any special revelation." [847] Smith was thus well founded in rationalism before he became personally acquainted with Voltaire and the other French freethinkers; and the pious contemporary who deplores his associations avows that neither before nor after his French tour was his religious creed ever "properly ascertained." [848] It is clear, however, that it steadily developed in a rationalistic direction. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) the prevailing vein of theistic optimism is sufficiently uncritical; but even there there emerges an apparent doubt on the doctrine of a future state, and positive hostility to certain ecclesiastical forms of it. [849] In the sixth edition, which he prepared for the press in 1790, he deleted the passage which pronounced the doctrine of the Atonement to be in harmony with natural ethics. [850] But most noteworthy of all is his handling of the question of religious establishments in the Wealth of Nations. [851] It is so completely naturalistic that only the habit of taking the Christian religion for granted could make men miss seeing that its account of the conditions of the rise of new cults applied to that in its origin no less than to the rise of any of its sects. As a whole, the argument might form part of Gibbon's fifteenth chapter. And even allowing for the slowness of the average believer to see the application of a general sociological law to his own system, there must be inferred a great change in the intellectual climate of Scottish life before we can account for Smith's general popularity at home as well as abroad after his handling of "enthusiasm and superstition" in the Wealth of Nations. The fact stands out that the two most eminent thinkers in Scotland in the latter half of the eighteenth century were non-Christians, [852] and that their most intellectual associates were in general sympathy with them.

§ 11

In Ireland, at least in Dublin, during the earlier part of the century, there occurred, on a smaller scale, a similar movement of rationalism, also largely associated with Shaftesbury. In Dublin towards the close of the seventeenth century we have seen Molyneux, the friend and correspondent of Locke, interested in "freethought," albeit much scared by the imprudence of Toland. At the same period there germinated a growth of Unitarianism, which was even more fiercely persecuted than that of Toland's deism. The Rev. Thomas Emlyn, an Englishman, co-pastor of the Protestant Dissenting Congregation of Wood Street (now Strand Street), Dublin, was found by a Presbyterian and a Baptist to be heretical on the subject of the Trinity, and was indicted in 1702 for blasphemy. He was sentenced to two years' imprisonment and a fine of £1,000, which was partly commuted on his release. He protested that South and Sherlock and other writers on the Trinitarian controversy might have been as justly prosecuted as he; but Irish Protestant orthodoxy was of a keener scent than English, and Emlyn was fain, when released, to return to his native land. [853] His colleague Boyse, like many other Churchmen, wished that the unhappy trinitarian controversy "were buried in silence," but was careful to conform doctrinally. More advanced thinkers had double reason to be reticent. As usual, however, persecution provoked the growth it sought to stifle; and after the passing of the Irish Toleration Act of 1719, a more liberal measure than the English, there developed in Ulster, and even in Dublin, a Unitarian movement akin to that proceeding in England. [854] In the next generation we find in the same city a coterie of Shaftesburyans, centring around Lord Molesworth, the friend of Hutcheson, a man of affairs devoted to intellectual interests. It was within a few years of his meeting Molesworth that Hutcheson produced his Inquiry, championing Shaftesbury's ideas; [855] and other literary men were similarly influenced. It is even suggested that Hutcheson's clerical friend Synge, whom we have seen [856] in 1713 attempting a ratiocinative answer to the unbelief he declared to be abundant around him, was not only influenced by Shaftesbury through Molesworth, but latterly "avoided publication lest his opinions should prejudice his career in the Church." [857] After the death of Molesworth, in 1725, the movement he set up seems to have languished; [858] but, as we have seen, there were among the Irish bishops men given to philosophic controversy, and the influence of Berkeley cannot have been wholly obscurantist. When in 1756 we read of the Arian Bishop Clayton [859] proposing in the Irish House of Lords to drop the Nicene and Athanasian creeds, we realize that in Ireland thought was far from stagnant. The heretic bishop, however, died (February, 1758) just as he was about to be prosecuted for the anti-Athanasian heresies of his last book; and thenceforth Ireland plays no noticeable part in the development of rationalism, political interests soon taking the place of religious, with the result that orthodoxy recovered ground.

It cannot be doubted that the spectacle of religious wickedness presented by the operation of the odious penal laws against Catholics, and the temper of the Protestant Ascendancy party in religious matters, had bred rational skepticism in Ireland in the usual way. Molesworth stands out in Irish history as a founder of a new and saner patriotism; and his doctrines would specially appeal to men of a secular and critical way of thinking. Heretical bishops imply heretical laymen. But the environment was unpropitious to dispassionate thinking. The very relaxation of the Penal Code favoured a reversion to "moderate" orthodoxy; and the new political strifes of the last quarter of the century, destined as they were to be reopened in the next, determined the course of Irish culture in another way.

§ 12

In England, meanwhile, there was beginning the redistribution of energies which can be seen to have prepared for the intellectual and political reaction of the end of the century. There had been no such victory of faith as is supposed to have been wrought by the forensic theorem of Butler. An orthodox German observer, making a close inquest about 1750, cites the British Magazine as stating in 1749 that half the educated people were then deists; and he, after full inquiry, agrees. [860] In the same year, Richardson speaks tragically in the Postscriptum to Clarissa of seeing "skepticism and infidelity openly avowed, and even endeavoured to be propagated from the press; the great doctrines of the gospel brought into question"; and he describes himself as "seeking to steal in with a disguised plea for religion." Instead of being destroyed by the clerical defence, the deistic movement had really penetrated the Church, which was become as rationalistic in its methods as its function would permit, and the educated classes, which had arrived at a state of compromise. Pope, the chief poet of the preceding generation, had been visibly deistic in his thinking; as Dryden had inferribly been before him; and to such literary prestige was added the prestige of scholarship. The academic Conyers Middleton, whose Letter from Rome had told so heavily against Christianity in exposing the pagan derivations of much of Catholicism, and who had further damaged the doctrine of inspiration in his anonymous Letter to Dr. Waterland (1731), while professing to refute Tindal, had carried to yet further lengths his service to the critical spirit. In his famous Free Inquiry into the miracles of post-apostolic Christianity (1749), again professing to strike at Rome, he had laid the foundations of a new structure of comparative criticism, and had given permanent grounds for rejecting the miracles of the sacred books.

Middleton's book appeared a year after Hume's essay Of Miracles, and it made out no such philosophic case as Hume's against the concept of miracle; but it created at once, by its literary brilliance and its cogent argument, a sensation such as had thus far been made neither by Hume's philosophic argument nor by Francklin's anticipation of that. [861] Middleton had duly safeguarded himself by positing the certainty of the gospel miracles and of those wrought by the Apostles, on the old principle [862] that prodigies were divinely arranged so far forth as was necessary to establish Christianity, but no further. "The history of the gospel," he writes, "I hope may be true, though the history of the Church be fabulous." [863] But his argument against post-Apostolic miracles is so strictly naturalistic that no vigilant reader could fail to realize its fuller bearing upon all miracles whatsoever. With Hume and Francklin, he insisted that facts incredible in themselves could not be established by any amount or kind of testimony; and he suggested no measure of comparative credibility as between the two orders of miracle. With the deists in general, he argued that knowledge "either of the ways or will of the Creator" was to be had only through study of "that revelation which he made of himself from the beginning in the beautiful fabric of this visible world." [864] An antagonist accordingly wrote that his theses were: "First, that there were no miracles wrought in the primitive Church; Secondly, that all the primitive fathers were fools or knaves, and most of them both one and the other. And it is easy to observe, the whole tenor of your argument tends to prove, Thirdly, that no miracles were wrought by Christ or his apostles; and Fourthly, that these too were fools or knaves, or both." [865] A more temperate opponent pressed the same point in less explosive language. Citing Middleton's demand for an inductive method, this critic asks with much point: "What does he mean by 'deserting the path of Nature and experience,' but giving in to the belief of any miracles, and acknowledging the reality of events contrary to the known effects of the established Laws of Nature?" [866]

No other answer was seriously possible. In the very act of ostentatiously terming Tindal an "infidel," Middleton describes an answer made to him by the apologist Chapman as a sample of a kind of writing which did "more hurt and discredit" to Christianity "than all the attacks of its open adversaries." [867] In support of the miracles of the gospel and the apostolic history he offers merely conventional pleas: against the miracles related by the Fathers he brings to bear an incessant battery of destructive criticism. We may sum up that by the middle of the eighteenth century the essentials of the Christian creed, openly challenged for a generation by avowed deists, were abandoned by not a few scholars within the pale of the Church, of whom Middleton was merely the least reticent. After his death was published his Vindication of the Inquiry (1751); and in his collected works (1752) was included his Reflections on the Variations or Inconsistencies which are found among the Four Evangelists, wherein it is demonstrated that "the belief of the inspiration and absolute infallibility of the evangelists seems to be more absurd than even that of transubstantiation itself." [868] The main grounds of orthodoxy were thus put in doubt in the name of a critical orthodoxy. In short, the deistic movement had done what it lay in it to do. The old evangelical or pietistic view of life was discredited among instructed people, and in this sense it was Christianity that had "decayed." Its later recovery was economic, not intellectual.

Thus Skelton writes in 1751 that "our modern apologists for
Christianity often defend it on deistical principles" (Deism
Revealed, pref. p. xii. Cp. vol. ii, pp. 234, 237). See also
Sir Leslie Stephen as cited above, p. 149, note; and Gostwick,
German Culture and Christianity, 1882, pp. 33-36.