Chapter XXXVI: Conclusion (3)

[725] Sir Leslie Stephen (English Thought, i, 283) speaks of Dodwell's thesis as deserving only "pity or contempt." Cp. Macaulay, Student's ed. ii, 107-108. But a doctrine of conditional immortality had been explicitly put by Locke in his Reasonableness of Christianity, 1695, p. 13. Cp. Prof. Fraser's Locke, 1890, pp. 259-60, and Fox Bourne's Life of Locke, ii, 287. The difference was that Dodwell elaborately gave his reasons, which, as Dr. Clarke put it, made "all good men sorry, and all profane men rejoice."

[726] History of his Own Time, ed. 1838, p. 887.

[727] Compare his ironical Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, 1708.

[728] He had, however, hailed the anonymous Letter Concerning Enthusiasm as "very well writ," believing it to be by a friend of his own--(Robert Hunter, to whom, accordingly, it has since been mistakenly attributed by various bibliographers, including Barbier). "Enthusiasm," as meaning "popular fanaticism," was of course as repellent to a Churchman as to the deists.

[729] Printed in folio 1711. Rep. in vol. xi of the Harleian Miscellany, p. 168 sq. (2nd ed. p. 163 sq.).

[730] Dr. E. Synge, of Dublin (afterwards Archbishop of Tuam), in his Religion Tryed by the Test of Sober and Impartial Reason, published in 1713, seems to be writing before the issue of Collins's book when he says (Dedication, p. 11) that the spread of the "disease not only of Heterodoxy but of Infidelity" is "too plain to be either denied or dissembled."

[731] Leslie affirms in his Truth of Christianity Demonstrated (1711, p. 14) that the satirical Detection of his Short Method with the Deists, to which the Truth is a reply, was by the author of Priestcraft in Perfection; but, while the Detection has some of Collins's humour, it lacks his amenity, and is evidently not by him.

[732] An English translation of the Dictionary, in 5 vols. folio, with "many passages restored," appeared in 1734.

[733] A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke, 1720, p. 271.

[734] E.g. Mark Pattison, who calls Collins's book of 178 pages a "small tract."

[735] "Ignorance," Collins writes, "is the foundation of Atheism, and Freethinking the cure of it" (Discourse of Freethinking, p. 105). Like Newton, he contemplated only an impossible atheism, never formulated by any writer. The Philosophical Principles of Religion, Natural and Reveal'd, of Dr. George Cheyne (1705, 2nd ed. 1715), similarly declares (pref. end) that "if the modern [i.e. Newtonian] philosophy demonstrates nothing else, yet it infallibly proves Atheism to be the most gross ignorance." Thus the vindicator of "religion" was writing in the key of the deist.

[736] Mr. Temple Scott, in his Bohn ed. of Swift's Works (iii, 166), asserts that Swift's satire "frightened Collins into Holland." For this statement there is no evidence whatever, and as it stands it is unintelligible. The assertion that Collins had had to fly to Holland in 1711 (Dr. Conybeare, Hist. of N. T. Crit. R. P. A. 1910, p. 38) is also astray.

[737] Second ed. 1717. Another writer, William Lyons, was on the same track, publishing The Infallibility of Human Judgment, its Dignity and Excellence (2nd ed. 1720), and A Discourse of the Necessity of Human Actions (1730).

[738] Work cited, p. 13.

[739] As to whose positions see a paper in the writer's Pioneer Humanists, 1907.

[740] There were six separate Discourses. Voltaire speaks of "three editions coup sur coup of ten thousand each" (Lettre sur les auteurs Anglais--in OEuvres, ed. 1792. lxviii, 359). This seems extremely unlikely as to any one Discourse; and even 5,000 copies of each Discourse is a hardly credible sale, though the writer of the sketch of his life (1733) says that "the sale of Mr. Woolston's works was very great." In any case, Woolston's Discourses are now seldomer met with than Collins's Discourse of Freethinking. Alberti (Briefe betreffend den Zustand der Religion in Gross-Brittannien) wrote in 1752 that the Discourses were even in that day somewhat rare, and seldom found together. Many copies were probably destroyed by the orthodox, and many would doubtless be thrown away, as tracts so often are.

[741] Tyerman's Life of Wesley, ed. 1871, i, 65-66.

[742] The Infidel Convicted, 1731, pp. 33, 62.

[743] Tindal (1653-1733) was the son of a clergyman, and in 1678 was elected a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford. From 1685 to 1688 he was a Roman Catholic. Under William III he wrote three works on points of political freedom--one, 1698, on The Liberty of the Press. His Rights of the Christian Church, anonymously published in 1706, a defence of Erastianism, made a great sensation, and was prosecuted--only to be reprinted. His later Defence of the Rights of the Christian Church was in 1710, by order of the House of Commons, burned by the common hangman.

[744] Middleton's Works, 2nd ed. 1755, iii, 50-56.

[745] Tindal (Voltaire tells) regarded Pope as devoid of genius and imagination, and so trebly earned his place in the Dunciad.

[746] A Layman's Faith.... "By a Freethinker and a Christian," 1732.

[747] Title-page of Rev. Elisha Smith's Cure of Deism, 1st ed. 1736; 3rd ed. 1740.

[748] Le Moine, Dissertation historique sur les écrits de Woolston, sa condemnation, etc. pp. 29-31, cited by Salchi, Lettres sur le Déisme, 1759, p. 67 sq.

[749] Lettre sur les auteurs Anglais, as cited. Voltaire tells that, when a she-bigot one day spat in Woolston's face, he calmly remarked: "It was so that the Jews treated your God." Another story reads like a carefully-improved version of the foregoing. A woman is said to have accosted him as a scoundrel, and asked him why he was not yet hanged. On his asking her grounds for such an accost, she replied: "You have writ against my Saviour. What would become of my poor sinful soul if it was not for my dear Saviour--my Saviour who died for such wicked sinners as I am." Life of Mr. Woolston, prefixed to a reprint of his collected Discourses, 1733, p. 27. Cp. Salchi, p. 78.

[750] Life cited, pp. 22, 26, 29.

[751] An Historical Defence of the Trustees of Lady Hewley's Foundations, by the Rev. Joseph Hunter, 1834, pp. 17, 35; The History, Opinions, and present legal position of the English Presbyterians, 1834, pp. 18, 29; Skeats, History of the Free Churches of England, ed. Miall, p. 240.

[752] Hunter, as cited, p. 17; History of the Presbyterians, as cited, p. 19; Fletcher, History of Independency, 1862, iv, 266-67.

[753] Hunter, pp. 37, 39.

[754] Skeats, as cited, p. 226.

[755] Hunter, pp. 24-25.

[756] Skeats (pp.239-40) sums up that while the Baptists had probably "never been entirely free from the taint" of Unitarianism, the Particular Baptists and the Congregationalists were saved from it by their lack of men of "eminently speculative mind"; while the Presbyterians "were men, for the most part, of larger reading than other Nonconformists, and the writings of Whiston and Clarke had found their way among them." But the tendency existed before Whiston and Clarke.

[757] History, cited, p. 22; Hunter, pp. 44-45; Skeats, pp. 243-44.

[758] Skeats, pp. 240-43, 245 sq.

[759] Skeats, p. 248.

[760] Hunter, p. 50.

[761] As Sir Leslie Stephen has observed (English Thought, i, 164), Chubb "deserves the praise of Malthusians." Having a sufficiency of means for himself, but not more, he "lived a single life, judging it greatly improper to introduce a family into the world without a prospect of maintaining them." The proverb as to mouths and meat, he drily observes, had not been verified in his experience. (The Author's Account of Himself, pref. to Posthumous Works, 1748, i, p. iv.)

[762] One of the then numerous tribe of eccentrics. He held by Judaic Sabbatarianism, and affected a Rabinnical costume. He made a competence, however, as an ironmonger.

[763] Essay Towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain.

[764] Discourse to Magistrates.

[765] Guardian, Nos. 3, 55, 88.

[766] The Analyst, Queries, 55-67.

[767] See above, pp. 126-28.

[768] Discourse of Passive Obedience, § 26.

[769] Works, ed. 1837, p. 352.

[770] See the whole context, which palpitates with excitement.

[771] Mr. Walter Sichel (Bolingbroke and his Times, 1901, i, 175) thinks fit to dispose of her attitude as "her aversion to the Church and to everything that transcended her own faculties." So far as the evidence goes, her faculties were much superior to those of most of her orthodox contemporaries. For her tone see her letters.

[772] E.g. Dunciad, ii, 399; iii, 212; iv, 492.

[773] Voltaire commented pointedly on Pope's omission to make any reference to Shaftesbury, while vending his doctrine. (Lettres Philosophiques, xxii.) As a matter of fact Pope does in the Dunciad (iv, 488) refer maliciously to the Theocles of Shaftesbury's Moralists as maintaining a Lucretian theism or virtual atheism. The explanation is that Shaftesbury had sharply criticized the political course of Bolingbroke, who in turn ignored him as a thinker. See the present writer's introd. to Shaftesbury's Characteristics, ed. 1900 (rep. in Pioneer Humanists); and cp. W. R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson, 1900, p. 101.

[774] Texte, Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature, Eng. tr. pp. 117-18.

[775] Chesterfield in his Characters (app. to the Letters) testifies that Pope "was a deist believing in a future state; this he has often owned himself to me." (Bradshaw's ed. of Letters, iii, 1410.) Chesterfield makes a similar statement concerning Queen Caroline:--"After puzzling herself in all the whimsies and fantastical speculations of different sects, she fixed herself ultimately in Deism, believing in a future state." (Id. p. 1406.)

[776] Dict. Philos. art. Athée, § 2.

[777] Wise, in his adaptation of Cudworth, A Confutation of the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism (1706), writes (i, 5) that "the philosophical atheists are but few in number," and their objections so weak "as that they deserve not a hearing but rather neglect"; but confusedly goes on to admit that "one or two broachers of 'em maybe thought able to infect a whole nation, as ... sad experience tells us."

[778] Complaint to this effect was made by orthodox writers. The Scotch Professor Halyburton, for instance, complains that in many sermons in his day "Heathen Morality has been substituted in the room of Gospel Holiness. And Ethicks by some have been preached instead of the Gospels of Christ." Natural Religion Insufficient (Edinburgh), 1714, p. 25. Cp. pp. 23, 26-27, 59, etc. Bishop Burnet, in the Conclusion to his History of his Own Time, declares, "I must own that the main body of our clergy has always seemed dead and lifeless to me," and ascribes much more zeal to Catholics and dissenters. (Ed. 1838, pp. 907-910.)

[779] The Moralists deals rather with strict skepticism than with substantive atheism.

[780] The Grand Essay: or, a Vindication of Reason and Religion against Impostures of Philosophy. The book was, on March 18, 1704, condemned by the House of Commons to be burned in Palace Yard, along with its author's Second Thoughts Concerning the Human Soul (1702). A second ed. of the latter appeared soon after.

[781] Above, p. 153.

[782] Mr. Herbert Paul, in his essay on Swift (Men and Letters, 1901, p. 267), lumps as deists the four writers named by Swift in his Argument. Not having read them, he thinks fit to asperse all four as bad writers. Asgill, as was noted by Coleridge (Table Talk, July 30, 1831; April 30, 1832), was one of the best writers of his time. He was, in fact, a master of the staccato style, practised by Mr. Paul with less success.

[783] Work cited, p. 324. The book is now rare.

[784] Cp. Cheyne, Founders of Old Testament Criticism, 1893, p. 2.

[785] Dr. Cheyne expresses surprise that a "theological writer" who got no far should not have been "prompted by his good genius to follow up his advantage." It is, however, rather remarkable that Parvish, who was a bookseller at Guildford (Alberti, Briefe, p. 426), should have achieved what he did. It was through not being a theological writer that he went so far, no theologian of his day following him.

[786] See the author's introduction to ed. of the Characteristics, 1900, rep. in Pioneer Humanists.

[787] The question remains obscure. Cp. the Letter cited, reprinted at end of Carver's 1830 ed. of Paine's Works (New York); F. Thackeray's Life of Chatham, ii, 405; and Chatham's "scalping-knife" speech.

[788] A Vindication of the Moral Philosopher appeared in 1741.

[789] Cp. Lechler, pp. 371, 386.

[790] Cp. Cairns, Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century, 1881, p. 101.

[791] Ed. 1741, p. 30 sq.

[792] View of the Deistical Writers, Letter XI (X in 1st ed.).

[793] Sir Leslie Stephen, English Thought, i, 169.

[794] Act 9th, Geo. II (1736), ch. 5.

[795] A Tour in Ireland, ed. 1892, ii, 59-72.

[796] Young at this period was entirely secular in his thinking. Telling of his recovery from a fever in 1790, he writes: "I fear that not one thought of God ever occurred to me at that time" (Autobiography, 1898, p. 188). Afterwards he fell into religious melancholia (Introd. note of editor).

[797] Really an abler man than half the others in the list, but himself a good deal of a heretic. So far from attempting to make "victims," he pleaded for a more candid treatment of deistic objections.

[798] Doddridge himself was not theologically orthodox, but was an evangelical Christian. Dr. Stoughton, Religion in England under Queen Anne and the Georges, 1878, i, 344-46.

[799] Whose doctrine Sir Leslie Stephen elsewhere (p. 258) calls a "brutal theology which gloried in trampling on the best instincts of its opponents," and a "most unlovely product of eighteenth-century speculation."

[800] Of Warburton Sir Leslie writes elsewhere (p. 353) that "this colossus was built up of rubbish." See p. 352 for samples. Again he speaks (p. 368) of the bishop's pretensions as "colossal impudence." It should be noted, further, that Warburton's teaching in the Divine Legation was a gross heresy in the eyes of William Law, who in his Short but Sufficient Confutation pronounced its main thesis a "most horrible doctrine." Ed. 1768, as cited, i, 217.

[801] As to whose "senile incompetence" see same vol. p. 234.

[802] History of Protestant Theology, Eng. tr. ii, 77. For the influence of deism on Germany, see Tholuck (Vermischte Schriften, Bd. ii) and Lechler (Gesch. des englischen Deismus).--Note by Dr. Cheyne.

[803] An Essay towards a Natural History of the Earth, 3rd ed. 1723, pref. and pp. 16 sq., 77 sq. Cp. White, Warfare of Science with Theology, i. 227.

[804] End of pref.

[805] Work cited, p. 85.

[806] Playfair, in the Edinburgh Review, January, 1808, cited by Brewster, Memoirs of Newton, 1855. i, 347.

[807] Brewster, as last cited.

[808] Grant, History of Physical Astronomy, 1852, p. 108.

[809] Baden Powell, Hist. of Nat. Philos. 1834, p. 363.

[810] Brewster, More Worlds than One, 1854, p. 111.

[811] Sir James Stephen, Horæ Sabbaticæ, ii, 281; Lechler, p. 451.

[812] See details in Dynamics of Religion, ch. viii.

[813] Essay on "Tendencies of Religious Thought in England: 1688-1750," in Essays and Reviews, 9th ed. p. 304.

[814] In criticizing whom Sir Leslie Stephen barely notices his scientific work, but dwells much on his religious fallacies--a course which would make short work of the fame of Newton.

[815] In his Case of Reason; or, Natural Religion Fully and Fairly Stated, in answer to Tindal (1732). See the argument set forth by Sir Leslie Stephen, i, 158-63. It is noteworthy, however, that in his Spirit of Prayer (1750), pt. ii, dial. i, Law expressly argues that "No other religion can be right but that which has its foundation in Nature. For the God of Nature can require nothing of his creatures but what the state of their nature calls them to." Like Baxter, Berkeley, Butler, and so many other orthodox polemists, Law uses the argument from ignorance when it suits him, and ignores or rejects it when used by others.

[816] The general reader should take note that in A. Murray's issue of Hume's Essays (afterwards published by Ward, Lock, and Co.), which omits altogether the essays on Miracles and a Future State, the Natural History of Religion is much mutilated, though the book professes to be a verbatim reprint.

[817] Even before his death he was suspected of that view. When his coffin was being carried from his house for interment, one of "the refuse of the rabble" is said to have remarked, "Ah, he was an atheist." "No matter," replied another, "he was an honest man" (Curious Particulars, etc., respecting Chesterfield and Hume, 1788, p. 15).

[818] See Burton, Hist. of Scotland, viii, 549-50, as to the case of Pitcairne.

[819] Howell's State Trials, xiii (1812), coll. 917-38.

[820] Macaulay, History, ch. xxii; student's ed. ii, 620-21; Burton, History of Scotland, viii, 76-77. Aikenhead seems to have been a boy of unusual if unbalanced capacity, even by the bullying account of Macaulay, who missed no opportunity to cover himself by stoning heretics. See the boy's arguments on the bases of ethics, set forth in his "dying speech," as cited by Halyburton, Natural Religion Insufficient, 1714, pp. 119-23, 131, and the version in the State Trials, xiii, 930-34.

[821] Macaulay ascribes the savagery of the prosecution to the Lord Advocate, Sir James Stewart, "as cruel as he was base"; but a letter printed in the State Trials, from a member of the Privy Council, says the sentence would have been commuted if "the ministers would intercede." They, however, "spoke and preached for cutting him off." Trials, xiii, 930; Burton, viii, 77.

[822] Letter to Sir Francis Masham, printed in the State Trials, xiii, 928-29--evidently written by Locke, who seems to have preserved all the papers printed by Howell.

[823] Macaulay, as cited. In 1681 one Francis Borthwick, who had gone abroad at the age of fourteen and turned Jew, was accused of blaspheming Jesus, and had to fly for his life, being outlawed. State Trials, as cited, col. 939.

[824] A Full Account of the Several Ends and Uses of Confessions of Faith, first published in 1719 as a preface to a Collection of Confessions of Faith, by Prof. W. Dunbar, of Edinburgh University, 3rd ed. 1775, p. 1.

[825] Work cited, p. 48.

[826] Id. p. 198.

[827] Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century. From the MSS. of John Ramsay, of Ochtertyre, 1888, i, 277. Ramsay describes Johnston as a "joyous, manly, honourable man," of whom Kames "was exceedingly fond" (p. 278).

[828] W. R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson, 1900, pp. 15, 20-21.

[829] Id. p. 52.

[830] Cp. Alberti, Briefe betreffende den Zustand der Religion in Gross-Brittannien, 1752, pp. 430-31.

[831] See Dr. McCosh's Scottish Philosophy, 1875, pp. 111-13. Dr. McCosh notes that at some points Dudgeon anticipated Hume.

[832] Dr. McCosh, however, admits that the absence of the printer's name on the 1765 edition of Dudgeon's works shows that there was then no thorough freedom of thought in Scotland.

[833] Rae, Life of Adam Smith, 1895, p. 13. Prof. Fowler shows no knowledge of this prosecution in his monograph on Hutcheson (Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, 1882); and Mr. W. R. Scott, in his, seems to rely for the wording of the indictment solely on Mr. Rae, who gives no references, drawing apparently on unpublished MSS.

[834] Rae, as cited, pp. 11-15.

[835] Scott, as cited, p. 87.

[836] Dr. James Orr, David Hume and his Influence, etc., 1903. pp. 36-37.

[837] Also for a time a theological professor in Edinburgh University.

[838] The Thoughts Concerning Religion, Natural and Revealed, appeared in 1735; the Letter to a Bishop in 1732; and the Reflections on the Sources of Incredulity (left unfinished) posthumously about 1750. Forbes in his youth had been famed as one of the hardest drinkers of his day.

[839] Reflections on Incredulity, in Works, undated, ii, 141-42. Yet the works of Forbes were translated for orthodox purposes into German, and later into French by Père Houbigant (1769), who preserves the passage on freethinkers' morals, though curtailing the Reflections as a whole.

[840] As to which see A Sober Enquiry into the Grounds of the Present Differences in the Church of Scotland, 1723.

[841] Cockburn's Life of Jeffrey, ed. 1872, p. 10.

[842] See the Autobiography of the Rev. Dr. A. Carlyle, 1860, pp. 492-93. Millar's Historical View of the English Government (censured by Hallam) was once much esteemed; and his Origin of Ranks is still worth the attention of sociologists.

[843] Ritchie's Life of Hume, 1807, pp. 52-81; Tytler's Life of Lord Kames, 2nd ed. 1814, i, ch. v; Burton's Life of Hume, i, 425-30.

[844] Ritchie, as cited, p. 57.

[845] McCulloch, Life of Smith prefixed to ed. of Wealth of Nations, ed. 1839, p. ii.

[846] Ramsay of Ochtertyre, Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, 1888, i, 462-63. Mr. Rae doubts the story, Life of Adam Smith, 1895, p. 60.

[847] Ramsay, as last cited.

[848] Ramsay, passage cited.

[849] Theory of Moral Sentiments, pt. iii, ch. ii, end.

[850] Cp. Rae, pp. 427-30. Mr. Rae thinks the deletion stood for no change of opinion, and cites Smith's own private explanation (Sinclair's Life of Sir John Sinclair, i, 40) that he thought the passage "unnecessary and misplaced." But this expression must be read in the light of Smith's general reticence concerning established dogmas. Certainly he adhered to his argument--which does not claim to be a demonstration--for the doctrine of a future state.

[851] Bk. v, ch. i, pt. iii, art. 3.

[852] Smith's admiration for Voltaire might alone indicate his mental attitude. As to that see F. W. Hirst, Adam Smith (Eng. Men of Letters ser.), pp. 127-28. But the assertion of Skarzinski, that Smith, after being an Idealist under the influence of Hume, "returned a materialist" from his intercourse with Voltaire and other French freethinkers, is an exhibition of learned ignorance. See Hirst, p. 181.

[853] An Explanation and Defence of the Principles of Protestant Dissent, by the Rev. Dr. W. Hamilton Drummond, 1842, pp. 5-6. 47; Skeats, Hist. of the Free Churches of England, ed. Miall, pp. 238-39; Wallace, Anti-Trinitarian Biography, iii, art. 360.

[854] Cp. Drummond, as cited, pp. 29-30; History, Opinions, etc., of the English Presbyterians, 1834, p. 29.

[855] W. R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson, p. 31.

[856] Above, p. 154, note.

[857] Scott, pp. 28-29, 35-36. The suggestion is not quite convincing. Synge, after becoming Archbishop of Tuam, continued to publish his propagandist tracts, among them An Essay towards making the Knowledge of Religion Easy to the Meanest Capacity (6th ed. 1734), which is quite orthodox, and which argues (p. 3) that the doctrine of the Trinity is to be believed, and not pried into, "because it is above our understanding to comprehend." All the while there was being sold also his early treatise, "A Gentleman's Religion: in Three Parts ... with an Appendix, wherein it is proved that nothing contrary to our Reason can possibly be the object of our belief, but that it is no just exception against some of the doctrines of Christianity that they are above our reason."

[858] Scott, p. 36.

[859] All that is told of this prelate by Lecky (Hist. of Ireland in the 18th Cent. 1892. i, 207) is that at Killala he patronized horse-races. He was industrious on more episcopal lines. He wrote an Introduction to the History of the Jews; a Vindication of Biblical Chronology; two treatises on prophecy; an anti-Athanasian Essay on Spirit (1751), which aroused much controversy; A Vindication of the Histories of the Old and New Testament, in answer to Bolingbroke (2 vols. 1752-1754; 2nd ed. 1757; rep. with the Essay on Spirit, Dublin, 1759), which led to his being prosecuted; and other works. The offence given by the Vindication lay in his denunciation of the Athanasian creed, and of the bigotry of those who supported it. See pt. iii, letters i and ii. The Essay on Spirit is no less heterodox. In other respects, however, Clayton is ultra-orthodox.

[860] Dr. G. W. Alberti, Briefe betreffende den Zustand der Religion in Gross-Brittannien, Hannover, 1752, p. 440.

[861] Above, p. 180.

[862] Put by Huarte in 1575. Above, i, 472.

[863] Inquiry, p. 162.

[864] Inquiry, pref. pp. x, xxii.

[865] A Letter to the Rev. Dr. Conyers Middleton, occasioned by his late "Free Inquiry," 1749, pp. 3-4.

[866] A Free Answer to Dr. Middleton's "Free Inquiry," by William Dodwell [son of the elder and brother of the younger Henry], Rector of Shottesbrook, 1749, pp. 14-15.

[867] Inquiry, p. 162.

[868] Works, 2nd ed. 1755, ii, 348.

[869] Cp. essay on Mandeville, in the author's Pioneer Humanists, 1907.

[870] As against the objections of Mr. Lang, see the author's paper in Studies in Religious Fallacy.

[871] Cp. the summary of Farrar, Crit. Hist. of Freethought, pp. 177-78, which is founded on that of Pusey's early Historical Enquiry concerning German Rationalism, pp. 124-26.

[872] Rep. same year at Dublin: 2nd ed. 1750. The first ed. was ascribed to D'Argens--an error caused though not justified by the publisher's notice.

[873] The point is further discussed in Dynamics of Religion, pp. 175-76.

[874] Cp. G. B. Hertz, The Old Colonial System, 1905, pp. 4, 22, 93, 157.

[875] Letter xxxi, in Mason's Memoir.

[876] Hill Burton's Life of Hume, ii, 433, 434, 484-85, 487.

[877] Compare the verdicts of Gibbon in his Autobiography, and of Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. v, ch. i, art. 2; and see the memoir of Smith in 1831 ed. and McCulloch's ed., and Rae's Life of Adam Smith, p. 24. It appears that about 1764 many English people sent their sons to Edinburgh University on account of the better education there. Letter of Blair, in Burton's Life of Hume, ii, 229.

[878] Essays, iv, end.

[879] Present State of Polite Learning, 1765, ch. vi. His story of how the father of St. Foix cured the youth of the desire to rationalize his creed is not suggestive of conviction. The father pointed to a crucifix, saying, "Behold the fate of a reformer." The story has been often plagiarized since--e.g., in Galt's Annals of the Parish.

[880] Abbey and Overton, The English Church in the Eighteenth Century, 1878, ii, 37.

[881] Dieu et les Hommes, ch. xxxix.

[882] Cp. Bishop Law, Considerations on the Theory of Religion, 6th ed. 1774, p. 65, note, and the Analysis of Bolingbroke's writings (1755) there cited. Mr. Sichel's reply to Sir L. Stephen's criticism may or may not be successful; but he does not deal with Bishop Law's.

[883] Mémoires de Diderot, ed. 1841, ii, 25.

[884] These had begun as early as 1753 (Micromégas).

[885] Works, ed. 1842, i, pp. cix, 445; ii, 628, 728. Cp. the poem Kew Gardens, left in MS.

[886] I here take a few sentences from my paper, The Church and Education, 1903.

[887] Short History, p. 717. The Concise Description of the Endowed Grammar Schools, by Nicholas Carlisle, 1818, shows that schools were founded in all parts of the country by private bequest or public action during the eighteenth century.

[888] Collis, in Transactions of the Social Science Association, 1857, p. 126. According to Collis, 48 had been founded by James I, 28 under Charles I, 16 under the Commonwealth, 36 under Charles II, 4 under James II, 7 under William and Mary, 11 under Anne, 17 under George I, and 7 under George II. He does not indicate their size.

[889] Green, as last cited.

[890] Gibbins, Industrial History of England, 1894, p. 151.

[891] Hist. of England under George III, ed. 1865, ii, 83.

[892] The document is given in Ritchie's Life of Hume, 1807, pp. 53-55.

[893] A reply, The World proved to be not eternal nor mechanical, appeared in 1790.

[894] The Doctrines of a Trinity and the Incarnation of God was published anonymously.

[895] See the Biographical Introduction to the Unitarian reprint of Watts's Solemn Address, 1840, which gives the letters of Lardner. And cp. Skeats, Hist. of the English Free Churches, ed. Miall, p. 240.

[896] Life of Lardner, by Dr. Kippis, prefixed to Works, ed. 1835, i, p. xxxii.

[897] Memoirs of Priestley, 1806, pp. 30-32, 35, 37. The Letter on the Logos was addressed by Lardner to the first Lord Barrington, and was first published anonymously, in 1759.

[898] Memoirs of Priestley, p. 19.

[899] Pamphlet of 1778, printing the sermon, with reply to a local attack.

[900] MS. alteration in print. See also p. 1 of Epistle Dedicatory.

[901] In criticizing whom Sir Leslie Stephen barely notices his scientific work, but dwells much on his religious fallacies--a course which would make short work of the fame of Newton.

[902] A Church dignitary has described Evanson's Dissonance as "the commencement of the destructive criticism of the Fourth Gospel" (Archdeacon Watkins's Bampton Lectures, 1890, p. 174).

[903] Williams (d. 1816), who published 3 vols. of "Lectures on Education" and other works, has a longer claim on remembrance as the founder of the "Literary Fund."

[904] The subject is discussed at length in the essay on Gibbon in the author's Pioneer Humanists.

[905] Cp. Bishop Watson's Apology for Christianity (1776) as to the vogue of unbelief at that date. (Two Apologies, ed. 1806, p. 121. Cp. pp. 179, 399.)

[906] The panegyric on Voltaire delivered at his death by Frederick the Great (Nov. 26, 1778) was promptly translated into English (1779).

[907] Reflections on the French Revolution, 1790, p. 131.

[908] See Hannah More's letter of April, 1777, in her Life, abridged 16mo-ed. p. 36. An edition of Shaftesbury, apparently, appeared in 1773, and another in 1790.

[909] The essays of Hume, including the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779), were now circulated in repeated editions. Mr. Rae, in his valuable Life of Adam Smith, p. 311, cites a German observer, Wendeborn, as writing in 1785 that the Dialogues, though a good deal discussed in Germany, had made no sensation in England, and were at that date entirely forgotten. But a second edition had been called for in 1779, and they were added to a fresh edition of the essays in 1788. Any "forgetting" is to be set down to preoccupation with other interests.

[910] Letter to the Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, 1777, p. 3.

[911] Dr. Parr, Characters of C. J. Fox, i, 220; cited in Charles James Fox, a Commentary, by W. S. Landor, ed. by S. Wheeler, 1907, p. 147. Fox's secretary and biographer, Trotter, while anxious to discredit the statement of Parr, gives such a qualified account (Memoirs of the Latter Years of C. J. Fox, 1811, pp. 470-71) of Fox's views on immortality as to throw much doubt on the stronger testimony of B. C. Walpole (Recollections of C. J. Fox, 1806, p. 242).

[912] See J. L. Le B. Hammond, Charles James Fox, 1903, ch. xiii.

[913] See a letter in Bishop Watson's Life, i, 402; and cp. Buckle, ch. vii, note 218.

[914] See his Task, bk. iii, 150-90 (1783-1784), for the prevailing religious tone.

[915] Princ. of Moral Philos. bk. v, ch. ix. The chapter tells of widespread freethinking.

[916] Ernest Krause, Erasmus Darwin, Eng. tr. 1879, p. 211. Cp. pp. 193, 194.

[917] Letters vii, viii, ix, xix, xxii.

[918] E.g., The Ordination, the Address to the Deil, A Dedication to Gavin Hamilton, The Kirk's Alarm, etc.

[919] See also the pieces printed between these in the Globe edition, pp. 66-68.

[920] The benevolent Supreme Being, he writes, "has put the immediate administration of all this into the hands of Jesus Christ--a great personage, whose relation to Him we cannot fathom, but whose relation to us is [that of] a guide and Saviour." Letter 86 in Globe ed. Letters 189 and 197, to Mrs. Dunlop, similarly fail to meet the requirements of the orthodox correspondent. The poem Look up and See, latterly printed several times apart from Burns's works, and extremely likely to be his, is a quite Voltairean criticism of David. If the poem be ungenuine, it is certainly by far the ablest of the unacknowledged pieces ascribed to him, alike in diction and in purport.

[921] Letter to Mrs. Dunlop, Jan. 1, 1789, in Robert Burns and Mrs. Dunlop, ed. by W. Wallace, 1898, p. 129. The passage is omitted from Letter 168 in the Globe ed., and presumably from other reprints.

[922] Letter to Mrs. Dunlop, July 9, 1790. Published for the first time in vol. cited, p. 266.

[923] Epistle to a Young Friend.

[924] Lecky, writing in 1865, and advancing on Burke, has said of the whole school, including Shaftesbury, that "the shadow of the tomb rests on all: a deep, unbroken silence, the chill of death, surrounds them. They have long ceased to wake any interest" (Rationalism in Europe, i, 116). As a matter of fact, they had been discussed by Taylor in 1853; by Pattison in 1860; and by Farrar in 1862; and they have since been discussed at length by Dr. Hunt, by Dr. Cairns, by Lange, by Gyzicki, by M. Sayous, by Sir Leslie Stephen, by Prof. Höffding, and by many others.

[925] Conway, introd. to Age of Reason, in his ed. of Paine's Works, iv, 3.

[926] Lemontey, Hist. de la régence et de la minorité de Louis XV, 1835, ii, 358, note. In 1731 there was published under the name of Boulainvilliers (d. 1722) a so-called Réfutation de Spinoza, which was "really a popular exposition." Pollock, Spinoza, 2nd ed. p. 363. Sir F. Pollock assents to Voltaire's remark that Boulainvilliers "gave the poison and forgot to give the antidote."

[927] For a brief view of the facts, usually misconceived, see Lanson, pp. 610-11. Fénelon seems to have been uncandid, while Bossuet, by common consent, was malevolent. There is probably truth, however, in the view of Shaftesbury (Characteristics, ed. 1900, ii, 214), that the real grievance of Fénelon's ecclesiastical opponents was the tendency of his mysticism to withdraw devotees from ceremonial duties.

[928] Now remembered chiefly through the account of his intercourse with Fénelon (repr. in Didot ed. of Fénelon's misc. works), and Hume's long extract from his Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion in the concluding note to the Essays. Cp. M. Matter, Le Mysticisme en France au temps de Fénelon, 1865, pp. 352-54.

[929] Tyssot de Patot was Professor of Mathematics at Deventer. In his Lettres choisies, published in 1726, there is an avowal that "he might be charged with having different notions from those of the vulgar in point of religion" (New Memoirs of Literature, iv (1726), 267); and his accounts of pietists and unbelieving and other priests sufficiently convey that impression (id. pp. 268-84).

[930] Towards the close of his "poem" Polignac speaks of a defence of Christianity as a future task. He died without even completing the Anti-Lucretius, begun half a century before. Of him are related two classic anecdotes. Sent at the age of twenty-seven to discuss Church questions with the Pope, he earned from His Holiness the compliment: "You seem always to be of my opinion; and in the end it is yours that prevails." Louis XIV gave him a long audience, after which the King said: "I have had an interview with a young man who has constantly contradicted me without my being able to be angry for a moment." (Éloge prefixed to Bougainville's trans., L'Anti-Lucrèce, 1767, i. 131.)

[931] Cp. Duvernet, Vie de Voltaire, ch. i. Rivarol (Lettres à Necker, in OEuvres, ed. 1852, p. 138) wrote that under Louis XV there began a "general insurrection" of discussion, and that everybody then talked "only of religion and philosophy during half a century." But this exaggerates the beginnings, of which Rivarol could have no exact knowledge.

[932] La verité de la religion chrétienne prouvée par les faits: précédée d'un discours historique et critique sur la méthode des principaux auteurs qui ont écrit pour et contre le christianisme depuis son origine, 1722. Rep. 1741, 3 vols. 4to., 4 vols. 12mo.

[933] Nouveau Dictionnaire historique portatif, 1771, art. Houteville, tom. ii.

[934] Whose Considérations sur les Moeurs (1751) does not seem to contain a single religious sentiment. Historiographer of France, he had not escaped the suppression of his Histoire de Louis XI, 1745.

[935] See above, p. 130. Buffier seems to have begun an attempt at spelling reform (by dropping doubled letters), followed in 1725 by Huard and later by Prémontval.

[936] 7 vols. 4to., 10 vols. 12mo. Rep. with corrections 1733. Seconde partie, 1753, 8 vols. 12mo.

[937] A reprint in 1735 bears the imprint of London, with the note "Aux dépens de la Compagnie."

[938] Lanson, p. 702. The Persian Letters, like the Provincial Letters of Pascal, had to be printed at Rouen and published at Amsterdam. Their freethinking expressions put considerable difficulties in the way of his election (1727) to the Academy. See E. Edwards, Chapters of the Biog. Hist. of the French Academy, 1864, pp. 34-35, and D. M. Robertson, Hist. of the French Academy, 1910, p. 92, as to the mystification about the alleged reprint without the obnoxious passages.

[939] Lettre 86.

[940] "Au point de vue religieux, Montesquieu tirait poliment son coup de chapeau au christianisme" (Lanson, p. 714). E.g. in the Esprit des Lois, liv. xxiv, chs. i, ii, iii, iv, vi, and the footnote to ch. x of liv. xxv. Montesquieu's letter to Warburton (16 mai, 1754), in acknowledgment of that prelate's attack on the posthumous works of Bolingbroke, is a sample of his social make-believe. But no religious reader could suppose it to come from a religious man.

[941] Also of E. Edwards, as cited above.

[942] See the notes cited on pp. 405, 407 of Garnier's variorum ed. of the Esprit des Lois, 1871. La Harpe and Villemain seem blind to irony.

[943] The flings at Bayle (liv. xxiv, chs. ii, vi) are part of a subtly ironical vindication of ideal as against ecclesiastical Christianity, and they have no note of faith.

[944] Paul Mesnard, Hist. de l'académie française, 1857, pp. 61-63.

[945] Pensées Diverses: De la religion.

[946] Lanson, p. 714, note.

[947] Tr. in English, 1753. It is noteworthy that Cataneo formally accepts Montesquieu's professions of orthodoxy.

[948] Correspondance littéraire de Grimm et Diderot, ed. 1829-31, i, 273. See the footnote for an account of the indecent efforts of the Jesuits to get at the dying philosopher. The curé of the parish who was allowed entry began his exhortation with: "Vous savez, M. le Président, combien Dieu est grand." "Oui, monsieur," returned Montesquieu, "et combien les hommes sont petits."

[949] Mesnard, Hist. de l'académie française, p. 63.

[950] A full analysis is given by Strauss in the second Appendix to his Voltaire: Sechs Vorträge, 2te Aufl. 1870.

[951] The details are dubious. See the memoir compiled by "Rudolf Charles" (R. C. D'Ablaing van Giessenburg), the editor of the Testament, Amsterdam, 3 tom. 1861-64. It draws chiefly on the Mémoires secrets de Bachaumont, under date Sept. 30, 1764.

[952] Testament, as cited, i, 25.

[953] iii, 396.

[954] First published in 1762 [or 1764? See Bachaumont, Oct. 30], with the date 1742; and reprinted in the Évangile de la Raison, 1764. It was no fewer than four times ordered to be destroyed in the Restoration period.

[955] Probably Diderot did the most of the adaptation. "Il y a plus que du bon sens dans ce livre," writes Voltaire to D'Alembert; "il est terrible. S'il sort de la boutique du Système de la Nature, l'auteur s'est bien perfectionné" (Lettre de 27 Juillet, 1775).

[956] "Il leur faut un Être à ces messieurs; pour moi, je m'en passe." Grimm, Correspondance Littéraire, ed. 1829-31, iv, 186.

[957] Grimm, as cited, i, 235. Grimm tells a delightful story of his reception of the confessor.

[958] "Cet ouvrage, dont les vers sont grands et bien tournés, est une satire des plus licencieuses contre les moeurs de nos évêques." Bachaumont, Mémoires Secrets, Juin 15, 1762.

[959] Bonet-Maury, Hist. de la lib. de conscience en France, 1900, p. 68.

[960] Nouveau dictionnaire historique-portatif ... par une Société de Gens de Lettres, ed. 1771, i, 314.

[961] Marmontel does not relate this in his Mémoires, where he insists on the decorum of the talk, even at d'Holbach's table.

[962] Chamfort, Caractères et Anecdotes.

[963] Nouveau dictionnaire, above cited, i, 315.

[964] Name assumed for literary purposes, and probably composed by anagram from the real name Arouet, with "le jeune" (junior) added, thus: A. R. O. V. E. T. L(e). I(eune).

[965] Not to be confounded with the greater and later Jean Jacques Rousseau. J. B. Rousseau became Voltaire's bitter enemy--on the score, it is said, of the young man's epigram on the elder poet's "Ode to Posterity," which, he said, would not reach its address. Himself a rather ribald freethinker, Rousseau professed to be outraged by the irreligion of Voltaire.

[966] See the poem in note 4 to ch. ii of Duvernet's Vie de Voltaire. Duvernet calls it "one of the first attacks on which philosophy in France had ventured against superstition" (Vie de Voltaire, ed. 1797, p. 19).

[967] Duvernet, ch. ii. The free-hearted Ninon de l'Enclos, brightest of old ladies, is to be numbered among the pre-Voltairean freethinkers, and to be remembered as leaving young Voltaire a legacy to buy books. She refused to "sell her soul" by turning dévote on the invitation of her old friend Madame de Maintenon. Madame D'Épinay, Voltaire's "belle philosophe et aimable Habacuc," Madame du Deffand, and Madame Geoffrin were among the later freethinking grandes dames of the Voltairean period; and so, presumably, was the Madame de Créquí, quoted by Rivarol, who remarked that "Providence" is "the baptismal name of Chance." As to Madame Geoffrin see the OEuvres Posthumes de D'Alembert, 1799, i, 240, 271; and the Mémoires de Marmontel, 1804, ii, 102 sq. If Marmontel is accurate, she went secretly at times to mass (p. 104).

[968] Deslandes wrote some new chapters of his Réflexions in London, for the English translation. Eng. tr. 1713, p. 99.

[969] Pour et Contre, ou Épitre à Uranie. It was of course not printed till long afterwards. Diderot, writing his Promenade du Sceptique in 1747, says: "C'est, je crois, dans l'allée des fleurs [of his allegory] entre le champagne et le tokay, que l'épitre à Uranie prit naissance." (L'Allée des Marronniers, ad init.) This seems unjust.

[970] He has been alternately represented as owing everything and owing very little to England. Cp. Texte, Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit, Eng. tr. p. 58. Neither view is just.

[971] In his Essay upon the Civil Wars of France, and ... upon Epick Poetry (2nd ed. 1728, "corrected by himself"), written and published in English, he begins his "Advertisement" with the remark: "It has the appearance of too great a presumption in a traveller who hath been but eighteen months in England, to attempt to write in a language which he cannot pronounce at all, and which he hardly understands in conversation." As the book is remarkably well written, he must have read much English.

[972] Lord Morley (Voltaire, 4th ed. p. 40) speaks of the English people as having then won "a full liberty of thought and speech and person." This, as we have seen, somewhat overstates the case. But discussion was much more nearly free than in France.

[973] Probably as much on political as on religious grounds. The 8th letter, Sur le Parlement, must have been very offensive to the French Government; and in 1739, moved by angry criticisms, Voltaire saw fit to modify its language. See Lanson's ed. of the Lettres, 1909, i, 92, 110.

[974] Condorcet, Vie de Voltaire, ed. 1792, p. 92. In reprints the poem was entitled Sur la religion naturelle, and was so commonly cited.

[975] Condorcet, p. 99.

[976] See above, pp. 213-14, as to the works of Boulainvilliers, Tyssot de Patot, Deslandes, and others who wrote between 1700 and 1715.

[977] Cited by Schlosser, Hist. of the Eighteenth Century, Eng. tr. i, 146-7.

[978] Traité de la verité de la religion chrétienne, tiré en partie du latin de M. J. Alphonse Turrettin, professeur ... en l'académie de Génève, par M. J. Vernet, professeur de belles-lettres en la même Académie. Revue et corrigé par un Théologien Catholique. 1e éd. Génève, 1730. Rep. in 2 tom. 1753. Ecclesiastical approbation given 15 janv. 1749; privilège, juillet, 1751.

[979] Dom Remi Desmonts, according to Barbier.

[980] "Par Panage" (=Toussaint?). Rep. 1755 and 1767 (Berlin).

[981] Work cited, ed. 1755, p. 252.

[982] A glimpse of old Paris before or about 1750 is afforded by Fontenelle's remark that the prevailing diseases might be known from the affiches. At every street corner were to be seen two, of which one advertised a Traité sur l'incrédulité. (Grimm, Corr. litt. iii, 373.)

[983] Thus Duruy had said in his Histoire de France (1st ed. 1852) that in the work of the Jansenists of Port Royal "l'esprit d'opposition politique se cacha sous l'opposition religieuse" (ed. 1880, ii, 298).

[984] The case has been thus correctly put by M. Rocquain, who, however, decides that "de religieuse qu'elle était, l'opposition devient politique" as early as about 1724-1733. L'Esprit révolutionnaire avant la révolution, 1878; table des matières, liv. 2e. Duruy (last note) puts the tendency still earlier.

[985] "Cette hardiesse étonna Voltaire, et excita son émulation" (ed. cited, p. 118).

[986] Avertissement des éditeurs, in Basle ed. of 1792, vol. xlv, p. 92.

[987] It has been counted that he used no fewer than a hundred and thirty different pseudonyms; and the perpetual prosecution and confiscation of his books explains the procedure. As we have seen, the Lettres philosophiques (otherwise the Lettres anglaises) were burned on their appearance, in 1734, and the bookseller put in the Bastille; the Recueil des pièces fugitives was suppressed in 1739; the Voix du Sage et du Peuple was officially and clerically condemned in 1751; the poem on Natural Law was burned at Paris in 1758; Candide at Geneva in 1759; the Dictionnaire philosophique at Geneva in 1764, and at Paris in 1765; and many of his minor pseudonymous performances had the same advertisement. But even the Henriade, the Charles XII, and the first chapters of the Siècle de Louis XIV were prohibited; and in 1785 the thirty volumes published of the 1784 edition of his works were condemned en masse.

[988] Diderot, critique of Le philosophe ignorant in Grimm's Corr. Litt. 1 juin 1766; Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Stück 10-12, 15; Gibbon, ch. i, note near end; ch. li, note on siege of Damascus. Rousseau was as hostile as any (see Morley's Rousseau, ch. ix, § 1). But Rousseau's verdict is the least important, and the least judicial. He had himself earned the detestation of Voltaire, as of many other men. In a moment of pique, Diderot wrote of Voltaire: "Cet homme n'est que le second dans tous les genres" (Lettre 71 à Mdlle. Voland, 12 août, 1762). He forgot wit and humour!

[989] Prof. Jowett, of Balliol College. See L. A. Tollemache, Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, 4th ed. pp. 27-28.

[990] See details in Lord Morley's Voltaire, 4th ed. pp. 165-70, 257-58. The erection by the French freethinkers of a monument to La Barre in 1905, opposite the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Montmartre, Paris, is an expression at once of the old feud with the Church and the French appreciation of high personal courage. La Barre was in truth something of a scapegrace, but his execution was an infamy, and he went to his death as to a bridal. The erection of the monument has been the occasion of a futile pretence on the clerical side that for La Barre's death the Church had no responsibility, the movers in the case being laymen. Nothing, apparently, can teach Catholic Churchmen that the Church's past sins ought to be confessed like those of individuals. It is quite true that it was a Parlement that condemned La Barre. But what a religious training was it that turned laymen into murderous fanatics!

[991] M. Lanson seems to overlook it when he writes (p. 747) that "the affirmation of God, the denial of Providence and miracles, is the whole metaphysic of Voltaire."

[992] Lord Morley writes (p. 209): "We do not know how far he ever seriously approached the question ... whether a society can exist without a religion." This overlooks both the Homélie sur l'Athéisme and the article Athéisme in the Dictionnaire Philosophique, where the question is discussed seriously and explicitly.

[993] Horace Walpole, Letter to Gray, Nov. 19, 1765. Compare the mordant criticism of Grimm (Corr. litt. vii, 54 sq.) on his tract Dieu in reply to d'Holbach. "Il raisonne là-dessus comme un enfant," writes Grimm, "mais comme un joli enfant qu'il est."

[994] Browning, The Two Poets of Croisic, st. cvii.

[995] Cp. Ständlin, Gesch. des Rationalismus und Supernaturalismus, 1826, pp. 287-90. Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, 2te Aufl. 1848, i, 218-20.

[996] Zimmerman, De causis magis magisque invalescentis incredulitatis, et medela huic malo adhibenda, Tiguri, 1739, 4to. Prof. Breitinger of Zurich wrote a criticism afterwards tr. (1741) as Examen des Lettres sur la religion essentielle. De Roches, pastor at Geneva, published in letter-form 2 vols. entitled Défense du Christianisme, as "préservatif contre" the Lettres of Mdlle. Huber (1740); and Bouillier of Amsterdam also 2 vols. of Lettres (1741).

[997] Cp. Bouillier, Hist. de la philos. cartés, ii, 624-25; D'Argenson, Mémoires, ed. Jannet, iv. 63.

[998] See the thesis (Jerusalem Coelesti) as printed in the Apologie de M. l'Abbé De Prades, "Amsterdam," 1752, pp. 4, 6.

[999] Id. p. 10.

[1000] Mémoires sur la vie et les ouvrages de Diderot, 1821, p. 160.

[1001] Cp. Bachaumont, Mémoires secrets, 4 fév. 1762; 22 avril, 1768. Tn the latter entry, Yvon is described as "poursuivi comme infidèle, quoique le plus croyant de France." In 1768, after the Bélisaire scandal, he was refused permission to proceed with the publication of his Histoire ecclésiastique.

[1002] This was de Prades's own view of the matter (Apologie, as cited, p. v); and D'Argenson repeatedly says as much. Mémoires, iv, 57, 65, 66, 74, 77.

[1003] Rocquain, L'esprit revolutionnaire avant la révolution, 1878, pp. 149-51; Morley, Diderot, ch. v; D'Argenson, iv, 78. The decree of suppression was dated 13 fév. 1752.

[1004] Mémoires, iv, 64, 74.

[1005] Id. iv, 129, 140.

[1006] Id. iv, 92-93.

[1007] Maury, Hist. de l'ancienne Académie des Inscriptions, 1864, pp. 312-13.

[1008] Journal historique de Barbier, 1847-56, iv, 304.

[1009] Astruc, we learn from D'Alembert, connected their decline with the influence of the new opinions. "Ce ne sont pas les jansenistes qui tuent les jésuites, c'est l'Encyclopédie." "Le maroufle Astruc," adds D'Alembert, "est comme Pasquin, il parle quelquefois d'assez bon sens." Lettre à Voltaire. 4 mai, 1762.

[1010] Cp. pref. (La Vie de Salvien) to French tr. of Salvian, 1734, p. lxix. I have seen MS. translations of Toland and Woolston.

[1011] MS. statement, in eighteenth-century hand, on flyleaf of a copy of 1755 ed. of the Grands hommes, in the writer's possession.

[1012] Lettre à D'Alembert, 16 Octobre, 1765.

[1013] Of the works noted below, the majority appear or profess to have been printed at Amsterdam, though many bore the imprint Londres. All the freethinking books and translations ascribed to d'Holbach bore it. The Arétin of Abbé Dulaurens bore the imprint: "Rome, aux dépens de la Congrégation de l'Index." Mystifications concerning authorship have been as far as possible cleared up in the present edition.

[1014] Given by Brunet, who is followed by Wheeler, as appearing in 1732, and as translated into English, under the title Dying Merrily, in 1745. But I possess an English translation of 1713 (pref. dated March 25), entitled A Philological Essay: or, Reflections on the Death of Freethinkers.... By Monsieur D----, of the Royal Academy of Sciences in France, and author of the Poetae Rusticantis Literatum Otium. Translated from the French by Mr. B----, with additions by the author, now in London, and the translator. [A note in a contemporary hand makes "B" Boyer.] Barbier gives 1712 for the first edition, 1732 for the second. Rep. 1755 and 1776.

[1015] There is no sign of any such excitement in France over the translation as was aroused in England by the original; but an Examen du traité de la liberté de penser, by De Crousaz, was published at Amsterdam in 1718.

[1016] This was probably meant to point to the Abbé de Marsy, who died in 1763.

[1017] The Abbé Sepher ascribed this book to one Dupuis, a Royal Guardsman.

[1018] This "prose poem" was not an intentional burlesque, as the ecclesiastical authorities alleged; but it did not stand for orthodoxy. See Grimm's Correspondance, i, 113.

[1019] "A eu les honneurs de la brûlure, et toutes les censures cumulées des Facultés de Théologie, de la Sorbonne et des évêques." Bachaumont, déc. 23, 1763. Marsy, who was expelled from the Order of Jesuits, was of bad character, and was hotly denounced by Voltaire.

[1020] See Grimm, Corr. v. 15.

[1021] A second edition appeared within the year. "Quoique proscrit presque partout, et même en Hollande, c'est de là qu'il nous arrive." Bachaumont, déc. 27, 1764.

[1022] Bachaumont, mai 7, 1767.

[1023] "Se repand à Paris avec la permission de la police." Bachaumont, 13 fév. 1766.

[1024] "Il est facile de se convaincre que les parties les plus importantes et les plus solides de cet ouvrage sont empruntées aux travaux de Burigny." L.-F. Alfred Maury, L'ancienne Académie des Incriptions et bellet-lettres, 1864, p. 316. Maury leaves it open question whether the compilation was made by Burigny or by Naigeon. The Abbé Bergier accepted it without hesitation as the work of Fréret, who was known to hold some heretical views. (Maury, p. 317.) Barbier confidently ascribes the work to Burigny.