Materialism in England. 81
his. These three thinkers all referred theology and philosophy to entirely distinct sources. They represented the one as having nothing to do with the other; as having each an authority of its own ; as having each a province in which for the other to enter is an act of usurpation. They drew the sharpest separation between reason and faith, philosophy and religion. They sought to save the one from the possibility of antagonism with the other, by describing them as quite unconnected in their principles, processes, and character. This was a reaction from the scholastic dogmatism which had ignored their real distinctions and endeavoured to make all science theological and all theology strict science. Hobbes professed himself to be an orthodox English Churchman. We have certainly no warrant to charge him with atheism.
The materialism even of Hobbes was thus incomplete. But no system of materialism more complete than his appeared in Great Britian until very recent times. When we remember the moral condition of the nation from the restoration of the Stuart dynasty in 1660 to the close of the eighteenth century, how low the general tone of spiritual life was throughout the whole period, how corrupt and profligate at certain dates, we can feel no surprise that numerous works were published in advocacy of materialistic tenets. The remarkable fact is one which our historians of
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