A short history of freethought, ancient and modern

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES

SPINOZA COLLECTION

OF

ABRAHAM WOLF

ACQUIRED 1950

WITH Till: HF.I.P OF

FRANK M. VAN'DLRHOOF

CLASS OF 1941

A SHOUT
HISTORY OF FREETHOUGHT

HERAT A

1'. 138, line 20, for " 159:5 " aW " 1563 "'

;'. 229, line 5 of note 1. for " Receuil " rcrni

" Recueil
1'. -ill. iiiidiT "1767," for "religious" read

" religions ''

i'. 241, under "1 707." for " l-'ivret " read
" 1'ivivt.'" unci ^o elsewhere

A SHORT HISTORY

OF

FREETHOUGHT

ANCIENT AND MODERN

BY

JOHN M. ROBERTSON

THIRD EDITION, REVISED AND EXPANDED

IN TWO VOLUMES
Vol. II

' ISSUED FOR THE RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, LIMITED )

London :

WATTS & CO.,

JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET. E.C.

1915

mi

CONTENTS

VOLUME II

PAGE

Chat. XIII— The Rise of Modern Freethought (continued)

§ 4. England, Persecution and executions under Henry VIII,
Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth. Charges of atheism.
Lilly's polemic. Reginald Scot on witchcraft. The
Family of Love. Hamond, Lewes, Kett. Apologetic
literature. Influence of Machiavelli. Nashe's polemic.
Marlowe, Raleigh, Harriott, Kyd. Protests of Pilkington
and Hooker. Polemic of Bishop Morton. Shakespeare.
The drama generally. Executions under James. Bacon.
Suckling ------- 1

is 5. Popular Thought in Europe. Callidius. Flade. Wier.
Coornhert. Grotius. Gorlaeus. Zwicker. Koerbagh.
Beverland. Socinianism. The case of Spain. Cervantes 32

§ G. Scientific Thought. Copernicus. Giordano Bruno. Vanini.
Galileo. The Aristotelian strife. Vivos. Ramus. Des-
cartes. Gassendi - - - - - - 41

Chap. XIV — British Freethought in the Seventeenth Century

§ 1. Lord Herbert of Cherbury. Hobbes. Selden - - 69

§ 2. The popular ferment : attempted suppression of heresy by
Parliament. Lawrence Clarkson. The Levellers and
Toleration. Forms of unbelief. The term "rationalist."
Propaganda against atheism. Culverwel. The Polemic
of Henry More. Freethought at the Restoration. The
case of Biddle. The protests of Howe, Stillingfleet, and
Baxter. Freethought in Scotland. The argument of
Mackenzie. English Apologetics of Casaubon, Ingelo,
Temple, Wilkins, Tillotson, Cudworth, Boyle, and others.
Martin Clifford, Emergence of Deism. Avowals of Arch-
deacon Parker, Sherlock, and South. Dryden. Discussion
on miracles. Charles Blount. Leslie's polemic. Growth
of apologetic literature. Toland. The Licensing Act - 75

;.' :J. Literary, scientific, and academic developments. Sir Thomas
Browne. Jeremy Taylor. John Spencer. Joseph Glanvill.
Cartesianism. Glisson. Influence of Gassendi. Resist-
ance to Copernican theory. Lord Falkland. Colonel
Fry. Locke. Bury. Temple. The Marquis of Halifax.
Newton. Lnitarianism. Penn. Firmin. Latitudi-
narianism. Tillotson. Dr. T. Burnet. Dr. B. Connor.
John Craig. The " rationalists " - - 100

vi CONTENTS

PAGE

Chap. XV— French and Dutch freethought in the seven-
teenth Century

1. Influence of Montaigne and Charron. Gui Patin. Naude. La

Mothe le Vayer ------ 117

2. Catholic Pyrrhonism ------ 120

3. Descartes's influence. Boileau. Jesuit and royal hostility - 121
1. Vogue of freethinking. Malherbe. Jean Fontanier. Theophile

de Viau. Claude Petit. Corneille. Moliere - - 122

5. Cyrano de Bergerac _..--- 123

6. Pascal's skepticism. Religious quarrels - - - 124

7. Huet's skepticism ...... 126

S. Cartesianism. Malcbranche ----- 12S

9. Burner. Scientific movements ----- 130

10. Richard Simon. La Peyrere - - 131

11. Dutch thought. Louis Meyer. Cartesian heresy - - 132

12. Spinoza -------- 133

13. Biblical criticism. Spinozism. Deurhoff. B. Bekker - 137

14. Bayle - - - - - - - - 139

15. Developments in France. The polemic of Abbadie. Persecu-

tion of Protestants. Fontenelle - - - - 141

1G. St. Evremond. Regnard. La Bruyere. Spread of skepticism.

Fanaticism at court - 143

Chap. XVI— British Freethought in the Eighteenth Century

Si 1. Toland. Blasphemy Law. Strifes among believers. Cudworth.
Bishops Browne and Berkeley. Heresy in the Church.
The Schools of Newton, Leibnitz, and Clarke. Hutchin-
son. Halley. Provincial deism. Saunderson. Simson.
Literary orthodoxy. Addison. Steele. Berkeley. Swift.
New deism. Shaftesbury. Trenchard. Unitarianism.
Asgill. Coward. Dodwell. Whiston - - - 147

§ 2. Anthony Collins. Bentlcy's attack. Mandcville. Woolston.
Middleton. Deism at Oxford. Tindal. Middleton and
Waterland ------- 154

S 3. Unitarianism: its spread among Presbyterians. Chubb.

Hall. Elwall ------ 159

S 4. Berkeley's polemic. Lady Mary Montagu. Pope. Deism

and Atheism. Coward. Strutt ... - 162

?! 5. Parvish. Influence of Spinoza .... lfij

:' 0. William Pitt. Morgan. Annet. Dodwell the Younger - 169

.. 7. The work achieved by deism. The social situation. Recent

disparagements and German testimony - - - 170

;: S. Arrest of English science. Hale. Burnet. Whiston.
Woodward. Effects of Imperialism. Contrast with
France. The mathematicians - 176

> 9. Supposed "decay "of deism. Butler. William Law. Hume 179

S 10. Freethought in Scotland. Execution of Thomas Aikenhead.
Confiscation of innovating books. Legislation against
<ln in. Anstruther's and Haly burton's polemic. Strife

CONTENTS vii

PAGE

over creeds. John Johnstone. William Dudgeon. Hutche-
son. Leechman. Forbes. Miller. Karnes. Smith.
Ferguson. Church riots - - - - - 181

§ 11. Freethought in Ireland. Lord Molesworth. Archbishop

Synge. Bishop Clayton ----- 18S

§ 12. Situation in England in 1750. Richardson's lament.
Middleton. Deism among the clergy. Sykcs. The
deistic evolution ------ l'JO

>i 13. Materialism. La Mettrie. Shifting of the social centre:
socio-political forces. Gray's avowal. Hume's estimate.
Goldsmith's. The later deism. Bolingbroke - - 19-1

S 14. Diderot's diagnosis. Influence of Voltaire. Chatterton.
Low state of popular culture. Prosecutions of poor free-
thinkers. Jacob Hive. Peter Annet. Later deistic
literature. Unitarianism. Evanson. Tomkyns. Watts.
Lardner. Priestley. Toulmin. D. Williams - - 108

>i 15. Gibbon. Spread of unbelief. The creed of the younger
Pitt. Fox. Geology. Hutton. Cowper's and Paley's
complaints. Erasmus Darwin. Mary Wollstonecraft - 203

s 16. Burns and Scotland ------ 208

S 17. Panic and reaction after the French Revolution. New
aristocratic orthodoxy. Thomas Paine. New democratic
freethought ------- 209

Chap. XVII— French Freethought in the Eighteenth Century

1. Boulainvilliers. Strifes in the Church. Fenelon and Ramsay.

Fanaticism at court. New freethinking. Gilbert.

Tyssot de Patot. Deslandes. Persecution of Protestants 213

2. Output of apologetics ------ 21-1

3. The political situation ------ 216

4. Huard and Huet- ------ 216

5. Montesquieu - - - - - - - 217

6. Jean Meslier ------- 219

7. Freethinking priests. Pleas for toleration. Boindin - - 221

8. Voltaire ------ - 222

9. Errors as to the course of development - 224

10. Voltaire's character and influence - 229

11. Progress of tolerance. Marie Huber. Resistance of bigotry.

De Prades. The Encjiclojjedie. Fontenelle as censor - 233

12. Chronological outline of the literary movement - - 236

13. New politics. The less famous freethinkers : Burigny ;

Fontenelle; De Brasses; Meister ; Vauvenargues ; Mira-
baud; Frerct - - - - - 214

1 I. N.-A. Boulanger. Dumarsais. Premontval. Solidity of much

of the French product - - - 246

15. General anonymity of the freethinkers. The orthodox defence 250

16. The prominent freethinkers. Rousseau 253

17. Astruc - - 256

18. Freethought in the Academic. Beginnings in classical research.

Emergence <>f anti-clericalism. D'Argenson's notes - 257

viii CONTENTS

PAGE

19. The affair of Pompignan - 258

20. Marmontel's BSlisaire ------ 259

21. The scientific movement : La Mettrie - 260

22. Study of Nature. Fontenelle. Lenglet du Fresnoy. De

Maillot's Telliamed. Mirabaud. Resistance of Voltaire

to the new ideas. Switzerland. Buffon and the Church 202

28. Maupertuis. Diderot. Condillac. Eobinet. Helvetius - 264

24. Diderot's doctrines and influence ... - 267

25. D'Alembert and d'Holbach - - - - 271

26. Frcethought and the Revolution - 273

27. The conventional myth and the facts. Necker. Abbe Grogoire.

The argument of Michelet. The legend of the Goddess of
Reason. Sacrilege in the English and French Revolu-
tions. Hebert. Danton. Chaumcttc. Clootz. The

atheist Salaville ------ 274

28. Religious and political forces of revolt. The polemic of Rivarol 280

29. The political causation. Rebellion in the ages of faith - 281

30. The polemic of Mallet du Pan. Saner views of Barante. Free-

thinkers and orthodox in each political camp. Mably.
Voltaire. D'Holbach. Rousseau. Diderot. Orthodoxy

of the mass. The thesis of Chamfort - - - 284

31. The reign of persecution- ----- 289

32. Orthodox lovers of tolerance - - - - - 291

33. Napoleon- ------- 292

Chap. XVIIT— German Freethought in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries

1. Moral Decline under Lutheranism. Freethought before the

Thirty Years' War. Orthodox polemic. The movement

of Matthias Knutzen ----- 294

2. Influence of Spinoza. Stosch. Output of apologetics - 297
•'!. Leibnitz -------- 298

4. Pietism. Orthodox hostility. Spread of Rationalism- - 300

5. Thomasius ------- 302

6. Dippel - - -.-.- 304

7. T. L. Lau - 305

8. Wolff - --._- 305

9. Freemasonry and freethinking. J.L.Schmidt. Martin Knutzen 300

10. J. C. Kdclmanu ------- 807

1 1. Abbot Jerusalem ...... 308

12. English and French influences. The scientific movemont.

Orthodox science. Hallcr. Rapid spread of rationalism 309

13. Frederick Lhc Great ...... 312

14. Mauvillon. Nicolai. Riem. Schade. Basedow. Eberhard.

Steinbart. Spalding. Teller - 315

15. Semler. Tiillner. Academic rationalism - - 318
10. Bahrdt -------- 820

17. Moses Mendelssohn. Leasing. Reimarus - - - 322

CONTENTS ix

PAGE

IS. Vogue of deism. Wieland. Cases of Isenbiehl and Steinbuhler.
A secret society. Clerical rationalism. Schulz. The
edict of Frederick William II. Persistence of skepticism.
The Marokkanisclie Briefe. Mauvillon. Herder - 329

19. Goethe -------- 333

•20. Schiller -------- 336

21. Kant -------- 337

22. Influence of Kant. The sequel. Hamann. Chr. A. Crusius.

Platner. Beausobre the younger - 345

23. Fichte. Philosophic strifes ----- 349

24. Rationalism and conservatism in both camps - - - 350

25. Austria. Jahn. Joseph II. Beethoven - - - 351

Chap. XIX — Freethought in the Remaining European States

§ 1. Holland. Elizabeth Wolff. Leenhof. Booms. Influence

ofBayle. Passerano. Lack of native freethought literature 352

§ 2. The Scandinavian States.

1. Course of the Reformation. Subsequent wars. Retro-

gression in Denmark ----- 354

2. Holberg's Nicolas Klimius - 355

3. Sweden. Queen Christina - 357

4. Swedenborg ------ 353

5. Upper-class indifference. Gustavus III. Kjellgren

and Bellman. Torild. Retrogression in Sweden - 359
G. Revival of thought in Denmark. Struensee. Mary

Wollstonecraft's survey .... 361

S 3. The Slavonic States.

1. Poland. Liszinski ----- 362

2. Russia. Nikon. Peter the Great. Kantemir. Catherine 363

? 4. Italy.

1. Decline under Spanish Rule. Naples - - - 365

2. Vico ------- 365

3. Subsequent scientific thought. General revival of

freethought under French influence - - - 367

4. Beccaria. Algarotti. Filangieri. Galiani. Genovesi.

Alfieri. Bettinelli. Dandolo. Giannone. Algarotti
and the Popes. The scientific revival. Progress and
reaction in Tuscany. Effects of the French Revolution 36S

i 5. SjMin and Portugal.

1. Progress under Bourbon rule in Spain. Aranda. D'Alba 372

2. Tyranny of the Inquisition. Aranda. Olavides 373

3. Duke of Almodobar. D'Azara. Ricla

4. The case of Samaniego - - 374

5. Bails. Cagnuelo. Cunteno
G. Faxardo. Iriarte - - -

7. Ista. Salas - - 376

8. Reaction after Charles III - 37(1
'.). Portugal. Pombal

x CONTENTS

PAGE

§ 6. Switzerland.

Socinianism and its sequelae. The Turrettini. Geneva

and Rousseau. Burlamaqui. Spread of deism - 378

CHAP. XX— EARLY FREETHOUGHT IN THE UNITED STATES

1. Deism of the revolutionary statesmen - 381

2. First traces of unbelief. Franklin - - - - 381

3. Jefferson. John Adams. Washington - - - - 382

4. Thomas Paine ------- 383

5. Paine' s treatment in America - - - 384
G. Palmer. Houston. Deism and Unitarianism - - - 385

Chap. XXL— Freethought in the Nineteenth Century

The Reaction. Tone in England. Clericalism in Italy and Spain.

Movement in France and Germany - - - 386

The Forces of Renascence. International movement. Summary
of critical forces. Developments of science. Lines of
resistance ------- 389

Section i.— Popular Propaganda and Culture

1. Democracy. Paine. Translations from the French - 391

2. Huttman. Houston. Wedderburn - - - 393

3. Pietist persecution. Eichard Carlile. John Clarke.

Robert Taylor. Charles Southwell. G.J. Holyoake.

Women helpers - 393

4. Hetherington. Operation of blasphemy law - - 395

5. Robert Owen ------ 395

6. The reign of bigotry. Influence of Gibbon - - 398

7. Charles Bradlaugh and Secularism. Imprisonment of

G. W. Foote. Treatment of Bradlaugh by Parliament.
Resultant energy of secularist attack - - - 399

8. New literary developments. Lecky. Conway. Win-

wood Reade. Spencer. Arnold. Mill. Clifford.
Stephen. Ambcrley. New apologetics - - 402

9. Freethought in France. Social schemes. Fourier.

Saint-Simon. Comte. Duruy and Sainte-Beuve - 404

10. Bigotry in Spain. Popular freethought in Catholic

countries. Journalism - 406

11. Fluctuations in Germany. Persistence of religious

liberalism. Marx and Socialism. Official orthodoxy - 409

12. The Scandinavian States and Russia - - - 412
l'i. "Free-religious " societies - 413

14. Unitarianism in England and America - - 414

15. Clerical rationalism in Protestant countries. Switzer-

land. Holland. Dutch South Africa - 415

1(J. Developments in Sweden - - - - 417

17. The United States. Ingersoll. Lincoln. Stephen

Douglas. Frederick Douglass. Academic persecution.

Changes of front ... 419

CONTENTS xi

PACK

Section 2.— Biblical Criticism

1. Rationalism in Germany. The Schleiermacher reac-

tion : its heretical character. Orthodox hostility - 420

2. Progress in both camps. Strauss's critical syncretism 423
•'!. Criticism of the Fourth Gospel - - - 425

4. Strauss's achievement ----- 425

5. Official reaction - 420

6. Fresh advance. Schwegler. Bruno Bauer - 12G

7. Strauss's second Life of Jesus. His politics. His

Voltaire and Old and Xeir Faith. His total influence 428

8. Fluctuating progress of criticism. Important issues

passed-by. Nork. Ghillany. Dimmer. Ewerbeck.
Colenso. Kuenen. Kalisch. Wellhausen - - 431

9. New Testament criticism. Baur. Zeller. Van

Manen ------- 434

10. Falling-off in German candidates for the ministry as

in congregations. Official orthodox pressures - 135

1 1 . Attack and defence in England. The Tractarian

reaction. Progress of criticism. Hennell. The United

States: Parker. English publicists : F.W.Newman ;

R, W. Mackay; W. R. Greg. Translations. E. P.

Meredith ; Thomas Scott ; W. R. Cassels - - 437

12. New Testament criticism in France. Rcnan and

Havet ------- 439

Section 3. — Poetry and General Literature

1. The French literary reaction. Chateaubriand - 440

2. Predominance of freethought in later belles lettres - 441

3. Beranger. De Mussel. Victor Hugo. Leconte do

Lisle. The critics. The reactionists - - 442
1. Poetry in England. Shelley. Coleridge. The romantic

movement. Scott. Byron. Keats - - - 443

5. Charles Lamb - 445

<;. Carlyle. Mill. Fronde 147
7. Orthodoxy and conformity. Bain's view of Carlyle,

Macaulay, and Lyell - 418
S. The literary influence. Ruskin. Arnold. Intellectual

preponderance of rationalism - 150
'.). English fiction from Miss Kdgeworth to the present

time; - - - - - - - 151

10. Richard Jefferies - - - 152

11. Poetry since Shelley - 152

12. American belles lettres - - - 153

13. Leopardi. Carducci. Kleist. Heine - 451
1 1. Russian belles lettres - - 15(1
15. The Scandinavian States - 157

Section l. The Natural Sciences

1. Progress in cosmology. Laplace and modern ustro-

tiomv. Orthodox resistance. Leslie- 157

CONTENTS

PAGE

2. Physiology in France. Cabanis - - - 459

3. Physiology in England. Lawrence. Morgan - 461

4. Geology after Hutton. Hugh Miller. Baden Powell - 4Gii

5. Darwin ------- 464

G. Robert Chambers - - - - - 404

7. Orthodox resistance. General advance - - 465

8. Triumph of evolutionism. Spencer. Clifford. Huxley 466

Section 5.— The Sociological, Sciences

1. Eighteenth-century sociology. Salverte. Charles

Comte. Auguste Comte - - 468

2. Progress in England. Orthodoxy of Hallam. Carlyle.

Grote. Thirlwall. Long - 468

3. Sociolog)- proper. Orthodox hostility - - 161)

4. Mythology and anthropology. Tylor. Spencer.

Avebury, Frazer - 470

Section 6. — Philosophy and Ethics

1. Fichte. Schelling. Hegel - - - - 471

2. Germany after Hegel. Schopenhauer. Hartmann - 474

3. Feuerbach. Stirner ----- 475

4. Arnold Ruge ------ 478

5. Buchncr -..--. 478

6. Philosophy in France. Maine de Biran. Cousin.

Jouffroy ------ 479

7. Movement of Lamennais ... - 480

8. Comte and Comtism ----- 483

9. Philosophy in Britain. Bentham. James Mill.

Grote. Political rationalism - 484

10. Hamilton. Mansel. Spencer - - - 485

11. Semi-rationalism in the churches - - - 487
1-2. J. S. Mill ...... 489

Section 7. — Modern Jewry

Jewish influence in philosophy since Spinoza. Modern

balance of tendencies ----- 489

Section h.-thf, Oriental civilizations

Asiatic intellectual life. Japan. Discussions on Japanese
psychosis. Fukuzawa. The recent Cult of the

Emperor. China. India. Turkey. Greece - 490

CON'CLUSION -------- 499

303

Chapter XIII
THE RISE OF MODERN FKEETHOUGHT— {Continued)

§ 4. England

While France was thus passing from general fanaticism to a large
measure of freethought, England was passing by a less tempestuous
path to a hardly less advanced stage of opinion. It was indeed a
bloody age ; and in 1535 we have record of nineteen men and live
women of Holland, apparently Anabaptists, who denied the

humanity " of Christ and rejected infant baptism and transub-
stantiation, being sentenced to be burned alive — two suffering at
Smithfield, and the rest at other towns, by way of example. Others
in Henry's reign suffered the same penalty for the same offence ; and
in 1538 a priest named Nicholson or Lambert, refusing on the King's
personal pressure to recant, was "brent in Smithfield" for denying
the bodily presence in the eucharist.1 The first decades of

Reformation" in England truly saw the opening of new vials
of blood. More and Fisher and scores of lesser men died as
Catholics for denying the King's " supremacy " in religion ; as
many more for denying the Catholic tenets which the King held
to the last ; and not a few by the consent of More and Fisher for
translating or circulating the sacred books. Latimer, martyred
under Mary, had applauded the burning of the Anabaptists. One
generation slew for denial of the humanity of Christ ; the next for
denial of his divinity. Under Edward VI there were burned no
Catholics, but several heretics, including Joan Bochcr and a Dutch
Unitarian, George Van Pare, described as a man of saintly life."
Still the English evolution was less destructive than the French or
the German, and the comparative bloodlessness of the strife between
Protestant and Catholic under Mary' and Elizabeth, the treatment

1 Stow's Annals, ed. 1015, pp. 570, 575.

- Burnet, Hint, of the. W-form'ttwii, el. Naves, ii, 170; iii, 2S0; Ktrype, Memorials of
Crn.nme.i-, ed. 1818-51, ii. 100.

■'■ The Marian persecutions undoubtedly did much to stimulate Protestantism. It is
not generally realized tliat many of the hurnim.'s of heretics under Mary were quasi-
sacrifices on her behalf. Ou each occasion of her hopes of pregnancy beiiit! disappointed,
some victims were sent to the stake. See Strype, ed. cited, iii, l'.'ii, and I'eter Martyr,
there cited ; Fronde, ed. 1870, v, 521 so., 530 sa. The influence of Spanish ecclesiastics may
he- inferred. The expulsions of the. lews and the Moriscoes from Spain were h.\ wa> of
averting the wrath of God. Still, a Spanish priest at Court preached in favour of mercy.
LiuHard, ed. 1855, v, 231,

VOL. II 1 11

2 THE EISE OF MODEKN FKEETHOUGHT

of the Jesuit propaganda under the latter queen as a political rather
than a doctrinal question,1 prevented any such vehemence of recoil
from religious ideals as took place in France. When in 1575 the
law De hceretico comburcndo, which had slept for seventeen years,
was set to work anew under Elizabeth, the first victims were Dutch
Anabaptists. Of a congregation of them at Aldgate, twenty-seven
were imprisoned, of whom ten were burned, and the rest deported.
Two others, John Wielmacker and Hendrich Ter Woort, were anti-
Trinitarians, and were burned accordingly. Foxe appealed to the
Queen to appoint any punishment short of death, or even that of
hanging, rather than the horrible death by burning; but in vain.
All parties at the time concurred " in approving the course taken.
Orthodoxy was rampant.

Unbelief, as we have seen, however, there certainly was ; and
it is recorded that Walter, Earl of Essex, on his deathbed at Dublin
in 157G, murmured that among his countrymen neither Popery nor
Protestantism prevailed : " there was nothing but infidelity, infidelity,
infidelity; atheism, atheism; no religion, no religion."'1 And when
we turn aside from the beaten paths of Elizabethan literature wo see
clearly what is partly visible from those paths — a number of free-
thinking variations from the norm of faith. Ascham, as we saw,
found some semblance of atheism shockingly common among the
travelled upper class of his day ; and the testimonies continue.
Edward Kirke, writing his "glosses" to Spenser's Shepherd's
Calendar in 1578, observes that " it was an old opinion, and yet
is continued in some men's conceit, that men of years have no fear
of God at all, or not so much as younger folk," experience having
made them skeptical. Erasmus, lie notes, in his Adages makes the
proverb " Nemo senex metuit Jovem " signify merely that " old men
are far from superstition and belief in false Gods." Put Kirke
insists that, " his great learning notwithstanding, it is too plain to
be gainsaid that old men are much more inclined to such fond
fooleries than younger men,"'1 apparently meaning that elderly men
in his day were commonly skeptical about divine providence.

Other writers of the day do not limit unbelief to the aged. Lilly,
in his Euphaes (1578), referring to England in general or Oxford in
particular as Athens, asks : " Pe there not many in Athens which
think there is no God, no redemption, no resurrection ? " Further,

1 The number slain was certainly not small. It amounted to at least 190, perhaps to
201. Soames, Elizabethan Religious History. 1830, p. 59(5-98. Under Mary there perished
some 288. Durham Dunlop, The Church under the Tudor a, ISO'.), p. 101 and rets.

- Sonnies, as cited, j)]). '213-1S, and refs.

:; Froude, Hint, of England, ed. 1870, x, 515 (ed. 1875. xi, 190), citing MSS. Ireland.

1 Glu-s to February in the Slieplterd's Calendar, Globe ed. pp. 151-5-2.

ENGLAND 3

be complains that " it was openly reported of an old man in Naples

that there was more lightness in Athens than in all Italy more

Papists, more Atheists, more sects, more schisms, than in all the
monarchies in the world";1 and he proceeds to frame an absurd
dialogue of " Euphues and Atheos," in which the latter, " monstrous,
yet tractable to he persuaded,"'2 is converted with a burlesque
facility. Lilly, who writes as a man-of-the-world believer, is a
poor witness as to the atheistic arguments current ; but those he
cites are so much better than his own, up to the point of terrified
collapse on the atheist's part, that he had doubtless heard them.
The atheist speaks as a pantheist, identifying deity with the
universe ; and readily meets a simple appeal to Scripture with the
reply that " whosoever denietb a godhead denieth also the Scriptures
which testifie of him."1 But in one of his own plays, played in
15S4, Lilly puts on the stage a glimpse of current controversy in
a fashion which suggests that he had not remained so contemptu-
ously confident of the self-evident character of theism. In Campaspe
(i,3) lie introduces, undramatically enough, Plato, Aristotle, Cleanthes,
Crates, and other philosophers, who converse concerning " natural
causes" and "supernatural effects." Aristotle is made to confess
that he "cannot by natural reason give any reason of the ebhing
and flowing of the sea"; and Plato contends against Cleanthes,
" searching for things which are not to ho found," that "there is no
man so savage in whom rcsteth not this divine particle, that there is
an omnipotent, eternal, and divine mover, which may he called God."
Cleanthes replies that ' that first mover, which you term God, is the
instrument of all the movings which we attribute to Nature. The
earth seasons fruits the whole firmament and what-
soever else appeareth miraculous, what man almost of mean capacity
hut can prove it natural." Nothing is concluded, and the dehate is
adjourned. Anaxarchus declares : " I will take part with Aristotle,
that there is Nat ura naturans, and yet not God"; while Crates
rejoins: "And I with Plato, that there is Deus optimus maximus,
and not Nature."

It is a curious dialogue to put upon the stage, by the mouth of
children-actors, and the arbitrary ascription to Aristotle of high
theistic views, in a scene in which he is expressly described by a
fellow philosopher as a Naturalist, suggests that Lilly felt the danger
of giving offence by presenting the supreme philosopher as an atheist.

1 i: ti )>h urs : Tlte Ann to my of Wit, Arbcr's reprint, i>]>. 110, 15.'!. That the lvfiToiicc was
mainly to Oxfonl is to \m inferred from tin; address "To my writ: jjooil friumls thu
Gonlli inuii Kchollurs of Oxford," prefixed to tile ed. of I.Vsl. Id. p. -Hfl .

'* Id. p. 10s. :; Id. pp. ltd, ltiti.

4 THE EISE OF MODEEN FREETHOUGHT

It is evident, however, both from Euphues and from Campaspe,
that naturalistic views were in some vogue, else they had not been
handled in the theatre and in a book essentially planned for the
general reader. But however firmly held, they could not bo directly
published ; and a dozen years later, over thirty years after the
outburst of Ascham, we still find only a sporadic and unwritten
freethought, however abundant, going at times in fear of its
life.

Private discussion, indeed, there must have been, if there be any
truth in Bacon's phrase that " atheists will ever be talking of that

opinion, as if they would be glad to be strengthened by the

consent of others " * — an argument which would make short work of
the vast literature of apologetic theism — but even private talk had
need be cautious, and there could be no publication of atheistic
opinions. Printed rationalism could go no further than such a
protest against superstition as Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witch-
craft (1584), which, however, is a sufficiently remarkable expression
of reason in an age in which a Bodin held angrily by the delusion.2
Elizabeth was herself substantially irreligious,8 and preferred to keep
the clergy few in number and subordinate in influence;4 but her
Ministers regarded the Church as part of the State system, and
punished all open or at least aggressive heresy in the manner of the
Inquisition. Yet the imported doctrine of the subjective character
of hell and heaven,5 taken up by Marlowe, held its ground, and is
denounced by Stubbes in Ids Anatomic of Abuses6 (1583); and other
foreign philosophy of the same order found religious acceptance.
A sect called the "Family of Love," deriving from Holland (already
a country fruitfull of heretics "),T went so far as to hold that
Christ dofli not signify any one person, but a quality whereof
many are partakers " — a doctrine which we have seen ascribed by
Calvin to the libertins of Geneva a generation before;8 but it does

1 Essay Of Atheism.

2 Lecky, nationalism, i, 103-lOt. Scot's book (now made accessible by a reprint, 1886)
had practically no influence in his own day ; and Kins James, who wrote against it, caused
it to be burned by the hangman in the next. Scot inserts the "inftdelitie of atheists" in
the list of intellectual evils on his title-page; but save' for an allusion to "the abhomina-
tion of idolatrie" all the others indicted are aspects of the black art.

3 "No woman ever lived who was so totally destitute of the sentiment of religion"
(Green, Short History, ch. vii, § 3, p. 800).

* Cp. Soamea, Elizabethan Iteliaious History, 1S39, p. 225. Yet when Morris, the attorney
of the Duchy of Lancaster, introduced in Parliament a Bill to restrain the power of the
ecclesiastical courts, she had him dismissed and imprisoned for life, being determined
that the control should remain, through those courts, in her own hands, lleylyn, Hist.
of the lleformation, ed. 1849, pref. vol. i, pp. xiv-xv.

•' See above, vol. i, pp. 435, 416, 459. G Collier's Reprint, p. 190.

7 Camden, Annals of Elizabeth, sub. ami. 1580; 3rd ed. 1635, p. 218. Cp. Koames, p. 214.

y Hooker, Pref. to Ecclesiastical Polity, ch. iii, § 9, ed. 1850. Camden (p. 219) states that
the Dutch teacher Henry Nichalai, whoso works were translated for the sect, "gave out
that lie did partake of God, and God of his humanity."

ENGLAND 5

not appear that they were persecuted.1 Some isolated propagandists,
however, paid the last penalty. One Matthew Hamont or Hamond,
a ploughwright, of Hetherset, was in 1579 tried by the Bishop and
Consistory of Norwich " for that he denyed Christo," and, being
found guilty, was burned, after having had his ears cut off, " because
he spake wordes of blasphcmie against the Queen's Maiistie and
others of her Counsell."2 The victim would thus seem to have
been given to violence of speech ; but the record of his negations,
which suggest developments from the Anabaptist movement, is none
the less notable. In Stow's wording,'' they run : —

"That the newo Testament and Gospell of Christo are but mere
foolishnesse, a storie of menne, or rather a mere fable.

" Item, that man is restored to grace by the meere mercy of God,
wythout the meane of Christ's bloud, death, and passion.

" Item, that Christe is not God, nor the Saviour of the world, but
a meere man, a sinfull man, and an abhominable Idoll.

" Item, that al they that worshippe him are abhominable
Idolaters ; And that Christe did not rise agayne from death to lifo
by the power of his Godhead, neither, that bee did ascendo into
Heaven.

" Item, that the holy Ghoste is not God, neither that there is
any suche holy Ghoste.

" Item, that Baptisme is not necessarie in the Churcho of God,
neither the use of the sacrament of the body and bloude of Christ."

There is record also of a freethinker named John Lowes burned
at the same place in 1583 for "denying the Godhead of Christ, and
holding other detestable heresies," in the manner of Hamond.4 In
the same year Elias Thacker and John Coping were hanged at
St. Edmonsbury " for spreading certaine bookes, seditiously penned
by one Robert Browne against the Booke of Common Prayer "; and
" their bookes so many as could be found were burnt before them."5
Further, one Peter Cole, an Ipswich tanner, was burned in 1587
(also at Norwich) for similar doctrine ; and Francis Kett, a young
clergyman, ex-fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, was
burned at the same place in 1089 for heresy of the Unitarian order.6

1 See above, i, 458, as to a, much more pronounced heresy in 1510, which also Feoms to
have escaped punishment. Camden tells that the books of the "Family of hove" were
burnt in 1.7-0, hut mentions no other penalties. Stow records that on October !), ].>,(),
"proclamation was published at London for the :i p prehension and severe punishing of all
persons xusjicctfd to bo of the family of love." Kd. 1015, p. 0S7. J-'ne of them had been
frightened info a public recantation in 1575. hi. p. 07°.

* May l.i. 1579. The burning was on the 20th.

3 Stow's Annuls, ed. 15S.0, pp. 1,1'Jl !)5. Kd. lid.',, p. f,05.

4 Slow, od. Kilo, p. 007 ; David' a Evidence, by William Burton, Preacher of Heading,
3502 i?\ i). 125.

•'■ Stow, ed. 101 5, p. 090.

c burton, as cited. See below, lip. 7, 12, as to Kelt's writings.

6 THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT

Hamond and Cole seem, however, to have been in their own way
religious men,1 and Kett a devout mystic, with ideas of a Second
Advent.2 All founded on the Bible.

Most surprising of all perhaps is the record of the trial of
one John Hilton, clerk in holy orders, before the Upper House
of Convocation on December 22, 1584, on the charge of having
"said in a sermon at St. Martin's-in-the-Fields that the Old
and New Testaments are but fables." (Lansdowne MSS.
British Museum, No. 982, fol. 46, cited by Prof. Storojenko,
Life of Bobcrt Greene, Eng. tr. in Grosart's " Huth Library"
ed. of Greene's Works, i, 39, note) As Hilton confessed to the
charge and made abjuration, it may be surmised that he had
spoken under the influence of liquor. Even on that view, how-
ever, such an episode tells of a considerable currency of un-
believing criticism.

Apart from constructive heresy, the perpetual religious dissen-
sions of the time were sure to stimulate doubt ; and there appeared
quite a number of treatises directed wholly or partly against explicit
unbelief, as: The Faith of the Church Militant, translated from
the Latin of the Danish divine Hemming (1581), and addressed "to
the confutation of the Jewes, Turks, Atheists, Papists, Hereticks,
and all other adversaries of the truth whatsoever"; " The Touch-
stone of True Religion against the impietie of Atheists, Epicures,

Lihertines, Hippocrites, and Temporisours of these times " (1590) ;
An Encmie to Atheisme, translated by T. Rogers from the Latin
of Avenar (1591) ; the preacher Henry Smith's God's Arrow
against Atheists (1533, rep. 1611) ; an English translation of the
second volume of La Primaudaye's U Academic Francaise, containing
a refutation of atheistic doctrine ; and no fewer than three " Treatises
of the Nature of God" — all anonymous, the third known to be by
Bishop Thomas Morton — all appearing in the year 1599.

All this smoke — eight apologetic treatises in eighteen years —
implies some fire ; and the translator of La Primaudaye, one " T. 13.,"
declares in his dedication that there has been a general growth of
atheism in England and on the continent, which he traces to " that
Monster Machiavell." Among English atheists of that school he
ranks the dramatist Robert Greene, who had died in 1592 ; and it
has been argued, not quite convincingly, that it was to Machiavelli
that Greene had pointed, in his death-bed recantation A Groatsicortii

1 Art. Matthew Hamond, in Diet, of Nat. Biog.
- Art. Fkancis Kett, in Vict, of Nat. Biog.

ENGLAND 7

of Wit (1592), as the atheistic instructor of his friend Marlowe,1
who introduces "Machiavel" as cynical prologist to his Jew of
Malta. Greene's own " atheism " had heen for the most part
a matter of bluster and disorderly living ; and we find his zealously
orthodox friend Thomas Nasho, in his Strange Neios (1592), calling
the Puritan zealot who used the pseudonym of Martin Marprelate
" a mighty platformor of atheism"; even as his own and Greene's
enemy, Gabriel Harvey, called Nashe an atheist.2 But Nashe in
his Christ's Tears over Jerusalem (1592), though ho speaks char-
acteristically of the " atheistical Julian," discusses contemporary
atheism in a fashion descriptive of an actual growth of the opinion,
concerning which he alleges that there is no "sect now in England
so scattered [i.e., so widely spread] as atheisme." The " outward
atheist," he declares, " establishes reason as his God "; and lie offers
some sufficiently primitive arguments by way of confutation.
"'They follow the Pironicks [i.e., Pyrrhonists] , whose position and
opinion it is that there is no hell or misery but opinion. Impudently
they persist in it, that the late discovered Indians show antiquities
thousands before Adam." For the rest, they not only reject the
miracles of Moses as mere natural expedients misrepresented, but
treat the whole Bible as "some late writers of our side" treat the
Apocrypha. And Nashe complains feelingly that while the atheists
" are special men of wit," and that the Romish seminaries have not
allured unto them so many good wits as atheism," the preachers who
reply to them are men of dull understanding, the product of a system
under which preferment is given to graduates on the score not of
capacity but of mere gravity and solemnity. " It is the super-
abundance of wit," declares Nashe, ' that makes atheists : will you
then hope to beat them down with fusty brown-bread dorbellism '? "°
There had arisen, in short, a ferment of rationalism which was
henceforth never to disappear from English life.

In 1593, indeed, we find atheism formally charged against two
famous men, CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE and Sir WALTER RALEIGH,
of whom the first is documentarily connected with Kett, and the
second in turn with Marlowe. An oilicial document,4 preserved by

1 Prof. Storojcnko, Lifr, of Grrrnc, Eng. tr. in Grosart's "Iluth Library" ed. of Greene's
Works, i, I'-!-.")!). 1 1> is quite clear that Malone and the critics who have followed him were
wrong in supposing the unnamed instructor to be Francis Kelt, who was a devout Uni-
tarian. I'rof. Storojcnko speaks of Kett as having been made an Arian ;i t Norwich , after
iii- return there in \ '>-,'>. by the in Hue nee of I .ewes and Ifa worth. Query llamond ?

- In I'icrr.i-H HuiM-.rr rutin titm, (Jollier's ed. p. H~>.

'■'■ Hep. of Nashe's Works in Grosart's " Hulh Library " cd. vol. iv, pp. 17-2, 173, 178, 1S2,
I-::, etc. K<1. McKerrow, 1UJ1, ii. Ill 11'.).

1 MS. Harl. i;s.->i. fol. :jj). It is given in full in the appendix to the. first issue of the
Rejected plays of Marlowe in the Mermaid Series, edited by Mr. lfavelock Ellis: and,
with omissions, in the editions of Cunningham, Uyce, and liallen.

8 THE EISE OF MODEEN FEEETHOUGHT

some chance, reveals that Marlowe was given — whether or not over
the wine-cup — to singularly audacious derision of the received
beliefs ; and so explicit is the evidence that it is nearly certain he
would have been executed for blasphemy had he not been privately
killed (1593) while the proceedings were pending. The " atheism "
imputed to him is not made out in any detail ; but many of the
other utterances are notably in keeping with Marlowe's daring
temper ; and they amount to unbelief of a stringent kind. In Doctor
Faustus1 he makes Mephistopheles affirm that " Hell hath no limits

but where we are is hell" — a doctrine which we have seen to

be current before his time ; and in his private talk he had gone much
further. Nashe doubtless had him in mind when he spoke of men
of " superabundance of wit." Not only did he question, with
Ealeigh, the Biblical chronology : he affirmed " That Moyses was
but a juggler, and that one Heriots " [i.e., Thomas Harriott, or
Harriots, the astronomer, one of Baleigh's circle] " can do more
than he"; and concerning Jesus he used language incomparably
more offensive to orthodox feeling than that of Hamond and Rett.
There is more in all this than a mere assimilation of Machiavelli ;
though the further saying " that the first beginning of religion was
only to keep men in awe" — put also by Greene [if not by Marlowe],
with much force of versification, in the mouth of a villain-hero in
the anonymous play of Sclimus2 — tells of that influence. Marlowe
was indeed not the man to swear by any master without adding
something of his own. Atheism, however, is not inferrible from any of
his works : on the contrary, in the second part of Ids famous first play
he makes his hero, described by the repentant Greene as the " atheist
Tamburlaine," declaim of deity with signal eloquence, though with
a pantheistic cast of phrase. In another passage, a Moslem
personage claims to bo on the side of a Christ who would punish
perjury ; and in yet another the hero is made to trample under foot
the pretensions of Mohammed.8 It was probably his imputation of
perjury to Christian rulers in particular that earned for Marlowe the
malignant resentment which inspired the various edifying comments
published after his unedifying death. Had lie not perished as he
did in a tavern brawl, he might have had the nobler fate of a
martyr.

Concerning Ealeigh, again, there is no shadow of proof of atheism,

1 Act II. sc. i.

- Grosart's ed. in "Temple Dramatists " series, 11. 216-371. There is plenty of " irreligion "
in the passage, but not atheism, though there is a denial of a future state (365-70), The
lines in question strongly suggest Marlowe's influence or authorship, which indeed is
claimed by Mr. C. Crawford for the whole play. Hut all the external evidence ascribes
the play to Greene. 3 Tamburlaine, Tart II, Act II, sc. ii. iii ; A', sc. i.

ENGLAND 9

though his circle, which included the Earls of Northumberland and
Oxford, was called a " school of atheism " in a Latin pamphlet by
the Jesuit Parsons,1 published at Rome in 1593 ; and this reputation
clung to him. It is matter of literary history, however, that he,
like Montaigne, had been influenced by the Hypotyposcs of Sextus
Empiricus ;2 his short essay The Sceptick being a naif exposition of
the thesis that " the sceptick doth neither affirm neither deny any
position ; but doubteth of it, and applyeth his Reason against that
which is affirmed, or denied, to justiiie his non-consenting."' The
essay itself, nevertheless, proceeds upon a set of wildly false proposi-
tions in natural history, concerning which the adventurous reasoner
has no doubts whatever ; and altogether we may be sure that his
artificial skepticism did not carry him far in philosophy. In the
Discovery of Guiana (1G00) he declares that he is " resolved " of
the truth of the stories of men whoso heads grow beneath their
shoulders ; and in his History of tlic World (1G03-1G) he insists
that the stars and other celestial bodies " incline the will by
mediation of the sensitive appetite."4 In other directions, however,
ho was less credulous. In the same History he points out, as
Marlowe had done in talk, how incompatible was such a pheno-
menon as the mature civilization of ancient Egypt in the days of
Abraham with the orthodox chronology." This, indeed, was heresy
enough, then and later, seeing that not only did Bishop Pearson, in
1659, in a work on The Creed which has been circulated down to
the nineteenth century, indignantly denounce all who departed from
the figures in the margin of the Bible ; but Coleridge, a century
and a half later, took the very instance of Egyptian history as
triumphantly establishing the accuracy of the Bible record against
the French atheists.0 As regards Raleigh's philosophy, the evidence
goes to show only that he was ready to read a Unitarian essay,
presumably that already mentioned, supposed to be Rett's ; and
that he had intercourse with Marlowe and others (in particular Ins
secretary, Harriott) known to be freethinkers. A prosecution begun
against him on this score, at the time of the inquiry concerning
Marlowe (when Raleigh was in disgrace with the Queen), came
to nothing. It had been led up to by a translation of Parsons's
pamphlet, which affirmed that Ins private group was known us
Sir Walter Rawley's school of Atheisme," and that therein "both

1 Writing as And row Pliilopater. Sec Diet, of Nut. Vina-, art. Uoin'.UT Pausons, nnd
Storojenko, us cited, i, :;ii, and Hate.

- Translated into Latin liv Henri Kstiennc in \TJC>2.

' Hrm'tinsoJ Sir Walter liakiyli, ed. JG07, p. ISi. •' I'.k. i. cli. i, sec. 11.

•' lik. ii, eli. i, see. 7. i; 1-is; aj on llie L'rumetheus.

10 THE ETSE OF MODEEN FBEETHOUGHT

Moyses and our Savior, the Old and the New Testaments, are jested
at, and the scholars taught among other things to spell God back-
wards." ] This seems to have been idle gossip, though it tells of
unbelief somewhere ; and Ealeigh's own writings always indicate
belief in the Bible ; though his dying speech and epitaph are
noticeably deistic. That he was a deist, given to free discussion,
seems the probable truth.

In passing sentence at the close of Ealeigh's trial for treason in
1603, in which his guilt is at least no clearer than the inequity of
the proceedings, Lord Chief Justice Popham unscrupulously taunted
him with his reputation for heresy. " You have been taxed by the
world with the defence of the most heathenish and blasphemous
opinions, which I list not to repeat, because Christian ears cannot
endure to hear them, nor the authors and maintainers of them be
suffered to live in any Christian commonwealth. You know what
men said of Harpool."3 If the preface to his History of the World,
written in the Tower, be authentic, Ealeigh was at due pains to
make clear his belief in deity, and to repudiate alike atheism and
pantheism. "I do also account it," he declares, "an impiety
monstrous, to confound God and Nature, be it but in terms."4
And he is no more tolerant than his judge when he discusses the
question of the eternity of the universe, then the crucial issue as
between orthodoxy and doubt. " Whosoever will make choice
rather to believe in eternal deformity [ = want of form] or in
eternal dead matter, than in eternal light and eternal life, let
eternal death be his reward. For it is a madness of that kind,
as wanteth terms to express it."5 Inasmuch as Aristotle was the
great authority for the denounced opinion, Ealeigh is anti-
Aristotelean. " I shall never be persuaded that God hath shut
up all light of learning within the lantern of Aristotle's brains."6
But in the whole preface there is only one, and that a conventional,
expression of belief in the Christian dogma of salvation ; and as to
that we may note his own words : " We are all in effect become
comedians in religion." ' Still, untruthful as he certainly was,s we
may take him as a convinced theist of the experiential school,
standing at the ordinary position of the deists of the next century.

Notably enough, he anticipates the critical position of Hume as

1 Art. Kaiyf.igh, in Dirt, of Nat. Biog.. xlvii, 10-2. _ 2 Id. pp. 200-201.

3 Report in 1730 ed. of History of the World, p. ccxlix. " Harpool " seems an error for
Harriott. Cp. Edwards, Life of Sir Walter Baleigh, 1868, i, 4:3-2, 130. It is after naming
"Harpool" that the judge says: "Let not any devil persuade you to think there is no
eternity in heaven."

1 Ed. cited, p. xxviii. 5 Id. p. xxiv.

G Id. p. xxii. 7 Id. p. xvi.

8 Cp. Gardiner, History of England, 1603-1612, 10-vol. ed. i. 132-35; iii, 150, 152.

ENGLAND 11

to reason and experience : " That these and these he the causes of
these and these effects, time hath taught us and not reason ; and so
hath experience without art." Such utterance, if not connected
with professions of piety, might in those days give rise to such
charges of unbelief as were so freely cast at him. But the charges
seem to have been in large part mere expressions of the malignity
which religion so normally fosters, and which can seldom have been
more bitter than then. Raleigh is no admirable type of rectitude ;
but he can hardly have been a worse man than his orthodox
enemies. And we must estimate such men in full view of the low
standards of their age.

The belief about Raleigh's atheism was so strong that wo
have Archbishop Abbot writing to Sir Thomas Roe on Feb. 19,
L618-1619, that Raleigh's end was due to his " questioning " of
" God's being and omnipotence." It is asserted by Francis
Osborn, who had known Raleigh, that he got his title of Atheist
from Queen Elizabeth. See the preface {Author to Header) to
Osborn's Miscellany of Sundry Essays, etc., in 7th ed. of his
Works, 1G73. As to atheism at Elizabeth's court see J. J.
Taylor, Retrospect of Bclig, Life of England, 2nd ed. p. 198, and
ref. Lilly makes one of his characters write of the ladies at
court that " they never jar about matters of religion, because
they never mean to reason of them" (Euphues, Arber's ed.
p. 191).

A curious use was made of Raleigh's name and fame after his
death for various purposes. In 1620 or 1621 appeared " Vox
Spiritus, or Sir Walter Rawleigh's Ghost ; a Conference between

Signr. Gondamier and Father Bauldwine " — a "seditious"

tract by one Captain Gainsford. It appears to have been
reprinted in 1622 as " Prosopoeia. Sir Walter Rawleigh's
Ghost." Then in 1626 came a new treatise, " Sir Walter
Rawleigh's Ghost, or England's Forewarner," published in
1626 at Utrecht by Thomas Scott, an English minister there,
who was assassinated in the same year. The title having thus
had vogue, there was published in 1631 " Baivlcigh's Ghost, or,
a Feigned Apparition of Syr Walter Rawleigh to a friend of his,
for the translating into English the Booke of Leonard Lcssius
(that most learned man), entituled Da Providentia Numinis et
animi immortal itatc, written against the Atheists and Polititians
of these days." The translation of a Jesuit's treatise (1613)
thus accredited purports to be by "A. B." In a reprint of 1651
the " feigned " disappears from the title-page; but " Sir Walter
Rawleigh's Ghost " remains to attract readers ; and the trans-
lation, now purporting to ho by John llolden, who claims to

1 Ed. cited, p. xxii.

12 THE EISE OF MODERN FEEETHOUGHT

have been a. friend of Raleigh's, is dedicated to his son Cavew.
In the preface the Ghost adjures the translator (who professes
to have heard him frequently praise the treatise of Lessius) to
translate the work with Raleigh's name on the title, so as to
clear his memory of " a foul and most unjust aspersion of me
for my presumed denial of a deity."

The latest documentary evidence as to the case of Marlowe
is produced by Mr. F. S. Boas in his article, "New Light on
Marlowe and Kyd," in the Fortnightly Bcvicic, February, 1899,
reproduced in his edition of the works of Thomas Kyd (Clarendon
Press, 1901). In addition to the formerly known data as to
Marlowe's " atheism," it is now established that Thomas Kyd,
his fellow dramatist, was arrested on the same charge, and
that there was found among his papers one containing vile
hereticall conceiptes denyinge the divinity of Jhesus Christe
our Saviour." This Kyd declared he had had from Marlowe,
denying all sympathy with its view. Nevertheless, he was
%mt to the torture. The paper, however, proves to be a
vehement Unitarian argument on Scriptural grounds, and is
much more likely to have been written by Francis Kett than by
Marlowe. In the MSS. now brought to light, one Cholmeley,
who " confessed that he was persuaded by Marlowe's reasons
to become an Atheiste," is represented by a spy as speaking
" all evil of the Counsell, saying that they are all Atheistes
and Machiavillians, especially my Lord Aclmirall." The same
"atheist," who imputes atheism to others as a vice, is described
as regretting he had not killed the Lord Treasurer, " sayenge
that he could never have done God better service."

For the rest, the same spy tells that Cholmeley believed
Marlowe was " able to shewe more sound reasons for Atheismo
than any devine in Englande is able to geve to prove devinitie,
and that Marloe told him that he hath read the Atheist lecture
to Sir Walter Raleigh and others." On the last point there
it no further evidence, save that Sir Walter, his dependent
Thomas Harriott, and Mr. Carewe Rawley, were on March 21,
1593-1594, charged upon sworn testimonies with holding
" impious opinions concerning God and Providence." There
was, however, no prosecution. Harriott had published in
1588 a work on his travels in Virginia, at the close of which
is a passage in the devoutest vein telling of his missionary
labours (quoted by Mr. Boas, art. cited, p. 225). Yet by 1592
he had, with his master, a reputation for atheism ; and that it
was not wholly on the strength of his great scientific knowledge
is suggested by the statement of Anthony a Wood that he
"made a philosophical theology, wherein he cast off the Old
Testament."

Of this no trace remains ; but it is established that he was
a highly accomplished mathematician, much admired by Kepler ;

ENGLAND 13

and that he "applied the telescope to celestial purposes almost
simultaneously with Galileo " (art. HARRIOTT in Diet, of Nat.

Biog.; cp. art. in Encyc. Brit). "Harriott was the first

who dared to say A = 13 in the form A — 13 = 0, one of the
greatest sources of progress ever opened in algebra " (Prof. A.
Do Morgan, Newton, his Friend and his Niece, 1885, p. 91).
Further, he improved algebraic notation by the use of small
italic letters in place of Roman capitals, and threw out the
hypothesis of secondary planets as well as of stars invisible
from their size and distance. " He was the first to verify the
results of Galileo." Rev. Baden Powell, Hist, of Nat. Philos.
1831, pp. 126, 168. Cp. Rigaud, as cited by Powell; Ellis's
notes on Paeon, in Routledge's 1-vol. ed. 1905, pp. G71-76 ;
and Storojenko, as above cited, p. 38, note.

Against the aspersion of Harriott at Raleigh's trial may be cited
the high panegyric of Chapman, who terms him " my admired and
soubloved friend, master of all essential and true knowledge,"1 and
one " whose judgment and knowledge, in all kinds, I know to be
incomparable and bottomless, yea, to be admired as much as his
most blameless life, and the right sacred expense of his time, is to
be honoured and reverenced " ; with a further " affirmation of his
clear unmatchedness in all manner of learning."'2

The frequency of such traces of rationalism at this period is to
be understood in the light of the financial and other scandals of the
Reformation ; the bitter strifes of Church and dissent ; and the
horrors of the wars of religion in France, concerning which Paeon
remarks in his essay Of Unity in Ileliijion that the spectacle would
have made Lucretius " seven times more Epicure and atheist than
he was." The proceedings against Raleigh and Kyd, accordingly,
did not check the spread of the private avowal of unbelief. A few
years later we find Hooker, in the Fifth Book of his Ecclesiastical
Polity (1597), bitterly declaring that the unbelievers in the higher
tenets of religion are much strengthened by tlio strifes of believers ;J
as a do/en years earlier Pishop Pilkington told of "young whelps"
who in corners make themselves merry with railing and scoffing
at the holy scriptures." i And in the Treatise of the Nature of Hod,
by Bishop Thomas .Morton (1599), a quasi-dialogue in which the
arguing is all on one side, the passive interlocutor indicates, in the
process of repudiating them, a full acquaintance with the pleas of
those who ' would openly profess themselves to bo of that [the

1 Title of verses appenrtert to trims, of Achillea Skidd, ir/fcJ. Chapman spells the name
Hnrriols.

~ I'ref. to complete trans, of Mi art.

" Uk. v, eh. ii, . :: I I. Works, >■<]. 1K.7), i, I .'52 :'.('>.

1 J-Uiiosition niton Xchemuih {IMZ) in Parker Soe. ert. of Works, 1812, p. 101.

14 THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT

atheistic] judgment, and as far as they might without danger defend
it by argument against any whatever." The pleas include the lack
of moral control in the world, the evidences of natural causation,
the varieties of religious belief, and the contradictions of Scripture.
And such atheists, we are told, " make nature their God." !

From Hooker's account also it is clear that, at least with
comparatively patient clerics like himself, the freethinkers would at
times deliberately press the question of theism, and avow the con-
viction that belief in God was "a kind of harmless error, bred and
confirmed by the sleights of wiser men." He further notes with
even greater bitterness that some — an " execrable crew " — who were
themselves unbelievers, would in the old pagan manner argue for
the fostering of religion as a matter of State policy, herein conning
the lesson of Machiavelli. For his own part Hooker was confessedly
ill-prepared to debate with the atheists, and his attitude was not
fitted to shake their opinions. His one resource is the inevitable
plea that atheists are such for the sake of throwing off all moral
restraint2 — a theorem which could hardly be taken seriously by
those who knew the history of the English and French aristocracies,
Protestant and Catholic, for the past hundred years. Hooker's own
measure of rationalism, though remarkable as compared with previous
orthodoxy, went no further than the application of the argument of
Pecock that reason must guide and control all resort to Scripture
and authority ;s and he came to it under stress of dispute, as a
principle of accommodation for warring believers, not as an expres-
sion of any independent skepticism. When his pious antagonist
Travel's cited him as saying that " his best author was his own
reason " i he was prompt to reply that he meant " true, souud, divine

reason ; reason proper to that science whereby the things of God

are known ; theological reason, which out of principles in Scripture
that are plain, soundly deduceth more doubtful inferences."' Of the
application of rational criticism to Scriptural claims he had no idea.
The unbelievers of his day were for him a frightful portent, menacing
all his plans of orthodox toleration ; and he would have had them
put down by force — a course which in some cases, as we have seen,
had in that age been actually taken, and was always apt to be
resorted to. But orthodoxy all the while had a sure support in the
social and political conditions which made impossible the publication

1 Work cited, pp. 8-11, 22. - Work*, i. 132; ii, 7G2-03.

a Uccles. Vol. bk. i, eh. vii ; bk. ii, eh. i, vii ; bk. iii, ch. viii, S 1G ; bk. v, ch. viii ; bk. vii,
ch. ,xi ; bk. viii, § G {Works, i, 105, 2:;i, 300, ill} ; ii, 38ti, 537). See the citations in Buckle,
3-vol. ed. iii, 311-12 ; 1-vol. ed. pp. 193-91.

1 Sujtplicittion of Travers, in Hooker's Works, ed. 1850, ii, G02.

5 Ansiver to T ravers, id. p. 003.

ENGLAND 15

of rationalistic opinions. While the whole machinery of puhlic
doctrine remained in religious hands or under ecclesiastical control,
the mass of men of all grades inevitably held by the traditional
faith. What is remarkable is the amount of unbelief, either
privately explicit or implicit in the higher literature, of which we
have trace.

Above all there remains the great illustration of the rationalistic
spirit of the English literary renascence of the sixteenth century —
the drama of SHAKESPEARE. Of that it may confidently be said
that every attempt to find for it a religious foundation has failed.1
Gervinus, while oddly suggesting that " in not only not seeking a
reference to religion in his works, but in systematically avoiding it
even when opportunity offered," Shakespeare was keeping clear of
an embroilment with the clergy, nevertheless pronounces the plays
to be wholly secular in spirit. While contending that " in action the
religious and divine in man is nothing else than the moral," the
German critic admits that Shakespeare " wholly discarded from his

works that which religion enjoins as to faith and opinion." "' And,

while refusing the inference of positive unbelief on the poet's part, he
pronounces that, "Just as Bacon banished religion from science, so did

Shakespeare from art From Bacon's example it seems clear that

Shakespeare left religious matters unnoticed on the same grounds." a
The latest and weightiest criticism comes to the same conclusion ;
and it is only on presupposition that any other can be reached.
One of the ablest of Shakespearean critics sums up that " the Eliza-
bethan drama was almost wholly secular; and while Shakespeare
was writing lie practically confined his view to the world of non-
theological observation and thought, so that lie represents it in
substantially one and the same way whether the period of the story
is pre-Christian or Christian."

[Prof. A. C. Bradley, Shakesperean Tragedy, 2nd ed. p. 25.
In the concluding pages of his lecture on Hamlet, Professor
Bradley slightly modifies this statement, suggesting that the
ghost is made to appear as " the representative of the hidden
ultimate power, the messenger of divine justice" (p. 171).
Jlere, it seems to the present writer, Professor Bradley obtrudes
the chief error of bis admirable book — the constant implication
that Shakespeare planned bis plays as moral wholes. The fact
is that he found the ghost an integral part of the old [day which
he rewrote ; and in making it, in Professor Bradley's words,

1 Some typical attempts of the kind arc discussed in the author's two lectures on The
lielidimi i.f Shnlci' /ji-nrc, 1887 (South I'lace Institute).

- filiakcsprnre Commentaries, i'.nU- tr, IfcjOU, ii, 018-19. ;l -Id- ii, 580.

1G THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT

"so majestical a phantom," he was simply heightening the
character as he does others in the play, and as was his habit in
the presentment of a king. In his volume of lectures entitled
Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909), Professor Bradley goes more
fully into the problem of Shakespeare's religion. Here he
somewhat needlessly obscures the issue by contending (p. 349)
that it is preposterous to suppose that Shakespeare was an
ardent and devoted atheist or Brownist or Roman Catholic,"
and makes the most of the poet's sympathetic treatment of
religious types and religious sentiments ; but still sums up that
he was not, in the distinctive sense of the word, a religious
man," and that " all was, for him, in the end, mystery " (p. 353).]

This perhaps somewhat understates the case. The Elizabethan
drama was not wholly secular ;' and certainly the dramatists indi-
vidually were not. Peele's David and Bethsabe is wholly Biblical
in theme, and, though sensual in sentiment, substantially orthodox
in spirit ; and elsewhere he has many passages of Protestant and
propagandist fervour.2 Greene and Lodge give a highly Scriptural
ring to their Looking -Glass for London ; and Lodge, who uses
religious expressions freely in his early treatise, A Defence of Poetry,
Music, and Stage Plays,3 later translated Josephus. Kyd in Arden
of Feversliam* accepts the Christian view at the close, though The
Spanish Tragedy is pagan ; and the pre- Shakespearean King Lcir
and his Three Daughters (1594), probably the work of Kyd and
Lodge, lias long passages of specifically Christian sentiment. Nashe,
again, was a hot religious controversialist despite his Bohemian
habits and his indecorous vein ; Greene on his repentant deathbed
was profusedly censorious of atheism ;5 Lilly, as we have seen, is
combatively theistic in his Campaspe ; while Jonson, as we shall see,
girds at skeptics in Volpone and The Magnetick Lady, and further
wrote a quantity of devotional verse. Even the " atheist " Marlowe,
as we saw, puts theistic sentiment info the mouth of his " atheist
Tamburlaine "; and of Doctor Faustus, despite incidental heresy,
the denouement is religiously orthodox. Thomas Heywood may
even be pronounced a religious man,6 as ho was certainly a strong
Protestant,' though an anti-Puritan ; and his prose treatise The

1 In the last edition I had written to that effect; but I have modified the opinion.

- 'I'tie allusion to " popish ceremonies " in Titus Andronicus is probably from his hand.
See the author's work. Diil Shakespeare Write " Titus Amlronicus" :', where it is argued
that the play in question is substantially l'eele's and Greene's.

a Shakespeare Hoc. re]). 1853, pp. 1 t. 16-17, ly. 21, -IS, etc.

4 This has been shown to be his by Fleay and Mr. Crawford.

5 See his Oroatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Uepentance.

G Compare the.Jane Shore portions of his Edward ICwiih thecloseof A Woman Killed
with Kindness. Note also the conclusion of The English Traveller.
7 See the poem England's Elizabeth, 1631.

ENGLAND 17

Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels (1G35) exhibits a religious tempera-
ment. The same may be said of Dekkor, who is recorded to have
written at least the prologue and the epilogue for a play on
Pontius Pilate,1 and is believed to be the author of the best scenes
in The Virgin Martyr, in which he collaborated with Massinger. He
too uses supererogatory religious expressions,'2 and shows his warm
Protestantism in The Whore of Babylon, as ho does his general
religious sentiment in his treatise The Seven Deadly Sins. Chapman
was certainly a devout theist, and probably a Christian. In the
"domestic" tragedy, A Warning for Fair Women (1599), which is
conjecturally ascribed to Lodge, the conclusion is on Christian lines,
as in Arden ; and the same holds of The Witch of Edmonton, by
Dekker and others. Of none of these dramatists could it be said,
on the mere strength of his work, that ho was " agnostic," though
Marlowe was certainly a freethinker. The others were, first or
last, avowedly religious. Shakespeare, and Shakespeare alone, after
Marlowe, is persistently non-religious in his handling of life. Lear,
his darkest tragedy, is predominantly pagan ; and The Tempest, in
its serener vein, is no less so. But indeed all the genuine plays
alike ignore or tacitly negate the idea of immortality ; even the
conventional religious phrases of Macbeth being but incidental
poetry.

In the words of a clerical historian, " the religious phrases
which are thinly scattered over his work are little more than
expressions of a distant and imaginative reverence. And on the

deeper grounds of religious faith his silence is significant The

riddle of life and death he leaves a riddle to the last, with-
out heeding the common theological solutions around him."'5 The
practical wisdom in which he rose above his rivals no less than in
dramatic and poetic genius, kept him prudently reticent on his
opinions, as it set him upon building his worldly fortunes while the
others with hardly an exception lived in shallows and miseries. As
so often happens, it was among the ill-balanced types that there was
found the heedless courage to cry aloud what others thought ; but
Shakespearo's significant silence reminds us that tho largest spirits

1 Jlenslowe's Diary, ed.Creg, i, fol. 90.

2 K.'.l., the lines,

The best of men
That o'er wore earth about him, was a sufferer,
A soft, meek, patient, humble, traiHiuil spirit,
The first true ilentleiiiau that ever breathed,

at the close of Part I of The Iliment Whore; and tho phrase, "J leaven's Croat aritlmn
t ieian," at the close of Old Fortuimtus.

'■'• Green, Short Hint. eh. vii, S 7 end. Ci>. liuskin, Hcaamc and Lilies, J.ect. iii, ? II.j,
VOL. II (J

18 THE EISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT

of all could live in disregard of contemporary creeds. For, while
there is no record of his having privately avowed unbelief, and
certainly no explicit utterance of it in his plays,1 in no genuine work
of his is there any more than bare dramatic conformity to current
habits of religious speech ; and there is often significantly less. In
Measure for Measure the Duke, counselling as a friar the condemned
Claudio, discusses the ultimate issues of life and death without a hint
of Christian credence.

So silent is the dramatist on the ecclesiastical issues of his day
that Protestants and Catholics are enabled to go on indefinitely
claiming him as theirs ; the latter dwelling on his generally kindly
treatment of friars ; the former citing the fact that some Protestant
preacher — evidently a protege of his daughter Susannah — was
allowed lodging at his house. But the preacher was not very
hospitably treated;" and other clues fail. There is good reason to
think that Shakespeare was much influenced by Montaigne's Essays,
read by him in Florio's translation, which was issued when he was
recasting the old Hamlet ; and the whole treatment of life in the
great tragedies and serious comedies produced by him from that
time forward is even more definitely untheological than Montaigne's
own doctrine.3 Nor can he be supposed to have disregarded the
current disputes as to fundamental beliefs, implicating as they did
his fellow-dramatists Marlowe, Kyd, and Greene. The treatise of
De Mornay, of which Sir Philip Sidney began and Arthur Golding
finished the translation,1 was in his time widely circulated in
England ; and its very inadequate argumentation might we'll
strengthen in him the anti-theological leaning.

A serious misconception has been set up as to Shakespeare's
cast of mind by the persistence of editors in including among
his works without discrimination plays which are certainly not
his, as the Henry VI group, to which he contributed little, and
in particular the First Part, of which he wrote probably nothing.
It is on the assumption that that play is Shakespeare's work
that Lecky (Rationalism in Europe, ed. 1887, i, 105-10G) speaks
of " that melancholy picture of Joan of Arc which is perhaps
the darkest blot upon his genius." Now, whatever passages
Shakespeare may have contributed to the Second and Third
Parts, it is certain that he has barely a scene in the First, and

1 The old work of W. J. Birch, M.A., An Inquiry into the Philosophy and Religion of
Shakspere (1S4S), is an unjudicial ex parte statement of the case for Shakespeare's
unbelief; but it is worth study.
. - The town paid for ins bread and wine, no doubt by way of compliment.

8 Cp. the author's Montaione and Shakespeare, '2nd ed. sec. viii.

4 A Woorke concerning tlie trewnesse of the Christian Religion, 1587. Reprinted in
1092, lOOi, and 1 (.'. 1 7 .

ENGLAND 19

that there is not a line from his hand in the La Pucelle scenes.
Many students think that Dr. Fumivall has even gone too far in

saying that "the only part to he put down to Shakespeare

is the Temple Garden scene of the red and white roses " (Introd.
to Leopold Shakespeare, p. xxxviii) ; so little is there to suggest
even the juvenile Shakespeare there. (The high proportion of
double-endings is a ground for reckoning it a late sample of
Marlowe, who in his posthumously published translation of
Lucan had approached that proportion. Cp. the author's vol.
en Titus Andronicus, p. 190.) But that any critical and
qualified reader can still hold him to have written the worst
of the play is unintelligihle. The whole work would he a " hlot
on his genius" in respect of its literary weakness. The doubt
was raised long before Lecky wrote, and was made good a
generation ago. When Lecky further proceeds, with reference
to the witches in Macbeth, to say (id. note) that it is "probable

that Shakespeare believed with an unfaltering faith in the

reality of witchcraft," he strangely misreads that play. Nothing
is clearer than that it grounds Macbeth's action from the first
in Macbeth's own character and his wife's, employing the witch
machinery (already used by Middleton) to meet the popular
taste, but never once making the witches really causal forces.
An "unfaltering" believer in witchcraft who wrote for the
stage would surely have turned it to serious account in other
tragedies. This Shakespeare never does. On Lecky's view,
he is to be held as having believed in the fairy magic of the
Midsummer Night's Dream and the Tempest, and in the actuality
of such episodes as that of the ghost in Macbeth. But who for
a moment supposes him to have had any such belief? It is
probable that the entire undertaking of Macbeth (1G05 '?) and
later of the Tempest (1G10 ?) was due to a wish on the part of
the theatre management to please King James, whose belief
in witchcraft and magic was notorious. Even the use of the
Ghost in Hamlet is an old stage expedient, common to the
pre-Shakespearean play and to others of Kyd's and Peele's.
Shakespeare significantly altered the dying words of Hamlet
from the " heaven receive my soul" of the old version to " the
rest is silence." The bequest of his soul to the Deity in Ins
will is merely the regulation testamentary formula of the time.
In his sonnets, which hint his personal cast if anything does,
there is no real trace of religious creed or feeling. And it is
clearly the hand of Fletcher, a no less sensual writer than
Peele, that penned the part of Henry VI !I in which occurs the

Protestant tag: "In her [Elizabeth's] days God shall be

truly known."

1 As to the export analysis of this play, which shows it to be in largo part I'ktclu t'h,
see Furnivall, as cited, pp. xciii xcvi.

20 THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT

While, however, Shakespeare is notahly naturalistic as compared
with the other Elizabethan dramatists, it remains true that their
work in the mass tells little of a habitually religious way of thinking.
Apart from the plays above named, and from polemic passages and
devotional utterances outside their plays, they hint as little of
Christian dogma as of Christian asceticism. Hence, in fact, the
general and bitter hostility of the Puritans to the stage. Even at
and after Shakespeare's death, the drama is substantially " graceless."
Jonson, who was for a time a Catholic, but reverted to the Church
of England, disliked the Puritans, and in Bartholomeiu Fair derides
them. The age did not admit of a pietistic drama ; and when there
was a powerful pietistic public, it made an end of drama altogether.
To Elizabeth's reign probably belongs the Atheist's Tragedy of
Cyril Tourneur, first published in 1611, but evidently written in
its author's early youth — a coarse and worthless performance, full
of extremely bad imitations of Shakespeare.1 But to the age of
Elizabeth also belongs, perhaps, the sententious tragedy of Mustapha
by Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, first surreptitiously published in
1609. A century and a half later the deists were fond of quoting2
the concluding Chorus Sacerdotum, beginning :

0 wearisome condition of humanity,
Born under one law, to another bound ;

Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity;
Created sick, commanded to be sound :

If nature did not take delight in blood,

She would have made more easy ways to good.

It is natural to suspect that the author of such lines was less
orthodox than his own day had reputed him ; and yet the whole
of his work shows him much pre-occupied with religion, though
perhaps in a deistic spirit. But Brooke's introspective and
undramatic poetry is an exception : the prevailing colour of the
whole drama of the Shakespearean period is pre-Puritan and semi-
pagan ; and the theological spirit of the next generation, intensified
by King James, was recognized by cultured foreigners as a change
for the worse.3 The spirit of free learning for the time was gone,
expelled by theological rancours ; and when Selden ventured in his
History of Tytlics (1618) to apply the method of dispassionate
historical criticism to ecclesiastical matters he was compelled to
make a formal retractation.4 Early Protestants had attacked, as a

' Cp. Soccombe and Allen. The Age of Shakxpere, 1003, ii, 1s0.

- Albci'ti, liriefe betreffende den Zvstand der Religion i)i Oross-Briiannien,Ha.no\'ev,
1752, ii. tl'J. Alberti reads "God" at the end of the passage ; I follow Grosart's edition.
'•'■ Hallam, Lit. Europe, ii, 371, 376 ; Pattison, Isaac Casaubon, 2nd ed. p. 2S6 s<7.
4 Pattison, as cited, p. 290 ; G. W. Johnson, Memoirs of John Selden, 1535, pp. 56-70.

ENGLAND 21

papal superstition, the doctrine that tithes were levied jure divino :
Protestants had now come to regard as atheistic the hint that tithes
were levied otherwise.1

Not that rationalism became extinct. The Italianate
incredulity as to a future state, which Sir John Davies had
sought to repel by his poem, Noscc Teipsum (1599), can hardly
have been overthrown even by that remarkable production, which
in the usual orthodox way pronounces all doubters to be " light
and vicious persons," who, " though they would, cannot quite bo
beasts."" And there wore other forms of doubt. In 1G02 appeared
The Unmasking of the Politique Atheist, by J. II. [John Hull] ,
Batclielor of Divinitie, which, however, is in the main a mere
attempt to retort upon Catholics the charge of atheism laid by
them against Protestants. Soon after, in 1G05, we find Dr. John
Dove producing a Confutation of Atheisme in the manner of previous
continental treatises, making the word " atheism " cover many shades
of theism ; and an essayist writing in 1G08 asserts that, on account
of the self-seeking and corruption so common among churchmen,
" prophane Atheisme hath taken footing in the hearts of ignorant
and simple men." 3 The orthodox Ben Jonson, in his VoJponc (1607),
puts in the mouth of a fool' the lines : — ■

And then, for your religion, profess none,

But wonder at the diversity of all ;

And, for your part, protest, were there no other

But simply the laws o' th' land, you would content you.

Nic Machiavel and Monsieur Bodin both

Were of this mind.

But tl 10 testimony is not the less significant ; as is the account in

The ILujnctick Lady (1G32) of

A young physician to the family
That, letting God alone, ascribes to Nature
More than her share ; licentious in discourse,
And in his life a profest voluptuary.5

Such statements of course prove merely a frequent coolness
towards religion, not a vogue of reasoned unbelief. But the
existence of rationalizing heresy is attested by the burning of two
men, Bartholomew Legate and Edward Wightman, for avowing
Unitarian views, in JG12. These, the last executions for heresy in
England, wero results of the theological zeal of King .James,

1 Mrnwirs cited, pp. GO-ljl. On the whole question sou the lie view appended by Seidell
to his History » fter a few copies hud been distributed.

* Poems of Sir John Danes, ed. Orosart, 187(i. i. H2. s:i.

:i Kssnies Politick?, and Mnroll, by I). T. Cent, liin.s. f'ol. 0. ' Act iv, sc. 1.

•' Act i, sc. 1. Jonson himself could have been so indicted on the strength of certain
verses.

22 THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT

stimulated by the Calvinistic fanaticism of Archbishop Abbot, the
predecessor of Laud.

James's career as a persecutor began characteristically in a
meddlesome attack upon a professor in Holland. A German
theologian of Socinian leanings, named Conrad Vorstius, professor
at Steinfurth, had produced in 160G a somewhat heretical treatise,
De Deo, but had nevertheless been appointed in 1610 professor of
theology at Leyden, in succession to Arminius. It was his accep-
tance of Arminian views, joined with his repute as a scholar, that
secured him the invitation, which was given without the knowledge
that at a previous period he had been offered a similar appointment
by the Socinians. In his Anti-Bcllarminus contractus, " a brief
refutation of the four tomes of Bellarmin," he had taken the
Arminian line, repudiating the Calvinist positions which, in the
opinion of Arminius, could not be defended against the Catholic
attack. But he was too speculative and ratiocinative to be safe in
an age in which the fear of spreading Socinianism and the hate of
Calvinists towards Arminianism had set up a reign of terror.
Vorstius was both "unsettling" and heterodox. His opinions
were " such as in our own day would certainly disqualify him
from holding such an office in any Christian University";2 and
James, worked upon by Abbot, went so far as to make the
appointment of Vorstius a diplomatic question. The stadhouder
Maurice and the bulk of the Dutch clergy being of his view, the
more tolerant statesmen of Holland, and the mercantile aristocracy,
yielded from motives of prudence, and Vorstius was dismissed in
order to save the English alliance. Remaining thenceforth without
employment, lie was further denounced in 1619 by the Synod of
Dort, and banished by the States General. Thereafter he lived for
two years in hiding ; and soon after obtaining a refuge in Holstein,
died, worn out by his troubles. In England, meantime, James drew
up with his own hands a catalogue of the heresies found by him in
Vorstius's treatise, and caused the book to be burned in London and
at the two Universities.3

1 Ho had been offered professorships of divinity at Saumur and Marburg.

2 Gardiner, History of England, 1G03-1G42, 4th ed. ii, lis. Cp. Bayle, art. Vobstius,
Note X. By his theological opponents and by .Tames. Vorstius was of course called an
atheist. He was in reality not a Socinian, but a " strict Arian, who believed that the Son
of God was at first created by the Father, and then delegated to create the universe— a
sort of inferior deity, who was nevertheless entitled to religious homage" (.lames Nichols,
note to A|i]i. 1\ on Brandt's Life of Arminius in Works of Arminius. 1825, i, 218). Nichols
gives a full survey of the subject, pp. 202-237. Fuller (Cli. Hist. 15. x, cent. 17, sec. iv,
£> i-5) tells the story, and pronounces the opinions of Vorstius " fitter to be remanded to
hell than committed to writing."

:; Bayle (art. cited. Note F) says hnth Universities, as does Fuller. At the Synod of
Dort, however, the British representatives read only.it seems, a decree (dated Sept. 21,
1611) of the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, ordering the burning of the book there.
(Nichols, Account of the Synod of Dort, in Works of Arminius, i, 497).

ENGLAND 23

On the heels of this amazing episode came the cases of Wightman
and Legate. Finding, in a personal conversation, that Legate had
" ceased to pray to Christ," the King had him brought before the
Bishop of London's Consistory Court, which sentenced the heretic
to Newgate. Being shortly released, he had the imprudence to
threaten an action for false imprisonment, whereupon he was
re-arrested. Chief Justice Coke held that, technically, the Con-
sistory Court could not sentence to burning ; but Hobart and Bacon,
the law officers of the Crown, and other judges, were of opinion that
it could. Legate, accordingly, was duly tried, sentenced, and burned
at Smithfield ; and Wightman a few days later was similarly disposed
of at Lichfield.1

Bacon's share in this matter is obscure, and has not been
discussed by either his assailants or his vindicators. As for the
general public, the historian records that "not a word was uttered
against this horrible cruelty. As we read over the brief contemporary
notices which have reached us, we look in vain for the slightest
intimation that the death of these two men was regarded with any
other feelings than those with which the writers were accustomed to
hear of the execution of an ordinary murderer. If any remark was
made, it was in praise of James for the devotion which he showed to
the cause of God." ' That might have been reckoned on. It was
not twenty years since Hamond, Lewis, Cole, and Kett had been
burned on similar grounds ; and there had been no outcry then.
For generations " direness " had been too familiar to men's thoughts
to admit of their being shocked by a judicial murder or two the
more. Catholic priests had been executed by the score : why not
a pair of Unitarians'?'5 Little had gone on in the average intel-
lectual life in the interim save religious discussion and Bibliolatry,
and not from such culture could there come any growth of human
kindness or any clearer conception of the law of reciprocity. But,
whether by force of recoil from a revival of the fires of Smithfield
or from a perception that mere cruelty did not avail to destroy
heresy, the theological ultima ratio was never again resorted to on
English ground.

Though no public protest was made, the retrospective Fuller

i Gardiner, pp. 120-:i0. Fuller (as last cited, S.Sfi 1-1) gives a list of Legate's "damnable
tenets." Sec it in Mrs. Bradlaugh Honner's Pr.naltirx \t)>nn O/rinioii, l>i>. 1.' II.

'-' Gardiner, as cited. Fuller is cheerfully acquiescent, '.though he notes the private
demurs, which he denounces. "God," lie says, "may seem well pleased with this season-
able sevi rity."

'■'• In 1.7S) Stow records how one Handall was put on trial for "conjuring to know where
treasure was bid in the earth and goods feloniously taken were become " ; and four others
were tried "for being present." four were found guilty and sentenced to be hanged,
Handall was executed, and the others reprieved. Hid. 101D, p. (jfab.)

24 THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT

testifies that "such burning of heretics much startled common
people, pitying all in pain, and prone to asperse justice itself with
cruelty, because of the novelty (!) and hideousness of the punish-
ment."1 It is noteworthy that within a few years of the burning of
Legate and Wightman there appeared quite a cluster of treatises
explicitly contending for toleration. In 1G11 came Religions
Peace : or, a Plea for Liberty of Conscience, by Leonard Busher,
the first English book of the kind. In 1615 came Persecution for
Religion Judged and Condemned ; and in 1G20 An Humble Supplica-
tion to the King's Majesty, pressing the same doctrine.2 There is
no record of any outcry over these works, though they are tolerably
freespokon in their indictment of the coercive school ; and they had
all to be reprinted a generation later, their point having never been
carried ; but it may be surmised that their appeal, which is sub-
stantially well reasoned from a secular as well as from a theological
point of view, had something to do with the abandonment of perse-
cution unto death. Even King James, in opening the Parliament
of 161-4, professed to recognize that no religion or heresy was ever
extirpated by violence.

That an age of cruel repression of heresy had promoted unbelief
is clear from the Atheomastix of Bishop Fotherby (1G22), which
notes among other things that as a result of constant disputing " the
Scriptures (with many) have lost their authority, and are thought
onely fit for the ignorant and idiote."3 On this head the bishop
attempts no answer ; and on his chosen themo he is perhaps the
worst of all apologists. His admission that there can be no a priori
proof of deity4 may be counted to him for candour ; but the childish-
ness of his reasoning a posteriori excludes the ascription of philo-
sophic insight. He does but use the old pseudo-arguments of
universal consent and design, with the simple device of translating
polytheistic terms into monotheistic. All the while he makes the
usual suggestions that there are few or no atheists to convert, and
these not worth converting — this at a folio's length. The book tells
only of difficulties evaded by vociferation. And while the growing
stress of the strife between the ecclesiasticism of the Crown and the
forces of nonconformity more and more thrust to the front religio-
political issues, there began alongside of those strifes the new and

1 Fuller actually alleges that "there was none ever after that openly avowed these
heretical doctrines" — an unintelligible figment.

- All reprinted in 1816 for the Hanserd Knollys Society, with histor. introd. by E. B.
Underbill, in the vol. Tracts on Liberty of Conscience and Persecution, 1614-1001. They
do not speak of Legate or Wightman.

■; Atheomastix, 1622, pref. big. J3. 3, verso. The work was posthumous and incomplete.

i Uk. i, eh. i, p. 5.

ENGLAND 25

powerful propaganda of deism, which, beginning with the Latin
treatise, De Veritatc, of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1624), was
gradually to leaven English thought for over a century.

Further, there now came into play the manifold influence of
FRANCIS BACON, whose case illustrates perhaps more fully than
any other the difficulties, alike external and internal, in the way of
right thinking. Taken as a whole, his work is on account of those
difficulties divided against itself, insisting as he does alternately on
a strict critical method and on the subjection of reason to the
authority of revelation, lie sounds a trumpet-call to a new and
universal effort of free and circumspect intelligence ; and on the
instant he stipulates for the prerogative of Scripture. Though only
one of many who assailed alike the methodic tyranny of Aristo-
telianism and the methodless empiricism of the ordinary ' scientific "
thought of the past, he made his attack with a sustained and mani-
fold force of insight and utterance which still entitles him to pro-
eminence as the great critic of wrong methods and the herald of
better. Yet he not only transgresses often his own principal
precepts in his scientific reasoning ; he falls below several of his
contemporaries and predecessors in respect of his formal insistence
on the final supremacy of theology over reason, alike in physics and
in ethics. Where Hooker is ostensibly seeking to widen the field
of rational judgment on the side of creed, Bacon, the very champion
of mental emancipation in the abstract, declares the boundary
to be fixed.

Of those lapses from critical good faith, part of the explanation
is to be found in the innate difficulty of vital innovation for all
intelligences ; part in the special pressures of the religious environ-
ment. On the latter head Bacon makes such frequent and emphatic
protest that we are bound to infer on his part a personal experience
in his own day of the religious hostility which long followed his
memory. ' Generally," he wrote of himself in one fragment, " he
perceived in men of devout simplicity this opinion, that the secrets
of nature were the secrets of God, and part of that glory whereinto

the mind of man if it seek to press shall be oppressed ; and on

the other side, in men of a devout policy he noted an inclination to
have the people depend upon God the more when they are less
acquainted with second causes, and to have no stirring in philosophy,
lest it may lead to innovation in divinity or else should discover

1 In Ui<! A'h-nvrrmmt (if Lfiruinri, hk. i (KnuUe.lUe eel. |>. 51), h<! himself notes how,
lontf before his time, the uew learning had in pari <li .credited the schoolmen.

26 THE EISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT

matter of further contradiction to divinity " * — a summary of the
"whole early history of the resistance to science.2 In the works
which he wrote at the height of his powers, especially in his
masterpiece, the Novum Organum (1620), where he comes closest
to the problems of exact inquiry, he specifies again and again both
popular superstition and orthodox theology as hindrances to scientific
research, commenting on " those who out of faith and veneration
mix their philosophy with theology and traditions,"3 and declaring
that of the drawbacks science had to contend with " the corruption
of philosophy by superstition and an admixture of theology is far
the more widely spread, and does the greatest harm, whether to
entire systems or to their parts. For the human understanding is
obnoxious to the influence of the imagination no less than to the
influence of common notions." In the same passage he exclaims
at the " extreme levity " of those of the moderns who have attempted
to " found a system of natural philosophy on the first chapter of
Genesis, on the book of Job, and other parts of the sacred writings ";°
and yet again, coupling as obstinate adversaries of Natural Philo-
sophy superstition, and the blind and immoderate zeal of religion,"
he roundly affirms that "by the simpleness of certain divines access
to any philosophy, however pure, is well nigh closed."6 These
charges are repeatedly salved by such claims as that " true religion"
puts no obstacles in the way of science ;7 that the book of Job runs
much to natural philosophy ;6 and, in particular, in the last book of
the Do Augmcntis Scicntiarum, redacted after his disgrace, by the
declaration — more emphatic than those of the earlier Advancement
of Learning — that " Sacred Theology ought to be derived from the
word and oracles of God, and not from the light of nature or the
dictates of reason." ° In this mood he goes so far as to declare,
with the thorough-going obscurantists, that " the more discordant
and incredible the divine mystery is, the more honour is shown to
God in believing it, and the nobler is the victory of faith."

[It was probably such deliverances as these that led to the
ascription to Bacon of Tlw Christian Paradoxes, first published

' Filum Labyrinthi— &n English version of the Cogitata et Visa — ? 7.

2 Cp. Huarte, cited above, p. 171.

3 Nov. Org. bk. i, Apb. 62 I Works, Routledge ed. p. 271). i Id. Aph. 65.

■> Id. ib. Cp. the Advancement of Learning, bk. ii, and the De Augmentis, bk. ix, near
end. (Ed. cited, pp. 173, (134.)

6 Nov. Org. Aph. 89. Cp. Aph. 46, 40. 06 ; the Valerius Terminus, ch. xxv ; the English
Filum Labyrinthi, I 7; and the De Principiis atgue Originibus (ed. cited, p. 650).

" Valerius Terminus, cap. i. (Ed. cited, p. 188.)

H Til. p. 187; Filum Labyrinthi, p. 209.

'■' Ilk. ix, cl). i. (Ed. cited, p. 631.) Compare Valerius Terminus, ch. i (p. 1S6), and De
Aug. bk. iii. ch. ii (p. 456.), as to the impossibility of knowing the will and character of
God from Nature, though {De Aug. last cit.) it reveals his power and glory.

ENGLAND 27

(surreptitiously), without author's name, in 1645. As has been
shown by Dr. Grosart (Lord Bacon not the Author of " The
Christian Paradoxes," I860) that treatise was really by Herbert
Palmer, B.D., who published it in full in part ii of his
Memorials of Godliness and Christianity, 5th ed. 1655. The
argument drawn from this treatise as to Bacon's skepticism is
a twofold mystification. The Paradoxes are the deliberate
declaration of a pietist that he believes the dogmas of revelation
without rational comprehension. The style is plainly not
Bacon's ; but Bacon had said the same thing in the sentence
quoted above. Dr. Grosart's explosive defence against the
criticism of Bitter (work cited, p. 11) is an illustration of the
intellectual temper involved.]

Yet even in the calculated extravagance of this last pronounce-
ment there is a ground for question whether the fallen Chancellor,
hoping to retrieve himself, and trying every device of his ripe
sagacity to avert opposition, was not straining his formal orthodoxy
beyond his real intellectual habit. As against such wholesale
affirmation we have his declarations that " certain it is that God
worketh nothing in nature but by second causes," and that any
pretence to the contrary " is mere imposture as it were in favour
towards God, and nothing else but to offer to the author of truth the
unclean sacrifice of a lie";1 his repeated objection to the discussion
of Final Causes ;'2 his attack on Plato and Aristotle for rejecting the
atheistic scientific method of Democritus ;3 his peremptory assertion
that motion is a property of matter;1 and his almost Democritean
handling of the final problem, in which he insists that primal matter
is, " next to God, the cause of causes, itself only without a cause."5
Further, though he speaks of Scriptural miracles in a conventional
way,6 he drily pronounces in one passage that, " as for narrations
touching the prodigies and miracles of religions, they are either not
true or not natural, and therefore impertinent for the story of
nature."7 Finally, as against the formal capitulation to theology at
the close of the De Augmentis, he has left standing in the first book
of the Latin version the ringing doctrine of the original Advancement
of Learning (1605), that "there is no power on earth which setteth

1 Advancement, bk. i 'ed. cited, p. 45). Op. Valerius Terminus, ch. i (p. 1R7).

- A<l vinrement. bk. ii: J)e Auamenlis, bk. iii, clis. iv and v ; Valerius Terminus,
ch.xxv; Novum Orannum, bk. i, Apli. 48 ; bk. ii, A ph. -Z. (Ed. cited, pp. <X>, -205, ->m, 302,
471. I7:i.)

'■ I)r Princi]dis atque Orioinihus, (Ed. cited, pp. fi 10-50.) Elsewhere (T)e Ann. bk. iii,
ch. iv. p. 171) he expressly puts it that the system of Demoeritus, which "removed God
and mind from Die structure of things," was more favourable to true science than the
teleology and theology of Plato and Aristotle.

1 l'l. pp. (551, 1157. ■' hi. p. (MS.

r< De Aur/mcntis, bk. iii, ch. ii ; bk. iv, ch. ii. (Ed. cited, pp. 15C, 182.)

' bl. bk. ii, ch. i. (Ed. cited, p. 4-2S. )

28 THE EISE OF MODEEN FEEETHOUGHT

up a throne or chair in the spirits and souls of men, and in their
cogitations, imaginations, opinions, and beliefs, but knowledge and
learning";1 and in his Wisdom of the Ancients2 he has contrived to
turn a crude myth into a subtle allegory in behalf of toleration.

Thus, despite his many resorts to and prostrations before the
Scriptures, the general effect of his writings in this regard is to set
up in the minds of his readers the old semi-rationalistic equivoque of
a "two-fold truth"; reminding us as they do that he "did in the
beginning separate the divine testimony from the human." When,
therefore, he announces that " we know by faith " that matter was
created from nothing,"3 he has the air of juggling with his problem ;
and his further suggestion as to the possibility of matter being
endowed with a force of evolution, however cautiously put, is far
removed from orthodoxy. Accordingly, the charge of atheism —
which he notes as commonly brought against all who dwell solely
on second causes i — was actually cast at his memory in the next
generation.'1 It was of course false : on the issue of theism he is
continually descanting with quite conventional unction ; as in the
familiar essay on atheism.0 His dismissal of final causes as
" barren " meant merely that the notion was barren of scientific
result;7 and he refers the question to metaphysic.8 But if his
theism was of a kind disturbing to believers in a controlling
Providence, as little was it satisfactory to Christian fervour : and it
can hardly be doubted that the main stream of his argument made
for a non-Biblical deism, if not for atheism ; his dogmatic orthodoxies
being undermined by his own scientific teaching.

Lechler {Gcsch. des onglisclien Dcismus, pp. 23-25) notes that
Bacon involuntarily made for deism. Cp. Amand Saintes, Hist,
dc la plains, de Kant, 1844, p. 69 ; and Kuno Fischer, Francis
Bacon, Eng. tr. 1857, ch. xi, pp. .3-41-43. Dean Church {Bacon,
in " Men of Letters " series, pp. 174, 205) insists that I3acon
held by revelation and immortality ; and can of course cite his
profession of such belief, which is not to be disputed. (Cp. the
careful judgment of "Prof. Fowler in his Bacon, pp. 180-91, and
his ed. of the Novum Organum, 1878, pp. 43-53.) But the
tendency of the specific .Baconian teaching is none the less to
put these beliefs aside, and to overlay them with a naturalistic
habit of mind. At the first remove from Bacon we have Hobbes.

1 ]>•■ Auamentis, ed. cited, p. 73.

- No. xviii, Vinmertes. Ed. cited, p. 811. s De Principiis atque Originibus, p. 661.

■< S<>v. Org. i. 8'J; Filum Laln/riuthi. > 7; Essay 16.
■'■ I'raneis Osborn, pref. to ids "Miscellany,'' in Works, 7th cd. 1673.
,; Cp. I'alcrius Terminus, ch. i.

' 'J'ni-i is noted by (Hansford in his tr. of the Novum Organum (1SI1, p. -26); and by
Ellis in bis and Speddiim's edition of the Works, (liontledgc ed. pp. 32, 173, note.)
b Dc Aug mentis, bk. iii, eh. iv, end.

ENGLAND 29

As regards his intellectual inconsistencies, we can but say that
they are such as meet us in men's thinking at every new turn.
Though we can see that Bacon's orthodoxy " doth protest too much,"
with an eye on king and commons and public opinion, we are not
led to suppose that he had ever in his heart cast off his inherited
creed. lie shows frequent Christian prejudice in his references to
pagans ; and can write that " To seek to extinguish anger utterly is
but the bravery of the Stoics," ' pretending that the Christian books
are more accommodating, and ignoring the Sermon on the Mount.
In arguing that the "religion of the heathen" set men upon ending

all inquisition of nature in metaphysical or theological discourse,"
and in charging the Turks with a special tendency to "ascribe
ordinary effects to the immediate workings of God,"2 he is playing
not very scrupulously on the vanity of Ins co-religionists. As ho
was only too well aware, both tendencies ruled the Christian thought
of his own day, and derive direct from the sacred books — not from

abuse," as he pretends. And on the metaphysical as on the
common-sense side of his thought he is self-contradictory, oven as
most men have been before and since, because judgment cannot
easily fulfil the precepts it frames for itself in illuminated hours.
Latter-day students have been impressed, as was Leibnitz, by the
original insight with which Bacon negated the possibility of our
forming any concrete conception of a primary form of matter, and
insisted on its necessary transcendence of our powers of knowledge.3
On the same principle he should have negated every modal concep-
tion of the still more recondite Something which he put as antecedent
to matter, and called God.1 Yet in his normal thinking lie seems to
have been content with the commonplace formula given in his essay
on Atheism — that we cannot suppose the totality of tilings to bo

without a mind." lie has here endorsed in its essentials what he
elsewhere calls "the heresy of the Anthropomorphites,"5 failing to
apply his own law in his philosophy, as elsewhere in his physics.
When, however, we realize that similar inconsistency is fallen into
after him by Spinoza, and wholly escaped perhaps by no thinker,
we are in a way to understand that with all his deflections from
his own higher law Bacon may have profoundly and fruitfully
influenced the thought of the next generation, if not that of
his own.

The fact of this influence lias been somewhat obscured by the

1 I. Kay 57, f)f Aii'/fr. '■'■ \'(ibrius Tcrmiiiux, eh. xxv.

'■'■ l)e I'mir,,,,, .,-, ci. cited, pp. C!-: 10. ('.]>. pp. C.li2 I:!. 4 /</. |>. lilH.

0 Valeria* Terminus, cli. ii ; J)c A mjinenlix, Ijk. v, cli . iv. Kd. cited, i>i>. 1'J'J, 517,

30 THE EISE OF MODEEN FREETHOUGHT

modern dispute as to whether he had any important influence on
scientific progress.1 At first sight the old claim for him in that
regard seems to he heavily discounted by the simple fact that he
definitely rejected the Copernican system of astronomy.2 Though,
however, this gravely emphasizes his fallibility, it does not cancel
his services as a stimulator of scientific thought. At that time only
a few were yet intelligently convinced Copernicans ; and we have
the record of how, in Bacon's day, Harvey lost heavily in credit
and in his medical practice by propounding his discovery of the
circulation of the blood, a which, it is said, no physician over forty
years old at that time believed in. For the scientific men of that
century — and only among them did Copernicanism find the slightest
acceptance — it was thus no fatal shortcoming in Bacon to have
failed to grasp the true scheme of sidereal motion, any more than it
was in Galileo to be wrong about the tides and comets. They could
realize that it was precisely in astronomy, for lack of special study
and expert knowledge, that Bacon was least qualified to judge.
Intellectual influence on science is not necessarily dependent on
actual scientific achievement, though that of course furthers and
establishes it ; and the fact of Bacon's impact on the mind of the
next age is abundantly proved by testimonies.

For a time the explicit tributes came chiefly from abroad ;
though at all times, even in the first shock of his disgrace, there
were Englishmen perfectly convinced of his greatness. To the
winning of foreign favour he had specially addressed himself in his
adversity. Grown wary in act as well as wise in theory, he deleted
from the Latin De Augment is a whole series of passages of the
Advancement of Learning which disparaged Catholics and Catho-
licism ;' and he had his reward in being appreciated by many Jesuit
and other Catholic scholars.5 But Protestants such as Comenius
and Leibnitz were ere long more emphatic than any Catholics ;G and
at the time of the Restoration we find Bacon enthusiastically praised
among the more open-minded and scientifically biassed thinkers of

1 Cp. Brewster, Life of Newton, 1S55. ii, 100-101 ; Draper, Intel. Bevel, of Europe, ed. 1875,
ii, 258 60; Dean Church, Bacon, pp. 180-201; Fowler, Bacon, ch. vi ; Lodge, Pioneers of
Science, pp. 115-51; Lange, Uesch. d. Materialismus, i, 197 sq. (Eng. tr. i, 236-37), and
cit. from Liebig— as to whom, however, see Fowler, pp. 13:{, 157.

2 Novum Organum, ii, 46 and 48, ? 17; De Aug. iii. 4: Thema Coeli. F.d. cited, pp. 364,
375, 101, 705, 709. Whewell [Hist, of Induct. Sciences, 3rd ed. i, 296, 29b) ignores the second
and third of these passages in denying Hume's assertion that Bacon rejected the Coper-
nican theory with "disdain." It is true, however, that Bacon had vacillated. The facts
are fairly faced by Prof. Fowler in his Bacon, 1881, pp. 151-52, and his ed. of Novum
Organum, Introd. pp. 30-36. See also the summing-up of Ellis in notes to passages above
cited, and at p. (175,

'■'■ Aubrey, Lives of Eminent Persons, ed. 1813, vol. ii, lit. ii, p. 383.
1 Sec notes in ed. cited, pp. 50, 53, 61, 63, 68, 75, 76, 84, 110.
5 Fowler, ed. of Nov. Org. i 14, pp. 101-101.
c Id. } 11, J). 108 ; Ellis in ed. cited, p. 643.

ENGLAND 31

England, who included some zealous Christians.1 It was not that
his special "method" enabled them to roach important results with
any new facility ; its impracticability is now insisted on by friends
as well as foes.2 It was that lie arraigned with extraordinary
psychological insight and brilliance of phrase the mental vices
which had made discoveries so rare ; the alternate self-complacency
and despair of the average indolent mind; the " opinion of store"
which was " cause of want "; the timid or superstitious evasion of
research. In all this he was using his own highest powers, his
comprehension of human character and his genius for speech. And
though his own scientific results were not to be compared with those
of Galileo and Descartes, the wonderful range of his observation
and his curiosity, the unwearying zest of his scrutiny of well-nigh
all the known fields of Nature, must have been an inspiration to
multitudes of students besides those who have recorded their debt
to him. It is probable that but for his literary genius, which
though little discussed is of a very rare order, his influence would
have been both narrower and less durable ; but, being one of the
great writers of the modern world, he has swayed men down till
our own day.

Certain it is that alongside of his doctrine there persisted in
England, apart from all printed utterance, a movement of deistic
rationalism, of which the eighteenth century saw only the fuller
development. Sir John Suckling (1G09-16I1), rewriting about
1637 his letter to the Earl of Dorset, An Account of Religion by
Reason, tells how in a first sketch it " had like to have made me an
Atheist at Court," and how "the fear of Socinianism at this time
renders every man that offers to give an account of religion by
reason, suspected to have none at all ";3 but he also mentions that
he knows it " still to be the opinion of good wits that the particular
religion of Christians lias added little to the general religion of the
world."1 Himself a young man of talent, he offers quasi-rational
reconciliations of faith witli reason which can have satisfied no real
doubter, and can hardly have failed to introduce doubt into the
minds of some of his readers.

1 Rawley's Life, in ed. cited, p. 0; Osborn, as above cited; Fowler, ed. of Nor. Oro.
Introd. Hi; T. Martin, Character of Bacon, Hi."), pp. 2115, ±'-7. 222 2:{.

1 Cp. Fowler, Bacon, pp. i:i'.MI ; Mill. Logic, bk. vi, cli. v, ? 5 ; Jevons. 1'riue. of Science,
1-vol. .• 1. ii ..,:•; ; Tyndall. Scieiitijic. Use of the. Imagination, :ird ed. pp. I. S-'J, 12 l.i ; T.
Martin, as cited, pp. 210-US ; Batfehot, Postulates of lung. I'olit. Emu. ed. lsKr>, pp. is 11);
Kllis and Spcddintf, in ed. cited, pp. x, xii, 22, .>'.). The notion of a dialectic method
which should mechanically enable any man to make discoveries is an irredeemable
fallacy, and must be abandoned. Bacon's own remarkable anticipation of modern
scientific thought in the formula that heat is a mode of motion [Sue. Org. ii, 20) is not
mechanically yielded by his own process, noteworthy and smWestive though that is.

- i'ref. Fpistlo. ' Works, ed. Dublin, 17M, p. 1.7J ; ed. l'JIO, p. oil.

32 THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT

S 5. Popular Thought in Europe

Of popular freothought in the rest of Europe there is little to
chronicle for a hundred and fifty years after the Reformation. The
epoch-making work of COPERNICUS, published in 1543, had little or
no immediate effect in Germany, where, as we have seen, physical and
verbal strifes had begun with the ecclesiastical revolution, and were
to continue to waste the nation's energy for a century. In 1546,
all attempts at ecclesiastical reconciliation having failed, the emperor
Charles V, in whom Melanchthon had seen a model monarch, decided
to put down the Protestant heresy by war. Luther had just died,
apprehensive for his cause. Civil war now raged till the peace of
Augsburg in 1555 ; whereafter Charles abdicated in favour of his
son Philip. Here were in part the conditions which in France and
elsewhere were later followed by a growth of rational unbelief ; and
there are some traces even at this time of partial skepticism in high
places in the German world, notably in the case of the Emperor
Maximilian II, who, " grown up in the spirit of doubt," " would
never identify himself with either Protestants or Catholics.'1 But
in Germany there was still too little intellectual light, too little
brooding over experience, to permit of the spread of such a temper ;
and the balance of forces amounted only to a deadlock between the
ecclesiastical parties. Protestantism on the intellectual side, as
already noted, had sunk into a bitter and barren polemic among
the reformers themselves ; and many who had joined the movement
reverted to Catholicism.' Meanwhile the teaching and preaching
Jesuits were zealously at work, turning the dissensions of the enemy
to account, and contrasting its schism upon schism with the unity
of the Church. But Protestantism was well welded to the financial
interest of the many princes and others who had acquired the
Church lands confiscated at the Reformation ; since a return to
Catholicism would mean the surrender of these.0 Thus there
wrought on the one side the organized spirit of anti-heresy' and on
the other the organized spirit of Bibliolatry, neither gaining ground ;
and between the two, intellectual life was paralysed. Protestantism
saw no way of advance ; and the prevailing temper began to be that

POPULAE THOUGHT IN EUEOPE 33

of the Dark Ages, expectant of the end of the world.1 Superstition
abounded, especially the belief in witchcraft, now acted on with
frightful cruelty throughout the whole Christian world ;2 and in the
nature of the case Catholicism counted for nothing on the opposite
side.

The only element of rationalism that one historian of culture can
detect is the tendency of the German moralists of the time to turn
the devil into an abstraction by identifying him with the different
aspects of human folly and vice/ There was, as a matter of fact,
a somewhat higher manifestation of the spirit of reason in the shape
of some new protests against the superstition of sorcery. About
1560 a Catholic priest named Cornelius Loos Callidius was
imprisoned by a papal nuncio for declaring that witches' con-
fessions were merely the results of torture. Forced to retract, lie
was released ; but again offended, and was again imprisoned, dying
in time to escape the fate of a councillor of Troves, named Flade,
who was burned alive for arguing, on the basis of an old canon
(mistakenly named from the Council of Ancyra), that sorcery is an
imaginary crime.1 Such, an infamy explains a great deal of the
stagnation of many Christian generations. But courage was not
extinct ; and in 15G3 there appeared the famous John Wior's
treatise on witchcraft,0 a work which, though fully adhering to the
belief in the devil and tilings demoniac, argued against the notion
that witches were conscious workers of evil. Wierb was a physician,
and saw the problem partly as one in pathology. Other laymen,
and even priests, as we have seen, had reacted still more strongly
against the prevailing insanity ; but it had the authority of Luther
on its side, and with the common people the earlier protests counted
for little.

Reactions against Protestant bigotry in Holland on other lines
were not much more successful, and indeed were not numerous.
One of the most interesting is that of DlRK COORNHEET (1522-
1590), who by liis manifold literary activities' became one of t ho
founders of Dutch prose, hi 1 i is youth Coornhert had visited Spain

1 I'reytn :. Bit Jer nun '1 . tUutxchcn Verganaenheit, Bd. ii, iaS3, p. 3S1 ; P.d. iii, <il init.

2 ('|i. L<-rkv. linliminlium in Europe, i, 53 83.
:; l-rcytai,', Bil'l, r. Hd. ii, Abth. ii. p. 378.

4 11, ■ Pope awl the Council, Untf. tr. p. -200 ; French tr. 1). 2S5.

■• he 1'raestiaiis Uaeinonu m, 15(13. See it described by Licckv, nationalism, i, S5 ^7 ;
Hallam, hit. of Europe, ii, 7(i.

' I5> Ditto)] historians Wier is claimed as a Dutchman. He was born at Cirave. in
North Brabant, but studied medicine at Paris and Orleans, and after practising physic; at
Arnheim in the Netherlands was called to Diisseldorf as phy-ioian lo the DuUo of .Iii licit,
to whom ho dedicated his treatise. His ideas are probably traceable to his studies in
France.

7 Hi- collected works tUV.i-1) amount to nearly 7, (XX) folio pa^es. ,). Ten Brink, Kleiue
Geschtnlrnit, ilrr Salerlnndxche. Leltercn, lbH-J, p.'Jl.

VOL. II I)

31 THE EISE OF MODEEN FEEETHOUGHT

and Portugal, and had there, it is said, seen an execution of victims
of the Inquisition,1 deriving thence the aversion to intolerance which
stamped his whole life's work. It does not appear, however, that
any such peninsular experience was required, seeing that the Dutch
Inquisition became abundantly active about the same period.
Learning Latin at thirty, in order to read Augustine, he became
a translator of Cicero and — singularly enough — of Boccaccio. An
engraver to trade, he became first notary and later secretary to the
burgomaster of Haarlem ; and, failing to steer clear of the strifes of
the time, was arrested and imprisoned at the Hague in 1567. On
his release lie sought safety at Kleef in Santen, whence he returned
after the capture of Brill to become secretary of the new national
Government at Haarlem ; but he had again to take to flight, and
lived at Kleef from 1572 to 1577. In 1578 he debated at Leyden
with two preachers of Delft on predestination, which he declared to
be unscriptural ; and was officially ordered to keep silence. There-
upon he published a protest, and got into fresh trouble by drawing
up, as notary, an appeal to the Prince of Orange on behalf of his
Catholic fellow-countrymen for freedom of worship, and by holding
another debate at the Hague.2 Always his master-ideal was that of
toleration, in support of which he wrote strongly against Beza and
Calvin (this in a Latin treatise published only after his death),
declaring the persecution of heretics to be a crime in the kingdom
of God ; and it was as a moralist that he gave the lead to Arminius
on the question of predestination.3 "Against Protestant and Catholic
sacerdotalism and scholastic lie set forth humanist world-wisdom and
Biblical ethic,"1 to that end publishing a translation of Boethius
(1585), and composing his chief work on Zedekunst (Ethics).
Christianity, he insisted, lay not in profession or creed, but in
practice. By way of restraining the ever-increasing malignity of
theological strifes, he made the quaint proposal that the clergy
should not be allowed to utter anything but the actual words of
the Scriptures, and that all works of theology should be seques-
trated. For these and other heteroclite suggestions he was expelled
from Delft (where he sought finally to settle, 1587) by the magis-
trates, at the instance of the preachers, but was allowed to die in
peace at Gouda, where he wrote to the last.0

All the while, though he drew for doctrine on Plutarch, Cicero,

! Ten Brink, p. 85. .Tonckbloet (Beknopte Gescliiedenis der Xederl. Lettcrkunde, ed.
1SS0, p. 11M is less specific.

- Ten Brink, pp. 89-90. 3 Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ii, S3. 4 Ten Brink, p. 87.

•"' .Tonckbloet, Beknoidr, Geschiedrnis, p. 149; Ten Brink, p. 91 ; Bayle, Dictionnaire, art.
KooKMii.irr ; 1'iinjer, Hint, of the Chr. Philos. of Religion, Eng. tr, p. 269; Dr. E. Gosse,
art. on Dutch Literature in Encyc. Brit. 9th ed. xii, 03.

POPULAR THOUGHT IN EUROPE 35

Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius equally with the Bihle, Coornhcrt
habitually founded on the latter as the final authority.1 On no
other footing could any one in his age and country stand as a
teacher. It was not till after generations of furious intolerance that
a larger outlook was possible in the Netherlands ; and the first steps
towards it were naturally taken independently of theology. Although
Grotius figured for a century as one of the chief exponents of Christian
evidences, it is certain that his great work on the Law of War and
Peace (1625) made for a rationalistic conception of society. " Modern
historians of jurisprudence, like Lerrainier and Bluntschli, represent
it as the distinctive merit of Grotius that he freed the science from
bondage to theology."'1 The breach, indeed, is not direct, as theistic
sanctions are paraded in the Prolegomena ; but along with these
goes the avowal that natural ethic would be valid even were there
no God, and — as against the formula of Horace, Utilitas justi mater
— that " the mother of natural right is human nature itself."'

Where Grotius, defender of the faith, figured as a heretic,
unbelief could not speak out, though there are traces of its
underground life. The charge of atheism was brought against
the Exccrcitationcs Pliilosophicce of Gorhcus, published in 1620 ;
but, the book being posthumous, conclusions could not bo tried.
Views far short of atheism, however, were dangerous to their
holders ; for the merely Socinian work of Voelkel, published at
Amsterdam in 1612, was burned by order of the authorities, and
a second impression shared the same fate.' In 1653 the States of
Holland forbade the publication of all Unitarian books and all
Socinian worship ; and though the veto as to books was soon
evaded, that on worship was enforced." Still, Holland was relatively
tolerant as beside other countries ; and when the Unitarian physician
Daniel Zwicker (1612-1678), of Dantzig, found Ins own country too
hot to hold him, he came to Holland (about 1652) " for security and
convenience." He was able to publish at Amsterdam in 16)58 his
Latin Irenicum Ircnicorum, wherein he lays down three principles
for the settlement of Christian difficulties, the first being " the
universal reason of mankind," while Scripture and tradition hold
only tho second and third places. His book is a remarkable
investigation of the rise of the doctrines of the Loyos and tho
Trinity, which he traced to polytheism, making out that the first
Christians, whom he identified with the Nazarenes, regarded Jesus

1 Ten Brink, p. 01. 2 Flint, 1'iVn, p. Hi.

3 Dp. Jure. Belli el Parts, prolef*. 55 11, 10. < ISuylo, art. Vdi.lki.i,

■• Sciilofjorn note fin Moshcim, K,-iri's <■ I. p. Hf>2.
c Nelson, Life of Bishop Bull, 2nd e<l. 171 I, 1). 302.

36 THE EISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT

as a man. The book evoked many answers, and it is somewhat
surprising that Z wicker escaped serious persecution, dying peacefully
in Amsterdam in 1678, whereas writers much less pronounced in
their heresy incurred aggressive hostility. Descartes, as we shall
see, during his stay in Holland was menaced by clerical fanaticism.
Some fared worse. In the generation after Grotius, one Koerbagh,
a doctor, for publishing (166S) a dictionary of definitions containing
advanced ideas, had to fly from Amsterdam. At Culenberg he
translated a Unitarian work and began another ; but was betrayed,
tried for blasphemy, and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment, to
be followed by ten years' banishment. He compromised by dying in
prison within the year. Even as late as 1678 the juri-eonsult
Hadrian Beverland (afterwards appointed, through Isaac Yossius,
to a lay office under the Church of England) was imprisoned and
struck off the rolls of Leyden University for his Peccatum Originate,
in which he speculated erotically as to the nature of the sin of Adam
and Eve. The book was furiously answered, and publicly burned.
It was only after an age of such intolerance that Holland, at the end
of the seventeenth century, began to become for England a model of
freedom in opinion, as formerly in trade. And it seems to have been
through Holland, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, that
there came the fresh Unitarian impulse which led to the considerable
spread of the movement in England after the Revolution of 1688.2

Unitarianism, which we have seen thus invading Holland some-
what persistently during half a century, was then as now impotent
beyond a certain point by reason of its divided allegiance, though it
has always had the support of some good minds. Its denial of the
deity of Jesus could not be made out without a certain superposing
of reason on Scripture ; and yet to Scripture it always finally
appealed. The majority of men accepting such authority have
always tended to believe more uncritically ; and the majority of
men who are habitually critical will always repudiate the Scriptural
jurisdiction. In Poland, accordingly, the movement, so flourishing
in its earlier years, was soon arrested, as we have seen, by the per-
ception that it drove many Protestants back to Catholicism ; among
these being presumably a number whose critical insight showed
them that there was no firm standing-ground between Catholicism
and Naturalism. Every new advance within the Unitarian pale

1 N'iceron, Mcmoires pour srrvir, etc., xiv (1731), 340 sq. One of the replies is the Junta
T)e1rstntio scelr-rati/mimi libelli Adriani Jieverlandi }><■ Pecrato Orioincth, by Leonard
JI\>m ii. ]i>0. A very free version of Bcverland's book appeared in French in 1714 under
the title YAai dr. Vllomme davn le Peche Oriyinel. It reached a sixth edition in 1741.

2 Nelson, Life of Bishop Bull, as cited, p. 280.

POPULAE THOUGHT IN EUROPE 37

terrified the main body, many of whom were mere Arians, holding
by the term Trinity, and merely making the Son subordinate to the
Father. Thus when one of their most learned ministers, Simon
Budny, followed in the steps of Ferencz Davides (whom we have
seen dying in prison in Transylvania in 1579), and represented
Jesus as a "mere" man, he was condemned by a synod (1582)
and deposed from his oilico (1581). He recanted, and was
reinstated,1 but his adherents seem to have been excommunicated.
The sect thus formed were termed Semi-Judaizers by another heretic,
Martin Czechowicz, who himself denied the pre-existence of Jesus,
and made him only a species of demi-god;" yet Fausto Sozzini,
better known as Faustus Socinus, who also wrote against them, and
who had worked with Biandrata to have Davides imprisoned,
conceded that prayer to Christ was optional/'

Faustus, who arrived in Poland in 1579, seems to have been
moved to his strenuously " moderate " policy, which for a time
unified the hulk of the party, mainly by a desire to keep on tolerable
terms with Protestantism. That, however, did not serve him with
the Catholics ; and when the reaction set in he suffered severely at
their hands. His treatise, De Jesu Christu Servatore, created bitter
resentment ; and in 1598 the Catholic rabble of Cracow, led " as
usual by the students of the university," dragged him from Ids
house. His life was saved only by the strenuous efforts of the
rector and two professors of the university ; and his library was
destroyed, with his manuscripts, whereof " he particularly regretted
a treatise which he had composed against the atheists "; ' though it is
not recorded that the atheists had ever menaced either Ins life or
his property. He seems to have been zealous against all heresy
that outwent his own, preaching passive obedience in politics as
emphatically as any churchman, and condemning alike the rising
of the Dutch against Spanish rule and the resistance of the French
Protestants to their king.5

Tins attitude may have had something to do with the better side
of the ethical doctrines of the sect, which leant considerably to non-
resistance. Czechowicz (who was deposed by his fellow-Socinians
for schism) seems not only to have preached a patient endurance of
injuries, hut to have meant it;" and to the Socinian sect belongs the

1 Krasinski, llrf. in Poland, 1S10, ii, ,'JG'i ; Moshoim, lli Cent. sen. iii, pt. ii. cli. iv, § 11.
M I'lny ir uiUatod ii in Iii bio, with rationalistic: notes. - Krasin :ki, 1>. Ml.

- Mosheim, last cit. " ■!■',. note 1.

* Krasinski, p. .'Xi7 ; Wallace, Xntitrin. liiotj. 18.J0, ii, 320.

■' liayle, art. Kai'sti: Sons. Krasinski, p. :i7t.

'• Krasinski, pp. :}ijl li-2. Fausto Soz/.ini also could apparently for^ivo everybody ;avo
those who believed ler-.s than he did.

38 THE EISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT

main credit of setting up a humane compromise on the doctrine of
eternal punishment.1 The time, of course, had not come for any
favourable reception of such a compromise in Christendom ; and it
is noted of the German Socinian, Ernst Schoner (Sonerus), who
wrote against the orthodox dogma, that his works are " exceedingly
scarce."2 Unitarianism as a whole, indeed, made little headway
outside of Poland and Transylvania.

In Spain, meantime, there was no recovery from the paralysis
wrought by the combined tyranny of Church and Crown, incarnate
in the Inquisition. The monstrous multiplication of her clergy
might alone have sufficed to set up stagnation in her mental life ;
but, not content with the turning of a vast multitude3 of men and
women away from the ordinary work of life, her rulers set them-
selves to expatriate as many more on the score of heresy. A century
after the expulsion of the Jews came the turn of the Moors, whose
last hold in Spain, Granada, had been overthrown in 1492. Within
a generation they had been deprived of all exterior practice of their
religion ■/ but that did not suffice, and the Inquisition never left
them alone. Harried, persecuted, compulsorily baptized, deprived
of their Arabic books, they repeatedly revolted, only to be beaten
down. At length, in the opening years of the seventeenth century
(1G10-1613), under Philip III, on the score that the great Armada
had failed because heretics were tolerated at home, it was decided
to expel the whole race ; and now a million Moriscoes, among the
most industrious inhabitants of Spain, were driven the way of the
Jews. It is needless here to recall the ruinous effect upon the
material life of Spain :J the aspect of the matter which specially
concerns us is the consummation of the policy of killing out all
intellectual variation. The Moriscoes may have counted for little
in positive culture ; but they were one of the last and most important
factors of variation in the country ; and when Spain was thus
successively denuded of precisely the most original and energetic
types among the Jewish, the Spanish, and the Moorish stocks, her
mental arrest was complete.

To modern freethought, accordingly, she has till our own age

1 Ci>. the inquiry as to Locke's Socinianism in J. Milner's Account of Mr. Lock's
Religion out of his own Writings, 1706, and Lessing's Zur Oeschichte unci Literatur, i, as
to Leibnitz's criticism of Sonerus.

- Rnfield's History of Philosophy fan abstract of Bruclcer), ed. 1S10, p. 537.

3 In the dominions of Philip II there are said to have been 58 archbishops, 684 bishops,
11,100 abbeys, 23,000 religious fraternities, -10, (XX) monasteries, 13.500 nunneries, 31-2,000
secular priests, 4(X),000 monks, 200, 000 friars and other ecclesiastics. II. E. Watts, Miguel
de Cervantes, 1805, pp. 67-03. Spain alone had 9,088 monasteries.

4 Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 181 ; 1-vol. ed. p. 561, and rets.

5 Cp. Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 497-99; 1-vol. ed. pp. 572-73 ; La Rigaudiere, Hist, des Persic.
Relig. en Espagne, 1860, pp. 220-26.

POPULAR THOUGHT IN EUROPE 39

contributed practically nothing. Huarto seems to have had no
Spanish successors. The brilliant dramatic literature of the- reigns
of the three Philips, which influenced the rising drama alike of
France and England, is notably unintellectual,1 dealing endlessly in
plot and adventure, but yielding no great study of character, and
certainly doing nothing to further ethics. Calderon was a thorough
fanatic, and became a priest;2 Lope de Yega found solace under
bereavement in zealously performing the duties of an Inquisitor ;
and was so utterly swayed by the atrocious creed of persecution
which was blighting Spain that he joined in the general exultation
over the expulsion of the Moriscoes. Even the mind of Cervantes
had not on this side deepened beyond tho average of his race and
time;0 his old wrongs at Moorish hands perhaps warping his better
judgment. His humorous and otherwise kindly spirit, so incon-
gruously neighboured, must indeed have counted for much in
keeping life sweet in Spain in the succeeding centuries of bigotry
and ignorance. But from the seventeenth century till the other
day the brains were out, in the sense that genius was lacking.
That species of variation had been too effectually extirpated during
two centuries to assert itself until after a similar duration of normal
conditions. The " immense advantage of religious unity," which
even a modern Spanish historian'1 has described as a gain balancing
the economic loss from the expulsion of the Moriscoes, was precisely
the condition of minimum intellectual activity — the unity of stagna-
tion. No kind of ratiocinative thought was allowed to raise its
head. A Latin translation of the Hypotyposcs of Sextus Empiricus
had been permitted, or at least published, in Catholic France ; but
when Martin Martinez dc Cantatapiedra, a learned orientalist and
professor of theology, ventured to do the same thing in Spain — ■
doubtless with the idea of promoting faith by discouraging reason
— lie was haled before the Inquisition, and the book proscribed
(1583). He was further charged with Lutheran leanings on the
score that he had a preference for the actual text of Scripture over
that of the commentators." In such an atmosphere it was natural
that works on mathematics, astronomy, and physics should be
censured as "favouring materialism and sometimes atheism."1 It

1 ("p. Lewes, Spanish Drama, passim.

- "He inspires me only with horror for the faith which lie professes. No one ever so
far disfigured Christianity ; no one ever assigned to it passions so ferocious, or morals so
corrupt" iSismondi, Lit. of Smith of Europe, Holm tr. ii, liT'.i).

;; Ticknor, Hist, of Spanish Lit. Glh ed. ii, 001 ; Don Quixote, pt. ii.ch.liv; Orinshy,
tr. of 1><<h Quixote. ls,85, introd. i, 58.

1 iiafuento, llistoriu tie Kspann, 1350, xvii, 310. It is not unite certain that Lafuento
expressed his sincere opinion.

•' Uorente, ii, \U. c hi. p. 1:20.

40 THE EISE OF MODERN FEEETHOUGHT

has boon held by one historian that at the death of Philip II there
arose some such sense of relief throughout Spain as was felt later
in France at the death of Louis XIY ; that " the Spaniards now
ventured to sport with the chains which they had not the power to
break"; and that Cervantes profited by the change in conceiving
and writing his Don Quixote.1 But the same historian had before
seen that " poetic freedom was circumscribed by the same shackles
which fettered moral liberty. Thoughts which could not be expressed
without fear of the dungeon and the stake were no longer materials
for the poet to work on. His imagination, instead of improving

them into poetic ideas had to be taught to reject them. But

the eloquence of prose was more completely bowed down under the
inquisitorial yoke than poetry, because it was more closely allied
to truth, which of all things was the most dreaded."2 Cervantes,
Lope de Yega, and Calderon proved that within the iron wall of
Catholic orthodoxy, in an age when conclusions were but slowly
being tried between dogma and reason, there could be a vigorous
play of imaginative genius on the field of human nature ; even as
in Velasquez, sheltered by royal favour, the genius of colour and
portraiture could become incarnate. But after these have passed
away, the laws of social progress are revealed in the defect of all
further Spanish genius. Even of Cervantes it is recorded — on very
doubtful authority, however — that he said " I could have made
Don Quixote much more amusing if it were not for the Inquisition ";
and it is matter of history that a passage in his book3 disparaging
perfunctory works of charity was in 1619 ordered by the Holy Office
to be expunged as impious and contrary to the faith.

See II. E. Watts, Miguel de Cervantes, p. 1G7. Don Quixote
was " always under suspicion of the orthodox." Id. p. 16G.
Mr. Watts, saying nothing of Cervantes's approval of the
expulsion of the Moriscoes, claims that his "head was clear
of the follies and extravagances of the reigning superstition"
(id. p. 231). But the case is truly summed up by Mr. Ormsby
when he says : For one passage capable of being tortured
into covert satire " against things ecclesiastical, "there are ten
in Don Quixote and-the novels that show — what indeed is very
obvious from the little we know of his life and character — that
Cervantes was a faithful son of the Church " (tr. of Don Quixote,
1885, introd. i, 57).

When the total intellectual life of a nation falls ever further in
the rear of the world's movement, even the imaginative arts are

1 Hoiitorwek, Hint, of Spanish and Fortiuiuese Literature, Eug. tr, 1823, i, 331.
- Id. i>. 1.31. •' Part 11, eh. xxxvi.

SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT 41

stunted. Turkey excepted, the civilized nations of Europe which
for two centuries have contributed the fewest groat names to the
world's head-roll have been Spain, Austria, Portugal, Belgium, and
Greece, all noted for their " religious unity." And of all of these
Spain is the supreme instance of positive decadence, she having
exhibited in the first half of the sixteenth century a greater complex
of energy than any of the others.1 The lesson is monumental.

§ G. Scientific Thought

It remains to trace briefly the movement of scientific and specu-
lative thought which constituted the transition between the Scholastic
and the modern philosophy. It may be compendiously noted under
the names of Copernicus, Bruno, Vanini, Galileo, Bamus, Gassendi,
Bacon, and Descartes.

The great performance of COPERNICUS (Nicolaus Koppornigk,
1473-1543), given to the world with an editor's treacherous preface
as he lay paralysed on his deathbed, did not become a general
possession for over a hundred years. The long reluctance of its
author to let it be published, despite the express invitation of a
cardinal in the name of the pope, was well founded in his knowledge
of the strength of common prejudice ; and perhaps partly in a sense
of the scientific imperfection of his own case." Only the special
favour accorded to his first sketch at Rome — a favour which he had
further carefully planned for in his dedicatory epistle to Pope Paul — -
saved his main treatise from prohibition till long after its work was
done.''' It was in fact, with all its burden of traditional error, the
most momentous challenge that had yet been offered in the modern
world to established beliefs, alike theological and lay, for it seemed
to flout " common sense " as completely as it did the cosmogony of
the sacred books. It was probably from scraps of ancient loro
current in Italy in his years of youthful study there that he first
derived his idea ; and in Italy none had dared publicly to propound
the geocentric theory. Its gradual victory, therefore, is the first
great modern instance of a triumph of reason over spontaneous and

1 Kouterwek, whose sociology, though meritorious, is ill-clarified, armies thai tho
Inquisition was in a manner congenita] to Spain because; before ils establishment the
(suspicion of heresy was already " more degrading in Spain than the most odious crimes
in other countries." IJut the same mij^ht have been said of the other countries also. As
to earlier Spanish heresy see above, vol. i, p. .'!:i? s<y.

- Despite tiie many fallacies retained by Copernicus from the current astronoiiiy.be
must be pronounced an exceptionally scientific spirit. Trained as a. mathematician,
astronomer, and physician, he showed a keen and competent interest in the practical
problem of currency ; and one of the two treatises which alone lie published of his own
accord was a sound scheme for the rectification of that of his own government. Though
a canon of Fruueuburi,', he never look orders; but did manifold and unselfish secular
service. ;; it was shielded by thirteen popes -from L'aul 111 to l'aul V.

42 THE EISE OF MODERN FEEETHOUGHT

instilled prejudice ; and Galileo's account of his reception of it should
be a classic document in the history of rationalism.

It was when he was a student in his teens that there came to
Pisa one Christianus Urstifcius of Rostock, a follower of Copernicus,
to lecture on the new doctrine. The young Galileo, being satisfied
that that opinion could be no other than a solemn madness," did
not attend ; and those of his acquaintance who did made a jest of
the matter, all save one, "very intelligent and wary," who told him
that ' the business was not altogether to be laughed at." Thence-
forth he began to inquire of Copernicans, with the result inevitable
to such a mind as his. " Of as many as I examined I found not so
much as one who told me not that he had been a long time of the
contrary opinion, but to have changed it for this, as convinced by
the strength of the reasons proving the same ; and afterwards
questioning them one by one, to see whether they were well
possessed of the reasons of the other side, I found them all to be
very ready and perfect in them, so that I could not truly say that
they took this opinion out of ignorance, vanity, or to show the
acuteness of their wits." On the other hand, the opposing Aristo-
teleans and Ptolemeans had seldom even superficially studied the
Copernican system, and had in no case been converted from it.
Whereupon, considering that there was no man who followed the
opinion of Copernicus that had not been first on the contrary side,
and that was not very well acquainted with the reasons of Aristotle
and Ptolemy, while, on the contrary, there was not one of the
followers of Ptolemy that had ever been of the judgment of
Copernicus, and had left that to embrace this of Aristotle," he
began to realize how strong must be the reasons that thus drew
men away from beliefs " imbibed with their milk." ' We can divine
how slow would be the progress of a doctrine which could only thus
begin to find its way into one of the most gifted scientific minds of
the modern world. It was only a minority of the elite of the
intellectual life who could receive it, even after the lapse of a
hundred years.

The doctrine of the earth's two-fold motion, as we have seen,
had actually been taught in the fifteenth century by Nicolaus
of Cusa (14.01-lIGi), who, instead of being prosecuted, was
made a cardinal, so little was the question then considered
(Qeberweg, ii, 23-24). See above, vol. i, p. 3G8, as to Pulci.
Only very slowly did the work even of Copernicus make its
impression. Green (Short History, ed. 1891, p. 297) makes

1 Galileo, Dialooi dei due massimi sistemi del mondo, ii {Opere, ed. 1S11, xi, 303-304).

SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT 43

first the mistake of stating that it influenced thought in tho
fifteenth century, and then tho further mistake of saying that
it was brought home to the general intelligence by Galileo
and Kepler in the later years of tho sixteenth century (id.
p. 412). Galileo's European notoriety dates from 1G1G ; his
Dialogues of the Two Systems of the World appeared only in
1632 ; and his Dialogues of the New Sciences in 1G38. Kepler's
indecisive Mysterium Cosmograpliicum appeared only in 1597 ;
his treatise on the motions of the planet Mars not till 1G09.

One of the first to bring the new cosmological conception to bear
on philosophic thought was GIORDANO BRUNO of Nola (1548-1600),
whose life and death of lonely chivalry have won him his place as
the typical martyr of modern freethought.1 He may be conceived as
a blending of the pantheistic and naturalistic lore of ancient Greece,
assimilated through the Florentine Platonists, with tho spirit of
modern science (itself a revival of the Greek) as it first takes firm
form in Copernicus, whose doctrine Bruno early and ardently
embraced. Baptized Filippo, ho took Giordano as his cloister-name
when ho entered the great convent of S. Domenico Maggiore at
Naples in 1563, in his fifteenth year. No human being was ever
more unfitly placed among the Dominicans, punningly named the
" hounds of the Lord " (domini canes) for their work as the corps of
the Inquisition ; and very early in his cloister life ho came near being
formally proceeded against for showing disregard of sacred images,
and making light of the sanctity of the Virgin.3 He passed his
novitiate, however, without further trouble, and was fully ordained
a priest in 1572, in his twenty-fourth year. Passing then through
several Neapolitan monasteries during a period of three years, ho
seems to have become not a little of a freethinker on Ids return to
his first cloister, as lie had already reached Arian opinions in regard

1 A good study of Kruno is supplied by Owen in Iris Skeptics of the Italian Renaissance.
He lias, however, omitted to embody the Inter discoveries of Dufour and Kerti, and has
some wrong dales. The Life of Giordano Bruno, by I. Frith (Mrs. Oppenheini), 18S7, gives
all the data, but is inadequate on the philosophic side. A competent estimate is given in
the late I'rof. Adamson's lectures on The Development of Modern 1'hilosoyhy, etc., 1903, ii,
23 «/,; also in his art. in J-'.neyc. lirit. For a hostile view see HalUun, Lit. of Europe, ii,
105-111, The biography of Karthohness, Jordano liruno, 1816, is extremely full and
sympathetic, but was unavoidably loose as to dates. Much new mutter has since been
collected, for which see the Vita di Giordano liruno of Domenico Kerti, rev. and enlarged
ed. lhS'J ; I'rof. .1. Ii. Mclntyre, Giordano liruno, 1003; Dufour, Giordano liruno a Geneve:
Jtociimi nls lui'-d its, 1SS1 ; David Devi, Giordano liruno, o la reliuiirne did uensiero: I'uorno,
lapustulo e il martin:, 1887 ; Dr. II. Hrunnhofor's Giordano Bruno's Weltanschauung it nil
Verliduijniss. 1882; and the doctoral treatise of O. Sigwart, Die Lehensiieschirltte Giordano
llrvnos, Tubingen, 1880. Dor other authorities see Owen's and 1. I'ritli's lists, and tho
liual Literal it rnaclnccis in Duslav Louis's Giordano liruno. seine Wella uscliau tint/ iiud
Lehensverfassuntl, Berlin, 1900. The study of liruno has been carried further in (iermany
than in Kngland; but .Mr. Whittaker (Essays and Notices, ltfjjj) and I'rof. Mclntyre make
up much leeway.

* Cp. iiartholme s, i, 10-.",:! ; Dange, Gesch. des Uaterialismus, i, 191 01 (Dug. tr. i, 23'2) ;
Gustav Douis. as cited, pp. 11. 88.

3 Kerti, Vita ili Giordano liruno, 1880, pp, 10 II, 120, Kruno gives the fact;; in his own
narrative before the Inquisitors at Venice.

44 THE RISE OF MODEBN FREETHOUGHT

to Christ, and soon proceeded to substitute a mystical and Pytha-
gorean for the orthodox view of the Trinity. 1

For the second time a " process " was begun against him, and he
took flight to Borne (1576), presenting himself at a convent of his
Order. News speedily came from Naples of the process against
him, and of the discovery that he had possessed a volume of the
works of Chrysostom and Jerome with the scholia of Erasmus — a
prohibited thing. Only a few months before Bartolomeo Garranza,
Bishop of Toledo, who had won the praise of the Council of Trent
for his index of prohibited books, had been condemned to abjure for
the doctrine that " the worship of the relics of the saints is of human
institution," and had died in the same year at the convent to which
Bruno had now gone. Thus doubly warned, he threw off his
priestly habit, and fled to the Genoese territory,2 where, in the
commune of Noli, he taught grammar and astronomy. In 1578
he visited successively Turin, Venice, Padua, Bergamo, and Milan,
resuming at the last-named town his monk's habit. Thereafter he
again returned to Turin, passing thence to Chambery at the end of
1578, and thence to Geneva early in 1579. 3 His wish, he said, was
to live in liberty and security "; but for that he must first renounce
his Dominican habit ; other Italian refugees, of whom there were
many at Geneva, helping him to a layman's suit. Becoming a
corrector of the press, he seems to have conformed externally to
Calvinism ; but after a stay of two and a-half months he published
a short diatribe against one Antonio de La Faye, who professed
philosophy at the Academy ; and for this he was arrested and
sentenced to excommunication, while his bookseller was subjected
to one day's imprisonment and a fine.4 After three weeks the
excommunication was raised ; but he nevertheless left Geneva, and
afterwards spoke of Calvinism as the "Reformed religion." After
a few weeks' sojourn at Lyons he went to Toulouse, the very centre
of inquisitional orthodoxy; and there, strangely enough, lie was able
to stay for more than a year,5 taking his degree as Master of Arts
and becoming professor of astronomy. But the civil wars made
Toulouse unsafe ; and at length, probably in 1581 or 1582, he
reached Paris, where for a time he lectured as professor extra-
ordinary.0 In 1583 he reached England, where he remained till

1 Berti, pp. 42-43, 47 ; Owen, p. 265.

2 Not to Genoa, as Berti stated in his first ed. See ed. 18S9, pp. 54, 392.

3 Berti, P. 65. Owen has the uncorrected date, 1576.

i Dufour, Giordano Bruno A Geneve: Documents Inedits, 1884 ; Berti, pp. 05-07 ; Gustav
Bonis, Giordano Bruno, pp. 73-75. Owen (p. 269) has overlooked these facts, set forth by
Dufour in 1884. The documents are yiven in full in Frith, Life, 1887, p. 60 aq.

'" The dates are in doubt. Cp. Berti, p. 115, and Frith, p. 65.

c See his own narrative before the Inquisitors in 1592. Berti, p. 394.

SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT 45

1585, lecturing, debating at Oxford on the Copernican theory, and
publishing a number of his works, four of them dedicated to his
patron Castelnau de Mauvissiere, the French ambassador. Oxford
was then a stronghold of bigoted Aristotelianism, where bachelors
and masters deviating from the master were fined, or, if openly
hostile, expelled.1 In that camp Bruno was not welcome. But ho
had other shelter, at the French Embassy in London, and there he
had notable acquaintances. He had met Sir Philip Sidney at Milan
in 1578 ; and his dialogue, Cena de le Cencri, gives a vivid account
of a discussion in which he took a leading part at a banquet given
by Sir Fulke Grevillc. His picture of " Oxford ignorance and
English ill-manners"2 is not lenient; and there is no reason to
suppose that his doctrine was then assimilated by many;'5 but
his stay in the household of Castelnau was one of tho happiest
periods of his chequered life. Whilo in England he wrote no fewer
than seven works, four of them dedicated to Castelnau, and two — the
Heroic Fervours and the Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast — to
Sir Philip Sidney.

Returning to Paris on the recall of Castelnau in 1585, ho made
an attempt to reconcile himself to the Church, but it was fruitless;
and thereafter he went his own way. After a public disputation at
the university in 158G, he set out on a new peregrination, visiting
first Mayence, Marburg, and Wittemberg. At Marburg ho was
refused leave to debate ; and at Wittemberg he seems to have been
carefully conciliatory, as lie not only matriculated but taught for
over a year (1586-1588), till the Calvinist party carried the day
over tho Lutheran.4 Thereafter he reached Prague, Helmstadt,
Frankfort, and Zurich. At length, on the fatal invitation of the
Venetian youth Mocenigo, he re-entered Italian territory, where, in
Venice, lie was betrayed to the Inquisition by his treacherous and
worthless pupil.5

What had been done for freethought by Bruno in his fourteen
years of wandering, debating, and teaching through Europe it is
impossible to estimate ; but it is safe to say that he was one of tho
most powerful antagonists to orthodox unreason that had yet

1 Melntyre, Giordano Bruno, 1007, pp. 21-22.

2 Frith, Life, p. 121, and ivfs.; Owen, p. 275; BartholmAss, Jorrlann Bruno, i, 130-38.

'■'■ Cp. Hallam. Lit. of Europe, ii. 111, note. As to Bruno's supposed in line nee on Bacon
and Shakespeare, ep. Bartholiness. i, 131-35; Frith, Life, pp. 101 IS; and tho author's
Montaigne rind S)ial:spere, pp. 132 -38. Here there is no case ; but there is much to lie said
for Mr. Whittakor's view {Essays and Notices, p. 01) that Spenser's late Cantos on
Mutability were sue:;. .tied by Bruno's Spaccio. Prof. Melntyre supports.

'Mi. prai if; of Luther, and his compliments to tho Lutherans, are in notable contrast
to his verdict on Calvinism. What, happened was that at Wittemberg he was on his best
behaviour, and was well treated accordingly.

■"' As to the traitor's motives cp. Melntyre, p. 00 sa.; Itcrli, p. 202 mi.

46 THE EISE OF MODEEN FEEETHOUGHT

appeared. Of all men of his time he had perhaps the least affinity
with the Christian creed, which was repellent to him alike in the
Catholic and the Protestant versions. The attempt to prove him
a believer on the strength of a non-autograph manuscript is idle.
His approbation of a religion for the discipline of uncivilized peoples
is put in terms of unbelief.2 In the Spaccio della bestia trionfante
he derides the notion of a union of divine and human natures, and
substantially proclaims a natural (theistic) religion, negating all
" revealed " religions alike. Where Boccaccio had accredited all the
three leading religions, Bruno disallows all with paganism, though
he puts that above Christianity.8 And his disbelief grew more
stringent with his years. Among the heretical propositions charged
against him by the Inquisition were these : that there is transmigra-
tion of souls ; that magic is right and proper ; that the Holy Spirit
is the same thing as the soul of the world ; that the world is eternal ;
that Moses, like the Egyptians, wrought miracles by magic ; that
the sacred writings are but a romance (sogno) ; that the devil will be
saved ; that only the Hebrews are descended from Adam, other men
having descended from progenitors created by God before Adam ;
that Christ was not God, but was a notorious sorcerer (insigne
mago), who, having deceived men, was deservedly hanged, not
crucified ; that the prophets and the apostles were bad men and
sorcerers, and that many of them were hanged as such. The cruder
of these propositions rest solely on the allegation of Mocenigo, and
were warmly repudiated by Bruno : others are professedly drawn,
always, of course, by forcing his language, but not without some
colourable pretext, from his two " poems," Dd triplice, viinimo, et
mensura, and De monade, numero etfigura, published at Frankfort in
1591, in the last year of his freedom.4 But the allusions in the
Sigillus Sigillorum5 to the weeping worship of a suffering Adonis, to
the exhibition of suffering and miserable Gods, to transpierced
divinities, and to sham miracles, were certainly intended to contemn
the Christian system.

Alike in the details of Ids propaganda and in the temper of his
utterance, Bruno expresses from first to last the spirit of freethought

1 Xoroff, as cited in Frith, p. 345.

2 Be V Infinite/, ed. Wagner, ii, 27; Cena de la Cencri, ed. Wagner, i, 173; Acrotismus,
ed. Gfrorer, p. 12.

3 Cp. Berti, pp. 187-S8 ; Whittaker, Bssays and Xotices, 1S9.3, p. 89; and Louis's
section, Stellnno zu Christrnthum unci Kirch e.

4 Berti, pp. 297-93. It takes much searching in the two poems to find any of the ideas
in question, and Berti lias attempted no collation; but, allowing for distortions, the
Inquisition has sufficient ground lor outcry.

•"' Sigillus Sigillorum: Da duodrcima contractionis spcriae. Cp. I". J. Clemens, Giordano
Bruno unci Nicolaus von Cusa, 1817, pp. 176, 183; and H. Brunnhofer, Giordano Bruno's
Weltanschauung unci Ferhcingniss, 18S2, pp. 227, 237.

SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT 47

anil freo speech. Libertas philosophical ! is the breath of his nostrils ;
and by his life and his death alike he upholds the ideal for men as
no other before him did. The wariness of Rabelais and the non-
committal skepticism of Montaigne are alike alien to him ; he is too
lacking in reticence, too explosive, to give due heed even to the
common-sense amenities of life, much more to hedge his meaning
with safeguarding qualifications. And it was doubtless as much by
the contagion of Ins mood as by his lore that he impressed men.

His personal and literary influence was probably most powerful
in respect of his eager propaganda of the Copernican doctrine, which
he of his own force vitally expanded and made part of a pantheistic
conception of the universe.2 Where Copernicus adhered by implica-
tion to the idea of an external and limitary sphere — the last of the
eight of the Ptolemaic theory — Bruno reverted boldly to the doctrine
of Anaximandros, and declared firmly for the infinity of space and of
the series of the worlds. In regard to biology he makes an
equivalent advance, starting from the thought of Empedocles and
Lucretius, and substituting an idea of natural selection for that of
creative providence.3 The conception is definitely thought out, and
marks him as one of the renovators of scientific no less than of
philosophic thought for the modern world ; though the special
paralysis of science under Christian theology kept his ideas on this
side pretty much a dead letter for his own day. And indeed it was
to the universal and not the particular that his thought chiefly and
most enthusiastically turned. A philosophic poet rather than a
philosopher or man of science, he yet set abroad for the modern
world that conception of the physical infinity of the universe which,
once psychologically assimilated, makes an end of the medieval
theory of things. On this head he was eagerly affirmative ; and the
merely Pyrrhonic skeptics he assailed as he did the " asinine "
orthodox, though he insisted on doubt as the beginning of wisdom.

Of his extensive literary output not much is stamped with lasting
scientific fitness or literary charm; and some of his treatises, us
those on mnemonics, have no more value than the product of his
didactic model, Raymond Lully. As a writer he is at his best in
the sweeping expatiation of his more general philosophic treatise-;,

1 In the treatise l>c. Limividr. combinatnrin Lulliann (l.'iSTK Aecordin : to Berti fp. -2-2(1)
he is the first, to employ this phrase, which becomes the watchword o1 Spinoza lit/rrtas
philomphrintli a century later.

- Berti, cap. iv ; Owen, p. 21 r) : UobrrweH. ii, 27: Ptinjer, p. O.'i ?</.: Whitbiker, Esxuit*
and .\.,/ir-^. p. GO. As to Kruno's debt to Nicolaus of ( ush <•]>,!<;■, !;n Louis, as ci!< I,
P- 11 : I'unjer, as cited : Carriere. Die jihUnnciphisrhe. ll'clt'titschriuuwi >l> >• ll-fnrm<it Oots-s'ii ,
p. -17, : and Wbitt.aker, p. Hi. Tho ari-'umenl of C'arriere's second edition i- analysed and
rebutted by Mr. Whittuker, p. 27j ,7.

' l)> Iinmenso, vii, c. IS, cited by Whitlakcr, Essays and Xoticcs. p. 70.

48 THE EISE OF MODEKN FEEETHOUGHT

where he attains a lifting ardour of inspiration, a fervour of soaring
outlook, that puts him in the front rank of the thinkers of his age.
And if his literary character is at times open to severe criticism in
respect of his lack of balance, sobriety, and self-command, his final
courage atones for such shortcomings.

His case, indeed, serves to remind us that at certain junctures
it is only the unbalanced types that aid humanity's advance. The
perfectly prudent and self-sufficing man does not achieve revolutions,
does not revolt against tyrannies ; he wisely adapts himself and
subsists, letting the evil prevail as it may. It is the more impatient
and unreticent, the eager and hot-brained — in a word, the faulty —
who clash with oppression and break a way for quieter spirits
through the hedges of enthroned authority. The serenely contem-
plative spirit is rather a possession than a possessor for his fellows ;
he may inform and enlighten, but is not in himself a countering or
inspiriting force : a Shelley avails more than a Goethe against
tyrannous power. And it may be that the battling enthusiast in
his own way wins liberation for himself from " fear of fortune and
death," as he wins for others liberty of action.1 Even such a
liberator, bearing other men's griefs and taking stripes that they
might be kept whole, was Bruno.

And though he quailed at the first shock of capture and torture,
when the end came he vindicated human nature as worthily as
could any quietist. It was a long-drawn test. Charged on the
traitor's testimony with many " blasphemies," he denied them all,
but stood to his published writings3 and vividly expounded his
theories,4 professing in the usual manner to believe in conformity
with the Church's teachings, whatever he might write on philo-
sophy. It is impossible to trust the Inquisition records as to his
words of self-humiliation ;° though on the other hand no blame can
rationally attach to anyone who, in his place, should try to deceive
such enemies, morally on a level with hostile savages. It is certain
that the Inquisitors frequently wrung recantations by torture.6

What is historically certain is that Bruno was not released, but
sent on to Rome, and was kept there in prison for seven years. He
was not the sort of heretic likely to be released; though the fact of
his being a Dominican, and the desire to maintain the Church's

1 As to "Bruno's own claim in the F.rnici Furori, cp. Whittaker, Essays, p. 90.

2 Documents in Berti, pp. 107-18; Mclntyre, p. 73 ^Q-

'■'• See the document in Berti, p. 398 sq.\ Frith, pp. 270-81. 4 Berti, p. 100 sq,

5 See Berti. p. 396 ; Owen, pp. 285-SO; Frith, pp. 2S-2-83.

c The controversy as to whether Galileo was tortured leaves it clear that torture was
common. See Dr. Barchappe, Galilee, sa vie, etc., I860, Ptic. ii, ch. 7.

SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT 49

intellectual credit, delayed so long his execution. Certainly not an
atheist (he called himself in several of his hook-titles Philotheus ;
he consigns insano atcismo to perdition ; and his quasi-pantheism
or monism often lapses into theistic modes),2 he yet was from first
to last essentially though not professedly anti-Christian in his view
of the universe. If the Church had cause to fear any philosophic
teaching, it was his, preached with the ardour of a prophet and the
eloquence of a poet. His doctrine that the worlds in space are
innumerable was as offensive to orthodox ears as his specific
negations of Christian dogma, outgoing as it did the later idea of
Kepler and Galileo. lie had, moreover, finally refused to make any
fresh recantation ; and the only detailed document extant concerning
his final trial describes him as saying to his judges : " With more
fear, perchance, do you pass sentence on me than I receive it."'
According to all accessihle records, he was burned alive at Rome in
February, 1G00, in the Field of Flowers, near where his statue now
stands. As was probably customary, they tied his tongue before
leading him to the stake, lest lie should speak to the people ;J and
his martyrdom was an edifying spectacle for the vast multitude of
pilgrims who had come from all parts of Christendom for the jubilee
of the pope." At the stake, when lie was at the point of death, there
was duly presented to him the crucifix, and he duly put it aside.

An attempt has been made by Professor Desdouits in a
pamphlet (Lit legcnde tmgique de Jordano Bruno ; Paris, 1885)
to show that there is no evidence that Bruno was burned ; and
an anonymous writer in the Scottish Review (October, 1888,
Art. II), rabidly hostile to Bruno, has maintained the same
proposition. Doubt on the subject dates from Bayle. Its main
ground is the fewness of the documentary records, of which,
further, the genuineness is now called in question. But no
good reason is shown for doubting them. They are three.

J. The Latin letter of Caspar Schopp (Scioppius), dated
February 17, 1G00, is an eye-witness's account of the sentencing
and burning of Bruno at that date. (Sec it in full, in the
original Latin, in Belli, p. IGl sq., and in App. V to Frith, Life

1 Sjirirrihih-llft hr.iUn I rionf<i „!,-. ci. Wagner, ii, 120.

-' I'rof. i ::."■ r>- i led that a transition from pantheism to thei-m marks the

growth of his thought; hut, sis is shown by Mr. Whittsiker, lie is markedly pantheistic in
his latent work of all, though bis psintheism is not merely natunili-tie. /-.'nw/i/.s and
. pp. 11. ■::,:■, :,-.

• Italian ver-iou- differ verbally, Cp. Levi, p, 370 : ISerti, p. x;. Thai inscribed on the
Hruiio ,latue at Koine is a close rendering of the Latin : Mii.iuri /m-miit cum tininrc
•■ nli ul in m iii mr f. rti ■ ipi'im ■ ijn urrijiimn. preserved by he i op pi

1 Arrisn, in Lerti, p. :',:'.'.) ; in Levi, p. Xi.

" Levi, pp. :jsl '.II. Levi relates (p. :j'.K)i Unit Lruno a.t the stake wa ; heard to utter the
words : " O Llerno. in to lino ■ l'or/.o ,upremo per a ttrarre in me i| ia nln \ i tra ii piii iliviun
tiell' miiver-o." He rile-; no authority. An Arrisn reports that I in mo -aid his ,oul would
ri-.e with the -,1110 l;e to Panel i -e p. Xi ; I Sort i. J). .'! .!<»>. but does nol da te that this wa all
at the -take. And Li vi accepts the other report tiiat Lruno was gai'ged.

vol. ii i:

50 THE EISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGIIT

of Bruno, and partly translated in Prof. Adamson's lectures, as
cited. It was rep. by Struvius in his Acta Literaria, torn, v,
and by La Croze in his Entretiens sur divers sujets in 1711,
p. 2S7.) It was not printed till 1621, but the grounds urged
for its rejection are totally inadequate, and involve assump-
tions, which are themselves entirely unproved, as to what
Scioppius was likely to do. Finally, no intelligible reason is
suggested for the forging of such a document. Tbe remarks of
Prof. Desdouits on this head have no force whatever. The
writer in the Scottish Bevieio (p. 2G3, and note) suggests as
' at least as possible an hypothesis as any other that he
[Bruno] was the author of the forged accounts of his own
death." Comment is unnecessary.

2. There are preserved two extracts from Roman news-letters
(Avvisi) of the time; one, dated February 12, 1600, comment-
ing on the case; the other, dated February 19, relating the
execution on the 17th. (See both in S. JR., pp. 2Gl-6o. They
were first printed by Berti in Documcnti intorno a Giordano
Bruno, Rome, 1880, and are reprinted in his Vita, ed. 1889,
cap. xix ; also by Levi, as cited.) Against these testimonies the
sole plea is that they mis-state Bruno's opinions and the duration
of his imprisonment — a test which would reduce to mythology
the contents of most newspapers in our own day. The writer
in the Scottish Bevieiv makes the suicidal suggestion that, inas-
much as the errors as to dates occur in Schopp's letter, the
so-called Schopp was fabricated from these notices, or they
from Schopp " — thus admitting one to bo historical.

3. There lias been found, by a Catholic investigator, a
double entry in the books of tbe Lay Brotherhood of San
Giovanni Decollate, whose function was to minister to prisoners
under capital sentence, giving a circumstantial account of
Bruno's execution. (See it in S. 11., pp. 2GG, 269, 270.) In
this case, the main entry being dated " 1G00. Thursday.
February 16th," the anonymous writer argues that " the whole
thing resolves itself into a make-up," because February 16 was
the Wednesday. The entry refers to the procedure of the
Wednesday night and the Thursday morning ; and such an
error could easily occur in any case. Whatever may be one
day proved, the cavils thus far count for nothing. All the
while, the records as to Bruno remain in the hands of the
Catholic authorities ; but, despite the discredit constantly cast
on the Church on the score of Bruno's execution, they offer no
official denial of the common statement ; while they do officially
admit (S. 1L, p. 202) that on February 8 Bruno was sentenced as
an obstinate heretic," and " given over to the Secular Court."
On the other hand, the episode is well vouched : and the argument
from the silence of ambassadors' letters is so far void. No pre-
tence is made of tracing Bruno anywhere after February, 1600.

SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT 51

Since the foregoing note appeared in the first edition I have
met with the essay of Mr. K. Copley Christie, " Was Giordano
Bruno Really Burned'?" {Maanillan's Magazine, October, 1885 ;
rep. in Mr. Christie's Selected Essays and Papers, 1902). This
is a crushing answer to the thesis of M. Desdouits, showing
as it does clear grounds not only for affirming the genuineness
of the letter of Scioppius, but for doubting the diligence of
M. Desdouits. Mr. Christie points out (1) that in bis book
Ecclesiasticus, printed in 1612, Scioppius refers to the burning
of Bruno almost in the words of his letter of 1G00 ; (2) that in
1G07 Kepler wrote to a correspondent of the burning of Bruno,
giving as his authority J. M. YYacker, who in 1000 was living
at Borne as the imperial ambassador ; and (.3) that the tract
Macliiavcllizatio, 1621, in which the letter of Scioppius was
first printed, was well known in its day, being placed on the
Index, and answered by two writers without eliciting any
repudiation from Scioppius, who lived till 1619. As M.
Desdouits staked his case on the absence of allusion to the
subject before 1661 (overlooking even the allusion by Mersenne,
in 1621, cited by Bayle), his theory may be taken as exploded.

Bruno has been zealously blackened by Catholic writers for the
obscenity of some of his writing1 and the alleged freedom of his
life — piquant charges, when we remember the life of the Bapal
Italy in which lie was born. LUCILIO VaxixI (otherwise Julius
Caesar Vanini), the next martyr of freethought, also an Italian
(b. at Taurisano, 1585), is open to the more relevant charges of an
inordinate vanity and some duplicity. Figuring as a Carmelite
friar, which he was not, he came to England (1612) and deceitfully
professed to abjure Catholicism,2 gaining, however, nothing by the
step, and contriving to be reconciled to the Church, after being
imprisoned for forty-nine days on an unrecorded charge. Breviously
he had figured, like Bruno, as a wandering scholar at Amsterdam,
Brussels, Cologne, Geneva, and Lyons ; and afterwards lie taught
natural philosophy for a year at Genoa. His treatise, Ampliitheatruni
/Eternal Providential (Lyons, 1615), is professedly directed against
ancient philosophers, Atheists, Epicureans, Beripatetics, and Stoics,"
and is ostensibly quite orthodox.'5 In one passage he untruthfully
tells how, when imprisoned in England, he burned with the desire
to shed his blood for the Catholic Church.4 In another, after
declaring that some Christian doctors have argued very weakly

1 Notably his comedy II CmuMnio.

- (J wen, Sl.-r/ttic-i of the Italian Iienaissmtcr, p. '■',■>!. A full narrative, from the
rlocMiinents, is ("iveii in It. ('.. Christie's essay, "Vanini in Knuhiml," in the Jlnahsli
Jlistt.ricnl H> rit w of April, IS.'.).",, reprinted in his Selected l-^sniis mot I'm" rs, \\nr>.

■'■ See it analysed by Owen, pp. a/il-IW, and by (arriere, Weltnn^elumunu, PP. I 'JO .MM.

* Amiihit heat nun, Willi, Kxereii. xix, pp. JITUb.

52 THE RISE OF MODERN FKEETHOUGHT

against the Epicureans on immortality, he avows that he, Chris-
tianus nomine cognomine Catholicus," could hardly have held the
doctrine if he had not learned it from the Church, " the most certain
and infallible mistress of truth." 1 As usual, the attack leaves us in
doubt as to the amount of real atheism current at the time. The
preface asserts that " 'AdeonjTo autem secta pestilentissima quotidie,
latins et latins vires acquirit eundo," and there are various hostile
allusions to atheists in the text ;2 but the arguments cited from them
are such as might bo brought by deists against miracles and the
Christian doctrine of sin ; and there is an allusion of the customary
kind to " Nicolaus Machiavellus Athcorum facile princeps,"* which
puts all in doubt. The later published Dialogues, De Admirandis
Natures Arcanis,4 while showing a freer critical spirit, would seem to
be in part earlier in composition, if we can trust the printer's preface,
which represents them as collected from various quarters, and
published only with the reluctant consent of the author." This, of
course, may be a mystification ; in any case the Dialogues twice
mention the Amphitheatrum ; and the fourth book, in which this
mention occurs, may be taken on this and other grounds to set forth
his later ideas. Even the Dialogues, however, while discussing many
questions of creed and science in a free fashion, no less profess
orthodoxy ; and, while one passage is pantheistic/ they also denounce
atheism.' And whereas one passage does avow that the author in
his Amphitheatrum had said many tilings lie did not believe, the
context clearly suggests that the reference was not to the main
argument, but to some of its dubious facts.8 In any case, though
the title — chosen by the editors — speaks daringly enough of ' Nature,
the queen and goddess of mortals," Yanini cannot be shown to be an

1 Ampliitheatrum, Exorcit. xxvii, p. 161. 2 Id. pp. 72, 73, 78, 113, etc.

'■'• P. 3.5. Machiavelli is elsewhere attacked. Pp. 36, 50.

4 Julii Cas'i ris Vanini Neapiditani, Tlieologi, lJ)iilosoplii,et juris utriusque Dnctoris, de
Ad/nirn udis Xaturee Reginivque Deeeque Mortalium Arcanis, libri quatuor. Luteticf, 1616.

•J Mr. Owen makes a serious misstatement on this point, by which I was formerly
misled. He writes (p. 369) that from the publisher's preface we " learn that the Dialogues
v.ere not written by Vanini, but by his disciples. They are a collection of discursive
conversations embodying their master's opinions." This is not what the preface says. It
tells, after a high-pitched eulogy of Vanini, that " nos publics utilitatis solliciti, alia eius
monumenta, qua- avarius re.iinebat, per idoneos ex seriptores nancisci curavimus." In
ascribing the matter of the dialogues to Vanini's young days, Mr. Owen forgets the
references to the Amphitheatrum.

u "Alex. Sed in <iua nam Keligione vere et pie Demn coli vetusti Philosophi existi-
marnnt? Vanini. In unica N a time lege, quam ipsa Xatura, qua.' Deus est (est enim

principinm motus) " De Arcanis, as cited, p. 366. Lib. iv. Dial. 50. See Kousselot's

French tr. 181:2, p. -2-27 . This passage is cited by Hallam (Lit. Hist, ii, 1611 as avowing

"disbelief of all religion except such as Nature has planted in the minds of men" — a

heedless perversion.

' De Arcanis, pp. 351-60. 120-22 (Dial. 50, 56); Ilousselot, pp. 210-23, 271-73.

* The special reference (lib. iv, dial. 56. p. 12s) is to a story of an infant prophesying
when only twenty-four hours old. (Amphitheatrum, Ex. vi. p. 3,S ; cp. Owen, p. 368, note.)
On this and on other points Cous'n (cited by Owen, pp. 368, 371. 377) and Hallam (Lit. Hist.
ii. 161 1 make highly prejudiced statements. Quoting the final pages on which the dialoguist
passes from serious debate to a profession of levity, and ends by calling for the play-table,
the English historian dismisses him as "the wretched man."

SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT 53

atheist ; and the attacks upon him as an immoral writer are not any
better supported.2 The publication of the dialogues was in fact
formally authorized by the Sorbonne,3 and it does not even appear
that when he was charged with atheism and blasphemy at Toulouse
that work was founded on, save in respect of its title.1 The charges
rested on the testimony of a treacherous associate as to his private
conversation ; and, if true, it only amounted to proving his pantheism,
expressed in his use of the word " Nature." At his trial he expressly
avowed and argued for theism. The judges, by one account, did not
agree. Yet lie was convicted, by the voices of the majority, and
burned alive (February 9, 1G19) on the day of his sentence. Drawn
on a hurdle, in his shirt, with a placard on his shoulders inscribed
Atheist and Blasphemer of the name of God," he went to his death
with a high heart, rejoicing, as he cried in Italian, to die like a
philosopher.5 A Catholic historian,0 who was present, says he
hardily declared that " Jesus facing death sweated with fear : I die
undaunted." But before burning him they tore out his tongue by
the roots ; and the Christian historian is humorous over the victim's
long cry of agony.' No martyr ever faced death with a more

dauntless courage than this

Lonely antagonist of Destiny

That went down scornful before many spears ;M

and if the man had all the faults falsely imputed to him,9 his death
might shame his accusers.

Vanini, like Bruno, can now be recognized and understood as
an kalian of vivacious temperament, studious without the student's
calm, early learned, alert in debate, fluent, imprudent, and i 11-

1 ('p. Carriere's analysis of the Dialogues, pp. 505-59; and the Apologia pro Jul. Casaro
Vanino 'by Ar])( i. 1712.

- See Owen's vindication, pp. 371-71. Kenan's criticism {Averrois, pp. 120-23) is not
quite judicial. Sec many others cited by Carriere, p. 510.

;i It is diilicult to uuderstan 1 how the nsor could let pass the description of Nature

in the title; but this may have been added after the authorization. The book is
dedicated by Vanini to Marshal liassompierre, and the epistle dedicatory makes men lion
of the Scroti iniiii'i It'-'iiiiu a etc mi nominis Marin Merticcra, which would disarm suspicion.
In any en •>.■ the permit was revoked, and the book condemned to bu burned.

1 Dwell, p. 395.

" Merc tire Francois. 1010, torn. v. p. 01.

G Dramond il'.arthclemi de Grammont), Tlistoria Gnllitr ah e.rcensu Ifenrici TV, 1013,
p. 2U9. Carriere translates the passage in full, pp. .",00-12, 51.) ; as .Iocs David Durand in
his hostile I'ii- et Sentintens (If Lurilio Vanini. 1717. As to Dramond see the Lrttrcsdi:
Cm I'alin. who 1 1, "U. 12-, ed. Keveillc-l'ariso) calls him dine foible t:t Li'jnti; and guilty of
falsehood and (lattery.

7 Dramond, p. 210. Of Vanini, as of llruno, it is recorded that at the stake he repelled
the proffered crucifix. Owen and oilier writer-, who justly remark that lie well might,
overlook the once received belief that it was tilts official pracl ice. with obstinate heretics,
to jiroffer a re l-liot crucifix, so that the victim should be sure' to spurn it \\ ilh open u tiger.

" Stephen Phillips, Mnrprssa.

3 Cp. Owen, pp. :;-u, :;:<]. and Carriere, pp. 512 d:i. as to the worst calumnies. It is
significant tnat Viniini was tried solelij for blasphemy and iithei-m. What is proved
ngitin>t him is that he and an associate practiced a rathe r gro- fraud on the Knglish
ecclesiastical authority ,. having apparently no higher motive than gain and a tree life.
Mr. Chri-tic notes, however, that Vanini in his writings always speaks very kindly of
England and tiie English, and ->o did not add ingratitude to his act ol imposture.

54 THE EISE OF MODEEN EEEETHOUGHT

balanced. By his own account he studied theology under the
Carmelite Bartolomeo Argotti, phoenix of the preachers of the time;1
but from the English Carmelite, John Bacon, " the prince of Aver-
roists,"2 ho declares, he "learned to swear only by Avorroes "; and
of Pomponazzi lie speaks as his master, and as " prince of the
philosophers of our age."3 He has criticized both freely in his
Amphithcatrum ; but whereas that work is a professed vindication
of orthodoxy, we may infer from the Dc Arcanis that the arguments
of these skeptics, like those of the contemporary atheists whom he
had met in his travels, had kept their hold on his thought even
while he controverted thern. For it cannot be disputed that the
long passages which ho quotes from the "atheist at Amsterdam"4
are put with a zest and cogency which are not infused into the
professed rebuttals, and are in themselves quite enough to arouse
the anger and suspicion of a pious reader. A writer who set forth
so fully the acute arguments of unbelievers, unprintable by their
authors, might well be suspected of writing at Christianity when he
confuted the creeds of the pagans. As was noted later of Fontenelle,
he put arguments against oracles which endangered prophecy ; his
dismissal of sorcery as the dream of troubled brains appeals to
reason and not to faith ; and his disparagement of pagan miracles
logically bore upon the Christian.

When he comes to the question of immortality he grows overtly
irreverent. Asked by the interlocutor in the last dialogue to give
his views on the immortality of the soul, ho begs to be excused,
protesting: "I have vowed to my God that that question shall not
bo handled by mo till I become old, rich, and a German." And
without overt irreverence he is ever and again unserious. Perfectly
transparent is the irony of the appeal, "Let us give faith to the
prescripts of the Church, and due honour to the sacrosanct Gregorian
apparitions," J and the protestation, "I will not invalidate the
powers of holy water, to which Alexander, Doctor and Pontifex of the
Christians, and interpreter of the divine will, accorded such countless
privileges."0 And even in the Amphithcatrum, "with all the parade
of defending the faith, there is a plain balance of cogency on tho
side of tho case for tho attack,' and a notable disposition to rely
finally on lines of argument to which faith could never give real
welcome. Tho writer's mind, it is clear, was familiar with doubt.

1 Dp, Arcanis, p. 205. Lib. iii, dial. 30. 2 Amphithcatrum, p. 17.

:! De Arcanis, lib. iv, dial. 52, p. 370; dial. 51, p. 373. Ci>. Amphitheatrum, p. 36; and
De A rem is, p. 2(1.

1 De Arcanis, dial. 50 and 56. In the Amphithcatrum he adduces an equally skilful
German atheist (p. 73).

5 Dial, li, p. 371. 6 Dial, liv, p. 107. 7 Cp. Bousselot, notice, p. xi.

SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT 55

In the malice of orthodoxy there is sometimes an instinctive percep-
tion of hostility ; and though Vanini had written, among other
tilings,1 an Apologia pro lege mosa'icd et Christiana, to which he often
refers, and an Apologia pro concilio Tridcntino, ho can he seen even
in the hymn to deity with which he concludes his Ampliitlicatrum
to have no part in evangelical Christianity.

He was in fact a deist with the inevitable leaning of the philo-
sophic thcist to pantheism ; and whatever he may have said to
arouse priestly hatred at Toulouse, he was rather less of an atheist
than Spinoza or Bruno or John Scotus. On his trial,2 pressed as to
his real beliefs by judges who had doubtless challenged his identifi-
cation of God with Nature, ho passed from a profession of orthodox
faith in a trinity into a flowing discourse which could as well have
availed for a vindication of pantheism as for the proposition of a
personal God. Seeing a straw on the ground, ho picked it up and
talked of its history; and when brought back again from his affirma-
tion of Deity to his doctrine of Nature, he set forth the familiar
orthodox theorem that, while Nature wrought the succession of seeds
and fruits, there must have been a first seed which was created. It
was the habitual standing ground of theism ; and they burned him
all the same. It remains an open question whether personal enmity
on the part of the prosecuting ofliciar or a real belief that he had
uttered blasphemies against Jesus or Mary was the determining force,
or whether even less motive sufficed. A vituperative Jesuit of that
age sees intolerable freethinking in his suggestion of the unreality
of demoniacal possession and the futility of exorcisms.'1 And for that
much they were not incapable of burning men in Catholic Toulouse
in the days of Mary do Medici.

There are in fact reasons for surmizing that in the cases alike of
Bruno and of Vanini it was the attitude of the speculator towards
scientific problems that primarily or mainly aroused distrust and
anger among the theologians. Vanini is careful to speak equivocally
of the eternity of the universe; and though he makes a passing
mention of Kepler," he docs not name Copernicus. He had learned
something from the fate of Bruno. Yet in the Dialogue Dc arli
forma ct moiorc' he declares so explicitly for a naturalistic explana-
tion of the movements of the heavenly bodies that lie must have
aroused in some orthodox readers such anger as was set up in Plato

' Durand compiles a list, of ten or eleven works of Vanini from the allusions in tlio
Ani)ihithr>itritm ami tin: !><■ A minis.

- Reported I>v (iriiuioii i. m eked. :; Owen, pp. :;■.,; -<)1.

■' r.Hi-a-c, hortrinr r,i ririist: tits beaux esprits, U)i:i.

•"- Dc ArauiiH dial, vii, p. 30. fi Dial, iv, p.Jl.

56 THE EISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT

by a physical theory of sun and stars. After an a priori discussion
on Aristotelian lines, the querist in the dialogue asks what may
fitly l)e held, with an eye to religion, concerning the movements of
the spheres. " This," answers Yanini, " unless I am in error: the
mass of the heaven is moved in its proper gyratory way by the
nature of its elements." " How then," asks the querist, "are the
heavens moved by certain and fixed laws, unless divine minds,
participating in the primal motion, there operate?" "Where is
the wonder ?" returns Yanini. " Does not a certain and fixed law
of motion act in the most paltry clockwork machines, made by a
drunken German, even as there works silently in a tertian and
quartan fever a motion which comes and goes at fixed periods with-
out trangressing its line by a moment ? The sea also at certain
and fixed times, by its nature, as you peripatetics affirm, is moved
in progressions and regressions. No less, then, I affirm the heaven
to be forever carried by the same motion in virtue of its nature
(a sua pura forma) and not to be moved by the will of intelligence."
And the disciple assents. Kepler had seen fit, either in sincerity or
of prudence, to leave "divine minds" in the planets ; and Vanini's
negation, though not accompanied by any assertion of the motion
of the earth, was enough to provoke the minds which had only
three years before put Copernicus on the Index, and challenged
Galileo for venting his doctrine.

It is at this stage that we begin to realize the full play of the
Counter-Reformation, as against the spirit of science. The move-
ment of mere theological and ecclesiastical heresy had visibly begun
to recede in the world of mind, and in its stead, alike in Protestant
and in Catholic lands, there was emerging a new activity of scientific
research, vaguely menacing to all theistic faith. Kepler represented
it in Germany, Harriott and Harvey and Gilbert and Bacon in
England ; from Italy had come of late the portents of Bruno and
Galileo ; even Spain yielded the Examen de Ingcnios of Huarte
(1575), where with due protestation of theism the physicist insists
upon natural causation ; and now Yanini was exhibiting the same
incorrigible /est for a naturalistic explanation of all things. His
dialogues arc full of such questionings; the mere metaphysic and
theosophy of the Ampliitlicatrum are being superseded by discus-
sions on physical and physiological phenomena. It was for this,
doubtless, that the De Arcanis won the special vogue over which
the Jesuit Garasse was angrily exclaiming ten years later.1 Not

1 Doctrine curicuse tics beaux esprits de ec temps, 1023, p. SIS.

SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT 57

merely the doubts cast upon sorcery and diabolical possession, but
the whole drift, often enough erratic, of the inquiry as to how things
in nature came about, caught the curiosity of the time, soon to bo
stimulated by more potent and better-governed minds than that of
the ill-starred Yanini. And for every new inquirer there would be
a hostile zealot in the Church, where the anti-intellectual instinct
was now so much more potent than it had been in the days before
Luther, when heresy was diagnosed only as a danger to revenue.

It was with GALILEO that there began the practical application
of the Copernican theory to astronomy, and, indeed, the decisive
demonstration of its truth. With him, accordingly, began the
positive rejection of the Copernican theory by the Church ; for thus
far it had never been officially vetoed — having indeed been generally
treated as a wild absurdity. Almost immediately after the publica-
tion of Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius (1610) his name is found in the
papers of the Inquisition, with that of Cremonini of Padua, as a
subject of investigation.1 The juxtaposition is noteworthy. Cremonini
was an Aristotelian, with AverroTst leanings, and reputed an atheist ;
and it was presumably on this score that the Inquisition was looking
into his case. At the same time, as an Aristotelian ho was strongly
opposed to Galileo, and is said to have been one of those who refused
to look through Galileo's telescope.'1 Galileo, on the other hand, was
ostensibly a good Catholic ; but his discovery of the moons of Jupiter
was a signal confirmation of the Copernican theory, and the new
status at once given to that made a corresponding commotion in the
Church. Thus lie had against him both the unbelieving pedants of
the schools and the typical priests.

In his book the great discoverer had said nothing explicitly on
the subject of the Copernican theory ; but in lectures and conversa-
tions he had freely avowed his belief in it ; and the implications of
the published treatise were clear to all thinkers. And though, when
he visited Rome in 1611, lie was well received by Pope Paul V, and
his discoveries were favourably reported of by the four scientific
experts nominated at the request of Cardinal Bellarmin to examine
them," it only needed that the Biblical cry should be raised to

1 Karl von Gebler, (Inlilcn (Inlilfi ami thr Unman Curia, Km!. 1r. 1S70, pp. :ai :>7.

- This appears from the letters of Sa^redo to Galileo. Gebler, p. 37. I'p. (iui Putin.
[.■■" -I-;, ed. Keveill.'-Parise, isji;, iii, 7.» ; Bayle, art. Cm mo.vin, notes (' and I); ami
Kenan, Arcrrnrs, lie edit, pp. IDS 1.1. Putin writes that his friend Naude "avoit ete in time
ami df! ('rem on in, qui n'etoit point meillenr Chretien que I'm upon ace. que Machiavel, que
Car i m et telle- a litres dont le pays ahonde."

:i l.um'r, (n-.-rh. ilrs M'ltrrinlisiiiiis, i, ls:j i Kutf. tr. i. ±*m : fielder, p. -ir,. Lihri actually
made tin' rofii-al; hut all that is moved as to Cn-inoniui is that ho opposed Galileo's
diseoverio- a priori. As to the attitude of sueli opponents see Galileo's letter to Kepler.
J. .(. Kiihie. (ialih;,: his Life and Work, VM'i, pp. lul 10-2.

1 I'ahie, Onlik-'i, p. 100. '" Id. P. 1-7.

58 THE EISE OF MODERN FREETHOUCHT

change the situation. The Church still contained men individually
open to new scientific ideas ; but she was then more than ever
dominated by the forces of tradition ; and as soon as those forces
had been practically evoked his prosecution was bound to follow.
The cry of " religion in danger " silenced the saner men at Rome.

The fashion in which Galileo's sidereal discoveries were met is
indeed typical of the whole history of freethought. The clergy
pointed to the story of Joshua stopping the sun and moon ; the
average layman scouted the new theory as plain folly ; and typical
schoolmen insisted that " the heavens are unchangeable," and that
there was no authority in Aristotle for the new assertions. With
such minds the man of science had to argue, and in deference to such
he had at length to affect to doubt his own demonstrations.1 The
Catholic Reaction had finally created as bitter a spirit of hostility to
free science in the Church as existed among the Protestants ; and in
Italy even those who saw the moons of Jupiter through his telescope
dared not avow what they had seen.2 It was therefore an unfortunate
step on Galileo's part to go from Padua, which was under the rule of
Venice, then anti-papal, '! to Tuscany, on the invitation of the Grand
Duke. When in 1G13 he published his treatise on the solar spots,
definitely upholding Copernicus against Jesuits and Aristotelians,
trouble became inevitable ; and his letter'' to his pupil, Father
Castelli, professor of mathematics at Pisa, discussing the Biblical
argument with which they had both been met, at once evoked an
explosion when circulated by Castelli. New trouble arose when
Galileo in 1615 wrote his apology in the form of a letter to his
patroness the Dowager Grand Duchess Cristina of Tuscany, extracts
from which became current. An outcry of ignorant Dominican
monks" sufficed to set at work the machinery of the Index,6 the first
result of which (1616) was to put on the list of condemned books
the great treatise of Copernicus, published seventy-three years
before. Galileo personally escaped for the present through the
friendly intervention of the Pope, Paul V, on the appeal of his
patron, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, apparently on the ground that
he had not publicly taught the Copernican theory. It would seem

1 Gebler, pp. 51, 129, and passim ; The Private Life of Galileo (by Mrs. Olney), Boston,
1870, pp. 67-72.

2 Galileo's letter to Kepler, cited by Gebler, p. 20.

:: The Jesuits were expelled from Venice in 1016, in retaliation for a papal interdict.

1 See it summarized by Gebler, pp. 40-00, and quoted in the Private Life, pp. 83-85.

"' The measure of reverence with which the orthodox handled the matter may be
inferred from the fact that the Dominican Caccini, who preached against Galileo in
Florence, took as one of his texts the verse in Acts i: " I'iri Ualilaei, quid statis
aspicientes in caelum," making a pun on the Scripture.

0 See this summarized by Gebler, pp. 01-70.

SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT 59

as if some of the heads of the Church were at heart Copernicans ;*
but they were in any case obliged to disown a doctrine felt by so
many others to he subversive of the Church's authority.

See the details of the procedure in Domenico Berti, II Proccsso
Originah de Galileo Galilei, ed. 1878, cap. iv ; in Fahie, ch. viii ;
and in Geblor, ch. vi. The last-cited writer claims to show that,
of two records of the " admonition " to Galileo, one, the more
stringent in its terms, was false, though made at the date it hears,
to permit of subsequent proceedings against Galileo. But the
whole thesis is otiose. It is admitted (Geblor, p. 89) that Galileo
was admonished " not to defend or hold the Copernican doctrine."
Geblor contends, however, that this was not a command to keep
' entire silence," and that therefore Galileo is not justly to be
charged with having disobeyed the injunction of the Inquisition
when, in his Dialogues on the Tiro Principal Systems of the
World, the Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632), he dealt dialectically
with the subject, neither affirming nor denying, but treating both
theories as hypotheses. But the real issue is not Galileo's
cautious disobedience (see Gebler's own admissions, p. 119) to
an irrational decree, but the crime of the Church in silencing
him. It is not likely that the " enemies " of Galileo, as Gebler
supposes (pp. 90, 338), anticipated his later dialectical handling
of the subject, and so falsified the decision of the Inquisition
against him in 1616. Gebler had at first adopted the German
theory that the absolute command to silence was forged in
1632 ; and, finding the document certainly belonged to 1616,
framed the new theory, quite unnecessarily, to save Galileo's
credit. The two records are quite in the spirit and manner of
Inquisitorial diplomacy. As Berti remarks, " the Holy Office
proceeded with much heedlessness (legerezza) and much con-
fusion " in 1616. Its first judgment, in either form, merely
emphasizes the guilt of the second. Cp. Fahie, pp. 167-69.

Thus officially "admonished" for his heresy, but not punished,
in 1616, Galileo kept silence for some years, till in 1618 he published
his (erroneous) theory of the tides, which he sent with an ironical
epistle to the friendly Archduke Leopold of Austria, professing to be
propounding a mere dream, disallowed by the official veto on Coper-
nicus.2 This, however, did him less harm than Ins essay 7/ Sug-
(jiutorc ( The Scales"), in which he opposed the Jesuit Grassi on
the question of comets. Receiving the imprimatur in 1623, it was
dedicated to the new pope, Urban VIII, who, as the Cardinal
MaiTco Barberini, had been Galileo's friend. The latter could now

1 Sec The Vrirfitp Life, of fSalilrn, pp. W, 87. 01, 00; fli-liUT, p. 11; laliio, pp. 100 70;
Hi rli. H l-rnrrsmi Oriuinnle tie dnlilen (inlilei, 1S7H, p. 5:i.

•' (M-lilcr (p. 101) solemnly comments on this letter as a lapse into "servility" on
Galileo's part.

60 THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT

hope for freedom of speech, as he had all along bad a number of
friends at the papal court, besides many priests, among his admirers
and disciples. But the enmity of the Jesuits countervailed all.
They did not succeed in procuring a censure of the Saggiatore,
though that subtly vindicates the Copernican system while pro-
fessing to hold it disproved by the fiat of the Church;1 but when,
venturing further, he after another lapse of years produced his
Dialogues on the Two Systems, for which he obtained the papal
imprimatur in 1G32, they caught him in their net. Having constant
access to the pope, they contrived to make him believe that Galileo
had ridiculed him in one of the personages of his Dialogues. It was
quite false ; but one of the pope's anti-Copernican arguments was
there unconsciously made light of ; and his wounded vanity was
probably a main factor in the impeachment which followed.2 His
Holiness professed to have been deceived into granting the impri-
matur ;s a Special Commission was set on foot; the proceedings of
1G16 were raked up; and Galileo was again summoned to Rome.
He was old and frail, and sent medical certificates of his unfitness
for such travel ; but it was insisted on, and as under the papal
tyranny there was no help, he accordingly made the journey. After
many delays he was tried, and, on his formal abjuration, sentenced
to formal imprisonment (1633) for teaching the " absurd" and " false
doctrine" of the motion of the earth and the non-motion of the sun
from east to west. In this case the pope, whatever were his motives,
acted as a hot anti-Copernican, expressing his personal opinion on
the question again and again, and always in an anti-Copernican
sense. In both cases, however, the popes, while agreeing to tire
verdict, abstained from officially ratifying it,1 so that, in proceeding
to force Galileo to abjure his doctrine, the Inquisition technically
exceeded its powers — a circumstance in which some Catholics
appear to find comfort. Seeing that three of the ten cardinals
named in the preamble to the sentence did not sign, it lias been
inferred that they dissented ; but there is no good reason to suppose
that either the pope or they wilfully abstained from signing. They
had gained their point — the humiliation of the great discoverer.

Compare Gebler, p. 211 ; Private Life, p. 257, quoting
Tiraboschi. For an exposure of the many perversions of the
facts as to Galileo by Catholic writers see Parchappe, Galilee,
sa vie, etc., 2e Partie. To such straits has the Catholic Church
been reduced in this matter that part of its defence of the

i Gebler, pp. 112-13. - Private Life, VV- 216-38 ; Gebler, pp. 157-G2.

8 Herti, pp. (il-Cl : Private Life, pp. 212-13; Gebler, p. 102.
4 Gebler, p. 239; Private Life, p. 206.

SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT Gl

treatment of Galileo is the plea that he unwarrantably asserted
that the fixity of the sun and the motion of the earth were
taught in the Scriptures. Sir Robert Inglis is quoted as having
maintained this view in England in 1821 (Mendham, The
Literary Policy of the Church of Borne, 2nd ed. 1830, p. 176),
and the same proposition was maintained in 1850 by a Roman
cardinal. See Galileo e V Inquisiziouc, by Monsignor Marini,
Roma, 1S50, pp. 1, 53-54, etc. Had Galileo really taught as
is there asserted, he would only have been assenting to what his
priestly opponents constantly dinned in his ears. But in point
of fact he had not so assented ; for in his letter to Castelli (see
Gebler, pp. 16-50) ho had earnestly deprecated the argument
from the Bible, urging that, though Scripture could not err, its
interpreters might misunderstand it ; and even going so far as
to argue, with much ingenuity, that the story of Joshua, literally
interpreted, could be made to harmonize with the Copernican
theory, hut not at all with the Ptolemaic.

The thesis revived by Monsignor Marini deserves to rank as
the highest flight of absurdity and effrontery in the entire
discussion (cp. 13erti, Giordano Bruno, 1889, p. 306, note).
Every step in both procedures of the Inquisition insists on the
falsity and the anti-scriptural character of the doctrine that the
earth moves round the sun (see Berti, II Brocesso, p. 115 sq.;
Gebler, pp. 76-77, 230-34) ; and never once is it hinted that
Galileo's error lay in ascribing to the Bible the doctrine of the
earth's fixity In the Roman Index of 166-1 the works of
Galileo and Copernicus are alike vetoed, with all other writings
affirming the movement of the earth and the stability of the
sun : and in the Index of 170-1 are included libri omnes docentes
mohilitatem tcrrac et immobilitatem solis (Putnam, The Censor-
ship of the Church of Borne, 1906-1907, i, 308, 312).

The stories of his being tortured and blinded, and saying Still
it moves," are indeed myths.1 Tho broken-spirited old man was in
no mood so to speak ; lie was, moreover, in all respects save his
science, air orthodox Catholic,' and as such not likely to defy the
Church to its face. \n reality lie was formally in tin; custody of
the Inquisition — and this not in a cell, but in the house of an
official -for only twenty-two days. After the sentence he was again
formally detained for some seventeen days in the Villa Medici, hut
was then allowed to return to his own rural home at Acafri,' on
condition that he lived in solitude, receiving no visitors. He was

' (iebler. ]>]>. -J II) <;:i; 1'rir.itr T,ifi\ pp. -j.v, 5(5; Marini. pp. ~>r, 57. The"e pur si nmnvc"
slorvi- lir t )i<:iLi-'l ol in 1771. A- to tin: torture, it in to lit! reme inhered tiiat (ialileo
recanted under tit mil ol it. Sec lii-rti. pp. '.):) 101 ; Marini, p. .V.I ; Sir (). l.od::e. I'imitrrs
of Srirnn; 1-,j:S. pp. hi-; :il. I'.erti iinjiic.-i that only tin: special humanity of the Cone
me ~:,r\ -O.n.n.l. Maeolano, saved him from the tort! ire. 1 'p. ( ohl.r. |>. d'i'.l, nofr.

- Gebler, p. J.~>\. ■'■ J'rirtttc Life, pp. JO W, -JOS; Gebler, p. irJ.

62 THE RISE OF MODERN FREETIIOUGHT

thus much more truly a prisoner than the so-called ' prisoner of the
Vatican " in our own day. The worst part of the sentence, however,
was the placing of all his works, published and unpublished, on the
Index Expurgatorius, and the gag thus laid on all utterance of
rational scientific thought in Italy — an evil of incalculable influence.
"The lack of liberty and speculation," writes a careful Italian
student, " was the cause of the death first of the Accademia dei
Lincei, an institution unique in its time ; then of the Accademia
del Cimento. Thus Italy, after the marvellous period of vigorous
native civilization in the thirteenth century, after a second period
of civilization less native but still its own, as being Latin, saw itself
arrested on the threshold of a third and not less splendid period.
Vexations and prohibitions expelled courage, spontaneity, and
universality from the national mind ; literary style became un-
certain, indeterminate; and, forbidden to treat of government,
science, or religion, turned to tilings frivolous and fruitless. For
the great academies, instituted to renovate and further the study of
natural philosophy, were substituted small ones without any such
aim. Intellectual energy, the love of research and of objective
truth, greatness of feeling and nobility of character, all suffered.
Nothing so injures a people as the compulsion to express or conceal
its thought solely from motives of fear. The nation in which those
conditions were set up became intellectually inferior to those in
which it was possible to pass freely in the vast regions of
knowledge. Her culture grew restricted, devoid of originality,
vaporous, umbratile ; there arose habits of servility and dissi-
mulation ; great books, great men, great purposes were dena-
turalized." '

It was thus in the other countries of Europe that Galileo's
teaching bore its fruit, for he speedily got his condemned Dialogues
published in Latin by the Elzevirs ; and in 1G38, also at the hands
of the Elzevirs, appeared his Dialogues of the Xcic Seiences [i.e., of
mechanics and motion] , the " foundation of mechanical physics."
By this time he was totally blind, and then only, when physicians
could not help him save by prolonging his life, was he allowed to live
under strict surveillance in Florence, needing a special indulgence
from the Inquisition to permit him even to go to church at Easter.
The desire of his last blind days, to have with him his best-beloved
pupil, Father Castelli, was granted only under rigid limitation and
supervision, though even the papacy could not keep from him the

1 Berti, II Processo di Galileo, pp. 111-1-2.

SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT G3

plaudits of the thinkers of Europe. Finally he passed away in his
rural "prison " — after five years of blindness — in 1G12, the year of
Newton's birth. At that time his doctrines were under anathema in
Italy, and known elsewhere only to a few. Hohbes in 1G3-1 tried in
vain to procure for the Earl of Newcastle a copy of the earlier Dia-
logues in London, and wrote : " It is not possible to get it for money.

I hear say it is called-in, in Italy, as a book that will do more

hurt to their religion than all the books of Luther and Calvin, such
opposition they think is between their religion and natural reason." '
Not till 1757 did the papacy permit other books teaching" the Coper-
nican system ; in 17G5 Galileo was still under ban ; not until 1822
was permission given to treat the theory as true ; and not until 1835
was the work of Copernicus withdrawn from the Index.2

While modern science was thus being placed on its special basis,
a continuous resistance was being made in the schools to the
dogmatism which held the mutilated lore of Aristotle as the sum of
human wisdom. Like the ecclesiastical revolution, this had been
protracted through centuries. Aristotelianism, whether theistic or
pantheistic, whether orthodox or heterodox, s had become a dogmatism
like another, a code that vetoed revision, a fetter laid on the mind.
Even as a negation of Christian superstition it had become impotent,
for the Peripatetics were not only ready to make common cause with
the Jesuits against Galileo, as we have seen ; some of them were
content even to join in the appeal to the Bible.4 The result of such
uncritical partisanship was that the immense service of Aristotle to
mental life — the comprehensive grasp which gave him his long
supremacy as against rival system-makers, and makes him still
so much more important than any of the thinkers who in the
sixteenth century revolted against him — was by opponents dis-
regarded and denied, though the range and depth of his inlluence
are apparent in all the polemic against him, notably in that of Eacon,
who is constantly citing him, and relates his reasoning to him,
however antagonistically, at every turn.

Naturally, the less sacrosanct dogmatism was the more freely

1 Letter of Hobbos to Newcastle, in Uejxirt of the Hist. Mux. Comm. nn the Duke of
Portlmul's 1'tiiiert;, 1802, ii. Hobbos explains that few copies were brought over, "anil
they that buy such books are not such men as to part will) them attain. " "1 doubt not,"
he adds, "but the translation of it will here bo publicly embraced."

- Colder, pp. Ill -2-1. "J ; I'utnam. Ceiixorxhi}! of tlic Church of Home, i, I11I3-1 I.

:; See leberwe^, ii, 12, as to the conflicting types. In addition to Cremonini, several
loading Aristotelians in thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries were accused of atheism
(Hallaui, Lit. Hist, ii, 101 102), the old charge against the IVripatotie school. Dallam
(p. 102) compln ins that Cksai.i-ini of I'isa "substitutes the barren unity of pantheism for
religion." dp. L'eborweg, ii, 11; Kenan, Arerrues, lie edit. p. 117. An Avcrro'fst on some
points, he believed in separate immortality.

1 Colder, pp. 117, !.">. Colder appears to surmise that Oremonini may have escaped the
attack upon himself by turning suspicion upon Galileo, but as to this then' is no evidence.

Gl THE EISE OE MODEBN EEEETHOUGHT

assailed ; and in the sixteenth century the attacks became numerous
and vehement. Luther was a furious anti-Aristotelian,1 as were also
some Calvinists ; but in 1570 we find Beza declaring to Eamus" that
" the Genevese have decreed, once and for ever, that they will never,
neither in logic nor in any other branch of learning, turn away from
the teaching of Aristotle." At Oxford the same code held.3 In
Italy, Telesio, who notably anticipates the tone of Bacon as to
natural science, and is largely followed by him, influenced Bruno
in the anti-Aristotelian direction,'1 though it was in a long line from
Aristotle that he got his principle of the eternity of the universe-
The Spaniard Ludovicus Vives, too (1192-1510), pronounced by
Lange one of the clearest heads of his age, had insisted on progress
beyond Aristotle in the spirit of naturalist science.0 But the typical
anti-Aristotelian of the century was EAMUS (Eierre de la Eamee,
1515-1572), whose long and strenuous battle against the ruling
school at Baris brought him to his death in the -Massacre of
St. Bartholomew.6 Eamus hardily laid it down that " there is no
authority over reason, but reason ought to be queen and ruler over
authority." ' Such a message was of more value than his imperfect
attempt to supersede the Aristotelian logic. Bacon, who carried on
in England the warfare against the Aristotelian tradition, never
ventured so to express himself as against the theological tyranny in
particular, though, as we have seen, the general energy and vividness
of his argumentation gave him an influence which undermined the
orthodoxies to which he professed to conform. On the other hand,
he did no such service to exact science as was rendered in his day by
Kepler and Galileo and their English emulators ; and Ins full didactic
influence came much later into play.

Like fallacies to Bacon's may be found in Descaetf.S, whose
seventeenth-century reputation as a champion of theism proved
mainly the eagerness of theists for a plausible defence. Already in
his own day his arguments were logically confuted by both Gassendi
and Elobbes ; and his partial success with theists was a success of
partisanism. It was primarily in respect of bis habitual appeal
to reason and argument, in disregard of the assumptions of faith,
and secondarily in respect of ins real scientific work, that he counts

1 Ueberwcg, ii, 17. 2 Kpist. 36. :; Sec above, p. 45.

■' Bartholmess, Jordann liruvn. i, 40.

•"- Lange, Gesch. rfes Mater, i, 189-90 (Eng. tr. i, 22S). Bom in Valencia and trained at
I'aris, Vives became a humanist teacher at Lotivain, and was called to England (1523) to
bo tutor to the Princess .Mary. During his stay he taught at Oxford. Being opposed to
the divorce of Henry VIII. he was imprisoned for a time, afterwards living at Bruges.

,; See the monograph, Itamus, s,i vie, ses ecrits, rt sen opinions, par Ch. Waddington,
1805. Owen has a good account of Ramus in Ids French Skeptics.

7 Schola math. 1. iii, p. 78, cited by Waddington, p. 313.

SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT 65

for freethoughfc. Ultimately his method undermined his creed ;
and it is not too much to say of him that, next to Copernicus,
Kepler, and Galileo,1 ho laid a good part of the foundation of modern
philosophy and science," Gassendi largely aiding. Though he never
does justice to Galileo, from his fear of provoking the Church, it can
hardly he doubted that he owes to him in large part the early
determination of his mind to scientific methods ; for it is difficult to
believe that the account he gives of his mental development in the
Discours do hi Methodc (1637) is biographically true. It is rather
the schemed statement, by a ripened mind, of how it might best
have been developed. Nor did Descartes, any more than Bacon, live
up to the intellectual idea he had framed. All through his life ho
anxiously sought to propitiate the Church ;' and his scientific as well
as his philosophic work was hampered in consequence. In England
Henry More, who latterly recoiled from his philosophy, still thought
his physics had been spoiled by fear of the Church, declaring that
the imprisonment of Galileo " frighted Des Cartes into such a
distorted description of motion that no man's reason could make
good sense of it, nor modesty permit him to fancy anything nonsense
in so excellent an author."

But nonetheless the unusual rationalism of Descartes's method,
avowe lly aiming at the uprooting of all his own prejudices" as a
first step to truth, displeased the Jesuits, and could not escape the
hostile attention of the Protestant theologians of Holland, where
Descartes passed so many years of his life. Despite his constant
theism, accordingly, he had at length to withdraw.0 A Jesuit, Pere
Bourdin, sought to have the Discours do la Metliode at once con-
demned by the French clergy, but the attempt failed for the time
being. France was just then, in fact, the most freothinking part of
Europe;' and Descartes, though not so unsparing with his prejudices
as he set out to be, was the greatest innovator in philosophy that
had arisen in the Christian era. He made real scientific discoveries,

1 "In many respects Galileo deserves to he ranked with Descartes as inammralinf!
modern philosophy." Prof. Adamson. Dcirlojimiuit of Mini, l'liilox. 19():J. i, 3. "We may
compare his I Hobbe-Vs! thought with I (eseartes's, hut the impulse came to him from the
physical v> a-onimjs of (ialileo." I'rof. ('room liobertson, llobhcx, lssf,. p. ■{■>.

- I Suckle 1-vol. ed. pp. -.Ml ■'/<; :i-vol.ed. ii, 77 S3. Cp. [jantfe, i, 1-25 I Km!, tr. i, 2 is, note) ;
Ad-imson. 1'liiloxoi/hy ,,f limit, 1S79, p. 191.

Cp. Nan^e. i, Ii3 Kntf. tr. i. 2IS-I9. note) ; Houillier, Hixt. tie hi philox. c</ rtrxicnnr,
1S31, i. K) 17. ]-:, SD; Bartholin's, Jorilann liruno, i, :j31-33; Memoir in (iarnier ed. of
(Kin-ri Choi in,, p. v. also pp. Ii, 17. 19, II. Hossuet prouoimced the precautions of
De riirte-. cxci-.--.ivt.-. lint cp. Dr. hand's notes in Spinor.n : Four Kxsmjx, IS->-J, p. 33.

1 Coll. of I'hilox. U'ritint/x, ed. 171-2, pref. p. xi.
hi n, itr ill- In Mrthnili; pties. i, ii, iii, i\ {(Kuvrcx Choixics, pp. S, II), II, 22, 21);
ili-ditation 1 <i<l. pp. 7.", 7-1).

'' l-'ill d. -tails in Kuno Fischer's Dcxcartea and his School, Kn;;. tr. 1S90, hk. i, ch. vi ;
liouillicr, i, clis. \ii. xiii.

7 iluckle, 1 -vol.ed. pp. W~ 39; 3-vol. cd. ii, 91. 97.

VOL. II F

G6 THE EISE OF MODEEN FEEETHOUGHT

too, where Bacon only inspired an approach and schemed a wandering
road to them. He first effectively applied algebra to geometry ; he
first scientifically explained the rainbow ; he at once accepted and
founded on Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, which
most physiologists of the day derided ; and he welcomed Aselli's
discovery of the lacteals, which was rejected by Harvey.1 And
though as regards religion his timorous conformities deprive him of
any heroic status, it is perhaps not too much to pronounce him

the great reformer and liberator of the European intellect."" One
not given to warm sympathy with freethought has avowed that

the common root of modern philosophy is the doubt which is
alike Baconian and Cartesian."3

Only less important, in some regards, was the influence of
Pierre Gassend or GASSEXDI (1592-1C55), who, living his life as
a canon of the Church, reverted in his doctrine to the philosophy
of Epicurus, alike in physics and ethics.4 It seems clear that he
never had any religious leanings, but simply entered the Church on
the advice of friends who pointed out to him how much better a
provision it gave, in income and leisure, than the professorship he
held in his youth at the university of Aix.5 Professing like
Descartes a strict submission to the Church, he yet set forth a
theory of things which had in all ages been recognized as funda-
mentally irreconcilable with the Christian creed ; and his substantial
exemption from penalties is to be set down to his position, his
prudence, and his careful conformities. The correspondent of
Galileo and Kepler, he was the friend of La Mothe le Vayer and
Naude ; and Gui Patin was his physician and intimate.0 Strong
as a physicist and astronomer where Descartes was weak, he divides
with him and Galileo the credit of practically renewing natural philo-
sophy ; Newton being Gassendist rather than Cartesian.' Indeed,
Gassendi's youthful attack on the Aristotelian physics (1624) makes
him the predecessor of Descartes ; and he expressly opposed his
contemporary on points of physics and metaphysics on which he
thought him chimerical, and so promoted unbelief where Descartes

1 Buckle, pp. 327-30; ii. 81. 2 Id. p. 330; ii, 82. The process is traced hereinafter.

:i Kuno Fischer, Francis Bacon, Eng. tr. 1857, p. 71.

4 For nn exact summary and criticism of Gassendi's positions see the masterly mono-
graph of Prof . Brett of Lahore, The Philosophy of Gassendi, 190S— a real contribution to
the history of philosophy.

5 Op. Adam Smith, Wraith of Nations, bk. v, ch. i (McCulloch's ed. 1839. pp. 304-65). It
is told of him, with doubtful authority, that when dying he said: "I know not who
brought me into the world, neither do I know what was to do there, nor why I go out of
it." Reflections on the Death of Freethinkers, by Deslandes (Eng. tr. of the Reflexions sur
h s grands Ivan mes qui sont marts en plaisantant), 1713. p. 105.

6 For n good account of Gassendi and his group (founded on Lange, ? iii, ch. i) see
Soury, Rrcviaire de I'hist. de mate rialisme , ptie. iii, ch. ii.

7 Voltaire, Elements de philos. de Newton, ch. ii ; Lange, i, 23'2 (Eng. tr. i, 2G7J and 2(30.

SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT 67

made for orthodoxy.1 Of the criticisms on his Meditations to which
Descartes published replies, those of Gassendi are, with the partial
exception of those of Hobbes, distinctly the most searching and
sustained. The later position of Hume, indeed, is explicitly taken
up in the first objection of Craterus ;'" but the persistent pressure of
Gassendi on the theistic and spiritistic assumptions of Descartes
reads like the reasoning of a modern atheist.3 Yet the works of
Descartes were in time placed on the Index, condemned by the
king's council, and even vetoed in the universities, while those of
Gassendi were not, though Ins early work on Aristotclianism had to
be stopped after the first volume because of the anger it aroused.4
Himself one of the most abstemious of men,'' like his master
Epicurus (of whom he wrote a Life, 1617), ho attracted disciples of
another temperamental cast as well as many of his own ; and as
usual his system is associated with the former, who arc duly vilified
by orthodoxy, although certainly no worse than the average orthodox.
Among his other practical services to rationalism was a curious
experiment, made in a village of the Lower Alps, by way of investi-
gating the doctrine of witchcraft. A drug prepared by one sorcerer
was administered to others of the craft in presence of witnesses. It
threw them into a deep sleep, on awakening from which they
declared that they had been at a witches' Sabbath. As they had
never left their beds, the experiment went far to discredit the super-
stition.e One significant result of the experiment was seen in the
course later taken by Colbert in overriding a decision of the Parle-
ment of Eouen as to witchcraft (1670). That Parlcment proposed
to burn fourteen sorcerers. Colbert, who had doubtless read
Montaigne as well as Gassendi, gave Montaigne's prescription that
the culprits should be dosed with hellebore — a medicine for brain
disturbance.7 In 1672, finally, the king issued a declaration for-
bidding the tribunals to admit charges of mere sorcery;" and any
future condemnations were on the score of blasphemy and poison-
in:,'. Yet further, in the section of his posthumous Syntagma Pliilo-
sophicum (16-08) entitled De Effectibus Siderum? Gassendi dealt the

1 Bayle, art. Pomponwcr, Xotea F. and fi . The complaint was made by Arnauld, who
with the rest of the Jansenists was substantially a (.'artesian.

- See it in Gander's cd. of Dc cartes-* CKuvrcs Choixies, p. 115.
'■'■ Id. pp. 158-01.

1 Apparently just because the .Tansenists adopter! Descartes and opposed fiassendi.
Hut Gassendi is extremely guarded in all his statements, save, indeed, in Ins objections to
the Meditations of I >escartes.

■"' See Soury, pp. :S97-98, sis to a water-drinking "debauch " of Gassendi and his friends.

r' Kambaud, a i cited, p. 151. '•' Id. p. 155.

- Voltaire. Sii- rip. dr. Louis XIV, od. Didot, p. :Si',l>. "On ne lent pas use sous [fenri IV
et ^ons Louis XI II," adds Voltaire, (p. Miehelet. I. a Sornrrr. cd. Seailles. l!Kj:j, p. 502.

'■> Tr. into Knijlish in 1059, under the title This Vanity <</' Judiciary Astruloyj.

68 THE RISE OF MODERN FEEETHOUGHT

first great blow on the rationalist side to the venerable creed of
astrology, assailed often, but to little purpose, from the side of faith ;
bringing to his task, indeed, more asperity than he is commonly
credited with, but also a stringent scientific and logical method,
lacking in the polemic of the churchmen, who had attacked astrology
mainly because it ignored revelation. It is sobering to remember,
however, that he was one of those who could not assimilate Harvey's
discovery of the circulation of the blood, which Descartes at once
adopted and propounded.

Such anomalies meet us many times in the history of scientific
as of other lines of thought ; and the residual lesson is the recogni-
tion that progress is infinitely multiplex in its causation. Nothing
is more vital in this regard than scientific truth, which is as a light-
house in seas of speculation ; and those who, like Galileo and
Descartes, add to the world's exact knowledge, perform a specific
service not matched by that of the Bacons, who urge right method
without applying it. Yet in that kind also an incalculable influence
has been wielded. Many minds can accept scientific truths without
being thereby led to scientific ways of thought ; and thus the
reasoners and speculators, the Brunos and the Vaninis, play their
fruitful part, as do the mentors who turn men's eyes on their own
vices of intellectual habit. And in respect of creeds and philosophies,
finally, it is not so much sheer soundness of result as educativeness
of method, effectual appeal to the thinking faculty and to the spirit
of reason, that determines a thinker's influence. This kind of impact
we shall find historically to be the service done by Descartes to
European thought for a hundred years.

From Descartes, then, as regards philosophy, more than from
any professed thinker of his day, but also from the other thinkers
we have noted, from the reactions of scientific discovery, from the
terrible experience of the potency of religion as a breeder of strife
and its impotence as a curber of evil, and from the practical free-
thinking of the more open-minded of that age in general, derives
the great rationalistic movement, which, taking clear literary form
first in the seventeenth century, lias with some fluctuations broadened
and deepened down to our own day.

Chapter XI V

BRITISH FEEETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH
CENTURY

j 1

The propagandist literature of deism begins with an English diplo-
matist, Lord HERBERT of Cherbury, the friend of Bacon, who stood
in the full stream of the current freethought of England and France1
in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. English deism, as
literature, is thus at its very outset affiliated with French ; all of
its elements, critical and ethical, arc germinal in Bodin, Montaigne,
and Charron, each and all of whom had a direct influence on English
thought ; and we shall find later French thought, as in the cases
of Gassendi, Bayle, Simon, St. Evremond, and Voltaire, alternately
influenced by and reacting on English. But, apart from the unde-
veloped rationalism of the Elizabethan period, which never found
literary expression, the French ferment seems to have given the
first effective impulse ; though it is to be remembered that about
the same time the wars of religion in Germany, following on an age
of theological uproar, had developed a common temper of in-
differentism which would react on the thinking of men of affairs
in France.

We have seen the state of upper-class and middle-class opinion
in France about 162-1. It was in Paris in that year that Herbert
published his l)c Veritatc, after acting for five years as the English
ambassador at the French court — an office from which he was
recalled in the same year." By his own account the book had been
"begun by me in England, and formed there in all its principal
parts," "but finished at Paris. He had, however, gone to France
in LG08, and had served in various continental wars in the years
following; and it was presumably in these years, not in his youth
in England, that lie had formed the remarkable opinions set forth in
his epoch-making book.

1 .I.!.i.: n Ti;..iii:i -i'i- in liN Ilinlnrin Alhriftmi <U\r.)l ioin Herbert v. itli line] in as huviiif*
five point- in common with him (eil. 17!):), ch. i\. .> -1. pp. Vii 77 ) .

- It illicit hav.- he n suppose I that, lie w.i ,-i reoalle i on aeeount of hi : lxu.1% ; hut it WMH
nol o. II ■ w : re : ille I Ijv leiter iii \pril, 1-e.turue 1 home in .Inly, ami ■ iviih to have sent
hi- hook tlienee to I'aris to he printe.l.

'■' .iiit'ibl •</ rn lih ij, Sir S. I. •«•'-_! i) 1 1 e'l. p. IIJJ.

70 BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY

Hitherto deism had been represented by unpublished arguments
disingenuously dealt with in published answers ; henceforth there
slowly grows up a deistic literature. Herbert was a powerful and
audacious nobleman, with a weak king ; and he could venture on
a publication which would have cost an ordinary man dear. Yet
even he saw fit to publish in Latin ; and he avowed hesitations.
The most puzzling thing about it is his declaration that Grotius and
the German theologian Tielenus, having read the book in MS.,
exhorted him "earnestly to print and publish it." It is difficult to
believe that they had gathered its substance. Herbert's work has
two aspects, a philosophical and a political, and in both it is
remarkable." Like the Discours cle la Methode of Descartes, which
was to appear thirteen years later, it is inspired by an original
determination to get at the rational grounds of conviction ; and in
Herbert's case the overweening self-esteem which disfigures his
Autobiography seems to have been motive force for the production
of a book signally recalcitrant to authority. Where Bacon attacks
Aristotelianism and the habits of mind it had engendered, Herbert
counters the whole conception of revelation in religion. Rejecting
tacitly the theological basis of current philosophy, ho divides the
human mind into four faculties — Natural Instinct, Internal Sense,
External Sense, and the Discursive faculty — through one or other
of which all our knowledge emerges. Of course, like Descartes, he
makes the first the verification of his idea of God, pronouncing that
to be primary, independent, and universally entertained, and there-
fore not lawfully to be disputed (already a contradiction in terms) ;
but, inasmuch as scriptural revelation has no place in the process,
the position is conspicuously more advanced than that of Bacon in
the De Augment is, published the year before, and even than that of
Locke, sixty years later. On the question of concrete religion
Herbert is still more aggressive. His argument8 is, in brief, that
no professed revelation can have a decisive claim to rational
acceptance ; that none escapes sectarian dispute in its own field ;
that, as each one misses most of the human race, none seems to be
divine ; and that human reason can do for morals all that any one of
them does. The negative generalities of Montaigne here pass into
a positive anti-Christian argument ; for Herbert goes on to
pronounce the doctrine of forgiveness for faith immoral.

1 The book was reprinted at London in Latin in 1633 ; again at Paris in 1036 ; and again
at London in 1615. It was translated and published in French in 1630. hut never in English.

2 Compare the verdict of Hamilton in his ed. of Reid, note A, § 6, 35 (p. 7S1).

■"' For a good analysis see I'iinjer. Hist, of the Christ. Plains, of Religion, Eng. trans.
1SS7, pp. 292-99 ; also Noack, Die Freiilcnlcer in tier Religion, Bern, lboi, i, 17-40 ; and
Lechler, Geschichte ties englischen Deismus, pp. 36-51.

BRITISH FEEETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY 71

Like all pioneers, Herbert falls into some inconsistencies on his
own part ; the most flagrant being his claim to have had a sign from
heaven — that is, a private and special revelation — encouraging him
to publish his book.1 But his criticism is nonetheless telling and
persuasive so far as it goes, and remains valid to this day. Nor do
his later and posthumous works2 add to it in essentials, though they
do much to construct the deistic case on historical lines. The De
religionc gent ilium in particular is a noteworthy study of pre-Christian
religions, apparently motived by doubt or challenge as to his theorem
of the universality of the God-idea. It proves only racial universality
without agreement; but it is so far a scholarly beginning of rational
hierology. The English Dialogue between ei Teacher and his Pupil,
which seems to have been the first form of the Religio Gcntilium,3 is
a characteristic expression of his whole way of thought, and was
doubtless left unpublished for the prudential reasons which led him
to put all his published works in Latin. But the fact that the Latin
quotations are translated shows that the book had been planned for
publication — a risk winch he did wisely to shun. The remarkable
tiling is that his Latin books were so little debated, the De Veritale
being nowhere discussed before Culverwel.1 Baxter in 1G72 could
say that Herbert, " never having been answered, might be thought
unanswerable ";" and his own answer" is merely theological.

The next great freothinking figure in England is THOMAS
HOBBES (lo88-lG79), the most important thinker of his age,
after Descartes, and hardly less influential. But the purpose of
Ilohbes being always substantially political and regulative, his
unfaith in the current religion is only incidentally revealed in the
writings in which he seeks to show the need for keeping it under
monarchic control. Ilohbes is in fact the anti-Presbyterian or anti-
Puritan philosopher ; and to discredit anarchic religion in the eyes
of the majority he is obliged to speak as a judicial Churchman. Yet
nothing is more certain than that he was no orthodox Christian ;

1 See his Autobiography, as cited, pp. 133-31.

- De emmis errorum, una cum tractate de religione laid rt appendice ad sacerrfotcs
(1615); l)r religione gentilium (166;}). The latter was translated into English hi 1705. The
former are short appendices to the lie. Veritata. In 1768 was published for the first time
from a man user ipt, .1 Din I mine between n Tutor and his Pupil, which, despite the don las
ol Itchier, may confidently be pronounced Herbert's from internal evidence. See the
"Advertisement " by the editor of the volume, and c p. Leo, p. n xx, and notes there referred
to. The " five points," in particular, occur not only in the lieligio Gentilium,, but in the
De Veritate. The style is clearly of the seventeenth century.

'■'• Sir Sidney Lee can hardly be right in taking the Dialogue to be the "little treatise"
which Herbert proposed to write on behaviour (Autoliiagraphg. Lee's -.hid ed. p. 13). It
doc, not answer to that description, being rather an elaborate discussion of the themes of
Herbert's main treatises, running to -111 quarto pages.

1 Sec below, j). SO. •"' More Hen sons for the. Christian lteligion, 167-2. p. 70.

'• l!, is to be remembered that the doctrine of the supremacy of the civil power in
religious matters (Krastianism) was maintained by some of the ablest men on the
Parliamentary side, in particular Seidell.

72 BRITISH FREETIIOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY

and even his professed theism resolves itself somewhat easily into
virtual agnosticism on logical pressure. No thought of prudence
could withhold him from shoving, in a discussion on words, that
he held the doctrine of the Logos to be meaningless.1 Of atheism he
was repeatedly accused by both royalists and rebels ; and his answer
was forensic rather than fervent, alike as to his scripturalism, his
Christianity, and his impersonal conception of Deity.2 Reviving as
he did the ancient rationalistic doctrine of the eternity of the world,
he gave a clear footing for atheism as against the Ju(heo-Christian
view. In affirming " one God eternal " of whom men " cannot have
any idea in their mind, answerable to his nature," he was negating
all creeds. He expressly contends, it is true, for the principle of
a Providence ; but it is hard to believe that he laid any store by
prayer, public or private ; and it would appear that whatever
thoughtful atheism there was in England in the latter part of the
century looked to him as its philosopher, insofar as it did not derive
from Spinoza.4 Nor could the Naturalist school of that day desire
a better, terser, or more drastic scientific definition of religion than
Hobbes gave them: "Fear of power invisible, feigned by tlie mind
or imagined from tales 'publicly allowed, Religion ; not allowed,
SuPEItSTITIOX." 5 As the Churchmen readily saw, Ids insistence
on identifying the religion of a country with its law plainly implied
that no religion is any more " revealed " than another. With him
too begins (lGol) the public criticism of the Bible on literary or
documentary grounds;6 though, as we have seen, this had already
gone far in private;' and lie gave a new lead, partly as against
Descartes, to a materialistic philosophy.8 His replies to the theistic
and spiritistic reasonings of Descartes's Meditations are, like those of
Gassendi, unrefuted and irrefutable ; and they are fundamentally
materialistic in their drift.0 lie was, in fact, in a special and
peculiar degree for Ins age, a freethinker ; and so deep was his
intellectual hostility to the clergy of all species that lie could not
forego enraging those of Ins own political side by his sarcasms.10

1 Leviathan, ch. iv, II. Morley's eel. p. 26.

- (']). his letter to an opponent, Considerations upon the, Reputation, etc., of Thomas
Hobbcs, lliso, with chs. .\i and xii of Leviathan, and Ve Corpore Politico, pt. ii, c. (i. One
of his most explicit declarations for theism is in the J)e Homine, c. 1. where lie employs
the design argument, declaring that he who will not see that the bodily organs are a menie
aliqua com! it as ordinatasque ad sua quasque, otjicia must be himself without mind.
This ascription of "mind." however, lie tacitly negates in Leviathan, ch. xi. and JJe
Corpore 1'olitico, pt. ii, e. li. :; l)e Corpore, pt. ii, c. s, ?' 20.

1 (.']). Bentley's letter to Bernard, 1002, cited in Dynamics of lieliuion, pp. 82-.S3.

•" ].• viathan, pt. i, ch. vi. Morley's ed. ]>. 34. ° Lr.vintluni, lit. iii. ch. xxxiii.

" Above, ]>. 21. * On this see Lange, Hist, of Materialism, see. iii, ch. ii.

0 Molyneux, an anti-Hobbesian, in translating Hobbes's objections along with the
Meditations (HiSOJ claims that the slightness of Descartes's replies was due to his
unacquaintance with Hobbes's works and philosophy in general (trans, cited, p. 111).
This i - an obviously lame defence, Descartes does parry some ol the tli rusts of 1 lobbes ;
others he simply cannot meet. lu E.g., Leviathan, pt. iv, ch. xlvii.

BRITISH FEEETHOUGIIT IN THE 17th CENTURY 73

Here he is in marked contrast with Descartes, who dissembled
his opinion about Copernicus and Galileo for peace' sake,1 and was
the close friend of the apologist Xlersenne down to his death."

With the partial exception of the more refined and graceful
Pecock, Hobbes has of all English thinkers down to his period
the clearest and hardest head for all purposes of reasoning, save in
the single field of mathematics, where he meddled without mastery;
and against the theologians of his time his argumentation is as a
two-edged sword. That such a man should have been resolutely on
the side of the king in the Civil War is one of the proofs of the
essential fanaticism and arbitrariness of the orthodox Puritans, who
plotted more harm to the heresies they disliked than was ever
wreaked on themselves. Hobbes came near enough being clerically
ostracized among the royalists ; hut among the earlier Puritans, or
under an Independent Puritan Parliament at any time, he would
have stood a fair chance of execution. It was doubtless largely due
to the anti-persecuting iniluence of Cromwell, as well as to his
having ostensibly deserted the royalists, that Hobbes was allowed
to settle quietly in England after making his submission to the
Rump Parliament in 1651. In 1666 his Leviathan and De Cive
were together condemned by the Restoration Parliament in its
grotesque panic of piety after the Great Fire of London ; and it
was actually proposed to revive against him the writ de herctico
comburendo ;3 but Charles II protected and pensioned him, though
he was forbidden to publish anything further on burning questions,
and Leviathan was not permitted in his lifetime to be republished in
English.4 He was thus for his generation the typical "infidel," the
royalist clergy being perhaps his bitterest enemies. His spontaneous
hostility to fanaticism shaped his literary career, which began in
1G2-S with a translation of Thucydides, undertaken by way of
showing the dangers of democracy. Next came the De Cive
(Paris, 1012), written when he was already an elderly man; and
thenceforth the Civil War tinges his whole temper.

It is in fact by way of a revolt against all theological ethic, us
demonstrably a source of civil anarchy, that Hobbes formulates

1 Knno l-'i-<h<T, 1 >< --rnvti-Hiinil his School, pp. 232 ;JV Cp. Huntley, Sermons mi Atheism
H.i'., hi- lioyle Lecture-', ed. 1721, p. ».

- Hobbe- a] o \\n< of Mcr en n it's acquaintance, but only i its n man of science. When,
in 1M7. Uobbi wn ■ believe. 1 to he ilyin«, Merseiinc for the lirsl time sought to discuss
theoloKj uii.ii him; but the sick man instantly ehaiu/ed the subject. In lill- Mcrsenne
died. He tun* did not live to meet the strain of L.-rinllnui < H>"d >, which enraged the,
l-'ri-neh no h - than tie- KnUli-h ehrL'v. K'rooiii KoberlMin's ll,,l,h,s, pp. (",:! ifi.l

■ Hobhe- lived to see this law abolished (11177'. There was left, however, the iuris-
liop> and ecele-dn ideal courts over cases of atheism, blasphemy, heresy,
and -ehi-m. -hort of tlie death pi nail v.

1 Croom Hubert on, Hobbes, p. l'.«, ; l'epJ's's Diary, Kept. 15, IflilH.

71 BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY

a strictly civic or legalist ethic, denying the supremacy of an abstract
or a priori natural moral law (though he founded on natural law), as
well as rejecting all supernatural illumination of the conscience. In
the Church of Rome itself there had inevitably arisen the practice of
Casuistry, in which to a certain extent ethics had to be rationally
studied ; and early Protestant Casuistry, repudiating the authority
of the priest, had to rely still more on reason.

Compare Whewell, Lectures on the History of Moral Philo-
sophy, ed. 1862, pp. 25-38, where it is affirmed that, after the
Reformation, " Since the assertions of the teacher had no
inherent authority, he was obliged to give his proofs as well
as his results," and "the determination of cases was replaced
by the discipline of conscience " (p. 29). There is an interesting
progression in English Protestant casuistry from W. Perkins
(1558-1602) and W. Ames (pub. 1630), through Bishops Hall
and Sanderson, to Jeremy Taylor. Mosheim (17 Cent. sec. ii,
pt. ii, § 9) pronounces Ames "the first among the Reformed
who attempted to elucidate and arrange the science of morals
as distinct from that of dogmatics." See biog. notes on Perkins
and Ames in Whewell, pp. 27-29, and Reid's Alosheim, p. 681.

But Hobbes passed in two strides to the position that natural
morality is a set of demonstrable inferences as to what adjustments
promote general well-being ; and further that there is no practical
code of right and wrong apart from positive social law.2 He thus
practically introduced once for all into modern Christendom the
fundamental dilemma of rationalistic ethics, not only positing the
problem for his age,3 but anticipating it as handled in later times.4

How far his rationalism was ahead of that of his age may be
realized by comparing Ids positions with those of John Selden, the
most learned and, outside of philosophy, one of the shrewdest of the
men of that generation. Selden was sometimes spoken of by the
Ilobbists as a freethinker ; and his Tabic Talk contains some sallies
which would startle the orthodox if publicly delivered ;5 but not only
is there explicit testimony by his associates as to his orthodoxy:0
Ins own treatise, Dc Jure Xaturali et Gentium juxta disciplinam
Ebrceorum, maintains the ground that the " Law of Nature " which
underlies the variants of the Laws of Nations is limited to the

1 Leviathan, ch. ii ; Morley's ed. p. 19; chs. xiv, xv, pp. 66, 71, 72, 7S ; ch. xxix,
pp. 1 18, 111).

2 Leviathan, chs. xv, xvii, xviii. Morley's ed. pp. 7-2. 82, S3, So.

:i " For two generations the effort to construct morality on a philosophical basis takes
more or less the form of answers to Hobbes" (Sidgwiek, Outlines of the History of Ethics,
3rd ed. p. 169).

1 As when he presents the law of Nature as "dictating peace, for a means of the
conservation of men in multitudes" [Leviathan, eh. xv. Morley's ed. p. 77).

;; See the headings. Council, Kkt.ioion. etc.

c G. \V. Johnson, Memoirs of John Selden, 1835, pp. 31S, 3G'2.

BRITISH FKEETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY 75

precepts and traditions set forth in the Talmud as delivered by
Noah to his posterity.1 Le Clerc said of the work, justly enough,
that in it " Selden only copies the Rabbins, and scarcely ever
reasons." It is likely enough that the furious outcry against
Selden for his strictly historical investigation of tithes, and the
humiliation of apology forced upon him in that connection in 1G1S,2
made him specially chary ever afterwards of any semblance of a
denial of the plenary truth of theological tradition ; but there is no
reason to think that he had ever really transcended the Biblical
view of the world's order. He illustrates, in fact, the extent to
which a scholar could in that day be anti-clerical without being
rationalistic. Like the bulk of the Parliamentarians, though without
their fanaticism, he was thoroughly opposed to the political preten-
sions of the Church,'' desiring however to leave episcopacy alone, as
a matter outside of legislation, when the House of Commons
abolished it. Yet he spoke of the name of Puritan as one which
he trusted he was not either mad enough or foolish enough to
deserve." 4 There were thus in the Parliamentary party men of
very different shades of opinion. The largest party, perhaps, was
that of the fanatics who, as Mrs. Hutchinson — herself fanatical
enough — tells concerning her husband, would not allow him to
be religious because his hair was not in their cut." Next in
strength were the more or less orthodox but anti-clerical and less
pious Scripturalists, of whom Selden was the most illustrious. By
far the smallest group of all were the freethinkers, men of their type
being as often repelled by the zealotry of the Puritans as by the
sacerdotalism of the State clergy. The Rebellion, in short, though
it evoked rationalism, was not evoked by it. Like all religious
strifes — like the vaster Thirty Years' War in contemporary Germany
— it generated both doubt and indifferentism in men who would
otherwise have remained undisturbed in orthodoxy.

s 2

When, however, we turn from the higher literary propaganda to
the verbal and other transitory debates of the period of the
Rebellion, we realize how much partial rationalism had hitherto
subsisted without notice. In that immense ferment some very
advanced opinions, such as quasi-Anarchism in politics" and anti-

1 (i. W. .John on. p. -311. - Abovo, p. -10. •'■ fi. W. Johnson, pp. <27,S, 30-2.

-1 Id. p. :«hi. ('p. in Die Tnhln Talk, art. Tiiimtv, hi ; vii-w of lln- Uoimillicails.
' Mrnuiirx of Cnlnind Hutchinntm, c<l. IMt), i, LSI . ('p. i. :".<■-'. ; ii, I I.

c Cp. Overton's piunphli't, .l/i Arrow m.minxt nil 'in rants and Turmmij I Id It;), cilcl in
the Jlistory <•/ I'nsaiva Obedience since the Iteformntioii, UH), i, ii'J; i>t. ii of Thomas

76 BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY

Scripturalism in religion, were more or less directly professed.
In January, 1646 (x.S.), the authorities of the City of London,
alarmed at the unheard-of amount of discussion, petitioned
Parliament to put down all private meetings;1 and on February 6,
1616 (x.S.), a solemn fast, or " day of puhlique humiliation," was
proclaimed on the score of the increase of "errors, heresies, and
blasphemies." On the same grounds, the Presbyterian party in
Parliament pressed an " Ordinance for the suppression of Blas-
phemies and Heresies," which, long held back by Vane and
Cromwell, was carried in their despite in 1618, by large majorities,
when the royalists renewed hostilities. It enacted the death
penalty against all who should deny the doctrine of the Trinity,
the divinity of Christ, the inspiration of the Bible, a day of
judgment, or a future state ; and prescribed imprisonment for
Arminianism, rejection of infant baptism, anti-Sabbatarianism,
anti-Presbyterianism, or defence of the doctrine of Purgatory or
the use of images.2 And of aggressive heresy there are some note-
worthy traces. In a pamphlet entitled "Hell Broke Loose : a
Catalogue of the many spreading Errors, Heresies, and Blasphemies
of these Times, for which we are to be humbled " (March 9, 1616,
N.S.), the first entry — and in the similar Catalogue in Edwards's
Gangrcena, the second entry — is a citation of the notable thesis,
That the Scripture, whether a true manuscript or no, whether
Hebrew, Greek, or English, is but humane, and not able to discover
a divine God."3 This is cited from " The Pilgrimage of the Saints,
by Lawrence Clarkson," presumably the Lawrence Clarkson who for
his book The Single Eye was sentenced by resolution of Parliament
on September 27, 1600, to be imprisoned, the book being burned by
the common hangman.'1 He is further cited as teaching that even
unbaptized persons may preach and baptize. Of the other heresies
cited the principal is the old denial of a future life, and especially of
a physical and future hell. In general the heresy is pietistic or
antinomian ; but we have also the declaration " that right Reason
is the rule of Faith, and that we are to believe the Scriptures and
the doctrine of the Trinity, Incarnation, Resurrection, so far as we

Edwards's Gangrcena : or a Catalogue and Discovery of many of the 1-2) rours. Heresies,
lilasphemies, and pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of tJiis tune, etc., 2nd cd. Ki-16, pp.
33-34 iN'os. 151-53).

1 Lords Journals, January 10, 1G45-1G16; Gangrcena, as cited, p. 150; ep. Gardiner,
Hist, of the Civil War, ed. 1893, iii, 11.

- Green, Short Hist. eh. viii, j 8, pp. 551 52 ; Gardiner, Hist, of the Civil War, iv, 2-2.

'■'■ Gangrcena, p. 18.

4 In Kill lie had been imprisoned at Bury St. Edmunds for "dipping" adults, and after
six months' durance had been released on n recantation and promise of amendment.
Gangrcena, as cited, pp. lui 105.

BRITISH FBEETIIOUGIIT IN THE 17th CENTURY 77

see them to be agreeable to reason and no further." Concerning
Jesus there are various heresies, from simple Unitarianism to
contemptuous disparagement, with the stipulation for a " Christ
formed in us." But though there are cases of unquotable or ribald
blasphemy there is little trace of scholarly criticism of the Bible, of
reasoning against miracles or the inconsistencies of Scripture, as
apart from the doctrine of deity. Nonetheless, it is very credible

that "multitudes, unsettled have changed their faith, either to

Scepticisme, to doubt of everything, or Atheisme, to believe nothing."

Against the furious intolerance of the Puritan legislature some
pleaded with new zeal for tolerance all round ; arguing that certainty
on articles of faith and points of religion was impossible — a doctrine
promptly classed as a bad heresy.2 The plea that toleration would
mean concord was met by the confident and not unfounded retort
that the "sectaries" would themselves persecute if they could.3
But this could hardly have been true of all. Notable among the
new parties were the Levellers, who insisted that the State should
leave religion entirely alone, tolerating all creeds, including even
atheism ; and who put forward a new and striking ethic, grounding
on universal reason " the right of all men to the soil.1 In the
strictly theological field the most striking innovation, apart from
simple Unitarianism, is the denial of the eternity or even the
existence of future torments — a position first taken up, as we have
seen, either by the continental Socinians or by the unnamed English
heretics of the Tudor period, who passed on their heresy to the
time of Marlowe.5 In this connection the learned booklet6 entitled
Of the Torments of Hell : the foundations and pillars thereof dis-
cover'd, search' d, shaken, and removed (1608) was rightly thought
worth translating into French by d'Holbach over a century later.' It
is an argument on scriptural lines, denying that the conception of
a place of eternal torment is either scriptural or credible ; and
pointing out that many had explained it in a "spiritual" sense.

Human': feeling of this kind counted for much in the ferment ;
but a contrary hate was no less abundant. The Presbyterian
Thomas Edwards, who in a vociferous passion of fear and zeal set

1 Rev. James C'ranford, Tlrereseo-Hachia, a Sermon, lfi-lfi, p. TO.

- No. 100 in (I'liiurrfiiii. '■'• Cranford. as cited, p. 11 Sf7.

1 Set (J. I*. (;.,.,.-),'. Hist, r,f Democ. Ideas in E n aland in the nth C< ntury, IMis, ch. vi.

"' A hove. pp. 1 and H.

,J in tin; British Museum copy the name Richardson is punned, not in a contemporary
liiind. at the < n i oj the preface ; and in the preface to vol. ii of the Then i.e. 170.S, in which
the treati-e i- reprinted, the same nam< is niven, hut with uncertainty-. The Richardson
pointed at mi, the author of The Seresaitu <,J Toleration in Matters of Keliuimi Uol7).
K. Ii. I 'ndcrhiil, in hi i collection of that and other Traetx on I. to, rtu of ('tm.-rit net for
the Hansen! Knoll ys Society, Iblfi, remains doubttul ip. :il7) as to the authorship of the
tract on hell. '' The fourth Kn;;li,h edition appeared ill 1701.

78 BRITISH FEEETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTUEY

himself to catalogue the host of heresies that threatened to over-
whelm the times, speaks of "monsters" unheard-of theretofore,
now common among us — as denying the Scriptures, pleading for
a toleration of all religions and worships, yea, for blasphemy, and
denying there is a God."1 "A Toleration," he declares, "is the
grand design of the Devil, his masterpiece and chief engine "; " every
day now brings forth books for a Toleration."' Among the 180
sects named by him3 there were " Libertines," " Antiscripturists,"
" Skeptics and Questionists," 4 who held nothing save the doctrine
of free speech and liberty of conscience;'5 as well as Socinians,
Arians, and Anti-trinitarians ; and he speaks of serious men who
had not only abandoned their religious beliefs, but sought to persuade
others to do the same.6 Under the rule of Cromwell, tolerant as he
was of Christian sectarianism, and even of Unitarianism as repre-
sented by Biddle, the more advanced heresies would get small
liberty ; though that of Thomas Muggleton and John Beeve, which
took shape about 1651 as the Muggletonian sect, does not seem to
have been molested. Muggleton, a mystic, could teach that there
was no devil or evil spirit, save in " man's spirit of unclean reason
and cursed imagination";7 but it was only privately that such men
as Henry Marten and Thomas Chaloner, the regicides, could avow
themselves to be of " the natural religion." The statement of
Bishop Burnet, following Clarendon, that " many of the republicans
began to profess deism," cannot be taken literally, though it is
broadly intelligible that " almost all of them were for destroying

all clergymen and for leaving religion free, as they called it,

without either encouragement or restraint."

See Burnet's History of His Own Time, bk. i, ed. 1838, p. 43.
The phrase, " They were for pulling down the churches," again,
cannot be taken literally. Of those who "pretended to little or
no religion and acted only upon the principles of civil liberty,"
Burnet goes on to name Sidney, Henry Nevill, Marten, Wild-
man, and Harrington. The last was certainly of Hobbes's way
of thinking in philosophy (Croom Eobertson, Hobbes, p. 223,
note) ; but Wildman was one of the signers of the Anabaptist
petition to Charles II in 1658 (Clarendon, Hist, of the Bcbeltion,

1 Gangrcena, ep. fled. (p. 5). Cp. pp. 47, 151, 17S-79 ; and Bailie's Letters, ed. 1841, ii,
231-37; iii, 393. The most sweeping plea for toleration seems to have been the book
entitled Toleration Justified, 1616. {Gangrcena, p. 151.) The Hanserd Knollys collection,
above mentioned, does not contain one of that title.

2 Gangrcena, pp. 152-53. s Pp. 18-36.

4 Id. p. 15. As to other sects mentioned by him cp. Tayler, p. 101.

5 On the intense aversion of most of the Presbyterians to toleration see Tayler, Retro-
spect of Iielig. Life of Eng. p. 136. They insisted, rightly enough, that the principle was
never recognized in the Bible.

6 See the citations in Buckle, 3- vol. ed. i, 317 ; 1-vol. ed. p. 196.

7 Alex. Ross, Pansebeia, 4th ed. 167-2, p. 379.

BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY 79

bk. xv, ed. 1S43, p. 855). As to Marten and Chaloncr, seo
Carlyle's Cromicell, iii, 19-1 ; and articles in Nat. Vict, of Biog.
Vaughan (Hist, of England, 1840, ii, 477, note) speaks of
Walwyn and Overton as " among the freethinkers of the times
of the Commonwealth." They were, however, Biblicists, not
unbelievers. Prof. Gardiner (Hist, of the Commonwealth and
Protectorate, ii, 253, citing a Newsletter in the Clarendon MSS.)
finds record in 1G53 of " a man [who] preached flat atheism in
Westminster Hall, uninterrupted by the soldiers of the guard";
but this obviously counts for little.

Between the advance in speculation forced on by tho disputes
themselves, and the usual revolt against the theological spirit after
a long and ferocious display of it, there spread even under tho
Commonwealth a new temper of secularity. On tho one hand,
the temperamental distaste for theology, antinomian or other, took
form in the private associations for scientific research which were
the antecedents of the Royal Society. On the other hand, the spirit
of religious doubt spread widely in the middle and upper classes ;
and between the dislike of the Roundheads for the established clergy
and the anger of the Cavaliers against all Puritanism there was
fostered that " contempt of tho clergy " which had become a clerical
scandal at the Restoration and was to remain so for about a century.1
Their social status was in general low, and their financial position
bad ; and these circumstances, possible only in a time of weakened
religious belief, necessarily tended to further the process of mental
change. Within the sphere of orthodoxy, it operated openly. It
is noteworthy that tho term "rationalist" emerges as the label of
a sect of Independents or Presbyterians who declare that "What
their reason dictates to them in church or State stands for good,
until they be convinced with better." ' The " rationalism," so-called,
of tli at generation remained ostensibly scriptural ; but on other
lines thought went further. Of atheism there are at this stage only
dubious biographical and controversial traces, such as Mrs. Hutchin-
son's characterization of a Nottingham physician, possibly a deist,
as a " horrible atheist,"3 and tho Rev. John Dove's Confutation ,f
Atheism (1G40), winch does not bear out its title. Ephraim Pagitt,
in his Ile.rcsiocjraphy (1644), speaks loosely of an 'atheistical sect
who affirm that men's soules sleep with them until /he day of
judgment"; and tells of some alleged atheist merely that ho
"mocked and jeared at Christ's Incarnation."' Similarly a work,

1 Op. the present writer's Buckle and liis Critics, 1S0."J>, el). \ iii. :: '2.

2 Sw above, vol. i, p. 5.

'■'■ Memoirs nf Coloiirl Hutchinson, 3rd ed. i. 200.

1 llnrrninaraphv : The Heretics and Nectaries of these. Times, IT. 11. Kpist. I)od.

80 BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE 17tii CENTURY

entitled Dispute betwixt an Atheist and a Christian (16IG), shows
the existence not of atheists but of deists, and the deist in the
dialogue is a Fleming.

More trustworthy is the allusion in Nathaniel Culverwel's
Discourse of the Light of Nature (written in 1G46, published posthu-
mously in 1652) to "those lumps and dunghills of all sects that

young and upstart generation of gross anti-scripturalists, that have
a powder-plot against the Gospel, that would very compendiously
behead all Christian religion at one blow, a device which old and
ordinary heretics were never acquainted withal."1 The reference is
presumably to the followers of Lawrence Clarkson. Yet even here
we have no mention of atheism, which is treated as something
almost impossible. Indeed, the very course of arguing in favour of
a "Light of Nature " seems to have brought suspicion on Culverwel
himself, who shows a noticeable liking for Herbert of Cherbury." He
is, however, as may be inferred from his angry tone towards anti-
scripturalists, substantially orthodox, and not very important.

It is contended for Culverwel by modern admirers (eel. cited,
p. xxi) that he deserves the praise given by Hallam to the later
Bishop Cumberland as " the first Christian writer who sought to
establish systematically the principle of moral right independent
of revelation." [See above, p. 74, the similar tribute of Mosheim
to Ames.] But Culverwel does not really make this attempt. His
proposition is that reason, " the candle of the Lord," discovers
" that all the moral law is founded in natural and common
light, in the light of reason, and that there is nothing in the
mysteries of the Gospel contrary to the light of reason " (Introd.
end) ; yet lie contends not only that faith transcends reason,
but that Abraham's attempt to slay his son was a dutiful
obeying of " the God of nature " (pp. 225-2G). He does not
achieve the simple step of noting that the recognition of revela-
tion as such must bo performed by reason, and thus makes no
advance on the position of Bacon, much less on those of Pecock
and Hooker. His object, indeed, was not to justify orthodoxy
by reason against rationalistic unbelief, but to make a case for
reason in theology against the Lutherans and others who,
' because Socinus has burnt his wings at this candle of the
Lord," scouted all use of it (Introd.). Culverwel, however, was
one of the learned group in Emanuel College, Cambridge, whoso
tradition developed in the next generation into Latitudinarian-
ism ; and he may be taken as a learned type of a number of the
clergy who were led by the abundant discussion all around them
into professing and encouraging a ratiocinative habit of mind.

1 Discourse, cd. 18j7, p. 226. 2 Dr. J. Brown's prcf. to cd. of ISjT, p. xxii.

BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY 81

Thus we find Dean Stuart, Clerk of the Closet to Charles I,
devoting one of his short homilies to Jerome's text, Tentemus
cuiimas quae deficiunt a fide naturalibus rationibus adjurare.
It is not enough," he writes, " for you to rest in an imaginary
faith, and easiness in beleeving, except yee know also what and
why and how you come to that beleef. Implicite beleevers,
ignorant beleevers, the adversary may swallow, but the under-
standing beleever bee must chaw, and pick bones before bee
come to assimilate him, and make him like himself. The
implicite beleever stands in an open field, and the enemy will
ride over him easily : the understanding beleever is in a fenced
town." (Catholique Divinity, 1G57, pp. 133-31 — a work written
many years earlier.)

The discourse on Atheism, again, in the posthumous works of
John Smith of Cambridge (d. 1652), is entirely retrospective; but
soon another note is sounded. As early as 16o2, the year after the
issue of Hobbes's Leviathan, the prolific Walter Charleton, who had
been physician to the king, published a book entitled The Darkness
of Atheism Expelled by tlie Light of Nature, wherein he asserted

that England "hath of late produced and doth foster more

swarms of atheistical monsters than any age, than any Nation

hath been infested withal." In the following year Henry More, the
Cambridge Platonist, published his Antidote against Atheism. The
flamboyant dedication to Viscountess Conway affirms that the
existence of God is " as clearly demonstrable as any theorem in
mathematicks "; but, the reverend author adds, " considering the
state of things as they are, I cannot but pronounce that there is
more necessity of this my Antidote than I could wish there were."
At the close of the preface he pleasantly explains that he will use
no Biblical arguments, but talk to the atheist as a " mere Naturalist ";
inasmuch as " he that converses with a barbarian must discourse to
him in his own language," and " he that would gain upon the more
weak and sunk minds of sensual mortals is to accommodate himself
to their capacity, who, like the bat and owl, can see nowhere so well
as in the shady glimmerings of their twilight." Then, after some
elementary play with the design argument, the entire Third Book of
forty-six folio pages is devoted to a parade of old wises' tales of
witches and witchcraft, witches' sabbaths, apparitions, commotions
by devils, ghosts, incubi, polter-geists — the whole vulgar medley of
the peasant superstitions of Europe.

It is not that the Platonist does violence to Ids own philosophic
tastes by way of influencing the "bats and owls " of atheism. This
mass of superstition is his own special pabulum. In the prelaeo

vol. ii <;

82 BRITISH FEEETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY

he has announced that, while he may abstain from the use of the
Scriptures, nothing shall restrain him from telling what he knows
of spirits. I am so cautious and circumspect," he claims, ' that
I make use of no narrations that either the avarice of the priest
or the credulity and fancifulness of the melancholist may render
suspected." As for the unbelievers, " their confident ignorance
shall never dash me out of confidence with my well-grounded
knowledge ; for I have been no careless inquirer into these things."
It is after a polter-geist tale of the crassest description that he
announces that it was strictly investigated and attested by " that
excellently-learned and noble gentleman, Mr. R. Boyle," who avowed
that all his settled indisposedness to believe strange tilings was
overcome by this special conviction." 1 And the section ends with
the proposition : " Assuredly that saying is not more true in politick,
No Bishop, no King, than this in metaphysicks, No Spirit, no God."
Such was the mentality of some of the most eminent and scholarly
Christian apologists of the time. It seems safe to conclude that the
Platonist made few converts.

More avowed that he wrote without having read previous
apologists ; and others were similarly spontaneous in the defence
of the faith. In 1654 there is noted" a treatise called Atlieismus
Vapulans, by William Towers, whose message can in part be
inferred from his title;3 and in 1657 Charleton issued his
Immortality of the Human Soul demonstrated by the Light of
Nature, wherein the argument, which says nothing of revelation,
is so singularly unconfident, and so much broken in upon by
excursus, as to leave it doubtful whether the author was more
lacking in dialectic skill or in conviction. And still the traces of
unbelief multiply. Baxter and Howe were agreed, in 1658, that
there were both " infidels and papists " at work around them ;
and in 1659 Howe writes : " I know some leading men are not
Christians."1 " Seekers, Yanists, and Behmenists " are specified
as groups to which both infidels and papists attach themselves.
And Howe, recognizing how religious strifes promote unbelief, bears
witness " What a cloudy, wavering, uncertain, lank, spiritless thing

is the faith of Christians in this age become! Most content

themselves to profess it only as the religion of their country."'

1 More, Collection of Philosophical Writings, 4th ed. 109:2, p. 95.

2 Fabricius, Delectus Arguinentorum ct Syllabus Scriptorum, 17-25, p. 311.

3 No copy in liritish Museum.

1 L'rwiok, Life of John Howe, with 1816 ed. of Howe's Select Works, pp. xiii, xix.
Urwick, a learned evangelical, fully admits the presence of "infidels" on both sides in
the politics of the time.

•: Discourse Concerning Union Among Protestants, ed. cited, pp. 1 i(i, 156, 158. In the
preface to his treatise, The liedeenier's Tears Wept over Lost Souls, Howe complains of

BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE 17TH CENTURY 83

Alongside of all this vindication of Christianity there was going
on constant and cruel persecution of heretic Christians. The
Unitarian John Riddle, master of the Gloucester Grammar School,
was dismissed for his denial of the Trinity ; and in 1647 he was
imprisoned, and his hook burned by the hangman. In 1654 he was
again imprisoned ; and in 1G55 he was banished to the Scilly
Islands. Returning to London after the Restoration, lie was again
arrested, and died in gaol in 1662. ' Under the Commonwealth
(1656) James Naylor, the Quaker, narrowly escaped death for
blasphemy, but was whipped through the streets, pilloried, bored
through the tongue with a hot iron, branded in the forehead, and
sent to hard labour in prison. Many hundreds of Quakers were
imprisoned and more or less cruelly handled.

From the Origines Sacra (1662) of Stillingtleet, nevertheless, it
would appear that both deism and atheism were becoming more and
more common." lie states that " the most popular pretences of
the atheists of our age have been the irreconcilableness of the
account of times in Scripture with that of the learned and ancient
heathen nations, the inconsistency of the belief of the Scriptures
witli the principles of reason ; and the account which may be given
of the origin of things from the principles of philosophy without the
Scriptures." These positions are at least as natural to deists as to
atheists ; and Stillingtleet is later found protesting against the policy
of some professed Christians who give up the argument from miracles
as valueless.3 His whole treatise, in short, assumes the need for
meeting a very widespread unbelief in the Bible, though it rarely
deals with the atheism of which it so constantly speaks. After the
Restoration, naturally, all the new tendencies were greatly reinforced,4
alike by the attitude of the king and his companions, all iniluenced
by French culture, and by the general reaction against Puritanism,
Whatever ways of thought had been characteristic of the Puritans
were now in more or less complete disfavour ; the belief in witchcraft
was scouted as much on this ground as on any other;5 and the

" the atheism of sonic;, the avowed mere theism of others," and of a fashionable habit of
ridiculing religion. Tli is sermon, however, appears to have been first published in hjdi;
and the date of its application is uncertain.

1 Wallace, Antit ra.ijit ruin liiiigrnithy. Art. 28o.

• The preface- begins: "It is neither to satisfie the importunity of friends, nor to
prevent false copies (which and such like excuses 1 know are expected in usual prefaces),
that 1 have adventured abroad this following treatise: Inn it is out of a just resentment
of the affronts and indignities which have been cast on religion, by such who account it
a matter of judgment to disbelieve the Scriptures, and a piece of wit to dispute themselves
out of tiie possibility ot being happy in another world."
Si e bk. ii, eh. x. I'age s:w, 3rd ed. Nltili.

1 (ji. (Uauvill, pref. Address to his Sce/isis Srieiitificu, Owen's ed, lSs,">, pp. lv-lvii ; and
Henry Mores Divine, Uinlngurs, Dial, i, eh. xxxii.

' Cp. Lecky, liiitionnlisin m KurinK, i, 10U.

81 BEITISH FBEETPIOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTUEY

deistic doctrines found a ready audience among royalists, whose
enemies had been above all things Bibliolaters.

There is evidence that Charles II, at least up to the time of
his becoming a Catholic, and probably even to the end, was
at heart a deist. See Burnet's History of his Oicn Time,
ed. 1838, pp. Gl, 175, and notes ; and cp. refs. in Buckle,
3-vol. eel. i, 3G2, note ; 1-vol. ed. p. 205. St. Evremond, who
knew him and many of his associates, affirmed expressly that
Charles's creed " etoit seulement ce qui passe vulgairement,
quoiqu' injustement, pour une extinction totale de Eeligion :
je veux dire le Deisme " {CEuvres melees: t. viii of Gluvrcs,
ed. 1711, p. 351). His opinion, St. Evremond admits, was
the result of simple recognition of the actualities of religious
life, not of reading, or of much reflection. And his adoption
of Catholicism, in St. Evremond's opinion, was purely political.
He saw that Catholicism made much more than Protestantism
for kingly power, and that his Catholic subjects were the most
subservient.

We gather this, however, still from the apologetic treatises and
the historians, not from new deistic literature ; for in virtue of the
Press Licensing Act, passed on behalf of the Church in 1G62, no
heretical book could be printed ; so that Herbert was thus far the
only professed deistic writer in the field, and Hobbes the only
other of similar influence. Baxter, writing in 1G55 on The
Unreasonableness of Infidelity, handles chiefly Anabaptists ; and
in his Reformed Pastor (1G5G), though he avows that " the common
ignorant people," seeing the endless strifes of the clergy, " are
hardened by us against all religion," the only specific unbelief he
mentions is that of " the devil's own agents, the unhappy Socinians,"

who had written " so many treatises for unity and peace." 1 But

in his Reasons of the Christian Religion, issued in 16G7, he thinks
fit to prove the existence of God and a future state, and the truth
and the supernatural character of the Christian religion. Any deist
or atheist who took the troublo to read through it would have been
rewarded by the discovery that the learned author has annihilated
his own case. In his first part he affirms : " If there were no life
of Eetribution after this, Obedience to God would be finally men's
loss and mine : But Obedience to God shall not be finally men's
loss and ruine : Ergo, there is another life."2 In the second part
he writes that " Man's personal interest is an unfit rule and measure
of God's goodness";'^ and, going on to meet the new argument

1 The Reformed Pastor, abr. ed. 1S-26, pp. 23fi, 239.

2 Work cited, ed. 1007, p. 136. The proposition is reiterated. 8 Id. p. 3SS.

BRITISH FREETIIOUGIIT IN THE 17th CENTURY 85

against Christianity based on the inference that an infinity of stars
are inhabited, he writes : —

Ask any man who knoweth these things whether all this earth
be any more in comparison of the whole creation than one Prison
is to a Kingdom or Empire, or the paring of one nail in com-
parison of the whole body. And if God should cast off all this earth,
and use all the sinners in it as they deserve, it is no more sign of
a want of benignity or mercy in him than it is for a King to cast

one subject of a million into a jail or than it is to pare a mans

nails, or cut off a wart, or a hair, or to pull out a rotten aking tooth.1

Thus the second part absolutely destroys one of the fundamental
positions of the first. No semblance of levity on the part of the
freethinkers could compare with the profound intellectual insincerity
of such a propaganda as this ; and that deism and atheism continued
to gain ground is proved by the multitude of apologetic treatises.
Even in church-ridden Scotland they were found necessary ; at least
the young advocate George Mackenzie, afterwards to be famous as
the " bluidy Mackenzie" of the time of persecution, thought it
expedient to make his first appearance in literature with a lieligio
Stoiei (1GG3), wherein he sets out with a refutation of atheism. It
is difficult to believe that his counsel to Christians to watch the
" horror-creating beds of dying atheists " — a false pretence as it
stands — represented any knowledge whatever of professed atheism
in his own country ; and his discussion of the subject is wholly on
the conventional lines — notably so when he uses the customary
plea, later associated with Pascal, that the thoist runs no risk even
if there is no future life, whereas the atheist runs a tremendous risk
if there is one ; s but when ho writes of that mystery why the
greatest wits are most frequently the greatest atheists,"1 he must he
presumed to refer at least to deists. And other passages show that
lie had listened to freethinking arguments. Thus ho speaks'' of
those who "detract from Scripture by attributing the production of
miracles to natural causes "; and again ' of those who ' contend that
the Scriptures are written in a mean and low style; are in some
places too mysterious, in others too obscure; contain many things
incredible, many repetitions, and many contradictions." His own
answers are conspicuously weak. In the latter passage he continues :
Bui those miscreants should consider that much of the Scripture's
native splendour is impaired by its translators"; and as to miracles

1 lint sun. * f if the Christian llcliuiun, pp. :SS,S H9.

- lOlir/iu Stuir.i, Ktli ii lm cull, ii'ii').',. p. ]'.). 'I'd o essay was rcprinti il in I til !-.">, ;md ill London
in lO'.U under the title of The Ui'lviious Stuic.

'■'' Id. p. la. ' Id. p. 1-2 J. •• Id. p. 7(5. ,: Id. p. ('/.).

86 BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY

he makes the inept answer that if secondary causes were in opera-
tion they acted by God's will ; going on later to suggest on his own
part that prophecy may be not a miraculous gift, but " a natural
(though the highest) perfection of our human nature." 1 Apart from
his weak dialectic, he writes in general with cleverness and literary
finish, but without any note of sincerity; and his profession of
concern that reason should be respected in theology 2 is as little
acted on in his later life as his protest against persecution. The
inference from the whole essay is that in Scotland, as in England,
the civil war had brought up a considerable crop of reasoned
unbelief ; and that Mackenzie, professed defender of the faith as he
was at twenty-five, and official persecutor of nonconformists as ho
afterwards became, met with a good deal of it in his cultured circle.
In his later booklet, Reason : an Essay (1G90), he speaks of the

' ridiculous and impudent extravagance of some who take pains

to persuade themselves and others that there is not a God." He
further coarsely asperses all atheists as debauchees,5 though he avows
that "Infidelity is not the cause of false reasoning, because such as
are not atheists reason falsely."

When anti-theistic thought could subsist in the ecclesiastical
climate of Puritan Scotland, it must have flourished somewhat in
England. In 1GG7 appeared A Philosophicall Essay towards an
eviction of the Being and Attributes of God, etc., of which the
preface proclaims " the bold and horrid pride of Atheists and
Epicures " who ' have laboured to introduce into the world a general
Atheism, or at least a doubtful Skepticisme in matters of Religion."
In 1GG8 was published Meric Casaubon's treatise, Of Credulity and
Incredulity in tilings Natural, Civil, and Divine, assailing not only
'the Sadducism of these times in denying spirits, witches," etc., but

Epicurus and the juggling and false dealing lately used to bring

Atheism into Credit" — a thrust at Gassendi. A similar polemic is
entombed in a ponderous folio " romance " entitled Bentivolio and
Urania, by Nathaniel Ingelo, D.D., a fellow first of Emanuel
College, and afterwards of Queen's College, Cambridge (1660; 4th
ed. amended, 1682). The second part, edifyingly dedicated to the
Earl of Lauderdale, one of the worst men of his day. undertakes

1 Religio Stoici, p. 116. 2 Id. p. 122.

3 This last is interesting as a probable echo of opinions he had heard from some of
his older contemporaries : "Opinion kept witliin its proper bounds is an i -the Scottish
"ane "J pure act of the mind; and so it would appear that to punish the body for that
which is a guilt of the soul is as unjust as to punish one relation for another " (pref.
pp. 10-11). He adds that "the Almighty hath left no war rand upon holy record for perse-
cuting such as dissent from us." ' Reason : an Essay, ed. lfj'JO, p. 21. Cp. p. 152.

"' l<l. p. 82. It is noteworthy that Mackenzie puts in a protest against "implicit Faith
and Infallibility, those great tyrants over Reason " (p. 88). But the essay as a whole is
ill-planned and unimpressive.

BRITISH FREETHOUGIIT IN THE 17th CENTURY 87

to handle tho "Atheists, Epicureans, and Skepticks"; and in
the preface the atheists are duly vituperated ; while Epicurus is
described as a gross sensualist, in terms of the legend, and the
skeptics as ' resigned to the slavery of vice." In the sixth hook
the atheists are allowed a momentary hearing in defence of their
" horrid absurdities," from which it appears that there were current
arguments alike anthropological and metaphysical against theism.
The most competent part of the author's own argument, which is
unlimited as to space, is that which controverts the thesis of the
invention of religious beliefs by " politicians " ' — a notion first put
in currency, as we have seen, by those who insisted on the expediency
and value of such inventions ; as, Polybius among tho ancients, and
Machiavelli among the moderns ; and further by Christian priests,
who described all non-Christian religions as human inventions.

Dr. Ingelo's folio seems to have had many readers ; but ho
avowedly did not look for converts ; and defences of the faith on
a less formidable scale were multiplied. A " Person of Honour "
(Sir Charles Wolseley) produced in 1669 an essay on The
Unreasonableness of Atheism made Manifest, which, without
supplying any valid arguments, gives some explanation of the
growth of unbelief in terms of the political and other antecedents ;2
and in 1670 appeared Richard Barthogge's Divine Goodness
Explicated and Vindicated from the Exceptions of the Atheists.
Baxter in 1671'' complains that "infidels are grown so numerous
and so audacious, and look so big and talk so loud"; and still the
process continues. In 167:2 Sir William Temple writes indignantly
of " those who would pass for wits in our age by saying things
which, David tells us, the fool said in his heart."1 In the same
year appeared The Ilcasonableness of Scripture-Belief, by Sir Charles
Wolseley, and The Atheist Silenced, by one J. M. ; in 1671, Dr. Thomas
Good's Eirmianus et Dubitantius, or Dialogues concerning Atheism,
Infidelity, and Popery ; in 1675, the posthumous treatise of Bishop
Wilkins (d. 1672), Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion,
with a preface by Tillotson ; and a Precis Demonstratio, with tho
modest sub-title, "The Truth of Christian Religion Demonstrated
by Reasons the best that have yet been out in English"; in 1677,
Bishop Stillingfleet's Letter to a Deist; and in 167H tho massive
work of Cudworth on The True Intellectual System of the Universe

1 Work cited, im\ oil. pt. ii. pp. IDT, 15.

- ('p. lJ>i>i"iHics t,f ll. lit/inn, pj). Mi S7, SO 90. This explanation is also fUven by Iiishop
Wilkin- in his tnati-e on S'llnrnl H,li<ii<»i. 7th id. p. :j.m.

'■'■ l:.-).;\ ■in.: to f ft.-rlx rt's I>< Vrritnti-, which lie seems not to have rea.l before.
1 1'ixt. to Obi. mion the United l'roc. of the SethcrOuids, in Work., e.l. 1-1 1 , i, 3(\.

88 BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY

attacking atheism (not deism) on philosophic lines which sadly-
compromised the learned author.1 English dialectic being found
insufficient, there was even produced in 1G79 a translation by the
Rev. Joshua Bonhome of the French L'AtJicisme Convaincu of
David Dersdon, published twenty years before.

All of these works explicitly avow the abundance of unbelief ;
Tillotson, himself accused of it, pronounces the age " miserably
overrun with Skepticism and Infidelity"; and Wilkins, avowing
that these tendencies are common " not only among sensual men
of the vulgar sort, but even among those who pretend to a more
than ordinary measure of wit and learning," attempts to meet them
by a purely deistic argument, with a claim for Christianity appended,
as if he were concerned chiefly to rebut atheism, and held his own
Christianity on a very rationalistic tenure. The fact was that the
orthodox clergy were as hard put to it to repel religious antinomianism
on the one hand as to repel atheism on the other; and no small part
of the deistic movement seems to have been set up by the reaction
against pious lawlessness.2 Thus we have Tillotson, writing as
Dean of Canterbury, driven to plead in his preface to the work of
AVilkins that "it is a great mistake" to think the obligation of
moral duties "doth solely depend upon the revelation of God's will
made to us in the Holy Scriptures." It was such reasoning that
brought upon him the charge of freethinking.

If it be now possihle to form any accurate picture of the state of
belief in the latter part of the seventeenth century, it may perhaps
be done by recognizing three categories of temperament or mental
proclivity. First we have to reckon with the great mass of people
held to religious observance by hebetude,3 devoid of the deeper
mystical impulse or psychic bias which exhibited itself on the one
hand among the dissenters who partly preserved the "enthusiasms "
of the Commonwealth period, and on the other among the more
cultured pietists of the Church who, banning " enthusiasm " in its
stronger forms, cultivated a certain " enthusiasm " of their own.
Religionists of the latter type were ministered to by superstitious
mystics like Henry More, who, even when undertaking to " prove"
the existence of God and the separate existence of the soul by
argument and by dcmonology, taught them to cultivate a " warranted
enthusiasm," and to " endeavour after a certain principle more noble

1 Cp. Dynamics nf Bcliaioti, pp. 87, 91-98, 111, 11-2.

2 As to the religious immoralism see Mosheim, 17 Cent. sec. ii, pt. ii, ch. ii, § 23, and
Murdoek's notes.

3 Compare the picture of average Protestant deportment given by benjamin Bennet in
his Discourses against I'opery, 1711, p. 377,

BRITISH FEEETIIOUGIIT IN THE 17th CENTURY 89

and inward than reason itself, and without which reason will falter, or

at least reach but to mean and frivolous things" "something in

me while I thus speak, which I must confess is of so retruse a nature
that I want a name for it, unless I should adventure to term it
divine sagacity, which is the first rise of successful reason, especially
in matters of great comprehension and moment." ' There was small
psychic difference between this dubiously draped affirmation of the
' inner light " and the more orotund proclamations of it by the
dissenters who, for a considerable section of the people, still carried
on the tradition of rapturous pietism ; and the dissenters were not
always at a disadvantage in that faculty for rhetoric which has
generally been a main factor in doctrinal religion.2

From the popular and the eclectic pietist alike the generality of
the Anglican clergy stood aloof; and among them, in turn, a ration-
alistic and anti-mythical habit of mind in a manner joined men who
were divided in their beliefs. The clergymen who wrote lawyer-like
treatises against schism were akin in psychosis to those who, in
their distaste for the parade of inspiration, veered towards deism.
Tillotson was not the only man reputed to have done so : fervid
dissenters declared that many of the established clergy paid " more
respect to the light of reason than to the light of the Scriptures,"
and further "left Christ out of their religion, disowned imputed
righteousness, derided the operations of the holy spirit as the empty
pretences of enthusiasts."" Of men of this temperament, some
would open dialectic batteries against dissent ; while others, of a
more searching proclivity, would tend to construct for themselves
a rationalistic creed out of the current medley of theological and
philosophic doctrine. The great mass of course maintained an
allegiance of habit to the main formulas of the faith, putting
quasi-rational aspects on the trinity, providence, redemption, and
the future life, very much as the adherents of political parties
normally vindicate their supposed principles ; and there was a good
deal of surviving temperamental piety even in the Restoration
period.1 But the outstanding feature of the age, as contrasted with

i More, Coll. of Plains. Writiiifis, Ith ed. 1712. Ren. prof. p. 7.

- Compare some of the extracts in Thomas Hcnnet's Defence of the Discourse of Schism,
etc. :Jnded. 1701. from the sermons of 14. UoiiRe (llif-.H). The description of men as " mortal
crumbling bits of dependency, yesterday's start-ups, that eome out of tin' abyss of nothing,
hastening to the bosom of their mother earth " (work cited, p. 'Xll is n reminder Unit tin-
re onant anil eadenced rhetoric of the ISrownes and Taylors and C'ndworths was an art of
the aUc, at the commune! of different orders of propuLla nda.

:; Cited bv Hennet, .1 Defence of the Discourse of Schism, etc.. as cited, p. II.

* Tim , Henry .Mores biographer, the Hev. Kichard Ward. .- a \ - " the late Mr. Chiswel
told a friend of mine that for twenty years together after the return o! Kim; Cluirlc s the
Second the M >l l'-r'l of (iodliness, and Dr. More'- other work-., ruled all the booksellers m
Loudon" Hjife of M„re, 1710, pp. 10J Ii3). We have seen the nature oi some of More's
" other works."

90 BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY

previous periods, was the increasing commonness of the skeptical or
rationalistic attitude in general society. Sir Charles Wolseley
protests1 that " Irreligion, 'tis true, in its practice hath still been
the companion of every age, but its open and public defence seems
the peculiar of this" ; adding that " most of the bad principles of this
age are of no earlier a date than one very ill book, and indeed but
the spawn of the Leviathan." This, as we have seen, is a delusion ;
but the influence of Hobbes was a potent factor.

All the while, the censorship of the press, which was one of the
means by which the clerical party under Charles combated heresy,
prevented any new and outspoken writing on the deistic side. The
Treatise of Humane [i.e. Human] Reason (1674)2 of Martin Clifford,
a scholarly man-about-town,8 who was made Master of the Charter-
house, went indeed to the bottom of the question of authority by
showing, as Spinoza had done shortly before,4 that the acceptance of
authority is itself in the last resort grounded in reason. The author
makes no overt attack on religion, and professes Christian belief, but
points out that many modern wars had been on subjects of religion,
and elaborates a skilful argument on the gain to be derived from
toleration. Reason alone, fairly used, will bring a man to the
Christian faith : he who denies this cannot be a Christian. As for
schism, it is created not by variation in belief, but by the refusal to
tolerate it. This ingenious and well-written treatise speedily elicited
three replies, all pronouncing it a pernicious work. Dr. Laney,
Bishop of Ely, is reported to have declared that book and author
might fitly be burned together ;5 and Dr. Isaac Watts, while praising
it for "many useful notions," found it " exalt reason as the rule of
religion as well as the guide, to a degree very dangerous."' Its
actual effect seems to have been to restrain the persecution of
dissenters.' In 1G80, three years after Clifford's death, there
appeared An Apology for a Treatise of Humane Reason, by Albertus
Warren, wherein one of the attacks, entitled Plain Dealing, by a
Cambridge scholar, is specially answered.8 This helped to evoke

1 The Reasonableness of Scripture Belief, 1672, Epist. Ded.

2 Rep. 1075 ; -2nd ed. 1691 ; rep. in the Phoenix, vol. ii. 1708 ; 3rd eel. 1736.

3 A very hostile account of him is given in Diet, of Nat. Biog. He was, however, the
friend of Cowley, anrl the " M. Clifford" to whom Sprat addressed his sketch of Cowley's
Life. He was also a foe of Dryden— the " malicious Matt Clifford" of Dryden's Sessions of
the Poets; and he attacked the poet in Notes on Dryden's Poems (published 1687), and is
supposed to have had a hand iu the Rehearsal. He was befriended by Shaftesbury.

» Tract. Theol. Polit. c. 15.

"' Wood, Athena- O.conienses, ii, 381-82; Granger, Bimj. Hist, of England, 5th ed. v, 293.

6 Johnson's Life of Dr. Watts, 1785, App. i.

7 Toulmin, Hist, of the Prnt. Dissenters, 1814, citing Johnson's Life of Dr. Walts.

s It has been suggested that this was really written by Clifford, for posthumous
publication. The humorous sketch of J £ is Character" at the close, suggesting that his
vices seem to the writer to have outweighed his virtues, hints of ironical mystification.

BRITISH FREETIIOUGIIT IN THE 17th CENTURY 91

the anonymous Discourse of Things above Benson (1681), by Robert
Boyle, the distinguished author of The Sceptical Chemist, whom we
have seen hacking up Henry More in acceptance of the grossest of
ignorant superstitions. The most notable thing about the Discourse
is that it anticipates Berkeley's argument against freethinking
mathematicians.1

The stress of new discussion is further to be gathered from the
work of Howe, On the Beconcilableness of God's Prescience of the
Sins of Men icith tiie Wisdom and Sincerity of his Counsels and
Exhortations, produced in 1677 at Boyle's request. As a modern
admirer admits that the thesis was a hopeless one," it is not to be
supposed that it did much to lessen doubt in its own day. Tho
preface to Stillingfleet's Letter to a Deist (1677), which for the first
time brings that appellation into prominence in English controversy,
tacitly abandoning the usual ascription of atheism to all unbelievers,
avows that " a mean esteem of the Scriptures and the Christian
Religion " has become very common " among the Skepticks of this
Age," and complains very much, as Butler did sixty years later, of
the spirit of " Raillery and Buffoonery " in which the matter was
too commonly approached. The ' Letter " shows that a multitude
of tho inconsistencies and other blemishes of the Old Testament
were being keenly discussed ; and it cannot be said that the Bishop's
vindication was well calculated to check the tendency. Indeed, we
have the angry and reiterated declaration of Archdeacon Parker,
writing in 1681, that "the ignorant and the unlearned among
ourselves are become the greatest pretenders to skepticism ; and
it is the common people that nowadays set up for Skepticism and
Infidelity"; that "Atheism and Irroligion are at length become as
common as Vice and Debauchery"; and that ' Plebeans and
Mechanicks have philosophized themselves into Principles of
Impiety, and read their Lectures of Atheism in the Streets and
Highways. And they are able to demonstrate out of the Leviathan
that there is no God nor Providence," and so on.' As the Arch-
deacon's method of refutation consists mainly in abuse, he doubtless
had the usual measure of success. A similar order of dialectic is
employed by Br. Sherlock in his Practical Discourse of lieliyious
.1 emblies (1681). The opening section is addressed to the specu-
lative atheists," here described as receding from the principles of

1 Work cited, pp. 10, 1 1, 30, ."». - Dr. Urwick. Li/r of Uoin; n , cited, p. xxxii.

- A l)r„in„-t r ition of fin: Dirinr : Authority of thrl.awof Satnn unit of the Christian
llrli'iooi, !,v Samuel I'arker, I). I)., Hoi. pref. Tin- fir.-t purl of liii • tnatUe is avowedly a
l>op:tiiiri/. uitin of the argument of (' urn O.rlo lid 's IHsiiiiiiiliu d, I ,< /Hois Saturn; Ui~->.
I' 1 1- 1.- -r h.i 1 previously puhli.-hed In In tin a l)ist>utati > ./■■ I >>■.,,■ I fno-iUrntia I >irina, in
which lie raise I the question, .In L'luljsophoruia ulli, ct on ma in A tin i fur runt (107b).

92 BEITISH FEEETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY

their "great Master, Mr. Hobbs," who, "though he had no great
opinion of religion in itself, yet thought it something considerable
when it became the law of the nation." Such atheists, the reverend
writer notes, when it is urged on them tbat all mankind worship
"some God or other," reply that such an argument is as good for
polytheism and idolatry as for monotheism ; so, after formally
inviting them to " cure their souls of that fatal and mortal disease,
which makes them beasts here and devils hereafter," and lamenting
that he is not dealing with " reasonable men," he bethinks him
that " the laws of conversation require us to treat all men with just
respects," and admits that there have been " some few wise and
cautious atheists." To such, accordingly, he suggests that the
atheist has already a great advantage in a world morally restrained
by religion, where he is under no such restraint, and that, " if he
should by his wit and learning proselyte a whole nation to atheism,
Hell would break loose on Earth, and he might soon find himself
exposed to all those violences and injuries which he now securely
practises." For the rest, they had better not affront God, who
may after all exist, and be able to revenge himself.1 And so forth.

Of deists as such, Sherlock has nothing to say beyond treating as
"practical atheists " men who admit the existence of God, yet never
go to church, though "religious worship is nothing else but a public
acknowledgment of God." Their non-attendance " is as great, if
not a greater affront to God, and contempt of him, than atheism
itself."2 But the reverend writer's strongest resentment is aroused
by the spectacle of freethinkers asking for liberty of thought.

" It is a fulsome and nauseous thing," he breathlessly protests, " to
see the atheists and infidels of our days to turn great reformers of
religion, to set up a mighty cry for liberty of conscience. For whatever
reformation of religion may be needful at this time, whatever liberty
of conscience may be fit to be granted, yet what have these men to
do to meddle with it ; those who think religion a mere fable, and
God to be an Utopian prince, and conscience a man of clouts set up
for a scarecrow to fright such silly creatures from their beloved
enjoyments, and hell and heaven to be forged in the same mint with
the poet's Styx and Acheron and Elysian Fields ? We are like to
see blessed times, if such men had but the reforming of religion."'5

Dr Sherlock was not going to do good if the devil bade him.

The faith had a wittier champion in South ; but he, in a West-
minster Abbey sermon of 1684-5,4 mournfully declares that

" The weakness of our church discipline since its restoration,

i Work cited, 2nd ed. 16S2, pp. 32, 38-40, 45-48. 2 Id. pp. 51-55.

° Id. p. 52. 4 Twelve Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions, 1692, pp. 438-39.

BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY 93

whereby it has been scarce able to get any hold on men's consciences,
and much less able to keep it ; and the great prevalence of that
atheistical doctrine of the Leviathan ; and the unhappy propagation
of Erastianism ; these things (I say) with some others have been
the sad and fatal causes that have loosed the bands of conscience
and eaten out the very heart and sense of Christianity among us, to
that degree, that there is now scarce any religious tye or restraint
upon persons, but merely from those faint remainders of natural
conscience, which God will be sure to keep alive upon the hearts of
men, as long as they are men, for the great ends of his own provi-
dence, whether they will or no. So that, were it not for this sole
obstacle, religion is not now so much in danger of being divided and
torn piecemeal by sects and factions, as of being at once devoured
by atheism. Which being so, let none wonder that irreligion is
accounted policy when it is grown even to a fashion ; and passes for
wit, with some, as well as for wisdom with others."

How general was the ferment of discussion may be gathered from
Dryden's Religio Laid (1682), addressed to the youthful Henry
Dickinson, translator of Pure Richard Simon's Critical History of the
Old Testament (Fr. 1678). The French scholar was suspect to begin
with ; and Bishop Burnet tells that Richard Hampden (grandson
of the patriot), who was connected with the Rye House Plot and
committed suicide in the reign of William and Mary, had been
"much corrupted " in his religious principles by Simon's conversa-
tion at Paris. In the poem, Dryden recognizes the upsetting
tendency of the treatise, albeit he terms it " matchless ": —
For some, who have his secret meaning guessed,
Have found our author not too much a priest ;

and his flowing disquisition, which starts from poetic contempt of
reason and ends in prosaic advice to keep quiet about its findings, leaves

the matter at that. The hopelessly confused but musical passage :
Dim as the borrowed beams of moon and stars,
To lonely, weary, wandering travellers,
Is Reason to the soul,

begins the poem ; but the poet thinks it necessary both in his
preface and in his piece to argue with the deists in a fashion which
must have entertained them as much as it embarrassed the more
thoughtful orthodox, his simple thesis being that ah ideas of deity
were debris from the primeval revelation to Noah, and that natural
reason could never have attained to a God-idea at all. And even at
that, as regards the Herbertian argument :

No supernatural worship can be true,

Because a general law is that alone

Which must to all and everywhere be known :

91 BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY

he confesses that

Of all objections this indeed is chief
To startle reason, stagger frail belief ;

and feebly proceeds to argue away the worst meaning of the creed
of "the good old man" Athanasius. Finally, we have a fatherly
appeal for peace and quietness among the sects : — ■

And after hearing what our Church can say,
If still our reason runs another way,
That private reason 'tis more just to curb
Than by disputes the public peace disturb ;
For points obscure are of small use to learn,
But common quiet is mankind's concern.

It must have been the general disbelief in Dryden's sincerity on
religious matters that caused the ascription to him of various free-
thinking treatises, for there is no decisive evidence that he was
ever pronouncedly heterodox. His attitude to rationalism in the
Beligio Laid is indeed that of one who either could not see the
scope of the problem or was determined not to indicate his recogni-
tion of it ; and on the latter view the insincerity of both poem and
preface would be exorbitant. By his nominal hostility to deism,
however, Dryden did freethought a service of some importance.
After his antagonism had been proclaimed, no one could plausibly
associate freethinking with licentiousness, in which Dryden so far
exceeded nearly every poet and dramatist of his age that the non-
juror Jeremy Collier was free to single him out as the representative
of theatrical lubricity. But in simple justice it must also be avowed
that of all the opponents of deism in that day he is one of the least
embittered, and that his amiable superficiality of argument must
have tended to stimulate the claims of reason.

The late Dr. Verrall, a keen but unprejudiced critic, sums up
as regards Dryden's religious poetry in general that " What is
clear is that he had a marked dislike of clergy of all sorts, as
such "; that " the main points of Deism are noted in Beligio
Laid (1G~G1) ; and that " his creed was presumably some sort
of Deism " {Lectures on Dryden, 1914, pp. 118-50). Further,

The State of Innocence is really deistic and not Christian in
tone : in his play of Tyrannic Love, the religion of St. Catharine
may be mere philosophy " ; and though the poet in his preface to
that play protests that his " outward conversation shall never
be justly taxed with the note of atheism or profaneness," the
disclaimer " proves nothing as to his positive belief: Deism is
not profane." In Absalom and Aclutophcl, again, the " coarse
satire on Transubstantiation (118. ij.) shows rather religious in-
sensibility than hostile theology," though " the poem shows his

BRITISH FREETIIOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY 95

dislike of liberty and private judgment (49-50)." Of the lieligio
Laici the critic asks : " Now in all this, is there any religion at
all ? " The poem " might well be dismissed as mere politics but
for its astounding commencement " (p. 155). The critic un-
expectedly fails to note that the admired commencement is an
insoluble confusion of metaphors.

How far the process of reasoning had gone among quiet thinking
people before the Revolution maybe gathered from the essay entitled
Miracles no Violations of the Laws of Nature, published in 1G83.1
Its thesis is that put explicitly by Montaigne and implicitly by
Bacon, that Ignorance is the only worker of miracles ; in other words,
"that the power of God and the power of Nature are one and the
same " — a simple and straightforward way of putting a conception
which Cudworth had put circuitously and less courageously a few
years before. No Scriptural miracle is challenged qua event. " Among
the many miracles related to be done in favour of the Israelites," says
the writer, " there is (I think) no one that can be apodictically
demonstrated to be repugnant to th' establisht Order of Nature";2
and he calmly accepts the Biblical account of the first rainbow,
explaining it as passing for a miracle merely because it was the first.
He takes his motto from Pliny : " Quid non miraculo est, cum primum
in notitiam venit ?"£ This is, however, a preliminary strategy ; as is

the opening reminder that "most of the ancient Fathers and of

the most learned Theologues among the moderns " hold that the
Scriptures as regards natural things do not design to instruct men in
physics but " aim only to excite pious affections in their breasts."

We accordingly reach the position that the Scripture " many
times speaks of natural things, yea even of God himself, very
improperly, as aiming to affect and occupy the imagination of men,
not to convince their reason." Many Scriptural narratives, there-
fore, " are either delivered poetically or related according to the
preconceived opinions and prejudices of the writer." " Wherefore
we here absolutely conclude that all the events that are truly
related in the Scripture to have come to pass, proceeded necessarily
according to the immutable Laws of Nature; and that if any-
thing lie found which can bo apodictically demonstrated to be

repugnant to those laws we may safely and piously believe the

same not to have been dictated by divine inspiration, but impiously
added to the sacred volume by sacrilegious men ; for whatever is

1 This has been ascribed, without any (,'ood ground, to Charles Blount. It dors not
seem to me to be in his style.

- I'remonition to the Candid Reader. '■' Hist. Nat, vii, I.

96 BEITISH EREETIIOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY

against Nature is against Reason ; and whatever is against Reason
is absurd, and therefore also to be rejected and refuted."

Lest this should be found too hard a doctrine there is added,
apropos of Joshua's staying of the sun and moon, a literary solution
which has often done duty in later times. " To interpret Scripture-
miracles, and to understand from the narrations of them how they
really happened, 'tis necessary to know the opinions of those who

first reported them otherwise we shall confound things which

have really happen'd with things purely imaginary, and which were
only prophetic representations. For in Scripture many things are
related as real, and which were also believ'd to be real even by the
relators themselves, that notwithstanding were only representations
form'd in the brain, and merely imaginary — as that God, the

Supreme Being, descended from heaven upon Mount Sinai ;

that Elias ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot which were

only representations accommodated to their opinions who deliver'd
them down to us." 2 Such argumentation had to prepare the way
for Hume's Essay Of Miracles, half a century later ; and concerning
both reasoners it is to be remembered that their thought was to be
"infidelity" for centuries after them. It needed real freeth inking,
then, to produce such doctrine in the days of the Rye House Plot.

Meanwhile, during an accidental lapse of the press laws, the
deist CHARLES BLOUNT8 (1654-1693) had produced with his
father's help his Anima Mundi (1679), in which there is set forth
a measure of cautious unbelief ; following it up (1680) by his much
more pronounced essay, Great is Diana of the Ephesians, a keen
attack on the principle of revelation and clericalism in general, and
his translation [from the Latin version] of Philostratus's Life of
Apollonius of Tyana, so annotated4 as to be an ingenious counter-
blast to the Christian claims, and so prefaced as to be an open
challenge to orthodoxy. The book was condemned to be burnt ;
and only the influence of Blount's family,5 probably, prevented his

1 Pamphlet cited, pp. 20. 21. - Id. p. 23.

3 Concerning whom see Macaulay's History, ch. xix, ed. 1877, ii, 411-12— a very pre-
judiced account. Blount is there spoken of as "one of the most unscrupulous plagiaries
that ever lived," and as having "stolen " from Milton, because he issued a pamphlet "By
Philopatris," largely made up from the Areopayitica. Compare Macaulay's treatment of
Locke, who adopted Dudley North's currency scheme (ch. xxi, vol. ii, p. 517).

i Bayle (art. Apollonius, note), who is followed by the French translator of Philos-
tratus with Blount's notes in 1779 (J. F. Salvemini de Castillon), says the notes were drawn
from the papers of Lord Herbert of Cherbury; but of this Blount says nothing.

" As to these see the Diet, of Nat. liiog. The statements of Anthony Wood as to the
writings of Blount's father, relied on in the author's Dynamics of lieliaion, appear to be
erroneous. Sir Thomas Pope Blount, Charles's eldest brother, shows a skeptical turn of
mind in his Essays (3rd ed. 1697. Essay 7). Himself a learned man, lie disparages learning
as checking thought; and, professing belief in the longevity of the patriarchs (p. 187),
pronounces popery and pagan religion to be mere works of priestcraft (Essay 1). He
detested theological controversy and intolerance, and seems to havo been a Lockian.

BRITISH FEEETIIOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY 97

being prosecuted. The propaganda, however, was resumed by
Blount and his friends in small tracts, and after his suicide1 in
1G93 these were collected as the Oracles of Beason (1G93), his
collected works (without the Apollonius) appearing in 1G95. By
this time the political tension of the Revolution of 1G88 was over;
Le Clerc's work on the inspiration of the Old Testament, raising
many doubts as to the authorship of the Pentateuch, had been
translated in 1G90 ; Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1G70)
had been translated into English in 1GS9, and had impressed in
a similar sense a number of scholars ; his Ethica had given a new
direction to the theistic controversy ; the Boyle Lecture had been
established for the confutation of unbelievers ; and after the political
convulsion of 1GSS has subsided it rains refutations. Atheism is
now so fiercely attacked, and with such specific arguments — as in
Bentley's Boyle Lectures (1G92), Edwards's Thoughts concerning
the Causes of Atheism (1695), and many other treatises — that there
can be no question as to the private vogue of atheistic or agnostic
opinions. If we are to judge solely from the apologetic literature,
it was more common than deism. Yet it seems impossible to doubt
that there were ten deists for one atheist. Bentley's admission that
he never met an explicit atheist2 suggests that much of the atheism
warred against was tentative. It was only the deists who could
venture on open avowals ; and the replies to them were most discussed.
Much account was made of one of the most compendious, the
Short and Easy Method icith the Deists (1G97), by the nonjuror
Charles Leslie ; but this handy argument (which is really adopted
without acknowledgment from an apologetic treatise by a French
Protestant refugee, published in 1688') was not only much bantered
by deists, but was sharply censured as incompetent by the French
Protestant Lo Clerc ;' and many other disputants had to come to
the rescue. A partial list will suffice to show the rate of increase
of the ferment : —

L0s3. Dr, Rust, Discourse on the Use of Reason in Religion, against Enthu-
siasts and Deists.

1GS5. Duke of Buckingham, .1 Short Discourse upon the Reasonableness of men's
having a religion or worship of God.
,, The Atheist Unmask* d. By a Person of Honour.

1 All that is known of this tragedy is that Hlount loved his deceased wife's sister and
•.-) marry her; but she held it unlawful, and he was in despair. Accordine, to
1'ope, a suHieientlv untrustworthy authority, he "«ave himself a .-Mb in the arm, us
pretending to kill him.-elf, of the eon>efluenee of which he really died " (note to I'.pihmui:
l' i t hi ,S 1 1 in- . i, h;. An overstrung nervous s.\ -teni may he iliaj'iio ed from his writ in :.
• /;../;,■ /,, cturrs nn Athns,,,. ed. 1721, p. 1.
/;'.,,.,„ i, ,,■,, i llir li,„,kx ,,< II, ,■ II-, m Scriptures to rstahlixh thr Truth of the
Clirislimi I:,ln,,,,ii. by I'eter Allix, 1)1).. lii^s, i, li 7.

1 A cited by Leslie, Truth of Christinnitu DrinouNtrtitcl, 1711, pp. 17 11.

VOL. II J!

98 BEITISH FEEETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY

1688. Peter Allix, D.D. Reflexions, etc., as above cited.

1691. Archbishop Tenison, The Folly of Atheism.

„ Discourse of Natural and Revealed Religion.

,, John Ray, Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of the Creation.
(Many reprints.)

1692. C. Ellis, The Folly of Atheism Demonstrated.

,, Bentley's Sermons on Atheism. (First Boyle Lectures.)

1693. Archbishop Davics, An Anatomy of Atheism. A poem.
,, A Conference between an Atheist and his Friend.

1691. J. Goodman, A Winter Evening Conference between Neighbours.
,, Bishop Kidder, A Demonstration of the Mcssias. (Boyle Lect.)

1695. John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity.

,, John Edwards, B.D., Some Tlwughts concerning the Several Causes and
occasions of Atheism. (Directed against Locke.)

1696. .1)1 Account of the Growth of Deism in England.
,, Re/lections on a Pamphlet, etc. (the last named).

,, Sir C. Wolseley, The Unreasonableness of Atheism Demonstrated. (Rep.)

„ Dr. Nichols' Conference with a Tlieist. Pt. I. (Answer to Blount.)

,, J. Edwards, D.D., A Demonstration of the Evidence and Providence of God.

,, E. Felling. Discourse on the Existence of God (Pt. IT in 1705).

1697. Stephen Eye, A Discourse concerning Natural and Revealed Religion.

,, Bishop Gastrell, The Certainty and Necessity of Religion. (Boyle Lect.)

,, II. Prideaux, Discourse vindicating Christianity, etc.

„ C. Leslie, A Short and Easy Method ivith the Deists.

1698. Dr. J. Harris, A Refutation of Atheistical Objections. (Boyle Lect.)

„ Thos. Ernes, The Atheist turned Deist, and the Deist turned Christian.

1699. C. Lidgould, Proclamation against Atheism, etc.

„ J. Bradley, An Impartial Vieiv of the Truth of Christianity. (Answer to
Blount.)

1700. Bishop Bradford, The Credibility of the Christian Revelation. (Boyle

Lect.)
,, Rev. P. Berault. Discourses on the Trinity, Atheism, etc.

1701. T. Knaggs, Against Atheism.

,, W. Scot, Discourses concerning the wisdom and goodness of God.

1702. .1 Confutation of Atheism.

,, Dr. Stanhope, The Truth and Excellency of the Christian Religion.
(Boyle Lect.)
1701. An Antidote of Atheism (? Reprint of More).

1705. Translation of Herbert's Ancient Religion of the Gentiles.
,, Charles Gildon, The Deist's Manual (a recantation).

„ Ed. Felling, Discourse concerning the existence of God. Part II.
,, Dr. Samuel Clarke, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God,
etc. (Boyle Lect. of 1701.)

1706. A Preservative against Atticism and Infidelity.

,, Th. Wise, B.D., A Confutation of the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism

(recast and abridgment of Cudworth).
„ T. Oldfield, Mille Testes ; against the Atheists. Deists, and Skepticks.
„ The Case of Deism fully and fairly stated, ivith Dialogue, etc.

1707. Dr. J. Hancock, Arguments to prove the Being of a God. (Boyle Lect.)

Still there was no new deistic literature apart from Toland's

BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY 99

Christianity not Mysterious (169G) and his unauthorized issue (of
course without author's name) of Shaftesbury's Inquiry Concerning
Virtue in 1699 ; and in that there is little direct conflict with
orthodoxy, though it plainly enough implied that scripturalism
would injuriously affect morals. It seems at that date, perhaps
through the author's objection to its circulation, to have attracted
little attention; but he tells that it incurred hostility.1 Blount's
famous stratagem of 16932 had led to the dropping of the official
censorship of the press, the Licensing Act having been renewed for
only two years in 1693 and dropped in 1695 ; but after the prompt
issue of Blount's collected works in that year, and the appearance
of Toland's Christianity not Mysterious in the next, the new and
comprehensive Blasphemy Law of 16973 served sufficiently to
terrorize writers and printers in that regard for the time being.'1
Bare denial of the Trinity, of the truth of the Christian religion, or
of the divine authority of the Scriptures, was made punishable by
disability for any civil office ; and on a second offence by three
years' imprisonment, with withdrawal of all legal rights. The
first clear gain from the freedom of the press was thus simply a
cheapening of books in general. By the Licensing Act of Charles II,
and by a separate patent, the Stationers' Company had a monopoly
of printing and selling all classical authors ; and while their editions
were disgracefully bad, the importers of the excellent editions printed
in Holland had to pay them a penalty of 6s. 8d. on each copy.'1 By
the same Act, passed under clerical influence, the number even of
master printers and letter-founders had been reduced, and tho
number of presses and apprentices strictly limited ; and the total
effect of the monopolies was that when Dutch-printed books wero
imported in exchange for English, tho latter sold moro cheaply at
Amsterdam than they did in London, the English consumer, of
course, bearing the burden. The immediate effect, therefore, of the
lapse of the Licensing Act must have been to cheapen greatly all

' Cli'trarteristirs, ii, 203 (Moralists, pt, ii. §3). Ono of the most dangerous positions
from the orthodox point of view would be the thesis that while religion could do either
great good or great harm to morals, atheism could do neither. (15k. I, pt. iii, J 1.)
Cp. Bacon's Kssay, (jf Atheism.

- Blount, after assailing in anonymous pamphlets Bohnn the licenf or, induced him to
license a work entitled Kino William and Queen Mary Conriuerors, which infuriated tho
nation. Macaulay en IN the device "a ha ->• and wicked sell erne." It was almost innocent
in comparison wit!) Blount's promotion of the " Popish plot " mania. See Win) Killed Mr
h'dmnnd Godfrey Hern/.' by Alfred Mark.-, HKTi, pp. ITS 115, I'd.

■''• See the text in Mrs. Bradla'lgh Bonner's Penalties upon Opinion, pp. 10 -1- Macaulay
doe- not mention this measure.

1 The Aft had been preceded by n proclamation of the king, dated Fob. -21, li',')7.

5 As to an earlier monopoly of the London book-. Hers, see ( Jorge Herbert's lot 1 or* to
the Archbishop of Canterbury and to Bacon, Jan. 2:), 1020. In Wnrl:s of Cem-ije Herbert ,
cd. 1-11, i. 217 b~.

'• See Brake's note, on the Licensing Act in Lord King's Life nf T.oche, 1-2.1, pp. 2(B 200 ;
Fox Bourne s Life of Locke, ii, :si:j 11; Macaulay's History, ii, 0(JI.

100 BRITISH FREETHOUGIIT IN THE 17th CENTURY

foreign books by removal of duties, and at the same time to cheapen
English books by leaving printing free. It will be seen above that
the output of treatises against freethought at once increases in 1696.
But the revolution of 1683, like the Great Rebellion, had doubtless
given a new stimulus to freethinking ; and the total effect of freer
trade in books, even with a veto on " blasphemy," could only be to
further it. This was ere long to be made plain.

§ 3

Alongside of the more popular and native influences, there were
at work others, foreign and more academic ; and even in professedly
orthodox writers there are signs of the influence of deistic thought.
Thus Sir Thomas Browne's Beligio Medici (written about 1634,
published 1612) has been repeatedly characterized1 as tending to
promote deism by its tone and method ; and there can be no
question that it assumes a great prevalence of critical unbelief, to
which its attitude is an odd combination of humorous cynicism
and tranquil dogmatism, often recalling Montaigne,2 and at times
anticipating Emerson. There is little savour of confident belief in
the smiling maxim that " to confirm and establish our belief 'tis
best to argue with judgments below our own"; or in the avowal,
" In divinity I love to keep the road ; and though not in an implicit
yet an humble faith, follow the great wheel of the Church, by which
I move."" The pose of the typical believer: I can answer all the
objections of Satan and my rebellious reason with that odd resolution
I learned of Tertullian, Certum est quia impossibile est,"* tells in his
case of no anxious hours ; and such smiling incuriousness is not
conducive to conviction in others, especially when followed by a
recital of some of the many insoluble dilemmas of Scripture. When
lie reasons lie is merely self-subversive, as in the saying, " 'Tis not
a ridiculous devotion to say a prayer before a game at tables ; for
even in sortileges and matters of greatest uncertainty there is a
settled and prc-ordered course of effects";5 and after remarking
that the notions of Fortune and astral influence " have perverted
the devotion of many into atheism," he proceeds to avow that his

1 Trinius, FreyclenTier-Lexicon, 1759, p. 120; Piin.ier, i, 291, 300-301. Browne was even

called an atheist. Arpe, Apologia pro Vanino, 1111, p. -27, citing Welschius. Mr. A. H.
Bullcn, in his introduction to his ed. of Marlowe (1SS5, vol. i, p. lviii), remarks that
Browne, who "kept the road" in divinity, "exposed the vulnerable points in the
Scriptural narratives with more acumen and gusto than the whole army of freethinkers,
from Anthony Collins downwards." This is of course an extravagance, but, as Mr. Bullen
remarks in the Diet, of Nat. Biog. vii, 66, Browne discusses "with evident relish" the
"seeming absurdities in the Scriptural narrative."

- Browne's Annotator points to the derivation of his skepticism from "that excellent
French writer Monsieur Mountaign. in whom I often trace him" (Sayle's ed. 1904, i,
p. xviii), :i Beligio Medici, i, 6. l Id. i, 'J. 5 Id. i, 18.

BRITISH FREETIIOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY 101

many doubts never inclined him " to any point of infidelity or
desperate positions of atheism ; for I have been these many years
of opinion there never was any." l Yet in his later treatise on
Vulgar Errors (1645) he devotes a chapter to the activities of

Satan in instilling the belief that " there is no God at all that

the necessity of his entity dependeth upon ours ; that the

natural truth of God is an artificial erection of Man, and the
Creator himself but a subtile invention of the Creature." He
further notes as coming from the same source " a secondary and
deductive Atheism — that although men concede there is a God, yet
should they deny his providence. And therefore assertions have
flown about, that he intendeth only the care of the species or
common natures, but letteth loose the guard of individuals, and
single existences therein."3 Browne now asserts merely that
many there are who cannot conceive that there was ever any
absolute Atheist," and does not clearly affirm that Satan labours
wholly in vain. The broad fact remains that he avows " reason is
a rebel unto faith "; and in the Vulgar Errors he shows in his own
reasoning much of the practical play of the new skepticism. Yet
it is finally on record that in 1661, on the trial of two women for
witchcraft, Browne declared that the fits suffered from by the
children said to have been bewitched " were natural, but heightened
by the devil's co-operating with the malice of the witches, at whose
instance he did the villainies." " This amazing deliverance is believed
to have " turned the scale " in the minds of the jury against the poor
women, and they were sentenced by the sitting judge, Sir Matthew
Hale, to be hanged. It would seem that in Browne's latter years
the irrational element in him, never long dormant, overpowered the
rational. The judgment is a sad one to have to pass on one of the
greatest masters of prose in any language. In other men, happily,
the progression was different.

The opening even of Jeremy Taylor's Ductor Dubitantium, so far
as it goes, falls little short of the deisfic position.'' A new vein of
rationalism, too, is opened in the theological held by the great

1 lti-liijin Mtdici, i, 20. - ISk. r. Hi. \.

:; Hurt: we ha vi- it theorem independently reached later (with the substitution of Xatu re
for fioilj by Mary WolKloneeraft and Tennyson in turn. Browne cites yet a not her : " ilia t
lie looks not below the moon, but hath resigned the regiment of sublunary affairs unto
inferior deputations" a tie' is adopted in effect by ( ludwort li.

' liy an error or the pre-s. I'.rownc is made in Mr. Sayle's excellent reprint (i, l()S> to

bc«in a sentence in the middle of a clau-e, with an odd re-nit : " 1 do < I'e>s I am an

: t per nade my>elf to honour that the world adores." The pa -a::e

hhould obviously rea i : "to that subterraneous Idol i avarice I and (iodol the barlb 1 do
conie - s 1 am an Athei -t," etc

5 Hutchinson. Hi tor. Ess-m Cone. Witchcraft, IVIs, p. lis; 2nd ed. 1720, p. 1.1.

'■ C'|J. Wnewell, Ltctuics on tin- llilonj of M«nd l'hilos»pltu, ed. \-ul, p. M.

102 BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY

Cambridge scholar John Spencer, whose Discourse concerning
Prodigies (1GG3 ; 2nd ed. 1GG5), though quite orthodox in its
main positions, has in part the effect of a plea for naturalism as
against supernaturalism. Spencer's great work, De legibus
Hebrceorum (1685), is, apart from Spinoza, the most scientific
view of Hebrew institutions produced before the rise of German
theological rationalism in the latter part of the eighteenth century.
Holding most of the Jewish rites to have been planned by the deity
as substitutes for or safeguards against those of the Gentiles which
they resembled, he unconsciously laid, with Herbert, the foundations
of comparative hierology, bringing to the work a learning which is
still serviceable to scholars.1 And there were yet other new depar-
tures by clerical writers, who of course exhibit the difficulty of
attaining a consistent rationalism.

One clergyman, Joseph Glanvill, is found publishing a treatise on
The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661 ; amended in 1665 under the title
Scepsis Scientifica),1 wherein, with careful reservation of religion, the
spirit of critical science is applied to the ordinary processes of
opinion with much energy, and the " mechanical philosophy " of
Descartes is embraced with zeal. Following Raleigh and Hobbes,8
Glanvill also puts the positive view of causation4 afterwards fully
developed by Hume.5 Yet he not only vetoed all innovation in
"divinity," but held stoutly by the crudest forms of the belief in
witchcraft, and was with Henry More its chief English champion in
his day against rational disbelief.6 In religion he had so little of the
skeptical faculty that he declared " Our religious foundations are
fastened at the pillars of the intellectual world, and the grand
articles of our belief as demonstrable as geometry. Nor will ever
either the subtile attempts of the resolved Atheist, or the passionate
hurricanes of the wild enthusiast, any more be able to prevail against
the reason our faith is built on, than the blustering winds to blowout
the Sun." ' lie had his due reward in being philosophically assailed
by the Catholic priest Thomas White as a promoter of skepticism,8

1 Robertson Smith, The Reliaimi of the Semites, 18S9, pref, p. vi; Rev. Dr. Duff, Hist, of
Old Test. Criticism, R. P. A. 1910, p. 113.

2 This appears again, much curtailed and "so altered as to be in a manner new," in its
author's collected Essays on Several Important Subjects in Religion and Philosophy (1670),
under the title Against Confidence in Philosophy.

a See the Humane Nature (1610), eh. iv, §§ 7-9. i Scepsis Scientifica, ch. 23, § 1.

5 See the passages compared by Lewes, History of Philosophy, 4th ed. ii, 338.

B In his Blow at Modern Sadducism (1th ed. 1668), Saild ucismus Triumphatus (1681;
3rd ed. 1680), and A Whip to the Droll, Fiiller to the Atheist (1688— a letter to Henry More,
who was zealous on the same lines). These works seem to have been much more widely
circulated than the Scepsis Scientifica. 7 Scepsis, ch. '20, § 3.

H See (jlanvill's reply in a letter to a friend (1665), re-written as Essay II, Of Scepticism
and, Certainty : in A short Reply to the learned Mr. Thomas White in his collected Essays
on Several Important Subjects, 1076.

BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY 103

and by an Anglican clergyman, wroth with the Royal Society and
all its works, as an infidel and an atheist.1

This was as true as clerical charges of the kind usually were in
the period. But without any animus or violence of interpretation, a
reader of Glanvill's visitation sermon on The Agreement of Reason
and Religion'2 might have inferred that he was a deist. It sets forth
that religion primarily and mainly consists in worship and vertue,"
and that it in a secondary sense consists in some principles relating
to the worship of God, and of his Son, in the ways of devout and
vertuous living"; Christianity having ' superadded" baptism and
the Lord's Supper to " the religion of mankind." Apart from his
obsession as to witchcraft — and perhaps even as to that — Glanvill
seems to have grown more and more rationalistic in his later years.
The Scepsis omits some of the credulous nights of the Vanity of
Dogmatizing ; the re-written version in the collected Essays omits
such dithyrambs as that above quoted; and the sermon in its
revised form sets out with the emphatic declaration : " There is not
anything that I know which hath done more mischief to religion
than the disparaging of reason under pretence of respect and favour
to it ; for hereby the very foundations of Christian faith have been
undermined, and the world prepared for atheism. And if reason
must not be heard, the Being of a God and the authority of
Scripture can neither be proved nor defended ; and so our faith
drops to the ground like an house that hath no foundation." Such
reasoning could not but be suspect to the orthodoxy of the age.

Apart from the influence of Hobbes, who, like Descartes, shaped
his thinking from the starting-point of Galileo, the Cartesian philo-
sophy played in England a great transitional part. At the university
of Cambridge it was already naturalized;1 and the influence of
Glanvill, who was an active member of the Royal Society, must have
carried it further. The remarkable treatise of the anatomist Glisson,"
De natura substantias energetica (1G72), suggests the influence of
either Descartes or Gasscndi ; and it is remarkable that the clerical
moralist Cumberland, writing his Disquisitio de legibus Natune (1G7-)
in reply to Hobbes, not only takes up a utilitarian position akin to
Ilobbes's own, and expressly avoids any appeal to the theological

1 See the reply in 1'i.rs I'r.TH.v: nr, the Proqress find Advancement of Knoieledoe since
the (lays of Aristotle. Lli«n, Kpi^t. Ded. 1'ivf. cli. xviii, unci ('(inclusion. [The re-written
treatise, in tin: collected Kssays, eliminates the controversial matter. I

-First printed with Glanvill's L'liilosophia fin in lf.71. K'l>. as an essay in the
collected /•.'.' "t . :i Owen, pref. to Scepsis, )>]>. xx xxii.

1 Owen, pref. to ed. of Scepsis Seientijiea, p. i\.

5 Of whom, however, a hi«h medical ant hority declares that, " ics a physiologist, he was
sunk in realism" (that is, metn physical apriorism). I'mf, '1'. Clifford Allium, Harveian
Oration on Science and Medieval Thoiiyht, I'JOl, 1). 11.

104 BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY

doctrine of future punishments, but introduces physiology into his
ethic to the extent of partially figuring as an ethical materialist.
In regard to Gassendi's direct influence it has to be noted that in
16o9 there appeared The Vanity of Judiciary Astrology, translated
by " A Person of Quality," from P. Gassendus ; and further that, as
is remarked by Eeid, Locke borrowed more from Gassendi than from
any other writer.2

[It is stated by Sir Leslie Stephen {English Thought in the
Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed. i, 32) that in England the philo-
sophy of Descartes made no distinguished disciples ; and that
John Norris " seems to be the only exception to the general
indifference." This overlooks (l) Glanvill, who constantly cites
and applauds Descartes (Scepsis Scientifica, passim). (2) In
Henry More's Divine Dialogues, again (1668), one of the dispu-
tants is made to speak {Dial, i, ch. xxiv) of " that admired wit
Descartes"; and he later praises him even when passing
censure (above, p. 65). More had been one of the admirers
in his youth, and changed his view (cp. Ward's Life of Dr.
Henry More, pp. 63-61). But his first letter to Descartes
begins: "Quanta voluptate perfusus est animus mens, Vir
clarissime, scriptis tuis legendis, nemo quisquam prseter te unum
potest conjectare." (3) There was published in 1670 a translation
of Des Eourneillis's letter in defence of the Cartesian system,
witli Francois Bayle's General System of the Cartesian Philo-
sophy, (l) The continual objections to the atheistic tendency
of Descartes throughout Cudworth's True Intellectual System
imply anything but "general indifference"; and (5) Barrow's tone
in venturing to oppose him (cit. in Whewell's Pliilosophy of
Discovery, 1860, p. 179) pays tribute to his great influence.
(6) Molyneux, in the preface to Ins translation of the Six Meta-
physical Meditations of Descartes in 1680, speaks of him as
"this excellent philosopher " and " this prodigious man." (7)
Maxwell, in a note to his translation (1727) of Bishop Cumber-
land's Disquisitio de legibus Nature?, remarks that the doctrine
of a universal plenum was accepted from the Cartesian philo-
sophy by Cumberland, " in whose time that philosophy prevailed
much " (p. 120). See again (8) Clarke's Answer to Butler's
Fifth Letter (1718) as to the "universal prevalence" of
Descartes's notions in natural philosophy. (9) The Scottish
Lord President Forbes (d. 1717) summed up that " Descartes's
romance kept entire possession of men's belief for fully fifty
years" {Works, ii, 132). (10) And his fellow-judge, Sir William
Anstruther, in his "Discourse against Atheism" {Essays,
Moral and Divine, 1701, pp. 6, 8, 9), cites with much approval

1 Cp. Whewell. as last cited, pp. 75-83; Hallam, Literature of Europe, iv, 159-71.

2 I i ( ■ i < 1 , Intellectual Powers, Essay I, ch. i; Hamilton's ed. of Works, p. '2-26. Glanvill
calls Gassendi "that noble wit." (Scepsis Scientifica, Owen's ed. p. 151.)

BRITISH FREETIIOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY 105

the theistic argument of "the celebrated Descartes" as "the
last evidences which appeared upon the stage of learning " in
that connection.

Cp. Berkeley, Siris, § 331. Of Berkeley himself, Professor
Adamson writes {Encijc. Brit, iii, 589) that " Descartes and

Locke are his real masters in speculation." The Cartesian

view of the eternity and infinity of matter had further become
an accepted ground for " philosophical atheists " in England
before the end of the century (Molyneux, in Familiar Letters of
Locke and Jus Friends, 1708, p. 4.6). As to the many writers
who charged Descartes with promoting atheism, see Mosheim's
notes in Harrison's ed. of Cudworth's Intellectual' System, i,
275-7G : Clarke, as above cited ; Leibnitz's letter to Philip, cited
by Latta, Leibnitz, 1898, p. 8, note ; and Brewster's Memoirs of
Xewton, ii, 315.

Sir Leslie Stephen seems to have followed, under a misappre-
hension, Whewell, who contends merely that the Cartesian
doctrine of vortices was never widely accepted in England
(Fhilos. of Discovery, pp. 177-78; cp. Hist, of the Induct.
Sciences, ed. 1857, ii, 107, 147-48). Buckle was perhaps
similarly misled when he wrote in his note-book : " Descartes
was never popular in England " (Misc. Works, abridged ed. i,
269). Whewell himself mentions that Clarke, soon after taking
his degree at Cambridge, " was actively engaged in introducing
into the academic course of study, first, the philosophy of
Descartes in its best form, and, next, the philosophy of Newton "
(Lectures on Moral Philosophy, ed. 18G2, pp. 97-98). And
Professor Fowler, in correcting his first remarks on the point,
decides that " many of the mathematical teachers at Cambridge
continued to teach the Cartesian system for some time after the
publication of Newton's Principia " (ed. of Nov. Org., p. xi).

It is clear, however, that insofar as new science set up a direct
conflict with Scriptural assumptions it gained ground but slowly and
indirectly. It is difficult to-day to realize with what difficulty the
Copernican and Galilean doctrine of the earth's rotation and move-
ment round the sun found acceptance even among studious men.
We have seen that Bacon finally rejected it. And as Professor
Masson points out,1 not only does Milton seem uncertain to the last
concerning the truth of the Copernican system, but his friends and
literary associates, the " Smectymnuans," in their answer to Bishop
Hall's Humble llemonstrance (1041), had pointed to the Copernican
doctrine as an unquestioned instance of a supremo absurdity.
dlanvill, remarking in IG65 that "it is generally opinion'd that the
Earth rests as the world's centre," avows that ' for a man to go

1 I'oet. Works <,/ Milton, 1871, Intro,], i, 9i* xij.

106 BEITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY

about to counter-argue this belief is as fruitless as to whistle against
the winds. I shall not undertake to maintain the paradox that con-
fronts this almost Catholic opinion. Its assertion would be enter-
tained with the hoot of the rabble ; the very mention of it as
possible, is among the most ridiculous."1 All he ventures to do is
to show that the senses do not really vouch the ordinary view. Not
till the eighteenth century, probably, did the common run of educated
people anywhere accept the scientific teaching.

On the other hand, however, there was growing up not a little
Socinian and other Unitarianism, for some variety of which we
have seen two men burned in 1612. Church measures had been
taken against the importation of Socinian books as early as 1610.
The famous Lord Falkland, slain in the Civil War, is supposed to
have leant to that opinion ; 2 and Chillingworth, whose Religion of
Protestants (1637) was already a remarkable application of rational
tests to ecclesiastical questions in defiance of patristic authority,
seems in his old age to have turned Socinian.4 Violent attacks on
the Trinity are noted among the heresies of 1616.° Colonel John Fry,
one of the regicides, who in Parliament was accused of rejecting the
Trinity, cleared himself by explaining that he simply objected to the
terms " persons " and " subsistence," but was one of those who sought
to help the persecuted Unitarian Biddle. In 1652 the Parliament
ordered the destruction of a certain Socinian Catechism ; and by
1655 the heresy seems to have become common.6 It is now certain
that Milton was substantially a Unitarian,7 and that Locke and
Newton were at heart no less so.8

The temper of the Unitarian school appears perhaps at its best
in the anonymous Rational Catecliism published in 1686. It
purports to be " an instructive conference between a father and
his son," and is dedicated by the father to his two daughters.
The " Catechism " rises above the common run of its species in
that it is really a dialogue, in which the roles are at times reversed,
and the catechumen is permitted to think and speak for himself.
The exposition is entirely unevangelical. Plight religion is declared
to consist in right conduct ; and while the actuality of the Christian
record is maintained on argued grounds, on the lines of Grotius and

1 Scepsis Scientifica, Owen's ed. p. 66. In the condensed version of the treatise in
Glanvill's collected Essays (167tj, p. 20), the language is to the same effect.

2 .7. .7. Tayler, Retrospect of the Religious Life of England, Martineau's ed. p. 204 ;
Wallace. Antitrinitarian Biography, iii, 152-53.

3 Cp. Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii. 347-51 ; 1-vol. ed. pp. 196-99.

4 Tayler, Retrospect, pp. '201-21)5; Wallace, iii, 154-56. 5 Gangrana, pt. i, p. 38.

c Tayler, p. 221. As to Biddle, the chief propagandist of the sect, sue pp. 221-24, and
Wallace. Art. 2S5.

7 Maeaulay, Essay on Milton. Cp. Brown's ed. (Clarendon Press) of the poems of
Milton, ii, 30. 8 Cp. Dynamics of Religion, ch. v.

BRITISH FREETIIOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY 107

Parker, the doctrine of salvation by faith is strictly excluded, future
happiness being posited as the reward of good life, not of faith.
There is no negation, the author's object being avowedly peace and
conciliation ; but the Epistle Dedicatory declares that religious
reasoners have hitherto " failed in their foundation-work. They
have too much slighted that philosophy which is the natural
religion of all men ; and which, being natural, must needs be
universal and eternal : and upon which therefore, or at least in
conformity with which, all instituted and revealed religion must
be supposed to be built." We have here in effect the position
taken up by Toland ton years later ; and, in germ, the principle
which developed deism, albeit in connection with an affirmation
of the truth of the Christian records. Of the central Christian
doctrine there is no acceptance, though there is laudation of Jesus ;
and reprints after 1695 bore the motto, from Locke:1 "As the
foundation of virtue, there ought very earnestly to be imprinted on
the mind of a young man a true notion of God, as of the independent
supreme Being, Author, and Maker of all things : And, consequent
to this, instil into him a love and reverence of this supreme Being."
We are already more than half-way from Unitarianism to deism.

Indeed, the theism of Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding
undermined even his Unitarian Scripturalism, inasmuch as it denies,
albeit confusedly, that revelation can ever override reason. In one
passage lie declares that " reason is natural revelation," while
revelation is natural reason enlarged by a new set of discoveries
communicated by God immediately, which reason vouchsafes the
truth of." " This compromise appears to be borrowed from
Spinoza, who had put it with similar vagueness in his great
Tractatus,3 of which pre-eminent work Locke cannot have been
ignorant, though he protested himself little read in the works of
Hobbes and Spinoza, "those justly decried names."'1 The Tractatus
being translated info English in the same year with the publication
of the Essay, its influence would concur with Locke's in a widened
circle of readers ; and the substantially naturalistic doctrine of both
books inevitably promoted the deistic movement. We have Locke's
own avowal that he had many doubts as to the Biblical narratives;'
and he never attempts to remove the doubts of others. Since,
however, his doctrine provided a sphere for revelation on the
territory of ignorance, giving it prerogative where its assertions

i 0/ >v/ unit ion, ' !.:•;. - /■:.s.svii/. Iik. iv. i'Ii. xi*. .■ I.

- Trm-tHlii* rhr„lii,iiri,-P,dilirHx,c. IT.. * Tliinl I., I It r tn I h, llishup i>/ \\'on;-sli-r.

■• Hmni: Ftimdair /.<■(/<■/■•> brdvrfii Mr. Lt,rl:r an, I Srrrrul of his Frit mis, 1 70s, pp. iid-l ;j(U.

108 BRITISH FREETHOEGHT IN THE I7th CENTURY

were outside knowledge, it counted substantially for Unitarianism
insofar as it did not lead to deism.

See the Essay, bk. iv, ch. xviii. Locke's treatment of
revelation may be said to be the last and most attenuated
form of the doctrine of " two-fold truth." On his principle,
any proposition in a professed revelation that was not provable
or disprovable by reason and knowledge must pass as true.
His final position, that " whatever is divine revelation ought
to overrule all our opinions" (bk. iv, ch. xviii, § 10), is tolerably
elastic, inasmuch as he really reserves the question of the
actuality of revelation. Thus he evades the central issue.
Naturally he was by critical foreigners classed as a deist.
Cp. Gostwick, German Culture and Christianity, 1882, p. 36.
The German historian Tennemann sums up that Clarke wrote
his apologetic works because ' the consequences of the
empiricism of Locke had become so decidedly favourable to
the cause of atheism, skepticism, materialism, and irreligion "
{Manual of the Hist, of PJiilos. Eng. tr. Bohn ed. j 319).

In his "practical" treatise on The Iieasonableness of Christianity
(1695) Locke played a similar part. It was inspired by the genuine
concern for social peace which had moved him to write an essay on
Toleration as early as 16G7,1 and to produce from 1685 onwards his
famous Letters on Toleration, by far the most persuasive appeal of
the kind that had yet been produced;2 all the more successful so
far as it went, doubtless, because the first Letter ended with a
memorable capitulation to bigotry : " Lastly, those are not at all
to be tolerated who deny the being of God. Promises, covenants,
and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold
upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in
thought, dissolves all. Besides, also, those that by their atheism
undermine and destroy all religion can have no pretence of religion
luhercupon to challenge the privilege of a toleration." This handsome
endorsement of the religion which had repeatedly "dissolved all"
in a pandemonium of internecine hate, as compared with the one
heresy which had never broken treaties or shed blood, is presumably
more of a prudent surrender to normal fanaticism than an expression
of the philosopher's own state of mind;3 and his treatise on Tlic
Iieasonableness of Christianity is an attempt to limit religion to a

i Fox Bourne, Life of Locke, 1876, ii, 31.

- The first Letter, written while he was biding in Holland in 1CS5, was in Latin, but
was translated into French, Dutch, and Knglish.

■; Mr. Fox Lou rue, in his biography (ii, 11), apologizes for the lapse, so alien to bis own
ideals, by the remark that "the atheism then in vogue was of a very violent and rampant
sort." It is to be feared that this palliation will not hold good— at least, the present
writer has been unable to trace the atheism in question. For "atheism " we had better
read " religion."

BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY 109

humane ethic, with sacraments and mysteries reduced to ceremonies,
while claiming that the gospel ethic was " now with divine authority
established into a legible law, far surpassing all that philosophy and
human reason had attained to." ' Its effect was, however, to promote
rationalism without doing much to mitigate the fanaticism of belief.

Locke's practical position has been fairly summed up by
Prof. Bain : " Locke proposed, in his Reasonableness of
Christianity, to ascertain the exact meaning of Christianity,
by casting aside all the glosses of commentators and divines,
and applying his own unassisted judgment to spell out its

teachings The fallacy of his position obviously was that

he could not strip himself of his education and acquired

notions Ho seemed unconscious of the necessity of trying

to make allowance for his unavoidable prepossessions. In
consequence, he simply fell into an old groove of received
doctrines ; and these he handled under the set purpose of
simplifying the fundamentals of Christianity to the utmost.
Such purpose was not the result of his Bible study, but of his
wish to overcome the political difficulties of the time. He
found, by keeping close to the Gospels and making proper
selections from the Epistles, that the belief in Christ as the
Messiah could be shown to be the central fact of the Christian
faith ; that the other main doctrines followed out of this by a
process of reasoning; and that, as all minds might not perform
the process alike, these doctrines could not be essential to the
practice of Christianity. He got out of the difficulty of framing
a creed, as many others have done, by simply using Scripture
language, without subjecting it to any very strict definition ;
certainly without the operation of stripping the meaning of its
words, to see what it amounted to. That his short and easy
method was not very successful the history of the deistical
controversy sufficiently proves " (Practical Essays, pp. 226-27).

That Locke was felt to have injured orthodoxy is further proved
by the many attacks made on him from the orthodox side. Even
the first Letter on Toleration elicited retorts, one of which claims to
demonstrate ' the Absurdity and Impiety of an Absolute Toleration." "
On his positive teachings he was assailed by Bishop Stillingfleet ; by
the Rev. John Milner, B.D. ; by the Rev. John Morris ; by William
Carrol; and by the Rev. John Edwards, B.D.;' his only assailant
with a rationalistic repute being Dr. Thomas Burnet. Some attacked
him on his Essays; some on his Tleasonahleness of Christianity ;
orthodoxy finding in both the same tendency to " subvert the naturo

1 Srrnii'l Viiul icttion ofThr Ifrasonahlrnrxx of Christiinitu," KV.I7, prcf.

- Fox liourne, Life of Lorlcr, ii. 1M.

:; Son of tliu rre.sbyterian author of the famous tinnurienn.

110 BRITISH FEEETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY

and use of divine revelation and faith." ' In the opinion of the Rev.
Mr. Bolde, who defended him in Some Considerations published in
1G99, the hostile clericals had treated him " with a rudeness peculiar
to some who make a profession of the Christian religion, and seem
to pride themselves in being the clergy of the Church of England."
This is especially true of Edwards, a notably ignoble type ;s but
hardly of Milner, whose later Account of Mr. Lock's Religion out of
his Own Writings, and in his Own Words (1700), pressed him
shrewdly on the score of his " Socinianism." In the eyes of a
pietist like William Law, again, Locke's conception of the infant
mind as a tabula rasa was "dangerous to religion," besides being
philosophically false/ Yet Locke agreed with Law'5 that moral
obligation is dependent solely on the will of God — a doctrine
denounced by the deist Shaftesbury as the negation of morality.

See the Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit, pt. iii, § 2 ; and
the Letters to a Student, under date June 3, 1709 (p. 403 in
Rand's Life, Letters, etc., of Shaftesbury, 1900). The extra-
ordinary letter of Newton to Locke, written just after or during
a spell of insanity, first apologizes for having believed that
Locke ' endeavoured to embroil me with women and by other
means," and goes on to beg pardon " for representing that you
struck at the root of morality, in a principle you laid down in
your book of ideas." In his subsequent letter, replying to that
of Locke granting forgiveness and gently asking for details, lie
writes : What I said of your book I remember not." (Letters
of September 16 and October 5, 1693, given in Fox Bourne's
Life of Locke, ii, 226-27, and Sir D. Brewster's Memoirs of Sir
Isaac Xeicton, 1855, ii, 148-51.) Newton, who had been on
very friendly terms with Locke, must have been repeating, when
his mind was disordered, criticisms otherwise current. After
printing in full the letters above cited, Brewster insists, on Ids
principle of sacrificing all other considerations to Newton's
glory (cp. Do Morgan, Neicton : his Friend : and his Xiecc,
1885, pp. 99-111), that all the while Newton was "in the full
possession of his mental powers." The whole diction of the
first letter tells the contrary. If we are not to suppose that
Newton had been temporarily insane, we must think of his
judgment as even less rational, apart from physics, than it is

1 Said by Carrol, Dissertation on Mr. Lode's Essay, 1706, cited by Anthony Collin?,
Essay Concerning the Use of Reason, 1709, p. 30,

2 Cited by Fox Bourne, Life of Locke, ii. 438.

'A Whose calibre may lie gathered from his eta-onions doctoral thesis, Concio a<l clerum
(lc ihrmonum malnrum existentia a Datura (1700)! After a list of the deniers of evil
spirit-, from the Kadducees and Sallnstius to Hekkev and Van Dale, he addresses to his
"dilectissimi in Christo fratres" the exordium: 'Kn, Acadeinici, veteres ac hodiernos
Saddticanosl quibuscum tota Atheorum cohors amicissime congruit; nam qui divinum
numen, iidem ipsi infernales spiritns acriter negant."

* Confutation of Warhurton H7.");1 in Extracts from Laic's Works, 1768, i. 20S-200.

5 Cp. the Essay, bk. i, ch. iii, § 6, with Law's Case of Reason, in Extracts, as cited, p. 36.

BRITISH FEEETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY 111

seen to be in his dissertations on prophecy. Certainly Newton
was at all times apt to be suspicious of his friends to the point
of moral disease (see his attack on Montague, in his letter to
Locke of January 26, 1691-1692 : in Fox Bourne, ii, 21S; and
cp. De Morgan, as cited, p. 146) ; but tho letter to Locke
indicates a point at which the normal malady had upset the
mental balance. It remains, nevertheless, part of tho evidence
as to bitter orthodox criticism of Locke.

On tho whole, it is clear, the effect of his work, especially of his
naturalistic psychology, was to make for rationalism ; and his com-
promises furthered instead of checking the movement of unbelief.
His ideal of practical and undogmatic Christianity, indeed, was
hardly distinguishable from that of Hobbes,1 and, as previously set
forth by the Rev. Arthur Bury in his Naked Gospel (1690), was so
repugnant to the Church that that book was burned at Oxford as
heretical.' Locke's position as a believing Christian was indeed
extremely weak, and could easily have been demolished by a
competent deist, such as Collins,3 or a skeptical dogmatist who
could control his temper and avoid the gross misrepresentation so
often resorted to by Locke's orthodox enemies. But by the deists
he was valued as an auxiliary, and by many latitudinarian Christians
as a helper towards a rationalistic if not a logical compromise.

Rationalism of one or the other tint, in fact, seems to have
spread in all directions. Deism was ascribed to some of the most
eminent public men. Bishop Burnet has a violent passage on Sir
William Templo, to the ei'fect that " He had a true judgment in
affairs, and very good principles with relation to government, but in
nothing else. He seemed to think that things are as they were from
all eternity; at least lie thought religion was only for the mob. He
was a great admirer of the sect of Confucius in China, who were
atheists themselves, but left religion to the rabble.'"1 The praise of
Confucius is tho note of deism ; and Burnet rightly held that no
orthodox Christian in those days would sound it. Other prominent
men revealed their religious liberalism. The accomplished and
influential George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, often spoken of as

1 Cp. Dynamics of Religion, p. 12'2. 2 Fox Horn-no, ii, 101 10.").

''• An ostensibly orthodox Professor of our own day lias written that I.o, ko's doctrine
rs to religion and ethics " shows at once the sincerity of his religious coin id ions and tho
inadequate conception lie had formed to himself of the grounds and nature of moral
philosophy" (Fowler, Locke. lf-'M), p. 76).

1 Unmet. History of. his Own Time, e<\. 1S3S, p. i:>\. Hurnot adds that Temple " was a
corrupter of all that came near him." The 18.'!S editor protests a«a in-t the u hole attack
as the " mo.-,t unfair and exaggerated" of Hurnet's portraits; inula writer in /Vie I'resent
Stair of the Reyithlick of Letters, Jan., 17:10, p. 20, carries the defen'-o to el a imi nil orthodoxy
for Temple. Hut the whole cast of his thought is deistic. Cp. the Lssay it)>mi ihr On, ,nt
and Mature of (invrnimnit , and ch. v of the < >l>sc rratinns upon tltc luit'd l'roriiiees
(Works, ed. 1770, i, ■!'.), 3(5, 170 71).

112 BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY

a deist, and even as an atheist, by his contemporaries,1 appears
clearly from his own writings to have been either that or a Unitarian ;2
and it is not improbable that the similar gossip concerning Lord
Keeper Somers was substantially true.

That Sir Isaac Newton was " some kind of Unitarian " 4 is proved
by documents long withheld from publication, and disclosed only in
the second edition of Sir David Brewster's Memoirs. There is indeed
no question that he remained a mere scripturalist, handling the texts
as such,5 and wasting much time in vain interpretations of Daniel
and the Apocalypse.6 Temperamentally, also, he was averse to any-
thing like bold discussion, declaring that "those at Cambridge ought
not to judge and censure their superiors, but to obey and honour
them, according to the law and the doctrine of passive obedience
— this after he had sat on the Convention which deposed James II.
In no aspect, indeed, apart from his supreme scientific genius, does
he appear as morally 8 or intellectually pre-eminent ; and even on the
side of science he was limited by his theological presuppositions, as
when he rejected the nebular hypothesis, writing to Bentley that

the growth of new systems out of old ones, without the mediation
of a Divine power, seems to me apparently absurd."'' There is
therefore more than usual absurdity in the proclamation of his pious
biographer that " the apostle of infidelity cowers beneath the implied
rebuke"10 of his orthodoxy. The very anxiety shown by Newton
and his friends11 to checkmate the infidels" is a proof that his
religious work was not scientific even in inception, but the expression
of his neurotic side ; and the attempt of some of his scientific
admirers to show that his religious researches belong solely to the
years of his decline is a corresponding oversight. Newton was
always pathologically prepossessed on the side of his religion, and
subordinated his science to his theology even in the Principia. It
is therefore all the more significant of the set of opinion in his day
that, tied as he was to Scriptural interpretations, lie drew away
from orthodox dogma as to the Trinity. Not only does he show
himself a destructive critic of Trinitarian texts and an opponent of
Athanasius : he expressly formulates the propositions (l) that

there is one God the Father and one mediator between God

and man, the man Christ Jesus "; (2) that " the Father is the

] Cp. Macaulay, History, ch. ii. Student's ed. i, 1-20.

-' Compare lii- Advice to a Daughter, i 1 (in Miscellanies, 17001, and his Political
Thoughts and Reflections : Religion. :) bee Macaulay, ch. xx. Student's ed. ii, 459.

1 Do Morgan, as cited, p. 107. 5 See Brewster, ii, 31S, 321-22, 323, 331 sq.;Si-2 sq.

6 Id. ]). :vn sq. 7 i,i. „. ii.-,. 8 CPi De Morgan, pp. 133-45.

0 Four Letters from Sir Isaac Xeivton to Dr. Bcntley, ed. 170(5, p. 25. Cp. Dynamics of
Religion, pp. 07-11)2. w Brewster, ii, 311. !1 Id. pp. 315-1(5. v- Id, pp. 31-2-16.

BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY 113

invisible God whom no eye hath seen or can see. All other beings
are sometimes visible"; and (3) that "the Father hath life in
himself, and hath given the Son to have life in himself."1 Such
opinions, of course, could not be published : under the Act of 1G97
they would have made Newton liable to loss of office and all civil
rights. In his own day, therefore, his opinions were rather
gossipped-of than known ;2 but insofar as his heresy was realized,
it must have wrought much more for unbelief than could be achieved
for orthodoxy by his surprisingly commonplace strictures on atheism,
which show the ordinary inability to see what atheism means.

The argument of his Short Scheme of True Religion brackets
atheism with idolatry, and goes on : ' Atheism is so senseless and
odious to mankind that it never had many professors. Can it be by
accident that all birds, beasts, and men have their right side and
left side alike shaped (except in their bowels), and just two eyes, and
no more, on either side of the face?" etc. (Brewster, ii, 317). The
logical implication is that a monstrous organism, with the sides
unlike, represents " accident," and that in that case there has either
been no causation or no "purpose" by Omnipotence. It is only
fair to remember that no avowedly "atheistic" argument could in
Newton's day find publication ; but his remarks are those of a man
who had never contemplated philosophically the negation of his own
religious sentiment at the point in question. Brewster, whoso
judgment and good faith are alike precarious, writes that " When
Voltaire asserted that Sir Isaac explained the prophecies in the same
manner as those who went before him, he only exhibited his
ignorance of what Newton wrote, and what others had written "
(ii, 331, note; 355). The writer did not understand what he
censured. Voltaire meant that Newton's treatment of prophecy is
on the same plane of credulity as that of his orthodox predecessors.

Even within the sphere of the Church the Unitarian tendency,
with or without deistic introduction, was traceable. Archbishop
Tillotson (d. 1691) was often accused of Socinianism ; and in the next
generation was smilingly spoken of by Anthony Collins ;is a leading
Freethinker. The pious Dr. Ilickes had in fact declared of the
Archbishop that "he caused several to turn atheists and ridicule the
priesthood and religion."3 The heresy must have been encouraged
even within the Church by the scandal which, broke out. when Dean
Sherlock's Vindication of Trinitarianism (1G90), written in reply to

1 Brewster, p. 319. See the remaining articles, and App. XXX. p. .".:!.'. - /</. p. 3^.

:; hi .-.•,,--■■ >,,, Till'itson rind Burnet, pp. 3>, 10, 71, cited by Collins, I)i ■ <<>■*>■ <</
Fret '.hinkino, 1713, pp. 171 -T2.

VOL. II I

114 BEITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY

a widely-circulated antitrinitarian compilation,1 was attacked by
Dean South3 as the work of a Tritheist. The plea of Dr. Wallis,
Locke's old teacher, that a doctrine of "three somewhats " — he
objected to the term " persons "■ — in one God was as reasonable as
the concept of three dimensions,3 was of course only a heresy the
more. Outside the Church, William Penn, the great Quaker, held
a partially Unitarian attitude;4 and the first of his many imprison-
ments was on a charge of "blasphemy and heresy" in respect of
his treatise The Sandy Foundation Shaken, which denied (l) that
there were in the One God " three distinct and separate persons ";
(2) the doctrine of the need of "plenary satisfaction"; and (3) the
justification of sinners by " an imputative righteousness." But
though many of the early Quakers seem to have shunned the
doctrine of the Trinity, Penn really affirmed the divinity of Christ,
and was not a Socinian but a Sabellian in his theology. Positive
Unitarianism all the while was being pushed by a number of tracts
which escaped prosecution, being prudently handled by Locke's
friend, Thomas Firmin.5 A new impulse had been given to
Unitarianism by the learning and critical energy of the Prussian
Dr. Zwicker, who had settled in Holland ;6 and among those English-
men whom his works had found ready for agreement was Gilbert
Clerke (b. 1611), who, like several later heretics, was educated at
Sidney College, Cambridge. In 1695 he published a Unitarian
work entitled Anti-Xicenismus, and two other tracts in Latin, all
replying to the orthodox polemic of Dr. Bull, against whom another
Unitarian had written Considerations on the Explications of the
Doctrine of the Trinity in 169-1, bitterly resenting his violence.7 In
1695 appeared yet another treatise of the same school, The Judg-
ment of the Fathers concerning the Doctrine of the Trinity. Much
was thus done on Unitarian lines to prepare an audience for the
deists of the next reign. h But the most effective influence was
probably the ludicrous strife of the orthodox clergy as to what
orthodoxy was. The fray over the doctrine of the Trinity waxed so

1 The Brief Notes on the Creed of St. Athanasius (author unknown), printed by Thomas
Firmin. Late in 1693 appeared another antitrinitarian tract, by William Freke, who
was prosecuted, fined .£500, and ordered to make a recantation in the Four Courts of
Westminster Hall. The book was burnt by the hangman. Wallace, Art. 354. There had
also been "two quarto volumes of tracts in support of Unitarianism," published in 1601
(Dr. W. H. Drummond, An Explanation anil Defence of the Principles of Protestant
Dissent, 1842, p. 17).

2 " Locke's ribald schoolfellow of nearly fifty years ago " (Fox Bourne, ii, 405).
•"• Id. ib.

4 Tayler, Betrospcct, p. 226'; Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography, i, 160-60.

5 Fox Fourne. ii. 405; Wallace, art. 353. 6 Above, pp. 35-36.
7 Nelson's Life of Bishop Hull, 2nd ed. 1711, p. 30S.

1 " Perhaps at no period was the Unitarian controversy so actively carried on in
England as between 1600 and 1720." History, Opinions, etc., of the English Presbyterians,
1631, p. 22.

BEITISH FEEETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTURY 115

furious, and the discredit cast on orthodoxy was so serious,1 that in
the year 1700 an Act of Parliament was passed forbidding the publi-
cation of any more works on the subject.

Meanwhile the so-called Latitudinarians,3 all the while aiming
as they did at a non-dogmatic Christianity, served as a connecting
medium for the different forms of liberal thought ; and a new element
of critical disintegration was introduced by a speculative treatment
of Genesis in the Arclueolocjia Philosophic^ (1692) of Dr. Thomas
Burnet, a professedly orthodox scholar, Master of the Charterhouse
and chaplain in ordinary to King William, who nevertheless treated
the Creation and Fall stories as allegories, and threw doubt on the
Mosaic authorship of parts of the Pentateuch. Though the book
was dedicated to the king, it aroused so much clerical hostility that
the king was obliged to dismiss him from his post at court.3 His
ideas were partly popularized through a translation of two of his
chapters, with a vindicatory letter, in Blount's Oracles of Reason
(1695) ; and that they had considerable vogue may be gathered from
the Essay towards a Vindication of the Vulgar Exposition of the
Mosaic History of the Fall of Adam, by John Witty, published in
1705. Burnet, who published three sets of anonymous Remarks on
the philosophy of Locke (1697-1699), criticizing its sensationist
basis, figured after his death (1715), in posthumous publications, as
a heretical theologian in other regards ; and then played his part in
the general deistie movement ; but his allegorical view of Genesis
does not seem to have seriously affected speculation in his time, the
bulk of the debate turning on his earlier Tclluris Tlicoria Sacra
(1681; trans. 1681), to which there were many rejoinders, both
scientific and orthodox. On this side he is unimportant, his science
being wholly imaginative ; and in the competition between his
Theory and J. Woodward's Essay towards a Natural History of the
Earth (1695) nothing was achieved for scientific progress.

Much more remarkable, but outside of popular discussion, were
the Evangclium medici (1697) of Br. B. Connor, wherein the gospel

1 Op. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 113-15 --Taylor, Retrospect, p. -227.

- A- to whom see Taylor, Retrospect, eh. v. § 4. They are spoken of as "the new sect
of Latitude-Men " in 1062 ; and in 1TOS are said to ho " at this day Low Churchmen." So'
A Brief Account of the. New Sect of Latitude-Men, hy " S. P." of Cambridge, IOni, reprinted
in The I'lienix, vol. ii. L708. and prof, to that vol. From " S. I'.'s" account it, is clear that,
they connected with the new scientific movement, and leant to Cartesianisni. As above
noted, they included sne.li prelates as Wilkins and Tillotson, The work of K. A. (ioorno,
Seventeenth Century Men of Latitude. (190-s). deals with Hale-, Chillinnworth, Whicheote,
II. More. Taylor. Browne, and Maxtor.

s Toulmin, Histor. Vine ,,f the Prat. Dissenters, 1M1. p. 270. A main ground of the
offence, taken was a, somewhat trivial dialogue in Burnet's hook between live and the

serpent, indicating the " popular" character of the tale. This was omitted fr , Dutch

edition at the author's request, and from the 3rd ed. 17.'i-'3 (Toulmin, as cited). It is Uiven
in the partial translation in Blount's Oracles of Reason.

116 BEITISH FBEETHOUGHT IN THE 17th CENTUEY

miracles were explained away, on lines later associated with German
rationalism, as natural phenomena ; and the curious treatise of
Newton's friend, John Craig,1 Theologies christian® principia mathc-
matica (1699), wherein it is argued that all evidence grows progres-
sively less valid in course of time;2 and that accordingly the
Christian religion will cease to be believed about the year 3144,
when probably will occur the Second Coming. Connor, when
attacked, protested his orthodoxy ; Craig held successively two
prebends of the Church of England ;8 and both lived and died
unmolested, probably because they had the prudence to write in
Latin, and maintained gravity of style. About this time, further,
the title of " Eationalist " made some fresh headway as a designa-
tion, not of unbelievers, but of believers who sought to ground them-
selves on reason. Such books as those of Clifford and Boyle tell
of much discussion as to the efficacy of " reason " in religious things ;
and in 1686, as above noted, there appears A Rational Catechism,
a substantially Unitarian production, notable for its aloofness from
evangelical feeling, despite its many references to Biblical texts in
support of its propositions. In the Essays Moral and Divine of the
Scotch judge, Sir William Anstruther, published in 1701, there is
a reference to " those who arrogantly term themselves Eationalists " 5
in the sense of claiming to find Christianity not only, as Locke put
it, a reasonable religion, but one making no strain upon faith.
Already the term had become potentially one of vituperation, and
it is applied by the learned judge to " the wicked reprehended by
the Psalmist."6 Forty years later, however, it was still applied
rather to the Christian who claimed to believe upon rational grounds
than to the deist or unbeliever ; 7 and it was to have a still longer
lease of life in Germany as a name for theologians who believed in
" Scripture " on condition that all miracles were explained away.

1 See Brewster's Memoirs of Newton, 1855, ii. 315-16, for a letter indicating Craigs'
religious attitude. He contributed to Dr. George Cheyne's Philosophical Principles of
Religion, Natural and Revealed, 1705. (Prcf. to pt. i, ed. 1725.)

J See the note of Pope and Warburton on the Dunciad, iv, 462.

3 See arts, in Diet, of Sat. Biog. * Reprinted at Amsterdam, 1712.

5 Essays as cited, p. 84. G Id. p. 30.

7 See Christianity not Founded, on Argument (by Henry Dodwell, jr.), 1741, pp. 11. 31.
Waterland, as cited by Phsbop Hurst, treats the terms Reasonist and Rationalist as labels
or nicknames of those who untruly profess to reason more scrupulously than other people.
The former term may. however, have been set up as a result of Le Clerc's rendering of
"thel/03os,"in John i, 1, by " Reason "—an argument to which Waterland repeatedly refers.

Chapter XV

FRENCH AND DUTCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

1. We have seen France, in the first quarter of the seventeenth
century, pervaded in its upper classes by a freethought partly born
of the knowledge that religion counted for little but harm in public
affairs, partly the result of such argumentation as had been thrown
out by Montaigne and codified by Charron. That it was not the
freethinking of mere idle men of the world is clear when we note the
names and writings of LA MoTHE LE Vayer (1588-1672), GUI
Patin (1601-1671), and Gabriel Naude (1600-1653), all scholars,
all heretics of the skeptical and rationalistic order. The last two
indeed, sided with the Catholics in politics, Patin approving of the
Fronde, and Naude of the Massacre, on which ground they are
sometimes claimed as believers.1 But though in the nature of the
case their inclusion on the side of freethought is not to be zealously
contended for, they must be classed in terms of the balance of
testimony. Patin was the admiring friend of Gassendi ; and though
he was never explicitly heretical, and indeed wrote of Socinianism as
a pestilent doctrine,2 his habit of irony and the risk of written
avowals to correspondents must be kept in view in deciding on his
cast of mind. He is constantly anti-clerical;3 and the germinal
skepticism of Montaigne and Charron clearly persists in him.

It is true that, as one critic puts it, such rationalists were not
" quite clear whither they were bound. At first sight," he adds,

" no one looks more negative than Gui Patin He was always

congratulating himself on being ' delivered from the nightmare ';
and he rivals the eighteenth century in the scorn ho pours on
priests, monks, and especially ' that black Loyolitic scum from
Spain ' which called itself the Society of Jesus. Yet Patin was

1 Prof. Strowski, who is concerned to prove that the freethinkers of the period were
mostly mon-about-town, claims I'atin as a l-'rondeur (I)c Mmitniunr << l'usrul, p. iil.M. Hut
l'atin's attitude in this matter was determined by hi.s detestation of Mazarin, whom ho
regarded as an arch-scoundrel. Niiudc.'s defence o] the Msi sac-re i toreusic.

- l.vtlrcH ilr. Qui I'atin, No. lLs, ,'.,lit. koveille-l'arise, ISHi, i, ;;C,I.

■"• (']>. Keveillo-l'ariso, as: cited, Notice nur Uui I'atin, ])]>. xxiii xxvii, and Uayle,
art. I'atin.

117

118 SEVENTEENTH CENTUEY

no freethinker. Skeptics who made game of the kernel of
religion came quite as much under the lash of his tongue as
bigots who dared defend its husks. His letters end with the
characteristic confession : ' Credo in Deum, Christum crucifixum,

etc.; De minimis non curat prcetor ' " (Viscount St. Cyres in

Cambridge Modem History, v, 73). But the last statement is
an error, and Patin did not attack Gassendi, though he did
Descartes. He says of Eabelais : " C'etoit un homme qui se
moquoit de tout ; en verite il y a bien des choses dont on doit

raisonnablement se moquer elles sont presque tous remplies

de vanite, d'imposture et d'ignorance : ceux qui sont un peu
philosophes ne doivent-ils pas s'en moquer?" (Lett. 485, ed.
cited, iii, 148). Again he writes that " la vie humaine n'est
qu'un bureau de rencontre et un theatre sur lesquels domine la
fortune " (Lett. 726, iii, 620). This is pure Montaigne. The
formula cited by Viscount St. Cyres is neither a general nor
a final conclusion to the letters of Patin. It occurs, I think,
only once (18 juillet, 1642, a M. Belin) in the 836 letters, and
not at the end of that one (Lett. 55, ed. cited, i, 90).

Concerning his friend Naude, Patin writes: "Je suis fort de
l'avis de feu M. Naude, qui disoit qu'il y avait quatre choses
dont il se fallait garder, afin de n'etre point trompe, savoir, de
proprieties, de miracles, de revelations, et d'apparitions " (Lett.
353, ed. cited, ii, 490). Again, he writes of a symposium of
Naude, Gassendi, and himself : " Peut-etre, tous trois, gueris de
loup-garou et delivres du mal des scrupules, qui est le tyran des
consciences, nous irons peut-etre jusque fort pres du sanctuaire.
Je fis l'an passe ce voyage de Gentilly avec M. Naude, moi seul
avec mi tete-a-tete ; il n'y avait point de temoins, aussi n'y en
falloit-il point : nous y parlames fort librement de tout, sans
que personne en ait ete scandalise " (Lett. 362, ii, 508). This
seems tolerably freethinking.

All that the Christian editor cares to claim upon the latter
passage is that assuredly " l'unite de Dieu, l'immortalite de l'ame,
l'egalite des hommes devant la loi, ces verites fondamentales de
la raison et consacrccs par le Christianisme, y etaient placees au
premier rang " in the discussion. As to the skepticism of Naude
the editor remarks : " Ce qu'il y a de remarquable, c'est que Gui

Patin soutenait que son ami avait puise son opinion, en

general tres peu orthodoxe, en Italie, pendant le long sejour qu'il
fit dans ce pays avec le cardinal Bagni " (ii, 490 ; cp. Lett. 816 ;
iii, 758, where Naude is again cited as making small account
of religion).

Certainly Patin and Naude are of less importance for freethought
than La Mothe le Vayer. That scholar, a " Conseiller d'Estat
ordinaire," tutor of the brother of Louis XIV, and one of the early
members of the new Academy founded by Richelieu, is an interesting

FKEETHOUGHT IN FEANCE 119

figure1 in the history of culture, being a skeptic of the school of
Sextus Empiricus, and practically a great friend of tolorance.
Standing in favour with Richelieu, he wrote at that statesman's
suggestion a treatise On the Virtue of the Heathen,2 justifying
toleration by pagan example — a course which raises the question
whether Richelieu himself was not strongly touched by the
rationalism of his age. If it be true that the great Cardinal
"believed as all the world did in his time,"3 there is little more
to be said ; for unbelief, as we have seen, was already abundant, and
even somewhat fashionable. Certainly no ecclesiastic in high power
ever followed a less ecclesiastical policy ;4 and from the date of his
appointment as Minister to Louis XIII (1G21), for forty years, there
was no burning of heretics or unbelievers in France. If he was
orthodox, it was very passively/

And Le Vayer's way of handling the dicta of St. Augustine and
Thomas Aquinas as to the virtues of unbelievers being merely vices
is for its time so hardy that the Cardinal's protection alone can
explain its immunity from censure. St. Augustine and St. Thomas,
says the critic calmly, had regard merely to eternal happiness,
which virtue alone can obtain for no one. They are, therefore, to
be always interpreted in this special sense. And so at the very
outset the ground is summarily cleared of orthodox obstacles/ The
Petit discours chretien sur V immo Halite de Vdme, also addressed to
Richelieu, tells of a good deal of current unbelief on that subject ;
and the epistle dedicatory professes pain over the " philosopher of
our day [Vanini] who has had the impiety to write that, unless one
is very old, very rich, and a German, one should never expatiate on
this subject." But on the very threshold of the discourse, again,
the skeptic tranquilly suggests that there would be " perhaps some-
thing unreasonable " in following Augustine's precept, so popular in
later times, that the problem of immortality should be solved by tho
dictates of religion and feeling, not of " uncertain " reason. " Why,"
he asks, "should the soul be her own judge?" And he shows a
distinct appreciation of the avowal of Augustine in Ins lictraetationcs
that his own book on the immortality of the Soul was so obscure to
him that in many places he himself could not understand it.H The

1 See the notices of liim in Owen's Skeptics of the i'n ncli Itenaissanct ; and in Sainte-
lieuve. Port lioytil, iii, 180, etc.

* l)e. la Vertu. (lex I'ayens, in t. v. of the 12mo ed. of fKniTra, IdG!).

•"• Hanotaux, Hint, du Cardinal de liichelieu. Ih'.lU, i, prof. p. 7.

1 Cp. itucklf!, ch. viii, 1 vol. (;d. pp. :;ov 10, :vi:> iH.

r' See the tiood criticism of M. Hanotaux in 1'orrens, Ijcs LibertiiiH en h' ranee an xeii.
Steele, p. 'X, m/.

u Uiucrrs, ed. lfi'JO, v. I sq. liollanilin, as 1,0 Vayer shows, had similarly explained
away Autmsuue. liut the doctrine that heathen virtue was not true virtue had remained
orthodox. "' lid. cited, iv, ilo. * Id. pp. liij iii.

120 SEVENTEENTH CENTUEY

" Little Christian Discourse " is, in fact, not Christian at all ; and its
arguments are but dialectic exercises, on a par with those of the
Discours sceptique sur la musiquc which follows. He was, in short,
a skeptic by temperament ; and his Preface d'une histoire1 shows his
mind to have played on the " Mississippi of falsehood called history "
very much as did that of Bayle in a later generation.

Le Vayer's Dialogues of Oratius Tubero (1633) is philosophically
his most important work;2 but its tranquil Pyrrhonism was not
calculated to affect greatly the current thought of his day ; and he
ranked rather as a man of all-round learning8 than as a polemist,
being reputed " a little contradictory, but in no way bigoted or
obstinate, all opinions being to him nearly indifferent, excepting
those of which faith does not permit us to doubt." 4 The last phrase
tells of the fact that it affects to negate : Le Vayer's general
skepticism was well known.5 He was not indeed an original
thinker, most of his ideas being echoes from the skeptics of
antiquity;6 and it has been not unjustly said of him that he is
rather of the sixteenth century than of the seventeenth.7

2. On the other hand, the resort on the part of the Catholics to
a skeptical method, as against both Protestants and freethinkers,
which we have seen originating soon after the issue of Montaigne's
Essais, seems to have become more and more common; and this
process must rank as in some degree a product of skeptical thought
of a more sincere sort. In any case it was turned vigorously, even
recklessly, against the Protestants. Thus we find Daille, at the
outset of his work On the True Use of the Fathers,8 complaining that
when Protestants quote the Scriptures some Eomanists at once ask
" whence and in what way those books may be known to be really
written by the prophets and apostles whose names and titles they
bear." This challenge, rashly incurred by Luther and Calvin in
their pronouncements on the Canon, later Protestants did not as
a rule attempt to meet, save in the fashion of La Placette, who in
his work De insanibili Ecclesia, Romance Scepticismo (1688) 9 under-

1 Tom. iii, 251.

- He wrote very many, the final collection filling three volumes folio, and fifteen in
duodecimo. The Cincq Dialogues fait* a. limitation des Anciensvieve pseudonymous, and
are not included in the collected works.

:i "On le regarde comme le Plutarque de notre siecle" (Perrault, Les Hommes Illustres
du XVIIe SiMe, ed. 1701, li. 131). * Perrault, ii. 13-2.

" Hayle, Diet. art. La Mothk le Vaykii. Cp. introd. to L' Esprit de la Mothe le Vayer,
par 51. de M. C. D. S. P. D.L. {i.e. De Montlinot, chanoine de Saint Pierre de Lille (1763,
pp. xviii, xxi, xxvi.

(; 51. Perrens, who endorses this criticism, does not note that some passages he quotes
from the Dialogues, as to atheism being less disturbing to States than superstition, are
borrowed from Bacon's essay 0/ Atheisrn, of which Le Vayer would read the Latin version.

• Perrens, p. 132. b In French, 1631; in Latin, 1656, amended.

'■> Translated into English in 1688, and into French, under the title T raite du Fyrrhonisme
de Viglise romaine, by N. Chalaire, Amsterdam, 1721.

FKEETHOUGHT IN FRANCE 121

takes to show that Romanists themselves are without any grounds
of certitude for the authority of the Church. It was indeed certain
that the Catholic method would make more skeptics than it won.

3. Between the negative development of the doctrine of
Montaigne and the vogue of upper-class deism, the philosophy
of Descartes, with its careful profession of submission to the
Church, had at first an easy reception ; and on the appearance of
the Discours de la Methode (1637) it speedily affected the whole
thought of France; the women of the leisured class, now much given
to literature, being among its students.1 From the first the Jansenists,
who were the most serious religious thinkers of the time, accepted
the Cartesian system as in the main soundly Christian ; and its
founder's authority had some such influence in keeping up the
prestige of orthodoxy as had that of Locke later in England.
Boileau, who wrote a satire in defence of the system when it was
persecuted after Descartes's death, is named among those whom he
so influenced.2 But a merely external influence of this kind could
not counteract the fundamental rationalism of Descartes's thought,
and the whole social and intellectual tendency towards a secular
view of life. Soon, indeed, Descartes became suspect, partly by
reason of the hostile activities of the Jesuits, who opposed him
because the Jansenists generally held by him, though he had been
a Jesuit pupil, and had always some adherents in that order ; '' partly
by reason of the inherent naturalism of his system. That his
doctrine was incompatible with the eucharist was the standing charge
against it,4 and his defence was not found satisfactory,'" though his
orthodox followers obtained from Queen Christina a declaration that
he had been largely instrumental in converting her to Catholicism.
Pascal reproached him with having done his best to do without Cod
in his system;' and this seems to have been the common clerical
impression. Thirteen years after his death, in 1GG3, his work was
placed on the Index Librorum ProJiibilonim, under a modified
censure," and in 1G71 a royal order was obtained under which his
philosophy was proscribed in all the universities of France.'
Cartesian professors and cures were persecuted and exiled, or

1 Bouillier, Hist, de hi Fhilos. carUsiennfi, lb".!, i, -IK) sq., 420 sq.; L.inson, llist tie I i litt.
frn iicai.se, 5e 6dit. p. 390; Hrunetiere, Etudes Critiques, 3e serie, p. 2 ; Hucklo, l-vol. ed.
p. 338. Houillier notes (i, 4-20/ that l\w femme.s sitatntes ridiculed by Molieiv are Cartesians.

- Houillier, i, 4u(j ; Lauson, p. 3Ij7. " Jiouillier, i, 11 1 ></. ' Id. p. 131 sq.

■■ Id. p. 437 sq. >' Id. pp. ll'.J .Ml.

7 "11 disait trey souvent," said Pascal's niece : -".!<• ne puis pardonner a Descartes: il
aurait hien voulu. dans touto sa philosophic, pouvoir so passer de Dion ; niais il n'a j»ti
B'empecher de lui ace order line cliiiuienade. pour mi'ttre le mondi' en imiuwiiiciiL ; npivs
cela il n'a plus <me faire de Dieu." ICeeit de Murqn, rite l'< ri< r {" Di: ue nue j'ai oiu aire
par M. Pascal, moii onclo"!, rei). with 1'cnsics, ud. 1S03, PP. 3s 3'.).

» liouillier, p. 403. 'J Id. v. 1j5 sq.

122 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

compelled to recant ; among the victims being Pere Lami of the
Congregation of the Oratory and Pere Andre the Jesuit;1 and the
Oratorians were in 1678 forced to undergo the humiliation of not
only renouncing Descartes and all his works, but of abjuring their
former Cartesian declarations, in order to preserve their corporate
existence.2 Precisely in this period of official reaction, however,
there was going on not merely an academic but a social development
of a rationalistic kind, in which the persecuted philosophy played its
part, even though some freethinkers disparaged it.

4. The general tendency is revealed on the one hand by the
series of treatises from eminent Churchmen, defending the faith
against unpublished attacks, and on the other hand by the prevailing
tone in belles lettres. Malherbe, the literary dictator of the first
quarter of the century, had died in 1628 with the character of a
scoffer ;3 and the fashion now lasted till the latter half of the reign
of Louis XIV. In 1621, two years after the burning of Vanini, a
young man named Jean Eontanier had been burned alive on the
Place de Greve at Paris, apparently for the doctrines laid down by
him in a manuscript entitled Lc Tresor Inestimable, written on
deistic and anti-Catholic lines.4 He was said to have been succes-
sively Protestant, Catholic, Turk, Jew, and atheist ; and had con-
ducted himself like one of shaken mind.5 But the cases of the poet
Theophile de Viau, who about 1623 suffered prosecution on a charge
of impiety,6 and of his companions Berthelot and Colletet — who like
him were condemned but set free by royal favour — appear to be the
only others of the kind for over a generation. Frivolity of tone
sufficed to ward off legal pursuit. It was in 1665, some years after
the death of Mazarin, who had maintained Richelieu's policy of
tolerance, that Claude Petit was burnt at Paris for "impious
pieces";7 and even then there was no general reversion to orthodoxy,
the upper-class tone remaining, as in the age of Richelieu and
Mazarin, more or less unbelieving. When Corneille had introduced
a touch of Christian zeal into his Polyeucte (1643) he had given
general offence to the dilettants of both sexes.8 Moliere, again, the

1 Sec Bouillier, i, 400 set.; ii, 373 sq,; and introd. to OSuvres philos. clu Pere Bujjier, 1846,
p. 4 ; and op. Rambaud, Hist, de la civilisation francaise, 6e edit. ii. 336.

2 Pouillier, i, 465. :i IJcrrens, pp. 84 -85. i Cp. Perrons, pp. 6S-69, and refs.
5 Cp. Strowski, De Montaigne d Pascal, p. 141.

c Sec Duvernet, Vie de Voltaire, ch. i. and note 1 ; and Perrons, pp. 74-80.

" For all that is known of Petit see the Avertissement to Bibliophile Jacob's edition of
Paris ridicule et burlesque <iu liieme siecle, and rets, in Perrens, p, 153. After Petit's
death, his friend Dn Pclletier defended him as being a deist ; hut beseems in his youthful
writings to have blasphemed at large, and lie bad been guilty of assassinating a young
monk. He was burned, however, for blaspheming the Virgin.

H Guizot, Corneille et son temps, ed. 1880, p. 200. The circle of the Hotel Rambouillet
were especially hostile. Cp, Palissot's note to Polyeucte, end. On the other hand,
Corneille found it prudent to cancel four skeptical lines which he had originally put in
the mouth of the pagan Severus, the sage of the piece. Perrens, Les Libertins, p. 140.

FREETIIOUGIIT IN FRANCE 123

disciple of Gassendi and "the very genius of reason,"'2 was
unquestionably an unbeliever ;8 and only the personal protection of
Louis XIV, which after all could not avail to support such a play
as Tart life against the fury of the bigots, enabled him to sustain
himself at all against them.

5. Equally freetbinking was his brilliant predecessor and early
comrade, CYRANO DE BERGERAC (1620-1655), who did not fear to
indicate his frame of mind in one of his dramas. In La llort
d'Agrippine he puts in the mouth of Sejanus, as was said by a con-
temporary, " horrible things against the Gods," notably the phrase,
whom men made, and who did not make men,"4 which, however,
generally passed as an attack on polytheism ; and though there was
certainly no blasphemous intention in the phrase, Frappons, voild
Vkostie [ = hostia, victim] , some pretended to regard it as an insult to
the Catholic host.5 At times Cyrano writes like a deist;6 but in so
many other passages does he hold the language of a convinced
materialist, and of a scoffer at that,' that he can hardly be taken
seriously on the former bead." In short, be was one of the first
of the hardy freethinkers who, under the tolerant rule of Richelieu
and Mazarin, gave clear voice to the newer spirit. Under any other
government, he would have been in danger of bis life : as it was, he
was menaced with prosecutions ; his Aarippinc was forbidden ; the
first edition of his Pedant jouc was confiscated ; during his last
illness tbere was an attempt to seize his manuscripts ; and down till
the time of the Revolution the editions of his works were eagerly
bought up and destroyed by zealots.9 His recent literary rehabilita-
tion thus hardly serves to realize his importance in the history of
freethought. Between Cyrano and Moliere it would appear that
tbere was little less of rationalistic ferment in the France of their
day than in England. Bossuet avows in a letter to Huet in 1678
that impiety and unbelief abound more than ever before. "

1 Under whom he studied in his youth with a number of other notably independent
spirits, anions them Cyrano <le HertH-rae. See Sainte-Heuve's essay on Moliere, prefixed
to the Hachettei dilion. Moliere held by Cassendi as against Dcsc irtes. liouillier. i.f.12 sti.

- Constant Coipielin, art. "Don Juan "in the International Itcvitic, September, l!KJ3,
I). (11 an an He an i -ch< iia rly study.

'■'■ " Moliere is u fn ethinker to i be marrow of his bones " (I'errens, p. 2S0). Cp. I. • on,
p. .vJO; Founder. Etudes sitr Moiiire, 1--.",, pp. 122-23; Soury. Here. ,!,■ iltist. dn mat, r.
p. 3->l. " (jini,*nene," writi Saint' Heme, "a public une brochure pour montrer Uabelais
jj recur -i ur tie la revolution frani;ai-c ; e'etoit inutile a prouver sur .Moliere" 'c ---ay cited I.

1 A ei 11. -c. iv, in >]■:,/ eres C in -hi tie s. etc., ed. Jacob, rep. by (hinder, pp. I2ti 27.

•"' See .I;e>o,,- note in l,,e., ed. cited, p. I.Vi.

r' K.rj. In-, l.rlt rr emit re mi l'i-dnnt I No. 13 of the T.i It rex Sat irin lies in e.I. cited, p. lsl),
which, however, appears to have been mil tilated in seme edit ions ; as one of the dei-tie
sentenci - cili I i ■ M. I'errens. j>. 217. docs not n ppear in tl i reprii I i ' I'.il.lioi i ile Jacob.

7 i:.a. the Ilistmre ilr.s ()i.-rniis in the Jlistoire Cmiiiniie tie* Hut* it empires du Soltil,
ed. .1 i :ob '(iarnii-r . p. 27- ; h n i the I' rni.iinriil >l, /'/i (/.-,«/ id ' ame vol.).

" Si e tin; care! ul critici-m ot I'errens, pp. 21- .',d.

'■I bibliophile Jacob, pref. to ed. cili d, pp. i li.
1- r, a'::; ,11.302. Comp re J'.o let': earlier sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent,

124 SEVENTEENTH CENTUEY

6. Even in the apologetic reasoning of the greatest French prose
writer of that age, Pascal, we have the most pregnant testimony to
the prevalence of unbelief ; for not only were the fragments
preserved as Pensees (1670), however originated,1 developed as part
of a planned defence of religion against contemporary rationalism,2
but they themselves show their author profoundly unable to believe
save by a desperate abnegation of reason, though he perpetually
commits the gross fallacy of trusting to reason to prove that reason
is untrustworthy. His work is thus one continuous paralogism, in
which reason is disparaged merely to make way for a parade of bad
reasoning. The case of Pascal is that of Berkeley with a difference :
the latter suffered from hypochondria, but reacted with nervous
energy ; Pascal, a physical degenerate, prematurely profound, was
prematurely old ; and his pietism in its final form is the expression
of the physical collapse.

This is disputed by M. Lanson, an always weighty authority.
He writes (p. 464) that Pascal was " neither mad nor ill " when
he gave himself up wholly to religion. But ill he certainly
was. He had chronically suffered from intense pains in the
head from his eighteenth year; and M. Lanson admits (p. 451)
that the Pensees were written in intervals of acute suffering.
This indeed understates the case. Pascal several times told his
family that since the age of eighteen he had never passed
a day without pain. His sister, Madame Perier, in her bio-
graphical sketch, speaks of him as suffering " continual and
ever-increasing maladies," and avows that the four last years
of his life, in which he penned the fragments called Pensees,

were but a continual languishment." The Port Eoyal preface
of 1670 says the same thing, speaking of the "four years of
languor and malady in which he wrote all we have of the book
he planned," and calling the Pensees " the feeble essays of a sick
man." Cp. Pascal's Priere pour demandcr a Dicu le bon usage
des maladies ; and Owen French Skeptics, pp. 746, 784.

Doubtless the levity and licence of the libertins in high places3
confirmed him in his revolt against unbelief ; but his own credence
was an act rather of despairing emotion than of rational conviction.
The man who advised doubters to make a habit of causing masses
to be said and following religious rites, on the score that cela vous

ICC,."), cited by Perrens, pp. 253-54, where ho speaks with something like fury of the free
discussion around him.

1 ("imsin plausibly argues that Pascal began writing Pensies under the influence of
a practice set up in her circle by Madame do Sable. Mine, de SaMi, 5e edit. p. 124 sq.

- It is to be remembered that the work as published contained matter not Pascal's.
Cp. Hrunetiere, Etudes, iii, 40-47 ; and the editions of the Pensees by Faugere and Havet.

:i As to some of these see Perrens, pp. 158-69. They included the great Conde and some
of the women in bis circle ; all of them unserious in their skepticism, and all " converted "
when the physique gave the required cue.

FEEETHOUGHT IN FEANCE 125

fcra croirc et vous abctira — " that will make you believe and will
stupefy you"1 — was a pathological case; and though the whole
Jansenist movement latterly stood for a reaction against free-
thinking, it can hardly bo doubted that the Pensecs generally acted
as a solvent rather than as a sustainer of religious beliefs.2 This
charge was made against them immediately on their publication by
the Abbe de Yillars, who pointed out that they did the reverso of
what they claimed to do in the matter of appealing to the heart
and to good sense, since they set forth all the ordinary arguments
of Pyrrhonism, denied that the existence of God could be established
by reason or philosophy, and staked the case on a " wager" which
shocked good sense and feeling alike. " Have you resolved," asks this
critic in dialogue, "to make atheists on pretext of combatting them ?"i
The same question arises concerning the famous Lettres Provin-
ciates (1G5G), written by Pascal in defence of Arnauld against the
persecution of the Jesuits, who carried on in Arnauld's case their
campaign against Jansen, whom they charged with mis-stating the
doctrine of Augustine in his great work expounding that Father.
Once more the Catholic Church was swerving from its own estab-
lished doctrine of predestination, the Spanish Jesuit Molina having
set up a new movement in the Pelagian or Arminian direction. The
cause of the Jansenists has been represented as that of freedom of
thought and speech ;4 and this it relatively was insofar as Jansen
and Arnauld sought for a hearing, while the Jesuit-ridden Sorbonne
strove to silence and punish them. Pascal had to go from printer
to printer as his Letters succeeded each other, the first three being
successively prosecuted by the clerical authorities ; and in their
collected form they found publicity only by being printed at Eouen
and published at Amsterdam, with the rubric of Cologne. All the
while Jansenism claimed to he strict orthodoxy ; and it was in
virtue only of the irreducible element of rationalism in Pascal that
the school of Port Royal made for freethought in any higher or
more general sense. Indeed, between his own reputation for piety
and that of the Jansenists for orthodoxy, the Provincial Letters
have a conventional standing as orthodox compositions. It is
strange, however, that those who charge upon the satire of the
later philosophers the downfall of Catholicism in Franco should

1 Penates, ed. Fangere, ii. 168-50. The "abetira" comes from Montnigno.

2 Thus Mr. Owen treats Pascal as a skeptic, which philosophically he was, insofar ns
he really philosophized and did not merely catch at pleas for his emotional beliefs. " I,e ;
Pe.nseea de 1'ascal," writes Prof. !>e Dantec, "sont a mon avis le livre le plus capable do
renforcer l'atheisme chez un atheo " ( // AthHsmr, loos, pp. i\ ■->:>>. They have m tact
always had that effect. :t 1>p. la Ih-licntcsHC, 1071, dial, v, P. WJ, etc.

1 Vinet, Etudci filer Blaine Pascal, 3o edit. p. -07 mi.

126 SEVENTEENTH CENTUEY

not realize the plain tendency of these brilliant satires to discredit
the entire authority of the Church, and, further, by their own
dogmatic weaknesses, to put all dogma alike under suspicion.1
Few thoughtful men can now read the Provinciates without being
impressed by the utter absurdity of the problem over which the
entire religious intelligence of a great nation was engrossed.

It was, in fact, the endless wrangles of the religious factions
over unintelligible issues that more than any other single cause
fostered the unbelief previously set up by religious wars ;2 and
Pascal's writings only deepened the trouble. Even Eossuet, in his
History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches (1G88), did but
throw a new light on the hollowness of the grounds of religion ;
and for thoughtful readers gave a lead rather to atheism than to
Catholicism. The converts it would make to the Catholic Church
would be precisely those whose adherence was of least value, since
they had not even the temperamental basis which, rather than
argument, kept Bossuet a believer, and were Catholics only for lack
of courage to put all religion aside. When "variation" was put as
a sign of error by a Churchman the bulk of whose life was spent in
bitter strifes with sections of his own Church, critical people were
hardly likely to be confirmed in the faith. Within ten years of
writing his book against the Protestants, Bossuet was engaged in
an acrid controversy with Fenelon, his fellow prelate and fellow
demonstrator of the existence and attributes of God, accusing him
of holding unchristian positions ; and both prelates were always
fighting their fellow-churchmen the Jansenists. If the variations
of Protestants helped Catholicism, those of Catholics must have
helped unbelief.

7. A similar fatality attended tiro labours of the learned Huet,
Bishop of Avranches, whose Demonstratio Evangelica (1G78) is
remarkable (with Boyle's Discourse of Things above Ticason) as
anticipating Berkeley in the argument from the arbitrariness of
mathematical assumptions. He too, by that and by his later works,
made for sheer philosophical skepticism," always a dangerous basis
for orthodoxy.4 Such an evolution, on the part of a man of

1 Cp. the Eloge de Pascal by Bordas Demoulin in Didot ed. of the Lett res, 1854,
pp. xxii-xxiii, and cit. from Saint-Beuve. Mark Pattison, it seems, held that the Jesuits
had the host of the argument. See the Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone, 1904,
p. 207. As regards the effect of Jansenism on belief, we find De Toequeville pronouncing

that "Le Jansenisrne ouvrit la breche par laquelle la philosophie du lSe siecle devait

faire irruption " (Hist, philos. du regno de Louis XV, 1849, i, 2). This could truly be said
of Pascal. 2 Cp. Voltaire's letter of 1768, cited by Morley, Voltaire, 4th ed. p. 159.

:i Cp. Owen. French Skeptics, pp. 76-2-63, 767.

4 This was expressly urged against Huet by Arnauld. See the Notice in Jourdain's ed
of the Loaique de 1'ort Royal, 1854, p. xi ; Perrens, Les Libertins, p. 301 ; and Bouillier
Hist, de la philos. cartesienne, 1854, i, 595-96, whore are cited the letters of Arnauld (Nos.

FREETIIOUGHT IN FRANCE 127

uncommon intellectual energy, challenges attention, the more so
seeing that it typifies a good deal of thinking within the Catholic
pale, on lines already noted as following on the debate with
Protestantism. Honestly pious by bent of mind, but always
occupied with processes of reasoning and research, Iluet leant
more and more, as ho grew in years, to the skeptical defence
against the pressures of Protestantism and rationalism, at onco
following and farthering the tendency of his age. That the skeptical
method is a last weapon of defence can be seen from the temper in
which the demonstrator assails Spinoza, whom he abuses, without
naming him, in the fashion of his day, and to whose arguments
concerning the authorship of the Pentateuch he makes singularly
feeble answers.1 They are too worthless to have satisfied himself ;
and it is easy to see how he was driven to seek a more plausible
rebuttal." A distinguished English critic, noting the general move-
ment, pronounces, justly enough, that Iluet took up philosophy "not
as an end, but as a means — not for its own sake, but for the support
of religion "; and then adds that his attitude is thus quite different
from Pascal's.3 But the two cases are really on a level. Pascal
too was driven to philosophy in reaction against incredulity ; and
though Pascal's work is of a more bitter and morbid intensity, Huet
also had in him that psychic craving for a supernatural support
which is the essence of latter-day religion. And if we credit this
spirit to Pascal and to Huet, as we do to Newman, we must suppose
that it partly touched the whole movement of pro-Catholic skepticism
which has been above noted as following on the Reformation. It is
ascribing to it as a whole too much of calculation and strategy to
say of its combatants that they conceived the desperate design of
first ruining the territory they were prepared to evacuate; before
philosophy was handed over to the philosophers the old Aristotelean
citadel was to be blown into the air." In reality they caught, as
religious men will, with passion rather than with policy, at any plea
that might seem fitted to beat down the presumption of the wild,
living intellect of man "; ' and their skepticism had a certain sincerity
inasmuch as, trained to uncritical belief, they had never found for
themselves the grounds of rational certitude.

£30, 831, and '•37 in GCurrrs Cnmpl. iii, 300, 101, ■1211 denouncing Hurt'? Pyrrhonism as
"impious " and perfect h adapted lo the purposes of the freethinkers.

i (], Alexandre Westphal. Lrx Sourer* <hi 1',-ntntfiiqu,'. i ii^-i. pp. Bl-CS.

- Hud himself incurred a charge of temerity in his handling ul uwtual questions.

T<i. i. m.

■ PattNon. 7-;s-sr; >/.<;, ] SSO. i. 303 301. ' Pattison, as cited.

■"' "After all, a book the P.ibii cannot make a t the u I : vinM i n ' elli ,•: , .f

man." Newman, Apuli,'ii'i l/rn Vita Sua, l.si, ed. p. 3b2 : vd. IbT.i, p. 2lj. The same is said
by Newman of religion in general (p. 213;

128 SEVENTEENTH CENTUEY

Inasmuch too as Protestantism had no such ground, and
rationalism was still far from having cleared its bases, Huet, as
things went, was within his moral rights when he set forth his
transcendentalist skepticism in his Qucestiones Abidance in 1690.
Though written in very limpid Latin,1 that work attracted practically
no attention ; and though, having a repute for provincialism in his
French style, Huet was loth to resort to the vernacular, he did
devote his spare hours through a number of his latter years to
preparing his Traite Philosophique de la faiblesse de V esprit humain,
which, dying in 1722, he left to be published posthumously (1723).
The outcry against his criticism of Descartes and his Demonstratio
had indisposed him for further personal strife; but he was deter-
mined to leave a completed message. Thus it came about that a
sincere and devoted Catholic bishop " left, as his last legacy to his
fellow-men, a work of the most outrageous skepticism."5

8. Meanwhile the philosophy of Descartes, if less strictly
propitious to science at some points than that of Gassendi, was
both directly and indirectly making for the activity of reason. In
virtue of its formal " spiritualism," it found access where any clearly
materialistic doctrine would have been tabooed ; so that we find the
Cartesian ecclesiastic Eegis not only eagerly listened to and acclaimed
at Toulouse in 1665, but offered a civic pension by the magistrates3
— this within two years of the placing of Descartes's works on the
Index. After arousing a similar enthusiasm at Montpellier and at
Paris, Eegis was silenced by the Archbishop, whereupon he set him-
self to develop the Cartesian philosophy in his study. The result
was that he ultimately went beyond his master, openly rejecting the
idea of creation out of nothing,4 and finally following Locke in
rejecting the innate ideas which Descartes had affirmed.5 Another
young Churchman, Desgabets, developing from Descartes and his
pupil Malebranche, combined with their " spiritist " doctrine much
of the virtual materialism of Gassendi, arriving at a kind of pan-
theism, and at a courageous pantheistic ethic, wherein God is
recognized as the author alike of good and evil6 — a doctrine which
we find even getting a hearing in general society, and noticed in the
correspondence of Madame de Sevigne in 1677. 7

Malebranche's treatise De la Recherche de la Verite (1674) was

1 Pattison disparages it as colourless, a fault he charges on Jesuit Latin in general.
But by most moderns the Latin style of Huet will be found pure and pleasant.
'2 Pattison, Essays, i, 299. Cp. Bouillier, i. 595.
3 Fontenelle, Kloqe sur Regis ; Bouillier, Philos. cartes, i, 507.
* Reponse to Huet's Censura philosophic cartes. 1691; Bouillier, i, 515.

5 Usage tie la raison et de lafoi, 1701, liv. i, ptio. i, ch. vii ; Bouillier, p. 511.

6 Bouillier, i, 521-25. 7 Lottro do 10 aout, 1677, No. 591, ed. Nodicr.

FREETHOUGHT IN FRANCE 129

in fact a development of Descartes which on the one hand sought to
connect his doctrine of innate ideas with his God-idea, and on the
other hand headed the whole system towards pantheism. The
tendency had arisen before him in the congregation of the Oratory,
to which he belonged, and in which the Cartesian philosophy had so
spread that when, in 1678, the alarmed superiors proposed to eradicate
it, they were told by the members that, " If Cartesianism is a plague,
there are two hundred of us who are infected." l But if Cartesianism
alarmed the official orthodox, Malebranche wrought a deeper disinte-
gration of the faith. In his old age his young disciple De Mairan,
who had deeply studied Spinoza, pressed him fatally hard on the
virtual coincidence of his philosophy with that of the more thorough-
going pantheist ; and Malebranche indignantly repudiated all agree-
ment with " the miserable Spinoza,"2 " the atheist,"" whose system
he pronounced " a frightful and ridiculous chimera," * " Neverthe-
less, it was towards this chimera that Malebranche tended."5 On
all hands the new development set up new strife ; and Malebranche,
who disliked controversy, found himself embroiled alike with Jansenists
and Jesuits, with orthodox and with innovating Cartesians, and with
his own Spinozistic disciples. The Jansenist Arnauld attacked his
book in a long and stringent treatise, Dcs vrayes et clcs fausscs idces
(lf)33),b accumulating denials and contradictions with a cold tenacity
of ratiocination which never lapsed into passion, and was all the
more destructive. For the Jansenists Malebranche was a danger to
the faith in the ratio of his exaltation of it, inasmuch as reference of
the most ordinary beliefs back to " faith " left them no ground upon
which to argue up to faith.7 This seems to have heen a common
feeling among his readers. For the same reason lie made no appeal
to men of science. He would have no recognition of secondary
causes, the acceptance of which he declared to be a dangerous
relapse into paganism.8 There was thus no scientific principle in the
new doctrine which could enable it to solve the problems or absorb
the systems of other schools. Locke was as little moved by it as
were the Jansenists. Malebranche won readers everywhere by his

' Honillier, ii. 10. - Mr'litations c!irrtie)incs,ix, i V.}.

11 J-'.ntri'ticnn mi'-tajriiyyifiupn, vi ii. * hi. viii, ix.

' Uouillier, ii, ■S.i. So Kuno Kischer: "In brief, Malebrancho's doctrine-. rightly under-
stood, is Spinoza's" (Descartes and Ins Sclioal, Kng. tr. IWK). p. 0fs<). C]i. p. Ol'Ji.

'- 'l"ii«- work of Arnauld was reprinted in 17-21 v. i!.h a rcnmrkable Ai>J>i'fl,nti,.ii hy Chivel,
in which he eulogizes the style and the dialectic of Arnauld. and expresses the hope that the
hook may " gucrir, s'il se pent, cl'une et range preoccupation et d'une e\ce - -i\ e con I la nee,
ceux qui enseigncnt on soutiennent com me evident ce rjii'il y ;i de phi.- d;ingen ux dan la
nouvelle philosopliio non-ohstant les defenses faites par le leu Koi Louis X I \ 'a I'l'ni versite
d' Angers en l'anneo 1(170 et a l'Universite de l'aria mix aunees Itl'Jl et 1701 de le laisser
enseignor on sontenir."

~< l)/s vruvas ft ties faunae s idees, cli. xxviii.

y liecherche <l<; In Viritv, liv. vi, ptio ii, ch. iii.

VOL. II I"

130 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

charm of style ;! but he was as much of a disturber as of a reconciler.
The very controversies which he set up made for disintegration ; and
Eenelon found it necessary to " refute " Malebranche as well as
Spinoza, and did his censure with as great severity as Arnauld's.2
The mere fact that Malebranche put aside miracles in the name of
divine law was fatal from the point of view of orthodoxy.

9. Yet another philosophic figure of the reign of Louis XIV,
the Jesuit Pere Buffier (1661-1737), deserves a passing notice here
— out of his chronological order — though the historians of philo-
sophy have mostly ignored him.3 He is indeed of no permanent
philosophic importance, being a precursor of the Scottish school of
Eeid, nourished on Locke, and somewhat on Descartes ; but he is
significant for the element of practical rationalism which pervades
his reasoning, and which recommended him to Voltaire, Eeid, and
Destutt de Tracy. On the question of " primary truths in theology "
he declares so boldly for the authority of revelation in all dogmas
which pass comprehension, and for the non-concern of theology
with any process of rational proof,4 that it is hardly possible to
suppose him a believer. On those principles, Islam has exactly
the same authority as Christianity. In his metaphysic " he rejects
all the ontological proofs of the existence of God, and, among others,
the proof of Descartes from infinitude : he maintains that the idea
of God is not innate, and that it can be reached only from con-
sideration of the order of nature."5 He is thus as much of a force
for deism as was his master, Locke ; and he outgoes him in point
of rationalism when he puts the primary ethic of reciprocity as a
universally recognized truth,6 where Locke had helplessly fallen back
on " the will of God." On the other hand he censures Descartes
for not admitting the equal validity of other tests with that of
primary consciousness, thus in effect putting himself in line with
Gassendi. For the rest, his Examen des yrcjiujcs vulgaires, the
most popular of his works, is so full of practical rationalism, and
declares among other things so strongly in favour of free discussion,
that its influence must have been wholly in the direction of free-
thought. Give me," he makes one of his disputants say, " a
nation where they do not dispute, do not contest : it will be, I assure

1 This was the main theme of the finished Eloge of Fontenelle, and was acknowledged
by Bayle, Daguesseau, Arnauld, Bossuet, Voltaire, and Diderot, none of whom agreed with
linn. Bouillier, ii, 19. Fontenelle opposed Malebranchu's philosophy in his Doutes sur ie
systhiie ltliysique des causes occasionelles. Id. p. 57.3. - Cp. Bouillier, ii, 260-61.

• lie is not mentioned by Ueberweg, Lange, or Lewes. His importance in aesthetics,
however, is recognized by some moderns, though he is not named in Mr. Bosanquet'3
llistorij <:/ sEstlietic. •> Traite des premieres verites, 1724, SS 521-31.

5 Bouillier, introd. to Buffier's CEuvres iJhilosoiJhiaues, 1816, p. xiii.

c liemarau.es sur les principen de La metaphysique de Locke, passages cited by Bouillier.

FREETHOUGHT IN FRANCE 131

you, a very stupid and a very ignorant nation."1 Such reasoning
could hardly please the Jesuits," and must have pleased freethinkers.
And yet Burner, like Gassendi, in virtue of his clerical status and
his purely professional orthodoxy, escaped all persecution.

While an evolving Cartesianism, modified hy the thought of
Locke and the critical evolution of that, was thus reacting on
thought in all directions, the primary and proper impulse of
Descartes and Locke was doing on the Continent what that of
Bacon had already done in England — setting men on actual
scientific observation and experiment, and turning them from
traditionalism of every kind. The more religious minds, as
ATalebranche, set their faces almost fanatically against erudition,
thus making an enemy of the all-learned Huet,8 but on the other
hand preparing the way for the scientific age. For the rest we find
the influence of Descartes at work in heresies at which he had not
hinted. Finally we shall see it taking deep root in Holland, further-
ing a rationalistic view of the Bible and of popular superstitions.

10. Yet another new departure was made in the France of
Louis XIV by the scholarly performance of RlCHAED SlMON
(1633-1712), who was as regards the Scriptural texts what Spencer
of Cambridge was as regards the culture-history of the Hebrews,
one of the founders of modern methodical criticism. It was as a
devout Catholic refuting Protestants, and a champion of the Bible
against Spinoza, that Simon began his work ; but, more sincerely
critical than Huet, he reached views more akin to those of Spinoza
than to those of the Church.4 The congregation of the Oratory,
where Simon laid the foundations of his learning, was so little
inclined to his critical views that he decided to leave it ; and though
persuaded to stay, and to become for a time a professor of philosophy
at Julli, he at length broke with the Order. Then, from his native
town of Dieppe, came his strenuous series of critical works — ■
L'histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678), which among other
things decisively impugned the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch ;
the Ilistoire critique die tcxtc da Nouceau Testament (Rotterdam,
1689) ; numerous other volumes of critical studies on texts, versions,
and commentators; and finally a French translation of flic Now
Testament with notes. His Bibliotkequc Critique (1 vols, under the
name of Saint-Jore) was suppressed by an order in council ; the
translation was condemned by Bossuet and the Archbishop of Paris ;

1 (EuvrtM, 6(1. Houillicr, p. 320. - ('p. Houillii-r, Hist. <\r it iiliitns. c.irh's. ii, 3.11.

'•'■ Malebmnche, Traiti- ih: Moral?, liv. ii. eh. ID. Op. lioiullior, i, 5o2, 0S« 'JU ; ii, 23.
4 Cp. West]>hul, La Sources du l'tntateutjue, lbbb, i, 07 su.

132 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

and the two first-named works were suppressed by the Parlement of
Paris and attacked by a host of orthodox scholars ; but they were
translated promptly into Latin and English ; and they gave a new
breadth of footing to the deistic argument, though Simon always
wrote as an avowed believer.

Before Simon, the Protestant Isaac la Peyrere, the friend of
La Mothe le Vayer and Gassendi, and the librarian of Conde, had
fired a somewhat startling shot at the Pentateuch in his Prceadamitcz
and Systema Theologica ex Prcs-adamitarum Hypothesi (both 1655 :
printed in Holland2), for which he was imprisoned at Brussels, with
the result that he recanted and joined the Church of Eome, going
to the Pope in person to receive absolution, and publishing an
Epistola ad Philotimum (Frankfort, 1658), in which he professed to
explain his reasons for abjuring at once his Calvinism and his
treatise. It is clear that all this wTas done to save his skin, for
there is explicit testimony that he held firmly by his Preadamite
doctrine to the end of his life, despite the seven or eight confutations
of his work published in 1656.3 Were it not for his constructive
theses — especially his idea that Adam was a real person, but simply
the father of the Hebrews and not of the human race — he would
deserve to rank high among the scientific pioneers of modern
rationalism, for his negative work is shrewd and sound. Like so
many other early rationalists, collectively accused of " destroying
without replacing," he erred precisely in his eagerness to build up,
for his negations have all become accepted truths.4 As it is, he
may be ranked, after Toland, as a main founder of the older
rationalism, developed chiefly in Germany, which sought to reduce
as many miracles as possible to natural events misunderstood. But
he was too far before his time to win a fair hearing. Where Simon
laid a cautious scholarly foundation, Peyrere suddenly challenged
immemorial beliefs, and failed accordingly.

11. Such an evolution could not occur in France without affecting
the neighbouring civilization of Holland. We have seen Dutch life

1 Prcradamita:, sive Exercitatio stiver versibus IS, 13, 14 cap. 5, Epi.it. D. Pauli ad
Romanes, Quibus inducuntur Primi Homines ante Ada-mum, conditi. The notion of a
pre-Adamite human race, as we saw, had been held by Bruno. (Above, p. 46.)

2 My copies of the Prceadamitce and Systema bear no place-imprint, but simply "Anno
Sahitis MDCLV." Both books seem to have been at once reprinted in l'2mo.

8 Baylo. Victionnaire. art. Peykkrk. A correspondent of Bayle's concludes his
account of " le Preadamite" thus: "Be Pereire etoit le meilleur homme du monde, le
plus doux, et qui tranquillement croyoit fort peu de chose." There is a satirical account
of him in the Lettres de Qui Putin, April 5, 1658 (No. 451, ed. Reveille-Parise, 1846, iii, 83),
cited by Bayle.

4 See the account of his book by Mr. Becky, Rationalism in Europe, i, 295-97. Rejecting
as he did the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, he ranks with Hobbes and Spinoza
among the pioneers of true criticism. Indeed, as his book seems to have been in MS. in
1615, he may precede Hobbes. Patin had heard of Peyrere's Praadamitce as ready for
printing in 1643. Bet. 169, ed. cited, i, 297.

FKEETHOUGHT IN HOLLAND 133

at the beginning of the seventeenth century full of Protestant
fanaticism and sectarian strife ; and in the timo of Descartes these
elements, especially on the Calvinist side, were strong enough
virtually to drive him out of Holland (1G-17) after nineteen years'
residence.1 He had, however, made disciples ; and his doctrine
bore fruit, finding doubtless some old soil ready. Thus in 16GG one
of his disciples, the Amsterdam physician Louis Meyer, published
a work entitled Philosophia Sacrae Scripturae Interpret,'1 in which,
after formally affirming that the Scripture is the infallible Word of
God, he proceeds to argue that the interpretation of the Word must
be made by the human reason, and accordingly sets aside all meanings
which are irreconcilable therewith, reducing them to allegories or
tropes. Apart from this, there is somewhat strong evidence that in
Holland in the second half of the century Cartesianism was in large
part identified with a widespread movement of rationalism, of a
sufficiently pronounced kind. Peter von Maastricht, Professor of
Theology at Utrecht, published in 1G77 a Latin treatise, Novitatum
Cartesianarum Gangrana, in which he made out a list of fifty-six
anti-Christian propositions maintained by Cartesians. Among them
are these : That the divine essence, also that of angels, and that of
the soul, consists only in Cogitation ; That philosophy is not sub-
servient to divinity, and is no less certain and no less revealed ;
That in things natural, moral, and practical, and also in matters of
faith, the Scripture speaks according to the erroneous notions of the
vulgar ; That the mystery of the Trinity may be demonstrated by
natural reason ; That the first chaos was able of itself to produce all
things material ; That the world has a soul ; and that it may be
infinite in extent.' The theologian was thus visibly justified in
maintaining that the " novelties " of Cartesianism outwent by a
long way those of Arminianism.'1 It had in fact established a new
point of view ; seeing that Arminius had claimed for theology all the
supremacy ever accorded to it in the Church."

12. As Meyer was one of the most intimate friends of Spinoza,
being with him at death, and became the editor of his posthumous
works, it can hardly bo doubted that his treatise, which preceded
Spinoza's Tractalus by four years, influenced the great -lew, who
speedily eclipsed hhn.e SPINOZA, however (1G32 1G77), was first led

i Kuno Fischer, Drurnrti h and his School, pp. 2r>l-CN.

"> Colorus ii.e, Koiilerj, Vie ,1.- Spurn;:, t. in ( ', f Hirer's cd. of the 0)u-rn, PP. xlv xlvii.
'■'■ Cited by (i('Oi-(ic Similar in prut, to Srilnn's Innisilils World iHsrucrrrd, llibJ, rep. 1S71.
I have been unable to meet, with a copy of Mastricht's hook.

4 " Xovilati i iv'.'- iariii* miilli parasamlas super link A rui ini:i tins."
■• Nichols, Works of A rminiun, 1".-1, i, ijT b (nu^intf partly duplicated).
r' Cp. Uouillier, i, -Z'Si-'ji.

134 SEVENTEENTH CENTUEY

to rationalize by his Amsterdam friend and teacher, Van den Ende,
a scientific materialist, hostile to all religion;1 and it was while
under his influence that he was excommunicated by his father's
synagogue. From the first, apparently, Spinoza's thought was
shaped partly by the medieval Hebrew philosophy2 (which, as we
have seen, combined Aristotelean and Saracen influences), partly by
the teaching of Bruno, though he modified and corrected that at
various points.3 Later he was deeply influenced by Descartes, whom
he specially expounded for a pupil in a tractate.4 Here he endorses
Descartes's doctrine of freewill, which he was later to repudiate and
overthrow. But he drew from Descartes his retained principle that
evil is not a real existence. In a much less degree he was influenced
by Bacon, whose psychology he ultimately condemned ; but from
Hobbes he took not only his rationalistic attitude towards "revela-
tion," but his doctrine of ecclesiastical subordination.0 Finally
evolving his own conceptions, he produced a philosophic system
which was destined to affect all European thought, remaining the
while quietly occupied with the handicraft of lens-grinding by which
ho earned his livelihood. The Grand Pensionary of the Nether-
lands, John de Witt, seems to have been in full sympathy with the
young heretic, on whom lie conferred a small pension before he had
published anything save his Cartesian Principia (1663).

The much more daring and powerful Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
(1670°) was promptly condemned by a Dutch clerical synod, along
with Hobbes's Leviathan, which it greatly surpassed in the matter
of criticism of the scriptural text. It was the most stringent censure
of supernaturalism that had thus far appeared in any modern
language ; and its preface is an even more mordant attack on
popular religion and clericalism than the main body of the work.
"What seems to-day an odd compromise — the reservation of supra-
rational authority for revelation, alongside of unqualified claims for
the freedom of reason ' — was but an adaptation of the old scholastic
formula of "twofold truth," and was perhaps at the time the
possible maximum of open rationalism in regard to the current creed,
since both Bacon and Locke, as we have seen, were fain to resort to
it. As revealed in his letters, Spinoza in almost all things stood at

1 Colerus, Vie de Spinoza, in Gfrorer's ed. of Opera, p. xxv ; Martineau, Study of
Spinoza, 1882, pp. 20-2-2; Pollock. Spinoza, 2nd erl. ]89D, pp. 10-14.

- As set forth by Joel, licit nine zur Gesch. tier Pinion., Breslau, 1S7G. See citations in
Land's note to his lecture in Spinoza : Four Essays, L8H2, pp. 51-53.

:; Land, "In Memory of Spinoza." in Spinoza : Four Essays, pp. 57-58; Sigwart, as there
cited : Pollock, Spinoza, p. 12. Cp. however. Martineau, p. 101, note.

1 Iienati T)es (Juries Princip, Philos. more geonietrico demonstrates, 1663.

5 ('i). Martineau, pp. 46, 57.

G Reprinted in 1674, without place-name, and with the imprint of an imaginary
Hamburg publisher. 7 Tractatus, c. 15.

FREETHOUGHT IN HOLLAND 135

the point of view of the cultivated rationalism of two centuries later.
He believed in a historical Jesus, rejecting the Resurrection ;' dis-
believed in ghosts and spirits;3 rejected miracles;* and refused to
think of God as ever angry ;4 avowing that he could not understand
the Scriptures, and had been able to learn nothing from them as to
God's attributes.5 The Tractatus could not go so far ; but it went
far enough to horrify many who counted themselves latitudinarian.
It was only in Holland that so aggressive a criticism of Christian
faith and practice could then appear ; and even there neither
publisher nor author dared avow himself. Spinoza even vetoed
a translation into Dutch, foreseeing that such a book would bo
placed under an interdict.6 It was as much an appeal for freedom
of thought (libertas philosophandi) as a demonstration of rational
truth ; and Spinoza dexterously pointed (c. 20) to the social effects
of the religious liberty already enjoyed in Amsterdam as a reason
for carrying liberty further. There can be no question that it
powerfully furthered alike the deistic and the Unitarian movements
in England from the year of its appearance ; and, though the States-
General felt bound formally to prohibit it on tho issue of the second
edition in 1G74, its effect in Holland was probably as great as
elsewhere : at least there seems to have gone on there from this
time a rapid modification of the old orthodoxy.

Still more profound, probably, was the effect of the posthumous
EtJiica (1G77), which he had been prevented from publishing in Ins
lifetime,7 and which not only propounded in parts an absolute
pantheism ( = atheisnr), but definitely grounded? ethics in human
nature. If more were needed to arouse theological rage, it was to
1)0 found in the repeated and insistent criticism of the moral and
mental perversity of tho defenders of tho faith9 — a position not
indeed quite consistent with tho primary teaching of the treatise on
the subject of Will, of which it denies the entity in the ordinary
sense. Spinoza was here reverting to tho practical altitude of
Bacon, which, under a partial misconception, ho had repudiated ;
and he did not formally solve tho contradiction. Jlis purpose was
to confute the ordinary orthodox dogma that unbelief is wilful sin ;

1 Ep. xxiv. to Oldenburg. " Epp. Iviii, Ix, to I'.oxel.

:; Ed. xxiii. to Oldenburg. •' Ep. xxiv.

5 Ep. xxxiv. to \V. van I'.leyenberfi.

6 Ep. xivii. to .lellis, l-'eb. 1C7 1. "' Ep. xix. ICTJ, l.o Oldenburg.

h "Kpino/.ism is atbeistic. mid has no valid ground lor returning tbe word Ood'"
(Martiuean. p. :jl'JJ. Tbi- estimate is systematically mad,' good by l'rol. E. I'.. l'o\w II of
Miami Eniversity in bis S/iiitr>ZD and llrUuiini U'.KHi'. See in partieular eb. v. Tbe
summing-up is tbat "tbe rigbt name for Spino/.a's pliilo opbj i Atiiei tie .Mom in"
(lip. \V,'.\ Id).

,J btlaa, lit, i, App.; [it. ii, end ; pt. v, prop. 11, schol. Cp. tlie Eetlers, jxivmin.

136 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

and to retort the charge without reconciling it with the thesis was
to impair the philosophic argument.1 It was not on that score,
however, that it was resented, but as an unpardonable attack on
orthodoxy, not to be atoned for by any words about the spirit of
Christ.2 The discussion went deep and far. A reply to the Tractatus
which appeared in 1674, by an Utrecht professor (then dead), is
spoken of by Spinoza with contempt;3 but abler discussion followed,
though the assailants mostly fell foul of each other. Franz Cuper
or Kuyper of Amsterdam, who in 1676 published an Arcana
Atheismi Iievelata, professedly refuting Spinoza's Tractatus, was
charged with writing in bad faith and with being on Spinoza's side
— an accusation which he promptly retorted on other critics,
apparently with justice.4

The able treatise of Prof. E. E. Powell on Spinoza and
Beligion is open to demur at one point — its reiterated dictum
that Spinoza's character was marred by " lack of moral courage "
(p. 44). This expression is later in a measure retreated from:
after "his habitual attitude of timid caution," we have:
" Spinoza's timidity, or, if you will, his peaceable disposition."
If the last-cited concession is to stand, the other phrases should
be withdrawn. Moral courage, like every other human attribute,
is to be estimated comparatively ; and the test-question here is :
Did any other writer in Spinoza's day venture further than he ?
Moral courage is not identical with the fanaticism which invites
destruction ; fanaticism supplies a motive which dispenses with
courage, though it operates as courage might. But refusal to
challenge destruction gratuitously does not imply lack of courage,
though of course it may be thereby motived. A quite brave man,
it has been noted, will quietly shun a gratuitous risk where one
who is " afraid of being afraid " may face it. When all is said,
Spinoza was one of the most daring writers of his day ; and his
ethic made it no more a dereliction of duty for him to avoid
provoking arrest and capital punishment than it is for either a
Protestant or a rationalist to refrain from courting death by
openly defying Catholic beliefs before a Catholic mob in Spain.
It is easy for any of us to-day to be far more explicit than
Spinoza was. It is doubtful whether any of us, if we had lived
in his day and were capable of going as far in heresy, would

1 The solution is, of course, that the attitude of the will in the forming of opinion may
or may not be passionally perverse, in the sense of being inconsistent. To show that it is
inconsistent may be a means of enlightening it ; and an aspersion to that effect may be
medicinal. Spinoza might truly have said that passional perversity was at least as
common on the orthodox side as on the oilier, in any case, he quashes his own criticism
of Bacon. Cp. the author's essay on Spinoza in Pioneer Humanists.

- I't. iv, prop. 68, schol. ;i Ep. 1 ; 2 June, 1674.

i Colerus, as cited, p. liv. Cuper appears to have been genuinely anti-Spinozist, while
his opponent. Breitburg, or Bredcnburg, of Rotterdam, iva.i a Spinozist. Both were
members of the society of " Collegiants," a body of non-dogmatic Christians, which for
a time was broken up through their dissensions. Hosheiui, 17 Cent. sec. ii, pt. ii,
ch. vii, § 2, and note.

FEEETHOUGHT IN HOLLAND 137

have run such risks as he did in publishing the Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus. For those who have lived much in his
society, it should be difficult to doubt that, if allowed, lie would
have dared death on the night of the mob-murder of tho
De Witts. The formerly suppressed proof of his very plain
speaking on the subject of prayer, and his indications of
aversion to the practice of grace before meals (Powell, pp. 323-25)
show lack even of prudence on his part. Prof. Powell is cer-
tainly entitled to censure those recent writers who have wilfully
kept up a mystification as to Spinoza's religiosity ; but their
lack of courage or candour docs not justify an imputation of tho
same kind upon him. That Spinoza was " no saint " (Powell,
p. 43) is true in the remote sense that he was not incapable of
anger. But it would be hard to find a Christian who would
compare with him in general nobility of character. Tho propo-
sition that he was not "in any sense religious" (id. ib.) seems
open to verbal challenge.

13. The appearance in 1678 of a Dutch treatise " against all sorts
of atheists," L and in 1681, at Amsterdam, of an attack in French on
Spinoza's Scriptural criticism,2 points to a movement outside of tho
clerical and scholarly class. All along, indeed, the atmosphere of
the Arminian or " Eemonstrant " School in Holland must have been
fairly liberal.3 Already in 1685 Locke's friend Lo Clerc had taken
up the position of Hobbes and Spinoza and Simon on the Pentateuch
in his Scntimciis de quclques thcologicns de Ilollandc (translated into
English and published in 1690 as " Five Letters Concerning tho
Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures").4 And although Lo Clerc
always remained something of a Scripturalist, and refused to go the
way of Spinoza, he had courage enough to revive an ancient heresy
by urging, in his commentary on the fourth Gospel (1701), that the
Logos" should be rendered " Eeason " — an idea which he probably
derived from the Unitarian Z wicker without realizing how far it
could take him. His ultimate recantation, on the subject of the
authorship of the Pentateuch, served only to weaken his credit with
freethinkers, and came too late to arrest the intellectual movement
which he had forwarded.

A rationalizing spirit had now begun to spread widely in Holland ;
and within twenty years of Spinoza's death there had arisen a Dutch

1 Thr.olrir/isch, Thiloxnpliixeh, en Jlixtorixch liroeexs voor Cod, tetjen alUrlci) Atlieixtcn.
]5v Francis Kidder, Rotterdam, 1078.

•'• I. Imiiirtr Coiti-'iiucit, " par Pierre Vvoii," Amsterdam. KM. keally lij the Sieur Noel
ilc Verse. This nj)]>ears to have heen reprinted in li>."> under ln<' title Limine
conriiincii, oh I): xcrlotjon rout re Sr'inoxn. on Von refute, lex/mid, no 'is d, wi;i nth, ism,:

■'■ See Fox liourne's Life of Locke, ii, iib-i-b:*. as to l.ockes friendly relations uilli tlio
Iicmoii.-traiil ■ m !■ . ■ !

; See the summary of his argument by Alexandre Westplial, />'-'s Sources du I'cnta
tewtue, lbo«, i, 7ts xq.

138 SEVENTEENTH CENTUEY

sect, led by Pontiaan van Hattem, a pastor at Philipsland, which
blended Spinozism with evangelicalism in such a way as to incur
the anathema of the Church.1 In the time of the English Civil
War the fear of the opponents of the new multitude of sects was
that England should become " another Amsterdam." 2 This very
multiplicity tended to promote doubt ; and in 1713 we find Anthony
Collins8 pointing to Holland as a country where freedom to think
has undermined superstition to a remarkable degree. During his
stay, in the previous generation, Locke had found a measure of
liberal theology, in harmony with his own ; but in those clays down-
right heresy was still dangerous. DEURHOFF (d. 1717), who trans-
lated Descartes and was accused of Spinozism, though he strongly
attacked it,4 had at one time to fly Holland, though by his writings
he founded a pantheistic sect known as Deurhovians ; and BALTHASAR
Bekker, a Cartesian, persecuted first for Socinianism, incurred so
much odium by publishing in 1691 a treatise denying the reality of
witchcraft that he had to give up his office as a preacher.

Cp. art. in Biographie Universelle, and Mosheim, 17 Cent,
pt. ii, ch. ii, § 35, and notes in Eeid's ed. Bekker was not the
first to combat demonology on scriptural grounds ; Arnold
Geulincx, of Leyden, and the French Protestant refugee Daillon
having less confidently put the view before him, the latter in
his Daimonologia, 1687 (trans, in English, 1723), and the former
in his system of ethics. Gassendi, as we saw, had notably
discredited witchcraft a generation earlier ; Reginald Scot had
impugned its actuality in 1581 ; and Wier, still earlier, in 1583.
And even before the Reformation the learned King Christian II
of Denmark (deposed 1523) had vetoed witch-burning in his
dominions. (Allen, Hist, de Danemark, French tr. 1878, i,
281.) As Scot's Discoveric had been translated into Dutch in
1609, Bekker probably bad a lead from him. Glanvill's Blow at
Modem Sadducism (1688), reproduced in Sadducismus Trium-
phatus, undertakes to answer some objections of the kind later
urged by Bekker ; and the discussion was practically inter-
national. Bekker's treatise, entitled De Betooverte Wereld, was
translated into English — first in 1695, from the French, under
the title The World Bewitched (only 1 vol. published), and
again in 1700 as The World turned upside down. In the French
translation, Be Monde Encliante (l torn. 1691), it had a great
vogue. A refutation was published in English in An Historiccd
Treatise of Spirits, by J. Beaumont, in 1705. It is noteworthy

1 Mosheim, Raid's ed. p. 836; Martineau, pp. 327-28. The first MS. of the treatise of
Spinoza. De Den et Homive, found and published in the nineteenth century, bore a note
which showed it to have been used by a sect of Christian Kpinozists. See Janet's ed. 1878,
p. 3. They altered the text, putting " faith " for "opinion." Id. p. 53, notes.

2 Edwards, Gavgrcena, as before cited.

'■'• Discourse of Freethinking , p. 28. i Colerus, as cited, p. lviii.

FREETHOUGHT IN HOLLAND 139

that Bekker was included as one of " four modern sages (vier
ncuer Welt-Weisen) " with Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza, in
a German folio tractate (hostile) of 1702.

14. No greater service was rendered in that age to the spread
of rational views than that embodied in the great Dictionnairc
Historiquc et Critique1 of PIERRE BAYLE (1647-1706), who, born
in France, but driven out by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes,
spent the best part of his life and did his main work at Rotterdam.
Persecuted there for his freethinking, to the extent of having to give
up his professorship, he yet produced a virtual encyclopedia for
freethinkers in his incomparable Dictionary, baffling hostility by
the Pyrrhonian impartiality with which he handled all religious
questions. In his youth, when sent by his Protestant father to
study at Toulouse, he had been temporarily converted, as was the
young Gibbon later, to Catholicism;2 and the retrospect of that
experience seems in Bayle's case, as in Gibbon's, to have been a
permanent motive to practical skepticism. But, again, in the one
case as in the other, skepticism was fortified by abundant know-
ledge. Bayle had read everything and mastered every controversy,
and was thereby the better able to seem to have no convictions of
his own. But even apart from the notable defence of the character
of atheists dropped by him in the famous Pounces diverscs sur la
Co?n6te (1632), and in the Eclaircisscmcnts in which lie defended it, it
is abundantly evident that he was an unbeliever. The only alternative
view is that lie was strictly or philosophically a skeptic, reaching no
conclusions for himself ; but this is excluded by the whole manage-
ment of his expositions.4 It is recorded that it was his vehement
description of himself as a Protestant "in the full force of the term,"
accompanied with a quotation from Lucretius, that set the clerical
diplomatist Polignac upon re-reading the Roman atheist and writing
his poem Anti- Lucretius.5 Bayle's ostensible Pyrrhonism was simply
the tactic forced on him by his conditions; and it was the positive
unbelievers who specially delighted in his volumes. He laid down
no cosmic doctrines, but he illuminated all ; and his air of repudiating

1 First crl. Rotter-lam, 2 vols, folio, 1H96.

2 Albert Cazes, Pierre lirtyle, an vie., sea itlees, son influence, srm a urre, 111'"., pp. f!. 7.

■' A movement of skepticism hail probably been first set up in tin' ymmi! Haylc by
Montaigne, who was one of his favourite authors before hi- conversion Mazes, p. .V.
Montaiune, it will be remembered, hail been ;i fanatic in i:.:- youth. Thus three typical
skeptics of tiie sixteenth, .seventeenth, iiiid eighteenth centum had known what it was

tO be Catholic believers.

I Cp. the es-ay on The Skepticism r,f V.milr in Sir ,T. I', Stephen's II«r,,' Snhl„itir<r,
vol iii. and the remark- of I'errens. /,,<v lAherlins, pp. :{:!! :',7.

Klinje <le M. In Ciinlimil pnli-iii'ir prefixed to Huinfii in ville's tr.i n- In t ion, l.'.lnti-
Lnrriee, ]7'i7, i, 1 II. liayle quoted words are :" (Mi, i nl'roti lant,

et dans toute la force du mot; car an fond de in on ante je proti -te contle tout ce tjui se
dit et tout ce (;ui se fait."

140 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

such views as Spinoza's had the effect rather of forcing Spinozists to
leave neutral ground than of rehabilitating orthodoxy.

On one theme he spoke without any semblance of doubt. Above
all men who had yet written he is the champion of toleration.1 At
a time when in England the school of Locke still held that atheism
must not be tolerated, he would accept no such position, insisting
that error as such is not culpable, and that, save in the case of a
sect positively inciting to violence and disorder, all punishment of
opinion is irrational and unjust.2 On this theme, moved by the
memory of his own life of exile and the atrocious persecution of the
Protestants of France, he lost his normal imperturbability, as in his
Letter to an Abbe (if it be really his), entitled Cc que e'est que la
France toute catholique sous le regne de Louis le Grand, in which a
controlled passion of accusation makes every sentence bite like an
acid, leaving a mark that no dialectic can efface. But it was not
only from Catholicism that he suffered, and not only to Catholics
that his message was addressed. One of his most malignant enemies
was the Protestant Jurieu, who it was that succeeded in having him
deprived of his chair of philosophy and history at Rotterdam (1693)
on the score of the freethinking of his Pensees sur la Comete. This
wrong cast a shadow over his life, reducing him to financial straits
in which he had to curtail greatly the plan of his Dictionary.
Further, it moved him to some inconsistent censure of the political
writings of French Protestant refugees3 — Jurieu being the reputed
author of a violent attack on the rule of Louis XIV, under the title
Les Soupirs de la France esclave qui aspire apres la liberie (1689). 4
Yet again, the malicious Jurieu induced the Consistory of Rotterdam
to censure the Dictionary on the score of the tone and tendency of
the article " David " and the renewed vindications of atheists.

But nothing could turn Bayle from his loyalty to reason and
toleration ; and the malice of the bigots could not deprive him of
his literary vogue, which was in the ratio of his unparalleled
industry. As a mere writer he is admirable : save in point of
sheer wit, of which, however, he has not a little, lie is to this day
as readable as Voltaire. By force of unfailing lucidity, wisdom, and

1 Cp. the testimony of Bonet-Maury, Histoire de hi liberie de conscience en France, 1000,
p. 55. .Besides the writings above cited, note, in the Dictionnaire, art. Mahomet, £ ix ; art.
Conectk ; art. Simonidk, notes II and G; art. Spondk, note C.

'2 Commentaire philosophiaite sur la pnrabole : Cnntrains-les d'entrer, le ptie, vi. Cp.
the Critique generate de V histoire du Calvinisme d u Pere Maimbourtj, passim.

s See pref. to Eng. tr. of Hotmail's Franco-Gnllin, 17L1.

4 Rep. at Amsterdam, 1788, under the title. Virux d'un Patriate. Turieu's authorship
is not certain. Cp. Ch. Nodier, Melanges tires d' line petite bibliothajue, 18J0, p. 357. But
it is more likely than the alternative ascription to Le Vassor. The book made such a
sensation that the police of Louis XIV destroyed every copy they could find ; and in 1772
the Chancelier Maupoou was said to have paid 500 livres for a copy at auction over the
Luc d'Orleans.

FREETHOUGHT IN FRANCE 141

knowledge, he made the conquest of literary Europe ; and fifty years
after his death we find the Jesuit Delarnare in his (anonymous)
apologetic treatise, La Foi justijiee de tout reproche de contradiction
avcc la raison (1761), speaking of him to the deists as " their
theologian, their doctor, their oracle." * He was indeed no less ;
and his serene exposure of the historic failure of Christianity was
all the more deadly as coming from a master of theological history.

lo. Meantime, Spinoza had reinforced the critical movement in
France," where decline of helief can he seen proceeding after as
before the definite adoption of pietistic courses by the king, under
the influence of Madame de Maintenon. Abbadie, writing his
Traite de la verite de la religion chretienne at Berlin in 1684, speaks
of an ' infinity" of prejudiced deists as against the "infinity" of
prejudiced believers1' — evidently thinking of northern Europeans in
general ; and he strives hard to refute both Hobbes and Spinoza on
points of Biblical criticism. In France ho could not turn the tide.
That radical distrust of religious motives and illumination which
can be seen growing up in every country in modern Europe where
religion led to war, was bound to be strengthened by the spectacle
of the reformed sensualist harrying heresy in his own kingdom in
the intervals of his wars with his neighbours. The crowning folly
of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes1 (1685), forcing the flight
from France of some three hundred thousand industrious5 and
educated inhabitants for the offence of Protestantism, was as mad
a blow to religion as to the State. Loss paralysing to economic
life than the similar policy of the Church against the Moriscoes in
Spain, it is no less striking a proof of the paralysis of practical
judgment to which unreasoning faith and systematic ecclesiasticism
can lead. Orthodoxy in France was as ecstatic in its praise of the
act as had been that of Spain in the case of the expulsion of the
Moriscoes. The deed is not to be laid at the single door of the king
or of any of his advisers, male or female : the act which deprived
France of a vast host of her soundest citizens was applauded by

1 Ed. 17(10, p. 7.

2 The Triu-.tntuH Theolorjico-Politicua had been translated into French in 1678 by Saint-
Glain, a Protestant, who jjavo it no fewer than three other titles in succession to evade
prosecution. (Note to Colerus in Gfrorer's ed. of Spinoza, p. xlix.) In addition to the.
work of Auhert de Verse, above mentioned, replies were published by Simon, De la Motto
(minister of the Savoy Chapel, London), I, ami, a Hencdictine, and others. Their spirit
may be divined from Lami's title, Nouvr.l atlieixme renverse, lVUii.

:) Tom. I. :: ii, eh. ix (ed. 1861, i, 131, 177).

•'The destruction of I'rotestant liberties was not the work of the single Act of
Revocation. It had betfun in detail as early as Kili.'l. From the withholding of court
favour it proceeded to subsidies for conversions, and thence to a graduated series of
inva ions of I'rotestant rights, so that the formal Kovocation was only the violent con-
summation of a process. See the recital in Honet-Maury, Jlintinrc de la liberty de conscience
bit France, 1900, pp. W,~ra.

'u As to tiie loss to French industry see Bond-Maury, aa cited, p. DO, and refs.

142 SEVENTEENTH CENTUEY

nearly all cultured Catholicism.1 Not merely the bishops, Bossuet
and Fenelon2 and Masillon, but the Jansenist Arnauld ; not
merely the female devotees, Mademoiselle de Scudery and Madame
Deshoulieres, but Eacine, La Bruyere, and the senile la Fontaine —
all extolled the senseless deed. The not over-pious Madame de
Sevigne was delighted with the " dragonnades," declaring that
" nothing could be finer : no king has done or will do anything
more memorable"; the still less mystical Bussy, author of the
Histoire amoureuse des Gaules, was moved to pious exultation ; and
the dying Chancelier le Tellier, on signing the edict of revocation,
repeated the legendary cry of Simeon, Nunc dimitte servum tuum,
Domine ! To this pass had the Catholic creed and discipline brought
the mind of France. Only the men of affairs, nourished upon
realities — the Vaubans, Saint Simons, and Catinats — realized the
insanity of the action, which Colbert (d. 1683) would never have
allowed to come to birth.

The triumphers, doubtless, did not contemplate the expatriation
of the myriads of Protestants who escaped over the frontiers in the
closing years of the century in spite of all the efforts of the royal
police, "carrying with them," as a later French historian writes,
" our arts, the secrets of our manufactures, and their hatred of the
king." The Catholics, as deep in civics as in science, thought only
of the humiliation and subjection of the heretics — doubtless feeling
that they were getting a revenge against Protestantism for the Test
Act and the atrocities of the Popish Plot mania in England. The
blow recoiled on their country. Within a generation, their children
were enduring the agonies of utter defeat at the hands of a coalition
of Protestant nations every one of which had been strengthened
by the piously exiled sons of France ; and in the midst of their
mortal struggle the revolted Protestants of the Cevennes so furiously
assailed from the rear that the drain upon the king's forces precipi-
tated the loss of their hold on Germany.

For every Protestant who crossed the frontiers between 1G85 and
1700, perhaps, a Catholic neared or crossed the line between indiffer-
entism and active doubt. The steady advance of science all the
while infallibly undermined faith ; and hardly was the bolt launched
against the Protestants when new sapping and mining was going on.
FONTENELLE (1657-1757), whose Conversations on the Plurality of
Worlds (1686) popularized for the elegant world the new cosmology,

1 See Duruy, Hist . tie la France, ii, 253 ; Bonet-Maury, as cited, pp. 53-6G.

2 As to whose attitude at this crisis see O. Douen, L' Intolerance de Fenelon,

FREETHOUGHT IN FEANCE 143

cannot but have undermined dogmatic faith in some directions;
above all by his graceful and skilful Ilistoire des Oracles (also 1686),
where " the argumentation passes beyond the thesis advanced. All
that he says of oracles could be said of miracles."1 The Jesuits
found the book essentially " impious"; and a French culture-historian
sees in it "the first attack which directs the scientific spirit against
the foundations of Christianity. All the purely philosophic arguments
with which religion has been assailed are in principle in the work
of Fontenelle."" In his abstract thinking he was no less radical, and
his Traite de la Liberie 8 established so well the determinist position
that it was decisively held by the majority of the French freethinkers
who followed. Living to his hundredth year, he could join hands
with the freethought of Gassendi and Voltaire,4 Descartes and
Diderot. Yet we shall find him later, in his official capacity of
censor of literature, refusing to pass heretical books, on principles
that would have vetoed his own. He is in fact a type of the free-
thought of the age of Louis XIV — Epicurean in the common sense,
unheroic, resolute only to evade penalties, guiltless of over-zeal.
Not in that age could men generate an enthusiasm for truth.

16. Of the new Epicureans, the most famous in his day was
SAINT-EVREMOXD,5 who, exiled from France for his politics, main-
tained both in London and in Paris, by his writings, a leadership in
polite letters. In England he greatly influenced young men like
Bolingbroke ; and a translation (attributed to Dryden) of one of his
writings seems to have given Bishop Butler the provocation to the
first and weakest chapter of his Analogy? As to his skepticism
there was no doubt in his own day ; and his compliments to Christi-
anity are much on a par with those paid later by the equally con-
forming and unbelieving Shaftesbury, whom he also anticipated in
his persuasive advocacy of toleration.7 REGNARD, the dramatist,
had a similar private repute as an " Epicurean." And even among
the nominally orthodox writers of the time in Franco a subtle
skepticism touches nearly all opinion. La Bruyere is almost the
only lay classic of the period who is pronouncedly religious ; and his
essay on the freethinkers, ^ against whom his reasoning is so forcibly

1 Hanson, Hint, de In litt.francaise, p. 027. 2 Id ih. Op. DemoScot, p. «VS.

:; Not printed till 1713, in tin: Nouvelles libertex de winner; and still read in MS. by
Grimm in lT/d. L'ontenelle was also credited with a heretical letter on the resurrection,
and an essay on tin; Infinite, pointing to disbelief. It should be noted, however, that ho
-la:; i - for deism in his essay, / >e 1'e.cintenre de Dieii, which is m guarded application of
tin- design argument against what was then assumed to be the only alternative -tho
"fortuitous concourse of atoms."

4 Hut Voltaire and he were not at one. He is the " nain de Saturne" in Mirromi'otis.

' H. I'd:; ; d. 17')!. A man who lived to ninety can have been no crcat debauchee.

0 Cp. Dynamics of lielujion, p. 17'2.

7 Cp. Gidel, Etude prefixed to (Ka errs Choisiexthi Haint-Kcrcmond, ed. Gamier, pp. li 1 09.

B Caructerea (Itol), ch. xvi : Ijch ExiirUs Forts.

144 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

feeble, testifies to their numbers and to the stress of debate set up
by them. Even he, too, writes as a deist against atheists, hardly as
a believing Christian. If he were a believer he certainly found no
comfort in his faith : whatever were his capacity for good feeling,
no great writer of his age betrays such bitterness of spirit, such
suffering from the brutalities of life, such utter disillusionment, such
unfaith in men. And a certain doubt is cast upon all his professions
of opinion by the sombre avowal : " A man born a Christian and
a Frenchman finds himself constrained1 in satire : the great subjects
are forbidden him : he takes them up at times, and then turns aside
to little things, which he elevates by his genius and his style."2

M. Lanson remarks that " we must not let ourselves be
abused by the last chapter [Des esprits forts] , a collection of
philosophic reflections and reasonings, where La Bruyere
mingles Plato, Descartes, and Pascal in a vague Christian
spiritualism. This chapter, evidently sincere, but without
individuality, and containing only the reflex of the thoughts of
others, is not a conclusion to which the whole work conducts.
It marks, on the contrary, the lack of conclusion and of general
views. What is more, with the chapter On the Sovereign, placed
in the middle of the volume, it is destined to disarm the temporal
and spiritual powers, to serve as passport for the independent
freedom of observation in the rest of the Caracteres " (p. 599).

On this it may be remarked that the essay in question is not
so much Christian as theistic ; but the suggestion as to the
object is plausible. Taine (Essais de critique et d'histoire, ed.
1901) first remarks (p. 11) on the " christianisme " of the essay,
and then decides (p. 12) that " he merely exposes in brief and
imperious style the reasonings of the school of Descartes." It
should be noted, however, that in this essay La Bruyere does
not scruple to write : " If all religion is a respectful fear of God,
what is to be thought of those who dare to wound him in his
most living image, which is the sovereign?" (§ 27 in ed.
Walckenaer, p. 578. Pascal holds the same tone. Vie, par
Madame Perier.) This appears first in the fourth edition ; and
many other passages were inserted in that and later issues : the
whole is an inharmonious mosaic.

Concerning La Bruyere, the truth would seem to be that the
inconsequences in the structure of his essays were symptomatic
of variability in his moods and opinions. Taine and Lanson are
struck by the premonitions of the revolution in his famous
picture of the peasants, and other passages ; and the latter
remarks (p. 603) that " the points touched by La Bruyere are
precisely those where the writers of the next age undermined

1 "Is embarrassed" in the first edition.

2 Des ouvraaen de I'esprit, near end. § 65 in ed. Walckenaer, p. 17G,

FKEETHOUGHT IN FEANCE 145

the old order: La Bruyere is already philosophe in the sense
which Voltaire and Diderot gave to that term." But we cannot
be sure that the plunges into convention were not real swervings
of a vacillating spirit. It is difficult otherwise to explain his
recorded approbation of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

The Dialogues sur le Quietisme, published posthumously under

his name (1699), appear to be spurious. This was emphatically

asserted by contemporaries {Sentiments critiques sur les Carac-

tercs de 31. dc la Bruyere, 1701, p. 447 ; Apologia dc 21. dc la

Bruyere, 1701, p. 357, both cited by Walckenaer) who on other

points were in opposition. Baron Walckenaer (Etude, ed. cited,

p. 76 sq.) pronounces that they were the work of Ellies du Pin,

a doctor of the Sorbonne, and gives good reasons for the

attribution. The Abbe d'Olivet in his Histoire de V Academic

francaisc declares that La Bruyere only drafted them, and that

du Pin edited them ; but the internal evidence is against their

containing anything of La Bruyere's draught. They are indeed

so feeble that no admirer cares to accept them as his. (Cp.

note to Suard's Notice sur la personne et les ecrits de la Bruyere,

in Didot ed. 1865, p. 20.) Written against Madame Guyon,

they were not worth his while.

If the apologetics of Huet and Pascal, Bossuet and Fenelon, had

any influence on the rationalistic spirit, it was but in the direction of

making it more circumspect, never of driving it out. It is significant

that whereas in the year of the issue of the Dcmoustratio the

Duchesse d'Orleans could write that " every young man either is

or affects to be an atheist," Le Yassor wrote in 1688 : " People talk

only of reason, of good taste, of force of mind, of the advantage of

those who can raise themselves above the prejudices of education

and of the society in which one is born. Pyrrhonism is the fashion

in many things : men say that rectitude of mind consists in ' not

believing lightly' and in being 'ready to doubt.'"1 Pascal and

Huet between them had only multiplied doubters. On both lines,

obviously, freethought was the gainer ; and in a Jesuit treatise,

Le Monde condamne par luymesme, published in 1695, the Preface

contra V incredulitc des libertins sets out with the avowal that "to

draw the condemnation of the world out of its own mouth, it is

necessary to attack first the incredulity of the unbelievers (libertins),

who compose the main part of it, and who under some appearance of

Christianity conceal a mind either Judaic [read deist ic] or pagan."

Such was France to a religious eye at the height of the Catholic

triumph over Protestantism. The statement that the libertins

1 M. Lo Vassor, De. hi veritable reAiginn, 1GRS, pref. no Vassor speaks in the same
preface of "this multitude of libertins ami of unbelievers which now terrifies us." His
book seeks to vindicate the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, inspiration, prophecies,
and miracles, auainst Spinoza, Le dure, and others.

VOL. II L

146 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

formed the majority of " the world " is of course a furious extrava-
gance. But there must have been a good deal of unbelief to have
moved a priest to such an explosion. And the unbelief must have
been as much a product of revulsion from religious savagery as a
result of direct critical impulse, for there was as yet no circulation of
positively freethinking literature. For a time, indeed, there was a
general falling away in French intellectual prestige,1 the result, not
of the mere " protective spirit " in literature, as is sometimes argued,
but of the immense diversion of national energy under Louis XIV to
militarism ;2 and the freethinkers lost some of the confidence as well
as some of the competence they had exhibited in the days of
Moliere.3 There had been too little solid thinking done to preclude
a reaction when the king, led by Madame de Maintenon, went about
to atone for Ids debaucheries by an old age of piety. " The king had
been put in such fear of hell that he believed that all who had not
been instructed by the Jesuits were damned. To ruin anyone it was
necessary only to say, 'He is a Huguenot, or a Jansenist,' and the
thing was done.""1 In this state of things there spread in France
the revived doctrine or temper of Quietism, set up by the Spanish
priest, Miguel de Molinos (1640-1697), whose Spiritual Guide,
published in Spanish in 1675, appeared in 1681 in Italian at Rome,
where lie was a highly influential confessor. It was soon translated
into Latin, French, and Dutch. In 1685 he was cited before the
Inquisition ; in 1687 the book was condemned to be burned, and he
was compelled to retract sixty-eight propositions declared to be
heretical ; whereafter, nonetheless, he was imprisoned till his death
in 1696. In France, whence the attack on him had begun, his
teaching made many converts, notably Madame Guyon, and may be
said to have created a measure of religious revival. But when
Fenelon took it up (1697), modifying the terminology of Molinos to
evade the official condemnation, ho was bitterly attacked by Bossuet
as putting forth doctrine incompatible with Christianity ; the prelates
fought for two years ; and finally the Pope condemned F ('melon's
book, whereupon he submitted, limiting his polemic to attacks on
the Jansenists. Thus the gloomy orthodoxy of the court and the
mysticism of the new school alike failed to affect the general
intelligence ; there was no real building up of belief ; and the
forward movement at length recommenced.

1 Cp. Huet. Huetiann, ? 1.

2 The question is discussed in the author's Buckle and his Critics, pp. 3-24-42, and ed. of
Buckle's Introduction. Buckle's view, however, was held by Huet, Huetiana, i 73.

:; ( ']). L'errens, pp. 310-14.

4 Letter of the Duchesso d'Orleans, cited by Rocquain, L'Esprit rcvolutionnaireavant
la recoluiion, 137S, p. 3, note.

Chapter XVI

BRITISH FEEETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH
CENTUEY

It appears from our survey that the " tleistic movement," commonly
assigned to the eighteenth century, had been abundantly prepared
for in the seventeenth, which, in turn, was but developing ideas
current in the sixteenth. When, in 1696, JOHN TOLAND published
his Christianity Not Mysterious, the sensation it made was due not
so much to any unheard-of boldness in its thought as to the simple
fact that deistic ideas had thus found their way into print.1 So far
the deistic position was explicitly represented in English literature
only by the works of Herbert, Hobbes, and Blount ; and of these only
the first (who wrote in Latin) and the third had put the case at any
length. Against the deists or atheists of the school of Hobbes, and
the Scriptural Unitarians who thought with Newton and Locke,
there stood arrayed the great mass of orthodox intolerance which
clamoured for the violent suppression of every sort of "infidelity."
It was this feeling, of which the army of ignorant rural clergy were
the spokesmen, that found vent in the Blasphemy Act of 1697. Tho
new literary growth dating from tho time of Toland is the evidence
of the richness of the rationalistic soil already created. Thinking
men craved a new atmosphere. Locke's Reasonableness of Christi-
anity is an unsuccessful compromise : Toland's book begins a new
propagandist era.

Toland's treatise,2 heretical as it was, professed to bo a defence
of the faith, and avowedly founded on Locke's anonymous Reason-
ableness of Christianity, its young author being on terms of
acquaintance with the philosopher.' He claimed, in fact, to take for
granted "the Divinity of the New Testament," and to 'demonstrate
the verity of divine revelation against atheists and all enemies of
revealed religion," from whom, accordingly, he expected to receive

1 As Voltaire noted, Toland was persecuted in I rein mi for his circumspect and emit ions
first ho ok. and left unmolested in Kiuiland when he «row much more iiiKiv sive.

- First od. anonymous, Second od., of same year, Hives author's name. Another ud.
in 1702. ;; See Dynamics of lit Union, i>. 1-J.

117

148 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

no quarter. Brought up, as he declared, " from my cradle, in the
grossest superstition and idolatry," he had been divinely led to make
use of his own reason ; and he assured his Christian readers of his
perfect sincerity in "defending the true religion."1 Twenty years
later, his primary positions were hardly to be distinguished from
those of ratiocinative champions of the creed, save in respect that
he was challenging orthodoxy where they were replying to
unbelievers. Toland, however, lacked alike the timidity and the
prudence which so safely guided Locke in his latter years ; and
though his argument was only a logical and outspoken extension of
Locke's position, to the end of showing that there was nothing
supra-rational in Christianity of Locke's type, it separated him from
" respectable " society in England and Ireland for the rest of his
life. The book was " presented " by the Grand Juries of Middlesex
and Dublin ; 2 the dissenters in Dublin being chiefly active in
denouncing it — with or without knowledge of its contents ; 3 half-a-
dozen answers appeared ; and when in 1698 Toland produced
another, entitled Amyntor, showing the infirm foundation of the
Christian canon, there was again a speedy crop of replies. Despite
the oversights inevitable to such pioneer work, this opens, from the
side of freethought, the era of documentary criticism of the New
Testament ; and in some of his later freethinking books, as the
Nazarcnus (1718) and the Panthcisticon (1720), he continues to
show himself in advance of his time in " opening new windows " for
his mind.1 The latter work represents in particular the influence of
Spinoza, whom he had formerly criticized somewhat forcibly ° for
his failure to recognize that motion is inherent in matter. On that
head he lays down 6 the doctrine that ' motion is but matter under
a certain consideration " — an essentially " materialist " position,
deriving from tbe pre-Socratic Greeks, and incidentally affirmed by
Bacon.' He was not exactly an industrious student or writer ; but
he had scholarly knowledge and instinct, and several of his works
show close study of Bayle.

As regards his more original views on Christian origins, he is not
impressive to the modern reader ; but theses which to-day stand for
little were in their own day important. Thus in his Ilodcgus (pt. i

1 Pref. to 2nd ed. pp. vi, viii, xxiv, xxvi.

2 As late as 1701 a vote for its prosecution was passed in the Lower House of Convoca-
tion. Farrar. Crit. Hist, of Freethought, p. ISO.

3 Molyneux, in Familiar Letters of Locke, etc. p. 22S.

4 No credit for this is given in Sir Leslie Stephen's notice of Toland in English Thought
in the Eighteenth Century, i. 101-12. Compare the estimate of Lange, Gesch. des Material-
ismus, i. 272-76 (Eng. tr. i. 324-30). Lange perhaps idealizes his subject somewhat.

s In two letters published along with the Letters to Serena, 1701.

G Letters to Serena, etc. 1701. pref.

7 Be l^rincipiis atque Originibus (lioutledgc's l-vol. cd. pp. 651, 667).

BEITISH FEEETHOUGHT 149

of the Tetradymus, 1720) it is elaborately argued that the " pillar of
fire by night and of cloud by day " was no miracle, but the regular
procedure of guides in deserts, where night marches are the rule ;
the "cloud " being simply the smoke of the vanguard's fire, which
by night flared red. Later criticism decides that the whole narrative
of the Exodus is myth. Toland's method, however, was relatively
so advanced that it had not been abandoned by theological ration-
alists " a century later. Of that movement he must be ranked an
energetic pioneer : though he lacked somewhat the strength of char-
acter that in his day was peculiarly needed to sustain a freethinker.
Much of his later life was spent abroad; and his Letters to Serena
(1701) show him permitted to discourse to the Queen of Prussia on
such topics as the origin and force of prejudice, the history of the
doctrine of immortality, and the origin of idolatry. He pays his corre-
spondent the compliment of treating his topics with much learning; and
his manner of assuming her own orthodoxy in regard to revelation
could have served as a model to Gibbon.1 But, despite such distin-
guished patronage, his life was largely passed in poverty, cheerfully
endured,2 with only chronic help from well-to-do sympathizers, such
as Shaftesbury, who was not over-sympathetic. When it is noted
that down to 17G1 there had appeared no fewer than fifty-four
answers to his first book,'* his importance as an intellectual influence
may be realized.

A certain amount of evasion was forced upon Toland by the
Blasphemy Law of 1G97; inferontially, however, he was a thorough
deist until he became pantheist ; and the discussion over his books
showed that views essentially deistie were held even among his
antagonists. One, an Irish bishop, got into trouble by setting forth
a notion of deity which squared with that of Ilobbos.4 The whole
of our present subject, indeed, is much complicated by the distribu-
tion of heretical views among the nominally orthodox, and of
orthodox views among heretics.5 Thus the school of Cudworth,
zealous against atheism, was less truly theistic than that of Blount,

1 Letters in Serena, pp. 19, 07.

- Sir Henry Craik (cited by Temple Scott, liohn erl. of Swift's Works, iii, 91 speaks of
Toland as "a man of utterly worthless character." This is mere malignant abuse. Toland
is described by l'opc in a note to the JJimciiid (ii, 30<J) as a spy to Lord Oxford. There
could hardly be a worse authority for such a charge.

'■'■ Gostwiuk, (lerinnii Culture tuiii Cli ristiu trity, 1882, 1). 2G.

* Cp. Stephen, as cited, p. ] 15.

5" The Christianity of many writers consisted simply in expressing deist opinions in
the o Id-fashioned phrasi ology " 'Stephen, i. 01 1.

,; Cp. I'iinjer, Christ. I'hilos. of Helii/inii, i, iSO 90 ; and P'/nnmics of IMiijinn, pp. 01-98.
Lord Morley's reference to "the godless deism of the Knglish school" ( Voltaire, lth ed.
p. tiO) is pu/.zlin«. Cp. Hosenkranz (UiileroV s [.ehen unit U'erke, l.-lill. ii. «1) on "den
ungottlichcn (iott der .lesuiten and Jansenisten, dies monstrose Xorrbild des alten
Jehovah, diesen apotheosirten Tyrannen, diesen Moloch." The latter application of the
term seems the more plausible.

150 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

who, following Hobbes, pointed out that to deny to God a continual
personal and providential control of human affairs was to hold to
atheism under the name of theism;1 whereas Cudworth, the
champion of theism against the atheists, entangled himself hope-
lessly2 in a theory which made deity endow Nature with " plastic "
powers and leave it to its own evolution. The position was serenely
demolished by Bayle,'" as against Le Clerc, who sought to defend it ;
and in England the clerical outcry was so general that Cudworth
gave up authorship.4 Over the same crux, in Ireland, Bishop
Browne and Bishop Berkeley accused each other of promoting
atheism ; and Archbishop King was embroiled in the dispute.0 On
the other hand, the theistic Descartes had laid down a " mechanical "
theory of the universe which perfectly comported with atheism, and
partly promoted that way of thinking ;6 and a selection from
Gassendi's ethical writings, translated into English7 (1G99), wrought
in the same direction. The Church itself contained Cartesians and
Cudworthians, Socinians and deists.8 Each group, further, had
inner differences as to free-will9 and Providence ; and the theistic
schools of Newton, Clarke, and Leibnitz rejected each other's philo-
sophies as well as that of Descartes. Leibnitz complained grimly
that Newton and his followers had " a very odd opinion concerning
the Work of God," making the universe an imperfect machine, which
the deity had frequently to mend ; and treating space as an organ
by which God perceives tilings, which are thus regarded as not
produced or maintained by him.10 Newton's principles of explana-
tion, he insisted, were those of the materialists.11 John Hutchinson,
a professor at Cambridge, in his Treatise of Poicer, Essential and
Mechanical, also bitterly assailed Newton as a deistical and anti-
scriptural sophist.12 Clarke, on the other hand, declared that the
philosophy of Leibnitz was " tending to banish God from the

1 Macaulay's description of Blount as an atheist is therefore doubly unwarranted.

2 Cp. Dynamic* of Religion, pp. 94-98.

'■'' Continuation cles Pensees Diverses a Voccasion da la Comete cle 1GS0, Amsterdam,

1705, i. 91.

4 Warburton, Divine Legation, vol. ii. preface.

5 Stephen, English Thought, i. 114-18.

G This, according to John Craig, was Newton's opinion. "The reason of his [Newton's]
showing the errors of Cartes's philosophy was because he thought it made on purpose to
be the foundation of infidelity." Letter to Conduitt, April 7. 17-27, in Brewster's Memoirs
of Newton, ii, 315. Clarke, in his Answer to Butler's Fifth Letter, expresses a similar view.

7 " Three Discourses of Happiness, Virtue, and Liberty, Collected from the Works of the
Learn'd Gassendi by Monsieur Bernier. Translated out of the French, 1699."

H Cp. W. Siehel, Bolingbroke and His Times, 1901, i, 175.

9 Sir fjeslie Stephen (i, :;:ii makes the surprising statement that a "dogmatic assertion
of free-will became a mark of the whole deist and semi-deist school." On the contrary,
Hobbes and Anthony Collins, not to speak of Locke, wrote with uncommon power against
the conception of free-will, and bad many disciples on that bea 1.

10 hotter to the Princess of Wales, November, 1715, in Brewster, ii, 2S4-S5.

11 Second Letter to Clarke, par. 1.

12 Abstract from the Works of John Hutchinson, 1755, pp. 149-63.

BEITISH FEEETHOUGHT 151

world." ' Alongside of such internecine strife, it was not surprising
that the great astronomer Halley, who accepted Newton's principles
in physics, was commonly reputed an atheist ; and that the free-
thinkers pitted his name in that connection against Newton's.2 As
it was he who first suggested'5 the idea of the total motion of the
entire solar system in space — described by a modern pietist as " this
great cosmical truth, the grandest in astronomy"'1 — they were not
ill justified. It can hardly be doubted that if intellectual England
could have been polled in 1710, under no restraints from economic,
social, and legal pressure, some form of rationalism inconsistent
with Christianity would have been found to be nearly as common
as orthodoxy. In outlying provinces, in Devon and Cornwall, in
Ulster, in Edinburgh and Glasgow, as well as in the metropolis, the
pressure of deism on the popular creed evoked expressions of Arian
and Socinian thought among the clergy.5 It was, in fact, the
various restraints under notice that determined the outward fortunes
of belief and unbelief, and have substantially determined them since.
When the devout Whiston was deposed from his professorship for
his Arianism, and the unbelieving Saunderson was put in his place,6
and when Sirnson was suspended from his ministerial functions in
Glasgow,' the lesson was learned that outward conformity was the
sufficient way to income.8

Hard as it was, however, to kick against the pricks of law and
prejudice, it is clear that many in tho upper and middle classes
privately did so. The clerical and tho now popular literature of tho
time prove this abundantly. In the Taller and its successors," tire
decorous Addison and the indecorous Steele, neither of them a
competent thinker, frigidly or furiously asperse the new tribe of
freethinkers ; while the evangelically pious Berkeley and tho
extremely unevangelical Swift rival each other in the malice of

1 Clarke's Answer to Leibnitz's First Letter, end.

- Berkeley, Defence of /<' reel Making in Mathematics, par. vii; and Stock's Memoir of
Berkeley. Cp. Brewster, Memoirs of Sen-ton, ii, IDS.

'■'■ In tho Pltilosojihtcul Transactions, 1719, No. 355, i, v, vi.

'! Brewster, More Worlds than One, 1851, p. 110.

5 Becky, Hist, of Knulantl in the Eighteenth Cent. ert. 1S92, iii. 22-24.

r' The tradition of Kaundorson's unbelief is constant. In the memoir prefixed to his
Elements of Algebra (1710) no word is said of his creed, though at death lie received tho
sacrament.

' See The State of the Process depending against Mr. Joint Simson, Kdmimnih. 1728.
Simson always expressed himself piously, hut had thrown out such expressions us llatio
est priiuiiiiiim et fundament urn I hi olo giie. wli ieh " con travelled the Act of Assembly, 1717"
(vol. cited, p. 31'i). The "process" against him he«an in 171 I, and drilled on for nearly
twenty yours, with the result of his rositmini; his professorship of theology at (ilas^ow
in 1729, and seceding from the Associate Presbytery in 1733. Burton, History of Scotland,
viii, :;:•'.) KXJ.

' Cp. the pamphlet hy "A Presbyter of the Church of Kni-dand," attributed to Bishop
Hare, cited in Dynamics of lieligion, pp. 177 7S. and by Becky, iii, 25.

'•> Tatter, No-. 12, 111, 135; Spectator, Nos. 23 1, 38 1 .:;.'. 5'.l'.l ; (Diardiaii, Nos. 3, 0, 27, 35. 3'.),
55, m, 70, 77, S3, 88, 12'i, 130, I'll). Most of the (iunrdian papers cited are hy Berkeley. They
are extremely virulent; but Steele'-) run them hard.

152 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

their attacks on those who rejected their creed. Berkeley, a man
of philosophic genius but intense prepossessions, maintained Chris-
tianity on grounds which are the negation of philosophy.1 Swift,
the genius of neurotic misanthropy, who, in the words of Macaulay,
" though lie had no religion, had a great deal of professional spirit," '
fought venomously for the creed of salvation. And still the deists
multiplied. In the Earl of Shaftesbury3 they had a satirist
with a finer and keener weapon than was wielded by either Steele
or Addison, and a much better temper than was owned by Swift or
Berkeley. He did not venture to parade his unbelief : to do so was
positively dangerous ; but his thrusts at faith left little doubt as to
his theory. He was at once dealt with by the orthodox as an
enemy, and as promptly adopted by the deists as a champion,
important no less for his ability than for his rank. Nor, indeed, is
he lacking in boldness in comparison with contemporary writers.
The anonymous pamphlet entitled The Natural History of Super-
stition, by the deist John Trenchard, M.P. (1709), does not venture
on overt heresy. But Shaftesbury's Letter Concerning Enthusiasm
(1708), his Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709), and
his treatise The Moralists (1709), had need be anonymous because
of their essential hostility to the reigning religious ethic.

Such polemic marks a new stage in rationalistic propaganda.
Swift, writing in 1709, angrily proposes to " prevent the publishing
of such pernicious works as under pretence of freethinking endeavour
to overthrow those tenets in religion which have been held inviolable
in almost all ages."4 But his further protest that " the doctrine of
the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the immortality of the soul, and
even the truth of all revelation, are daily exploded and denied in
books openly printed," points mainly to the Unitarian propaganda.
Among freethinkers he names, in his Argument Against Abolishing
Christianity (1703), Asgill, Coward, Toland, and Tindal. But the
first was an ultra-Christian ; the second was a Christian upholder
of the thesis that spirit is not immaterial ; and the last, at that
date, had published only his Four Discourses (collected in 1709) and
his Bights of the Christian Church, which are anti-clerical, but not

1 Analyst, Queries GO and G2: Defence of Freethinking in Mathematics, 11 5, G, 50. Cp.
Dynamics of Religion, pp. 141-42.

- Letter in De Morgan's Neivton : his Friend : and 7iis Niece, 1SS5, p. GO.

;! The essays in the Characteristics (excepting the Inquiry Concerning Virtue and
Merit, which was published by Toland, without permission, in 1G99) appeared between
1704 and 1711, being collected in the latter year. Shaftesbury died in 1713, in which year
appeared his paper on The Judgment of Hercules.

4 A Project/or the Advancement of Religion. Bohn ed. of Works, iii, 41. In this paper
Swift reveals bis moral standards by the avowal (p. 40) that " hypocrisy is much more

eligible than open infidelity and vice : it wears the livery of religion and is cautious of

giving scandal."

BKITISH FEEETnOUGHT 153

anti-Christian. Prof. Henry Dodwell, who about 1G73 published Two
Letters of Advice, I, For the Susception of Holy Orders ; II, For
Studies Theological, especially such as are Bational, and in 170G an
Epistolary Discourse Concerning the Soul's Natural Mortality, main-
taining the doctrine of conditional immortality,1 which he made
dependent on baptism in the apostolical succession, was a devout
Christian ; and no writer of that date went further. Dodwell is in
fact blamed by Bishop Burnet for stirring up fanaticism against lay-
baptism among dissenters." It would appear that Swift spoke
mainly from hearsay, and on the strength of the conversational
freethinking so common in society.'1 But the anonymous essays of
Shaftesbury which were issued in 1709 might be the immediate
provocation of his outbreak.4

An official picture of the situation is formally drawn in A Repre-
sentation, of the Present State of Religion, with regard to the late
excessive growth of infidelity, heresy, and profancness, drawn up by
the Upper House of Convocation of the province of Canterbury in
1711." This sets forth, as a result of the disorders of the Eebellion,
a growth of all manner of unbelief and profanity, including denial of
inspiration and the authority of the canon ; the likening of Christian
miracles to heathen fables ; the treating of all religious mysteries as
absurd speculations ; Arianism and Socinianism and scoffing at the
doctrine of the Trinity ; denial of natural immortality ; Erastianism ;
mockery of baptism and the Lord's Supper ; decrying of all priests
as impostors ; the collecting and reprinting of infidel works ; and
publication of mock catechisms. It is explained that all such
printing has greatly increased " since the expiration of the Act for
restraining the press "; and mention is made of an Arian work just
published to which the author has put his name, and which he has
dedicated to the Convocation itself. This was the first volume of
Winston's Primitive Christianity Revived, the work of a devout
eccentric, who had just before been deprived of his professorship at
Cambridge for his orally avowed heresy. Whiston, whose cause was

1 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. Hut a doctrine of
conditional immortality had been explicitly put by Locke in his lleaso)iableness of
Christianity, lttr,, p. l:{. Cp. I'rof. Kraser's Locke, 1890, pp. 2n9-60, and fox Bourne's
Life, of Locke, ii, 287. The difference was that Dodwell elaborately gave his reasons,
which, as Or. Clarke put it, made ":ill Hood men sorry, and all profane men rejoice."

- Ilia torn of Ins (Jii-ii Time., ed. 18:38, p. 8,87.

:! Compare his ironical Argument Against Abolishing Christianity. 1708.

4 lie had, however, hailed tin- anonymous Letter Concerning Jlnthusiasm as "very
well writ." believing it to Ik; by a friend of his own -(Robert Hunter, to whom, accordingly,
it has since been mistaken^ attributed by various bibliographers, including Barhier).
" Knthu-dasm," ;is meaning " popular fanaticism," was of course as repellent to a Church-
man as to the i lei I -.

•"' Printed m folio 1711. lie]), in vol. xi of the llurleian Miscellany, p. 108 sii. (-2nd ed.
p. 10J mi.).

154 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

championed, and whose clerical opponents were lampooned, in an
indecorous but vigorous sketch, The Tryal of William Whiston,
Clerk, for defaming and denying the Holy Trinity, before the Lord
Chief Justice Reason (1712 ; 3rd ed. 1740), always remained per-
fectly devout in his Arian orthodoxy ; but his and his friends'
arguments were rather better fitted to make deists than to persuade
Christians ; and Convocation's appeal for a new Act " restraining the
present excessive and scandalous liberty of printing wicked books at
home, and importing the like from abroad " was not responded to.
There was no love lost between Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury ; but
the government in which the former, a known deist, was Secretary
of State, could hardly undertake to suppress the works of the latter.

§ 2

Deism had been thus made in a manner fashionable when, in
1713, Anthony Collins (1676-1729) began a new development by
his Discourse of Frccth inking. He had previously published a notably
frecthinking Essay Concerning the Use of Reason (1707), albeit
without specific impeachment of the reigning creed ; carried on
a discussion with Clarke on the question of the immateriality of the
soul ; and issued treatises entitled Priestcraft in Perfection (1709,
dealing with the history of the Thirty-nine Articles)2 and A Vindica-
tion of the Divine Attributes (1710), exposing the Hobbesian theism
of Archbishop King on lines followed twenty years later by Berkeley
in his Minute Pliilosophcr. But none of these works aroused such
a tumult as the Discourse of Frecthinking, which may be said to
sum up and unify the drift not only of previous English freethinking,
but of the great contribution of Bayle, whose learning and temper
influence all English deism from Shaftesbury onwards/ Collins's
book, however, was unique in its outspokenness. To the reader of
to-day, indeed, it is no very aggressive performance : the writer was
a man of imperturbable amenity and genuine kindliness of nature ;
and his style is the completest possible contrast to that of the furious
replies it elicited. It was to Collins that Locke wrote, in 1703 :
" Believe it, my good friend, to love truth for truth's sake is the

1 Dr. E. Syngc. of Dublin (afterwards Archbishop of Tuam), in his Religion Tryed by
the Test of Sob,')- 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."

- Leslie afhrins 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 lucks bis amenity, and is evidently not' by him.

'■'■ An English translation of the Dictionary, in 5 vols, folio, with "many passages
restored," appeared in 1731.

BRITISH FREETHOUGHT 155

principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of
all other virtues ; and, if I mistake not, you have as much of it as
I ever met with in anybody."1 The Discourse does no discredit to
this uncommon encomium, being a luminous and learned plea for the
conditions under which alone truth can be prosperously studied, and
the habits of mind which alone can attain it. Of the many replies,
the most notorious is that of Bentley writing as Phileleuthcrus
Lipsiensis, a performance which, on the strength of its author's
reputation for scholarship, has been uncritically applauded by not
a few critics, of whom some of the most eminent do not appear to
have read Collins's treatise.2 Bentley's is in reality pre-eminent only
for insolence and bad faith, the latter complicated by lapses of scholar-
ship hardly credible on its author's part.

See the details in Dynamics of Religion, ch. vii. I am com-
pelled to call attention to the uncritical verdict given on this
matter by the late Sir Leslie Stephen, who asserts {English
Thought, i, 200) that Bentley convicts Collins of "unworthy
shuffling " in respect of his claim that freethinking had " banished
the devil." Bentley affirmed that this had been the work, not of
the freethinkers, but of " the Royal Society, the Boyles and the
Newtons"; and Sir Leslie comments that " nothing could be
more true." Nothing could be more untrue. As we have seen
(above p. 82), Boyle was a convinced believer in demonology ;
and Newton did absolutely nothing to disperse it. Glanvill,
a Royal Society man, had been a vehement supporter of the
belief in witchcraft; and the Society as such never meddled
with the matter. As to Collins's claim for the virtue of free-
thinking, Sir Leslie strangely misses the point that Collins
meant by the word not unbelief, but free inquiry. He could not
have meant to say that Holland was full of deists. In Collins's
sense of the word, the Royal Society's work in general was
freethinking work.

One mistranslation which appears to have been a printer's error,
and one mis-spelling of a Greek name, are the only heads on winch
Bentley confutes his author. He had, in fact, neither the kind of
knowledge nor the candour that could lit him to handle the problems
raised. It was Bentley's cue to represent Collins as an atheist,
though he was a very pronounced deist;'5 and in the first uproar

i ,1 C Urrtion f,f Srrrral Vim i of Mr. John Lorl-c. 17-20, p. 271.

- I'. .//. Miir); I'aUi-on, who culls CollinVs hook of 17m pattes a "small tract."

;l"l:(iior:i ," Collins writes, " is Lin: foundation of Atheism, ami KivcLhmkiri!,' the

r-nre oi it" i Iti-r mrsr of }■'<■■ •■tlii.iil:i,t<i. p. KJ.i. Like Newton, he contemplated only mi

mipo ol.' L'.'nci m, never formulate.! ov a:iv writer. The /' Uir-il I'rinciiilrs of

/.'. ojion, Salnril and llm-ild., of ] Jr. OcoriM Cneyne U7D"i, -hid el. 171..), si in ihirly

I - • nid that " il tile mo dern \i.r. Newtonian] philo mil', lemons! r it.es nothing

it, iii fall i uly prove Ulii'i-m lulji-i . i . n ice.'' 'I' nu lliu vindicator

oi " n .. ;ion " v, as writ in;; in tie- key of the deist.

156 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

Collins thought it well to fly to Holland to avoid arrest.1 But deism
was too general to permit of such a representative being exiled ; and
he returned to study quietly, leaving Bentley's vituperation and
prevarication unanswered, with the other attacks made upon him.
In 1715 he published his brief but masterly Inquiry Concerning
Human Liberty — anonymous, like all his works — which remains
unsurpassed as a statement of the case for Determinism.2

The welcome given to Bentley's attack upon Collins by the
orthodox was warm in proportion to their sense of the general
inadequacy of the apologetics on their side. Amid the common
swarm of voluble futilities put forth by Churchmen, the strident
vehemence as well as the erudite repute of the old scholar were fitted
at least to attract the attention of lay readers in general. Most of
the contemporary vindications of the faith, however, were fitted only
to move intelligent men to new doubt or mere contempt. A sample
of the current defence against deism is the treatise of Joseph Smith
on The Unreasonableness of Deism, or, the Certainty of a Divine
Revelation, etc. 1720, where deists in general are called "the Wicked
and Unhappy men we have to deal with ":3 and the argumentation
consists in alleging that a good God must reveal himself, and that if
the miracle stories of the New Testament had been false the Jews
would have exposed and discarded them. Against such nugatory
traditionalism, the criticism of Collins shone with the spirit of
science. Not till 1723 did he publish his next work, A Discourse of
the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, a weighty attack
on the argument from prophecy, to which the replies numbered
thirty-five ; on which followed in 1727 his Scheme of Literal Prophecy
Considered, a reply to criticisms. The former work was pronounced
by Warburton one of the most plausible ever written against Chris-
tianity, and he might well say so. It faced the argument from
prophecy not merely with the skepticism of the ordinary deist, but
with that weapon of critical analysis of which the use had been briefly
shown by Hobbes and Spinoza. Apparently for the first time, he
pointed out that the " virgin prophecy " in Isaiah had a plain reference
to contemporary and not to future events ; he showed that the out
of Egypt " prophecy referred to the Hebrew past ; and he revived the
ancient demonstration of Porphyry that the Book of Daniel is

1 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. H. P. A. 1910, p. 38) is also astray.

- Second ed. 1717. Another writer, William Lyons, was on the same track, publishing
The Infallibility of Human Judgment, its Dignity and Excellence ('2nd ed. 172U), and
A Discourse of the Necessity of Human Actions (1730).

3 Work cited, p. 13.

BRITISH FREETIIOUGHT 157

Maccabean. The general dilemma put by Collins — that either the
prophecies must be reduced, textually and otherwise, to non-
prophetic utterances, or Christianity must give up prophetic claims
— has never since been solved.

The deistic movement was now in full flood, the acute MANDE-
VILLE having issued in 1720 his Free Thoughts on Religion, and in
1723 a freshly-expanded edition of his very anti-evangelical Fable of
the Bees ; while an eccentric ex-clergyman, Thomas WOOLSTON,
who had already lost his fellowship of Sidney-Sussex College, Cam-
bridge, for vagaries of doctrine and action, contributed in 172G-28
his freshly reasoned but heedlessly ribald Discourses on Miracles.
Voltaire, who was in England in 1728, tells that thirty thousand
copies were sold;2 while sixty pamphlets were written in opposi-
tion. Woolston's were indeed well fitted to arouse wrath and
rejoinder. The dialectic against the argument from miracles in
general, and the irrelevance or nullity of certain miracles in
particular, is really cogent, and anticipates at points the thought
of the nineteenth century. But Woolston was of the tribe who
can argue no issue without jesting, and who stamp levity on
every cause by force of innate whimsicality. Thus he could best
sway the light-hearted when his cause called for the wdnning-over
of the earnest. Arguments that might have been made convincing
were made to pass as banter, and serious spirits were repelled.
It was during this debate that CONYEES MlDDLETON, Fellow
of Trinity College, Cambridge, produced his Letter from Piomc
(1729), wherein the part of paganism in Christianity is so set forth
as to carry inference further than the argument ostensibly goes. In
that year the heads of Oxford University publicly lamented the
spread of open deism among the students ; and the proclamation
did nothing to check the contagion. In Foggs Weekly Journal of
July 4, 1730, it is announced that " one of the principal colleges in
Oxford has of late been infested with deists ; and that three deistical
students have been expelled ; and a fourth lias had his degree
deferred two years, during which he is to be closely confined in
college ; and, among other things, is to translate Leslie's Short and

1 As to whose positions soo a paper in the writer's Pioneer Humanists, 1007.

2 There were six separate Discourses. Voltaire speaks of "three editions coup sur
cnii p of ten thousand each" (Lettre sur Irs auteurs Anolnis in (Kuvres, ed. 1702, lxviii,
3.7)). This seems extremely unlikely as to any oiks Discourse; and even ,">.0i)O 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 cii^r, Woolston's
Discourses are now seldouier met, with than Collins's Discourse of Frrethinkina. Alherti
(Jiriefe hcl.reffentL <lc.n Xust/nvl de.r Jtelit/ion in (Iross-Hrittuniiien) wrote in I7.V2 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.

158 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

Easy Method with the Deists." 1 It is not hard to divine the effect
of such exegetic methods. In 1731, the author of an apologetic
pamphlet in reply to Woolston laments that even at the universities
young men " too often " become tainted with " infidelity "; and, on
the other hand, directing his battery against those who " causelessly
profess to build their skeptical notions " on the writings of Locke,
he complains of Dr. Iloldsworth and other academic polemists who
had sought to rob orthodoxy of the credit of such a champion as
Locke by ' consigning him over to that class of freethinkers and
skeptics to which he was an adversary." 2

With the most famous work of MATTHEW TlNDAL,3 Christianity
as Old as Creation (1730), the excitement seems to have reached
high-water mark. Here was vivacity without flippancy, and argu-
ment without irrelevant mirth ; and the work elicited from first to
last over a hundred and fifty replies, at home and abroad. Tindal's
thesis is that the idea of a good God involved that of a simple,
perfect, and universal religion, which must always have existed
among mankind, and must have essentially consisted in moral
conduct. Christianity, insofar as it is true, must therefore be a
statement of this primordial religion ; and moral reason must be
the test, not tradition or Scripture. One of the first replies was the
Vindication of Scripture by Waterland, to which Middleton promptly
offered a biting retort in a Letter to Dr. Waterland (1731) that serves
to show the slightness of its author's faith. After demolishing
Waterland's case as calculated rather to arouse than to allay
skepticism, he undertakes to offer a better reply of his own. It
is to the simple effect that some religion is necessary to mankind
in modern as in ancient times ; that Christianity meets the need
very well; and that to set up reason in its place is "impracticable"
and " the attempt therefore foolish and irrational," in addition to
being ' criminal and immoral," when politically considered.'1 Such
legalist criticism, if seriously meant, was hardly likely to discredit
Tindal's book. Its directness and simplicity of appeal to what passed
for theistic common-sense were indeed fitted to give it the widest
audience yet won by any deist ; and its anti-clericalism would carry
it far among his fellow Whigs to begin with.5 One tract of the

1 Tyerman's Life of Wesley, eel. 1871, i, 65-66. 2 The, Infuld Convicted, 1731. pp. 33, 62.

3 Tindal (1653-1733) was the son of a clergyman, and in 1678 was elected a Fellow of All
Souls, Oxford. From 16S5 to 16S8 he was a Roman Catholic. Under William III ho 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. i Middleton's Works, '2nd ed. 1755, iii. 50-56.

5 Tindal (Voltaire tells) regarded Fope as devoid of genius and imagination, and so
trebly earned his place in the Dunciad.

BRITISH FREETHOUGHT 159

period, dedicated to the Queen Regent, complains that " the present
raging infidelity threatens an universal infection," and that it is not
confined to the capital, but " is disseminated even to the confines of
your kingdom." 1 Tindal, like Collins, wrote anonymously, and so
escaped prosecution, dying in 1733, when the second part of his
book, left ready for publication, was deliberately destroyed by Bishop
Gibson, into whoso hands it came. In 1736 he and Shaftesbury are
described by an orthodox apologist as the "two oracles of deism."'

Woolston, who put his name to his books, after being arrested
in May, 1728, and released on bail, was prosecuted in 1729 on the
charge of blasphemy, in that lie had derided the gospel miracles
and represented Jesus alternately as an impostor, a sorcerer, and a
magician. His friendly counsel ingeniously argued that Woolston
had aimed at safeguarding Christianity by returning to the allegorical
method of the early Fathers ; and that he had shown his reverence
for Jesus and religion by many specific expressions ; but the jury
took a simpler view, and, without leaving the court, found AVoolston
guilty. He was sentenced to pay a fine of £100, to suffer a year's
imprisonment, and either to find surety for his future good conduct
or pay or give sureties for £2,000.3 He is commonly said to have
paid the penalty of imprisonment for the rest of his life (d. 1733).
being unable to pay the fine of £100 ; but Voltaire positively asserts
that " nothing is more false " than the statement that he died in
prison ; adding : " Several of my friends have seen him in his house :
he died there, at liberty." i The solution of the conflict seems to be
that lie lived in his own house " in the rules of " the King's Bench
Prison — that is, in the precincts, and under technical supervision.''
In any case, ho was sentenced ; and the punishment was the measure
of the anger felt at the continuous advance of deistic opinions, or at
least against hostile criticism of the Scriptures.

§ 3
Unitarianism, formerly a hated heresy, was now in comparison
leniently treated, because of its deference to Scriptural authority,

1 .■( Layman's Faith " By a Freethinker and a Christian," 1733.

- Title-page of Rev. l-llisha Smith's Cure of Deism, 1st ert. 173(5 ; 3rd cd. 1710.

''■ Lo Moine, Dissertation historique sur Irs ee.rits tie, Woolston, sa condemnation, etc.
pp. 2'J 31, cited by Siilclii. Lettres sur le. Deismc, 3759, ]). 07 so.

4 Lettre sur le.s auteurs Anr/lais, as cited. Voltaire tells that, when a she-bigot one day
spat in Wool- ton's face, lie calmly remarked : " It was so that the .lews treated your Cod."
Another story reads like a carefully-improved version of the foregoing. A woman is said
to have accosted him as a scoundrel, and risked him why Vie was not yet hanged. On his
asking her grounds for such an accost, she replied : "You have writ against my Saviour.
U'hal 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 a.m." Life of Mr. Woolston, prefixed to a reprint
of his collected Discourse.*, 1733, p. 21. Cp. Salchi, p. 79.

•"' Lifecited,!pp. 522, 2(3, -J.'.).

160 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

Where the deists rejected all revelation, Unitarianism held by the
Bible, calling only for a revision of the central Christian dogma. It
had indeed gained much theological ground in the past quarter of a
century. Nothing is more instructive in the culture-history of the
period than the rapidity with which the Presbyterian succession of
clergy passed from violent Calvinism, by way of Baxterian "
Arminianism, to Arianism, and thence in many cases to Unitarianism.
First they virtually adopted the creed of the detested Laud, whom
their fathers had hated for it ; then they passed step by step to a
heresy for which their fathers had slain men. A closely similar
process took place in Geneva, where Servetus after death triumphed
over his slayer.1 In 1691, after a generation of common suffering,
a precarious union was effected between the English Presbyterians,
now mostly semi-Arminians, and the Independents, still mostly
Calvinists : but in 1691 it was dissolved.2 Thereafter the former
body, largely endowed by the will of Lady Hewley in 1710, became
as regards its Trust Deeds the freest of all the English sects in
matters of doctrine.3 The recognition of past changes had made
their clergy chary of a rigid subscription. Naturally the movement
did not gain in popularity as it fell away from fanaticism ; but the
decline of Nonconformity in the first half of the eighteenth century
was common to all the sects, and did not specially affect the
Presbyterians. Of the many " free " churches established in England
and Wales after the Act of Toleration (1689), about half were extinct
in 1715 ;4 and of the Presbyterian churches the number in Yorkshire
alone fell from fifty-nine in 1715 to a little over forty in 1730.5
Economic causes were probably the main ones. The State-endowed
parish priest had an enduring advantage over his rival. But the
Hewley endowment gave a certain economic basis to the Presby-
terians ; and the concern for scholarship which had always marked
their body kept them more open to intellectual influences than the
ostensibly more free-minded and certainly more democratic sectaries
of the Independent and Baptist bodies.6

The result was that, with free Trust Deeds, the Presbyterians

1 .4?; Historical Defence of the Trustees of Lady Hewley's Foundations, by the Rev.
Joseph Hunter, 1834, pp. 17, 3.r> ; The History, Opinions, and present legal position of the
English Presbyterians, 1831, pp. 18, 29; Skeats, History of the Free Churches of England,
ed. Miall, p. 210.

2 Hunter, as cited, p. 17 ; History of the Presbyterians, as cited, p. 10 ; Fletcher, History
of Independency, 1862, iv, 266-67. ;; Hunter, pp. 37. 39.

4 Skeats, as cited, p. 226. 5 Hunter, pp. 24-25.

6 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.

BKITISH FREETHOUGHT 161

openly exhibited a tendency which -was latent in all the other
churches. In 1719, at a special assembly o{ Presbyterian ministers
at Salters' Hall, it was decided by a majority of 73 to G9 that
subscription to the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity should no
longer be demanded of candidates for the ministry.1 Of the 73,
the majority professed to bo themselves orthodox ; but there was
no question that antitrinitarian opinions had become common,
especially in Devonshire, where the heresy case of Mr. Peirce of
Exeter had brought the matter to a crisis." From this date " Arian "
opinions spread more rapidly in the dwindling denomination, shading
yet further into Unitarianism, step for step with the deistic move-
ment in the Church. " In less than half a century the doctrines of
the great founders of Presbytcrianism could scarcely be heard from
any Presbyterian pulpit in England."3 "In the English Presby-
terian ministry the process was from Arian opinions to those called

Unitarian by a gradual sliding," even as the transition had been

made from Calvinism to Arminianism in the previous century.'

Presbyterianism having thus come pretty much into line with
Anglicanism on the old question of predestination, while still
holding fast by Scriptural standards as against the deists, the old
stress of Anglican dislike had slackened, despite the rise of the new
heretical element. Unitarian arguments were now forthcoming from
quarters not associated with dissent, as in the case of TliOMAS
CHUBB'S first treatise, The Supremacy of the Father Asserted (1715),
courteously dedicated " To the Reverend the Clergy, and in particular
to the Right Reverend Gilbert Lord Bishop of Sarum, our vigilant
and laborious Diocesan." Chubb (1G79-1717) had been trained to
glove-making, and, as his opponents took care to record, acted also
as a tallow-chandler;5 and the good literary quality of his work
made some sensation in an England which had not learned to think
respectfully of Bunyan. Chubb's impulse to write had come from
the perusal of Whiston's Primitive Christianity Jlevived, in 1711,
and that single-minded Arian published his book for him.

The Unitarians would naturally repudiate all connection with
such a performance as A Sober Reply to Mr. Iliggs's Merry
Arguments front, the Light of Nature for the Tritheistic Doctrine
of the Trinity, which was condemned by the House of Lords on

1 History, cited, p. 22; Hunter, pp. 41 15; Kkeats, pp. 213-14.

- Slants, pp. 210- Hi, 215 .sc/. '■'■ Kkeats, p. 2IS. '1 Hunter, p. 50.

5 As Sir Leslie Stephen has observed [HiKjlish Tliouriht, i, Ml), Chubb "deserves the
praise of Malthusians." Having a Kuflicieney of means for himself, but not more, ho
"lived a single life, jiiduint; it greatly improper to introduce a family into the world
win i out a pro, peel of maintaining them." The proverb as to mouths and meat, he drily
oh erves, had not been verified in his experience. (The Author's Accuiuil of Jlimsclf, pref.
to Posthumous Works, 171b, i, p. iv.)

VOL. II M

162 EIGHTEENTH CENTUKY

February 12, 1720, to be burnt, as having " in a daring, impious
manner, ridiculed the doctrine of the Trinity and all revealed
religion." Its author, Joseph Hall, a serjeant-at-arms to the
King, seems to have undergone no punishment, and more decorous
antitrinitarians received public countenance. Thus the Unitarian
Edward Ehvall,1 who had published a book called A True Testimony
for God and his Sacred Law (1721), for which he was prosecuted at
Stafford in 1726, was allowed by the judge to argue his cause fully,
and was unconditionally acquitted, to the displeasure of the clergy.

§ 4

Anti-scriptural writers could not hope for such toleration, being
doubly odious to the Church. Berkeley, in 1721, had complained
bitterly2 of the general indifference to religion, which his writings
had done nothing to alter ; and in 1736 he angrily demanded that
blasphemy should be punished like high treason.8 His Minute
Philosopher (1732) betrays throughout his angry consciousness of
the vogue of freethinking after twenty years of resistance from his
profession ; and that performance is singularly ill fitted to alter the
opinions of unbelievers. In his earlier papers attacking them he had
put a stress of malice that, in a mind of his calibre, is startling even
to the student of religious history.4 It reveals him as no less
possessed by the passion of creed than the most ignorant priest
of his Church. For him all freethinkers were detested disturbers of
his emotional life; and of the best of them, as Collins, Shaftesbury,
and Spinoza, he speaks with positive fury. In the Minute Philosopher,
half-conscious of the wrongness of his temper, he sets himself to
make the unbelievers figure in dialogue as ignorant, pretentious, and
coarse-natured ; while his own mouthpieces are meant to be benign,
urbane, wise, and persuasive. Yet in the very pages so planned he
unwittingly reveals that the freethinkers whom he goes about to
caricature were commonly good-natured in tone, while he becomes
as virulent as ever in his eagerness to discredit them. Not a
paragraph in the book attains to the spirit of judgment or fairness;
all is special pleading, overstrained and embittered sarcasm, rankling
animus. Gifted alike for literature and for philosophy, keen of vision
in economic problems where the mass of men were short-sighted, ho
was flawed on the side of his faith by the hysteria to which it always

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

2 E unity 'Towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain.

3 Discourse to Magistrates. i Guardian, >."os. 3, 55, SS.

BRITISH FEEETHOUGHT 163

stirred him. No man was less qualified to write a well-balanced
dialogue as between bis own side and its opponents. To candour bo
never attains, unless it be in the sense that his passion recoils on his
own case. Even while setting up ninepins of ill-put " infidel "
argument to knock down, he elaborates futilities of rebuttal, indi-
cating to every attentive reader the slightness of his rational basis.

On the strength of this performance he might fitly be termed the
most ill-conditioned sophist of his age, were it not for the perception
that religious feeling in him has become a pathological phase, and
that he suffers incomparably more from his own passions than ho
can inflict on his enemies by his eager thrusts at them. More than
almost any gifted pietist of modern times he sets us wondering at the
power of creed in certain cases to overgrow judgment and turn to
naught the rarest faculties. No man in Berkeley's day had a finer
natural lucidity and suppleness of intelligence ; yet perhaps no
polemist on his side did less either to make converts or to establish
a sound intellectual practice. Plain men on the freethinking side ho
must either have bewildered by his metaphysic or revolted by
his spite ; while to the more efficient minds he stood revealed as a
kind of inspired child, rapt in the construction and manipulation of
a set of brilliant sophisms which availed as much for any other
creed as for his own. To the armoury of Christian apologetic now
growing up in England he contributed a special form of the skeptical
argument : freethinkers, he declared, made certain arbitrary or
irrational assumptions in accepting Newton's doctrine of fluxions,
and it was only their prejudice that prevented them from being
similarly accommodating to Christian mysteries.1 It is a kind of
argument dear to minds pre- convinced and incapable of a logical
revision, but worse than inept as against opponents ; and it availed
no more in Berkeley's hands than it had done in those of Iluet."
To theosophy, indeed, Berkeley rendered a more successful service in
presenting it with the no better formula of "existence [i.e., in con-
sciousness] dependent upon consciousness " — a verbalism which has
served the purposes of theology in the philosophic schools down till
our own day. For his, however, the popular polemic value of such
a theorem must have been sufficiently countervailed by bis vehement
championship of the doctrine of passive obedience in its most extreme
form — "that loyalty is a virtue or moral duty; and disloyalty or
rebellion, in the most strict and proper sense, a vice or crime against
the law of nature." ''

1 The Analyst, QuorioH, 55-07. - S( c above, pp. l'2(i 2a.

" Discourse of Passive Obedience, i -JO.

164 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

It belonged to the overstrung temperament of Berkeley that, like
a nervous artist, he should figure to himself all his freethinking
antagonists as personally odious, himself growing odious under the
obsession ; and he solemnly asserts, in his Discourse to Magistrates,
that there had been " lately set up within this city of Dublin " an
" execrable fraternity of blasphemers," calling themselves " blasters,"
and forming " a distinct society, whereof the proper and avowed
business shall be to shock all serious Christians by the most impious
and horrid blasphemies, uttered in the most public manner." 1 There
appears to be not a grain of truth in this astonishing assertion, to
which no subsequent historian has paid the slightest attention. In
a period in which freethinking books had been again and again
burned in Dublin by the public hangman, such a society could be
projected only in a nightmare ; and Berkeley's hallucination may
serve as a sign of the extent to which his judgment had been
deranged by his passions.2 His forensic temper is really on a level
with that of the most incompetent swashbucklers on his side.

When educated Christians could be so habitually envenomed as
was Berkeley, there was doubtless a measure of contrary heat
among English unbelievers ; but, apart altogether from what could
be described as blasphemy, unbelief abounded in the most cultured
society of the day. Bolingbroke's rationalism had been privately
well known ; and so distinguished a personage as the brilliant and
scholarly Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, hated by Pope, is one of
the reputed freethinkers of her time.'5 In the very year of the
publication of Berkeley's Minute Philosopher, the first two epistles
of the Essay on Man of his own friend and admirer, Pope, gave
a new currency to the form of optimistic deism created by
Shaftesbury, and later elaborated by Bolingbroke. Pope was
always anxiously hostile in his allusions to the professed free-
thinkers 4 — among whom Bolingbroke only posthumously enrolled
himself — and in private he specially aspersed Shaftesbury, from
whom he had taken so much ;5 but his prudential tactic gave all

1 Worlds, ed. 1837, p. 352.

2 See the whole context;, which palpitates with excitement.

3 .Mr. Walter Sichcl UJolingbnike 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.

■' /■,'.'/. Diiiiciml, ii, 399; iii, '212; iv, 4'.)-2.

5 Voltaire commented pointedly on Pope's omission to make any reference to
Shaftesbury, while vending his doctrine. (Li.tlres Pliilosophiques. xxii.) As a matter
of fact Pope does in the Dunciad (iv, 488) refer maliciously to the Theocles of Shaftes-
bury'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 Char-
acteristic*, ed. l'JOU (rep. in Pioneer Humanists) ; and cp. W. K. Scott, Francis Hutchusun,
l'JOU, p. 101.

BRITISH FEEETHOUGHT 165

the more currency to the virtual deism he enunciated. Given out
without any critical allusion to Christianity, and put forward as
a vindication of the ways of God to men, it gave to heresy, albeit
in a philosophically incoherent exposition, the status of a well-bred
piety. A good authority pronounces that " the Essay on Man did
more to spread English deism in France than all the works of
Shaftesbury";1 and wo have explicit testimony that the poet
privately avowed the deistic view of things."

The line of the Essay which now reads :

The soul, uneasy and confined from home,
originally ran "at home"; but, says Warton, " this expression
seeming to exclude a future existence, as, to speak the plain
truth, it teas intended to do, it was altered" — presumably by
Warburton. (Warton's Essay on Pope, 4th ed. ii, 67.) The
Spinozistie or pantheistic character of much of the Essay on
Man was noted by various critics, in particular by the French
Academician De Crousaz {Exanicn de I'Essay de M. Pope sur
V Homme, 1718, p. 90, etc.) After promising to justify the ways
of God to man, writes Crousaz (p. 33), Pope turns round and
justifies man, leaving God charged with all men's sins. When
the younger Racine, writing to the Chevalier Ramsay in 1712,
charged the Essay with irreligion, Pope wrote him repudiating
alike Spinoza and Leibnitz. (Warton, ii, 121.) In 1755,
however, the Abbe Gauchat renewed the attack, declaring that
the Essay was "neither Christian nor philosophic" (Lettres
Critiques, i, 316). Warburton at first charged the poem with
rank atheism, and afterwards vindicated it in his manner.
(Warton, i, 125.) But in Germany, in the youth of Goethe,
we find the Essay regarded by Christians as an unequivocally
deistic poem. (Goethe's Wahrheit unci Dichtung, Th. II, B. vii :
Werke, cd. 1SG6, xi, 203.) And by a modern Christian polemist
the Essay is described as " the best positive result of English
deism in the eighteenth century" (Gostwick, German Culture
and Christianity, 1832, p. 31).

In point of fact, deism was the fashionable way of thinking among
cultured people. Though Voltaire testifies from personal know-
ledge that there were in England in his day many principled atheists,'
there was little overt atheism, whether by reason of the special

' Texte. nnuispfiu ami thr Cosmopolitan Spirit in TAtrraturr. Y.na.. tr. pp. 117 is.

'■* Chesterfield in bis Clio rartrrx dipp. to the Lcttrrs) testifies Unit I'opc " \v;is a deist
ludiiiviw; in a future state: this lie lias often owned himself tome." (I'.nulsliiiw's ed. of

. iii. 1110.) Chesterfield makes a similar statement concernim,' Queen Caroline :
" After puzzling herself in all the whimsies and fant;i-l ical speculal ions of different sects,
hhe fixed herself ultimately in Deism, believing in a future state." (I<1. p. 1 !()ii.)

■■ hirt. I'hilon. art. Atiikk, 5 ■>.

' Wise, in his adaptation of Cudworth, A Confutation of thr Hrason and Pliilosophy nf
Athfium U7(>;), writes (i. :,) that "the philosophical athewts nre hut few in number," nnd
their objection o weak "as Unit they deserve not a he.irin:; out lather ne;:leet"; but
confusedly noes on to admit that "one or two broaeliers of 'em maybe thought able to
infect a whole nation, as sad experience tells us."

166 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

odium attaching to that way of thought, or of a real production of
theistic belief by the concurrence of the deistic propaganda on this
head with that of the clergy, themselves in so many cases deists.1
Bishop Burnet, in the Conclusion to the History of his Own Time,
pronounces that " there are few atheists, but many infidels, who
are indeed very little better than the atheists." Collins observed
that nobody had doubted the existence of God until the Boyle
lecturers began to prove it ; and Clarke had more than justified the
jest by arguing, in his Boyle Lectures for 1705, that all deism
logically leads to atheism. But though the apologists roused much
discussion on the theistic issue, the stress of the apologetic literature
passed from the theme of atheism to that of deism. Shaftesbury's
early Inquiry Concerning Virtue had assumed the existence of a good
deal of atheism ; but his later writings, and those of his school, do
not indicate much atheistic opposition.2 Even the revived discus-
sion on the immateriality and immortality of the soul — which began
with the Grand Essay of Dr. William Coward,3 in 1701, and was
taken up, as we have seen, by the non-juror Dodwell i — -was
conducted on either orthodox or deistic lines. Coward wrote as
a professed Christian,' to maintain, against impostures of philo-
sophy," that "matter and motion must be the foundation of thought
in men and brutes." Collins maintained against Clarke the pro-
position that matter is capable of thought ; and SAMUEL STEUTT
("of the Temple ")i whose Philosophical Inquiry into the Physical
Spring of Human Actions, and the Immediate Cause of Thinking
(1732), is a most tersely cogent sequence of materialistic argument,
never raises any question of deity. The result was that the problem
of "materialism" was virtually dropped, Strutt's essay in particular
passing into general oblivion.

It was replied to, however, with the Inquiry of Collins, as
late as 17G0, by a Christian controversialist who admits Strutt

1 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 this Gospels of Christ." Natural Heligion Insufficient (Edinburgh),
L7U, p. 25. Cp. pp. 23, 26-27, 5;), etc. JSishop 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.
1834, pp. 907-010.)

~ The Moralists deals rather with strict skepticism than with substantive atheism.

:! The, Grand Essay : or, a Vindication of Reason and Heligion against Impostures of
Philosophy. The book was, on March IS, 1704, condemned by the House of Commons to
be burned in Palace Yard, along with its author's Second Thoughts Concerning the
Human Saul 1 1702). A second ed. of the latter appeared soon.'after, 4 Above, p. 153.

■"' .Air. Herbert Paul, in his essay on Swift (Men and Letters, 1001, p. 207), 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 (Tab le 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.

BKITISH FEEETHOUGHT 167

to have boon " a gentleman of an excellent genius for philo-
sophical inquiries, and a close reasoner from those principles he
laid down" (An Essay towards demonstrating the Immateriality
and Free Agency of the Soul, 17G0, p. 91). The Rev. Mr. Monk,
in his Life of Bentlcy (2nd ed. 1833, ii, 391), absurdly speaks of
Strutt as having " dressed up the arguments of Lord Herbert
of Cherbury and other enemies of religion in a new shape."
The reverend gentleman cannot have paid any attention to the
arguments either of Herbert or of Strutt, which have no more
in common than those of Toland and Hume. Strutt's book
was much too closely reasoned to be popular. His name was
for the time, however, associated with a famous scandal at
Cambridge University. When in 1739 proceedings were taken
against what was described as an " atheistical society " there,
Strutt was spoken of as its " oracle." One of the members was
Paul Wbitehead, satirized by Pope. Another, Tinkler Ducket,
a Fellow of Caius College, in holy orders, was prosecuted in the
Vice-Chancellor's Court on the twofold charge of proselytizing
for atheism and of attempting to seduce a " female." In his
defence he explained that he had been for some time " once
more a believer in God and Christianity"; but was nevertheless
expelled. See Monk's Life of Bentlcy, as cited, ii, 391 sq.

§ 5

No less marked is the failure to develop the "higher criticism"
from the notable start made in 1739 in the very remarkable Inquiry
into the Jeivish and Christian Bcvelations by Samuel Parvish, who
made the vital discovery that Deuteronomy is a product of the
seventh century B.C.1 His book, which is in the form of a dialogue
between a Christian and a Japanese, went into a second edition
(1716) ; but bis idea struck too deep for the critical faculty of that
age, and not till the nineteenth century was the clue found again
by De Wette, in Germany.2 Parvish came at the end of tbo main
deistic movement,'' and by that time the more open-minded men
had come to a point of view from which it did not greatly matter
when Deuteronomy was written, or precisely how a cultus was built
up ; while orthodoxy could not dream of abandoning its view of
inspiration. There was thus an arrost alike of historical criticism
and of the higher philosophic thought under the stress of the
concrete disputes over ethics, miracles, prophecy, and politics ; and

1 Work cited, p. 32J. The book is now raro.

1 <■]>. Ohcync, Founders <>( obi. Testament Criticism, 1S03. p. '2.

:; Dr. Cheyne expresses surprise Unit a " theological writer" who i«ot so far should not
have been "prompted bv his t;ood Senilis to follow up his advantage." It is, however,
rather remarkable Unit Parvish, who was a bookseller at Guildford (Alberti, llrirf,;
p I'i'i), should have achieved what he did. ft was through not bein;4 a theological writer
that he went so far, no theologian of his clay following him.

168 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

a habit of taking deity for granted became normal, with the result
that when the weak point was pressed upon by Law and Butler
there was a sense of blankness on both sides. But among men
theistically inclined, the argument of Tindal against revelationism
was extremely telling, and it had more literary impressiveness than
any writing on the orthodox side before Butler. By this time
the philosophic influence of Spinoza — seen as early as 1699 in
Shaftesbury's Inquiry Concerning Virtue,1 and avowed by Clarke
when he addressed his Demonstration (1705) " more particularly in
answer to Mr. Hobbs, Spinoza, and their followers " — had spread
among the studious class, greatly reinforcing the deistic movement ;
so that in 1732 Berkeley, who ranked him among " weak and wicked
writers," described him as " the great leader of our modern infidels."

See the Minute Philosopher, Dial, vii, § 29. Similarly Leland,
in the Supplement (1756) to his View of the Deistical Writers
(afterwards incorporated as Letter VI), speaks of Spinoza as
"the most applauded doctor of modern atheism." Sir Leslie
Stephen's opinion (English Thought, i, 33), that " few of the
deists, probably," read Spinoza, seems to be thus outweighed.
If they did not in great numbers read the Ethica, they certainly
read the Tractatus and the letters. As early as 1677 we find
Stillingfleet, in the preface to his Letter to a Deist, speaking of
Spinoza as "a late author [who] I hear is mightily in vogue
among many who cry up anything on the atheistical side,
though never so weak and trifling"; and further of a mooted
proposal to translate the Tractatus Thcologico-Toliticus into
English. A translation was published in 1689. In 1685 the
Scotch Professor George Sinclar, in the " Preface to the Reader "
of his Satan's Divisible World Discovered, writes that " There
are a monstrous rable of men, who following the Hobbesian and
Spinosian principles, slight religion and undervalue the Scrip-
ture," etc. In Gildon's work of recantation, The Deist's Manual
(1705, p. 192), the indifferent Pleonexus, who " took more
delight in bags than in books," and demurs to accumulating
the latter, avows that he has a few, among them being Hobbes
and Spinoza. Evelyn, writing about 1680-90, speaks of " that
infamous book, the Tractatus Thcologico-Politicus," as " a
wretched obstacle to the searchers of holy truth " {The
History of Picligion, 1850, p. xxvii). Cp. Halyburton, Natural
Religion Disufjicient, Edinburgh, 1714, p. 31, as to the "great
vogue among our young Gentry and Students " of Hobbes,
Spinoza, and others.

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

BRITISH FEEETHOUGHT 1G9

§ 6

Among the deists of the upper classes was the young William
Pitt, afterwards Lord Chatham, if, as has been alleged, it was he
who in 1733, two years before he entered Parliament, contributed
to the London Journal a " Letter on Superstition," the work of a
pronounced freethinker.1 On the other hand, such deistic writing
as that with which Chubb, in a multitude of tracts, followed up
his early Unitarian essay of 1715, brought an ethical " Christian
rationalism " within the range of the unscholarly many. THOMAS
MORGAN (d. 1711), a physician, began in the Moral Philosopher,
1739-1710," to sketch a rationalistic theory of Christian origins,
besides putting the critical case with new completeness. Morgan
had been at one time a dissenting minister at Frome, Somerset, and
had been dismissed because of his deistical opinions. Towards the
Jehovah and the ethic of the Old Testament ho holds, however,
the attitude rather of an ancient Gnostic than of a modern
rationalist ; and in his philosophy he is either a very godly "
deist or a pantheist miscarried."

At the same time Peter Annet (1693-1769), a schoolmaster
and inventor of a system of shorthand, widened the propaganda in
other directions. He seems to have been the first freethought
lecturer, for his first pamphlet, Judging for Ourselves : or, Free-
thinking the Great Duty of Iicligion, " By P. A., Minister of the
Gospel " (1739), consists of " Two Lectures delivered at Plaisterers'
Hall." Through all his propaganda, of which the more notable
portions are his Supernaturals Examined and a series of controversies
on the Resurrection, there runs a train of shrewd critical sense, put
forth in crisp and vivacious English, which made him a popular
force. What he lacked was the duo gravity and dignity for the
handling of such a theme as the reversal of a nation's faith. Like
Woolston, ho is facetious where he should be serious ; entertaining
where he had need be impressive ; provocative where he should have
aimed at persuasion. We cannot say what types lie influenced, or
how deep his influence went : it appears only that lie swayed many
whose suffrages weighed little. At length, when in 1761 he issued
nine numbers of The Free Inquirer, in which he attacked the
Pentateuch with much insight and cogency, hut with a certain

1 Tho question remains obscure, fin. the Letter (sited, reprinted at end of Carver's
1H:;o >-.<\. of J'nirie'H Works (New York); F. Thackeray's Life of Chatham, ii, JOj ; and
Chatham's "scalpinU-knife " speech.

- A Vindication of the. Moral I'hilonoplier appeared iu 1711.

:; Cp. Lechler, pp. Ii71, UbG.

170 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

want of rational balance (shown also in his treatise, Social Bliss
Considered, 1749), he was made a victim of the then strengthened
spirit of persecution, being sentenced to stand thrice in the pillory
with the label " For Blasphemy," and to suffer a year's hard labour.
Nevertheless, he was popular enough to start a school on his release.
Such popularity, of course, was alien to the literary and social
traditions of the century ; and from the literary point of view the
main line of deistic propaganda, as apart from the essays and
treatises of Hume and the posthumous works of Bolingbroke, ends
with the younger HENRY DODWELL'S (anonymous) ironical essay,
Christianity not Founded on Argument (1741). So rigorously con-
gruous is the reasoning of that brilliant treatise that some have not
quite unjustifiably taken it for the work of a dogmatic believer,
standing at some such position as that taken up before him by Huet,
and in recent times by Cardinal Newman.1 He argues, for instance,
not merely that reason can yield none of the confidence which
belongs to true faith, but that it cannot duly strengthen the moral
will against temptations.2 But the book at once elicited a number of
replies, all treating it unhesitatingly as an anti-Christian work ;
and Leland assails it as bitterly as he does any openly freethinking
treatise.3 Its thesis might have been seriously supported by refer-
ence to the intellectual history of the preceding thirty years, wherein
much argument had certainly failed to establish the reigning creed
or to discredit the unbelievers.

? 7

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 regime of Walpole under the first
two Georges, that the ferment worked at its height. Collins's

i Cp. Cairns, Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century, 1881, p. 101.

- Ed. 1741, p. 30 sq. 3 View of tltc Deistical Writers, Letter XI (X in 1st cd.).

BRITISH FEEETHOUGHT 171

Discourse of Frectliinking was synchronous with the Peaco of
Utrecht : the era of war re-opened in 1739, much against the will
of Walpole, who resigned in 1712. Home and foreign wars there-
after 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." 1 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 them-
selves 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

1 Sir Leslie Stephen, English Thought, i, UY.I.

172 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

it had begun. That generation left its specific mark on the statute-
book in a complete repeal of the old laws relating to witchcraft ; 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 con-
tracted 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 17802
are the outcome of two generations of deistic thinking ; the spirit of
religion has been ousted by judgment.3 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 environ-
ment 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 con-
troversy " all that was intellectually venerable in England "
appeared " on the side of Christianity " (Sir Leslie Stephen,
English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, i, 8G). 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 " (Else caul Influence of Rationalism,
pop. ed. i, 175). The proposition seems to be an echo of orthodox

1 Act 9th, Geo. II (1736), ch. 5. '■ A Tour in Ireland, eel. 1802, ii. 50-72.

:i Young at this period was entirely secular in his thinking. Tolling 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).

BRITISH FREETHOUGHT 173

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, War-
burton, Sherlock, Gibson, Conybeare, Smalbroke, Leslie, Law,
Leland, Lardner, Foster, Doddridge, Lyttelton, Barrington,
Addison, Pope, Swift. He might have added Newton and
Boyle. Sykes,1 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." 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," Warburton,4 Smalbroke,5 Sherlock, Leslie, and
half-a-dozen more as " intellectually venerable " is grotesquo ;
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, Ilobbcs, Blount, Halley (well known
to he an unbeliever, though he did not write on the subject),

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

- Uoddridgc himself was not theologically orthodox, but was an evangelical Christian.
Dr. Stoughton, Urliginn in Knylmul under Queen Anne and the Gear urn, 1K7H, i, 3M-l(i.

:i Whose doctrine Sir Leslie Stephen elsewhere (]>. 25N) calls a "brutal theology which
gloried in trampling on the best instincts of its opponents," and a "most unlovely product
of eighteenth-century speculation."

1 Of Warburton Sir Leslie writes elsewhere- (p. 35:!) that "this colossus was built up of
rubbish." See p. 3.12 for samples. Again lie speaks I p. 3liN) of the bishop's pretensions as
"colossal impudence." It, should be noted, further, that Warlmrton's teaching in the
Divine Lriintiim was a gross heresy in the eyes of William l,aw, who in his Short but
Sujiirt'iil ('ci)ifutatiun pronounced its main thesis a " most horrible doctrine." Ed. 1708,
as cited, i, 217.

1 As to whose "senile incompetence" see same vol. p. '231.

174 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

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 otber.
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 higber 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 atmo-
sphere " 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, Shaftes-
bury against Addison, Mandeville against Swift, Bolingbroke
against Butler, Collins against Clarke, Plerbert 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 Bellow 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

BEITISII FREETHOUGHT 175

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 ho was a poor man. Leibnitz, who answered
him, praises his acuteness, as does Pusey, who further admits
the uncommon ability of Morgan and Collins {Ilistor. Enq.
into Herman nationalism, 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. Hoffding (Hist, of Modem Philos.
Eng. -tr. 1900, i, 103), that Sir Leslie "rightly remarks of
the English deists that they were altogether inferior to their
adversaries"; and further (p. 40o), 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. Hoffding 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. Hoffding writes in
ignorance of the literature lie 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.
Chcyne 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.' This, however, as it appears to me, is a very
inadequate description of the facts. It was not merely a new

' History of 1'rotrstant ThrulntpJ, V.nti. tr. ii. 77. For the influence of ileism on
florniany, see Tholuck {Vertiu ulttt Scliriften, lid. ii) and ljuchlcr (Ocucti. den cituUachcn
I) i must.— Soto by Dr. Chvynu.

176 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

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. Hoffding could sum up
the work of the deists without a glance at what it meant for
Biblical criticism.

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 (1C85) ; Dr. Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory
of the Earth (1680-1689) ; and Whiston's New Theory of the Earth
(1G9G) — all devoid of scientific value ; Hale's work being pre-New-
tonian ; Burnet's anti-Newtonian, though partly critical as regards
the sources of the Pentateuch ; and AVhiston'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

BRITISH FREETHOUGHT 177

recognizing that fossils were really prehistoric remains, decided that
they were deposited by the Deluge.1

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 Closes "only as an historian," and to give him credit
finally because ho finds his narrative " punctually true." ' 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'' — a hypothesis far more extravagant than any
of those ho dismissed. With all his method and scrutiny ho 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 flunking 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 Elder, 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

1 An Kmv-iu tmonrilx a Natural History of the Earth, 3rd od. 17-23, prof, and pp. 16 sq.,
77 .■'/. (.']). WhiU;, Warfare of 'Science with Tlicolonu, i,'2-27.

- Knd of prof. •> Work cited, p. 85.

YOU II N

178 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

who followed Newton in his brilliant career and completed the
magnificent edifice of which he laid the foundation." l " Scotland
contributed her Maclaurin, but England no European name."'2
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 con-
ducted the foreign mathematicians to so many sublime results."0
' 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 ";4 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
Gottingen.5 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 Ncicton, i, 348,
note) puts forward the theory that the progress of the higher
science in France was duo to the ' small pensions and great
honours " bestowed on scientific men by the Academy of
Sciences. The lack of such an institution in England lie 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 1710
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,
wrho left his works to be published after his death ; and of
Gibbon, who also breathed the intellectual air of France.

1 Playfair, in the Edinburgh Review, January, 180S, cited by Brewster, Memoirs of
Newton, 1855, i, 317. '2 Brewster, as last cited.

3 Grant, History of Physical Astronomy, 1S52, p. 10S.

4 Baden Powell, Hint, of Nat. Philos. 1834, p. 363.
0 Brewster, More Worlds than One, 1854, p. 111.

BRITISH FREETHOUGHT 179

§ 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 (173G).1 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," 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 (l) 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 unenthu-
siastic 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." '

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 indus-
triously propounded by Priestley'1 towards the end of the century,
made a numerical progress out of all proportion to that of orthodoxy.
The argument of William Law,'"' again, which insisted on the irrecon-
cilability of the course of things with human reason, and called for

1 Sir Jamns Stephen, TTortr. Sabbaticce, ii, 281; Lechler, p. 451.
'' See rletails in Dynamics of Hr.lioion, eh. viii.

- nee uciaus in i/i/nn mics iij nrttriinii, en. viii,

'< Kssay on " Tendencies of Religious Thought in England: 1GSS-1750," in Essays an
Rp.vii ir.s, rjth ed. p. :;ui.

4 In criticizing whom Sir Leslie Stephen barely notices his scientific work, but
much fni his religious fallacies a course which would make short work of the f(
Newton.

1 wells
line Of

180 EIGHTEENTH CENTUKY

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. Fraxcklix) of Cicero's Dc 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, Dc 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 tilings 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 con-
fidence 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 ration-
alism, 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 conscious-
ness. 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,

BKITISH FEEETHOUGHT 181

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 Ilierology.1 Finally, his posthumous
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) admit, though in-
directly, the untenableness of deism, and fall back decisively upon
the atheistic or agnostic position.2 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 speccli and thought were socially least free. Free-
thought 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.3 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.4
The spirit of the prosecution may be gathered from the facts that
the boy broke down and pleaded penitence,5 and that the statute
enacted the capital penalty only for obstinately persisting in the
denial of any of the persons of the Trinity.6 He had talked reck-

1 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 bo a verbatim reprint.

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

:; See Burton, Hist, of Scotland, viii, 54VH50, as to the case of l'iteairne.

1 Howell's Statu Trials, xiii (1812). coll. 917-38.

5 Macaulay, History, ch. xxii ; student's ed. ii, (>J0--21 ; Burton, History of Scotland, viii,
70-77. 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 boys arguments on the bases of ethics, set forth in his " dying speech,"
as cited by Halyburton, Natural lieligion Insufjicieut, 1711, pp. ll'J-23, 131, and the version
in the State Trials, xiii, 'MU 31.

,; Macaulay ascribes the savagery of the prosecution to the Bord Advocate, Kir James
Stewart, "as cruel as lie was base"; but a letter printed in the State Trials, from a
member of the l'rivy Council, says the sentence would have been (.'unlimited if "the
ministers would intercede." They, however, "spoke and preached for cutting him off."
Trials, xiii.'JJU; Burton, viii, 77.

182 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

lessly 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."1 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:
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 Bex (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 theo-
logical 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 free-
thought 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 lieligion

1 Letter to Sir Francis Mashara, printed in the State Trials, xiii, 9-28-29 — evidently
written by Locke, who seems to have preserved all the papers printed by Howell.

- Macaulay, as cited. In 1G81 one Francis liorthwiek, who had gone abroad at the age
of fourteen and turned Jew, was accused of blaspheming Jesus, and had to lly for his life,
being outlawed. State Trials, as cited, col. 939.

BRITISH FREETHOUGHT 183

Insufficient (Edinburgh, 1714), Epist. of Recom. ; prof. 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 lie 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 insincero in their pro-
fession 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
arc 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."
This writer admits the intense bitterness of the theological disputes
of the time ;2 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, subtili/ed into an airy phantom,
or at least doubted, if not disclaimed." 3 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 tire apologists. Thus the
Professor of Medicine at Glasgow University in the opening years
of the eighteenth century, John Johnston, was a known freethinker.'
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

1 A Vail Account of the. Several Ends and Uses of Confession a of Fttith, first published
in 171'J as a preface to a Collection of Confessions of Faith, by I'rof. W. Dunbar, of
Edinburgh University, 3rd ed. 1775, p. 1.

± Work cited, p. 4H. :! Id. p. 108.

1 Scotland and Scotsmen in the. Eighteenth Centura. From the AISS. of John Kanisiiy,
of Ociitertyre, IKH4, i, '277. kamsay describes Johnston as a "joyous, manly, honourable
man," of whom Karnes " was exceedingly fond" (p, -27b).

184 EIGHTEENTH CENTUKY

gave much offence in the Presbyterian pulpit in Ulster.1 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 satirize! as introducing Shaftesbury's

system into a University,2 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 Eeligion, which takes a distinctly anti-clerical

attitude. The Catechism answers to its title, save insofar as it is

a 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."' His case had in fact been raised in the

Church courts, the proceedings going through many stages in the

years 1732-3G ; but in the end no decision was taken,4 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.0

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

1 W. R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson, 1900, pp. 15, 20-21. 2 Id. p. 52.

:i Cp. Alberti, Briefe betreffende den Zustand der Religion in Gros8-lirittannien,ll52,
pp. 430-31.

> See Dr. McCosh's Scottish Philosophy, 1S75, pp. 111-13. Dr. McCosh notes that at
some points Dudgeon anticipated Hume.

" Dr. .McCosh, however, admits that the absence of the printer's name on the 17G5
edition of Dudgeon's works shows that there was then no thorough freedom of thought
in Scotland.

BRITISH FEEETHOUGHT 185

have a knowledge of good and evil without and prior to a knowledge
of God." ' 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.2 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 (1743-14) for a sermon on Prayer,
which Hutcheson and his sympathizers pronounced "noble,"3 but
which " resolved the efficacy of prayer into its reflex influence on
the mind of the worshipper"4 — 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.0

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 collected6 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." '
Such an utterance from such a dignitary told of a profound change ;
and, largely through the influence of Hutcheson and Leechman on

1 Rae, Life of Adam Smith, 1895, p. 13. Prof. Fowler shows no knowledge of this
prosecution in his monograph on Hutcheson {Shaftesbury and Hutclieson, 188-2); and
Mr. W. K. Scott, in iiis, seems to rely for the wording of the indictment solely on Mr. Kae,
who gives no references, drawing apparently on unpublished MSS.

- kae, as cited, pp. 1 1-15. s Scott, as cited, p. 87.

1 Dr. James Orr, David Hume and his Influence, etc., J<)()3, pp. :i(i-:i7.

6 Also for a time a theological professor in Kdinburgh University.

,; The Tim iif/iii s Cinict niuiu lleli'/ion. Natural and lierealed, appeared in 1 T;J~> ; the
Lfdter to a Jiisliii/j in 17:iJ; and the Uejlectionn on the Source* of htcredulitijiU'U unfinished)
posthumously about 1750. Forbes in his youth had been famed as one of the hardest
drinkers of his day.

1 Rejections on Incredulity, in Works, undated, ii, 111 1-2. Vet the works of Forbes
were translated for orthodox purposes into German, and later into French by I 'tiro
Houhinant ( lTtiU), who preserves the passage on freethinkers' moral.., though curtailing
the Uejlectionn as a whole.

186 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

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, 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," 2 was known to be rationalistic in a
high degree;3 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
tban drama.4 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

i As to which sec A Sober Enquiry into the Grounds of the Present Differences in the
Church of Scotland, 17-23. - Oockbui-n's Life of Jeffrey, ed. 1S72, p. 10.

3 See the Autobiography of the Rev. Br, A. Carlyle, 1860, pp. 49-2-93. Millar's Historical
View of the English Government (censured by Hallam) was once much esteemed ; and his
Origin of Hanks is still worth the attention of sociologists.

■i lUtchie's Life of Hume, 1H07, pp. 52-51 ; Tytler's Life of Lord Kames, 2nd ed. 1811, i,
ch. v ; Burton's Life of Hume, i, 120-30.

BEITISH FEEETHOUGHT 187

period wont to go to church to see the fun.1 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." When, in 1751, he became
Professor of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow7 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.3 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 witli the duties
which man owes to God and his neighbours, may be discovered by
the light of nature without any special revelation."'1 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."' 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. In the sixth edition, which lie
prepared for the press in 1790, he deleted the passage which pro-
nounced the doctrine of the Atonement to be in harmony with
natural ethics. Put most noteworthy of all is his handling of the
question of religious establishments in the Wealth of Nations." It
is so completely naturalistic that only the habit of taking the

1 Ritchie, as cited, p. 57.

- MeCulloeh, Life of Smith prefixed to ed. of Wealth of Nations, ert. 1S30, ]>. ii.

:; Kamsay of Ochtcrtyre, Scotland ami Scotsmen in the Eiuhteentli Century, 1888, i,
UV> (iii. Mr. line doubts tin; story, Life of Adam Smith, 1895, ]>. fill.

-1 Kamsay, as last cited. ■'' Ramsay, passage cited.

c Tlteory of Mnml Sentiments, pt. iii, eh. ii. end.

"i (..]). liae, pi). \il :;(). .Mr. Uae thinks the deletion stood for no change of opinion, and
cites Smith's own private explanation (Sinclair's Life, of Sir John Sinclair, i, -10) that lie
thought the pas^ane " unnecessary and misplaced." Hut this expression must be read in
the 1 i <4l 1 1. of Smith's general reticence concerning established dogmas. Certainly be
adhered to his argument which does not claim to be a demonstration for the doctrine
ol a future stale. K lik. v, ch. l, pt. iii, art. \i.

188 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

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,1 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 here-
tical 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 Ids 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.2 His colleague Boyse, like many other Churchmen, wished
that the unhappy trinitarian controversy " were buried in silence,"
but was careful to conform doctrinallv. More advanced thinkers

maienansi irom ms imercourse wiin \ onaire anu oiner rrenun ireeininKers, is au
exhibition of learned ignorance. Sec Hirst, ]). lsl.

- An Explanation and Defence of the Principles (if Protestant Dissent, by the Rev. Dr.
W. Hamilton Drummond, lb42, pp. 5-6, 17; Kkeats. Hist, of the Free Churches of England,
ed. Miall, pp. 238-39 ; Wallace, Xnti-Triniturian Biography, iii, art. 360.

BRITISH FEEETHOUGHT 189

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.1 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;2 and other literary men were
similarly influenced. It is even suggested that Hutcheson's clerical
friend Synge, whom wo have seen'1 in 1713 attempting a ratiocinativo
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."4 After the death of Molesworth, in 1725, the move-
ment he set up seems to have languished;'^ but, as wo have seen,
there were among the Irish bishops men given to philosophic con-
troversy, and the influence of Berkeley cannot have been wholly
obscurantist. When in 1756 we read of the Arian Bishop Clayton6
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,

1 Cp. Drnmmond, as cited, pp. 20-30; History, Opinions, etc., of the English Presby-
terians, 1S31. p. 29.

'- W. R. Scott. Francis Hutcheson, p. 31. 3 Above, p. 151, vote.

1 Scott, pp. 28-29,35-36. The suggestion is not quite convincing, Synge, after becoming
Archbishop of Tuain, continued to publish his propagandist tracts, anions them An Essay
towards making the Knowledge of Religion Easy to the Meanest Capacity (6th ed. 1734),
which is finite 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."
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

Kea-'on can possibly be the object of our belief, but that it is no just exception ngainsti
some of the doctrines of Christianity that thev are above our reason." ■"• Scott,, p. 36.

,; All that is told of this prelate by Leeky (77isf. of Ireland in the ISth Cent. 189-2, i. 207)
is that at Killala he patronized horse-races. He was industrious on more episcopal lines,
lie wrote an Tut mdiictinn to the History of the Jews ; a Vindication of liihlical Ch ronalogy ;
two treatises on prophecy ; an anti-Athanasian Essay on Spirit < 1751 ), which aroused much
controversy; .! Vindication of the Histories of the Old and Xew Testament, in answer to
Molingbrokc 2 vols. 175:' 1751 : 2nd ed. 1757; rep. with the Essay on Spirit. Dublin, 1750),
which led to his being prosecuted; and other works. The offence given by the Vindication
lay in hi- 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.

190 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

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 dispas-
sionate 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.1 In the same year, Bichardson 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 Borne 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 (1719), again professing to
strike at Eome, he had laid the foundations of a new structure of

1 Dr. G. W. Alberti, Briefe betreffende den Zustand dcr Religion in Gross-Brittannicn,
Hannover, 1752, p. 440.

BRITISH FREETHOUGHT 191

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 antici-
pation of that.1 Middleton had duly safeguarded himself by positing
the certainty of the gospel miracles and of those wrought by the
Apostles, on the old principle" 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." A 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 what-
soever. 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." 4 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 wholo 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."'1 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 tho
known effects of the established Laws of Nature? "

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

' Above, p. ISO. a p„t i,y Huavto in 1.775. Above, i. 172.

:; Inquiry, p. lfj-2. 4 Inquiry, prof. pp.x, .wii.

•' A Letter to the Ilev. Dr. Conyers Middleton, occasioned by Ins lute. 'Tree Inquiry."
1719, pi). 3-1.

fi A Free. Answer to Dr. Middleton's "Free. Inquiry," by William Dodwoll [son of tho
elder and brother of the younger Henry], Hector of Shottosbrook, 1719, pp. 11 15.

192 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

kind of writing which did " more hurt and discredit " to Christianity
" than all the attacks of its open adversaries." * 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 ivhich arc found among the Four Evan-
gelists, 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." 2 The main grounds of
orthodoxy were thus put in doubt in the name of a critical orthodoxy.
In short, the deistic movement had clone 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. 231, 237). vSee also Sir
Leslie Stephen as cited above, p. 149, note ; and Gostwick,
German Culture and Christianity, 1882, pp. 33-36.

An interesting instance of liberalizing orthodoxy is furnished
by the Rev. Arthur Ashley Sykes, who contributed many volumes
to the general deistic discussion, some of them anonymously.
In the preface to his Essay on the Truth of the Christian Religion

(1732; 2nd ed. enlarged, 1755) Sykes remarks that "since

systematical opinions have been received and embraced in such
a manner that it has not been safe to contradict them, the
burden of vindicating Christianity has been very much increased.
Its friends have been much embarrassed through fear of speaking
against local truths ; and its adversaries have so successfully
attacked those weaknesses that Christianity itself has been
deemed indefensible, when in reality the follies of Christians
alone have been so." Were Christians left to the simple
doctrines of Christ and the Apostles, he contends, Infidelity
could make no converts. And at the close of the book he
writes: " Would to God that Christians would be content with

the plainness and simplicity of the gospel That they would

not vend under the name of evangelical truth the absurd and

1 Inquiry, p. 162. " Works, 2nd cd. 1755, ii, 348.

BRITISH FREETHOUGHT 193

contradictory schemes of ignorant or wicked men ! That they
would part with that load of rubbish which makes thinking
men almost sink under the weight, and gives too great a handle
for Infidelity ! " Such writing could not give satisfaction to the
ecclesiastical authorities ; and as little could Sykes's remarkable
admission (The Principles and Connection of Natural and
Revealed Religion, 1740, p. 242) : " When the advantages of
revelation are to be specified, I cannot conceive that it should
be maintained as necessary to fix a ride of morality. For what
one principle of morality is there which the heathen moralists
had not asserted or maintained ? Before ever any revelation is
offered to mankind they are supposed to be so well acquainted
with moral truths as from them to judge of the truth of the
revelation itself." Again he writes : —

" Nor can revelation bo necessary to ascertain religion. For
religion consisting in nothing but doing our duties from a sense
of the being of God, revelation is not necessary to this end,
unless it be said that we cannot know that there is a God, and
what our duties are, without it. Reason will teach us that there
is a God that we are to be just and charitable to our neigh-
bours ; that we are to be temperate and sober in ourselves "
(id. p. 244).

This is simple Shaftesbury an deism, and all that the apologist
goes on to contend for is that revelation " contains motives and
reasons for the practice of what is right, more and different from
what natural reason without this help can suggest." He seems,
however, to have believed in miracles, though an anonymous
Essay on the Nature, Design, and Origin of Sacrifices (1748)
which is ascribed to him quietly undermines the whole evan-
gelical doctrine. Throughout, he is remarkable for the amenity
of his tone towards " infidels."

Balguy, a man of less ability, is notably latitudinarian in his
theology. In the very act of criticizing the deists, he complains
of Locke's arbitrariness in deriving morality from the will of
God. Religion, ho argues, is so derived, but morality is inherent
in the whole nature of tilings, and is the same for God and men.
This position, common to the school of Clarke, is at bottom that
of Shaftesbury and the Naturalists. All that Balguy says for
religion is that a doctrine of rewards and punishments is neces-
sary to stimulate the average moral sense ; and that the Christian
story of the condescension of Omnipotence in coming to earth
and suffering misery for man's sake ought to overwhelm the
imagination ! (See A Letter to a Deist, 2nd ed. 1730, pp. 5, 14,
15, 31 ; Foundation of Moral Goodness, pt. ii, 1723, p. 41 sq.)

The next intellectual step in natural course would have been a
revision of the deistic assumptions, insofar, that is, as certain posil ivo
assumptions were common to the deists. But, as we have seen,
VOL. If 0

194 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

certain fresh issues were raised as among the deists themselves. In
addition to those above noted, there was the profoundly important
one as to ethics. Shaftesbury, who rejected the religious basis, held
a creed of optimism ; and this optimism was assailed by Mandeville,
who in consequence was opposed as warmly by the deist Hutcheson
and others as by Law and Berkeley. To grapple with this problem,
and with the underlying cosmic problem, there was needed at least
as much general mental activity as went to the antecedent discussion ;
and the main activity of the nation was now being otherwise directed.
The negative process, the impeachment of Christian supernaturalism,
had been accomplished so far as the current arguments went. Toland
and Collins had fought the battle of free discussion, forcing ratio-
cination on the Church ; Collins had shaken the creed of prophecy ;
Shaftesbury had impugned the religious conception of morals ; and
Mandeville had done so more profoundly, laying the foundations
of scientific utilitarianism.1 So effective had been the utilitarian
propaganda in general that the orthodox Brown (author of the once
famous Estimate of the life of his countrymen), in his criticism of
Shaftesbury (1751), wrote as a pure utilitarian against an incon-
sistent one, and defended Christianity on strictly utilitarian lines.
Woolston, following up Collins, had shaken the faith in New
Testament miracles ; Middleton had done it afresh with all the
decorum that Woolston lacked ; and Hume had laid down with
masterly clearness the philosophic principle which rebuts all
attempts to prove miracles as such.2 Tindal had clinched the
case for natural " theism as against revelationism ; and the later
deists, notably Morgan, had to some extent combined these results.3
This literature was generally distributed ; and so far the case had
been thrashed out.

§ 13
To carry intellectual progress much further there was needed a
general movement of scientific study and a reform in education.
The translation of La Mettrie's Man a 2Iachhie (1719) 4 found a
public no better prepared for the problems he raised than that
addressed by Strutt eighteen years before ; and the reply of Luzac,
Man More than a Machine, in the preface to which the translator
(1752) declared that " irreligion and infidelity overspread the land,"

1 Cp. essay on Mandeville, in the author's Pioneer Humanists, 1907.

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

BRITISH FREETHOUGHT 195

probably satisfied what appetite .there .was for such a discussion.
There had begun a change in the prevailing mental life, a diversion
of interest from ideas as such to political and mercantile interests.
The middle and latter part of the eighteenth century is the period
of the rise of (l) the new machine industries, and (2) the new
imperialistic policy of Chatham.1 Both alike withdrew men from
problems of mere belief, whether theological or scientific.2 That
the reaction was not one of mere fatigue over deism we have
already seen. It was a general diversion of energy, analogous to
what had previously taken place in France in the reign of Louis XIV.
As the poet Gray, himself orthodox, put the case in 17ol, " the mode
of freethinking has given place to the mode of not thinking at all."3
In Hume's opinion the general pitch of national intelligence south
of the Tweed was lowered.4 This state of things of course was
favourable to religious revival ; but what took place was rather a
new growth of emotional pietism in the new industrial masses (the
population being now on a rapid increase), under the ministry of the
Wesleys and Whitefield, and a further growth of similar religion in
the new provincial middle-class that grew up on the industrial basis.
The universities all the while were at the lowest ebb of culture, but
officially rabid against philosophic freethinking.5

It would be a great mistake, however, to suppose that all this
meant a dying out of deism among the educated classes. The state-
ment of Goldsmith, about 1760, that deists in general " have been
driven into a confession of the necessity of revelation, or an open
avowal of atheism," b is not to be taken seriously. Goldsmith,
whose own orthodoxy is very doubtful, had a whimsical theory
that skepticism, though it might not injure morals, has a " manifest
tendency to subvert the literary merits" of any country;7 and
argued accordingly. Deism, remaining fashionable, did but fall
partly into the background of living interests, the more concrete
issues of politics and the new imaginative literature occupying the
foreground. It was early in the reign of George III that Sir
William Blackstone, having had the curiosity to listen in succession

1 The point is further discussed in Dynamic* of Religion, pp. 175-7G.

2 Cp. (;. B. Hertz. The Old Colonial System, 1005, pp. 1, -2>, 93, 157.
'■' Letter xxxi, in Mason's Memoir.

4 Hill Burton's Life of Hume, ii, 433, 431, 481-85. 4S7.

r' Compare the verdicts of Gibbon in his Autobiography, and of Adam Smith. Wealth
of Sations, bk. v. oh. i, art. 1 ; and see the memoir of Smith in IS3I e 1. and McCullochs
ed., and Hue's Life of A/lam Smith, p, 24. It appears that about 1 To I many KnClish people
sent their sons to Kdinburnh University on account of the better education there. Letter
ol Blair, in Burton'.-, Life, of Hume, ii, ±1'.). <; Kxxinjx, iv, end.

" I're-> nl State of Polite. Learning. 1705, eh. vi. His story of how the father of St. Koix
cured the youth of the desire to rationalize his creed is not smwesti vo 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 U alt's Aiuiulu of ttie 1'arislt.

196 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

to the preaching of every clergyman in London, " did not hear a
single discourse which had more Christianity in it than the writings
of Cicero," and declared that it would have been impossible for
him to discover from what he heard whether the preacher were a
follower of Confucius, of Mahomet, or of Christ.1 When the Church
was thus deistic, the educated laity can have been no less so. The
literary status of deism after 1750 was really higher than ever. It
was now represented by Hume ; by ADAM Smith (Moral Sentiments,
1759) ; by the scholarship of Conyers Middleton ; and by the post-
humous works (1752-54) of Lord BOLINGBROKE, who, albeit more
of a debater than a thinker, debated often with masterly skill, in a
style unmatched for harmony and energetic grace, which had already
won him a great literary prestige, though the visible insincerity of
his character, and the habit of browbeating, always countervailed
his charm. His influence, commonly belittled, was much greater
than writers like Johnson would admit ; and it went deep. Voltaire,
who had been his intimate, tells2 that he had known some young
pupils of Bolingbroke who altogether denied the historic actuality
of the Gospel Jesus — a stretch of criticism beyond the assimilative
power of that age.

His motive to write for posthumous publication, however, seems
rather to have been the venting of his tumultuous feelings than any
philosophic purpose. An overweening deist, he is yet at much pains
to disparage the a priori argument for deism, bestowing some of his
most violent epithets on Dr. Samuel Clarke, who seems to have
exasperated him in politics. But his castigation of " divines " is
tolerably impartial on that side ; and he is largely concerned to
deprive them of grounds for their functions, though he finally insists
that churcbes are necessary for purposes of public moral teaching.
His own teachings represent an effort to rationalize deism. The
God whom he affirms is to be conceived or described only as omni-
potent and omniscient (or all-wise), not as good or benevolent any
more than as vindictive. Thus he had assimilated part of the
Spinozistic and the atheistic case against anthropomorphism, while
still using anthropomorphic language on the score that " we must
speak of God after the manner of men." Beyond this point he
compromises to the extent of denying special while admitting
collective or social providences ; though he is positive in his denial of
the actuality or the moral need of a future state. As to morals he
takes the ordinary deistic line, putting the innate "law of nature"

1 Abbey and Overton, The English Church in the Eighteenth Century, 1878, ii, 37.
- JJieu et les JJom/nes, cb. xxxix.

BEITISH FEEETIIOUGHT 197

as the sufficient and only revelation by the deity to his creaturos.
On the basis of that inner testimony he rejects the Old Testament
as utterly unworthy of deity, but endorses the universal morality
found in the gospels, while rejecting their theology. It was very
much the deism of Voltaire, save that it made more concessions to
anti-theistic logic.

The weak side of Bolingbroke's polemic was its inconsistency —
a flaw deriving from his character. In the spirit of a partisan
debater he threw out at any point any criticism that appeared for
the moment plausible ; and, having no scientific basis or saving
rectitude, would elsewhere take up another and a contradictory
position. Careful antagonists could thus discredit him by mere
collation of his own utterances.1 But, the enemy being no more
consistent than he, his influence was not seriously affected in the
world of ordinary readers ; and much of his attack on " divines,"
on dogmas, and on Old Testament morality must have appealed to
many, thus carrying on the discredit of orthodoxy in general.
Leland devoted to him an entire volume of his View of the Principal
Deist iced Writers, and in all bestows more space upon him than on
all the others together — a sufficient indication of his vogue.

In his lifetime, however, Bolingbroke had been exti'emely
careful to avoid compromising himself. Mr. Arthur Hassall,
in his generally excellent monograph on Bolingbroke (Statesmen
Series, 1889, p. 226), writes, in answer to the attack of Johnson,
that " Bolingbroke, during his lifetime, had never scrupled to
publish criticisms, remarkable for their freedom, on religious
subjects." I cannot gather to what he refers ; and Mr. Walter
Sichel, in his copious biography (2 vols. 1901-1902), indicates
no such publications. The Letters on the Study and Use of
History, which contain (Lett, iii, sect. 2) a skeptical discussion
of the Pentateuch as history, though written in 173-J-3G, were
only posthumously published, in 17o2. The Examcn Important
de Milord Bolingbroke, produced by Voltaire in 1707, but dated
1730, is Voltaire's own work, based on Bolingbroke. In his
letter to Swift of September 12, 1721 (Swift's Works, Scott's ed.
1824, xvi, 148-49), Bolingbroke angrily repudiates the title of
c prit fort, declaring, in the very temper in which pious posterity
lias aspersed himself, that " such are the pests of society,

because they endeavour to loosen the bands of it I therefore

not only disown, hut I detest, this character." In this letter
lie even affects to believe in " the truth of the divine revelation

1 (']). Bishop Law, Consult Ttitions on the Thrtiry of Ilelit.iion, (ith ed. 1771, p. (!.", nntr.

Analysis of Bolini-ibi'oke'H writings (17fj.)) there cited. .Air. SiHiel's reply to Sir

B. Stephen's criticism may or may uot bo buccessful ; but be does not deal with
Bishop Law's.

198 EIGHTEENTH CENTUKY

of Christianity." He began to write his essays, it is true,
before his withdrawal to France in 1735, but with no intention
of speedily publishing them. In his Letter to Mr. Pope
(published with the Letter to Wyndham, 1753), p. 481, he
writes : " I have been a martyr of faction in politics, and have
no vocation to be so in philosophy." Cp. pp. 485-86. It is
thus a complete blunder on the part of Bagehot to say {Literary
Studies, Hutton's ed. iii, 137) that Butler's Analogy, published
in 1736, was " designed as a confutation of Shaftesbury and
Bolingbroke." It is even said (Warton, Essay on Pope, 4th ed.
ii, 294-95) that Pope did not know Bolingbroke's real opinions ;
but Pope's untruthfulness was such as to discredit such a
statement. Gp. Bolingbroke's Letter as cited, p. 521, and his
Philosophical Works, 8vo-ed. 1754, ii, 405. It is noteworthy
that a volume of controversial sermons entitled A Preservative
against unsettled notions and Want of Principles in Religion, so
entirely stupid in its apologetics as to be at times positively
entertaining, was published in 1715 by Joseph Trapp, M.A.,
"Chaplain to the Bight Honble. The Lord Viscount Bolingbroke."
In seeking to estimate Bolingbroke's posthumous influence
we have to remember that after the publication of his works
the orthodox members of his own party, who otherwise would
have forgiven him all his vices and insincerities, have held him
up to hatred. Scott, for instance, founding on Bolingbroke's
own dishonest denunciation of freethinkers as men seeking to
loosen the bands of society, pronounced his arrangement for the
posthumous issue of his works "an act of wickedness more
purely diabolical than any hitherto upon record in the history
of any age or nation " (Note to Bolingbroke's letter above cited
in Swift's Works, xvi, 400). It would be an error, on the other
hand, to class him among either the great sociologists or the
great philosophers. Mr. Sichel undertakes to show (vol. ii, ch. x)
that Bolingbroke had stimulated Gibbon to a considerable extent
in his treatment of early Christianity. This is in itself quite
probable, and some of the parallels cited are noteworthy ; but
Mr. Sichel, who always writes as a panegyrist, makes no
attempt to trace the common French sources for both. He
does show that Voltaire manipulated Bolingbroke's opinions in
reproducing them. But he does not critically recognize the
incoherence of Bolingbroke's eloquent treatises. Mr. Hassall's
summary is nearer the truth ; but that in turn does not note
how well fitted was Bolingbroke's swift and graceful declamation
to do its work with the general public, which (if it accepted him
at all) would make small account of self-contradiction.

§ 14
In view of such a reinforcement of its propaganda, deism could

BKITISH FEEETHOUGIIT 199

not be regarded as in the least degree written down. In 1765, in
fact, we find Diderot recounting, on the authority of d'Holbach, who
had just returned from a visit to this country, that " the Christian
religion is nearly extinct in England. The deists are innumerable ;
there are almost no atheists ; those who are so conceal it. An
atheist and a scoundrel are almost synonymous terms for them."
Nor did the output of deistic literature end with the posthumous
works of Bolingbroke. These were followed by translations of the
new writings of VOLTAIRE,2 who had assimilated the whole propa-
ganda of English deism, and gave it out anew with a wit and
brilliancy hitherto unknown in argumentative and critical literature.
The freethinking of the third quarter of the century, though
kept secondary to more pressing questions, was thus at least as
deeply rooted and as convinced as that of the first quarter ; and it
was probably not much less common among educated men, though
new social influences caused it to be more decried.

The hapless Chatterton, fatally precocious, a boy in years and
experience of life, a man in understanding at seventeen, incurred
posthumous obloquy more for his " infidelity " than for the harmless
literary forgeries which reveal his poetic affinity to a less prosaic
age. It is a memorable fact that this first recovery of the lost note
of imaginative poetry in that "age of prose and reason" is the
exploit of a boy whose mind was as independently " freethinking "
on current religion as it was original even in its imitative reversion
to the poetics of the past. Turning away from the impossible
mythicism and mysticism of the Tudor and Stuart literatures, as
from the fanaticism of the Puritans, the changing English world
after the Restoration had let fall the artistic possession of imagina-
tive feeling and style which was the true glory of the time of
Renascence. The ill-strung genius of Chatterton seems to have been
the first to reunite the sense of romantic beauty witli the spirit of
critical reason. He was a convinced deist, avowing in his verse, in
Ids pathetic will (1770), in a late letter, and at times in his talk, that
lie was " no Christian," and contemning the ethic of Scripture history
and the absurdity of literal inspiration.3 Many there must have been
who went as far, with less courage of avowal.

What was lacking to the ago, once more, was a social foundation
on which it could not only endure but develop. hi a nation of winch
the majority had no intellectual culture, such a foundation could not

i Mihmirrn dr nidi-rat, oA. 1811, ii, 25.

l These hsul bcLtiui us early as 175:1 (Micrmnt'rjrm).

'■■ Workst, ed. IBM, i, pp. cix, 115 ; ii, (328, 72b. Cp. the poem Kew Gardens, left iu MS.

200 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

exist. Green exaggerates1 when he writes that " schools there were
none, save the grammar schools of Edward and Elizabeth ";2 but by
another account only twelve public schools were founded in the long
reign of George III;3 and, as a result of the indifference of two
generations, masses of the people "were ignorant and brutal to a
degree which it is hard to conceive."4 A great increase of popula-
tion had followed on the growth of towns and the development of
commerce and manufactures even between 1700 and 1760 ;5 and
thereafter the multiplication was still more rapid. There was thus
a positive fall in the culture standards of the majority of the people.
According to Massey, " hardly any tradesman in 1760 had more
instruction than qualified him to add up a bill "; and " a labourer,
mechanic, or domestic servant who could read or write possessed a
rare accomplishment."6 As for the Charity Schools established
between 1700 and 1750, their express object was to rear humble trades-
men and domestics, not to educate in the proper sense of the term.

In the view of life which accepted this state of things the
educated deists seem to have shared ; at least, there is no record of
any agitation by them for betterment. The state of political thought
was typified in the struggle over " Wilkes and Liberty," from which
cool temperaments like Hume's turned away in contempt ; and it is
significant that poor men were persecuted for freethinking while the
better-placed went free. JACOB Ilive, for denying in a pamphlet
(1753) the truth of revelation, was pilloried thrice, and sent to hard
labour for three years. In 1751 the Grand Jury of Middlesex
" presented " the editor and publisher of Bolingbroke's posthumous
works7 — a distinction that in the previous generation had been
bestowed on Mandeville's Fable of the Bees ; and in 1761, as before
noted, Peter Annet, aged seventy, was pilloried twice and sent to
prison for discrediting the Pentateuch ; as if that were a more serious
offence than his former attacks on the gospels and on St. Paul. The
personal influence of George III, further, told everywhere against
freethinking ; and the revival of penalties would have checked pub-
lishing even if there had been no withdrawal of interest to politics.

Yet more or less freethinking treatises did appear at intervals

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

2 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.

;i Collis, in Transactions of the Social Science Association, 1857, p. 1'26. According to
Collis, 48 had been founded by James I, 2S under Charles 1, 16 under the Commonwealth,
3ii under Charles If. 4 under James If, 7 under William and Mary, 11 under Anne, 17 under
George I, and 7 under George II. He does not indicate their size.

j Green, as last cited. 5 Gibbins, Industrial History of England, 1S94, p. 151.

fi Hist, of England under George III, ed. 1865, ii, 83.

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

BRITISH FREETHOUGHT 201

in addition to the works of the better-known writers, such as
Bolingbroke and Hume, after the period commonly marked as
that of the ' decline of deism." In the list may be included a
few by Unitarians, who at this stage were doing critical work.
Like a number of the earlier works above mentioned, the follow-
ing (save Evanson) are overlooked in Sir Leslie Stephen's survey: — ■
171G. Essay on Natural Religion. Falsely attributed to Dryden.
,, Deism fairly stated and fully vindicated, etc. Anon.

1749. J. G. Cooper, Life of Socrates.

1750. John Dove, A Creed founded on Truth and Common Sense.
,, The British Oracle. (Two numbers only.)

1752. The Pillars of Priestcraft and OrtJiodoxy SJiakcn. Four vols, of free-
thinking pamphlets, collected (and some written) by Thomas Gordon,
formerly secretary to Trenchard. Edited by R. Barron. (Rep. 17GS.)

17G5. W. Dudgeon, PJiilosojiJiical Works (reprints of those of 1732,-1,-7,-9,
above mentioned). Privately printed — at Glasgow?

1772. E. Evanson, The Doctrines of a Trinity and the Incarnation, etc.

1773. Three Discourses (1. Upon the Man after God's own Heart ; 2. Upon

the Faith of Abraham ; 3. Upon the Seal of the Foundation of God).

1777. Letter to BisJiop JIurd.

1781. W. Nicholson, The Doubts of the Infidels. (Rep. by R. Carlile.)

1782. W. Turner, Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Pliilosophical Unbeliever .
1785. Dr. G. Hoggart Toulmin, Tlie Antiquity and Duration of the World.
17S9. The Eternity of the Universe.1 (Rep. 1825.)

,, Dr. T. Cooper, Tracts, Ethical, Theological, and Political.
1792. E. Evanson, The Dissonance of the Four Evangelists. (Rep. 1805.)
1795. Dr. J. A. O'Keefe, On the Progress of the Human Understanding.
1797. John C. Davies, The Scripturian's Creed. Prosecuted and imprisoned.
(Book rep. 1822 and 1839.)

Of tho work here noted a considerable amount was done by
Unitarians, Evanson being of that persuasion, though at the time
of writing his earlier Unitarian works ho was an Anglican vicar.'2
During the first half of the eighteenth century, despite the move-
ment at the end of tho seventeenth, specific anti-Trinitarianism was
not much in evidence, the deistic controversy holding the foreground.
But gradually Unitarianism made fresh headway. One dissenting
clergyman, Martin Tomkyns, who had been dismissed by his con-
gregation at Stoke Newington for his " Arian or Unitarian opinions,"
published in 1722 A Sober Appeal to a Turk or cm Indian, concerning
the plain sense of the Trinity, in reply to tho treatise of Dr. Isaac
Watts on The Christian Doctrine of the Trinity. A second edition
of Tomkyns's book appeared in 1718, with a further reply to Watts's
Dissertations of 1721. The result scorns to have been an unsetfle-
ment of the orthodoxy of tho hymn-writer. There is express
testimony from Dr. Lardner, a very trustworthy witness, that

1 A reply, The IVorld proved to he not eternal nor mechanical, appi'iircd in 1700.

- The Jjoctrincs of a Trinity and the Incarnation of God was published anonymously.

202 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

Watts in his latter years, " before he was seized with an imbecility
of his faculties," was substantially a Unitarian. His special papers
on the subject were suppressed by his executors ; but the full text
of his Solemn Address to the Great and Blessed God goes far to bear
out Lardner's express assertion.1 Other prominent religionists were
more outspoken. The most distinguished names associated with
the position were those of Lardner and Priestley, of whom the
former, trained as a simple " dissenter," avowedly reached his
conclusions without much reference to Socinian literature ;2 and
the second, who was similarly educated, no less independently gave
up the doctrines of the Atonement and the Trinity, passing later
from the Arian to the Socinian position after reading Lardner's
Letter on the Logos.3 As Priestley derived his determinism from
Collins,'1 it would appear that the deistical movement had set up a
general habit of reasoning which thus wrought even on Christians
who, like Lardner and Priestley, undertook to rebut the objections
of unbelievers to their faith. A generally rationalistic influence is
to be noted in the works of the Unitarian Antipaedobaptist Dr.
Joshua Toulmin, author of lives of Socinus (1777) and Biddle
(1789), and many other solid works, including a sermon on "The
Injustice of classing Unitarians with Deists and Infidels " (1797).
In his case the " classing " was certainly inconvenient. In 1791
the effigy of Paine was burned before his door, and his windows
broken. His house was saved by being closely guarded ; but his
businesses of schoolkeeping and bookselling had to be given up. It
thus becomes intelligible how, after a period in which Dissent,
contemned by the State Church, learned to criticize that Church's
creed, there emerged in England towards the close of the eighteenth
century a fresh movement of specific Unitarianism.

Evanson and Toulmin were scholarly writers, though without
the large learning of Lardner and the propagandist energy and
reputation of Priestley ; and the Unitarian movement, in a quiet
fashion, made a numerical progress out of all proportion to that of
orthodoxy. It owed much of its immunity at this stage, doubtless,
to the large element of tacit deism in the Church ; and apart from
the scholarly work of Lardner both Priestley and Evanson did
something for New Testament criticism, as well as towards the

1 See the Biographical Introduction to the Unitarian reprint of Watts's Solemn
Address, 1810, which gives the letters of Lardner. And cp. Skeats, Hist, of the English
Free Churches, ed. Miall, p. 240.

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

3 Memoirs of Priestley, 1806, pp. 30-3'2, 35, 37. The Letter on the Logos was addressed
by Lardner to the first Lord .Harrington, and was first published anonymously, in 1759.

4 Memoirs of Priestley, p. 19.

BRITISH FREETIIOUGHT 203

clearing-up of Christian origins. Evanson was actually prosecuted
in 1773, on local initiative, for a sermon of Unitarian character
delivered by him in the parish church of Tewkesbury on Easter-Day
of 1771 ; and, what is much more remarkable, members of his con-
gregation, at a single defence-meeting in an inn, collected £150 to
meet his costs. Five years later he had given up the belief in
eternal punishment, though continuing to believe in "long pro-
tracted " misery for sinners.2 Still later, after producing his
Dissonance, he became uncommonly drastic in his handling of the
Canon. He lived well into the nineteenth century, and published
in 1S05 a vigorous tractate, Second Thoughts on the Trinity,
recommended to the Bight Bevcrcnd the Lord Bishop of Gloucester.
In that he treats the First Gospel as a forgery of the second century.
The method is indiscriminating, and the author lays much uncritical
stress upon prophecy. On the whole, the Unitarian contribution to
rational thought, then as later, was secondary or ancillary, though
on the side of historical investigation it was important. Lardner's
candour is as uncommon as his learning ; and Priestley'5 and
Evanson have a solvent virtue.'4 In all three the limitation lies
in the fixed adherence to the concept of revelation, which withheld
them from radical rationalism even as it did from Arianism.
Evanson's ultra-orthodox acceptance of the Apocalypse is signi-
ficant of his limitations ; and Priestley's calibre is indicated by his
life-long refusal to accept the true scientific inference from his own
discovery of oxygen. A more pronounced evolution was that of the
Welsh deist David Williams, who, after publishing two volumes of
Sermons on Religious Hypocrisy (1771), gave up his post as a
dissenting preacher, and, in conjunction with Franklin and other
freethinkers, opened a short-lived dcistic chapel in Margaret Street,
London (1776), where there was used a " Liturgy on the Universal
Principles of Religion and Morality."0

? 15

On the other hand, apart from the revival of popular religion
under Whitefield and Wesley, which won multitudes of the people

1 Pamphlet of 1778, printing the sermon, with reply to a local attack.

•- .MS. alteration in print. Sec also p. 1 of Kpistlu Dedicatory.

:; In criticizing whom Sir Leslie Stephen barely notices nis scientific work, hut dwells
much on his religious fallacies a course which would make short work of the fame of
Newton.

1 A Church diimitary has described Kvanson's TiiHxmvuirr as "the roi ncenient

of the destructive criticism of tiie Fourth Gospel" (Archdeacon Watkins's Hamilton
Lectures, I'-.'.*), p. 171'.

•' Williams (d. HI-',), who published .'! vols, of "Lecture-; on Kdtication " and other
works, lias a longer claim on remembrance as the founder ul the " Literary Fund."

204 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

whom no higher culture could reach, there was no recovery of
educated belief upon intellectual lines ; though there was a steady
detachment of energy to the new activities of conquest and com-
merce which mark the second half of the eighteenth century in
England. On this state of things supervened the massive perform-
ance of the greatest historical writer England had yet produced.
GlEBON, educated not by Oxford but by the recent scholarly
literature of France, had as a mere boy seen, on reading Bossuet,
the theoretic weakness of Protestantism, and had straightway
professed Romanism. Shaken as to that by a skilled Swiss
Protestant, he speedily became a rationalist pure and simple,
with as little of the dregs of deism in him as any writer of his
age ; and his great work begins, or rather signalizes (since Hume
and Robertson preceded him), a new era of historical writing, not
merely by its sociological ti'eatment of the rise of Christianity, but
by its absolutely anti-theological handling of all things.

The importance of the new approach may be at once measured
by the zeal of the opposition. In no case, perhaps, has the essen-
tially passional character of religious resistance to new thought
been more vividly shown than in that of the contemporary attacks
upon Gibbon's History. There is not to be found in controversial
literature such another annihilating rejoinder as was made by
Gibbon to the clerical zealots who undertook to confound him on
points of scholarship, history, and ratiocination. The contrast
between the mostly spiteful incompetence of the attack and the
finished mastery of the reply put the faith at a disadvantage from
which it never intellectually recovered, though other forces reinstated
it socially. By the admission of Macaulay, who thought Gibbon
"most unfair" to religion, the whole troup of his assailants are
now "utterly forgotten"; and those orthodox commentators who
later sought to improve on their criticism have in turn, with a
notable uniformity, been rebutted by their successors ; till Gibbon's
critical section ranks as the first systematically scientific handling
of the problem of the rise of Christianity. He can be seen to have
profited by all the relevant deistic work done before him, learning
alike from Toland, from Midclleton, and from Bolingbroke ; though
his acknowledgments are mostly paid to respectable Protestants and
Catholics, as Basnage, Beausobro, Lardner, Mosheim, and Tillemont ;
and the sheer solidity of the work has sustained it against a hundred
years of hostile comment. While Gibbon was thus earning for his

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

BRITISH FREETHOUGHT 205

country a new literary distinction, the orthodox interest was con-
cerned above all things to convict him of ignorance, incompetence,
and dishonesty ; and Davis, the one of his assailants who most fully
manifested all of these qualities, and who will long be remembered
solely from Gibbon's deadly exposure, was rewarded with a royal
pension. Another, Apthorp, received an archiepiscopal living ; while
Chelsum, the one who almost alone wrote against him like a
gentleman, got nothing. But no cabal could avail to prevent the
instant recognition, at home and abroad, of the advent of a new
master in history ; and in the worst times of reaction which followed,
the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire impassively
defied the claims of the ruling creed.

In a literary world which was eagerly reading Gibbon1 and
Voltaire,2 there was a peculiar absurdity in Burke's famous question
(1790) as to "Who now reads Bolingbroke " and the rest of the
older deists.8 The fashionable public was actually reading Boling-
broke even then ;4 and the work of the older deists was being done
with new incisiveness and thoroughness by their successors.5 In the
unstudious world of politics, if the readers were few the indifferentists
were many. Evanson could truthfully write to Bishop Hurd in 1777
that " That general unbelief of revealed religion among the higher
orders of our countrymen, which, however your Lordship and I
might differ in our manner of accounting for it, is too notorious for
either of us to doubt of, hath, by a necessary consequence, produced
in the majority of our present legislators an absolute indifference
towards religious questions of every kind."G Beside Burke in
Parliament, all the while, was the Prime Minister, WILLIAM PlTT
the younger, an agnostic deist.

Whether or not the elder Pitt was a deist, the younger gave
very plain signs of being at least no more. Gladstone (Studies
subsidiary to Die Works of Bishop Butler, ed. 189G, pp. 30-33)
has sought to discredit the recorded testimony of Wilberforce
{Life of Wilberforce, 1838, i, 98) that Pitt told him " Bishop

1 Cp. Hishop Watson's Apology for Ch ristianity (177G) as to the vogue of unbelief at that
date. {Two Auolorjics, ed. lhOO, p. 1-21. Cp. pp. 179, 399.)

- The panegyric on Voltaire delivered at his death by Frederick the Great (Nov. 20,
177~; was promptly translated into Knglish (1779).

'■'■ Refactions on the French Revolution, 1790. p. 131.

4 See Hannah More's letter of April, 1777. in her Lift; abridged Ifimo-ed. p. 3(5. An
edition oi Shaftesbury, apparently, appeared in 1773, and another in 1790.

■: The essays of Hume, including the DinloyUfs concerniny Mat u nil lirli/jion (17791, were
now circulated in repeated editions. Mr. Kae, in his valuable I. iff of Ail mi Smith, p. 311,
cites a German observer, Wendeborn, as writing in 17 V> that the Dioloijin s, though n ! >u i
deal discussed in Germany, had made no sensation in Kngland, and were at that date
entirely forgotten, lint a second edition had been called for in 177'.'. and 11 icy were ail led
to a fresh edition of the essays in 17oS. Any " forgetting" is to be set down to preoccupa-
tion with other interests.

« Letter to the Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, 1777, p. 3.

206 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Butler's work raised in his mind more doubts than it had
answered." Gladstone points to another passage in Wilber-
force's diary which states that Pitt " commended Butler's
Analogy" {Life, i, 90). But the context shows that Pitt
had commended the book for the express purpose of turning
Wilberforce's mind from its evangelical bias. Wilberforce was
never a deist, and the purpose accordingly could not have been
to make him orthodox. The two testimonies are thus perfectly
consistent ; especially when we note the further statement
credibly reported to have been made by Wilberforce {Life, i, 95),
that Pitt later " tried to reason vie out of my convictions." We
have yet further the emphatic declaration of Pitt's niece, Lady

Hester Stanhope, that he " never went to church in his life

never even talked about religion " {Memoirs of Lady Hester
Stanhope, 1845, iii, 166-67). This was said in emphatic denial
of the genuineness of the unctuous death-bed speech put in
Pitt's mouth by Gifford. Lady Hester's high veracity is
accredited by her physician {Travels of Lady Hester Stanhope,
1816, i, pref. p. 11). No such character can be given to the
conventional English biography of the period.

We have further to note the circumstantial account by
Wilberforce in his letter to the Rev. S. Gisborne immediately
after Pitt's death {Correspondence, 1810, ii, 69-70), giving the
details he had had in confidence from the Bishop of Lincoln.
They are to the effect that, after some demur on Pitt's part
(" that he was not worthy to offer up any prayer, or was too
weak,") the Bishop prayed with him once. Wilberforce adds
his " fear " that " no further religious intercourse took place
before or after, and I own I thought what ivas inserted in the
papers impossible to be true."

There is clear testimony that Charles James Fox, Pitt's illustrious
rival, was no more of a believer than he,1 though equally careful to
make no profession of unbelief. And it was Fox who, above all the
English statesmen of his day, fought the battle of religious toleration'2
— a service which finally puts him above Burke, and atones for many
levities of political action.

Among thinking men too the nascent science of geology was
setting up a new criticism of "revelation " — this twenty years before
the issue of the epoch-making works of Hutton.3 In England the
impulse seems to have come from the writings of the Abb6 Langlet
du Fresnoy, De Maillet, and Mirabaud, challenging the Biblical

mine anxious 10 discredit me statement 01 rarr, Hives sucn a qualified account [Jiemoirs
of the Latter Years of C.J. Fox., 1811, ]>!>. 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). 2 See J. lv. Jje B. Hammond, diaries James Fox, 1903. ch. xiii.

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

BEITISH FREETHOUGHT 207

account of the antiquity of the earth. The new phase of " infidelity "
was of course furiously denounced, one of the most angry and most
absurd of its opponents being the poet Cowper.1 Still rationalism
persisted. Paley, writing in 1786, protests that " Infidelity is now
served up in every shape that is likely to allure, surprise, or beguile
the imagination, in a fable, a tale, a novel, or a poem, in interspersed
or broken hints, remote and oblique surmises, in books of travel, of
philosophy, of natural history — in a word, in any form rather than
that of a professed and regular disquisition."2 The orthodox Dr. J.
Ogilvie, in the introduction to his Inquiry into the Causes of the
Infidelity and Skepticism of the Times (1783), begins : " That the
opinions of the deists and skeptics have spread more universally
during a part of the last century and in the present than at any
former asra since the resurrection of letters, is a truth to which the
friends and the enemies of religion will give their suffrage without
hesitation." In short, until the general reversal of all progress
which followed on the French Revolution, there had been no such
change of opinion as Burke alleged.

One of the most popular poets and writers of the day was the
celebrated ERASMUS DARWIN, a deist, whose Zoonomia (1794)
brought on him the charge of atheism, as it well might. However
he might poetize about the Creator, Dr. Darwin in his verse and
prose alike laid the foundations of the doctrines of the transmutation
of species and the aqueous origin of simple forms of life which
evolved into higher forms ; though the idea of the descent of man
from a simian species had been broached before him by Buffon
and Helvetius in France, and Lords Karnes and Monboddo in
Scotland. The idea of a Nctiura na.turans was indeed ancient ; but
it has been authoritatively said of Erasmus Darwin that "he was
the first who proposed and consistently carried out a well-rounded
theory with regard to the development of the living world — a merit
which sbines forth more brilliantly when we compare it with tbo
vacillating and confused attempts of Buffon, Linnams, and Goethe.
It is the idea of a power working from within the organisms to
improve their natural position"'' — the idea which, developed by
Lamarck, was modified by the great Darwin of the nineteenth
century into the doctrine of natural selection.

And in the closing years of the century there arose a new
promise of higher life in the apparition of MARY WOLLSTONRCRAFT,

1 See his Task, bk. iii, 150-90(178:3-1781), for the prevail inn religious tone.

1 l'rinc. of Mi, rid I'liilon. hk. v. eh. i.v. The chapter tells of widespread fvcothiukiuiJ.

'■'• lUrucat Krauac, EramnuH Darwin, Km;, tr. lb7'J, p. i!ll. C'p. pp. 11W, IU-1.

208 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

ill-starred but noble, whose Letters on Sweden, Norway , and Denmark
(1796) show her to have been a freethinking deist of remarkable
original faculty,1 and whose Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1792) was the first great plea for the emancipation of her sex.

§ 16

Even in rural Scotland, the vogue of the poetry of BURNS told
of germinal doubt. To say nothing of his mordant satires on
pietistic types — notably Holy Willie's Prayer, his masterpiece in
that line — Burns even in his avowed poems2 shows small regard
for orthodox beliefs ; and his letters reveal him as substantially a
deist, shading into a Unitarian. Such pieces as A Prayer in the
prospect of Death, and A Prayer under the pressure of Violent
Anguish, are plainly unevangelical ;3 and the allusions to Jesus in
his letters, even when writing to Mrs. Maclehose, who desired to
bring him to confession, exclude orthodox belief,4 though they
suggest Unitarianism. He frequently refers to religion in his
letters, yet so constantly restricts himself to the affirmation of a
belief in a benevolent God and in a future state that he cannot
be supposed to have held the further beliefs which his orthodox
correspondents would wish him to express. A rationalistic habit
is shown even in his professions of belief, as here : " Still I am a
very sincere believer in the Bible ; but I am drawn by the conviction
of a man, not the halter of an ass ";5 and in the passage : " Though
I have no objection to what the Christian system tells us of another
world, yet I own I am partial to those proofs and ideas of it which
we have wrought out of our own heads and hearts." 6 Withal,
Burns always claimed to be " religious," and was so even in a
somewhat conventional sense. The lines :

An atheist-laugh's a poor exchange
For Deity offended7

exhibit a sufficiently commonplace conception of Omnipotence ; and

1 Letters vii, viii, ix, xix, xxii.

2 Ejj., The Ordination, the Address to the Dcil, A Dedication to Gavin Hamilton, The
Kirk's Alarm, etc.

3 See also the pieces printed between these in the Globe edition, pp. G6-68.

4 The benevolent Supremo Being, he writes, "lias 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 unacknow-
ledged pieces ascribed to him, alike in diction and in purport.

5 better to Mrs. Dunlop, Jan. 1, 1789, in Robert Hunts and Mrs. Dunlop, ed. by
W. Wallace;, 1898, p. 129. The passage is omitted from better 1GS in the Globe ed., and
presumably from other reprints.

jj Letter to Mrs. Dunlop, July 9, 1700. Published for the first time in vol. cited, p. 266.
7 Epistle to a Young Friend.

BRITISH FREETHOUGIIT 209

there is no sign that the poet ever did any hard thinking on the
problem. But, emotionalist of genius as he was, his influence as
a satirist and mitigator of the crudities and barbarities of Scots
religion has been incalculably great, and underlies all popular
culture progress in Scotland since his time. Constantly aspersed
in his own day and world as an " infidel," ho yet from the first
conquered the devotion of the mass of his countrymen ; though ho
would have been more potent for intellectual liberation if he had
been by them more intelligently read. Few of them now, probably,
realize that their adored poet was either a deist or a Unitarian — ■
presumably the former.

§ 17
With the infelicity in prediction which is so much commoner
with him than the "prescience" for which he is praised, Burke
had announced that the whole deist school " repose in lasting
oblivion." The proposition would be much more true of 999 out
of every thousand writers on behalf of Christianity. It is charac-
teristic of Burke, however, that ho does not name Shaftesbury,
a AVhig nobleman of the sacred period.1 A seeming justice was
given to Burke's phrase by the undoubted reaction which took
place immediately afterwards. In the vast panic which followed
on the French Revolution, the multitude of mediocre minds in the
middle and upper classes, formerly deistic or indifferent, took fright
at unbelief as something now visibly connected with democracy and
regicide ; new money endowments were rapidly bestowed on the
Church ; and orthodoxy became fashionable on political grounds
just as skepticism had become fashionable at the Restoration.
Class interest and political prejudice wrought much in both cases ;
only in opposite directions. Democracy was no longer Bibliolatrous,
therefore aristocracy was fain to became so, or at least to grow
respectful towards the Church as a means of social control. Gibbon,
in his closing years, went with the stream. And as religious wars
have always tended to discredit religion, so a war partly associated
with the freethinking of the French revolutionists tended to discredit
freethought. The brutish wrecking of Priestley's house and library
and chapel by a mob at Birmingham in 1791 was but an extreme

1 Leeky, writing in ISC,."), and advancing on Harko, has said of the whole school,
including Shaftesbury, that " the shadow of the tomb rests on all: a deep, unbiolieii
silence, the chill of death, surrounds them. They have long mi ed lo v, i K . ■ an\ interest "
Ut-iiioniilium in Eumiir. i, lllli. As a matter of fact, they had been di ■ ■ . i b> Tayler
in 1 -.">.! ; I)'.' 1'attison in l->t;<); and by I'arrar in lsii-2; and the v have inei- In en ni-'ui ed at
length by [Jr. Hunt, by Dr. Cairn,, by l.ange, by C.yzieki, h.v M. Sayoiis, by Sir I.e lie
Steuben, by l'rof, HCfiding, and by many oilier-;.
VOL. II

210 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

manifestation of a reaction which affected every form of mental
life. But while Priestley went to die in the United States, another
English exile, temporarily returned thence to his native land, was
opening a new era of popular rationalism. Even in the height of
the revolutionary tumult, and while Burke was blustering about the
disappearance of unbelief, THOMAS PAINE was laying deep and wide
the English foundations of a new democratic freethought ; and the
upper-class reaction in the nature of the case was doomed to imper-
manency, though it was to arrest English intellectual progress for
over a generation. The French Revolution had re-introduced free-
thought as a vital issue, even in causing it to be banned as a danger.

That freethought at the end of the century was rather driven
inwards and downwards than expelled is made clear by the
multitude of fresh treatises on Christian evidences. Growing
numerous after 1790, they positively swarm for a generation
after Paley (1791). Cp. Essays on the Evidence and Influence
of Christianity, Bath, 1790, pref.; Andrew Fuller, The Gospel
its oxen Witness, 1799, pref. and concluding address to deists ;
Watson's sermon of 1795, in Two Apologies, ed. 180G, p. 399 ;
Priestley's Memoirs (written in 1795)', 1806, pp. 127-28;
Wilberforce's Practical View, 1797, passim {e.g., pp. 36G-09,

8th ed. 1841); Rev. D. Simpson, A Elect for Religion

addressed to the Disciples of Thomas Paine, 1797. The latter
writer states (2nd ed. p. 126) that " infidelity is at this moment
running like wildfire among the common people"; and Fuller
(2nd ed. p. 128) speaks of the Monthly Magazine as " pretty
evidently devoted to the cause of infidelity." A pamphlet on
The Eise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in this Metropolis
(London, ItiOO), by W. Hamilton Reid, describes the period as
the first " in which the doctrines of infidelity have been exten-
sively circulated among the lower orders"; and a Summary of
Christian Incidences, by Bishop Porteous (1800 ; 16th ed. 1826),
affirms, in agreement with the 1799 Report of the Fords' Com-
mittee on Treasonable Societies, that " new compendiums of
infidelity, and new libels on Christianity, are dispersed con-
tinually, with indefatigable industry, through every part of the
kingdom, and every class of the community." Freethought, in
short, was becoming democratized.

As regards England, Paine is the great popular factor ; and it is
the bare truth to say that he brought into the old debate a new
earnestness and a new moral impetus. The first part of the Age of
Reason, hastily put together in expectation of speedy death in 1793,
and including some astronomic matter that apparently antedates
17b!,1 is a swift outline of the position of the rationalizing deist,

1 Conway, introd. to Age of Reason, in Lis eel. of Paine's Works, iv, 3.

BRITISH FREETHOUGHT 211

newly conscious of firm standing-ground in astronomic science.
That is the special note of Fame's gospel. He was no scholar ;
and the champions of the "religion of Galilee" have always been
prompt to disparage any unlearned person who meddles with
religion as an antagonist ; but in the second part of his book Paine
put hard criticism enough to keep a world of popular readers
interested for well over a hundred years. The many replies are
forgotten : the Biblical criticism of Paine will continue to do its
work till popular orthodoxy follows the lead of professional scholar-
ship and gives up at once the acceptance and the circulation of
things incredible and indefensible as sacrosanct.

Mr. Benn (Hist, of Eng. Rationalism in the Nineteenth

Century, i, 217) remarks that Paine's New Testament criticisms
are "such as at all times would naturally occur to a reader of
independent mind and strong common sense." If so, these had
been up to Paine's time, and remained long afterwards, rare
characteristics. And there is some mistake about Mr. Benn's
criticism that " the repeated charges of fraud and imposture

brought against the Apostles and Evangelists jar painfully

on a modern ear. But they are largely due to the mistaken
notion, shared by Paine with his orthodox contemporaries, that
the Gospels and Acts were written by contemporaries and eye-
witnesses of the events related." Many times over, Paine
argues that the documents could not have been so written.
E.g. in Conway's ed. of Works, pp. 157, 158, 159, 1G0, 1G1, 167,
168, etc. The reiterated proposition is " that the writers cannot
have been eye-witnesses and ear-witnesses of what they relate ;

and consequently that the books have not been written by

the persons called apostles " (p. 168). And there is some
exaggeration even in Mr. Benn's remark that, " strangely
enough, he accepts the Book of Daniel as genuine." Paine
(ed. p. 144) merely puts a balance of probability in favour of
the genuineness. It may be sometimes — it is certainly not
always — true that Paine " cannot distinguish between legendary
or [? and] mythical narratives" (Benn, p. 21G) ; but it is to be
feared that the disability subsists to-day in more scholarly quarters.
Despite bis deadly directness, Paine, in virtue of his strong
sincerity, probably jars much less on the modern ear than bo
did on that of his own, which was so ready to make felony of
any opinion hostile to reigning prejudices. But if it be other-
wise, it is to be feared that no less offence will be given by
Mr. Benn's own account of the Ilexateuch as "the records kept
by a lying and bloodthirsty priesthood "; even if that estimate
he followed by the very challengeable admission that ' priest-
hoods are generally distinguished for their superior humanity "
(Perm, p. 350, and note).

212 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

Hencefortli tliore is a vital difference in the fortunes of free-
thought and religion alike. Always in the past the institutional
strength of religion and the social weakness of freethought had lain
in the credulity of the ignorant mass, which had turned to naught an
infinity of rational effort. After the French Eevolution, when over
a large area the critical spirit began simultaneously to play on faith
and life, politics and religion, its doubled activity gave it a new
breadth of outlook as of energy, and the slow enlightenment of the
mass opened up a new promise for the ultimate reign of reason.

Chapter XVII

FRENCH FEEETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH
CENTURY

1. THE fruits of the intellectual movement of the seventeenth
century are seen beginning to take form on the very threshold of
the eighteenth. In 1700, at the height of the reign of the King's
confessors, there was privately printed the Lettre d 'Ilippocratc a
Damagete, described as ' the first French work openly destructive of
Christianity/' It was ascribed to the Comte tie Boulainvilliers, a
pillar of the feudal system.1 Thus early is the sound of disintegra-
tion heard in the composite fabric of Church and State ; and various
fissures are seen in all parts of the structure. The king himself, so
long morally discredited, could only discredit pietism by his adoption
of it ; the Janscnists and the Molinists [i.e., the school of Molina, not
of Molinos] fought incessantly ; even on the side of authority there
was bitter dissension between Bossuet and Fenelon ;'2 and the
movement of mysticism associated with the latter came to nothing,
though he had the rare crodit of converting, albeit to a doubtful
orthodoxy, the emotional young Scotch deist Chevalier Ramsay.3
Where the subtlety of Fenelon was not allowed to operate, the loud
dialectic of Bossuet coidd not avail for faith as against rationalism,
whatever it might do to upset tire imperfect logic of Protestant sects.
in no society, indeed, docs mere declamation play a larger part than
in that of modern France ; but in no society, on the other hand, is
mere declamation more sure to be disdained and derided by the
keener spirits, in the years of disaster and decadence winch
rounded oil' in gloom the life of the Grand Monarque, with defeat
dogging his armies and bankruptcy threatening his finances, tho

1 L-iMontfiv. I[i. /.,!,!, i ,■;,/, ,,rr r, ! ,]<■ I, minnrUi- <Jr hmiis AT. [S !.->, ii. :i>S, note. In 17:',1
tV-ri! -.v.i pui.JMn 1 under the name, of lSoulairivilliers dl. I7±J) a so-called Urfutation tin
Sinit'iX't, which was "really a popular exposition," Pollock, Ki>iwi::<<, -Jiid ed. p. lili.'i. Sir
I'. Pollock h ■■in to Voltaire's remark that Uoulaiiivillicrs "nave the poi on and forgot
to ::iv<; the iillfi lote."

- For a briel view of the facts, usually misconceived, see rainson, pp. C.KI 11. I'eilclon
seems to liave heeii uii'-i ndid, while P.ossuet, hy common con en!. wa . malevolent. Then;
i pro ha hi. \ tnit.ii, however, m tlie view of Shafteshury IChii rurlrrixtirs, e . 1 IK), ii. '.'1 I ',

Hint the real ii .anee "I I eiielon's < lesin tical opponents was the tendency of his

myTci in to v. ill i draw devotees from ceremonial duties.

■■ Sou reim-inhered chiellv thromlh the account of his intercourse with IVnelon (repr.
in Dido: ed. of I'enelon's misc. worksi, and Hume's loin: extrnct from his I'liilamiiliicil
l'niirinl, ■ i,l Suliirnl nml Itcrcnutl Hrlinimi in t!ie coneludini; note to the /■.'.' smju. t'p. M.

.Mailer, /./■ My lii-i in,; , ,( I'l'lllCr till tl'milK tit: V'V IH'lvlt , lhl)5, PP. 3<- 'ii.

214 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

spirit of criticism was not likely to slacken. Literary polemic,
indeed, was hardly to be thought of at such a time, even if it had
been safe. In 1709 the king destroyed the Jansenist seminary of
Port Royal, wreaking an ignoble vengeance on the very bones of the
dead there buried ; and more heretical thinkers had need go warily.

Yet even in those years of calamity, perhaps by reason of the
very stress of it, some frcethinking books somehow passed the press,
though a system of police espionage had been built up by the king,
step for step with some real reforms in the municipal government of
Paris. The first was a romance of the favourite type, in which a
traveller discovers a strange land inhabited by surprisingly rational
people. Such appear to have been the Ilistoire de Calejava, by Claude
Gilbert, produced at Dijon in 1700, and the imaginary travels of Juan
do Posos, published at Amsterdam in 1708. Both of these were
promptly suppressed ; the next contrived to get into circulation. The
work of Symon Tyssot de Patot, Voyages ct Avantures de Jacques
Masse", published in 1710, puts in the mouths of priests of the
imaginary land discovered by the traveller such mordant arguments
against the idea of a resurrection, the story of the fall, and other
items of the Christian creed, that there could be small question of
the deism of the author;1 and the prefatory Lcttrc de I'cditeur
indicates misgivings. The Reflexions sur les grands homines qui sont
morts en plaisantant, by Deslandes, ostensibly published at Amsterdam
in 1712, seems to have had a precarious circulation, inasmuch as
Brunet never saw the first edition. To permit of the issue of such a
book as Jacques Masse — even at Bordeaux — the censure must have
been notably lax ; as it was again in the year of the king's death,
when there appeared a translation of Collins's Discourse of Free-
thinking. For the moment the Government was occupied over an
insensate renewal of the old persecution of Protestants, promulgating
in 1715 a decree that all who died after refusing the sacraments
should be refused burial, and that their goods should be confiscated.
The edict seems to have been in large measure disregarded.

2. At the same time the continuous output of apologetics testified
to the gathering tide of unbelief. The Benedictine Lami followed up
his attack on Spinoza with a more popular treatise, L'Incrddule
amend a la religion par la raison (1710) ; the Abbe Genest turned
Descartes into verse by way of P relives naturcllcs de V existence de

1 Tyssot de Patot was Professor of Mathematics at Deventor. In his Lett res chnisies,
published in 17-26, th ere is an avowal that "he might be charged with having different
tint i ons from those of the vulgar in point of religion " {Xew Memoirs of Literature, iv U7-2(>),
2f*>7): and his accounts of pietists and unbelieving and other priests sufficiently convey
that impression [id. pp. 2(iS-fc>4).

FRENCH FREETIIOUGIIT 215

Dieu ct de Vimmortalite dc Vdmc (1716) ; and the Anti-Lucretius of
Cardinal Polignac (1661—1741), though only posthumously published
in full (1715), did but pass on to the next age, when deism was tho
prevailing heresy, a cleistic argument against atheism. It is difficult
to see any Christian sentiment in that dialectic performance of a
born diplomatist.1

"\\ hen the old king died, even the fashion of conformity passed
away among the upper classes;" and the feverish manufacture of
apologetic works testifies to an unslackened activity of unbelief. In
1719 Jean Denyse, professor of philosophy at the college of Montaigu,
produced La vcrilc dc la religion ehretienne demontree par ordre
gcomctriquc (a title apparently suggested by Spinoza's early exposi-
tion of Descartes), without making any permanent impression on
heterodox opinion. Not more successful, apparently, was the per-
formance of the Abbe Houteville, first published in 1722.:! Much
more amiable in tone, and more scientific in temper, than the
common run of defences, it was found, says an orthodox biographical
dictionary, to be better fitted to make unbelievers than to convert
them," seeing that " objections were presented with much force and
fulness, and the replies with more amenity than weight." i That tho
Abbe was in fact not rigorously orthodox might almost be suspected
from his having been appointed, in the last year of his life (1712),
perpetual secretary " to tho Academic, an office winch somehow
tended to fall to more or less frcothinking members, being held
before him by tho Abbe Dubos, and after him by Mirabaud, tho
Abbe Duclos," D'Alembert, and Marmontel. The Traites des
Premieres Vcritez of the Jesuit Father Buffier (1721) can hardly
have been more helpful to the faith. Another experiment by way
of popularizing orthodoxy, the copious Ilistoirc du pcuple dc Dieu, by
the Jesuit Berruyer, first published in 1728,' had little better fortune,

1 Towards tin1 close of his "poem" Poliffiiac speaks of a defence of Christianity as a
future task, lie died without even completing the Anti-Lucretius, be^un h;ilf a. century
before. Of liiin arc related two classic anecdotes. Sent at the utic of twenty-seven to
discuss Church questions with the Pope, he earned from His Holiness the compliment:
"You ;ei'in always to be of my opinion; and in the end it is yours that prevails."
Louis XIV nave hi in a lout; audience, after win eh the Kim! said : "1 have had an interview
you nt; man _v, ho iias constantly contradicted me without my lieiiu: able to be anj,'ry
for a moment." \KUn\e. prefixed to Bougainville's trans., // Ant i- 1 ,ne r< Vr, 17(i7, i. IM.)

- Cii. Ouvernet. Vie tit- Voltaire., eh. i. kivarol (Letters a Xrckcr, in (Lurrrs, ed. IS.V2,
p. bJSi wrote tlii't under bun is XV there benan a "general insurrection " of discus -inn, and
that evervbo Iv then talked "only of religion and philosophy tin rim! half a century." lint
tlii cm: csa-;,:,- i i ) c I ,.!' i ii ii i 1 1 !-!- , of which liivarol could have no exact knowledge.

; /.-/ rerite tie. la reliijion eltret ieune. prouvee par Irs frtits: preced>r dun ilisroiirs
I,, •'.ii- 1 ur i I eri tiii ue sur la metlioilr. des priiicipa u.r. aute.u rs qui out cent pour et Con tic
le cln-i-itianisme ilepuis son ormiue, 17-2-2. Hop. 17 II , 3 vols, ho., 1 vols, l-.'mo.

' Si, i, ruin Jtictionnairr hislnriqur porlatif, 1771. art. Hoi tkvii. i.i.. torn. ii.

■'• Who c Com id,' rations sue les Mirnrs (17."d I does not seem to eon la in a sincle reli.dous
sentiment. Hi torioMra plier of J-'rance, he had not escaped tbesuppri ion of his llistoi re
lie Louts XI, 1715.

>'• See above, p. |:10. Mullicr seems to have hetfiin an attempt at i pclliin: reform (by
dropping double. 1 IeUcr I, followed in I7A1 by Una id and lali r Ijj l'r.'- il\.-il.

' 7 vols, lto., KJ vols. 12mo. Uep. with corrections lT.j:;. S> coiide partie, 1 703 , 8 vols. lJnio.

216 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

inasmuch as it scandalized the orthodox by its secularity of tone
"without persuading the freethinkers. Condemned by the Bishop of
Montpellier in 1731, it was censured by Rome in 1731; and the second
part, produced long afterwards, aroused even more antagonism.

3. There was thus no adaptation on the side of the Church
to the forces which in an increasing degree menaced her rule.
Under the regency of Orleans (1715-1723), the open disorder of
the court on the one hand and the ruin of the disastrous financial
experiment of Law on the other were at least favourable to tolera-
tion ; but under the Due de Bourbon, put in power and soon
superseded by Fleury (bishop of Frejus and tutor of Louis XV ;
later cardinal) there was a renewal of the rigours against the
Protestants and the Jansenists ; the edict of 1715 was renewed ;
emigration recommenced ; and only public outcry checked the policy
of persecution on that side. But Fleury and the king went on
fighting the Jansenists ; and while this embittered strife of the
religious sections could not but favour the growth of freethought,
it was incompatible alike with official tolerance of unbelief and with
any effectual diffusion of liberal culture. Had the terrorism and
the waste of Louis XIV been followed by a sane system of finance
and one of religious toleration ; and had not the exhausted and
bankrupt country been kept for another half century — save for eight
years of peace and prosperity from 1718 to 1755 — on the rack of
ruinous wars, alike under the regency of Orleans and the rule of
Louis XV, the intellectual life might have gone fast and far. As it
was, war after war absorbed its energy ; and the debt of five milliards
left by Louis XIV was never seriously lightened. Under such a
system the vestiges of constitutional government were gradually
swept away.

4. As the now intellectual movement began to find expression,
then, it found the forces of resistance more and more organized. In
particular, the autocracy long maintained the severest checks on
printing, so that freethought could not save by a rare chance attain to
open speech. Any book with the least tendency to rationalism had
to seek printers, or at least publishers, in Holland. Iluard, in
publishing his anonymous translation of the II ypoty poses of Sextus
Empiricus (1725), is careful to say in his preface that he "makes
no application of the Pyrrhonian objections to any dogma that may
1)0 called theological"; but he goes on to add that the scandalous
quarrels of Christian sects are well fitted to confirm Pyrrhonists in
their doubts, the sects having no solid ground on which to condemn
each oilier. As such an assertion was rank heresy, the translation

FKENCH FEEETHOUGHT 217

had to be issued in Amsterdam, and even there without a publisher's
name. And still it remains clear that the ago of Louis XIV had
passed on to the next a heritage of hidden freethinking, as well as
one of debt and misgovernment. What takes place thereafter is
rather an evolution of and a clerical resistance to a growth known
to have begun previously, and always feared and hated, than any
new planting of unbelief in orthodox soil. As we have seen, indeed,
a part of the early work of skepticism was done by distinguished
apologists. Huet, dying in 1722, left for posthumous publication
his Traitc philosophiquc de la faiblessc de V esprit humain (1723).
It was immediately translated into English and Gorman; and though
it was probably found somewhat superfluous in deistic England, and
supersubtlo in Lutheran Germany, it helped to prepare the ground
for the active unbelief of the next generation in France.

5. A continuous development may be traced throughout the
century. MONTESQUIEU, who in his early Persian Letters (1721)
had revealed himself as " fundamentally irreligious " a and a censor
of intolerance,0 proceeded in his masterly little book on the Greatness
and Decadence of the Romans (1731) and his famous Spirit of Laws
(1718) to treat the problems of human history in an absolutely
secular and scientific spirit, making only such conventional allusions
to religion as were advisable in an ago in which all heretical works
were suppressible.4 Tbe attempts of La Harpe and Villemain" to
establish the inference that he repented his youthful levity in the
Persian Letters, and recognized in Christianity the main pillar of
society, will not bear examination. The very passages on winch
they found6 are entirely secular in tone and purpose, and tell of
no belief.' So lato as 17ol there appeared a work, Les Lcttrcs
Persanes convaincues d'impicle, by the Abbe Gaultier. The election
of Montesquieu was in fact the beginning of the struggle between
the Philosopkc party in the Academy and their opponents ;s and in

1 A roprint in 1733 bears the imprint of London, with the nolo "Aux depens de la
Com pasj'iie."

- Nanson, p. 702. The Versian Letters, like the Vravinciul Letters of l\i eal, had to
!)<■ printed at Kouen and published at Amsterdam. Their frecthinkin« expressions put
considerable difficulties in the way of his election ( 17:>7) to the Afiademv. See K. Kd wards,
Chnyters «1 the. liifuj. Hist, of the. Frenrh Academy, lM',1. pp. :j I -:!."., and 1). M . Koberlson,
Hi t. «j the. Fr< nch Academy, I'JK), p. 'J'2, as to the mystification about the alleged reprint
without the obnoxious passages. ;; Nettrc M>.

1 "An point de vuu reli'lioux, Montesquieu tirii.it poliment son coup de ohnpeau au
chrislianisme" (Nanson, p. 71 1). /.'.</. in the Ksjirit des Lais, liv. xxiv, chs. i, ii, iii. iv, vi,
and the footnote to ch. x of liv. xxv. Montesquieu's letter to Warhurtun l Hi inn. I7;.H, in
acknowledgment of that prelate's attack on the posthumous works of llnlinitbroke, i m
sample of his social make-believe. Jiut no relh'iotis reader could • u ]>]<■> e il to ckdu- from
a relitdous mail. ■"' Also oi K. Kdwards, as cited a hove.

' See the notes cited on pp. 10.7, 107 of (iarnier's variorum ed. of the i:-:nit ties Luis,
1871. Nil Harpe and \ illemain eem blind to irony.

' The 11 in;; , at liayle (liv. xxiv, eh-, ii, vi) are part of a subtly ironical vindication of
ideal us a«ainst ecclesiastical Christianity, and they have no note ol faith.

h I'aul Mc na.nl, Jlist. dc I academic Jrancaise, 1807, pp. 01 li.j.

218 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

his own day there was never much doubt about Montesquieu's
deism. In his posthumous Pensces his anti-clericalism is sufficiently
emphatic. " Churchmen," he writes, " are interested in keeping the
people ignorant." He expresses himself as a convinced deist, and,
with no great air of conviction, as a believer in immortality. But
there his faith ends. " I call piety," he says, " a malady of the
heart, which plants in the soul a malady of the most ineradicable
kind." " The false notion of miracles comes of our vanity, which
makes us believe wre are important enough for the Supreme Being
to upset Nature on our behalf." " Three incredibilities among
incredibilities : the pure mechanism of animals [the doctrine of
Descartes] ; passive obedience ; and the infallibility of the Pope." *
His heresy was of course divined by the guardians of the faith,
through all his panegyric of it. Even in his lifetime, Jesuits and
Jansenists combined to attack the Spirit of Laics, which was
denounced at an assembly of the clergy, put on the Roman Index,
and prohibited by the censure until Malesherbes came into office in
1750. 2 The Count de Cataneo, a Venetian noble in the service of
the King of Prussia, published in French about 1751 a treatise on The
Source, the Strength, and the True Spirit of Laics? in which the
political rationalism and the ethical utilitarianism of Cumberland
and Grotius were alike repelled as irreconcilable with the doctrine
of revelation. It was doubtless because of this atmosphere of
hostility that on the death of Montesquieu at Paris, in 1755,
Diderot was the only man of letters who attended his funeral,'1
though the Academie performed a commemorative service.5 Never-
theless, Montesquieu was throughout his life a figure in " good
society," and suffered no molestation apart from the outcry against
his books. He lived under a tradition of private freethinking and
public clericalism, even as did Moliere in the previous century ; and
where the two traditions had to clash, as at interment, the clerical
dominion affirmed itself. But even in the Church there were
always successors of Gassondi, to wit, philosophic unbelievers, as
well as quiet friends of toleration. And it was given to an obscure
Churchman to show the way of freothought to a generation of lay
combatants.

| Peiisecft Diverses : Dela religion. 2 Lanson, p. 714, note.

:i Tr. in English, 1753. It is noteworthy that Cataneo formally accepts Montesquieu's
professions of orthodoxy.

1 Correspmidance litteraire de Grimm et Tfidernt, 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
cure of the parish who was allowed entry began his exhortation with : " Vons savcz, M. Io
President, com bien Dieu est grand." "Oui, monsieur," returned Montesquieu, "et eonibien
les homines sont petits."

5 Mosnard, Hist, de I' 'academic francaise, p. 63.

FRENCH FREETHOUGHT 219

6. One of tho most comprehensive freethinking works of the
century, tho Testament of Jean MESLIER, cure of Etrepigny, in
Champagne (d. 1723, 1729, or 1733), though it inspired numbers of
eighteenth-century freethinkers who read it in manuscript, was never
printed till 1861-61. It deserves here some special notice.1 At his
death, by common account, Meslier left two autograph copies of his
book, after having deposited a third copy in the archives of tho
jurisdiction of Sainte-Menehould. By a strange chance one was
permitted to circulate, and ultimately there were some hundred
copies in Paris, selling at ten louis apiece. As he told on the
wrapper of the copy he left for his parishioners, he had not dared
to speak out during his life ; but he had made full amends. Ho is
recorded to have been an exceptionally charitable priest, devoted to
his parishioners, whoso interests he indignantly championed against
a tyrannous lord of the manor ;" apropos of Descartes's doctrine of
animal automatism, which he fiercely repudiates, ho denounces with
deep feeling all cruelty to animals, at whose slaughter for food ho
winces ; and his book reveals him as a man profoundly impressed at
once by the sufferings of the people under heartless kings and nobles,
and the immense imposture of religion which, in his eyes, maintained
the whole evil system. Some men before him had impugned miracles,
some the gospels, some dogma, some tho conception of deity, some
tho tyranny of kings. He impugns all : and where nearly all tho
deists had eulogized the character of the Gospel Jesus, the priest
envelops it in his harshest invective.

He must have written during whole years, with a sombre,
invincible patience, dumbly building up, in his lonely leisure, his
unfaltering negation of all that tho men around him held for sacred,
and that lie was sworn to preach — the whole to bo his testament to
his parishioners. In the slow, heavy style — the style of a cart horse,
AToltairo called it — there is an indubitable sincerity, a smouldering
passion, hut no haste, no explosion. Tho long-drawn, formless,
prolix sentences say everything that can be said on their theme ;
and when tho long book was done it was slowly copied, and yet
again copied, by tho same heavy, unwearying hand. He had read
few books, it seems —only the Bible, some of the hat hers, Montaigne,
the Turkish Spy," Naude, Charron, Pliny, Tourneminc cm atheism,
and Fenelon on the existence of God, with some history, and Moron's

1 A full analysis is civen by Strauss in the second \ppendi\ to his Vulluiri : SVr/i.s
Vortrn'jr, ■>>.,. A nil. 1*70.

- The details h re dubious Kee the memoir compile I bv " Uud.df Ohiirles" IK. ('.
IVAblaint? van (lie- en bun; J. the editor of the Ti <tmnt ul. \in iVrdiim, :( torn. [Nil 01. It
draw-, chiefly on tho Mrinnircs sec rut n dc linclmumont. under date S«-pt. JO, 1701.

220 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Dictionary ; but ho had re-read them often. He does not cite Bayle ;
and Montaigne is evidently his chief master. But on his modest
reading he had reached as absolute a conviction of the untruth of
the entire Judseo-Christian religion as any freethinker ever had.
Moved above all by his sense of the corruption and misrule around
him, he sets out with a twofold indictment against religion and
government, of which each part sustains the other, and he tells his
parishioners how he had been " hundreds of times " ! on the point
of bursting out with an indignant avowal of his contempt for the
rites he was compelled to administer, and the superstitions he had
to inculcate. Then, in a grimly-planned order, he proceeds to
demolish, section by section, the whole structure.

Eeligions in general he exhibits as tissues of error, illusion, and
imposture, the endless sources of troubles and strifes for men. Their
historical proofs and documentary bases are then assailed, and the
gospels in particular are ground between the slow mill-stones of his
dialectic; miracles, promises, and prophecies being handled in turn.
The ethic and the doctrine are next assailed all along the line,
from their theoretic bases to their political results ; and the kings of
France fare no better than their creed. As against the theistic
argument of Fenelon, the entire theistic system is then oppugned,
sometimes with precarious erudition, generally with cumbrous but
solid reasoning; and the eternity of matter is affirmed with more
than Averroi'stic conviction, the Cartesians coming in for a long
series of heavy blows. Immortality is further denied, as miracles
had been; and the treatise ends with a stern affirmation of its
author's rectitude, and, as it were, a massive gesture of contempt for
all that will be said against him when he lias passed into the nothing-
ness which he is nearing. " I have never committed any crime," he
writes," " nor any bad or malicious action : I defy any man to make
me on fids head, with justice, any serious reproach "; but he quotes
from the Psalms, with grim zest, phrases of hate towards workers of
iniquity. There is not even the hint of a smile at the astonishing
bequest lie was laying up for his parishioners and his country. He
was sure he would be read, and he was right. The whole polemic of
the next sixty years, the indictment of the government no less than
that of the creed, is laid out in his sombre treatise.

To the general public, however, he was never known save by the
"Extract " — really a deistic adaptation — made by Voltaire," and the

1 Teatamcnt, as cited, i, '25. 2 iii, 306.

3 First published in 1T0-2 [or 1761? Sec Baehaumont. Oct. IJOj, will] the date 1742; and
reprinted in the Eiutngile de la Unison, 1701. It was no lev. or than four times ordered to
bo destroyed in the Kestoration period.

FRENCH FREETHOUGHT 221

re -written summary by d'Holbach and Diderot entitled Le Bon Sens
du Cure Meslier (1772). l Even this publicity was delayed for a
generation, since Voltaire, who heard of the Testament as early as
1735, seems to have made no use of it till 1762. But the entire
group of lighting freethinkers of the age was in some sense inspired
by the old priest's legacy.

7. Apart from this direct influence, too, others of the cloth bore
some part in the general process of enlightenment. A good type of
the agnostic priest of the period was the Abbe Terrasson, the author
of the philosophic romance Sethos (1732), who died in 1750. Not
very judicious in his theory of human evolution (which he repre-
sented as a continuous growth from a stage of literary infancy, seen
in Homer), he adopted the Newtonian theory at a time when the
entire Academy stood by Cartesianism. Among his friends he
tranquilly avowed his atheism." He died " without the sacraments,"
and when asked whether he believed all the doctrine of the Church,
he replied that for him that was not possible.3 Another anti-clerical
Abbe was Gaidi, whose poem, La Religion a V 'Assemble du Clerge de
France (17G2), was condemned to be burned.4

Among or alongside of such disillusioned Churchmen there must
have been a certain number who, desiring no breach with the
organization to which they belonged, saw the fatal tendency of the
spirit of persecution upon which its rulers always fell back in their
struggle with freethought, and sought to open their eyes to the folly
and futility of their course. Freethinkers, of course, had to lead the
way, as we have seen. It was the young Turgot who in 1753
published two powerful Lettrcs surla tolerance, and in 175-1 a further
series of admirable Lett res d' un ecclesiastique a un magistrat, pleading
the same cause.' But similar appeals were anonymously made, by a
clerical pen, at a moment when the Church was about to enter on a
new and exasperating conflict with the growing band of freethinking
writers who rallied round Voltaire. The small book of Quest ions sin-
la tolerance, ascribed to the Abbe Tailhe or Tailhie and the canonist
Maultrot (Geneva, 1758), is conceived in the very spirit of rationalism,
yet with a careful concern to persuade the clergy to sane courses,
and is to this day worth reading as a utilitarian argument. But the

1 Probably Diderot did the most of the adaptation. " II v a plus mho du lion sons dans
cc livre," writes Voltaire to IVAlembert ; "il est terrible. S'il sort do la boutique du
,S7 f. me ile bi Suture, l.'auteur s'e.-4 bien porfectioniiO " Ibottre de -.:7 .luillet, 177.".).

- "II lour faut un Ktre a ees messieurs; pour moi, je mVii pa ■ -o." (.iriiinii, Cnrre-
Uljoiiihiiirr l.tlt, rmrr, ml. 1^'J -:;l , iv. lSii.

1 flriiiiui. as cited, i, £!.-». (irioiiu tells ad. •Ii«htful story of his reception of the confe ;sor.
1 "Cot iiuvrajje, d.mt les vers sont urn in is et liien ton rue •. e t line : atiro des plus lieeii-
cii i i contre les ino-ur , de no i ov.'-muos." liaohaiuiiont, .1/. mnin t S, en ts, Juiii 1 .'., 170-'.

- liouet-Maury, lltt. dc In lib. de conscience en Fnuice, l'.XJO, p. OS

222 EIGHTEENTH CENTUBY

Church was not fated to he led by such light. The principle of;
toleration was left to become the watchword of freethought, while
the Church identified herself collectively with that of tyranny.

Anecdotes of the time reveal the coincidence of tyranny and
evasion, intolerance and defiance. Of Nicolas Boindin (1676-1751),
procureur in the royal Bureau des Finances, who was received into
the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres in 1706, it is told
that he " would have been received in the French Academy if the
public profession he made of being an atheist had not excluded him." *
But the publicity was guarded. When he conversed with the young
Marmontel2 and others at the Cafe Procope, they used a conversa-
tional code in which the soul was called Margot, religion Javotte,
liberty Jeanneton, and the deity Monsieur de I'Etre. Once a listener
of furtive aspect asked Boindin who might be this Monsieur de I'Etre
who behaved so ill, and with whom they were so displeased ? " Mon-
sieur," replied Boindin, " he is a police spy " — such being the avoca-
tion of the questioner.3 " The morals of Boindin," says a biographical
dictionary of the period, " were as pure as those of an atheist can be ;
his heart was generous ; but to these virtues he joined presumption
and the obstinacy which follows from it, a bizarre humour, and an
unsociable character."4 Other testimonies occur on the first two
heads, not on the last. But he was fittingly refused " Christian "
interment, and was buried by night, " sans pompe."

8. With the ground prepared as we have seen, freethought was
bound to progress in France in the age of Louis XV ; hut it chanced
that the lead fell into the hands of the most brilliant and fecund of
all the writers of the century. YOLTAIRE5 (1691-1778) was already
something of a freethinker when a mere child. So common was
deism already become in Paris at the end of the seventeenth century
that his godfather, an abbe, is said to have taught him, at the age of
three, a poem by J. B. BOUSSEAU,0 then privately circulated, in
which Moses in particular and religious revelations in general are
derided as fraudulent.' Knowing this poem by heart in his child-

1 Nouveau (Lictionnaire historique-portatif par une Societe de Gens de Lettres,

ed. 1771, i, 314.

2 Marmontel does not relate this in his Memoires, where he insists on the decorum of
the talk, even at d'Holbach's table. 3 Chaiufort, Caracteres et Anecdotes.

4 Nouveau (lictionnaire, above cited, i. 315.

5 Name assumed lor literary purposes, and probably composed by anagram from the
real name Aroukt, with "le jeune " (junior) added, thus : A. K. O. V. E. T. L(e). I (eune).

0 Not to be confounded with the greater and later Jean Jacques Rousseau. ,f. 1*.
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.

7 See the poem in note 4 to ch. ii of Duvemet's Vie de Voltaire. Duvernet calls it " one
of the first attacks on which philosophy iu France had ventured against superstition"
(Vie de Voltaire, ed, 1797, p. 10).

FRENCH FHEETHOUGHT 2-23

hood, the boy was well on the way to his life's work. It is on
record that many of his school-fellows were, like himself, already
deists, though his brother, a juvenile Jansenist, made vows to
propitiate the deity on the small unbeliever's behalf.1 It may have
been a general reputation for audacious thinking that led to his being
charged with the authorship of a stinging philippic published in 1715,
after the death of Loins XIY. The unknown author, a young man,
enumerated the manifold abuses and iniquities of the reign, con-
cluding: "I have seen all these, and I am not twenty years old."
Voltaire was then twenty-two ; but D'Argenson, who in the poem
had been called "the enemy of the human race," finding no likelier
author for the verses, put him under surveillance and exiled him from
Paris ; and on his imprudent return imprisoned him for nearly a year
in the Bastille (1716), releasing him only when the real author of the
verses avowed himself. Unconquerable then as always, Voltaire
devoted himself in prison to his literary ambitions, planning his
Henriade and completing his CEdipe, which was produced in 1718
with signal success.

Voltaire was tints already a distinguished young poet and
dramatist when, in 172G, after enduring the affronts of an assault
by a nobleman's lacqueys, and of imprisonment in the Bastille for
seeking amends by duel, he came to England, where, like Deslandes
before him, he met with a ready welcome from the freethinkers."
Four years previously, in the powerful poem. For and Against,'* he
had put his early deistic conviction in a vehement impeachment of
the immoral creed of salvation and damnation, making the declara-
tion, " I am not a Christian." Thus what ho had to learn in
England was not deism, but the physics of Newton and the details
of the deist campaign against revelationism ; and these he mastered.4
Not only was he directly and powerfully influenced by Bolingbroke,
who became his intimate friend, but he read widely in the philo-

1 Duvernet. cli. ii. The froe-h carted Ninon dt: i.'Entlos, brightest of old ladies, is to
be numbered among the pro-Voltairean freethinkers, and to lie remembered as leaving
young Voltaire a legacy to buy books. She refused to " sell her soul" by turning devote
on l 'ue invitation ot her old friend Madame; de Main tenon. Madame I)' K pi nay, Voltaire's
" belle philo.-ophe et amiable Habaeue," Madame' du Deli'and, and Madame Geoll'rin were
among the later frei thinking u ramies ilnmrn of the Voltairean period ; and so, presumably,
was tin- Madame dc ( r. 1 1 u i . quoted by Kivarol, who remarked that " I'rovideiiee " is " the
bapti-mal nam.- of Chance." A, to Madame (iool'friii see the (Knrrrs I'tisthiaiirx tic
J j Al< mbt-rt, 1 :.v, i. -ilo.-jTl ; and the Mi ,n irrn tic Muriaiiiitcl, 1-01, ii, h>- W. Ii Marinontel
i.T accurate, she \v> nt secretly at times to mass (p. 10!).

- Ue-laudes wrote some new chapters of his licjlcxitms ill Loudon, for the Knglish
tm n- : ition. Kng. tr. 171:J, p. '.•'.!.

■'■ I'mir it Cnntrc, "ii Kvitrc o ['runic It was of course not printed till lorn: afterwards.
Diderot, writing his 1' nunc mule <ht Sc< />! hi in- in 1717, says: "( 'est, je erois, dans l'allee des
11< ur- nt in- allegory entre le (diamiiagne et le tokay, que l'cpitre a L'ranie prit naissance."
(L Alice ,lr:, Murnmiiicrs, ad init.i '1 his seem , unju.-t,.

1 He has been alternately represented us owing everything and owing very little to
Kngland. Cp. Texte, linuxm-un ami tin Cusiutijuditnii Sjiirtt, Ihig. tr. p. Jb. Neither view-
is just.

224 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

sophic, scientific, and deistic English literature of the day,1 and went
back to France, after three years' stay, not only equipped for his
ultimate battle with tyrannous religion, but deeply impressed by the
moral wholesomeness of free discussion. Not all at once, indeed,
did he become the mouthpiece of critical reason for his age : his
literary ambitions were primarily on the lines of belles lettres, and
secondarily on those of historical writing. After his Pour et Contre,
his first freetbinking production was the not very heretical Lettres
pliilosoiriiiques or Lettres anglaises, written in England in 1728,
and, after circulating in MS., published in five editions in 173-4 ;
and the official burning of the book by the common hangman,
followed by the imprisonment of the bookseller in the Bastille,1' was
a sufficient check on such activity for the time. Save for the jests
about Adam and Eve in the Mondain (173G), a slight satire for
which hehad to fly from Paris; and the indirect though effective thrusts
at bigotry in the Lique (1723 ; later the Henriade) ; in the tragedy of
Mahomet (1739; printed in 17-42), in the tales of Memnon and Zadig
(1747-48), and in the Ide.es dc La Mothe le Vaycr (1751) and the
Defense de Milord Bolingbrolce (1752), ho produced nothing else
markedly deistic till 1755, when he published the " Poem to the
King of Prussia," otherwise named Sur la hi naturelle (which
appears to have been written in 1751, while he was on a visit to
the Margravine of Bayreuth), and that on the Earthquake of Lisbon.
So definitely did the former poem base all morality on natural
principles that it was ordered to be burned by the Parlement of
Paris, then equally alarmed at freethinking and at Molinism.4 And
so impossible was it still in France to print any specific criticism of
Christianity that when in 1759 he issued his verse translations of
the Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes they also were publicly
burned, though he had actually softened instead of heightening the
eroticism of the first and the " materialism " of the second/

9. It is thus a complete mistake on the part of Buckle to affirm
that the activity of the French reformers up to 1750 was directed

1 In his Essay upon the Civil Wars of France, and upon Epiclc Poetry (2nd ed. 172S,

"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.

- 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. Hut discussion was much more nearly free than in France.

•'' 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 173'.), moved
by angry criticisms, Voltaire saw fit to modify its language. See Lanson's ed. of the
Lettres, 1009, i, 92, 110.

4 Condorcet, Vie de Voltaire, ed. 1792, p. 92. In reprints the poem was entitled Sur la
religion naturelle, and was so commonly cited. s Condorcet, p. 99.

FKENCII FEEETHOUGHT 225

against religion, and that it was thereafter turned against the Stato.
Certainly there was much freethinking among instructed men and
others, but it proceeded, as under Louis XIV, mainly by way of
manuscripts and conversation, or at best by the circulation of
English books and a few translations of these ; and only guardedly
before 1715 by means of published French books.1 The Abbe
Eanchon, in his MS. Life of Cardinal Fleury, truly says that " tho
time of the Regency was a period of the spirit of dissoluteness and
irreligion "; but when he ascribes to " those times " many licentious
and destructive writings " he can specify only those of tho English
deists. Precisely in the time of the Regency a multitude of those
offensive and irreligious books were brought over the sea : Franco
was deluged with them."'" It is incredible that multitudes of
Frenchmen read English in the days of the Regency. French
freethinkers like Saint Evremond and Deslandes, who visited or
sojourned in London before 1715, took their freethought there
with them ; and the only translations then in print were
those of Collins's Discourse of Freethinking and Shaftesbury's
essays on the Use of Ridicule and on Enthusiasm. Apart from
these, the only known French freethinking book of the Regency
period was the work of Vroes, a councillor at the court of Brabant,
on the Spirit of Spinoza, reprinted as Des trois imposteurs. Meslier
died not earlier than 1729 ; the Ilistoirc de la philosojdiie payennc of
Burigny belongs to 1721 ; the Lettres philosophiqncs of Voltaire to
1731; tho earlier works of d'Argens to 1737-38; tho Nonvelles
liberies de penser, edited by Dumarsais, to 1713 ; and tho militant
treatise of De la Serre, best known as the Examen de la Religion,
to 1715.

The ferment thus kept up was indeed so groat that about 1718
the ecclesiastical authorities decided on the remarkable step of
adopting for their purposes the apologetic treatise adapted by Jacob
Vernet, professor of belles letlres at Geneva, from the works of
Jean-Alphonso Turrettin,3 not only a Protestant hut a substantially
Socinian professor of ecclesiastical history at tho same university.
The treatise is itself a testimony to the advance of rationalism in
the Protestant world; and its adoption, even under correction, by
the Catholic Church in France tells of a keen consciousness of

1 See above, pp. -213-1 I, as to the work, of 15 mlainvilliors, Tyssot (It; I'atnt, Deslamles,
and others who wrote between 1700 and 171.7.

* Cited by Sehlosser. Hist. ,,( the, Ebihternth Centum. Knfi. tr. i. 1 1(5 17.

Trail/ ilc la rrriti- th: la rrlitjitm rhritirinir, tire en partie cln latin de M. .1. Alplionso

Tnrrett.in. profe eur en 1 aeademie de Ci'miM'o, par M. -I . Vernel , prolY enr de 1 ..■!]<• ;-

lettrc- en la nn'oiie Aeademie. |{(!VUO e.t, corri^e par mi Theolo.'den 0a tln>li(|iie. h.-l.
Ceneve, 17. 10. Kep. in -1 torn. 1703. Kculesiastieal approbation (Jiven Ij janv. 17!'.);
privilege, bullet, 1701.

VOL. II O

226 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

need. But the dreaded advance, as we have seen, was only to a
small extent yet traceable by new literature. The Examcn critique
des apologistcs de la religion chretienne of Levesquo de Burigny was
probably written about 1732, and then and thereafter circulated in
manuscript, but it was not published till 176G ; and even in manu-
script its circulation was probably small, though various apologetic
works had testified to the increasing uneasiness of the orthodox
world. Such titles as La religion chretienne demontree par la
Iicsurrcction (by Armand de la Chapelle, 1728) and La religion
chretienne prouvce par V accompli sscment des prophetics (by Pere
Baltus, 1728) tell of private unbelief under the Regency. In 1737
appeared the voluminous treatise (anonymous) of the Abbe de la
Chambre, Traite de la veritable religion contre les athecs, les dcistcs,
etc. (5 vols.). In 1717, again, there appeared a learned, laborious,
and unintelligent work in three volumes (authorized in 1742), Le
Libertinage combattu par la tcmoignagc des autcurs profanes, by an
unnamed Benedictine1 of the Congregation of St. Yanne. It declares
that, between atheism and deism, there lias never been so much
unbelief as now ; but it cites no modern books, and is devoted to
arraying classic arguments in support of theism and morals. Part
of the exposition consists in showing that Epicurus, Lucian, and
Euripides, whom modern atheists are wont to cite as their masters,
were not and could not have been atheists ; and the pious author
roundly declares in favour of paganism as against atheism.

So much smoke tells of fire ; but only in 1715 and 1710 did the
printed Examcn of De la Serre and the Pensees philosophiqucs of
Diderot begin to build up in France the modern school of critical
and philosophic deism. When in 1751 the Abbe Gauchat began
his series of Lcttrcs critiques, he set out by attacking Voltaire's
Lcttres philosophiqucs, Diderot's Pensees philosophiques, the anony-
mous Discours sur la vie licurcuse (1718), Les Mceurs* (1718), and
Pope's Essay on Man ; taking up in his second volume the Lcttrcs
Pcrsancs of Montesquieu (1721), and other sets of Lcttrcs written in
imitation of them. In the third volume he has nothing more
aggressive of Voltaire's to deal with than La Ilcnriadc, the Mahomet,
and some of his fugitive pieces. And the Bishop of Puy, writing
in 1754 his La Devotion concilicc avec V 'esprit, could say to the
faithful : You live in an age fertile in pretended esprits forts, who,
too weak nevertheless to attack in front an invincible religion,
skirmish lightly around it, and in default of the reasons they lack,

1 pom Renri Desmonts. according to Barbier.

2 " Far Panagc " ( = Toussaint :>). Hep. 1750 and 1767 (Berlin).

FEENCH FREETHOUGHT 227

employ raillery."1 The chivalrous bishop knew perfectly well that
had a serious attack been published author and publisher would
have been sent if possible to the Bastille, if not to the scaffold.
But his evidence is explicit. There is here no recognition of any
literary bombardment, though there was certainly an abundance
of unbelief."

Buckle has probably mistaken the meaning of the summing up
of some previous writer to the el'f'ect that up to 1750 or a few years
later the political opposition to the Court was religious, in the
sense of ecclesiastical or sectarian (Jansenist),3 and that it after-
wards turned to matters of public administration.' It would bo
truer to say that the early Lcttrcs pliilosophiques, the reading of
which later made the boy Lafayette a republican at nine, were a
polemic for political and social freedom, and as such a more direct
criticism of the French administrative system than AToltaire ever
penned afterwards, save in the Voix da Sage ct du Pcuplc (1750).
In point of fact, as will be shown below, only some twenty scattered
freethinking works had appeared in French up to 1745, almost none
of them directly attacking Christian beliefs ; and, despite the above-
noted sallies of Voltaire, Condorcet comes to the general conclusion
that it was the hardihood of Rousseau's deism in tho " Confession
of a Savoyard Vicar" in his Emilc (1762) that spurred Voltaire to
new activity. ' This is perhaps not quite certain ; there is some
reason to believe that his " Sermon of the Fifty," his "first frontal
attack on Christianity," G was written a year before; but in any
case that and other productions of his at once left Rousseau far in
the rear. Even now he had no fixed purpose of continuous warfare
against so powerful and cruel an enemy as the Church, which in
1757 had actually procured an edict pronouncing tho death penalty
against all writers of works attacking religion ; though the fall of
the Jesuits in 1701 raised new hopes of freedom. But when, after
that hopeful episode, there began a new movement of Jansenist
fanaticism: and when, after the age of religious savagery had seemed
to be over, there began a new series of religious atrocities in Franco

1 Work cited, e 1. 17-V,. p. 2.V2.

- A glimpse of old I 'iiris before or about 17.10 is afforded by Fontenelle's remark that
the prevailing diseases mi^ht be known from tho afiiches. At every si reel, corner were to
be .(■(•II two, oi which one advertised a Tniite stir I incrediilite. (driiiim. Cnrr. litt. iii. 373.)

■'■ Tims IJiiruy had said in his llistnire de France (1st erf. Ls.52) that in the work of the
.Tansenists of 1'orL ltoval "l'esprit rf'opposition politique se cacha sous ['opposition
relieieuse " (ed. l-"0. ii, 2!M.

1 The case has been thus correctly put by M. Iiocquain, who. however, decides that
" de reliitieu-e qu'elle etait, l'oppo.sition rfevient politique " as early a- about 1721-1733.
1/ Ksitrit rr' ml ii I ion nu in- <i, ■mil hi rr mint inn, H7S ; tnhle des mxtii res, liv. 2e. Duvuy (last
noli pul the I endem-v still earlier.

"(j Ui Ii ir lii ii i -ohm a Voltaire, et excita son emulation" led. cited, p. IIS).

'■'■ A a rtixpement d< rditcurs, in iin !• « I. <,! 17.'.:. vol. \lv, p. If-.!.

228 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

itself (1762-66), ho girded on a sword that was not to be laid down
till his death.

Even so late as 1768, in his last letter to Damilaville (8 iev.),
Voltaire expresses a revulsion against the aggressive freethought
propaganda of the time which is either one of his epistolary-
stratagems or the expression of a nervous reaction in a time of
protracted bad health. " Mes chagrins redoublent," he writes,
" par la quantite incroyable d'ecrits contre la religion chretienne,
qui so succedent aussi rapidement en Hollande que les gazettes
et les journaux." His enemies have the barbarism to impute
to him, at his age, " une partie de ces extravagances composees
par de jeunes gens et par des moines defroques." His imme-
diate ground for chagrin may have been the fact that this out-
break of anti-Christian literature was likely to thwart him in
the campaign he was then making to secure justice to the
Sirven family as he had already vindicated that of Calas.
Sirven barely missed the fate of the latter.

The misconception of Buckle, above discussed, has been
widely shared even among students. Thus Lord Morley, dis-
cussing the " Creed of the Savoyard Vicar " in Eousseau's
Emile (1762), writes that " Souls weary of the fierce mockeries
that had so long been flying like fiery shafts against the far
Jehovah of the Hebrews, and the silent Christ of the later
doctors and dignitaries," may well have turned to it with
ardour {Rousseau, ed. 1886, ii, 266). He further speaks of the
" superiority of the sceptical parts of the Savoyard Vicar's pro-
fession over the biting mockeries which Voltaire had made

the fashionable method of assault" (p. 29-1). No specifications
are offered, and the chronology is seen to be astray. The only
mockeries which Voltaire could be said to have made fashion-
able before 1760 were those of his Lettres philosophiqucs, his
Mondain, Ids Defense de Milord Bolingbrokc, and his philoso-
phically humorous tales, as Candida, Zadig, Micronicgas, etc.:
all his distinctive attacks on Judaism and Christianity were
yet to come. [The Abbe Guyon, in his L'Oracle des nouveaux
philosophcs (Berne, 17-59-60, 2 torn.), proclaims an attack on
doctrines taught "dans les livres de nos beaux esprits " {Avert.
p. xi) ; but he specifies only denials of (l) revelation, (2) immor-
tality, and (3) the Biblical account of man's creation ; and he
is largely occupied with Diderot's Pcnsces philosophiqucs,
though his book is written at Voltaire. The second volume is
devoted to Candida and the Precis of Ecclesiastes and the
Song of Solomon — not very fierce performances.] Lord Morley,
as it happens, does not make this chronological mistake in his
earlier work on Voltaire, where he rightly represents him as
beginning his attack on " the Infamous " after he had settled
at Eernoy (1758). His "fierce mockeries " begin at the earliest

FEEXCTI FEEETIIOUGIIT 229

in 1761. The mistake may have arisen through taking as true
the fictitious date of 173(5 for the writing of the Examai
Important de Milord Bolingbrokc. It belongs to 1707. Buckle's
error, it may he noted, is repeated by so careful a student as
Dr. Redlich, Local Government in England, Eng. tr. 190.'], i, Gl.

10. The rest of Voltaire's long life was a sleepless and dexterous
warfare, by all manner of literary stratagem,1 facilitated by vast
literary fame ami ample acquired wealth, against what he called
" the Infamous " — the Church and the creed which he found still
swift to slay for mere variation of belief, and slow to let any good
thing l)e wrought for the bettering of men's lives. Of his prodigious
literary performance it is probably within the truth to say that in
respect of rapid influence on the general intelligence of the world it
has never been equalled by any one man's writing; and that, what-
ever its measure of error and of personal misdirection, its broader
influence was invariably for peace on earth, for tolerance among
men, and for reason in all things. His faults were many, and some
were serious ; but to no other man of his age, save possibly Beccaria,
can be attributed so much beneficent accomplishment, lie can
perhaps better be estimated as a force than as a man. So great
was the area of his literary energy that he is inevitably inadequate
at many points. Lessing could successfully impugn him in drama ;
Diderot in metaphysic ; Gibbon in history; and it is noteworthy
that all of these men2 at different times criticized him with asperity,
testing him by the given item of performance, and disparaging his
personality. Yet in his own way he was a greater power than any
of them ; and his range, as distinguished from his depth, otitgoes
theirs. In sum, ho was the greatest mental fighter of his age,
perhaps of any age : in that aspect he is a power-house " not to
be matched in human history; and his polemic is mainly for good.
It was a distinguished English academic who declared that " civiliza-
tion owes more to Voltaire than to all the Fathers of the Church put

1 It, lias been counted that ha used no fewer than a hundred and thirty different
pseudonyms; and the perpetual prosecution and confiscation of his hooks explains the
procedure. As we have seen, tin: Lett rex philumiphiiiucx (otherwise the l.eitn - n injlnises)
were burned on their appearance, in 17:J1, and the bookseller put in the liastille ; the
Heeeuil ilex pieces futjUivex was suppressed in 17.7.); the \\,i.c d it Sane et tin Veiiple was
oilicially and clerically condemned in 1751 ; the poem on Xatuial Line was burned at Paris
in 1V,>, ; Cainlidc u.1 fieneva in 17.7.) ; the Uictioitnaiie. philtistaihuiuc at (hncva in 17i!l. and
at i'aris in 17t;.>; and many of his minor pseudonymous performances had the same udver-
ti-einent. 1; it even the Hen rimle. the diaries XII. and the lirsl chapters of the Sii'ele tie
Lmtix XIV were prohibited : and in 17.S5 the thirty volumes publi-hed ol the I7sl edition
of his work-, were condemned en Masse.

- Diderot, eritinue of l.r philnsnphe iipioraitt in (irimm's Can: Lilt. 1 juin 17ii<i ;
J.e-dm,', Unmlai mische lira mat it mie, Stiiek 10-1-2, 1 .'. ; llibboii. eh. i. note near end;
cli. It, note on sie^e of Damascus. Kousseau was as ho -tile a , any is.-e Morlcy's Umisseau,
eh. ix, ■ 1). lint Ron-.- call , Verdict is the lea t important, an i tl e 1< a I indieial. lie had
him elf earned the detestation of Voltaire, as of niiui) other men. In a moment ol piipie,
Diderot wrote of Voltaire: "('et homme n'e t epie Ic second dan; tons le.-i fjenn
(Lettre 71 a Mdlle. Voland, 12 aotil, 17'i2). He forgot, v, it and humour !

230 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

together."1 If in a literary way he hated his personal foes, much
more did he hate cruelty and bigotry ; and it was his work more
than any that made impossible a repetition in Europe of such
clerical crimes as the hanging of the Protestant pastor, La Rochette ;
the execution of the Protestant, Galas, on an unproved and absurdly
false charge ; the torture of his widow and children ; the beheading
of the lad La Barre for ill-proved blasphemy.2 As against his many
humanities, there is not to be charged on him one act of public
malevolence. In his relations with his fickle admirer, FREDERICK
THE GREAT, and with others of his fellow-thinkers, he and they
painfully brought home to freethinkers the lesson that for them as
for all men there is a personal art of life that has to be learned, over
and above the rectification of opinion. But he and the others
wrought immensely towards that liberation alike from unreason
and from bondage which must precede any great improvement of
human things.

Voltaire's constant burden was that religion was not only untrue
but pernicious, and when he was not dramatically showing this of
Christianity, as in his poem La Ligice (1723), lie was saying it by
implication in such plays as Zaire (1732) and Mahomet (1742), dealing
with the fanaticism of Islam; while in the Essai sur las mceurs
(1756), really a broad survey of general history, and in the Steele de
Louis XIV, he applied the method of Montesquieu, with pungent
criticism thrown in. Later, he added to his output direct criticisms
of the Christian books, as in the Examcn important de Milord
Bolingbrohe (1767), and the Recherches historiques sur le CJiris-
tianisme ('? 17G9), continuing all his former lines of activity. Moan-
while, with the aid of his companion the MARQUISE DU CHATELET,
an accomplished mathematician, lie had done much to popularize the
physics of Newton and discredit the scientific fallacies of the system
of Descartes ; all the while preaching a Newtonian but rather agnostic
deism. This is the purport of his Philosophe Ignorant, his longest
philosophical essay.'5 The destruction of Lisbon by the earthquake

1 Prof. Jowetb, of Balliol College. See L. A. Tollemache, Benjamin Jowett, Master of
Balliol, 4th ed. pp. 27-23.

2 See details in Lord Morley's Voltaire, 4th ed. pp. 1G5-70, 257-58. The erection by the
French freethinkers of a monument to La Havre in 1905, opposite the Cathedral of the
Sacre 1 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, hut his execution was an infamy, and lie went to his death as to a bridal.
The erection of Die 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
Parlem ait that condemned La Barre, Put what a religious training was it that turned
laymen into murderous fanatics !

■! M. Lanson seems to overlook it when he writes (p. 717) that " the affirmation of God,
the denial of Providence and miracles, is the whole metaphysic of Voltaire."

FRENCH FREETIIOUGIIT 231

of 1755 seems to have shaken him in his deistic faith, since tho
upshot of his poem on that subject is to leave the moral government
of the universe an absolute enigma ; and in the later Candide (1759)
he attacks theistic optimism with his matchless ridicule. Indeed, as
early as 1719, in his Traite de la Metaphysiquc, written for the
Marquise du Chatelet, he reaches virtually pantheistic positions in
defence of the God-idea, declaring with Spinoza that deity can he
neither good nor had. But, like so many professed pantheists, ho
relapsed, and he never accepted the atheistic view ; on the contrary,
we find him arguing absurdly enough, in his Homily on Atheism
(17G5), that atheism had keen the destruction of morality in Rome;1
on the publication of d'llolbach's System of Nature in 1770 he threw
oil an article Dial : reponse ait Systemc de la Nature, where he argued
on the old deistic lines; and his tale of Jenni ; or, the Sage and the
Atheist (1775), is a polemic on the same theme. By this time tho
inconsistent deism of his youth had itself keen discredited among
the more thoroughgoing freethinkers ; and for years it had keen said
in one section of literary society that Voltaire after all " is a bigot ;
he is a deist ! "

But for freethinkers of all schools tho supreme service of Voltaire
lay in his twofold triumph over the spirit of religious persecution.
He had contrived at once to make it hateful and to make it ridicu-
lous ; and it is a great theistic poet of our own day that has pro-
nounced his blade the

sharpest, shrewdest steel that ever stahhed
To death Imposture through the armour joints. ::

To be perfect, the tribute should have noted that he hated cruelty
much more than imposture ; and such is the note of tho whole
movement of which his name was the oriilamme. Voltaire personally
was at once the most pugnacious and the most forgiving of men.
Few of the Christians who hated him had so often as he fulfilled
their own precept of returning good for evil to enemies ; and none
excelled him in hearty philanthropy. It is notable that most of the
humanitarian ideas of the latter half of the century the demand for
the reform of criminal treatment, the denunciation of war and slavery,
the insistence on good government, and toleration of all creeds - are

1 Lord Morley writes fj). 200) : " We do not know liov f;ir lie ever senon ly approached

tin- question whether a society can exist without a religion." This overlooks l.otli the

Homi-lif stir VAtliiisnw and the article ATI ikisMK in tin: Diet urn n>iin I'iitl ■ 7 ' n/ur, where
the question is discussed criously and explicitly.

- Horace Walpole, Letti r to Or;, v. Nov. 10. I To... Compare 1.1 h t clit.ici 1

firiinin iCitrr. lilt. vii. .jl k/.) on his tract, hint in reply to d'l lolhach. "II rai onne li-
dessus com me un enfant," writes Orimm. " luais coiume 1111 oli 1 plant < 1 1 1 " i I e I."

- Browning, T lie Two I'oeta 0/ Croinic, st. cvii.

232 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

more definitely associated with the freethinking than with any religious
party, excepting perhaps the laudable but uniniluential sect of Quakers.

The character of Voltaire is still the subject of chronic debate ;
but the old deadlock of laudation and abuse is being solved in a
critical recognition of him as a man of genius flawed by the
instability which genius so commonly involves. Carlyle (that
model of serenity), while dwelling on his perpetual perturbations,
half-humanely suggests that we should think of him as one con-
stantly hag-ridden by maladies of many kinds ; and this recogni-
tion is really even more important in Voltaire's case than in
Caiiyle's own. He was " a bundle of nerves," and the clear
light of his sympathetic intelligence was often blown aside by
gusts of passion — often enough excusably. But while his
temperamental weaknesses exposed him at times to humilia-
tion, and often to sarcasm ; and while his compelled resort to
constant stratagem made him more prone to trickery than his
admirers can well care to think him, the balance of his character
is abundantly on the side of generosity and humanity.

One of the most unjustifiable of recent attacks upon him (one
regrets to have to say it) came from the pen of the late Prof.
Churton Collins. In his book on Voltaire, Montesquieu, and
Rousseau in England (1908) that critic gives in the main an
unbiassed account of Voltaire's English experience ; but at one
point (p. 39) he plunges into a violent impeachment with the
slightest possible justification. He in effect adopts the old
allegation of Euffhead, the biographer of Pope — a statement
repeated by Johnson — that Voltaire used his acquaintance with
Pope and Bolingbroke to play the spy on them, conveying
information to Walpole, for which he was rewarded. The
whole story collapses upon critical examination. Ruffhead's
story is, in brief, that Pope purposely lied to Voltaire as to the
authorship of certain published letters attacking "Walpole. They
were by Bolingbroke ; but Pope, questioned by Voltaire, said
they were his own, begging him to keep the fact absolutely
secret. Next day at court everyone was speaking of the letters
as Pope's ; and Pope accordingly knew that Voltaire was a
traitor. For this tale there is absolutely nothing but hearsay
evidence. Euffhead, as Johnson declared, knew nothing of
Pope, and simply used Warburton's material. The one quasi-
confirmation cited by Mr. Collins is Bolingbroke's letter to
Swift (May 18, 1727) asking him to " insinuate " that Walpole's
only ground for ascribing the letters to Bolingbroke " is the

authority of one of his spies who reports, not ichat he hears

but what he guesses." This is an absolute contradiction of

the Pope story, at two points. It refers to a guess at Boling-
broke, and tells of no citation from Pope. To put it as con-
firming the charge is to exhibit a complete failure of judgment.

FRENCH FREETIIOUGHT 233

After this irrational argument, Mr. Collins offers a worse. He
admits (p. -±3) that Voltaire always remained on friendly terms
with both Pope and Bolingbroke ; but adds that this "can
scarcely be alleged as a proof of his innocence, for neither Pope
nor Bolingbroke would, for such an offence, have been likely to
quarrel with a man in a position so peculiar as that of Voltaire.

His flatter}) was j)leasant " Such an argument is worse

than nugatory. That Bolingbroke spoke ill in private of
Voltaire on general grounds counts for nothing. He did the
same of Pope and of nearly all his friends. Mr. Collins further
accuses Voltaire of baseness, falsehood, and hypocrisy on the
mere score of his habit of extravagant flattery. This was notori-
ously the French mode in that age ; but it had been just as
much the mode in seventeenth-century England, from the
Jacobean translators of the Bible to Dry den— to name no
others. And Mr. Collins in effect charges systematic hypocrisy
upon both Pope and Bolingbroke.

Other stories of Bullhead's against Voltaire are equally
improbable and ill-vouched — as Mr. Collins incidentally admits,
though he forgets the admission. They all come from War-
burton, himself convicted of double-dealing with Pope ; and
they finally stand for the hatred of Frenchmen which was so
common in eighteenth-century England, and is apparently not
yet quite extinct. Those who would have a sane, searching,
and competent estimate of Voltaire, leaning humanely to the
side of goodwill, should turn to the Voltaire of M. Champion.
A brief estimate was attempted by the present writer in the
It. P. A. Annual for 1912.

11. It is difficult to realize how far the mere demand for
tolerance which sounds from Voltaire's plays and poems before he
has begun to assail credences was a signal and an inspiration to
new thinkers. Certain it is that the principle of toleration, passed
on by Holland to England, was regarded by the orthodox priesthood
in France as the abomination of desolation, and resisted by them
with all their power. But the contagion was unquenchable. It
was presumably in Holland that there were printed in 1738 the two
volumes of Lett res sur la religion essenliclle a Vhomme, distinguee tie
re qui n'en esl que Vaccessoire, by Marie Iluber, a (lenevese lady
living in Lyons; also the two following parts (173'J), replying to
criticisms on the earlier. In its gentle way, the book stands very
distinctly for the "natural" and ethical principle in religion, denying
that the deity demands from men either service or worship, or that,
he can be wronged by their deeds, or that he can punish them
eternally for their sins. This was one of the first French fruits,

231 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

after Voltaire, of the English deistic influence;1 and it is difficult to
understand how the authoress escaped molestation. Perhaps the
memory of the persecution inflicted on the mystic Madame Guyon
withheld the hand of power. As it was, four Protestant theologians
opened fire on her, regarding her doctrine as hostile to Christianity.
One pastor wrote from Geneva, one from Amsterdam, and two
professors from Zurich — the two last in Latin.'2

From about 1746 onwards, the rationalist movement in eighteenth-
century France rapidly widens and deepens. The number of ration-
alistic writers, despite the press laws which in that age inflicted the
indignity of imprisonment on half the men of letters, increased from
decade to decade, and the rising prestige of the philosophes in con-
nection with the Encyclopedia (1751-72) gave new courage to writers
and printers. At once the ecclesiastical powers saw in the Encyclo-
pedie a dangerous enemy ; and in January, 1752, the Sorbonne
condemned a thesis " To the celestial Jerusalem," by the Abbe de
Prades. It had at first (1751) been received with official applause,
but was found on study to breathe the spirit of the new work, to
which the Abbe had contributed, and whose editor, Diderot, was his
friend. Sooth to say, it contained not a little matter calculated to
act as a solvent of faith. Under the form of a vindication of orthodox
Catholicism, it negated alike Descartes and Leibnitz ; and declared
that the science of Newton and the Dutch physiologists was a better
defence of religion than the theses of Clarke, Descartes, Cudworth,
and Malebranche, which made for materialism. The handling, too,
of the question of natural versus revealed religion, in which " theism "
is declared to be superior to all religions si imam excipias veram, "if
you except the one true," might well arouse distrust in a vigilant
Catholic reader.'1 The whole argument savours far more of the
scientific comparative method than was natural in the work of an
eighteenth-century seminarist ; and the principle, " Either we are
ocular witnesses of the facts or we know them only by hearsay," c
was plainly as dangerous to the Christian creed as to any other.
According to Naigeon,*3 the treatise was wholly the work of de Prades

1 Cp. Rtiiudlin, Gesch. flea Ilationalismus unci Supernatia-alismus, 1S26, pp. 237-90
Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte des IS. und 19. Jalirhunderts, 2te And. 1848, i. '218-20.

2 Zimmerman, De causis magis magisque i)iv<descentis incredulitaiis, et meilela huic
malo adhibenda. Tiguri, 1730. Ito. Prof. Breitinger of Zurich wrote a criticism afterwards
tr. (1741) as Examen des Lettres surla religion essentielle. De Roches, pastor at Geneva,
published in letter-form 2 vols, entitled Vefensi du Christianisme, as " preservatif contre"
the Lettres of Mdlle. Huber (1710) ; and Bouillier of Amsterdam also 2 vols, of Lettres (1741).

8 Cp. Bouillier, Hist, de la plulos. cartes, ii, (524-2,3; D'Argenson, Mi- moires, ed. Jannet,
iv, 63.

4 See the thesis (Jerusalem Calesti) as printed in the Apologie de M. I'Abbe De Prades,
"Amsterdam," 1752. pp. 4, 6.

s LI. p. 10. G Mimoires surla vie et les ouvrages de Diderot , 1S21, p. 160.

FRENCH FREETHOUGHT 235

and another Abbe, Yvon ; but it remains probable that Diderot
inspired not a little of the reasoning' ; and the clericals, bent on
putting down the Encyclopedic, professed to have discovered that ho
was the real author of the thesis. Either this belief or a desire to
strike at the Encyclopedic through one of its collaborators2 was tho
motive of the absurdly belated censure. Such a iiasco evoked much
derision from the philosophic party, particularly from Voltaire ; and
the Sorbonne compassed a new revenge. Soon after came the formal
condemnation of the first two volumes of tho Encyclopedic, of which
the second had just appeared."

D'Argenson, watching in his vigilant retirement the course of
things on all hands, sees in the episode a new and dangerous
development, " the establishment of a veritable inquisition in
France, of which the Jesuits joyfully take charge," though he
repeatedly remarks also on the eagerness of tho Jansenists to
outgo the Jesuits.4 But soon the publication of the Encyclopedic
is resumed ; and in 1753 D'Argenson contentedly notes tho oificial
bestowal of "tacit permissions to print secretly" books which
could not obtain formal authorization. Tho permission had been
given first by the President Malesherbes ; but even when that
official lost the king's confidence the practice was continued by the
lieutenant of police." Despite the staggering blow of the suppression
of the Encyclopedic, the philosophes speedily triumphed. So great
was the discontent even at court that soon (1752) Madame do
Pompadour and some of the ministry invited D'Alemhert and Diderot
to resume their work, " observing a necessary reserve in all things
touching religion and authority." Madame do Pompadour was in
fact, as D'Alemhert said at her death, "in her heart one of ours," as
was D'Argenson. But D'Alemhert, in a long private conference with
D'Argenson, insisted that they must write in freedom like the English
and the Prussians, or not at all. Already there was talk of sup-
pressing the philosophic works of Gondillac, which a few years before
bad gone uncondemned ; and freedom must be preserved at any cost.
1 acquiesce," writes the ex-Minister, "in these arguments."'
Curiously enough, the freethinking Fontenelle, who for a time (the
dates are elusive) held the office of royal censor, was more rigorous

i ('!). I'.achiiumont., Mrnv.irm srrrrts, 1 fev. 17f,.!; II nvril, 17t'.S. In the latter entry,
Yvon is descrihed as " pour-uivi romme infidele, <pioi<!iie le plus rroyant il<' Franer." In
ITiVs. after the lili. nirr <rn n< l;i 1, lie was rctu -cr I permission to proceed with the puhlieation

Ol hi Hlxtuia- , rrlr institllli'.

■■ 'liii- ■:.., d. •!■!■.• le ■■ o-.vn vii ■.'. of the matter f.f/io/.,r/jV, as cited, p. v>; and D'Argenson
repeatedly ays a mileh. Mi'-mairrs, i v, ",7, 17",. III!, 71, 77.

•'- Koe.qiiain, I/rs,>rit rmdiitiininiiirc iirmit In rrmliititm, 1S7S, pp. ll'lTil; Morley,
Dt'hmt, ,:],. v; I ) A r:Vn on . I v, 7-. The derive of lippiv ion was dal ed 1:) lev. 17.VJ.

1 Mrmoiris, iv. CI, 71. ;- hi. iv, I !'.!, 1 II). ^ /''. iv, '.U 'J3.

236 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

than other officials who had not his reputation for heterodoxy. One
day he refused to pass a certain manuscript, and the author put the
challenge : " You, sir, who have published the llistoire dcs Oracles,
refuse me this '? " " If I had been the censor of the Oracles," replied
Fontenelle, " I should not have passed it." ' And he had cause for
his caution. The unlucky Tercier, who, engrossed in " foreign affairs,"
had authorized the publication of the De V Esprit of Helvetius, was
compelled to resign the censorship, and severely rebuked by the Paris
Parlement.2 But the culture-history of the period, like the political,
was one of ups and downs. From time to time the philosophic party
had friends at court, as in the persons of the Marquis D'Argenson,
Malesherbes, and the Due de Choiseul, of whom the last-named
engineered the suppression of the Jesuits.3 Then there were checks
to the forward movement in the press, as when, in 1770, Choiseul
was forced to retire on the advent of Madame Du Barry. The
output of freethinking books is after that year visibly curtailed. But
nothing could arrest the forward movement of opinion.

12. A new era of propaganda and struggle had visibly begun.
In the earlier part of the century freethought had been disseminated
largely by way of manuscripts4 and reprints of foreign books in
translation ; but from the middle onwards, despite denunciations
and prohibitions, new books multiply. To the policy of tacit
toleration imposed by Malesherbes a violent end was tem-
porarily put in 1757, when the Jesuits obtained a proclamation
of the death penalty against all writers who should attack the
Christian religion, directly or indirectly. It was doubtless under
the menace of this decree that Deslandes, before dying in 1757,
caused to be drawn up by two notaries an actc by which he dis-
avowed and denounced not only his Grands homines morts en
plaisantant but all his other works, whether printed or in MS.,
in which ho had "laid down principles or sustained sentiments
contrary to the spirit of religion."0 But in 1761, on the suppression
of the Jesuits, there was a vigorous resumption of propaganda.
" There are books," writes Voltaire in 1765, " of which forty years
ago one would not have trusted the manuscript to one's friends, and
of which there are now published six editions in eighteen months."0

' Maury. Hist, de Vancienne Acailhnie des Inscriptions, 1864, pp. 312-13.

2 Journal historique de Bar bier, 1847-50, iv, 301.

:; Astruc, wejearn from D'Aleinbert, connected their decline with the influence of the
new opinions. " Ce ne sont pas les jansenistes qui tuent les jesuites, e'est l'Encyclope lie."
"Le rnaroufle Astruc." adds D'Aleinbert, "est comme I'asquin, il parle quelquefois d'assez
bon sens." Lettre a Voltaire, 4 mai, 1762.

1 (']>. pref. (La Vie de Salcien) to French tr. of Salvian, 1731, p. lxix. I have scon MS.
translations of Toland and Woolston.

5 MS. statement, in eitfhteenth-century hand, on flyleaf of a copy of 1755 ed. of the
Grands homines, in the writer's possession. G Lettre a D'Alembert, 16 Oetobre, 1765.

FRENCH FEEETHOUGHT 237

Voltairo single-handed produced a library ; and d'llolbach is credited
with at least a dozen freethinking treatises, every one remarkable in
its day. But there were many more combatants. The reputation
of Voltaire lias overshadowed even that of his leading contemporaries,
and theirs and his have further obscured that of the lesser men; but
a list of miscellaneous freethinking works by French writers during
the century, up to the Revolution, will serve to show how general
was the activity after 1750. It will bo seen that very little was
published in France in the period in which English deism was most
fecund. A noticeable activity of publication begins about 1745. But
it was when the long period of chronic warfare ended for Franco
with the peace of Paris (1763) ; when she had lost India and North
America ; when she had suppressed the Jesuit order (1761) ; and
when England had in the main turned from intellectual interests to
the pursuit of empire and the development of manufacturing industry,
that the released French intelligence turned with irresistible energy
to the rational criticism of established opinions. The following table
is thus symbolic of the whole century's development : — ■

1700. Lettre d' Hypocratc a Damagdte, attributed to the Comtc do Boulainyillicrs.

(Cologne.) Rep. in Bibliothfique Volantc, Amsterdam, 1700.
,, [Claude Gilbert.] Histoire dc C ale Java, on de Visle des homines raison-
nablcs, avec le parallele de leur morale et du CJiristianismc. Dijon.
Suppressed by the author: only one copy known to have escaped.

1701. [Gucudeville.] Dialogues de M. le Baron de la Haitian et d'un sauvage

dans VAmCriquc. (Amsterdam.)

1709. Lettre sitr Vcnthoitsiasme (Fr. tr. of Shaftesbury, by Samson). La Have.

1710. [Tyssot de Pa tot, Symon.] Voyages et Avantures de Jaques Masse.

(Bourdeaux.)
,, Essai sitr Vusage de la raillerie (Fr. tr. of Shaftesbury, by Van Effen).
La Have.

1712. [Deslandes, A. F. B.] Reflexions sur les grands homines qui sont inorts
en 2>laisantant.'2 (Amsterdam.)

1711. Discours sur la liberty dc penser 'French tr. of Collins's Discourse of Frcc-

tliinking], traduit de I'anglois et augmente d'une Lettre d'un Medecin
Arabe. (Tr. by Henri Scheurleer and Jean Rousset.) [Rep. 1717. j"

1 Of the works noted below, the majority appear or profess to have been printed at
Amsterdam, though many bore the imprint Londrcs. All the freethinking bonks and
translations ascribed to d'Holbach bore it. The Art' tin of Abbe Dulanrens bore the
imprint: " Rome, aux depens de la Congregation de l'lndex." Mystifications concerning
authorship have been as far as possible cleared up in the present edition.

- (liven by Unmet, who is followed by Wheeler, as appearing in 17:5-2. and as translated
into Hntflish, under the title I)ijin<) MrrrVu, in 171"). But I possess an Bullish translation
of /;-/.7'pref. dated March A>>, entitled A Philobmcd Kssoy : or. l!< tlrrl ions on Hi, Ih.itli of
Frrrtliiiikrm..... By Mon-ieur I) -. of the Royal Acadeno of Sciences in France, nnd
author of the I'orlor Ititntirnntis Litcratum Ofiitm. Translated from the French by
Mr. 15 — , with additions by the author, now in London, and the translator. I A note in
ii con tern porarv hand makes "15" Borer. ! Bar bier j;ives 1712 for the first edition, 17.T2 for
the econd. Hep. 17.V, and 177*5.

:: Tli ere is no .-i;{n of an v such excitement in Franco over the translation ns was arou :ed
in Kn^laed by the original ; but an i:.r>uta n du truili- debt liht rt> >tr. a nm r, by De Crousaz,
wa . published at Amsterdam in 1 7 1 ss .

238 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

1719. [Vroes.] La Vie ct V Esprit cle M. Benolt de Spinoza.

1720. Same work rep. under the double title: De tribus impostoribas : Des trois

bnposteurs. Frankfort on Main.
1724. [LevesquedcBurigny.] Histoircdela philosophic payennc. LaHayc, 2tom.

1730. [Bernard, J.-F.] Dialogues critiques ct philosophises. " Par l'Abbe de

Charte-Livry." (Amsterdam.) Rep. 1735.

1731. Refutation des crrcurs de Benoit de Spinoza, par Fenelon, le P. Laury,

benedictin, et Boulainvilliers, avec la vie de Spinoza par Colerus,

etc. (collected and published by Lcnglet du Fresnoy). Bruxelles
(really Amsterdam). The treatise of Boulainvilliers is really a
popular exposition.

1732. Re-issue of Deslandes's Reflexions.

1734. [Voltaire.] Lettres philosophises. 4 edd. within the year. [Condemned
to be burned. Publisher imprisoned.]
,, [Longue, Louis-Pierre de.] Lcs Princesses Malabares, ou le Celibat Phi-
losophiquc . [Deistic allegory. Condemned to be burned.]

1737. Marquis D'Argens. La Pliilosophie du Bon Sens. (Berlin: 8th edition,

Dresden, 1754.)

1738. , Lettres Juices. 6 torn. (Berlin.)

,, [Marie Huber.] Lettres stir la religion cssenticlle a Vhomme, distingue de
ce qui n'en est que Vaccessoirc. 2 torn. (Nominally London.) Rep.
1739 and 1756.

1739. , Suite to the foregoing, "servant de rcponse aux objections," etc.

Also Suite de la troisUme par tie.

1741. [Deslandes.] Pignialion, ou la Statue aniniee. [Condemned to be burnt
by Parlcment of Dijon, 1742.]

,, , De la Certitude des connaissanccs humaines traduit cle I'anglais

par F. A. D. L. V.
1743. Nouvelles libcrtes de penser. Amsterdam. [Edited by Dumarsais. Con-
tains the first print of Fontonelle's Traite de la Liberte, Dumarsais's
short essays Le Pliilosnphe and De la raison, Mirabaud's Sentimens
des philosophcs sur la nature de Vdrne, etc.]
1745. [Lieut. De la Serre.] La vraie religion traduite de VEcriturc Salute, par
permission de Jean, Luc, Marc, et Matthieu. (Nominally Trevoux,
"aux depens des Peres de la Societe de Jesus.") [Appeared later as
Examcn, etc. Condemned to be burnt by Parlement of Paris.]
[This book was republished in the same year with "demontree par" substituted
in the title for " traduite de," and purporting to be " traduit do 1' Anglais dc
Gilbert Burnet," with the imprint " Londres, G. Code, 1745." It appeared
again in 1761 as Examen de la religion dont on cherche V eclaircissement dc b>~>une
foi. Attribue a M. de Saint-Euremont, traduit, etc., with the same imprint. It
again bore the latter title when reprinted in 1763. and again in the Evangilc de
la Raison in 1761. Voltaire in 1763 declared it to be the work of Dumarsais,
pronouncing it to be assuredly not in the style of Saint-Evremoud (Grimm, iv,
85-88; Voltaire, Lcttre a Damilaville, 6 dec. 1763), adding "mais il est fort
tronque et detestablement imprime." This is true of the reprints in the Evangilc
de la Raison (1764, etc.), of one of which the present writer possesses a copy to
which there has been appended in MS. a long section which had been lacking.
The Evangilc as a whole purports to be " Ouvragc posthume dc M. D. M y." l

1 This was probably meant to point to the Abbe de Marsy, who died in 17G3.

FEENCH FEEETHOUGHT 239

But its first volume includes four pieces of Voltaire's, and his abridged Testament
de Jean Me slier. Further, De la Serre is recorded to have claimed the authorship
in writing on the eve of his death. Barbier, Diet, des Anonymes, 2e ed, No. 615S.
He is said to have been hanged as a spy at Maastricht, April 11, 1718.]
1715. [La Mettrie.] Histoire natureUe de Vdme. [Condemned to be burnt,

17-lG.j Rep. as Trait'' de 1'Anie.
17-16. [Diderot.] Pensees philosophiques. [Condemned to be burnt.]
1718. [P. Esteve.] L'Origine de V Univcrs cxpliquee par an principe de matierc.

(Berlin.)
,, [Benoit de Maillet.l Telliamed, on Entretiens d'un philosoimc indicn avec

an missionnire francais. (Printed privately, 1735; rep. 1755.)
[La Mettrie.] L'Homme Machine.

1750. Xouvelles liberies de jJcnser. Rep.

1751. [Mirabaud, J. B. de.] Le Monde, son origine et son antiquite. [Edited

by the Abbe Le Mascrier (who contributed the preface and the third
part) and Dumarsais.J
,, De Prades. Sorbonne 'Thesis.

1752. [Gouvest, J. II. Maubert de.] Lctlrcs Iroquoises. " Irocopolis, chez les

Yenerables." 2 torn. (Rep. 17G9 as Lcttres ehcral:esiennes.)
' ,, [Genard, F.] TTKcole de I'homme, on Parallelc des Portraits dit siecle
et des tableaux de Vecriture sainte.1 Amsterdam, 3 torn. [Author
imprisoned.]

1753. [Baume-Desdossat, Canon of Avignon.] La Christiadc. [Book sup-

pressed. Author fined.] -
, , Maupertuis. SystOme de la nature.

,, Astruc, Jean. Conjectures sur les memoires originaux dont il parait que
Mo'ise s'est servi pour composer le livre de la Gcnesc. Bruxclles.
1751. Premontval, A. I. le Guay do. Le Dioge'nc da d'Alembert, ou Pensees
libres sur I'homme. Berlin. (2nd ed. enlarged, 1755.)
,, Burigny, J. L. ThCologic payenne. 2 torn. (New ed. of his Histoire de

la philosophic. 1721.)
,, "Diderot.] Pensees sur V interpretation de la nature.

,, Beausobre, L. de (the younger). Pyrrhanismc du Sage. Berlin. (Burned
by Paris Parlement.)
1755. Rechcrches philosophiqucs sur la liberty de I'homme. Trans, of Collins's
Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty.
,, [Voltaire.] Poeme Sur la loi naturcllc.

,, Analyse raisonnce de Bayle. i torn, [By the Abbe de Marsy. Sup-
pressed.;! Continued in 1773, in 1 new vols., by Robinet.]
Morally. Code de la Nature.
,, [Deleyre.] Analyse de In ]>hilosophie de Bacon. (Largely an exposition
of Deleyre's own views.)
1757. Pn'montval. Vues Philosophiques. (Amsterdam.)

In this year apparently after one of vigilant repression — was pronounced
the death penalty against all writers attacking religion. Hence a general suspen-

1 Tl n Ahljr Scpher ascribed tin's book to one Dupuis, n Royal Guardsman.

- This " prose poem ' was not an intentional burlc iim-. u> the ecclesiastical authorities
alleged ; lju t it diil not stand for orthodoxy. See Gri nun's Ci»-rr-v<»i'l<nic<-, i. ll:l.

'■' " A en les honncurs de !a brnlure, et toutes les censures cnmuNVs lies I'ncultes de
Thcolofie. do In Sorbonne et de ev.'onfs." Hachaumont. d.V. il. 17t>:{. Mar v. who was
expelled from the Order of Jesuits, was ot bad character, and was hotly denounced by
Voltaire.

240 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

sion of publication. In 1761 the Jesuits were suppressed, and the policy of

censorship was soon paralysed.]

175S. Helvetius. Dc V Esprit. (Authorized. Then condemned.)

1759. [Voltaire.] Candide. ("Geneve.")

,, Translation of Hume's Natural History of Religion and Philosophical
Essays. (By Merian.) Amsterdam.

1761. [N.-A. Boulanger.1] Itechcrches sur Vorigine du despotisme oriental, ct

des superstitions. " Ouvrage posthume de Mr. D. J. D. P. E. C."
,, Rep. of De la Serro's La vraie religion as Examen de la religion, etc.
,, [D'Holbach.] Le Christianisme devoile. [Imprint: " Londres, 1756."
Really printed at Nancy in 1761. Wrongly attributed to Boulanger
and to Damilaville.] Rep. 1767 and 1777.
[Grimm (Corr. incditc, 1829, p. 191) speaks in 1763 of this book in his notice
of Boulanger, remarking that the title was apparently meant to suggest the
author of L'AntiquiU dcvoilce, but that it was obviously by another hand.
The Antiqidti, in fact, was the concluding section of Boulanger' s posthumous
Despotisme Oriental (1761), and was not published till 1766. Grimm professed
ignorance as to the authorship, but must Lave known it, as did Voltaire, who
by way of mystification ascribed the book to Damilaville. See Barbier.]

1762. Rousseau. Entile. [Publicly burned at Paris and at Geneva. Con-

demned by the Sorbonne.]
,, Robinet, J. B. De la nature. Vol. i. (Vol. ii in 1761 ; iii and iv in 1766.)

1763. [Voltaire.] Saiil. Geneve.

,, ■ Dialogue entrc un Caloyer ct un honnetc liommc.

,, Rep. of De la Serres' Examen.
1761. Diseours sur la liberty de penscr. (Rep. of trans, of Collins.)

,, [Voltaire.] Dictionwiirc philosophique portatif.- [First form of the
Dictionnairc pliilosophigue. Burned in 1765.]

,, Lettres secretes de M. de Voltaire . [Holland. Collection of tracts made
by Robinet, against Voltaire's will.]

,, [Voltaire.] Melanges, 3 torn. Geneve.

,, [Dulaurens, Abbe H. J.] L'Aretin.

,, L'Evangile dc la Eaison. Ouvrage posthume dc M. D. M y. [Ed. by

Abbe Dulaurens ; containing the Testament de Jean Meslier (greatly
abridged and adapted by Voltaire) ; Voltaire's Catechisme de Vhonnete
homme, Sermon des cinnuantc, etc.; the Examen de la religion,
attribui a M. de St. Evremond; Rousseau's Vicaire .Savoyard, from
Emilc; Dumirsais's Analyse de la religion chretienne, etc. Rep.
1765 and 1766. j

1765. Recueil Necessaire, avee L'Evangile de la Eaison, 2 torn.

[Rep. of parts of the Evangile. Rep. 1767, :i 176S, with Voltaire's Examen
important de Milord Bolingbroke substituted for that of De la Scrre (attribui a
M. de St. Evremond), and with a revised set of extracts from Meslier.]

,, Castillon, J. L. Essai dc philosophic morale.

1766. Boulanger, N. A. L'Antiguitd dcvoilie.* 3 torn. [Recast by d'Holbach.

Life of author by Diderot.]

1 Hce Grimm, Corr. v, 15.

2 A second edition appeared within the year. " Quoique proscrit prepque partout, et
meme en Hollande, e'est de la qu'il nous arrive." Bachaumont, dee. -21, 1761.

•1 Bachaumont, mai 7, 1767.

J " Se repand a Paris avec la permission de la police." Bachaumont, 13 few 1766.

FRENCH FREETIIOUGIIT Ml

1766. Voyage de Robertson aux terres australes. Traduit sue lo Manuscrifc
Anglois. Amsterdam.

[B.irbior {Diet, des Oitvr. Anon., 2e ed. iii, 437) has a note concerning this
Voyage which pleasantly illustrates the strategy that went on in the issue of
freethinking books. An ex-censor of the period, he tells us. wrote a note on the
original edition pointing out that it contains (pp. 1.15-51) a tirade against
"Parlements." This passage was "suppressed to obtain permission to bring the
book into France,-' and a new passage attacking the Encyclopedistes under the
name of Pansoqdiistes was inserted at another point. The ex-censor had a copy
of an edition of 1767. in 12mo, better printed than the first and on better paper.
In this, at p. 87, line 30, begins the attack on the Encyclopedistes, which
continues to p. 93.

If this is accurate, there has taken place a double mystification. I possess a
copy dated 1767, in 12mo, in which no page has so many as 30 lines, and in
which there has been no typographical change whatever in pp. 87-93, where
there is no mention of Encyclopedistes. But pp. 1-15-51 are clearly a typogra-
phical substitution, in different type, with fewer lines to the page. Hero there
is a narrative about the Pansophistes of the imaginary " Australie"; but while it
begins with enigmatic satire it ends by praising them for bringing about a great
intellectual and social reform.

If the censure was induced to pass the book as it is in this edition by this
insertion, it was either very heedless or very indulgent. There is a sweeping
attack on the papacy (pp. 9 1— 9 j) , and another on the Jesuits (pp. 100-102) ; and
it leans a good deal towards republicanism. But on a balance, though clearly
anti-clerical, it is rather socio-political than freethinking in its criticism. The
wards on the title-page, traduit sur la manuscrit anglois, arc of course pure
mystification. It is a romance of the Utopia school, and criticizes English
conditions as well as French.]

1766. De Pradcs. Abridge de Vhistoire eccUsiastique de Fleurg. (Berlin.) Pref.

by Frederick the Great. (Rep. 1767.)
,, [Burigny.] Examen critique des Apologistes de la religion chnHiennc.

Published (by Naigeon ?) under the name of Freret.' [Twice rep. in

1767. Condemned to be burnt, 1770. J
,, [Voltaire.] Le philosoplie ignorant.
,, [Abbe Millot.] Histoire philosophiqiie de Vhommc. [Naturalistic theory

of human beginnings, j

1767. Castillon. Almanach Pliilosophique.

,, Doutes sur la religion (attributed to Gueroult de Pival), siiivide V Analyse
du Trait'1 tht'ologique-politiqucde Spinoza (by Boulainvillicrs). [Hep.
with additions in 17'J'2 under the title Doutes sur les religious rrrrlres,
adressi's a Voltaire, par Kmilie du Chatelef. Ouvragc posthumc.J

,, [Dulaurens.] L' antipapisme revi'li'.

,, Lettre dr. Tkrasybule a Lcucippe. [Published under the name of Freret
(d. 1710). Written or edited by Naigeon. -J

i "II est faeile de se eonvainore que les parties les plu> import antes et le - plus sol ides
de eet ouvraHe out em prim tees mix Ira van x he IS uri' my." 1 j. I''. A It' re i Maury, l/iuirii-mir
A ci 'I'1 inii' Urn Iiiwrijitimtx rt bAlrs-lrll n-s, IMil, p. :jlii. Maui's leave it an open t\ u-stiim
wneLher the compilation was made Ijy ISuri^n V or l».v Nai "'■,,,,. I ie M.Ij.' I '•• i;l i. -r accepted
it without hesitation a Llie >vork of Kivret, who wa.s known to hoi, I nine I nicLi t;l1 view-.
(Maury, p. ::I7.) liarbier confidently a cribe ; Llie work to ISiirhmv.

^ The nivstifiitiaion in rcna.nl to this work i ; elaborate. 1 1, purport s to be translated
from an K;i ;H in version, declared in turn by it . trail dator i , he ma le 'from the l ireek."
VoL. II R

242 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

1767. [D'Holbach.] U Imposture saccrdotale, ou Becueil clc pieces sur la clerge,

traduitcs de Vanglois.
,, [Voltaire.] Collection des lettres sur les miracles.

, , ■ Examen important de milord Bolingbrokc .

,, Marmontel. Belisaire. (Censured by the Sorbonne.)

[Damilaville.] L'konnetete theologiqae.
,, Reprint of Le Christianisme devoile. [Condemned to be burnt, 1768
and 1770.]
[Voltaire.] Questions sur les Miracles. Par un Proposant.
,, Seconde partie of the RechercJies sur Vorigine du despotisme.

1768. Meister, J. H. De Voriginc des principes religieux.

[Author banished from his native town, Zurich, "in perpetuity" (decree
rescinded in 1772). and book publicly burned there by the hangman.1 Meister
published a modified edition at Zurich in 1769. Orig. rep. in the Becueil
Philosojfliique , 1770.]

1763. Catalogue raisonne des esprits forts, depuis le cure Babelais jusqiVau curi
Meslier.
,, [D'Holbach.] La Contagion sacrie, ou histoirc naturelle de la super-
stition. [Condemned to be burnt, 1770.]

,, Lettres pliilosophigjies sur Voriginc des prejuges, etc., traduites de

Vanglois (of Toland).

,, Lettres a Eugenic, ou preserratif confrc les prrjuges. 2 torn.

,, Theologie Portative. "Par l'abbe Bernier." [Also burnt, 1776.]

,, Traite des trois Imposteurs. (See 1719 and 1720.) Rep. 1775, 1777, 1793.
,, Naigeon, J. A. Le militairc philosophe. [Adaptation of a MS. The

last chapter by d'Holbach.]
,, D'Argens. (T.uvrcs completes, 21 torn. Berlin.
,, Examen des propla'tics qui screent de fondement d la religion clirctienne

(tr. from Collins by d'Holbach).
,, Robinct. Considerations pliilosophirpies.
1769-17S0. L'Evangile dujour. 18 torn. Series of pieces, chiefly by Voltaire.

1769. [Diderot. Also ascribed to Castillon.] Histoire generale des dogmes

ct opinions pliilosophiqucs tiree du Dictionnairc encyclope digue .

Londres, 3 torn.

,, [Mirabaud.] Opinions des anciens sur les juifs, and Reflexions impar-
tialcs sur VEvangile'2 (rep. in 1777 as Examen critique du Nouveau
Testament).

,, [Isoard-Delislc, otherwise Delisle de Sales.] De la Pliilosophie de la Nature.
6 torn. [Author imprisoned. Book condemned to be burnt, 1775.]

,, [Seguicr de Saint-Brisson.] Trait/' des Droits de Genie, dans lequel on
examine si la connoissance de la verite est avantageusc aux hommes ct
piossible au philosoplia. "Carolsrouhe," 1769. [A strictly naturalistic-
ethical theory of society. Contains an attack on the doctrine of
Rousseau, in Entile, on the usefulness of religious error.]

It is now commonly ascribed to Naigeon. CUanry. as cited, p. .'117.1 Its machinery, and
its definite atheism, mark it as of the school of d'Holbach, though it is alleged to have
been written by Freret as early as 172.!. It is however reprinted, witli the Examen critique
ties Apologistes, in the 17i)tj edition of Frerot's works without comment ; and liarhier was
satisfied that it was the one genuine "philosophic" work ascribed to Freret, but that it
was redacted by Naigcon from imperfect MSS.

1 Notice sur Henri Master, pref. to Lettres inedites de Madame de Stael a Henri
Meister, 1003, p. 17.

- " Deux nouveaux livres infernaux connus comme manuscrits depuis longtemps et

gardes dans l'obscurite des portei'euilles " Bachaumont, -2-2 mars, 1769.

FRENCH FBEETHOUGHT 243

1769. L'enfer dt'truit, traduit de l'Anglois [by d'Holbach.]

1770. [D'Holbach.] Histoire critique de Jesus Christ.

,, Examen critique de la vie et des ouvrages de Saint Paul (tr. from

English of Peter Annet).

,, Essai sur les PrcjunCs. (Not by Dumarsais, whose name on the

title-page is a mystification.)

,, Si/steme de la Nature. 2 torn.

,, Recueil Philosopliinue, 2 torn. [Edited by Naigcon. Contains a rep.
of Dmnarsais's essays Le Philosophy and De la. raison, an extract
from Tindal, essays by Vauvenargu.es and Freret (or Eontenelle), three
by Mirabaud, Diderot's Pensees sur la religion, several essays by
d'Holbach, Cloister's De Variable des principes religieux, etc.]
,, Analyse de Bn/le. Rep. of the four vols, of De Marsy, with four more

by Robinet.
,, TS Esprit da Judaisme. (Trans, from Collins by d'Holbach.)
,, Raynal (with Diderot and others). Histoire philosophique des deux Tildes.

(Containing atheistic arguments by Diderot. Suppressed, 1772.)
fin this year there wore condemned to be burned seven frcothinking works :
d'Holbach's Contagion Sacree ; Voltaire's Dicu et les Homines; the French
translation (undated) of Woolston's Discourses on the Miracles of Jesus Christ;
Freret's (really Burigny's) Examen critique de la religion chreticnne ; an Examen
impartial des principales religions (lit monde, undated ; d'Holbach's Christianisme
drvoile ; and his Si/steme de la Nature.]

1772. Le Bon Sens. [Adaptation from Meslicr by Diderot and d'Holbach.

Condemned to be burnt, 1774. J
De In nature humaine. [Trans, of Hobbes by d'Holbach.]

1773. Helvetius. De V Homme. Ouvrage posthume. 2 torn. [Condemned to

be burnt, Jan. 10, 1774. Rep. 1775.]
Carra, J. L. Si/steme de hi liaison, on le proplictc philosophe.
,, [Burigny ('?).] Reclicrches sur les miracles.
,, [D'Holbach.] La politique naturelle. 2 torn.
,, . Sysleme Sacialc. 3 torn.

1774. Abauzit, 1''. Reflexions impartiales sur les Evannilcs, suivies d'un essai

sur V A])ocahjj)sc. (Abauzit died 17G7.)
,, [Condorcet.] Lettres d'un Tlicaloijicn. (Atheistic.)
,, Now edition of Theologic Portative. 2 torn. [Condemned to be burnt.]

1775. [Voltaire. I Histoire de Jeuui, on Le Sage et VAthee. [Attack on atheism.]
1770. [D'Holbach.] La morale universclle. 3 torn.

,, — ■ — . Ethocratie.

1777. Examen critique du Nouvcau Testament, "par M. Freret." [Not by
Freret. A rep. of Mirabaud's Inflexions impartiales sur VEvanr/ilc,
170'J, which was probably written about 1750, bring replied to in the
Refutation du ('else mode me of the Alibi' Gauticr, 1752 and 1765. j
,, Carra. Esprit de la morale et de la philosophic.

177-^. liarthoz, I'. -I. Nnurenitx elements de la s( ieuce de Vhommc.

177'). Vie (V.i polbniLUs de Tijanc par Philoslratc, avee los ooimnenlaires (Limit's
en anglois par Charles Blount sur los dou\ premiers livi'es. [Trans.
by J. |-\ Salvemini de Ca Li 1 Ion , Berlin.] Am terdam, I lorn, (hi
addition to Blount's prof, and notes there is a sculling dedication to
Pope Clement XI V.)

244 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

1730. Duvernct, Abbe Th. J. L' Intolerance religieuse.

Clootz. Anacharsis. La Certitude des preuves da Mahometisme. [Reply

by way of parody to Bergier's work, noted on p. 250.]
Second ed. of Raynal's Histoire philosophique, with additions. (Con-
demned to be burnt, 1781.)
1781. Marechal, Sylvain. Le nouvcau Lucrecc.
1783. Brissot de Warville. Lettres philosophiques sur S. Paul.

1731. Doray de Longrais. Faust in, ou le sie.de philosophique,
Pougens, M. C. J. dc. Recreation* de philosophic ct de morale.

17S5. Marechal. Livre6chnppe.au Deluge. [Author dismissed.]

1737. Marquis Pastoret. Zoroastre, Confucius, ct Mahomet.

1738. Meister. De la morale naturclle.

, , Pastoret. Mo'ise considere comme legislateur ct comme moralistc.

Marechal. Almanack des honnetes gens. [Author imprisoned; book
burnt.]

1739. Volney. Les Ruincs des Empires.

,, Duvernet, Abbe. Les Devotions dc Madame de Betzamootk.
,, Cerutti (Jesuit Father). BrCviaire Philosophique, ou Histoire du
Judaismc, clu Christianisme , ct du Deisme.
1791-3. Naigeon. Dictionnairc de la philosophic ancienne ct moderne.
1795. Dupuis. De Vorigine de tons les Cultes. 5 torn.

,, La Fable de Christ devoilec ; ou Lcttre du muphti de Constantinople a
Jean Ange Braschy, muphti de Rome.
1797. Rep. of d' Hoi bach's Contagion sacree, with notes by Lemaire.
179S. Marechal. Pense.es libres sur les pretres. A Rome, et se trouve a Paris,
chez les Marchands de Nouveautes. L'An Ier de la Raison, et VI do
la Republiquc Francaise.

13. It will bo noted that after 1770 — coincidently, indeed, with a
renewed restraint upon the press — there is a notable faliing-off in
the freethinking output. Rationalism had now permeated educated
France ; and, for different but analogous reasons, the stress of discus-
sion gradually shifted as it had done in England. France in 1760
stood to the religious problem somewhat as England did in 1730,
repeating the deistic evolution with a difference. By that time
England was committed to the new paths of imperialism and
commercialism ; whereas France, thrown back on the life of ideas
and on her own politico-economic problems, went on producing the
abundant propaganda we have noted, and, alongside of it, an inde-
pendent propaganda of economics and politics. At the end of 17G7,
the leading French diarist notes that " there is formed at Paris a
new sect, called the Economists," and names its leading personages,
Qucsnay, Mirabeau the elder, the Abbe Bandeau, Mercier de la
I {mere, and Turgot. These developed the doctrine of agricultural or
" real " production which so stimulated and influenced Adam Smith.
llul immediately afterwards" the diarist notes a rival sect, the school

1 Bachaumout, Mcnioirex Secrets, dec. 20, 1767. - Id. Jan. 18, 1768.

FRENCH FEEETHOUGHT 245

of Forbonnais, wlio founded mainly on the importance of commerce
and manufactures. Each "sect" had its journal. The intellectual
ferment had inevitably fructified thought upon economic as upon
historical, religious, and scientific problems ; and there was in
operation a fourfold movement, all tending to make possible the
immense disintegration of the State which began in 1789. After
the Economists came the "Patriots," who directed towards the
actual political machine the spirit of investigation and reform. And
the whole effective movement is not implausibly to be dated from
the fall of the Jesuits in 1764. 1 Inevitably the forces interacted :
Montesquieu and Rousseau alike dealt with both the religious and
the social issues ; d'Holbach in his first polemic, the Christianisme
dtiuoile, opens the stern impeachment of kings and rulers which he
develops so powerfully in the Essai sur les Pnjugcs ; and the
Encyclopedic sent its search-rays over all the fields of inquiry. But
of the manifold work done by the French intellect in the second and
third generations of the eighteenth century, the most copious and
the most widely influential body of writings that can be put under
one category is that of which we have above made a chronological
conspectus.

Of these works the merit is of course very various ; but the total
effect of the propaganda was formidable, and some of the treatises
are extremely effective. The Examcn critique of Burigny,2 for
instance, which quickly won a wide circulation when printed, is one
of the most telling attacks thus far made on the Christian system,
raising as it does most of the issues fought over by modern criticism.
It tells indeed of a whole generation of private investigation and
debate ; and the Abbe Bergier, assuming it to be the work of Freret,
in whose name it is published, avows that its author " has written it
in the same style as his academic dissertations : he has spread over
it the same erudition ; he seems to have read everything and mastered
everything." Perhaps not the least effective part of the book is the
chapter which asks : " Are men more perfect since the coming of
Jesus Christ ?"; and it is here that the clerical reply is most feeble,
The critic cites the claims made by apologists as to the betterment
of life by Christianity, and then contrasts with those claims the
thousand-and-one lamentations by Christian writers over the utter
badness of all the life around them. Bergier in reply follows the
tactic habitually employed in the same difficulty to-day : he ignores

' So I'idiinsat do Muirobort in his prefaoo to the first cl. (1777) of the Mriimi res Secrets
of Had in union t, continui;<i by him. Su<; nrcf. to the aljii I :> 1 ,,|. by liiblioiihilc Jacob.
- \a lo Our author; hiji si <• n hove, |>. -.Ml.
:: L<t Ci rtitude ties v return tin Christianiamc (1707), 2u t'dit. 17liS. .In rtinsi itient.

246 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

the fact that his own apologists have been claiming a vast better-
ment, and contends that religion is not to be blamed for the evils it
condemns. Not by such furtive sophistry could the Church turn the
attack, which, as Bergicr bitterly observes, was being made by
Voltaire in a new book every year.

As always, the weaker side of the critical propaganda is its effort
at reconstruction. As in England, so in France, the faithful accused
the critics of "pulling down without building up," when in point of
fact their chief error was to build up — that is, to rewrite the history
of human thought — before they had the required materials, or had
even mastered those which existed. Thus Voltaire and Eousseau
alike framed a priori syntheses of the origins of religion and society.
But there were closer thinkers than they in the rationalistic ranks.
Fontenelle's essay De I'origine des fables, though not wholly exempt
from error, admittedly lays aright the foundations of mythology and
hierology ; and De Brosses in his treatise Die Cultedes dieux fetiches
(17G0) does a similar service on the side of anthropology. Meister's
essay De I'origine des principes religieux is full of insight and
breadth ; and, despite some errors due to the backwardness of
anthropology, essentially scientific in temper and standpoint. His
later essay, De la morale naturellc, shows the same independence
and fineness of speculation, seeming indeed to tell of a character
which missed fame by reason of over-delicacy of fibre and lack of
the driving force which marked the foremost men of that tem-
pestuous time. Vauvenargues's essay De la suffisancc de la religion
naturclle is no less clinching, granted its deism. So, on the side
of philosophy, Mirabaud, who was secretary of the Academie from
1742 to 1755, handles the problem of the relation of deism to
ethics — if the posthumous essays in the Ilecueil pkilosophique be
indeed his — in a much more philosophic fashion than does Voltaire,
arguing unanswerably for the ultimate self-dependence of morals.
The Lettre de Thrasybule a Lcucippe, ascribed to Freret, again, is a
notably skilful attack on theism.

14. One of the most remarkable of the company in some respects
is Nicolas- Axtoixe Boulaxger (1722-1759), of whom Diderot
gives a vivid account in a sketch prefixed to the posthumous
L'Antiquite devoilec par ses usages (17G6). x\t the College de
Beauvais, Boulanger was so little stimulated by Ins scholastic
teachers that they looked for nothing from him in his maturity.
When, however, at the age of seventeen, he began to study mathe-
matics and architecture, his faculties began to develop; and the
life, first of a military engineer in 1743-44, and later in the service

FRENCH FREETTIOUGIIT 247

of the notable department of Roads and Bridges — tbo most efficient
of all State services under Louis XV — made him an independent
and energetic thinker. The chronic spectacle of the corvee, the
forced labour of peasants on the roads, moved him to indignation ;
but he sought peace in manifold study, the engineer's contact with
nature arousing in him all manner of speculations, geological and
sociological. Seeking for historic light, ho mastered Latin, which
he had failed to do at school, reading widely and voraciously ; and
when the Latins failed to yield him the light he craved he syste-
matically mastered Greek, reading the Greeks as hungrily and with
as little satisfaction. Then he turned indefatigably to Hebrew,
Syriac, and Arabic, gleaning at best verbal clues which at length
he wrought into a large, loose, imaginative yet immensely erudite
schema of ancient social evolution, in which the physicist's pioneer
study of the structure and development of the globe controls the
anthropologist's guesswork as to the beginnings of human society.
The whole is set forth in the bulky posthumous work Eecherches
sur Vorifjinc du despotisms oriental (1761), and in the further treatise
L'antiquite devoilce (3 torn. 176G), which is but the concluding
section of the first-named.

It all yields nothing to modern science ; the unwearying research
is all carried on, as it were, in the dark ; and the sleepless brain of
the pioneer can but weave webs of impermanent speculation from
masses of unsifted and unmanageable material. Powers which
to-day, on a prepared ground of ascertained science, might yield the
greatest results, were wasted in a gigantic effort to build a social
science out of the chaos of undeciphered antiquity, natural and
human. But the man is nonetheless morally memorable. Diderot
pictures him with a head Socratically ugly, simple and innocent
of life, gentle though vivacious, reading Rabbinical Hebrew in his
walks on the high roads, suffering all his life from ' domestic
persecution," "little contradictory though infinitely learned," and
capable of passing in a moment, on the stimulus of a new idea,
into a state of profound and entranced absorption. Diderot is
always enthusiastically generous in praise ; but in reading and
reviewing Boulanger's work we can hardly refuse assent to his
friend's claim that " if ever man lias shown in his career the true
characters of genius, it was he." His immense research was all
compassed in a life of thirty-seven years, occupied throughout in
an active profession; and the diction in which he sets forth his
imaginative construction of the past reveals a constant intensity
of thought rarely combined with scholarly knowledge. But it was

248 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

an age of concentrated energy, carrying in its womb the Revolution.
The perusal of Boulanger is a sufficient safeguard against the long-
cherished hallucination that the French freethinking of his age was
but a sparkle of raillery.

Even among some rationalists, however, who are content to
take hearsay report on these matters, there appears still to subsist
a notion that the main body of the French freethinkers of the
eighteenth century were mere scoffers, proceeding upon no basis
of knowledge and with no concern for research. Such an opinion
is possible only to those who have not examined their work. To
say nothing more of the effort of Boulanger, an erudition much
more exact than Voltaire's and a deeper insight than his and
Rousseau's into the causation of primitive religion inspires the
writings of men like Burigny and Freret on the one hand, and
Fontenelle and Meister on the other. The philosophic reach of
Diderot, one of the most convinced opponents of the ruling religion,
was recognized by Goethe. And no critic of the " philosojihes "
handled more uncompromisingly than did Dumarsais1 the vanity of
the assumption that a man became a philosopher by merely setting
himself in opposition to orthodox belief. Dumarsais, long scholas-
tically famous for his youthful treatise Des Tropes, lived up to his
standard, whatever some of the more eminent philosophcs may have
done, being found eminently lovable by pietists who knew him ;
while for D'Alembert he was " the La Fontaine of the philosophers "
in virtue of his lucid simplicity of style." The Analyse de la religion
chretienne printed under his name in some editions of the Evangile
de la liaison has been pronounced supposititious. It seems to be
the work of at least two hands'' of different degrees of instruction ;

1 In the short essay Le Pliilosophe, which appeared in the 2?ouvelles Liberies de
Tenser, J 713 and 1750, and in tl;e liecueil Philostrphique, 1770. In tiie 1793 rep. of the
Essai sur les prejuyes (attain rep. in 1622) it is unhesitatingly affirmed, on the strength of
its title-page and the prefixed letter of Dumarsais, dated 1750, that that book is an expan-
sion of the essay La Pliilosophe, and that this was published in 1760. But Le Pliilosophe
is an entirely different production, 'which to a certain extent criticizes les philosopher
so-called. The Ess/ii sur les prejuijes published in 1770 is not the work of Dumarsais; it
is a new work by d'Holbach. This was apparently known to Frederick, who in his rather
angry criticism of the hook writes that, whereas Dumarsais had always respected con-
stituted authorities, other- had " put out in his name, two years alter he was dead and
buried, a libel of which the veritable author could only be a schoolboy as new to the
world as he was puzzle-headed." (Mrlunyes en errs it en prose de Frederic II, 179-2, ii, 21:3).
Dumarsais died in 1751, but I can find no good evidence that the Essai sur les prejuges
was ever printed before 1770. As to d'Holbach's authorship see the (Euvres de Diderot,
ed. 16-21, xii, 115 sti. — passage copied in the 1629-31 ed. of the Correspondence litteraire of
Grimm and Diderot, xiv, 293 «/. In a letter to D'Alembert dated Mars -27, 1773, Voltaire
writes that in a newly-printed collection of treatises containing his own Lois de Minos is
included "le pliilosojihe de Dumarsais, qui n'a jamais etc miprime jusqu'a present."
This seems to be a complete mistake.

- Grimin (iv, 60) has some good stories of him. He announced one day that he had
found twenty-live fatal Haw- in the story of the resurrection of Lazarus, the first being
that the dead do not rise. His scholarly friend Nicolas lioindin (see above, p. 222) said :
" Dumarsais is a Jansenist atheist ; as for me, I am a Molinist atheist."

:; On two successive pages the title iVIessiuh is declared to moan " simply one sent " and
simply " anointed."

FRENCH FREETHOUGHT 249

but, apart from sorao errors due to one of these, it does him no
discredit, being a vigorous criticism of Scriptural contradictions and
anomalies, such as a " Jansonist atheist" might well compose,
though it makes the usual profession of deistic belief.

Later polemic works, inspired by those above noticed, reproduce
some of their arguments, but with an advance in literary skill, as
in the anonymous Bon Sens given forth (1772) by Diderot and
d'Holbach as the work of Jean Meslier, but really an independent
compilation, embodying other arguments with his, and putting the
whole with a concision and brilliancy to which he could make no
approach. Premontval, a bad writer,1 contrives nonetheless to say
many pungent things of a deistic order in his Diogene de d'Alembert,
and, following Marie Huber, puts forward the formula of religion
versus theology, which has done so much duty in the nineteenth
century. Of the whole literature it is not too much to say that
it covered cogently most of the important grounds of latter-day
debate, from the questions of revelation and the doctrine of torments
to the bases of ethics and the problem of deity ; and it would be
hard to show that the nineteenth century has handled the main
issues with more sincerity, lucidity, or logic than were attained by
Frenchmen in the eighteenth. To-day, no doubt, in the light of a
century and a-half of scientific, historic, and philosophic accumula-
tion, the rationalist case is put with more profundity and accuracy
by many writers than it could be in the eighteenth century. But
we have to weigh the freethinkers of that age against their opponents,
and the French performers against those of other countries, to make
a fair estimate. When this is done their credit is safe. When
German and other writers say with Tholuck that " unbelief entered
Germany not by the weapons of mere wit and scoffing as in France ;
it grounded itself on learned research," " they merely prove their
ignorance of French culture-history. An abundance of learned
research in France preceded the triumphant campaign of Voltaire,
who did most of the witty writing on the subject ; and whose light
artillery was to the last reinforced by the heavier guns of d'Holbach.
It is only in the analysis of the historical problem by the newer
tests of anthropology and hierology, and in the light of latterly
discovered documents, that our generation has made much advance
on the strenuous pioneers of the age of Voltaire. And even in the

1 Like }'. u flier anil Hiiard, however, lie strives for a reform in spelling, dropping many
doubled letter-', and wrilini; Itoiiv. hum; iirusr, fulv, (tju-llr. Iiintrt>\ nfrru.r, eU\

- Abrivi riiii't- (i< rldrhtr rlrr I'm"- ilgiinu r, :,■/,,- ,„ // /; , / u„f <h-m <h hi, !•■ d, r 7 henlixjir
in lh iii-clibiHil xttitt U'fiiti'liii, in Tholuck'.s Vermischti: Scltri/tcn, lbJ'J, ii, 5. The propo-
sition in repeated pp. Jl, ;;J.

250 EIGHTEENTH CENTUKY

field of anthropology the sound thinking of Fontenelle and De
Brosses long preceded any equally valid work by rationalists in
Germany ; though Spencer of Cambridge had preceded them in his
work of constructive orthodoxy.

15. Though the bibliographers claim to have traced the author-
ship in most cases, such works were in the first instance generally
published anonymously,1 as were those of Voltaire, d'Holbach, and
the leading freethinkers ; and the clerical policy of suppression had
the result of leaving them generally unanswered, save in anonymous
writings, when they nevertheless got into private circulation. It
was generally impolitic that an official answer should appear to a
book which was officially held not to exist ; so that the orthodox
defence was long confined mainly to the classic performances of
Pascal, Bossuet, Huet, Fenelon, and some outsiders such as the
Protestant Abbadie, who settled first in Berlin and later in London.
The polemic of every one of the writers named is a work of ability ;
even that of Abbadie (Traite de la Vcrite de la religion chretienne,
1G84), though now little known, was in its day much esteemed.2
In the age of Louis XIV those classic answers to unbelief were by
believers held to be conclusive ; and thus far the French defence
was certainly more thorough and philosophical than the English.
But French freethought, which in Herbert's day had given the lead
to English, now drew new energy from the English growth ; and
the general arguments of the old apologists did not explicitly meet
the new attack. Their books having been written to meet the
mostly unpublished objections of previous generations, the Church
through its chosen policy had the air of utter inability to confute
the newer propaganda, though some apologetic treatises of fair
power did appear, in particular those of the Abbe Bergier. By the
avowal of a Christian historian, " So low had the talents of the
once illustrious Church of France fallen that in the latter part of
the eighteenth century, when Christianity itself was assailed, not
one champion of note appeared in its ranks ; and when the convo-
cation of the clergy, in 1770, published their famous anathema
against the dangers of unbelief, and offered rewards for the best

1 The exceptions were books published outside of France.

- Madame de Sevigne, for instance, declared that she would not let pass a year of her
life without re-reading the second volume of Abbadie.

:i Le Dcisme refute par lui-meme (largely a reply to Rousseau), 1765; 1770, Apologie de la
religion chretienne ; 1773, La certitude d,-s prcuces tin Christ ianisme. In 1759 had appeared
the Lettres sur le JJeimne of the younger Salchi, professor at Lausanne. It deals chiefly
with the English deists, and with D'Argens, As before noted, the Abbe Gauchat began in
1751 his Lettres Critiques, which in time ran to 15 volumes (1751-61). There were also two
journals, .Jesuit and .Jansenist, which fought the nliilosophes (Lanson, p. 721); and some-
times even a manuscript war, answered — e.q. the Refutation du Celse motlerne of the Abbe
Gautier (175-2), a reply to Mirabaud's unpublished Exuinen critique.

FEENCH FEEETHOUGHT 251

essays in defence of the Christian faith, the productions called forth
were so despicable that they sensibly injured the cause of religion." '
The freethinking attack, in fact, had now become overwhelming.
After the suppression of the Jesuit Order ( 1 7(> 4 ) 2 the press grew
practically more and more free ; and when, after tho accession of
Pope Clement XIV (17G9), the freethinking books circulated with
less and less restraint, Bergier extended his attack on deism, and
deists and clerics joined in answering the atheistic Si/slcvie dc la
Nature of d'Holbach. But by this time the deistic books were
legion, and the political battle over the taxation of Church property
had become the more pressing problem, especially seeing that the
mass of the people remained conforming. The manifesto of the
clergy in 1770 was accompanied by an address to the king "On the
evil results of liberty of thought and printing," following up a
previous appeal by the pope ;'! and in consideration of the donation
by the clergy of sixteen million livres the Government recommended
the Parlcment of Paris to proceed against impious books. There
seems accordingly to have been some hindrance to publication for
a year or two ; but in 1772 appeared the Bon Sens of d'Holbach
and Diderot ; and there was no further serious check, the Jesuits
being disbanded by the pope in 1773.

The English view that French orthodoxy made a " bad "
defence to the freethinking attack as compared with what was
done in England (Sir J. F. Stephen, Horcs Sabbaticte, 2nd. ser.
p. 281 ; Alison, as cited above) proceeds on some misconception
of the circumstances, which, as has been shown, were substantially
different in the two countries. Could the English clergy have
resorted to official suppression of deistic literature, they too
would doubtless have done so. Swift and Berkeley bitterly
desired to. Hut the view that the English defence was relatively
"good," and that Butler's in particular was decisive, is also, as
we have seen, fallacious. In Sir Leslie Stephen's analysis, as
apart from his preamble, the orthodox defence is exhibited as
generally weak, and often absurd. Nothing could be more
futile than the three ' Pastoral Letters " published by the
Bishop of London (1728, 1730, 1731) as counterblasts to the
freethinking books of this period. \n France the defence began
sooner, and was more profound and even more methodical.
Pascal at least went deeper, and Bossuet (in his J J /.scours stir

1 Alison, History of Eitroyp, ed. 1819, i, ISO SI.

2 Tho Jesuits wore expelled from Portugal in 17.7.); from Bohemia and Denmark in
1700; from tho whole dominions of Spain in 1707; from (ienoa and Venice in the same
year; and from Naples, Malla, and I'arniii in 170s. Ollirially suppressed in Franco in
1701, they were expelled thence in 1707. l'ope Clement X 1 1 1 strove to defend them ; hut
in 1773 the Society was suppressed by papal bull by Clement XI V ; whereafter they took
refuse in I'm ia and Itu si a, ruled by the freethinking Frederick and Catherine.

;; Sec tiie CorreiijHjiidiince da Uriin.ui, ed. Itiii'J 31, vii, 01 sti.

252 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

I'Histoire Univcrscllc) more widely, into certain inward and
outward problems of the controversy than did any of the
English apologists ; Huet produced, in his Demonstratio Evati-
gclica, one of the most methodical of all the defensive treatises
of the time; Ahbadie, as before noted, gave great satisfaction,
and certainly grappled zealously with Hobbes and Spinoza ;
Allix, though no great dialectician, gave a lead to English
apologetics against the deists (above, p. 97), and was even
adapted by Paley ; and Fenelon, though his Traite de V Existence
et ties Attribute de JJicu (1712) and Lettrcs sur la Beligion (1716)
are not very powerful processes of reasoning, contributed through
his reproduced conversations (1710) with Ramsay a set of argu-
ments at least as plausible as anything on the English side, and,
what is more notable, marked by an amenity which almost no
English apologist attained.

The ground had been thus very fully covered by the defence
in France before the main battle in England began ; and when
a new French campaign commenced with Voltaire, the defence
against that incomparable attack, so far as the system allowed
of any, was probably as good as it could have been made in
England, save insofar as the Protestants gave up modern
miracles, while most of the Catholics claimed them for their
Church. Counterblasts sucli as the essay of Linguet, Le
Fanatisme des Philosopher (17G1), were but general indictments
of rationalism ; and other apologetic treatises, as we saw,
handled only the most prominent books on the other side. It
should be noted, too, that as late as 1761 the police made it
almost impossible to obtain in Paris works of Voltaire recently
printed in Holland (Grimm, vii, 123, 133, 434). But, as
Paley admitted with reference to Gibbon (" Who can refute a
sneer?"), the new attack was in any case very hard to meet.
A sneer is not hard to refute when it is unfounded, inasmuch
as it implies a proposition, which can be rebutted or turned by
another sneer. The Anglican Church had been well enough
pleased by the polemic sneers of Swift and Berkeley ; but the
other side had the heavier guns, and of the mass of defences
produced in England nothing remains save in the neat compila-
tion of Paley. Alison's whole avowal might equally well apply
to anything produced in England as against Voltaire. The
skeptical line of argument for faith had been already employed
by Huet and Pascal and Fenelon, with visibly small success ;
Berkeley had achieved nothing with it as against English deism ;
and Butler had no such effect in his day in England as to induce
French Catholics to use him. (He does not appear to have been
translated into French till 1821.)

An Oratorian priest, again, translated the anti-deistic essays
of President Forbes; and the Pensees Theologiques relatives aux
erreurs da temps of Pere Jamin (1768; le edit. 177-'J) were

FRENCH FREETHOUGHT 253

thought worthy of being translated into German, poor as they
were. With their empty affirmation of authority they suggest
so much blank cartridge, which could avail nothing with thinking
men ; and here doubtless the English defence makes a better
impression. But, on the other hand, Voltaire circulated widely
in England, and was no better answered there than in France.
His attack was, in truth, at many points peculiarly baffling,
were it only by its inimitable wit. The English replies to
Spinoza, again, were as entirely inefficient or deficient as the
French ; the only intelligent English answers to Hume on
Miracles (the replies on other issues were of no account) made
use of the French investigations of the Jansenist miracles ; and
the replies to Gibbon were in general ignominious failures.

Finally, though the deeper reasonings of Diderot were over
the heads alike of the French and the English clergy, the
Systems dc la Nature of d'Holbach was met skilfully enough at
many points by G.J. Holland (1772), who, though not a French-
man, wrote excellent French, and supplied for French readers a
very respectable rejoinder;1 whereas in England there was
practically none. In this case, of course, the defence was
deistic ; as was that of Voltaire, who criticized d'Holbach as
Bolingbroke attacked Spinoza and Hobbes. But the Examcn
du Materialisms of the Abbe Bergier (1771), who was a member
of the Academy of Sciences, was at least as good as anything
that could then have been done in the Church of England ; and
the same may be said of his reply to Freret's (really Burigny's)
Examcn. It is certainly poor enough ; but Bishop Watson used
some of its arguments for his reply to Paine. Broadly speaking,
as we have said, much more of French than of English intelli-
gence had been turned to the dispute in the third quarter of the
century. In England, political and industrial discussion relieved
the pressure on creed ; in France, before the Revolution, the
whole habit of absolutism tended to restrict discussion to
questions of creed ; and the attack would in any case have had
the best of it, because it embodied all the critical forces hitherto
available. The controversy thus went much further than the
pre-IIumian issues raised in England ; and the English ortho-
doxy of the end of the century was, in comparison, intellectually
as weak as politically and socially it was strong. In France,
from the first, the greater intellectual freedom in social inter-
course, exemplified in the readiness of women to declare them-
selves freethinkers (cp. .lamin, as cited, eh. xix, ? 1), would have
made the task of the apologists harder even had they been more
competent,

I {). Above the -.eatfored hand of minor combat .ml-; rises a group

1 Tin"; :iiH,].rv:.;,- v.m I:, jitlcr li'i.viii'' !>"en |>r:ii ■<■,! by the r.'ll ;or ami ivcislriv.l willi
n-ii-i:- tji- tin rui in Novi-inhcr, In-, .v,i- uiliciallj »uin>l'oH u<l on .Jan. 17, l/.'.i, ami, it would
L]j]H.'ar, l'ui^uijd in that ymr,

254 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

of writers of special power, several of whom, without equalling
Voltaire in ubiquity of influence, rivalled him in intellectual power
and industry. The names of DIDEROT, D'HOLBACH, D'ALEMBERT,
HELVETIUS, and CoXDORCET are among the first in literary France
of the generation before the Revolution ; after them come VOLNEY
and DUPUIS ; and in touch with tlie whole series stands the line
of great mathematicians and physicists (to which also belongs
D'Alembert), Laplace, Lagrange, Lalaxde, Delambre. When
to these we add the names of MONTESQUIEU, BUFFON, CHAMFORT,
RlVAROL, VAUVENARGUES ; of the materialists La METTRIE and
CABANIS ; of the philosophers CONDILLAC and DESTUTT DE TRACY ,"
of the historian RAYNAL ; of the poet AxDRE Chexier ; of the
politicians TURGOT, MlRABEAU, DANTOX, DESMOULIXS, ROBES-
PIERRE— all (save perhaps Raynal) deists or else pantheists or
atheists — it becomes clear that the intelligence of France was
predominantly rationalistic before the Revolution, though the mass
of the nation certainly was not.

It is necessary to deprecate Mr. Lecky's statement (Ration-
alism in Europe, i, 176) that "Raynal has taken, with Diderot,
a place in French literature which is probably permanent" — an
estimate as far astray as the declaration on the same page that
the English deists are buried in "unbroken silence." Raynal's
vogue in his day was indeed immense (cp. Morley, Diderot,
ch. xv) ; and Edmond Scherer {Etudes sur la litt. du ISe Steele,
1891, pp. 277-78) held that Raynal's Histoire philosopliiqne des
deux hides had had more inlluence on the French Revolution
than even Rousseau's Conlrat Social. Rut the book has long
been discredited (cp. Scherer, pp. 27o-76). A biographical
Dictionary of ISil spoke of it as " cet ouvrage ampoule qu'on
lie lit pas aujourd'hui." Although the first edition (1770)
passed the censure only by moans of bribery, and the second
(1780) was publicly burned, and its author forced to leave
France, he was said to reject, in religion, " only the pope, hell,
and monks " (Scherer, p. 286) ; and most of the anti-religious
declamation in the first edition of the Ilistoire is said to bo
from the pen of Diderot, who wrote it very much at random,
at Raynal's request.

No list of orthodox names remotely comparable with these can
be drawn from the literature of France, or indeed of any other
country of that time. Jean JACQUES Hol'SSEAU (1712-1778), the
one other pre-eminent figure, though not an anti-Christian propa-
gandist, is distinctly on the side of deism, in the Central Social,1

1 Liv. i, ch. viii.

FEENCH FREETHOUGHT 255

writing with express approbation of Hobbes, he declares that " the
Christian law is at bottom more injurious than useful to the sound
constitution of the State"; and even the famous Confession of Faith
of a Savoyard Vicar in the Emilc is anti-revelationist, and practically
anti-clerical. lie was accordingly anathematized by the Sorbonne,
which found in Emilc nineteen heresies ; the book was seized and
burned both at Paris and at Geneva within a few weeks of its
appearance,1 and the author decreed to be arrested ; even the
Contrat Social was seized and its vendors imprisoned. All the
while he had maintained in Emilc doctrines of the usefulness of
religious delusion and fanaticism. Still, although his temperamental
way of regarding things has a clear affinity with some later religious
philosophy of a more systematic sort, he undoubtedly made for
freethought as well as for the revolutionary spirit in general. Thus
the cause of Christianity stood almost denuded of intellectually
eminent adherents in the France of 17S9 ; for even among the
writers who had dealt with public questions without discussing
religion, or who had criticized Rousseau and the philosophcs — as the
Abbes Mably, Morellet, Millot — the tone was essentially rationalistic.

It lias been justly enough argued, concerning Rousseau (see
below, p. 287), that the generation of the Revolution made him
its prophet in his own despite, and that had he lived twenty
years longer he would have been its vehement adversary. But
tins does not alter the facts as to his influence. A great writer
of emotional genius, like Rousseau, inevitably impels men
beyond the range of his own ideals, as in recent times Ruskin
and Tolstoy, both anti- Socialists, have led thousands towards
Socialism. In his own generation and the next, Rousseau
counted essentially for criticism of the existing order ; and it
was the revolutionaries, never the conservatives, who acclaimed
him. De Tocqueville (Hist, philos. die rcgne dc Louis XV, 1819,
i, 33) speaks of his " impiete dogmatique." Martin clu Theil,
in his J . J. llousseait apologiste de la religion chrcticnnc (2e edit.
1840), makes out his case by identifying emotional deism with
Christianity, as did Rousseau himself when lie insisted that
" the true Christianity is only natural religion well explained."
Rousseau's praise of the gospel and of the character of Jesus
was such as many deists acquiesced in. Similar language, in
the mouth of Matthew Arnold, gave rather more offence to
Gladstone, as a believing Christian, than did the language of
simple; unbelief; and a recent Christian poleinist, at the close
of a copious monograph, has repudiated the association of
Rousseau with the faith (see J. V . Nourrissou, ,/. -/. Housseau,
el le Uousseanismr, 1903, p. 197 *'/.). What is true of him is

1 Baehauinont, juin 22 ; juillel 0, 20, 27 ; novembrc; II, 1702.

256 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

that he was more religiously a theist than Voltaire, whose
impeachment of Providence in the poem on the Earthquake of
Lisbon he sought strenuously though not very persuasively to
refute in a letter to the author. But, with all his manifold
inconsistencies, which may be worked down to the neurosis
so painfully manifest in his life and in his relations to his
contemporaries, he never writes as a believer in the dogmas
of Christianity or in the principle of revelation ; and it was as
a deist that he was recognized by his Christian contemporaries.
A demi-Christian is all that Alichelet will call him. His com-
patriot the Swiss pastor Eoustan, located in London, directed
against him his Offrande aux Autels et a la Patrie, oil Defense
du Christianisme (1764), regarding him as an assailant. The
work of the Abbe Bergier, Le Deisme refute par lui-meme (1765,
and later), takes the form of letters addressed to Eousseau, and
is throughout an attack on his works, especially the Emile.
When, therefore, Buckle (l-vol. ed. p. 475) speaks of him as
not having attacked Christianity, and Lord Morley {Rousseau,
ch. xiv) treats him as creating a religious reaction against the
deists, they do not fully represent his influence on his time.
As we have seen, he stimulated Voltaire to new audacities by
his example.

17. An interlude in the critical campaign, little noticed at the
time, developed importance a generation later. In 1753 JEAN
AsTRUC, doctor of medicine, published after long hesitation his
Conjectures on the original documents whicli Moses seems to have
used in composing the book of Genesis. Only in respect of his flash
of insight into the composite structure of the Pentateuch was Astruc
a freethinker. His hesitation to publish was due to his fear that
Us pretendus espriis forts might make a bad use of his work ; and lie
was quite satisfied that Moses was tire author of the Pentateuch as
it stands. The denial of that authorship, implied in the criticisms
of Hobbes and Spinoza, he described as " the disease of the last
century." This attitude may explain the lack of interest in Astruc's
work shown by the freethinkers of the time. Nonetheless, by his
perception of the clue given by the narrative use of the two names
Yahweh and Elohim in Genesis, he laid a new foundation of the
Higher Criticism of the Bible in modern times, advancing alike on
Spinoza and on Simon. For freethought lie had " builded better
than he knew."

1 Grimm notices Astruc's Dissertations stir I'immnrtaJite, I'immatarirtlite, rf hi liherte
(If I'd me, published in 1735 {Cnrr. i, 43S), but not his Conjectures. At his death I17(it>) he
pronounces him "mi des homines les plus decries de Paris," "II passait pour fripon,
fourbe, mediant, en uti mot pour 1111 tres-malhonnete homme." "II etait violent et
emporte, et d'une avarice sordide." Finally, lie died "sans sacremens" after having
"fait le devot" and attached himself to the Jesuits in their day of power. Corr. v, 'Jti
But Grimm was a man of many hates, and not the best of historians.

FRENCH FBEETIIOUGIIT 257

18. In the select Parisian arena of the Academie, the intellectual
movement of the age is as it were dramatized ; and there more clearly
than in the literary record we can trace the struggle of opinions, from
the admission of Voltaire (1716) onwards. In the old days the
Academie had hecn rather tho homo of convention, royalism, and
orthodoxy than of ideas, though before Voltaire there were some
freethinking members of the lesser Academies, notably Boindin.1
The admission of Montesquieu (1728), after much opposition from
the court, preludes a new era ; and from the entrance of Voltaire,
fourteen years after his first attempt," the atmosphere begins per-
ceptibly to change. When, in 1727, the academician Bonamy had
read a memoir On the character and the paganism of the emperor
Julian, partly vindicating him against the aspersions of tho Christian
Fathers, the Academy feared to print the paper, though its author
was a devout Catholic/ When the Abbe La Bletterie, also orthodox,
read to the Academy portions of his Vic de Julien, the members were
not now scandalized, though the Abbe's Jansenism moved the King
to veto his nomination. So, when Blanchard in 1735 read a memoir
on Les exorcismes magiques there was much trepidation among the
members, and again the Secretary inserted merely an analysis,
concluding with the words of Philetas, " Believe and fear God ;
beware of questioning."' Even such a play of criticism as the
challenging of the early history of Pome by Levesque de Pouilly
(brother of Levesque de Burigny) in a dissertation before the
Academie in 1722, roused the fears and the resentment of the
orthodox ; the Abbe Sallier, in undertaking to refute him, insinuated
that he had shown a spirit which might be dangerous to other
beliefs ; and whispers of atheism passed among the academicians/
Pouilly, who bad been made a freethinker by English contacts, went
again to England later, and spent his last years at Bheims.1' I lis
tbesis was much more powerfully sustained in 1738 by Beaufort, in
the famous dissertation Stir V incertitude des cinq premiers siecles de
Vhistoire romainc ; but Beaufort was of a refugeo-IIuguenot stock;
his book was published, under his initials, at Utrecht ; and not till
1753 did tho Academie award him a medal on the score ol an
earlier treatise. And in 17-bS the lle.ligio ceterum Versa rum of the
English Orientalist Hyde, published as long before as 1700, found a

1 f'p. Maury, L'tuiru-mw Academic tl fa inncrinfioiiN rt bcllcn-lrtl res, ISUI, pp. 55-51!.

2 Voltaire's various stratagems to secure election are not, to his credit. See 1'anl
Me-nard, Jlistoirc. tl<- 1'iirtnlciiiir fr<i iiniinc. ls">7, pp. IIS 71. I'.ut even Montesquieu is said
to have resorted to sonic que Lionable device! I'or the iioeend. Id. p. (hi.

'■'■ .Ma urv, Ij'anciiiiiii: Ac uli inic il, s iuncriijliuns, pp. .'. ! ..... '.'I. :!(N.

1 /'/. p. '.).!. ■ / /. pp. i n; ,'D.

c Where lie was lieutenant !;,'u<'ral , and died in 17.V.J.

VOL. II S

258 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

vehement assailant within the Academy in the Abbe Foucher, who
saw danger in a favourable view of any heathen religion.

Yet even in the time of Louis XIV the Abbe Mongault, tutor of
the son of the Regent, and noted alike for his private freethinking
and for the rigid orthodoxy which he instilled into his pupil, treated
the historic subject of the divine honours rendered to Roman
governors with such latitude as to elicit from Freret, in his eloge of
Mongault, the remark that the tutor had reserved to himself a liberty
of thought which he doubtless felt to be dangerous in a prince.1
And after 17o0 the old order can be seen passing away. D'Argenson
notes in his diary in 1754 : " I observe in the Academie de belles-
lettres, of which I am a member, that there begins to be a decided
stir against the priests. It began to show itself at the death of
Boindin, to whom our bigots refused a service at the Oratory and a
public commemoration. Our deist philosophers were shocked, and
ever since, at each election, they are on guard against the priests and
the bigots. Nowhere is this division so marked, and it begins to
bear fruits."'2 The old statesman indicates his own sympathies by
adding : " Why has a bad name been made of the title of deist ? It
is that of those who have true religion in their hearts, and who have
abjured a superstition that is destructive to the whole world." It
was in this year that D'Alembert, who took nearly as much pains to
stay out as Voltaire had done to enter,3 was elected a member ; and
with two leading cncyclopedistes in the forty, and a friendly abb6
(Duclos) in the secretaryship (l7oo), and another zealous freethinker,
Levesque de Burigny, admitted in 1756,' the fortunes of freethought
were visibly rising. Its influence was thrown on the side of the
academic orator Thomas, a sincere believer but a hater of all perse-
cution, and as such offensive to the Church party.''

19. In 1759 there came a check. The Encyclopedic, which had
been allowed to resume publication after its first suppression in
1752, was again stopped; and the battle between philosophes and
fanatics, dramatized for the time being in Palissot's comedy Les
I'hilosophcs and in Voltaire's rejoinder to Freron, L'Ecossaise, came
to be fought out in the Academy itself. The poet Lefranc de
Pompignan,6 elected in 1759 without any opposition from the free-
thinkers, had in his youth translated Pope's " Deist's Prayer," and
had suffered for it to the extent of being deprived by D'Aguesseau of

1 Maury, DP- 53, 86-S7. - IThnoires, eel. Jannet, iv, 181.

:; Cp. Mesnard, as cited, pp. 79-SO. ' Maury, p. 315.

0 l-l. pp. bl-<A. It i^ noteworthy that the orthodox Thomas, and not any of the
p?iilosrtp]ies, was the first to impeach the Government in academic discourses. Mesuard,
pp. 8-2-81, 100 s<j.

0 "I/excellent I'orupik'nan," M. Lausorj calls him. p. 723,

FRENCH FREET1T0UGHT 259

his official charge1 for six months. With such a past, with a keen
concern for status, and with a character that did not stick at tergi-
versation, Pompignan saw tit to signalize his election hy making his
discours do reception (.March, 1760) a violent attack on the whole
philosophic school, which, in his conclusion, he declared to he under-
mining ' equally the throne and the altar." The academicians
heard him out in perfect silence, leaving it to the few pietists
among the audience to applaud ; hut as soon as the reports reached
Ferney there began the vengeance of Voltaire. First came a leaflet
of stinging sentences, each beginning with Quand : " When one has
translated and even exaggerated the ' Deist's Prayer ' composed by

Pope ," and so on. The maddened Pompignan addressed a

fatuous memorial to the King (who notoriously hated the philosoplies,
and had assented only under petticoat influence to Voltaire's elec-
tion") ; and, presuming to print it without the usual official sanction,
suffered at the hands of Vlalesherbes the blow of having the printer's
plant smashed. Other combatants entered the fray. Voltaire's
leaflet " les quand" was followed by " les si, les pour, les qui, les
quoi, les car, les ah !" — by him or others — and the master-mocker
produced in swift succession three satires in verse,'' all accompanied
by murderous prose annotations. The speedy result was Pompignan's
retirement into provincial life. He could not face the merciless hail
of rejoinders ; and when at his death, twenty-five years later, the
Abbe Maury had to pronounce his cloijc, the mention of his famous
humiliation was hardly tempered by compassion."1

20. Voltaire could not compass, as he for a time schemed, the
election of Diderot ; but other philosophcs of less note entered from
time to time ;" Marmontel was elected in 1763 ; and when in 1764
the Academy's prize for poetry was given to Chamfort for a pieco
which savoured of what were then called ' the detestable principles
of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Helvetius," and in 1768 its prize
for eloquence went to the same writer, the society as a whole had
acquired a certain character for impiety.'' \n 1767 there had
occurred the famous ecclesiastical explosion over Marmontel's
philosophic romance IJclisaire, a performance in which it is some-
what difficult to-day to defect any exciting quality, it was hy a
chapter in praise of toleration that the ' universal and mediocre

1 "Les provisions de su chanie pendant six mois en IT.'Jii." Voltaire, i.ettre « Mine.
D'Kpinay, l.'ijuin, 17'JO. "■)>■ Ie M.-rvis dans cette all'.ure," adds Voltaire.
- Mesnard, pp. U7. 71. 7:i, k'J.

3 Lf J'nurre iJinblr, tiucr.ujr <-n ivr.s nhi's dv frit M. \\i,h', mis i n Uimirri' i>a r Catherine
Vaib . a ciju ine liaise! y dated 170bJ ; Lit Ynniti ; and /. lim • a I'd if-.

4 Me uard, pp. b«j 'J.'.. • Id. pp :• : Jl. c 11 pp '.r- Uil.

2G0 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Marmontel " l secured from the Sorbonne the finest advertisement
over given to a work of fiction, the ecclesiastics of the old school
being still too thoroughly steeped in the past to realize that a gospel
of persecution was a bad warcry for a religion that was being more
and more put on the defensive. Only an angry fear before the
rising flood of unlicensed literature, combining with the long-baffled
desire to strike some blow at freethinking, could have moved the
Sorbonne to select for censure the duly licensed work2 of a popular
academician and novelist ; and it should be remembered that it was
at a time of great activity in the unlicensed production of freethink-
ing literature that the attack was made. The blow recoiled signally.
The book was of course promptly translated into all the languages
of Europe, selling by tens of thousands;'* and two sovereigns took
occasion to give it their express approval. These were the Empress
Catherine (who caused the book to be translated by members of
her court while she was making a tour of her empire, she herself
taking a chapter), and the Empress Maria-Theresa. From Catherine,
herself a freethinker, the approbation might have been expected ;
but the known orthodoxy and austerity of Maria-Theresa made her
support the more telling. In France a small literary tempest raged
for a year. Marmontel published his correspondence with the syndic
of the Sorbonne and with Voltaire ; and in all there appeared some
dozen documents pro and con, among them an anonymous satire by
Turgot, Les xxxvii verites opposces aux xxxvii impietes de Belisaire,
"Par un Bachelier Ubiquiste," 4 which, with the contributions of
Voltaire, gave the victim very much the best of the battle.

21. Alongside of the more strictly literary or humanist move-
ment, too, there went on one of a scientific kind, which divided into
two lines, a speculative and a practical. On the former the free-
lance philosopher JULIEX OFFRAY LA METTRIE gave a powerful
initial push by his materialistic theses, in which a medical know-
ledge that for the time was advanced is applied with a very keen
if unsystematic reasoning faculty to the primary problem of mind
and body ; and others after him continued the impulse. La Mettrie
produced his Natural Ilistoru of the Mind in 1715 ;" and in 174G

1 Eanson, Hist, de la lift, francaise, p. 7-2-").

2 The formal approval of a Sorbonnist was necessary. One refused it; another gave
it. Marmontel, Memoires, 1801, iii, 35-36.

'■'• .Marmontel mentions that while he was still discussing a compromise with the syndic
of the Sorbonne, 40,000 copies had been sold throughout Europe. Memoires, iii, 39.

4 This satire was taken by the German freethinker Eberhard, in his New Apology for
Socrates, as the actual publication of the Sorbonne. Barbier, Diet, des Ouvr. anon et
Pseud., 2e edit, i, 4GS.

5 Published pseudonymously as a translation from the English: Histoire naturelle.de

I'&rne, traduite de l'Anglais de M. Charp, par feu M. II ;, de l'Academie des Sciences.

A La Haye, 1715. Republished under the title Traite de I' Ante,

FRENCH FEEETIIOUGHT 261

appeared the Essay on the Origin of Hitman Knowledge of the Abbe
COXDILLAC, both essentially rationalistic and anti-theological works,
though differing in their psychological positions, Condillac being a
non-materialist, though a strong upholder of " sensism." La Mettrie
followed up his doctrine with the more definitely materialistic but
less heedfully planned works, L' Homme Plant e and U Homme
Machine (1748), the second of which, published at Leyden1 and
wickedly dedicated to the pious Baron von Haller, was burned by
order of the magistrates, its author being at the same time expelled
from Holland. Both books are remarkable for their originality of
thought, biological and ethical. Though La Mettrie professed to
think the "greatest degree of probability" was in favour of the
existence of a personal God," his other writings gave small support
to the hypothesis ; and even in putting it he rejects any inference
as to worship. And lie goes on to quote very placidly an atheist
who insists that only an atheistic world can attain to happiness.
It is notable that he, the typical materialist of his age, seems to
have been one of its kindliest men, by the consent of all who knew
him, though heedless in his life to the point of ending it by eating
a monstrous meal out of bravado.

The conventional denunciation of La Mettrie (endorsed by
Lord Morley, Voltaire, p. 122) proceeds ostensibly upon those of
his writings in which he discussed sexual questions with absolute
scientific freedom. He, however, insisted that his theoretic dis-
cussion had nothing whatever to do with his practice ; and there
is no evidence that he lived otherwise than as most men did in
his age, and ours. Still, the severe censure passed on him by
Diderot (Essai sur les regnes de Claude et de Xeron, ed. 1782, ii,
22-21) seems to convict him of at least levity of character.
Voltaire several times holds the same tone. But Diderot writes
so angrily that his verdict incurs suspicion.

As Lange notes, there lias been much loose generalization as
to the place and hearing of La Mettrie in the history of French
thought. Hettner, who apparently had not thought it worth
while to read him, has ascribed his mental movement to the
influence of Diderot's Pensres pliilosopjiigues (17-1(3), whereas it
had begun in his own Histoirc natiirelle, de I'dnie, published a
year before. La Mettrie's originality and influerife in general

• Hv Klic 7,uz:if!, to whom is aserihed tin- reply entitied /,' / hmunr i>tnn n>f Miirhiiir
[171's ill i.l. Tlii i.-, printed in the (Kitri;-. ///n7<.vn/-/i<V/'ms ol I, a M< ttrie as if it w civ his ;
i, ■• ■. •-■ i. ; ! -i eem to tli i nl; it was. Hut tin; l)il.li..::ia).iirr a-eril>e it to l.u/.u-, who
was a. man of culture and alhlity.

- /-' Hoiiuni- MiirlUw, i-d. A -.. /at, lS'Ti, l>. '.il : r7,*«, ,,',,!■ .el 1771. iii. .".I.

" l.am-'i-, Cmrli. ihs Mntr riul t smu x, i, :W,i. ,v/. (Km!. If. ii, 7' ••() ; S.iuy, Hn'rinn ,1,
I hist.ilu iimlrri'iti //<<•. pp. >'.<;;, llv, lis; Voltaire, I In,,,, I if si, r Ctt hi i-iin , eml. } r. derick
the (iri at, who ^ave I M .Mettrie ha rlioiini!,'i\ .11 ji port, ami I riemi In p. ami ,'. m> ua net a
l,;el imlye of men, wrote an. I read in Lhe Merlin Academy the fmmra I elmle of Ka. Mettrie,
and pron 011 need him "nut a me pure et 11 11 en nr sei viabli ." I!.\ " pure " In meant incore.

262 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

have been underestimated as a result of the hostility set up by
disparagement of his character. The idea of a fundamental
unity of type in nature — an idea underlying all the successive
steps of Lamarck, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Goethe, and others,
towards the complete conception of evolution — is set forth by
him in L'Homme Plante in 174S, the year in which appeared
De Maillet's Tdliamed. Buffon follows in time as in thought,
only beginning his great work in 1749 ; Maupertuis, with his
pseudonymous dissertation on the Universal sj/stcm of Nature,
applies La Mettrie's conception in 1751 ; and Diderot's Pcnsces
sur V interpretation de la nature, stimulated by Maupertuis,
appeared only in 1754. La Mettrie proceeded from the classi-
fication of Linnauis, but did not there find his idea. In the
words of Lange, these forgotten writings are in nowise so
empty and superficial as is commonly assumed." Gcsch. des
Materialisvius, i, 32S-29. Lange seems to have been the first
to make a judicial study of La Mettrie's work, as distinguished
from the scandals about his character.

22. A more general influence, naturally, attached to the simple
concrete handling of scientific problems. The interest in such
questions, noticeable in England at the Restoration and radiating
thence, is seen widely diffused in Erance after the publication of
Fontenelle's Entretiens, and thenceforward it rapidly strengthens.
Barren theological disputations set men not merely against theology,
but upon the study of Nature, where real knowledge was visibly
possible. To a certain extent the study took openly heretical lines.
The Abbe Lenglet du Fresnoy, who was four times imprisoned in
the Bastille, supplied material of which D'Argens made much use,
tending to overthrow the Biblical chronology and to discredit the
story of the Flood.1 Benolt de Maillet (1656-1738), who had been
for fifteen years inspector of the French establishments in Egypt
and Barbary, left for posthumous publication (1748) a work of which
the first title was an anagram of his name, Telliamed, on Entretiens
d'un philosophe indien avee un missionaire francais. Of this treatise
the thesis is that the shell deposits in the Alps and elsewhere showed
the sea to have been where land now was ; and that the rocks were
gradually deposited in their different kinds in the fashion in which
even now arc being formed mud, sand, and shingle. De Maillet had
thus anticipated the central conception of modern geology, albeit
retaining many traditional delusions. His abstention from publica-
tion during his lifetime if tifies Lo hi- ;ense of the danger he under-
went, the treatise having been printed by him only in 1733, at the

1 Salchi, I.tUn. > sur le DiisHie, 17.30, pp. 177. LOT, 230, 2S3 nq.

FRENCH FREETHOUGHT 263

age of seventy-nine ; and not till ten years after his death was it
given to the world, with " a preface and dedication so worded as, in
case of necessity, to give the printer a fair chance of falling back on
the excuse that the work was intended for a mere jcu d' esprit." l

The thesis was adopted, indeed plagiarized,2 by Mirabaud in his
Lc Monde, son originc ct son antiquite (1751). Strangely enough,
Voltaire refused to be convinced, and offered amazing suggestions as
to the possible deposit of shells by pilgrims.'5 It is not unlikely that
it was Voltaire's opposition rather than any orthodox argumentation
that retarded in France the acceptance of an evolutionary view of
the origin of the earth and of life. It probably had a more practical
effect on scientific thought in England' — at least as regards geology :
its speculations on the modification of species, which loosely but
noticeably anticipate some of the inferences of Darwin, found no
acceptance anywhere till Lamarck. In the opinion of Huxley, the
speculations of Robinet, in the next generation, " are rather behind
than in advance of those of De Maillet";5 and it may be added that
the former, with his pet theory that all Nature is " animated," and
that the stars and planets have the faculty of reproducing themselves
like animals, wandered as far from sound bases as De Maillot ever
did. The very form of De Maillet's work, indeed, was not favourable
to its serious acceptance; and in his case, as in those of so many
pioneers of new ideas, errors and extravagances and oversights in
regard to matters of detail went to justify " practical " men in
dismissing novel speculations. Needless to say, the common run of
scientific men remained largely under the influence of religious pre-
suppositions in science even when they had turned their backs on
the Church. Nonetheless, on all sides the study of natural fact
began to play its part in breaking down the dominion of creed. Even
in hidebound Protestant Switzerland, the sheer ennui of Puritanism
is seen driving the descendants of the Huguenot refugees to the
physical sciences for an interest and an occupation, before any free-
thinking can safely ho avowed ; and in France, as Buckle has shown
in abundant detail, the study of the physical sciences became for
many years hefore the Revolution almost a fashionahlo mania. And
at the start the Church had contrived that such study should rank
as unbelief, and so make unbelievers.

' Hiixlev, c: Hay on Darwin on the Ori'lin of Hnrrien ■ li. I'. A. c 1. of Twelve r'wetines and

i: <•/)/*, i>. ui.

* Sec the parallel passages in the I,, ■Kick l'riti(p,es of Lhe ALU' ( hi nihil t , vol. XV
(ITf'.l), P. !■'.' /■

- See his e :tv Des Siiniiil'irilrt de la Xatnre, eh. mi, mi I hi Dissertation sue is
ehantirnients arrie/s dons not ee ah, I.e. ■' I'.m' tr. IV.'.H.

•"' 1 ;- ii y cited, p. 'ji;. The uritici: m ignore ; the (.'renter eon i pre] n i! i\cnes of Ko I unci's
survey of nature.

264 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

When Buff on1 in 1749-50 published his Histoire Naturelle, the
delight which was given to most readers by its finished style was
paralleled by the wrath which its Theorie de la Terre aroused among
the clergy. After much discussion Buffon received early in 1751
from the Sorbonne an official letter specifying as reprehensible in his
book fourteen propositions which he was invited to retract. He
stoically obeyed in a declaration to the effect that he had " no inten-
tion to contradict the text of Scripture," and that he believed " most
firmly all there related about the creation," adding: "I abandon
everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth." ;
Still he was attacked as an unbeliever by the Bishop of Auxerre in
that prelate's pastoral against the thesis of de Prades.3 During the
rest of his life he outwardly conformed to religious usage, but all
men knew that in his heart he believed wdiat he had written ; and
the memory of the affront that the Church had thus put upon so
honoured a student helped to identify her cause no less with
ignorance than with insolence and oppression. For all such insults,
and for the long roll of her cruelties, the Church was soon to pay a
tremendous penalty.

23. But science, like theology, had its schisms, and the rational-
izing camp had its own strifes. MAUPERTTJIS, for instance, is
remembered mainly as one of the victims of the mockery of
Voltaire (which he well earned by his own antagonism at the court
of Frederick) ; yet he was really an energetic man of science, and
had preceded Yoltaire in setting up in France the Newtonian against
the Cartesian physics. In his System of Nature* (not to be confused
with the later work of d'Holbach under the same title) he in 1751
propounded a new version of the hylozoisms of ancient Greece ;
developed the idea of an underlying unity in the forms of natural
life, already propounded by La Mettrie in his U Homme Plante ;
connected it with Leibnitz's formula of the economy of nature
("minimum of action" — the germ of the modern "line of least
resistance "), and at the same time anticipated some of the special
philosophic positions of Kant.5 Diderot, impressed by but professedly
dissenting from Maupertuis's Systeme in his Pensees sur I' interpreta-
tion de la nature (1751), promptly pointed out that the conception

1 George-Louis Leclere, Comte de Buffon, 17G7-17<-3,

~ Lyeil, Principles of Geology, tiitti ed. ls.75, i, 57-53.

■'■ Suite <le I'Apoloriie de M. I' Abbe De Prudes, 1752, p. 37 sq.

4 Uissertatio iniiuuurulis metaphysial de unicersali natures systemate. published
nt (iottiugou as the doctoral thesis of an imaginary Dr. Uauinann, 1751. In French
17.5:5.

3 Soury, p. 570. The later speculations of Maupertuis by their extravagance discredited
the earlier.

FRENCH FEEETHOUGHT 265

of a primordially vitalized atom excluded that of a Creator, and for
his own part thereafter took that standpoint.1

In 1751 came the Traite dcs Sensations of Condillac, in which is
most systematically developed the physio-psychological conception
of man as an " animated statue," of which the thought is wholly
conditioned by the senses. The mode of approach had been laid
down before by La yfettrie, by Diderot, and by Buff on ; and
Condillac is rather a developer and systematizer than an originator;2
but in this case the process of unification was to the full as important
as the first steps ;" and Condillac has an importance which is latterly
being rediscovered by the school of Spencer on the one hand and by
that of James on the other. Condillac, commonly termed a mate-
rialist, no more held the legendary materialistic view than any other
so named : and the same may be said of the next figure in the
" materialistic " series, J. B. BOBINET, a Frenchman settled at
Amsterdam, after having been, it is said, a Jesuit. His Nature
(l vols. 1761-1768) is a remarkable attempt to reach a strictly
naturalistic conception of things.' But he is a theorist, not an
investigator. Even in his fixed idea that the universe is an
"animal" lie had perhaps a premonition of the modern discovery
of the immense diffusion of bacterial life ; but he seems to have had
more deriders than disciples. He founds at once on Descartes and
on Leibnitz, but in his Philosophical Considerations on the natural
(/nidation of living forms (1768) he definitely sets aside theism as
illusory, and puts ethics on a strictly scientific and human footing,"
extending the arguments of Hume and Hutcheson somewhat on the
lines of Mandeville." On another line of reasoning a similar applica-
tion of Mandeville's thesis had already been made by HELVETIUS
in his Traite de V Esprit ' (1758), a work which excited a hostility
now difficult to understand, but still reflected in censures no less
surprising.

One of the worst misrepresentations in theological literature
is the account of Helvctius by the late Principal Cairns {Unbelief
in tic Eighteenth Century, 1881, p. 158) as appealing to govern-
ment "to promote luxury, and, through luxury, public good, by
abolishing all those laws t hat cherish a false modesty and restrain

1 "Seheinbar bekiimiifl c:r Maupcrtuis de-;s ivri'ni, aber i'n 'jelii'Inieti slimiiit it ibm
b<-i " i Itfi a-iiki";uix, i, MH.

■'- It i mild be noti i lk:d l;v t'onclilliic's; avuua] be v,a- much niile ! b, his liiend
Mdlle. ]•'( n-iiml.

- ( p. Iic:b. ir.' , Ct.itiliH'tr, i,n V, i,i/urisiili- ft Ir rati.,, i. tit ,111; IS:',!, Hi. i.

4 I,;i :: ■ ••, ii, 11, -£.\ ; Suliry, pp. b.Ki 11. •"■ Sniirv, pp. iV.li; i '>()(); l.n in,'. , i i . .','.

G Oddly enoiii;li lie became ultimately press censor! I te lived till I.YiO, il.viu;: at KeimeH
,:■ i lie arc Di h:>.

7 This may be4 be \.r:tu-i\n.U-tl 'I'mitis-i- nti tin- Miwl . The Kiii;li-,h translation of 17."/. 1
rep. 1 307 J is entitled JUc I ' K- /nil : or, i. ■ </;/.s on the Miml. etc.

266 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

libertinage." Helvetius simply pressed the consequences of the
existing theory of luxury, which for his own part he disclaimed.
De V Esprit, Disc, ii, ch. xv. Dr. Piinjer (i, 462) falls so far
below his usual standard as to speak of Helvetius in a similar
fashion. As against such detraction it is fitting to note that
Helvetius, like La Mettrie, was one of the most lovable and most
beloved men of his time, though, like him, sufficiently licentious
in his youth.

It was at once suppressed by royal order as scandalous, licentious,
and dangerous, though Helvetius held a post at court as maitrc d' hotel
to the Queen. Ordered to make a public retractation, he did so in a
letter addressed to a Jesuit ; and this being deemed insufficient, he
had to sign another, "so humiliating," wrote Grimm,1 "that one
would not have been astonished to see a man take refuge with the
Hottentots rather than put his name to such avowals." The wits
explained that the censor who had passed the book, being an official
in the Bureau of Foreign Affairs, had treated De I' Esprit as belonging
to that department.2 A swarm of replies appeared, and the book was
formally burnt, with Voltaire's poem Sur la hi naturelle, and several
obscure works of older standing." The De V Esprit, appearing along-
side of the ever-advancing Encyclopedic* was in short a formidable
challenge to the powers of bigotry.

Its real faults are lack of system, undue straining after popularity,
some hasty generalization, and a greater concern for the air of
paradox than for persuasion ; but it abounds in acuteness and
critical wisdom, and it definitely and seriously founds public ethics
on utility. Its most serious error, the assumption that all men are
born with equal faculties, and that education is the sole differentiat-
ing force, was repeated in our own age by John Stuart Mill ; lout in
Helvetius the error is balanced by the thoroughly sound and pro-
foundly important thesis that the general superiorities of nations
are the result of their culture-conditions and politics.'' The over-
balance of his stress on self-interest,J is an error easily soluble. On
the other hand, we have the memorable testimony of BECCAEIA
that it was the work of Helvetius that inspired him to his great
effort for the humanizing of penal laws and policy ; ' and the only

1 Correaprmdance, ii, 262. - Id. p. 2f,3. 3 Id. p. 293.

4 At the time the pietists declared that Diderot had collaborated in De V Esprit. This
was denied by Grimm, who affirmed that Diderot and Helvetius were little acquainted,
and rarely met; but his Secretary, Meister, wrote in ITS'; that the finest pages in the book
were Diderot's. Id. p. 291, note. In his sketch a In mhnoire de Diderot (1786, app. to
Naigeon's Mhnoires, 1821, p. 425, note), Meister speaks of a number of " belles pages," but
doe not particularize. ■■ De I' Esprit, Disc, iii.ch. 30.

c ('li. Morley's criticism. Diderot, ed. P-84, pp, Z'.',l~:',l.

7 lieccaria's Letter to Morellet, cited in cli. i of J. A. Farrer's ed. of the Crimes cuid
Funislnnents, p. 6. It is noteworthy that the partial reform effected earlier in England

FRENCH FREETHOUGHT 267

less notable testimony of Bentham that Helvetius was /12s teacher
and inspirer.1 It may be doubted whether any such fruits can be
claimed for the teachings of the whole of tho orthodox moralists of
the age. For the rest, Helvetius is not to be ranked among the
great abstract thinkers ; but it is noteworthy that his thinking went
on advancing to the end. Always greatly influenced by Voltaire,
he did not philosophically harden as did his master ; and though in
his posthumous work, Lcs Progrcs dc la liaison dans la recherche
du Vrai (published in 1775), he stands for deism against atheism,
the argument ends in the pantheism to which Voltaire had once
attained, but did not adhere.

24. Over all of these men, and even in some measure over
Voltaire, DlDEROT (1713-1781) stands pre-eminent, on retrospect,
for variety of power and depth and subtlety of thought ; though for
these very reasons, as well as because some of his most masterly
works were never printed in his lifetime, he was less of a recognized
popular force than some of his friends. In his own mental history
he reproduces the course of the French thought of his time.
Beginning as a deist, he assailed the contemporary materialists ; in
the end, with whatever of inconsistency, lie was emphatically an
atheist and a materialist. One of his most intimate friends was
Damilaville, of whom Voltaire speaks as a vehement anti-theist ;a
and his biographer Naigeon, who at times overstated his positions
but always revered him, was the most zealous atheist of his day.'1

Compare, as to Diderot's position, Soury's contention (p. 577)
that we shall never make an atheist and a materialist out of
"this enthusiastic artist, this poet-pantheist" (citing Rosen-
kranz in support), with his own admissions, pp. 589-90, and
with Lord Morley's remarks, pp. 33, 401, 418. See also Lange,
i, 310 sq.; ii, 03 (Eng. tr. ii, 32, 25G). In the affectionate eloge
of his friend Meister (1780) there is an express avowal that "it
had been much to be desired for the reputation of Diderot,
perhaps even for the honour of his age, that he had not been
an atheist, or that he had been so with less zeal." The fact
is thus put beyond reasonable doubt. \\) tho Corrcspondance
Lit ,'rnire of Grimm and Diderot, under date September 15,
1705 (vii, 300), there is a letter in criticism of Descartes,
thoroughly atheistic in its reasoning, which is almost, certainly
by Diderot. And if the criticism of Voltaire's Lien, above
referred to 'p. ^31), be not by him, lie was certainly in entire
agreement with it, as with Grimm in general. Ko enkranz

t O. •!, ■] 1 ,„■ in, 1,« 'i,.,li 1 . ; . . ... i. ■, ■ . 17 , ■ , • , heluin: Lu lln- I On- <>! | \\,\vA.
■ ■:, 1. •...;:'... ■ ' Alorl<y, /«'/■ - '. |i :; '.

- 1,1.11 ■ ■ . ', ;.. M. rt, '.) ,::,'. 11 !•. ] rv.t ' I'p. Kuxjiiknui/., I'm In riclit, p. vi.

268 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

finally (ii, 421) sums up that " Diderot war als Atheist
Pantheist," which is merely a way of saying that he was
scientifically monistic in his atheism. Lange points out in
this connection (i, 310) that the Hegelian schema of philosophic
evolution, " with its sovereign contempt for chronology," has
wrought much confusion as to the real developments of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

It is recorded that Diderot's own last words in serious conver-
sation were : " The beginning of philosophy is incredulity"; and it
may be inferred from his writings that his first impulses to searching
thought came from his study of Montaigne, who must always have
been for him one of the most congenial of spirits. At an early
stage of his independent mental life we find him turning to the
literature which in that age yielded to such a mind as his the
largest measure both of nutriment and stimulus — the English. In
1745 he translated Shaftesbury's Inquiry concerning Virtue and
Merit ; and he must have read with prompt appreciation the other
English freethinkers then famous. Ere long, however, he had risen
above the deistical plane of thought, and grappled with the funda-
mental issues which the deists took for granted, partly because of
an innate bent to psychological analysis, partly because he was
more interested in scientific problems than in scholarly research.
The Pensces philosophiqucs, published in 1746, really deserve their
name ; and though they exhibit him as still a satisfied deist, and
an opponent of the constructive atheism then beginning to suggest
itself, they contain abstract reasonings sufficiently disturbing to the
deistic position." The Promenade du Sccptique (written about 1747,
published posthumously) goes further, and presents tentatively the
reply to the design argument which was adopted by Hume.

In its brilliant pages may be found a conspectus of the intellectual
life of the day, on the side of the religious problem. Every type of
thinker is there tersely characterized — the orthodox, the deist, the
atheist, the sheer skeptic, the scoffer, the pantheist, the solipsist, and
the freethinking libertine, the last figuring as no small nuisance to
the serious unbeliever. So drastic is the criticism of orthodoxy that
the book was unprintable in its day;'5 and it was little known even
in manuscript. But ere long there appeared the Letter on the Blind,
for the use of those who see (1749), in which a logical rebuttal alike of
the ethical and the cosmological assumptions of theism, developed
from hints in the Pensees, is put in the mouth of the blind English

1 Cp. Morley, Diderot, ed. 1831, p. :)1. a E.g. S 21.

;; A police agent seized the MS. in Diderot's library, and Diderot could not get it back.
Maleshcrbes, the censor, kept it sale for him !

FRENCH FREETHOUGIIT 209

mathematician, Sanderson. It is not surprising that whereas
the Pensees had been, with some other books, ordered by the Paris
Parlement to he burnt by the common hangman, the Lett re sur les
Aveugles led to his arrest and an imprisonment of six months in the
Chateau de Vincennes. Both hooks had of course been published
without licence ;2 but the second book was more than a defiance of
the censorship : it was a challenge alike to the philosophy and the faith
of Christendom ; and as such could not have missed denunciation.''

But Diderot was not the kind of man to be silenced by menaces.
In the famous Sorbonne thesis of the Abbe de Prades (1751) he
probably had, as we have seen, some share ; and when De Prades
was condemned and deprived of Ins licence (1752) Diderot wrote the
third part of the Apologie (published by De Trades in Holland), which
defended his positions ; and possibly assisted in the other parts.'
The hand of Diderot perhaps may be discovered in the skilful
allusions to the skeptical Demonstratio Evangelica of Huet, which
De Prades professes to have translated when at his seminary, seeking
there the antidote to the poison of the deists. The entire handling
of the question of pagan and Christian miracles, too, suggests the
skilled dialectician, though it is substantially an adaptation of
Leslie's Short and Easy Method with the Deists. The alternate
eulogy and criticism of Locke are likely to be his, as is indeed the
abundant knowledge of English thought shown alike in the thesis
and in the Apologie. Whether he wrote the passage which claims
to rebut an argument in his own Pensees piiilosupliiques" is surely
doubtful. But Ids, certainly, is the further reply to the pastoral of
the Jansenist Bishop of Auxerre against de Prades's thesis, in which
the perpetual disparagement of reason by Catholic theologians is
denounced'" as the most injurious of all procedures against religion.
And his, probably, is the peroration' arraigning the Jansenists and

1 According to Kaigeon < Mr moires, 1S21, p. 131), three months and ten days.

- The Letter purports, like so many oilier books of that and the next feneration, to be
published " A I.ondres."

■■ Diderot daughter, in her memoir of him, speaks of Ins imprisonment in the Bastille
as brought about through the resentment of a lady of whom he had spoken slight
and her husbai d left a statement in MS. to the same effect (printed at the end of the
M'-moirrs by Naigeon). The lady is named as Madame Dupiv de Saint-Ma ur, a. mistress
of the King, and the offence is said to have la-en committed in the story entitled Le 1'iijeon
bliuir. How.-oever this may have been, tile prosecution was quite in the spirit of the
peri ml. and the i arlier /'■ it • < wire made part of the case again-! him. See Delort, Hist,
de l<i detention ties phiiosojilirs, ls-j'j, ii, -ais p;. M. de Vundeul-Diderot te lilies that the
Marquis Du Chatelet. Governor of Vincennes, treated his prisoner very kindly. Huckle
(1-vol. ed. p. 1'J.j] doe- ii., i eeni to have fully read the Lett re. whieh he describes as merely
discussing the differential ion of thought and sen -at inn among the bind.

; His Iriend Mei t.-r ./ In mrnioiredr Diderot. 17m;, app. to Naigeon's Mr moires de
Diderot. i-.JI. p. I-JU writes a- it Diderot had written the whole .-]/; / .//. " in a few nays."
The third part, a reply to the pastoral ol the I'd -hop of Auxerre. appeared separalelj as a
Unite to the others. ' A/edoijie, a < cited. Lie pari ie, p, sy .-.,/.

'■ Obse rvntions sur i instruction iJOstoralede Mona. i I.e. que d Auxerre. l'.erhn, 17...i, p. 17.

■ Id. p. 10/ nj.

270 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

imputing to their fanaticism and superstition, their miracle-monger-
ing and their sectarian bitterness, the discredit which among thinking
men had latterly fallen upon Church and creed alike.

De Prades, who in his thesis and Apologie had always professed
to be a believing Christian, was not a useful recruit to rationalism.
Passing from Holland to Berlin, he was there appointed, through the
influence of Voltaire, reader and amanuensis to the King, who in
1754 arranged for him an official reconciliation with the Church.
A formal retractation was sent to the Pope, the Sorbonne, and the
Bishop of Montauban;3 and Frederick in due course presented him
to a Catholic canonry at Glogau. In 1757, however, he was put
under arrest on the charge, it is commonly said, of supplying military
information to his countrymen ;4 and thereafter, returning to France
in 1759, he obtained a French benefice. Diderot, who was now a
recognized champion of freethought, turned away with indignation.

Thenceforward he never faltered on his path. It is his peculiar
excellence to be an original and innovating thinker not only in
philosophy but in psychology, in aesthetics, in ethics, in dramatic
art ; and his endless and miscellaneous labours in the Encyclopedic,
of which he was the most loyal and devoted producer, represent an
extraordinary range of interests. He suffered from his position as a
hack writer and as a forced dissembler in his articles on religious
matters ; and there is probably a very real connection between his
compulsory insincerities6 in the Encyclopedic — to say nothing of the
official prosecution of that and of others of his works— and his
misdeeds in the way of indecent fiction. When organized society is
made to figure as the heartless enemy of thinking men, it is no great
wonder if they are careless at times about the effect of their writings
on society. But it stands to his lasting honour that his sufferings
at the hands of priests, printers, and parlcvicnts never soured his
natural goodness of heart.' Having in his youth known a day's
unrelieved hunger, he made a vow that he would never refuse help
to any human being ; and, says Ids daughter, no vow was ever more
faithfully kept. No one in trouble was ever turned away from his

1 Cp. Morley, Diderot, pp. 98-99. '2 Carlyle, Frederick, bk. xviii, cb. ix, end

s D'Argenson, Mimoires, iv, 188. 4 Carlyle. as cited.

5 "Quelle abominable bomuie !" he writes to Mdlle. Voland (15 juillet, 1759) ; and Lord
Morley pronounces de Prades a rascal (Diderot, p. 98). Carlyle is inarticulate with disgust
— but as much against the original heresy as against the treason to Frederick. As to that,
Thiebault was convinced that de Prades was innocent and calumniated. Everybody at
court, he declares, held the same view. Men Souvenirs de vingt tins de sejour a Berlin,
2e edit. 1805, v, 402-404.

u It is not clear how these ere to be distinguished from the mutilations of the later
volumes by his treacherous publisher Le Breton. Of this treachery the details are given
by Grimrn, Corr. litt. ed. 1829. vii, 141 sq.

7 Buckle's account of him (1-vol. ed. p. 420) as "burning with hatred against his perse-
cutors" after his imprisonment is overdrawn. He was a poor hater.

FRENCH FREETHOUGHT 271

door ; and even his enemies were helped when they were base
enough to beg of him. It seems no exaggeration to say that the
bulk of his life was given to helping other people ; and the indirect
eflect of his work, which is rather intellectually disinterested than
didactic, is no less liberative and humanitarian. " To do good, and
to find truth," were his mottoes for life.

His daughter, Madame de Yandeul, who in her old age remained
tranquilly divided between the religion instilled into her by her pious
mother and the rationalism she had gathered from her father and
his friends, testified, then, to his constant goodness in the home;1
and his father bore a similar testimony, contrasting him with his
pious brother.2 He was, in his way, as beneficent as Voltaire,
without Voltaire's faults of private malice ; and his life's work was
a great ministry of light. It was Goethe who said of him in the
next generation that " whoever holds him or his doings cheaply is
a Philistine." His large humanity reaches from the planes of
expert thought to that of popular feeling ; and while by his Letter
on the Blind he could advance speculative psychology and pure
philosophy, he could by his tale The Nun (La Religeuse,4 written
about 1760, published 1796) enlist the sympathies of the people
against the rule of the Church. It belonged to his character to be
generously appreciative of all excellence ; he delighted in other
men's capacity as in pictures and poetry ; and he loved to praise.
At a time when Bacon and Hobbes were little regarded in England
he made them newly famous throughout Europe by his praises.
In him was realized Bacon's saying, Admiratio semen scientiae, in
every sense, for his curiosity was as keen as his sensibility.

2o. With Diderot were specially associated, in different ways,
D'ALEMBERT, the mathematician, for some years his special colleague
on the Encyclopedic, and Baron D'HOLBACH. The former, one of
the staunchest friends of Voltaire, though a less invincible fighter
than Diderot, counted for practical freethought by his miscellaneous
articles, his little book on the Jesuits (17G0), his Pensees philoso-
phiques, his physics, and the general rationalism of his Preliminary

1 Madame Diderot, says ln:r daughter, was very upright as well as very religious, but
her temper, "eterhellenioht grondeur, faisait de notre interieur un enter, dout 111011 pere
etait l'ange eonsolate ir" (Letter to Meister, iu Nut ten pref. to Lett res Inedites de Mine, de
Stn>;l n Henri Mrixter, I'.W, p. t>l).

- "Helas! elicit mori excellent grand-pere, j'ai deux Ills: 1'un sera srtrement un saint,
et je crains hi en que 1 'autre ne soil dam tie ; mais jo ne puis vivre avee le saint, el je mi is
tres beureux du temps que je passe avee le damne" ( Letter of Mine, de Vandeul, last cited).
Freethinker as lie was, his fellow-townsmen otlieially requested in 17SU to be allowed to
pay for a portrait of iiim for public exhibition, and the bronze bust he sent them was
placed in the hotel de v die MS. ol M. de Vandeul-Diderot, as eited).

;; Madame de Vandeul states that this story was motived by the ease of Diderot's
siiter, who died mad at the a :< ol 2.1 or -:.-. Letter above eited ; Ho- on L ran/, i, 'J).

272 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

Discourse to the Encyclopedic. It is noteworthy that in his intimate
correspondence with Voltaire he never avows theism, and that his
and Diderot's friend, the atheist Damilaville, died in his arms.1
On Dumarsais, too, he penned an of which eloge Voltaire wrote :
" Dumarsais only begins to live since his death ; you have given
him existence and immortality." 2 And perpetual secretary as he
was of the Academy, the fanatical daughter of Madame Geoffrin
could write to him in 1776 : " For many years you have set all
respectable people against you by your indecent and imprudent
manner of speaking against religion."3 Baron d'Holbach, a
naturalized German of large fortune, was on the other hand one
of the most strenuous propagandists of freethought in his age.
Personally no less beloved than Helvetius,4 he gave his life and his
fortune to the work of enlightening men on all the lines on which
he felt they needed light. Much of the progress of the physical
sciences in pre-revoiutionary France was due to the long series — at
least eleven in all — of his translations of solid treatises from the
German ; and his still longer series of original works and transla-
tions from the English in all branches of freethought — a really
astonishing movement of intellectual energy despite the emotion
attaching to the subject-matter — was for the most part prepared
in the same essentially scientific temper. Of all the freethinkers
of the period he had perhaps the largest range of practical erudition ;°
and he drew upon it with unhasting and unresting industry.
Imitating the tactic of Voltaire, he produced, with some assistance
from Diderot, Naigeon, and others, a small library of anti-Christian
treatises under a variety of pseudonyms;0 and his principal work,
the famous System of Nature (1770), was put out under the name of
Mirabaud, an actual person, then dead. Summing up as it does with
stringent force the whole anti-theological propaganda of the age, it has
been described as a "thundering engine of revolt and destruction."7

i Lettre de Voltaire a D'Alembert, 27 aout, 1771.

2 Lettre de 2 decembre, 1757.

'■'• CEuvres pnsthuines de D'Alembert. 1790, i, 210.

^ D'Holbach was the original of the character of Wolmar in Rousseau's NouveUe
Helo'ise, of whom Julie says that he "does Hood without recompense." "I never saw a
man more simply simple" was the verdict of Madame Geoffrin. Corr.litt.de Grimm
(notice probably by Meister), ed. 1829-31, xiv, 291.

■' Marmontel says of him that he " avoit tout lu et n'avoit jamais rien oublie d'interes-
sant." Memoires, 1801, ii, 312.

6 See a full list of his works (compiled by Julian Hibbert after the list given in the
1821 ed. of Diderot's Works, xii. 110, and rep. in tlio ls-29-31 ed. of Grimm and Diderot's
Correxprmdanee, xiv, 293), prefixed to Watson's ed. (1831 and later) of the English transla-
tion of the Syxtoti of Is tit it re.

7 Morley, Diderot, p. 311. The chapter gives a good account of the book. Cp. Lange,
i, 364 «/. (Eng. trans, ii, 26 sq.) as to its materialism. The best pages were said to be by
Diderot ICorr. de Grimm, as cited, p. 2s9 ; the statement of Meister, who makes it also in
his Klo(ie). Naigeon denied that Diderot had any part in the Systeme, but in 1820 there was
published an edition with "notes and corrections " by Diderot.

FEENCH FKEETHOUGHT 273

It was the first published atheistic ' treatise of a systematic
kind, if we except that of Eobinet, issued some years before ;
and it significantly marks the era of modern freethought, as does
the powerful Essai sur les prdjuges, published in the same year,2
by its stern impeachment of the sins of monarchy — here carrying
on the note struck by Jean Meslier in his manuscript of half-a-
century earlier. Bather a practical argument than a dispassionate
philosophic research, its polemic against human folly laid it open to
the regulation retort that on its own necessarian principles no such
polemic was admissible. That retort is, of course, ultimately invalid
when the denunciation is resolved into demonstration. If, however,
it be termed " shallow " on the score of its censorious treatment of
the past,3 the term will have to be applied to the Hebrew books, to
the Gospel Jesus, to the Christian Fathers, to Pascal, Milton,
Carlyle, Paiskin, and a good many other prophets, ancient and
modern. The synthesis of the book is really emotional rather than
philosophic, and hortatory rather than scientific ; and it was all the
more influential on that account. To the sensation it produced is
to be ascribed the edict of 1770 condemning a whole shelf of
previous works to be burnt along with it by the common hangman.

2G. The death of d'Holbach (1789) brings us to the French
Revolution. By that time all the great freethinking propagandists
and non-combatant deists of the Voltairean group were gone, save
Condorcet. Voltaire and Rousseau had died in 1778, Helvetius
in 1771, Turgot in 1781, D'Alembert in 1783, Diderot in 178-1.
After all their labours, only the educated minority, broadly speaking,
bad been made freethinkers ; and of these, despite the vogue of the
System of Nature, only a minority were atheists. Deism prevailed,
as we have seen, among the foremost revolutionists ; but atheism
was relatively rare. Voltaire, indeed, impressed by the number of
cultured men of his acquaintance who avowed it, latterly speaks4 of
them as very numerous ; and Grimm must have had a good many
among the subscribers to his correspondence, to permit of his

1 It is to be noted that the English translation (3 vols. 3rd ed. 1817; 4th ed. 1820)
deliberately tampers with the language of the original to the extent of making it deistie.
This perversion lias been by oversight preserved in all the reprints.

- Mirabeau spoke ol the J-Jxxni as " le livre le moins connu, et eelui qui merite le plus
l'etre." Kven the reprint of 17'J3 had become " extremely rare" in 1S-2-J. The book seems
to have been specially disquieting to orthodoxy, and was hunted down accordingly.

'■'■ So Morley. p. 317. It (iocs not occur to Lord Morley, and to the Comtists who take
a similar tone, that in thus disparaging past thinkers they arc really doing the thing
they blame.

1 Lettnude Mrmmiux a Cireron (1771); llistnirc ile Je.nni (1775). In the earlier article,
Athki . in the Inrtiniinaire 1'liilnaoiiltiiiiie, he speaks of having met in France very good
physicists who were aUe-i-ls. In Ins letter of September -t'>, 1770, to .Madame Necker, ho
writes concerning the Si/xtriile <l<: In Suture: "II est mi pen hontciix it notre nation <pio
tant de gens aieut emora-ise si vite une opinion si ridicule." And yet I'rof. \\. M. Sloane,
of Columbia b'niver ity, still writes of Voltaire, in in.' manner of Knglish bishops, as
"atheistical " [The French Uevulutiun and lieliyious liejurin, l'JUl, P. -<>i.

VOL. II T

274 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

penning or passing the atheistic criticism there given of Voltaire's
first reply to d'Holbach. Nevertheless, there was no continuous
atheistic movement ; and after 1789 the new freethinking works
run to critical and ethical attack on the Christian system rather
than on theism. VOLNEY combined both lines of attack in his
famous Ruins of Empires (1791) ; and the learned DUPUIS, in his
voluminous Origin of all Cults (1795), took an important step, not
yet fully reckoned with by later mythologists, towards the mytho-
logical analysis of the gospel narrative. After these vigorous
performances, the popular progress of French freethought was for
long practically suspended1 by the tumult of the Eevolution and the
reaction which followed it, though LAPLACE went on his way with
his epoch-making theory of the origin of the solar system, for which,
as he told Napoleon, he had " no need of the hypothesis " of a God.
The admirable Cc-NDORCET had died, perhaps by his own hand, in
1794, when in hiding from the Terrorists, leaving behind him his
Esquisse d'un tableau historique cles procjres de V esprit humain, in
which the most sanguine convictions of the rationalistic school are
reformulated without a trace of bitterness or of despair.

27. No part of the history of freethought has been more distorted
than that at which it is embroiled in the French Eevolution. The
conventional view in England still is that the Eevolution was the
work of deists and atheists, but chiefly of the latter ; that they
suppressed Christianity and set up a worship of a Goddess of
Eeason, represented by a woman of the town ; and that the blood-
shed of the Terror represented the application of their principles to
government, or at least the political result of the withdrawal of
religious checks.2 Those who remember in the briefest summary
the records of massacre connected with the affirmation of religious
beliefs — the internecine wars of Christian sects under the Eoman
Empire ; the vast slaughters of Manicha^ans in the East ; the
bloodshed of the period of propagation in Northern Europe, from
Charlemagne onwards ; the story of the Crusades, in which nine
millions of human beings are estimated to have been destroyed ;
the generation of wholesale murder of the heretics of Languedoc
by the papacy ; the protracted savageries of the Hussite War ; the
early holocaust of Protestant heretics in France ; the massacres of

1 Though in 1707 we have Marechal's Code d'une Societe d'hommes satis Dieu, and in
1703 his Pendens libres sur lex vretres.

1 Thus Dr. Cairns (U)i belief in the. Eighteenth Century, p. 165) gravely argues that the
French Revolution proves the inefficacy of theism without a Trinity to control conduct.
He lias omitted to compare the theistic bloodshed of the Revolution with the Trinitarian
bloodshed of the Crusades, the papal suppression of the Albigenses, the Hussite wars, and
other orthodox undertakings.

FEENCH FEEETHOUGHT 275

German peasants and Anabaptists ; the reciprocal persecutions in
England ; the civil strifes of sectaries in Switzerland ; the ferocious
wars of the French Huguenots and the League ; the long-drawn
agony of the war of thirty years in Germany ; the annihilation of
myriads of Mexicans and Peruvians by the conquering Spaniards in
the name of the Cross — those who recall these tilings need spend no
time over the proposition that rationalism stands for a removal of
restraints on bloodshed. But it is necessary to put concisely the
facts as against the legend in the case of the French Bevolution.

(a) That many of the leading men among the revolutionists were
deists is true ; and the fact goes to prove that it was chiefly the
men of ability in France who rejected Christianity. Of a number
of these the normal attitude was represented in the work of Necker,
Sur V importance des id&es rcligieuses (1787), which repudiated the
destructive attitude of the few, and may be described as an utterance
of pious theism or Unitarianism.1 Orthodox he cannot well have
been, since, like his wife, he was the friend of Voltaire.2 But the
majority of the Constituent Assembly was never even deistic ; it
professed itself cordially Catholic ;3 and the atheists there might be
counted on the fingers of one hand.4

The Abbe Bergier, in answering d'Holbach {Examen die
Mater icdisme, ii, ch. i, § l), denies that there has been any wide
spread of atheistic opinion. This is much more probable than
the statement of the Archbishop of Toulouse, on a deputation
to the king in 1775, that " le monstrueux atheisme est devenu
l'opinion dominante " (Soulavie, Edgne de Louis XVI, iii, 16;
cited by Buckle, 1-vol. ed. p. 483, note). Joseph Drox, a
monarchist and a Christian, writing under Louis Philippe,
sums up that " the atheists formed only a small number of
adepts " (Ilistoire du Iiegne de Louis XVI, ed. 1839, p. 42).
And Eivarol, who at the time of writing his Lcttrcs a M.
Necker was substantially an atheist, says in so many words

1 The book was accorded the Monthyon prize by the French Academy. In translation
(17-,S) it found a welcome in Kngland anions Churchmen by reason of its pro-Christian
tone and its general vindication of religious institutions. The translation was the; work
of Mary Wollstonecraft. See Kegan Paul's William (Indicia, lsVii, i. VXi. Mrs. Dunlop,
tin: friend of Hums, recommending its perusal to the poet, paid it a curious compliment :
"He [oos not write like a sectary, hardly like, a Christian, but yet while 1 read him, 1 like
bolter my Cod, my neighbour, Monsieur Necker, and myself." Hubert Jiitrns mid Mrs.
Vunlni), ed. by W. Wallace, Ib!)H, p. ii-W.

- See Voltaire's letters to Madame Necker, Corr. de. Grimm, ed. 1N-20, vii. '!:!. lis. Of
the lady. (In hum writes (p. 118): " 11 y pa tide Necker passe sa vie avec des systematiques,
tnais idle est devote a sa maniere. Kile voudrait etre sineerement hugenote, mi socinieune,
on deistiipie. mi plutot, pour etre ipiehpie chose, idle prend le parti de lie se rendre coinpte
sur r ieu." " Hvpathie " was Vol tain;' a complimentary name lor her.

'•'■ Cp. Aulard, /.-• Cidte <!■ in Unison it le Cull,- de V M re. Sit/ireine, IN!)'.!, pp. 17 1'.).
M. Gazier (/•>„./,-, turl'liistitire relitiieuse. de In reeollltion frnitenise, 1-77. pp. 1-. 17.;. l-'.l Nf/.l
speaks somewhat hue ely of a prevailing anti-Christian feeling when actually idling only
isolated instances, and giving proof's of a general orthodoxy. Vet lie points out the
complete misconception of Thiers on the subject (p. 21 hi I.

* Cp. i'ruf. W. M. Sloane, The French Revolution and ltdiuious Reform, p. 13.

276 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

that, while Rousseau's " Confession of a Savoyard Vicar " was
naturally very attractive to many, such a book as the Systeme
de la Nature, " were it as attractive as it is tedious, would win
nobody" {CEuvres, ed. 185 I, p. 134). Still, it ran into seven
editions between 1770 and 1780.

Nor were there lacking vigorous representatives of orthodoxy :
the powerful Abbe Gregoire, in particular, was a convinced Jansenist
Christian, and at the same time an ardent democrat and anti-
royalist.1 He saw the immense importance to the Church of a
good understanding with the Revolution, and he accepted the
constitution of 1790. With him went a very large number of
priests. M. Leonce de Lavergne, who was pious enough to write
that " the philosophy of the eighteenth century had had the audacity
to lay hands on God ; and this impious attempt has had for punish-
ment the revolutionary expiation," also admits that, " of the clergy,
it was not the minority but the majority which went along with the
Tiers Etat." ' Many of the clergy, however, being refractory, the
Assembly pressed its point, and the breach widened. It was solely
through this political hostility on the part of the Church to the new
constitution that any civic interference with public worship ever
took place. Gregoire was extremely popular with the advanced
types,'' though his piety was conspicuous \* and there were not a
few priests of his way of thinking,5 among them being some of the
ablest bishops.0 On the flight of the king, he and they went with
the democracy ; and it was the obstinate refusal of the others to
accept the constitution that provoked the new Legislative Assembly
to coerce them. Though the new body was more anti-clerical than
the old, however, it was simply doing what successive Protestant
monarclis had done in England and Ireland ; and probably no
Government in the world would then have acted otherwise in a
similar case.' Patience might perhaps have won the day ; but the
Revolution was fighting for its life ; and the conservative Church, as
all men knew, was eager to strangle it. Had the clergy left politics
alone, or simply accepted the constitutional action of the State,
there would have been no religious question. To speak of such a
body of priests, who had at all times been eager to put men to
death for heresy, as vindicating " liberty of conscience" when they
refused fealty to the constitution," is somewhat to strain the terms.

' Gazior, as cited, pp. 2, 4, 12, 10-21, 71, etc.

- Leu A ssfiabU es Provinciates sons Louis XVI, 1864, pref. pp. viii-ix.

U Ga/.ier, Ij. li, ch. i. •' /./. p ti7. ■' LI. p. &.). 8 Leonce de Lavergne, as cited.

• Tno authority of Turgot himself could be cited for tile demand Chat the Stale clergy
should accept the constitution of the Stale. Cp. Aulard, Le Culte de In Liaison, p. 12;
'iibsot, Etude sur Turgot, 1B78, p. ItiU. b Gazier, p. 113.

FEENCH FEEETHOUGHT 277

The expulsion of the Jesuits under the Old Regime had been a moro
coercive measure than the demand of the Assembly on the allegiance
of the State clergy. And all the while the reactionary section of tho
priesthood was known to be conspiring with tho royalists abroad.
It was only when, in 1793, tho conservative clergy were seen to bo
the great obstacle to the levy of an army of defence, that the more
radical spirits began to think of interfering with their functions.1

(b) An a priori method has served alike in freethinkers' and in
pietists' hands to obscure the facts. When Michelet insists on the
irreconcilable opposition of Christianity to tho Eevolution " — a
thesis in which he was heartily supported by Proudhon'2 — ho means
that the central Christian dogmas of salvation by sacrifice and faith
exclude any political ethic of justice'1 — any doctrine of equality and
equity. But tins is only to say that Christianity as an organization
is in perpetual contradiction with some main part of its professed
creed ; and that has been a commonplace since Constantino. It
does not mean that either Christians in multitudes or their churches
as organizations have not constantly proceeded on ordinary political
motives, whether populist or anti-populist. In Germany we have
seen Lutheranism first fomenting and afterwards repudiating the
movement of the peasants for betterment ; and in England in the
next century both parties in the civil war invoke religious doctrines,
meeting texts with texts. Jansenism was in constant friction with
the monarchy from its outset ; and Eouis XIV and Louis XV alike
regarded the Jansenists as the enemies of the throne. " Christianity "
could be as easily "reconciled" with a democratic movement in the
last quarter of the eighteenth century as with the Massacre of Saint
Bartholomew's Bay in the sixteenth. If those Christians who still
charge " the bloodshed of the French Eevolution" on the spirit of
incredulity desire to corroborate Michelet to the extent of making
Christianity the bulwark of absolute monarchy, the friend of a cruel
feudalism, and the guardian genius of the Bastille, they may be left
to the criticism of their felknwbelievers who have embraced the
newer principle that the truth of the Christian religion is to be
proved by connecting it in practice with the spirit of social reform.
To point out to either party, as did Michelet, that evangelical
Christianity is a religion of submission and preparation for the end
of all things, and has nothing to do with rational political reform,

1 v.i i- !, c lit,-, pp. in >o.

- Mielielet. Hi»t. /In In rrcnlntinnfrinictiise, ed. Svo ISfiS and Inter, i, II",. Cp. I'roudlion's
I)i' In ]u fin:, IKX.

; 'Tout, jiuletnent r< • I : : * i < •,i\ on politique est line contrndietion flagrante dims line
religion uniquemeut foudoe sur uu dogme utraub'er a. la justice." Ed. cited, in trod. p. lit).

278 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

is to bestow logic where logic is indomiciliable. While rationalism
undoubtedly fosters the critical spirit, professed Christians have
during many ages shown themselves as prone to rebellion as to
war, whether on religious or on political pretexts.

(c) For the rest, the legend falsifies what took place. The facts
are now established by exact documentary research. The Govern-
ment never substituted any species of religion for the Catholic.1
The Festival of Eeason at Notre Dame was an act not of the
Convention but of the Commune of Paris and the Department ; the
Convention had no part in promoting it ; half the members stayed
away when invited to attend ; and there was no Goddess of Eeason
in the ceremony, but only a Goddess of Liberty, represented by an
actress who cannot even be identified.2 Throughout, the devoutly
theistic Eousseau was the chief literary hero of the movement.
The two executive Committees in no way countenanced the dechris-
tianization of the Churches, but on the contrary imprisoned persons
who removed church properties ; and these in turn protested that
they had no thought of abolishing religion. The acts of irresponsible
violence did not amount to a hundredth part of the ' sacrilege "
wrought in Protestant countries at the Eeformation, and do not
compare with the acts charged on Cromwell's troopers. The policy
of inviting priests and bishops to abdicate their functions was
strictly political ; and the Archbishop Gobel did not abjure Catho-
licism, but only surrendered his office. That a number of priests
did gratuitously abjure their religion is only a proof of what was
well known — that a good many priests were simple deists. We
have seen how many abbes fought in the freethought ranks, or near
them. Diderot in a letter of 1769 tells of a day which he and
a friend had passed with two monks who were atheists. " One of
them read the first draft of a very fresh and very vigorous treatise
on atheism, full of new and bold ideas ; I learned with edification
that this doctrine was the current doctrine of their cloisters. For
the rest, these two monks were the ' big bonnets ' of their monastery ;
they had intellect, gaiety, good feeling, knowledge."1 And a priest
of the cathedral of Auxerre, whose recollections went back to the
revolutionary period, has confessed that at that time " philosophic "

1 The grave misstatement of Michelet on this heart is exposed by Aulard, Culte, p. 60.

2 Yet it is customary among Christians to speak of this lady in the, most opprobrious
terms. The royalist (but malcontent) Marquis do Villeneuve, who had seen the Revolu-
tion in his youth, claimed in his old age to have afterwards " conversed with the Goddess
Reason of Paris and with the Goddess Reason of Bourges " (where he became governor) ;
but, though lie twice alludes to those women, he says nothing whatever against their
characters ( Dp. V Agonie fie la France, 1835. i. 3, 10). Prof. W. M. Sloane. with all his reli-
gions prejudice, is satisfied that the women chosen as Goddesses of Reason outside of
Paris were "noted for their spotless character." Work cited, p. 103.

3 Mi'inuircs, ed. 1811, ii, 166.

FEENCH FKEETHOUGIIT 279

opinions prevailed in most of the monasteries. His words even
imply that in his opinion the unbelieving monks were the majority.1
In the provinces, where the movement went on with various
degrees of activity, it had the same goneral character. " Eeason "
itself was often identified with deity, or declared to be an emanation
thereof. Hebert, commonly described as an atheist for his share
in the movement, expressly denied the charge, and claimed to have
exhorted the people to read the gospels and obey Christ.'2 Danton,
though at his death he disavowed belief in immortality, had declared
in the Convention in 1793 that " we have not striven to abolish
superstition in order to establish the reign of atheism."3 Even
Chaumette was not an atheist;4 and the Prussian Clootz, who
probably was, had certainly little or no doctrinary influence ; while
the two or three other professed atheists of the Assembly had no
part in the public action.

((/) Finally, Eobespierre was all along thoroughly hostile to the
movement ; in his character of Eousseauist and deist ho argued
that atheism was "aristocratic"; he put to death the leaders of the
Cult of Eeason ; and he set up the Worship of the Supremo Being
as a counter-move. Broadly speaking, he affiliated to Necker, and
stood very much at the standpoint of the English Unitarianism of
the present day. Thus the bloodshed of the Eeign of Terror, if it
is to be charged on any species of philosophic doctrine rather than
on the unscrupulous policy of the enemies of the Eevolution in
and out of France, stands to the credit of the belief in a God, the
creed of Frederick, Turgot, Necker, Franklin, Pitt, and Washington.
The one convinced and reasoning atheist among the publicists of
the Eevolution, the journalist SALAVILLE,5 opposed the Cult of
Eeason with sound and serious and persuasive argument, and
strongly blamed all forcible interference with worship, while at the
same time calmly maintaining atheism as against theism. The ago
of atheism had not come, any more than the triumph of Eeason.

Mallet du Pan specifies, as among those who since L788
have pushed the blood-stained car of anarchy and atheism,"
Chamfort, Gronvelle, Garat, and Cerutti. Chamfort was as
high-minded a man as Mallet himself, and is to-day so recog-
nized by every unprejudiced reader. The others are forgotten.

1 I'ere V.-.J.-Y. Fortin, Souvenirs, Auxerre, 18(17, ii, 11.

^ See the speech in Aulard, Citlte, p. 210 ; ami ep- pp. 7'.) H.1.

:i " Le pen pie aura des fetes dans lesquelles ii oll'rira de 1'eneens f< I'll:, re Supremo, mi
rnaitro de la nature, oar nous n'avous pas voulu aneantir la superstition pour etahlir
lis re^ne <le latheisnie." Speech of Nov. lili, lTSi, in the Mmiili it r. {Discuit rn ili: Dniiton,
ed. Andre Krihour«, I'M), p. O'J'.J.)

* Aulanl, CulU:, pp. Bl ti± 5 Concerning whom see Aulard, Culk; pp. 80 9G.

280 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

Gronvelle, who as secretary of the executive council read to
Louis XVI his death-sentence, wrote De Vautorite de Montes-
quieu dans la revolution presente (1789). Garat was Minister
of Justice in 1792 and of the Interior in 1793, and was ennobled
by Napoleon. He had published Considerations sur la Revo-
lution (1792) and a Memoirc sur la Revolution (1795). Cerutti,
originally a Jesuit, became a member of the Legislative
Assembly, and was the friend of Mirabeau, whose funeral
oration he delivered.

28. The anti-atheistic and anti-philosophic legend was born of
the exasperation and bad faith of the dethroned aristocracy, them-
selves often unbelievers in the day of their ascendancy, and, whether
unbelievers or not, responsible with the Church and the court for
that long insensate resistance to reform which made the revolution
inevitable. Mere random denunciation of new ideas as tending to
generate rebellion was of course an ancient commonplace. Medieval
heretics had been so denounced ; Wiclif was in his day ; and when
the Count de Cataneo attacked Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws, he
spoke of all such reasonings as " attempts which shake the sacred
basis of thrones."1 But he and his contemporaries knew that
freethinkers were not specially given to mutiny ; and when, later,
French Churchmen had begun systematically to accuse the philo-
sophers of undermining alike the Church and the throne,2 the
unbelieving nobles, conscious of entire political conservatism, had
simply laughed. Better than anyone else they knew that political
revolt had other roots and motives than incredulity ; and they could
not but remember how many French kings had been rebelled against
by the Church, and how many slain by priestly hands. Their
acceptance of the priestly formula came later. In the life of the
brilliant Bivarol, who associated with the noblesse while disdained
by many of them because of his obscure birth, we may read the
intellectual history of the case. Brilliant without patience, keen
without scientific coherence,8 Bivarol in 1787 met the pious deism
of Necker with a dialectic in which cynicism as often disorders as
illuminates the argument. With prompt veracity he first rejects the

1 The Source, the Strength, and the True Spirit of Lairs, Eng. tr. 1753, p. 6.

2 K.q.. in the Arret du Parlement of !) juin, 17fi'2, denouncing Rousseau's V.mile as
tending to make the royal authority odious and to destroy the principle of obedience;
and in the Exanien du Belisaire de M. Marmontel, by Coger (N'onv. ed. augrn. 1767. p. 15 sq.
Cp. Marrnontel's Memoires, 1&04. iii, 46, as to bis being called ennemi du trdne et de Vautel).
This kind of invective was kept up against the philosoiriu s to the moment of the Revolution.
Set.- for instance Le. vrai religieux, Discour^ dedie a -Madame Louise de France, par le
R. P. C. A. 17^-7. i). 4 : " L'ne philosophic orgueilleuse a renverse les limites sacrees que la
main du Tres-Haut avoit elle-meme elevees. La raison de l'liomme a ose sonder les

decrets de Dieu Dans les acces de son ivresse, n'a-t-elle pas sape les fondemens du trono

et iles lois," etc.

:i Cp. the admissions of Cnrnier (Rivarnl, sa vie et sr.s ceuvres, 1858, p. 149) in deprecation
of Burke's wild likening of Rivarol's journalism to the Annals of Tacitus.

FKENCH FEEETHOUGHT 281

ideal of a beneficent reign of delusion, and insists that religion is seen
in all history powerless alike to overrule men's passions and preju-
dices, and to console the oppressed by its promise of a reversal of
earthly conditions in another world. But in the same breath, by
way of proving that the atheist is less disturbing to convention than
the deist, he insists that the unbeliever soon learns to see that
irreverences are crimes against society"; and then, in order to
justify such conformity, asserts what he had before denied. And
the self-contradiction recurs.1 The underlying motive of the whole
polemic is simply the grudge of the upper class diner-out against the
serious and conscientious bourgeois who strives to reform the existing
system. Conscious of being more enlightened, the wit is eager at
once to disparage Necker for his religiosity and to discredit him
politically as the enemy of the socially useful ecclesiastical order.
Yet in his second letter Sur la morale (1788) he is so plainly an
unbeliever that the treatise had to be printed at Berlin. The due
sequence is that when the Revolution breaks out Rivarol sides with
the court and the noblesse, while perfectly aware of the ineptitude
and malfeasance of both ;'2 and, living in exile, proceeds to denounce
the philosophers as having caused the overturn by their universal
criticism. In 1787 he had declared that he would not even have
written his Letters to Necker if he were not certain that ' the
people does not read." Then the people had read neither the philo-
sophers nor him. But in exile he must needs frame for the emigres
a formula, true or false. It is the falsity of men divided against
themselves, who pay themselves with recriminations rather than
realize their own deserts.3 And in the end Rivarol is but a deist.

29. If any careful attempt be made to analyse the situation, tho
stirring example of the precedent revolution in the British American
colonies will probably be recognized as counting for very much more
than any merely literary influence in promoting that of France. A
certain " republican " spirit bad indeed existed among educated men
in France throughout the reign of Louis XV : D'Argenson noted it in
1700 and later.1 But this spirit, which D'Argenson in large measure
shared, while holding firmly by monarchy," was simply the spirit of
constitutionalism, the love of law and good government, and it derived

i CJCurres, ed. cited, pp. 13fi- 10. 117-55.

- ('p. the erititiuf! of Sainte-J'.euve, prefixed to od. cited, pp. 11 17, and Unit of Arscnc

Houssaye, id. pp. :il ■'■':•>. Mr. Kaintsbury, though biassed to the side of tlie royalist, admits
that " Rivarol hardly knows what sincerity is" IMisrrlliinrtnt.i Kssihjk, Is!1:', p. ii7).

•• Charle< ( omte is thus partly inaccurate in say inn [Tniitr il<- l.t'iiislnlimi, Is:;:,, i, 7-2)
that tin- charge against tho philosophers began "on the day on which there was set up a
government in France that sought to re-establish the abuses ol which they had sought the
destruction." Wind is true is that tin: charge, framed at once by the backers ol the Old
Itegime, has always since done duly for reaction.

4 Mcmciren, ed. Jannet, in, 3J3 ; iv, 70; v. ;ilG, 318. ■' Id. Hi, 316-17.

282 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

from English example and the teachings of such Englishmen as
Locke,1 insofar as it was not spontaneous. If acceptance of the
doctrine of constitutional government can lead to anarchy, let it be
avowed ; but let not the cause be pretended to be deism or atheism.
The political teaching for which the Paris Parlement denounced
Eousseau's Emile in 1762, and for which the theologians of the
Sorbonne censured Marmontel's Belisaire in 1767, was the old
doctrine of the sovereignty of the people. But this had been main-
tained by a whole school of English Protestant Christians before
Bossuet denounced the Protestant Jurieu for maintaining it. Nay,
it had been repeatedly maintained by Catholic theologians, from
Thomas Aquinas to Suarez,2 especially when there was any question
of putting down a Protestant monarch. Protestants on their part
protested indignantly, and reciprocated. The recriminations of
Protestants and Catholics on this head form one of the standing
farces of human history. Coger, attacking Marmontel, unctuously
cites Bayle's censure of his fellow Protestants in his Avis aux
Refugiez3 for their tone towards kings and monarchy, but says
nothing of Bayle's quarrel with Jurieu, which motived such an
utterance, or of his Critique Generate of Maimbourg's Histoire du
Calvinismc, in which he shows how the Catholic historian's prin-
ciples would justify the rebellion alike of Catholics in every
Protestant country and of Protestants in every Catholic country,
though all the while it is assumed that true Christians never resort
to violence. And, unless there has been an error as to his author-
ship, Bayle himself, be it remembered, had in his letter Ce que c'est
que la France toute catholique sous le re/jne de Louis le Grand passed
as scathing a criticism on Louis XIV as any Protestant refugee
could well have compassed. Sectarian hypocrisies apart, the
doctrine of the sovereignty of the people — for opposing which the
freethinker Hobbes has been execrated by generations of Christians
— is the professed political creed of the very classes who, in England
and the United States, have so long denounced French freethinkers
for an alleged "subversive" social teaching which fell far short of
what English and American Protestants had actually practised.
The revolt of the American colonies, in fact, precipitated demo-

1 D'Argenson, noting in his old age how "on n'a jamais autant parle de nation et d'Etat
qu'aujourd'hui," how no such talk had been heard under Louis XIV, and how ho himself
had developed on the subject, adds, "cela vient du parlement et des Anglois." He goes on
to i
the

FRENCH FBEETHOUGHT 283

cratio feeling in France in a way that no writing had ever clone.
Lafayette, no freethinker, declared himself republican at once on
reading the American declaration of the Rights of Man.1 In all
this the freethinking propaganda counted for nothing directly and
for little indirectly, inasmuch as there was no clerical quarrel in the
colonies. And if we seek for even an indirect or general influence,
apart from the affirmation of the duty of kings to their people,
the thesis as to the activity of the philosophes must at once bo
restricted to the cases of Rousseau, Helvetius, Raynal, and d'Holbach,
for Marmontcl never passed beyond " sound " generalities.

As for the pretence that it was freethinking doctrines that
brought Louis XVI to the scaffold, it is either the most impudent
or the most ignorant of historical imputations. The " right " of
tyrannicide had been maintained by Catholic schoolmen before the
Reformation, and by both Protestants and Catholics afterwards,
times without number, even as they maintained the right of the
people to depose and change kings. The doctrine was in fact not
even a modern innovation, the theory being so well primed by the
practice — under every sort of government, Jewish and pagan in
antiquity, Moslem in the Middle Ages, and Christian from the day
of Pepin to the day of John Knox — that a certain novelty lay on
the side of the "divine right of kings" when that was popularly
formulated. And on the whole question of revolution, or the right
of peoples to recast their laws, the general doctrine of the most
advanced of the French freethinkers is paralleled or outgone by
popes and Church Councils in the Middle Ages, by Occam and
Marsiglio of Padua and Wiclif and more than one German legist in
the fourteenth century, by John Major and George Buchanan in
Scotland, by Goodman in England, and by many Huguenots in
France, in the sixteenth ; by Ilotman in his Francogallia in 1571 ;
by the author of the Soupirs tie la France Esclavc' in L689 ; and
by the whole propagandist literature of the English and American
Revolutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth. Ho far from being
a specialty of freethinkers, " sedition " was in all these and other
cases habitually grounded on Biblical texts and religious protesta-
tions ; so that Bacon, little given as he was to defending rationalists,
could confidently avow that "Atheism leaves a man to sense, to
philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation hut super-
stition dismounts all these, and ercctoth an absolute monarchy in
the minds of men. Therefore atheism did never perturb states

i Op. tin; *nrvf:y of Aularrt. Hist, jmlit. tie la n'u.franraisr, 2c Mil. lOO.'J. pp. 2-'23.
- I'robaljly Ihc work oi a Juusuuist.

284 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

But superstition hath been the confusion of many states." For
"superstition" read "sectarianism," "fanaticism," and " ecclesias-
ticism." Bacon's generalization is of course merely empirical,
atheism being capable of alliance with revolutionary passion in its
turn ; but the historical summary holds good. Only by men who
had not read or had forgotten universal history could the ascription
of the French Revolution to rationalistic thought have been made.1

30. A survey of the work and attitude of the leading French
freethinkers of the century may serve to settle the point once for
all. Voltaire is admittedly out of the question. Mallet du Pan,
whose resistance to the Revolution developed into a fanaticism
hardly less perturbing to judgment2 than that of Burke, expressly
disparaged him as having so repelled men by his cynicism that he
had little influence on their feelings, and so could not be reckoned
a prime force in preparing the Revolution.3 " Mably," the critic
adds, " whose republican declamations have intoxicated many
modern democrats, was religious to austerity : at the first stroke
of the tocsin against the Church of Rome, he would have thrown
his books in the fire, excepting his scathing apostrophes to Voltaire
and the atheists. Marmontel, Saint-Lambert, Morellet, Encyclo-
pedists, were adversaries of the revolution."' On the other hand,
Barante avows that Mably, detesting as he did the freethinking
philosophers of his day, followed no less than others " a destructive
course, and contributed, without knowing it, to weaken the already
frayed ties which still united the parts of an ancient society." :
As Barante had previously ascribed the whole dissolution to the
autocratic process under Louis XIV,G even this indictment of the
orthodox Mably is invalid. Voltaire, on the other hand, Barante
charges with an undue leaning to the methods of Louis XIV.
Voltaire, in fact, was in tilings political a conservative, save insofar
as he fought for toleration, for lenity, and for the most necessary

1 On the whole question of the growth of abstract revolutionary doctrine in politics
cp. W. S. McKechnie on the De Jure Iieani apud Scotos in the " George Buchanan" vol. of
Glasgow Quatercentenary Studies, 1006, pp. 256-76 ; Gierke, Political Tlieories of the, Middle
Ages, Maitland's tr. 1900, p. 87 sg.

2 Mallet actually reproaches the philo/tophes in tin; mass — while admitting the hostility
of many of them to the Revolution — with "having accelerated French degeneration and

depravation by rendering the conscience argumentative [raisonneuse), by substituting

for duties inculcated by sentiment, tradition, and habit, the uncertain rules of the human
reason and sophisms adapted to passions," etc., etc. (B. Mallet, as cited, p. 360). With all
his natural vigour of mind, Mallet du Pan thus came to talk the language of the ordinary
irrationalist of the Reaction. Certainly, if the stimulation of the habit of reasoning bo
a destructive course, the philosophes stand condemned. But as Christians had been
reasoning as best they could, in an eternal series of vain disputes, for a millennium and
a-half before the Revolution, with habitual appeal to the passions, the argument only
proves how vacuous a Christian champion's reasoning can be.

:t Art. in Mercure Britannique, No. 13, Feb. 21, 1700; cited by B. Mallet in Mallet du
Pan and the French Revolution, 1002, App. p. 357. ' Id. p. 350.

s Tableau litteraire du dix-huitieme siecle, tie edit. pp. 112, 113. 6 Id. p. 72.

FEENCH FREETHOUGHT 285

reforms. And if Voltaire's attack on what he held to be a demoral-
izing and knew to be a persecuting religion be saddled with the
causation of the political crash, the blame will have to be carried
back equally to the English deists and the tyranny of Louis XIV.
To such indictments, as Barante protests, there is no limit : every
age pivots on its predecessor ; and to blame for the French Revolu-
tion everybody but a corrupt aristocracy, a tyrannous and ruinously
spendthrift monarchy, and a cruel church, is to miss the last
semblance of judicial method. It may be conceded that the works
of Meslier and d'Holbach, neither of whom is noticed by Barante,
are directly though only generally revolutionary in their bearing.
But the main works of d'Holbach appeared too close upon the
Revolution to be credited with generating it ; and Meslier, as we
know, had been generally read only in abridgments and adaptations,
in which his political doctrine disappears.

Mallet du Pan, striking in all directions, indicts alternately
Rousseau, whose vogue lay largely among religious people, and the
downright freethinkers. The great fomenter of the Revolution, the
critic avows, was Rousseau. " He had a hundred times more

readers than Voltaire in the middle and lower classes No one

has more openly attacked the right of property in declaring it a

usurpation It is he alone who has inoculated the French with

the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, and with its most
extreme consequences." l After this " be alone," the critic obliviously
proceeds to exclaim: " Diderot and Condorcet : there are the true
chiefs of the revolutionary school," adding that Diderot had pro-
claimed equality before Marat; the Rights of Man before Sieves ;
sacred insurrection before Mirabeau and Lafayette ; the massacre
of priests before the Septembrists." 2 But this is mere furious
declamation. Only by heedless misreading or malice can support
be given to the pretence that Diderot wrought for the violent over-
throw of the existing political system. Passages denouncing kingly
tyranny had been inserted in their plays by both Corneille and
Voltaire, and applauded by audiences who never dreamt of abolishing
monarchy. A phrase about strangling kings in the bowels of priests
is expressly put by Diderot in the mouth of an FAaittht '•romane or
Liberty-maniac \?' which shows that the type had arisen in his
lifetime in opposition to his own bias. This very poem he read to

1 Work cited, p. :;.>. - Til. p. lir.'.l.

'■'■ ('p. Mor'.cy, Outi-mf, p. 407. Lord Morley points to the phra-e in another form in a
letter ol Voltaire - in IV'il. It really derives from Jean Meslier, who emotes it from an
unlettered man [Testament, i, l'Jl.

286 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

the Prince von Galitzin, the ambassador of the Empress Catherine
and his own esteemed friend.1 The tyranny of the French Govern-
ment, swayed by the king's mistresses and favourites and by the
Jesuits, he did indeed detest, as he had cause to do, and as every
man of good feeling did with him ; but no writing of his wrought
measurably for its violent overthrow. D'Argenson in 1751 was
expressing his fears of a revolution, and noting the " desobeissance
constante " of the Parlement of Paris and the disaffection of the
people, before he had heard of " un M. Diderot, qui a beaucoup
d'esprit, mais qui affecte trop 1'irreligion." And when he notes that
the Jesuits have secured the suppression of the Encyclopedia as
being hostile "to God and the royal authority," he does not attach
the slightest weight to the charge. He knew that Louis called the
pious Jansenists " enemies of God and of the king." 8

Mallet du Pan grounds his charge against Diderot almost solely
on "those incendiary diatribes intercalated in the Histoire philoso-
phique cles deux hides which dishonour that work, and which
Eaynal, in his latter days, excised with horror from a new edition
which he was preparing." But supposing the passages in question
to be all Diderot's4 — which is far from certain — they are to be
saddled with responsibility for the Eeign of Terror only on the
principle that it was more provocative in the days of tyranny to
denounce than to exercise it. To this complexion Mallet du Pan
came, with the anti-Eevolutionists in general ; but to-day we can
recognize in the whole process of reasoning a reductio ad absurdum.
The school in question came in all seriousness to ascribe the evils
of the Eevolution to everything and everybody save the men and
classes whose misgovernment made the Eevolution inevitable.

Some of the philosophers, it is true, themselves gave colour to
the view that they were the makers of the Eevolution, as when
D'Alembert said to Eomilly that "philosophy " had produced in his
time that change in the popular mind which exhibited itself in the
indifference with which they received the news of the birth of the
dauphin.5 The error is none the less plain. The x>liilosoplics had
done nothing to promote anti-monarch ism among the common
people, who did not read.0 It was the whole political and social

1 Rosenkranz, Diderot' s Leben uml Werlce, 1866. ii. 3S0-S1.

2 As Lord Morley points out, Henri Martin absolutely reverses the purport of a passage
in order to convict Diderot of justifying regicide.

'•'' Memoires, ed. Jannet, iv. 41, 51, 68, 60, 71, 91, 93, 101, 103.

4 Mallet du Pan says lie saw the MS., and knew Diderot to have received 10,000 livres
tournois for his additions. This statement is incredible. But Meister is explicit, in his
iloge, as to Diderot having written for the book much that he thought nobody would sign,
whereas liaynal was ready to sign anything.

" Memoirs of Sir Samuel ltomilly, 3rd ed. 1841, i, 46.

6 When D'Argenson writes in 1752 [Memoires, ed. Jannet, iv, 103) that he hears "only

FRENCH FREETHOUGHT 287

evolution of two generations that had wrought the change ; and the
people were still for the most part believing Catholics. Frederick
the Great was probably within the mark when in 1769 he privately
reminded the more optimistic philosophers that their entire French
public did not number above 200,000 persons. The people of Paris,
who played the chief part in precipitating the Revolution, were spon-
taneously mutinous and disorderly, but were certainly not in any
considerable number unbelievers. " While Voltaire dechristianized
a portion of polite society the people remained very pious, even at
Paris. In 1766 Louis XV, so unpopular, was acclaimed because he
knelt, on the Pont Neuf, before the Holy Sacrament." 1

And this is the final answer to any pretence that the Revolution
was the work of the school of d'Holbach. Bergier the priest, and
Rivarol the conservative unbeliever, alike denied that d'Holbach's
systematic writings had any wide public. Doubtless the same men
were ready to eat their words for the satisfaction of vilifying an
opponent. It has always been the way of orthodoxy to tell atheists
alternately that they are an impotent handful and that they are
the ruin of society. But by this time it ought to be a matter of
elementary knowledge that a great political revolution can be
wrought only by far-reaching political forces, whether or not these
may concur with a propaganda of rationalism in religion.2 If any
"philosopher" so-called is to be credited with specially promoting
the Revolution, it is either Rousseau, who is so often hailed latterly
as the engineer of a religious reaction, and whose works, as has
been repeatedly remarked, contain much that is utterly and irre-
concilably opposed " to the Revolution,3 or Raynal, who was only
anti-clerical, not anti-Christian, and who actually censured the
revolutionary procedure. When he published his first edition he
must be held to have acquiesced in its doctrine, whether it were
from Diderot's pen or his own. Rousseau and Raynal were the
two most popular writers of their day who dealt with social as
apart from religious or philosophical issues, and to both is thus
imputed a general subversiveness. But here too the charge rests
upon a sociological fallacy. The Parlement of Paris, composed of
rich bourgeois and aristocrats, many of them Jansenists, very few

Ijhibisniihes say, as if convinced, that even anarchy would be better" than the existing
misuovomment, lie makes no suj,'«estion that they touch this. And he declares lor his

own part that everything is drifting to rum: "nude reformation nulle amelioration.

Tout tombe, par lambeaux."

1 Anlard, Hist, yulit. <Ie In rvrul. p. -31.

'2 This is the suflieient comment on a perplexing pa'-lo of Lord Morley's second mono-
graph on l',urke(pp. 110-11), winch I have never been able to reconcile with the rest of
his writing.

3 Lecky, Hist, nf Enyland in the Eighteenth Century, small ed. vi, H'ii.

288 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

of them freethinkers, most of them ready to burn freethinking books,
played a "subversive" part throughout the century, inasmuch as it
so frequently resisted the king's will.1 The stars in their courses
fought against the old despotism. Rousseau was ultimately influen-
tial towards change because change was inevitable and essential,
not because he was restless. The whole drift of things furthered
his ideas, which at the outset won no great vogue. He was followed
because he set forth what so many felt ; and similarly Raynal was
read because he chimed with a strengthening feeling. In direct
contradiction to Mallet du Pan, Chamfort, a keener observer, wrote
while the Revolution was still in action that " the priesthood was
the first bulwark of absolute power, and Voltaire overthrew it.
Without this decisive and indispensable first step nothing would
have been done." 2 The same observer goes on to say that Rousseau's
political works, and particularly the Gontrat Social, " were fitted for

few readers, and caused no alarm at court That theory was

regarded as a hollow speculation which could have no further
consequences than the enthusiasm for liberty and the contempt of
royalty carried so far in the pieces of Corneille, and applauded at
court by the most absolute of kings, Louis XIV. All that seemed
to belong to another world, and to have no connection with ours ;

in a word, Voltaire above all has made the Revolution, because

he has written for all ; Rousseau above all has made the Constitu-
tion because he has written for the thinkers."' And so the changes
may be rung for ever. The final philosophy of history cannot be
reached by any such artificial selection of factors ; and the ethical
problem equally evades such solutions. If we are to pass any
ethico-political judgment whatever, it must be that the evils of the
Revolution lie at the door not of the reformers, but of the men, the
classes, and the institutions which first provoked and then resisted
it.5 To describe the former as the authors of the process is as
intelligent as it was to charge upon Sokrates the decay of orthodox
tradition in Athens, and to charge upon that the later downfall of
the Athenian empire. The wisest men of the age, notably the great
Turgot, sought a gradual transformation, a peaceful and harmless
transition from unconstitutional to constitutional government.

1 D'Argenson notes this repeatedly, though in one passage he praises the Parlernent
as having alone made head against absolutism (dec. 1752 ; ed. cited, iv, 116).

2 Maximes et, Pensees, ed. 1856, p. 72. u Id. pp. 73-74.

4 Chamfort in another passage maintains against Soulavie that the Academy did much
to develop tile spirit of freedom in thought and politics. Id. p. 107. And this too is
arguable, as we have seen.

5 On this complicated issue, which cannot be here handled at any further length, see
1'rof. P. A. Wadia's essay The Philosopher* and the French Revolution (Social Science
Series, 1904), which, however, needs revision ; and compare the argument of Nourrisson,
J.-J. liousseau et U liousseauisme- 1903, eh. xx.

FRENCH FREETHOUGIIT 2S9

Their policy wag furiously resisted by an unteachable aristocracy.
When at last fortuitous violence made a breach in the feudal walls,
a people unprepared for self-rule, and fought by an aristocracy eager
for blood, surged into anarchy, and convulsion followed on convul-
sion. That is in brief the history of the Revolution.

31. While the true causation of the Revolution is thus kept
clear, it must not he forgotten, further, that to the very last, save
where controlled by disguised rationalists like Malesherbes, the
tendency of the old regime was to persecute brutally and senselessly
wherever it could lay hands on a freethinker. In 1788, only a year
before the first explosion of the Revolution, there appeared the
Almanack des Ilonnetcs Gens of Sylvain MARECHAL, a work of
which the offence consisted not in any attack upon religion, but in
simply constructing a calendar in which the names of renowned
laymen were substituted for saints. Instantly it was denounced
by the Paris Parlement, the printer prosecuted, and the author
imprisoned ; and De Sauvigny, the censor who had passed the book,
was exiled thirty leagues from Paris.1

Some idea of the intensity of the tyranny over all literature
in France under the Old Regime may be gathered from Buckle's
compendious account of the books officially condemned, and
of authors punished, during the two generations before the
Revolution. Apart from the record of the treatment of Buff on,

Marmontel, Morellet, Voltaire, and Diderot, it runs: "The

tendency was shown in matters so trilling that nothing but
the gravity of their ultimate results prevents them from being
ridiculous. In 1770, Imbert translated Clarke's Letters on
Spain, one of the best works then existing on that country.
This book, however, was suppressed as soon as it appeared ;
and the only reason assigned for such a stretch of power is that
it contained some remarks respecting the passion of Charles II 1
for hunting, which were considered disrespectful to the French
crown, because Louis XV himself was a great hunter. Several
years before this La Bletterie, who was favourably known in
France by his works, was elected a member of the French
Academy. But he, it seems, was a Jansenist, and had more-
over ventured to assert that the Emperor Julian, notwithstanding
his apostasy, was not entirely devoid of good qualities. Such
offences could not be overlooked in so pure an age; and the
king obliged the Academy to exclude La Hletterie from their
society. That the punishment extended no further was an
instance of remarkable leniency; for fro ret, an eminent critic
and scholar, was confined in the Bastille because he stated,

1 Correspowlance dc G rimm, c<l. cited, xiv, 5 !>. Lettiv <U: jiuiv. ITbS.
VOL. II I"

290 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

in one of his memoirs, that the earliest Frankish chiefs had
received their titles from the Romans. The same penalty was
inflicted four different times upon Lenglet du Fresnoy. In the
case of this amiahle and accomplished man, there seems to have
heen hardly the shadow of a pretext for the cruelty with which
he was treated ; though on one occasion the alleged offence was
that he had published a supplement to the History of De Thou.
" Indeed, we have only to open the biographies and corre-
spondence of that time to find instances crowding upon us from
all quarters. Rousseau was threatened with imprisonment, was
driven from France, and his works were publicly burned. The
celebrated treatise of Helvetius on the Mind was suppressed by
an order of the Royal Council ; it was burned by the common
hangman, and the author was compelled to write two letters
retracting his opinions. Some of the geological views of Buff on
having offended the clergy, that illustrious naturalist was obliged
to publish a formal recantation of doctrines which are now
known to be perfectly accurate. The learned Observations on
the History of France, by Mably, were suppressed as soon as
they appeared : for what reason it would be hard to say, since
M. Guizot, certainly no friend either to anarchy or to irreligion,
has thought it worth while to republish them, and thus stamp
them with the authority of his own great name. Tlw History
of the Indies, by Raynal, was condemned to the flames, and the
author ordered to be arrested. Lanjuinais, in his well-known
work on Joseph II, advocated not only religious toleration, but
even the abolition of slavery ; his book, therefore, was declared
to be 'seditious'; it was pronounced 'destructive of all subor-
dination,' and was sentenced to be burned. The Analysis of
Baylc, by Marsy.was suppressed, and the author was imprisoned.
The History of the Jesuits, by Linguet, was delivered to the
flames ; eight years later his journal was suppressed ; and, three
years after that, as he still persisted in writing, his Political
Annals were suppressed, and he himself was thrown into the
Bastille. Delisle de Sales was sentenced to perpetual exile and
confiscation of all his property on account of his work on the
Philosoijhy of Xature. The treatise by Mey, on French Law,
was suppressed ; that by Boncerf, on Feudal Law, was burned.
The Memoirs of Beaumarchais were likewise burned ; the Eloge
on Fenclon, by La Harpe, was merely suppressed. Duvernet,
having written a History of the Sorbonne, which was still
unpublished, was seized and thrown into the Bastille, while
the manuscript was yet in his own possession. The celebrated
work of De Lolme on the English constitution was suppressed
by edict directly it appeared. The fate of being suppressed or
prohibited also awaited the Letters of Gervaise in 1721 ; the
Dissertations of Courayer in 1727 ; the Letters of Montgon in
1732 ; the History of Tamerlane, by Margat, also in 1732 ; the

FEENCH FEEETHOUGHT 291

Essay on Taste, by Cartaud, in 1736; The Life of Domat, by
Prevost de la Jannes, in 1742; the History of Louis XI, by
Duclos, in 1745 ; the Letters of Bargeton in 1750 ; the Memoirs
on Troycs, by Grosley, in the same year ; the History of
Clement XI, by Eeboulet, in 1752 ; The Scliool of Man, by
Genard, also in 1752; the Therapeutics of Garlon in 175G ;
the celebrated thesis of Louis, on Generation, in 1754 ; the
treatise on Presidial Jurisdiction, by Jousse, in 1755 ; the
Ericie of Fontenelle in 1768; the Thoughts ofJamin'm 1769;
the History of Siam, by Turpin, and the Eloge of Marcus
Aurelius, by Thomas, both in 1770 ; the works on Finance by
Darigrand, in 1764, and by Le Trosne in 1779 ; the Essay on
Military Tactics, by Guibert, in 1772 ; the Letters of Boucquet
in the same year; and the Memoirs of Terrai, by Coquereau, in
1776. Such wanton destruction of property was, however,
mercy itself compared to the treatment experienced by other
literary men in France. Desforges, for example, having written
against the arrest of the Pretender to the English throne, was,
solely on that account, buried in a dungeon eight feet square
and confined there for three years. This happened in 1749 ;
and in 1770, Audra, professor at the College of Toulouse, and
a man of some reputation, published the first volume of his
Abridgement of General History. Beyond this the work never
proceeded ; it was at once condemned by the archbishop of the
diocese, and the author was deprived of his office. Audra, held
up to public opprobrium, the whole of his labours rendered use-
less, and the prospects of his life suddenly blighted, was unable
to survive the shock. He was struck with apoplexy, and within
twenty-four hours was lying a corpse in his own house."

32. Among many other illustrations of the passion for persecution
in the period maybe noted the fact that after the death of the atheist
Damilaville his enemies contrived to deprive his brother of a post
from which he had his sole livelihood.1 It is but one of an infinity
of proofs that the spirit of sheer sectarian malevolence, which is far
from being eliminated in modern life, was in the French Church
of the eighteenth century the ruling passion. Lovers of moderate
courses there were, even in the Church ; but even among professors
of lenity we find an ingrained belief in the virtue of vituperation
and coercion. And it is not until the persecuted minority has
developed its power of written retaliation, and the deadly arrows
of Voltaire have aroused in the minds of persecutors a new terror,
that there seems to arise on that side a suspicion that there can bo
any better way of handling unbelief than by invective and imprison-
ment. After they had taught the heretics to defend themselves, and

1 Lettrc do Voltaire a D'Alenibort, 27 aoi'lt, 1774.

292 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

found them possessed of weapons such as orthodoxy could not hope
to handle, we find Churchmen talking newly of the duty of gentle-
ness towards error ; and even then clinging to the last to the weapons
of public ostracism and aspersion. So the fight was of necessity
fought on the side of freethought in the temper of men warring on
incorrigible oppression and cruelty as well as on error. The wonder
is that the freethinkers preserved so much amenity.

33. This section would not be complete even in outline without
some notice of the attitude held towards religion by Napoleon, who
at once crowned and in large measure undid the work of the
Revolution. He has his place in its religious legend in the current
datum that he wrought for the faith by restoring a suppressed public
worship and enabling the people of France once more to hear church-
bells. In point of fact, as was pointed out by Bishop Gregoire in
1826, " it is materially proved that in 1796, before he was Consul,
and four years before the Concordat, according to a statement drawn
up at the office of the Domaines Nationaux, there were in France
32,214 parishes where the culte was carried on." 1 Other common-
places concerning Napoleon are not much better founded. On the
strength of a number of oral utterances, many of them imperfectly
vouched for, and none of them marked by much deliberation, he has
been claimed by Carlyle2 as a theist who philosophically disdained
the "clatter of materialism," and believed in a Personal Creator of
an infinite universe ; while by others he is put forward as a kind of
expert in character study who vouched for the divinity of Jesus.3 In
effect, his verdict that " this was not a man " would tell, if anything,
in favour of the view that Jesus is a mythical construction. He was,
indeed, by temperament quasi-religious, liking the sound of church
bells and the atmosphere of devotion ; and in his boyhood he had
been a rather fervent Catholic. As he grew up he read, like his
contemporaries, the French deists of his time, and became a deist
like his fellows, recognizing that religions were human productions.
Declaring that he was " loin d'etre athee," he propounded to O'Meara
all the conventional views — that religion should be made a support
to morals and law ; that men need to believe in marvels ; that religion
is a great consolation to those who believe in it ; and that " no one

1 Histoire dn mariage des pritres en France, par. M. Gregoire, ancien eveque de Blois,
1826, p. v. Compare the details in the Appendice to the Etudes of M. Gazier, before cited.
That writer's account is the more decisive seeing that his bias is clerical, and that, writing
before M. Anlard, he had to a considerable extent retained the old illusion as to the
"decreeing of atheism" by the Convention (p. 313). See pp. 2-30-260 as to the readjust-
ment effected by Gregoire, while the conservative clergy were still striving to undo the
Revolution. - Heroes and Hero- Worship : Napoleon.

•'< See the Sentiments de Napoleon sur le Christianisme : conversations reeueillies a
Sainte-ileli ne par le Comte de Montholon, 1841. Many of the utterances here set forth are
irreconcilable with Napoleon's general tone.

FRENCH FREETHOUGHT 293

can tell what ho will do in his last moments."1 The opinion to
which he seems to have adhered most steadily was that every man
should die in the religion in which he had been brought up. And he
himself officially did so, though lie put off almost to the last the
formality of a deathbed profession. His language on the subject is
irreconcilable with any real belief in the Christian religion : he was
a deist a la Voltaire who recalled with tenderness his Catholic
childhood, and who at death reverted to his first beliefs."" For tho
rest, he certainly believed in religion as a part of the machinery of
the State, and repeated the usual platitudes about its value as a
moral restraint. He was candid enough, however, not to pretend
that it had ever restrained him ; and no freethinker condemned more
sweepingly than he the paralysing effect of the Catholic system on
Spain. To the Church his attitude was purely political ; and his
personal liking for the Pope never moved him to yield, where he
could avoid it, to tho temporal pretensions of the papacy. The
Concordat of 1802, that " brilliant triumph over the genius of the
Revolution,"1 was purely and simply a political measure. If he had
had his way, he would have set up a system of religious councils in
France, to be utilized against all disturbing tendencies in politics.
Had he succeeded, he was capable of suppressing all manifesta-
tions of freethought in the interests of "order."6 He had, in
fact, no disinterested love of truth ; and we have his express
declaration, at St. Helena, on the subject of IMoliere's Tart ufe :
"I do not hesitate to say that if the piece had been written in
my time, I would not have permitted its representation."' Free-
thought can make no warm claim to the allegiance of such a ruler ;
and if the Church of Rome is concerned to claim him as a son on the
score of his deathbed adherence, after a reign which led the Catholic
clergy of Spain to hold him up to the faithful as an incarnation of
the devil," she will hardly gain by the association. Napoleon's ideas
on religious questions were in fact no more noteworthy than his
views on economics, which were thoroughly conventional.

1 O'Meara, X.i,„j;,,n en Ksil, ed. Lacroix, ls07, ii. :;;.'.

- 1'ii. Gomaird, 7,.-s nrirjinrs ,!<■ in Irc/fiide SuimU-onienne, 190t'>, p. -JW :; 7>7 P -V.0.

'' l'a-q:iii r, cited by Kom;, Infr t>f S,ti„,h:,,n, ed. I'll:}, \,s-l. The Concordat was bitterly
ru.~e.nted by the freethinker-, in the army. fil. p. -J-l.

■'■ See -l ;'.< - I {ami - Snji I, ,,,, 1,-r, ed. 1S70. p. ,S:i, as to the amazing ( Viteehi. -in imposed
by Nap', 1'. on on l-'rance in 1-11. Tor the history ol its preparation and impo-iUon sec
be l.ahone, l>urin .sods Snindfini : Lit IW.Iiniun, 1<X)7, p. 100 m/.

'' As to the Napoleonic cen-or-hip of literature, cp. Madame de Stael, Cm ^',1,'rn Units
sur h, ri-r,,liiti'Jii (r<inr<ns,\ ptie. iv. ch. hi; Uix Amu; t ,1 l-l.nl, pref. ; Wcl.-c
L<t Ci-iinttri' «,«.> It- in; ,i,v v iln, i, it;-. ]<-l.

' Las ( :a e- . M, „t i , ,, ,h- - tint, //, , „, , \[\ unfit, 1-Ifi

"* Mi.I.'iet, lliht.dclu iri-'dittioil/riiie/titst.', le edit, ii, ;{I(J.

Chapter XYIII

GEEMAN FEEETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH
AND EIGHTEENTH CENTUEIES

1. When two generations of Protestant strife had turned to naught
the intellectual promise of the Eeformation, and much of the ground
first won by it had lapsed to Catholicism, the general forward move-
ment of European thought availed to set up in Germany as elsewhere
a measure of critical unbelief. There is abundant evidence that the
Lutheran clergy not only failed to hold the best intelligence of the
country with them, but in large part fell into personal disrepute.1

The scenes of clerical immorality," says an eminently orthodox
historian, " are enough to chill one's blood even at the distance of
two centuries."2 A Church Ordinance of 1G00 acknowledges
information to the effect that a number of clergymen and school-
masters are guilty of " whoredom and fornication," and commands
that if they are notoriously guilty they shall be suspended."
Details are preserved of cases of clerical drunkenness and ruffianism ,"
and the women of the priests' families do not escape the pillory.
Nearly a century later, Arnold resigned his professorship at Giessen

from despair of producing any amendment in the dissolute habits
of the students."4 It is noted that "the great moral decline of the
clergy was confined chiefly to the Lutheran Church. The Eeformed
[Calvinistic] was earnest, pious, and aggressive"5 — the usual result
of official hostility.

In such circumstances, the active freethougbt existing in France
at the beginning of the seventeenth century could not fail to affect
Germany; and even before the date of the polemic of Garasse and
Mersenne there appeared (1G15) a counterblast to the new thought
in the Tlicologia Naturalis of J. II. Alsted, of Frankfort, directed
adversus atheos, Epicureos, et sophistas hujus temporis. The preface
to this solid quarto (a remarkable sample of good printing for the
period) declares that " there are men in this diseased (exulcerato)

1 Cp. Pusey, Histor. Enauiry into the Probable Causes of the nationalist Character

of tin- Tlteoloyy of Germany, 182S, p. 7!).

2 hishop Hurst. History of nationalism, ed. 1867, p. 56.

:< /-/. pi). 57 > (last ed. pp. 74-7f>). citing Tholuck, Deutsche Vniversitiiten, i, 145-48, and
Dowdinn, Life of Calixtus, pp. 132-33. 4 I'usey, p, 113. '" Hurst, p. 09.

291

GERMAN FEEETIIOUGHT 17th AND ISth CENTURIES 295

age who dare to oppose science to revelation, reason to faith, nature
to grace, the creator to the redeemer, and truth to truth "; and the
writer undertakes to rise argumentatively from nature to the
Christian God, without, however, transcending the logical plane
of De Alornay. The trouble of the time, unhappily for the faith,
was not rationalism, but the inextinguishable hatreds of Protestant
and Catholic, and the strife of economic interests dating from the
appropriations of the first reformers. At length, after a generation
of gloomy suspense, came the explosion of the hostile ecclesiastical
interests, and the long-drawn horror of the Thirty Years' War,
which left Germany mangled, devastated, drained of blood and
treasure, decivilized, and well-nigh destitute of the machinery of
culture. No such printing as that of Alsted's book was to be done
in the German world for many generations. But as in France, so in
Germany, the exhausting experience of the moral and physical evil
of religious war wrought something of an antidote, in the shape of a
new spirit of rationalism.

Not only was the Peace of Westphalia an essentially secular
arrangement, subordinating all religious claims to a political settle-
ment,1 but the drift of opinion was markedly freethinking. Already
in 1G30 one writer describes " three classes of skeptics among the
nobility of Hamburg : first, those who believe that religion is nothing
but a mere fiction, invented to keep the masses in restraint ; second,
those who give preference to no faith, but think that all religions
have a germ of truth ; and third, those who, confessing that there
must be one true religion, are unable to decide whether it is papal,
Calvinist, or Lutheran, and consequently believe nothing at all."
No less explicit is the written testimony of Walther, the court
chaplain of Ulrich II of East Friesland, 1G37 : " These infernal
courtiers, among whom I am compelled to live against my will, doubt
those truths which even the heathen have learned to believe." ' In
Germany as in France the freethinking which thus grew up during
the religious war expanded after the peace. As usual, this is to bo
gathered from the orthodox propaganda against it, setting out in
1GG2 with a Prcscrcatice against the Pest of Present-da 1/ Atheists,'' by
one Theophilus Gegenbauer. So far was this from attaining its end
that there ensued ere long a more positive and aggressive development
of freethinking than any other country had yet seen. A wandering

1 Cp. Buckle. 1-vol. ed. I>j>. UDH :}09. "The result of the Thirty Years' War was indiffer-
ence, ii'it only to the (.'unlesMim, but to religion in general, liver since that period,
sec uiar interests dei:i( lei 11 y occupy t ho foreground " (Kahilis, Internal Hialnru nf Oi riuan
I',. •■ lunlixm, Knii. tr. I-.'.v p. -J] ).

- Quote 1 by I'.i nop llur.-t, e<l. cited, p. f,(J (7S).

:; I'rcstrvuli'j wider die l'cat dcr licutitjcu AUuiUcn.

296 GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE

scholar, Matthias KNUTZEN of Holstein (b. 1645), who had studied
philosophy at Konigsberg, went about in 1674 teaching a hardy
Religion of Humanity, rejecting alike immortality, God and Devil,
churches and priests, and insisting that conscience could perfectly
well take the place of the Bible as a guide to conduct. His doctrines
are to be gathered chiefly from a curious Latin letter,1 written by
him for circulation, headed Amicus Amicis Arnica ; and in this the
profession of atheism is explicit: " Insicper Deumnegamus." In two
dialogues in German he set forth the same ideas. His followers, as
holding by conscience, were called Geivissener ; and he or another of
his group asserted that in Jena alone there were seven hundred of
them.'2 The figures were fantastic, and the whole movement passed
rapidly out of sight — hardly by reason of the orthodox refutations,
however. Germany was in no state to sustain such a party ; and
what happened was a necessarily slow gestation of the seed of new
thought thus cast abroad.

Knutzen's Latin letter is given in full by a Welsh scholar
settled in Germany, Jenkinus Thomasius (Jenkin Thomas), in
his Historia Atheismi (Altdorf, 1692), ed. Basel, 1709, pp. 97-101;
also by La Croze in his (anon.) Entreticns sur divers sujets, 1711,
p. 402 sq. Thomasius thus codifies its doctrine : — " 1. There is
neither God nor Devil. 2. The magistrate is nothing to be
esteemed ; temples are to be condemned, priests to be rejected.
3. In place of the magistrate and the priest are to be put know-
ledge and reason, joined with conscience, which teaches to live
honestly, to injure none, and to give each his own. 4. Marriage
and free union do not differ. 5. This is the only life : after it,
there is neither reward nor punishment. 6. The Scripture
contradicts itself." Knutzen admittedly wrote like a scholar
(Thomasius, p. 97) ; but his treatment of Scripture contradic-
tions belongs to the infancy of criticism ; though La Croze,
replying thirty years later, could only meet it with charges of
impiety and stupidity. As to the numbers of the movement see
Trinius, Freydenker Lexicon, 1759, s. v. KNUTZEN. Kurtz {Hist,
of the Christian Church, Eng. tr. 1864, i, 213) states that a
careful academic investigation proved the claim to a member-
ship of 700 to be an empty boast (citing II. Rossel, Studicn und
Kritikcn, 1844, iv). This doubtless refers to the treatise of
Musseus, Jena, 1675, cited by La Croze, p. 401. Some converts
Knutzen certainly made ; and as only the hardiest would dare
to avow themselves, his influence may have been considerable.
Examples of total unbelief come only singly to knowledge,"
says Tholuck ; "but total unbelief had still to the end of the

' "Dated from Rome; but this was a mystification.
2 Kalmis, p. 125; La Croze, Entretiens, 1711, p. 401.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 297

century to bear penal treatment." He gives the instances (l)
of the Swedish Baron Skytte, reported in 1669 by Spener to the
Frankfort authorities for having said at table, before the court
preacher, that the Scriptures were not holy, and not from God
but from men ; and (2) " a certain minister " who at the end of
the century was prosecuted for blasphemy. (Das kirchliche
Lcben des 17ten Jahrhunderts, 2 Abth. pp. 56-57.) Even Ana-
baptists were still liable to banishment in the middle of the
century. Id. 1 Abth. 1861, p. 36. As to clerical intolerance
see pp. 40-11. On the merits of the Knutzen movement cp.
Piinjer, Hist, of the Christian PJiilos. of Religion, Eng. tr. i, 137-8.

2. While, however, clerical action could drive such a movement
under the surface, it could not prevent the spread of rationalism in
all directions ; and there was now germinating a philosophic unbelief
under the influence of Spinoza. Nowhere were there more prompt
and numerous answers to Spinoza than in Germany,2 whence it may
be inferred that within the educated class he soon had a good many
adherents. In point of fact the Elector Palatine offered him a
professorship of philosophy at Heidelberg in 1G73, promising him
the most ample freedom in philosophical teaching," and merely
stipulating that he should not use it " to disturb the religion publicly
established."3 On the other hand, Professor Rappolt, of Leipzig,
attacked him as an atheist, in an Oratio contra naturalistas in 1G70 ;
Professor Alusams, of Jena, assailed him in 1G71;4 and the Chan-
cellor Kortholt, of Kiel, grouped him, Herbert, and Hobbes as The
TJiree Great Impostors in 1680.° After the appearance of the Etliica
the replies multiplied. On the other hand, Cuffelaer vindicated
Spinoza in 1684 ; and in 1G91 F. W. Stosch, a court official, and
son of the court preacher, published a stringent attack on revela-
tionism, entitled Concordia rationis et fidci, partly on Spinozistic
lines, which created much commotion, and was forcibly suppressed
and condemned to be burnt by the hangman at Uerlin,0 as it denied
not only the immateriality but the immortality of the soul and the
historical truth of the Scriptural narratives. This seems to have
been the first work of modern freethought published by a German,'
apart from Knutzen's letter ; but a partial list of the apologetic works

1 Kven Knutzen seem- to have Ik -en influenced l>y Spinoza. Piinjer. Hist . nf (lie Chriit.
J'lnlns. (if liriiyion, V.nii- tr. i. V.',". Piinjer, however, heenis to have exuberated the
connection.

- Op. l,an:;e. (Irxrh. firs M>itrrinlii<mHX, :ite Ann. i. Ills (Kn«. tr. ii, :)">).

■'' I'.in -/'..'(/• mi S/iiiitiZ'tiit ft Itfiiiiinxinnrs, in dfrorcr, liii.

4 Cnlcnis, Vic <i>- SjjimiZ'i, in dtroivrs ed. ot the O/w r>i, ISiO, pp. I v. K i.

5 Piinjer, an cited, i, f.it -■'•>>; hanije, la^t cit. Lan«e note Unit dentin'"* CitniirinHum
il>- imijiixturii rrliijidiuint, which Inn heeii erroneously u-Mflned to the sixteenth century,
mu^t helorit; to the period of Kortholt's work.

': Piinjer. p. I., I ; l.an«e, Ia.-.t cit.; Tholuek, Kirch. l.< hru, -1 Ahth. Pl>. .'i7 .o.
~ it wa.-i nominally i. n d at Am ti rdani, really at lierlin.

298 GERMAN FEEETHOUGHT IN THE

of the period, from Gegenbauer onwards, may suffice to suggest the
real vogue of heterodox opinions : —

16G2. Th. Gegenbauer. Preservatio wider die Pest der lieutigen Athcisten. Erfurt.
1GG8. J. Musseus. Examcn Cherburianismi. Contra E. Herbertumcle Cherbury.
,, Anton Eeiser. De origins, progressu, ct incremento Antitheismi seu
Atheismi.1 Augsburg.
1670. Rappolt. 0 ratio contra Naturalistas. Leipzig.
1G72. J. Miiller. Atheismus devictus (in German). Hamburg.
,, J. Lassen. Arcana-Politica-AtJieistica (in German).

1G73. ■ Besiegte Atheisterey.

,, Chr. Pfaff. Disputatio contra Atheistas.
1G74. J. Musaeus. Sjhnozismus. Jena.

1G77. Val. Greissing. Corona Transylvani ; Exerc. 2, de Atlicismo, contra
Cartesium et Math. Knutzen. Wittemberg.

,, Tobias Wagner. Examcn atheismi speculativi. Tubingen.

,, K. Rudrauff, Giessen. Dissertatio de Atheismo.
1G80. Chr. Kortholt. De tribus impostoribas magnis liber. Kiloni.
1GS9. Th. Undereyck. Der Ndrrische Atheist in seiner Thorheit ucberzeugt.

Bremen.
1G92. Jenkinus Thomasius. Historia Atheismi. Altdorf.
lG'JG. J. Lassen. Arcana-Politica-Atheistica. Reprint.

1G97. A. II. Grosse. An Atheismus necessario ducat ad comiptionem morum.
Rostock.
,, Em. "Weber. Bcurthcilunrj der Athcistcrei.
1700. Tribbechov. Historia Naturalismi. Jena.

1708. Loescher. Prcenotiones Theological contra Naturalistarnm ct Fanaticoriim
ovine genus, Atheos, Deistas, Indijj'erentistas. etc. Wittemberg.
,, Schwartz. Demonstrationes Dei. Leipzig.

,, Reehenberg. Fundamenta vcrce religionis Prudentum, adverstis Atheos, etc.
1710. J. C. Wolfius. Dissertatio de Atheismi falso suspectis. Wittemberg.
1713. J. N. Fromman. Atlicus Stultus. Tubingen.

,, Anon. Widerlegung der Athcisten, Deisten, und ncucn Ziecifeler.
Frankfort.
[Later came the works of Buddeus (171G) and Reimmann and Fabricius,
noted above, vol. i, ch. i, $ 2.]

3. For a community in which the reading class was mainly
clerical and scholastic, the seeds of rationalism were thus in part
sown in the seventeenth century ; but the ground was not yet
propitious. LEIBNITZ (1646-1716), the chief thinker produced by
Germany before Kant, lived in a state of singular intellectual isola-
tion ;'2 and showed his sense of it by writing his philosophic treatises
chiefly in French. One of the most widely learned men of his age,
he was wont from his boyhood to grapple critically with every
system of thought that came in his way ; and, while claiming to be

1 This writer gives (p. 12) a notable list of the forms of atheism: Atheismus clirectus,
inrtirectust, formalis, virtualis, thenreticus, practicus, iiichoatus, consummatus, subtilis,
crassus, yrivativua, negativus, and so on, ad lib.

'A Cp. Buckle and liis Critics, pp. 171-7J ; Piinjer, i. 515.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 299

always eager to learn,1 he was as a rule strongly concerned to affirm
his own powerful bias. Early in life he writes that it horrifies hirn
to think how many men he has met who were at once intelligent
and atheistic;" and his propaganda is always dominated by the
desire rather to confute unbelief than to find out the truth. As
early as 1GGS (act. 22) he wrote an essay to that end, which was
published as a Confessio naturce contra Atheistas. Against Spinoza
he reacted instantly and violently, pronouncing the Tractatus on its
first (anonymous) appearance an " unbearably bold (liccntiosum)
book," and resenting the Hobbesian criticism which it ' dared to
apply to sacred Scripture."3 Yet in the next year we find him
writing to Arnauld in earnest protest against the hidebound ortho-
doxy of the Church. " A philosophic age," he declares, " is about to
begin, in which the concern for truth, flourishing outside the schools,
will spread even among politicians. Nothing is more likely to
strengthen atheism and to upset faith, already so shaken by the
attacks of great but bad men [a pleasing allusion to Spinoza] , than
to see on the one side the mysteries of the faith preached upon as
the creed of all, and on the other hand become matter of derision to
all, convicted of absurdity by the most certain rules of common
reason. The worst enemies of the Church are in the Church. Let
us take care lest the latest heresy — I will not say atheism, but —
naturalism, be publicly professed."'1 For a time he seemed thus
disposed to liberalize. He wrote to Spinoza on points of optics
before he discovered the authorship ; and he is represented later as
speaking of the Tractatus with respect. He even visited Spinoza in
1G7G, and obtained a perusal of the manuscript of the Ethica ; but
he remained hostile to him in theology and philosophy. To the last
he called Spinoza a mere developer of Descartes," whom he also
habitually resisted.

This was not hopeful ; and Leibnitz, with all his power and
originality, really wrought little for the direct rationalization of
religious thought.0 His philosophy, with all its ingenuity, has the
common stamp of the determination of the theist to find reasons
for the God in whom he believed beforehand ; and his principle that
all is for the best is the fatal rounding of his argumentative circle.
Thus his doctrine that that is true which is clear was turned to the

• LoUftr cited liv Dr. I.atti. Leihniz, 1808, p. -J, note.

~ 1'hilon. Sri, rift en, ed. (lurlnmU, i, :'X, ; Martineau, StioJu of Sirinor.a, p. 77.

:i Letter to Thomas, December ■!.',, 1(170.

1 Quoted bv Tholuck, as hi :, cited, p. ill. Spcner took the -ami' tone.

■r' I'lnlnn. Sehriften, ed. Oorhardt. i. :it ; ii. :">(;:{; Latta, p. i\ ; Martineau, p. 75. ('p.
Refill tit ion of Si, n in.y, I,,/ I .,,!,,, it ::. ed. by ['"oilcher do I'.areil, V,\v.\. \,r . I.S.V..

'' His notable suriui.-e as to gradation of species I ee Lalta, pp. .is. :','.)) was taken up
among the r'rencli materialist'., but did not thou modify current science.

300 GEEMAN FEEETHOUGHT IN THE

account of an empiricism of which the " clearness " was really
predetermined by the conviction of truth. His Theodicee,1 written
in reply to Bayle, is by the admission even of admirers a process
of begging the question. Deity, a mere " munition " of finite
qualities, is proved a priori, though it is expressly argued that a
finite mind cannot grasp infinity ; and the necessary goodness of
necessary deity is posited in the same fashion. It is very significant
that such a philosopher, himself much given to denying the religious-
ness of other men's theories, was nevertheless accused among both
the educated and the populace of being essentially non-religious.
Nominally he adhered to the entire Christian system, including
miracles, though he declared that his belief in dogma rested on the
agreement of reason with faith, and claimed to keep bis thought free on
unassailed truths ;s and he always discussed the Bible as a believer ;
yet he rarely went to church ;4 and the Low German nickname
Lovenix (= Glaubet nichts, " believes nothing") expressed his local
reputation. No clergyman attended his funeral ; but indeed no one
else went, save his secretary.5 It is on the whole difficult to doubt
that his indirect influence not only in Germany but elsewhere had
been and has been for deism and atheism.0 He and Newton were
the most distinguished mathematicians and theists of the age ; and
Leibnitz, as we saw, busied himself to show that the philosophy of
Newton' tended to atheism, and that that of their theistic predecessor
Descartes wTould not stand criticism.8 Spinoza being, according to
him, in still worse case, and Locke hardly any sounder,9 there
remained for theists only his cosmology of monads and his ethic of
optimism — all for the best in the best of all possible worlds — which
seems at least as well fitted as any other theism to make thoughtful
men give up the principle.

4. Other culture-conditions concurred to set up a spirit of
rationalism in Germany. After the Thirty Years' War there
arose a religious movement, called Pietism by its theological
opponents, which aimed at an emotional inwardness of religious

1 The only lengthy treatise published by him in his lifetime.

2 M. A. Jacques, intr. to CEuvres de Leibniz, 1816, i, 5-1-57,

;s Cp. Tholuek, Das Icirchliche Leben, as cited, 2 Abth. pp. 52-55. Kahnis, coinciding
with Rrdmann, pronounces that, although Leibnitz "acknowledges the God of the
Christian faith, yet bis system assigned to Him a very uncertain position only " (Int.
Hist, of Ger. Protestantism, p. 26). J Cp. 1'linjer, i, 500, as to his attitude on ritual.

•' Latta, as cited, p. 16; Vie de Leibnitz, par Dc Jaucourt, in ed. 17-17 of the Essais de
Theodicee, i, 235-39.

0 As to his virtual deism see Piinjer, i, 513-15. But he proposed to send Christian
missionaries to the heathen. Tholuek, as last cited, p. 55.

" Lett res entre Leibnitz et Clarke.

H Discount de la conformity de la. foi avec la raison, §§ 68-70; Essais sur la bonti de
Die u, etc., S§ 50, 61, 104, 180, 292-93.

9 The Nouveaux Essais sur V Entendemenl humain, refuting Locke, appeared post-
humously in 1765. Locke had treated his theistic critic with contempt. (Latta, p. 13.1

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 301

life as against what its adherents held to he an irreligious orthodoxy
around them.1 Contending against rigid articles of credence, they
inevitably prepared the way for less credent forms of thought.2
Though the first leaders of Pietism grew embittered with their
unsuccess and the attacks of their religious enemies,3 their impulse
went far, and greatly influenced the clergy through the university of
Halle, which in the first part of the eighteenth century turned out
6,000 clergymen in one generation.4 Against the Pietists were
furiously arrayed the Lutherans of the old order, who even con-
trived in many places to suppress their schools.5 Virtues generated
under persecution, however, underwent the law of degeneration
which dogs all intellectual subjection ; and the inner life of Pietism,
lacking mental freedom and intellectual play, grew as cramped in its
emotionalism as that of orthodoxy in its dogmatism. Religion was
thus represented by a species of extremely unattractive and frequently
absurd formalists on the one hand, and on the other by a school
which at its best unsettled religious usage, and otherwise tended
alternately to fanaticism and cant.6 Thus " the rationalist tendencies
of the age were promoted by this treble exhibition of the aberrations
of belief." ' " How sorely," says Tholuck, " the hold not only of
ecclesiastical but of Biblical belief on men of all grades had been
shaken at the beginning of the eighteenth century is seen in many
instances."8 Orthodoxy selects that of a Holstein student who
hanged himself at Wittemberg in 1088, leaving written in bis New
Testament, in Latin, the declaration that " Our soul is mortal ;
religion is a popular delusion, invented to gull the ignorant, and so
govern the world the better."9 But again there is the testimony of
the mint-master at Hanover that at court there all lived as " free
atheists." And though the name " freethinker " was not yet much
used in discussion, it had become current in the form of Frcujeist —
the German equivalent still used. This, as we have noted,1" was
probably a survival from the name of the old sect of the ' Free
Spirit," rather than an adaptation from the French esprit fort or
the English " freethinker."

! Amanri Saintes, ffist. rrit. flu Ratinnrtlisme en AUemagne, ISil, ch. vi ; Ileinrich
Schmirt. Die (ii-nrhirhfe dea Vietismus, ISfi.'J. ch. ii.

- Saintes. p. 51 ; cp, 1'usey, p. 105, as to "the want of resistance from the school of
['ii ' . ' ■ to tin- subsequent invasion of unbelief."

■''■ Hatfenbach, (ii rmnn Uation>tlixm, Kn«. tr. 1R65, p. 0.

1 Id. p. 30: I'u-ev. Histor. Knquiru into the Ctutuf-n of German llntinnaliKm, lS'JS,

pp.M.07; Tholuck, Abrw.i finer (ir.srliiehte. den Umw'ilziniu *eit i: , ■ au/ileni Gebvtc

der Tht '.or/ie in Ijeutsrhlrnul, in \'r nnixchte Hehriften, iti'.iO, ii, 0.

•' 1"; ey, pp. -;. -T. .'-.

r' fjp. I'usf.y, pp. 37-:j.S, -l.j, IS, 40, 53 51, 70. 101-100; Snintes, pp. -_'S, 7:> SO; Ha ■;enbnch ,
pp. H, 72, 105. ' I'u-ev, i>. Ilo. Cp. Saintes, eh. vi.

" Dun kirrhlichc Leben, as cited, i Abth. p. ,>. ;' Id. pp. 5li 57.

lu Vol. i, p. G.

302 GEEMAN FEEETHOUGHT IN THE

5. After the collapse of the popular movement of Matthias
Knutzen, the thin end of the new wedge may he seen in the manifold
work of Christian THOMASIUS (1655-1728), who in 1687 pub-
lished a treatise on "Divine Jurisprudence," in which the principles
of Pufendorf on natural law, already offensive to the theologians,
were carried so far as to give new offence. Eeading Pufendorf
in his nonage as a student of jurisprudence, he was so conscious
of the conflict between the utilitarian and the Scriptural view of
moral law that, taught by a master who had denounced Pufendorf,
he recoiled in a state of theological fear.1 Some years later, gaining
self-possession, he recognized the rationality of Pufendorf 's system,
and both expounded and defended him, thus earning his share in
the hostility which the great jurist encountered at clerical hands.
Between that hostility and the naturalist bias which he had acquired
from Pufendorf, there grew up in him an aversion to the methods
and pretensions of theologians which made him their lifelong
antagonist.2 Pufendorf had but guardedly introduced some of the
fundamental principles of Hobbes, relating morals to the social
state, and thus preparing the way for utilitarianism.3 This sufficed
to make the theologians his enemies ; and it is significant that
Thomasius, heterodox at the outset only thus far forth, becomes
from that point onwards an important pioneer of freethought, tolera-
tion, and humane reform. Innovating in all things, he began, while
still a Privatdoccnt at Leipzig University, a campaign on behalf of
the German language ; and, not content with arousing much pedantic
enmity by delivering lectures for the first time in his mother tongue,
and deriding at the same time the bad scholastic Latin of his com-
patriots, he set on foot the first vernacular German periodical,4
which ran for two years (1688-90), and caused so much anger that
he was twice prosecuted before the ecclesiastical court of Dresden,
the second time on a charge of contempt of religion. The periodical
was in effect a crusade against all the pedantries, the theologians
coming in for the hardest blows.0 Other satirical writings, and a

1 H. Luden, Christian Thomnsius nach seinen Schicksalen und Schriffen darge.itellt,
1805, p. 7. - Cp. Schmid, Geschichte ilea Pietismus. pp. 486-88.

'■' Pufendorf s bulky treatise De Jure Natura el Gentium was published at Lund, where
he was professor, in 167-2. The shorter De Officio hominis et civis (also Lund, 1673) is a
condensation and partly a vindication of the other, and this it was that convinced
Thomasius. As to Pufendorf s part in the transition from theological to rational moral
philosophy, see Hallam, Lit. of Europe, iv, 171-78. He is fairly to be bracketed with
Cumberland; but Hallam hardly recognizes that it was the challenge of Hobbes that
forced the change.

1 Freimilthige, lustige und ernsthafte, jedoch vernunft- und gesetzmcissige Geclankeit,
Oder Monatgesprdche iiber allerhand, vornehmlich iiber neue Bticher. There had been an
earlier Acta Eruditorum, in Latin, published at Leipzig, and a French Ephemerides
savantes, Hamburg, 1686. Oilier German and French periodicals soon followed that of
Thomasius. Luden, p. 162.

5 Schmid, pp. 188-92, gives a sketch of some of the contents.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 303

defence of intermarriage between Calvinists and Lutherans,1 afc
length put him in such danger that, to escape imprisonment, he
sought the protection of the Elector of Brandenburg at Halle, where
he ultimately became professor of jurisprudence in the new university,
founded by his advice. There for a time he leant towards the
Pietists, finding in that body a concern for natural liberty of feeling
and thinking which was absent from the mental life of orthodoxy ;
but he was "of another spirit" than they, and took his own way.

In philosophy an unsystematic pantheist, he taught, after
Plutarch, Bayle, and Bacon, that " superstition is worse than
atheism"; but his great practical service to German civilization,
over and above his furthering of the native speech, was his vigorous
polemic against prosecutions for heresy, trials for witchcraft, and
the use of torture, all of which he did more than any other German
to discredit, though judicial torture subsisted for another half-
century.2 It was by his propaganda that the princes of Germany
were moved to abolish all trials for sorcery." In such a battle he
of course had the clergy against him all along the line; and it is as
an anti-clerical that he figures in clerical history. The clerical
hostility to Ids ethics he repaid with interest, setting himself to
develop to the utmost, in the interest of lay freedom, the Lutheran
admission of the divine right of princes.'1 This he turned not against
freedom of opinion but against ecclesiastical claims, very much in
the spirit of Hobbes, who may have influenced him.

The perturbed Mosheim, while candidly confessing that Thoma-
sius is the founder of academic freedom in Germany, pronounces
that the " famous jurists" who were led by Thomasius "set up a
new fundamental principle of church polity — namely, the supreme
authority and power of the civil magistrate," so tending to create
the opinion "that the ministers of religion are not to be accounted
ambassadors of God, hut vicegerents of the chief magistrates. They
also weakened not a little the few remaining prerogatives and.
advantages winch were left of the vast number formerly possessed

1 Pusey. p. S'">. nnt/'. It i« surprising that Pusey does not make move account of
Thomasiu^'s naturalistic treatment of polygamy and suicide, which he showed to lie not
criminal in terms of natural law.

* Compare Weber, (irsch . iter ilcutschcn Lit. 5 SI (ed. 1SS0. pp. OO-'.UI: Pus.y, as cited,
p. 11 I. //'.,V; Knfield's Hiit. <,f Philns. Lbst. of Bruelver's Hist. crit. pliiins.). 1M0, pp. 610-
012; I'fAu rweg, ii. 115; and Schlegel's note in Keid's Mosheim. p. Tin), with Karl ilille-
brand, >'// I. <•<■',. mi the Hist. ,,f (irrinan Th might, ISM), pp. HI I5J. 1'iiere is ;i modern
monograph bv A. Nicoladoni, Christ inn Thomunius ; cin licit nig ~ur (icschichtr iter
A uC: ii rung, 1 — .

iron de I'.ielfeld. Progrrs ilr.i AUrmanrts, 3e ed. 1787, i. 21. " Heforc Thomasius,"
writes Bielfel 1. "an old woman could not have, rod eyes without running the ri>k ol being
acciw d of witchcraft and burned at the stake."

1 Sehmid, pp. l°:s-n7. Thoma-dus's principal writings on this theme were : I'ntn lirrht
errmwlixrlirn Fiirstrii I ,i Mittrl,linr,,;i f I IV (-.»>; Vmn Itcrht rrangrlisrlicn l-'iirstrn III tllfola-

gixclten Strciligkcitcn Uti'JtjJ ; Vmn LI cht ecu aw lischcn l-'iirntcn g-gen Ketzcr UtJ'J7).

304 GERMAN FREETHOIJGHT IN THE

by the clergy ; and maintained that many of the maxims and
regulations of our churches which had come down from our fathers
were relics of popish superstition. This afforded matter for long
and pernicious feuds and contests between our theologians and our

jurists It will be sufficient for us to observe, what is abundantly

attested, that they diminished much in various places the respect
for the clergy, the reverence for religion, and the security and
prosperity of the Lutheran Church."1 Pusey, in turn, grudgingly
allows that " the study of history was revived and transformed
through the views of Thomasius." 2

6. A personality of a very different kind emerges in the same
period in Johann Conrad Dippel (1673-1734), who developed a
system of rationalistic mysticism, and as to whom, says an orthodox
historian, " one is doubtful whether to place him in the class of
pietists or of rationalists, of enthusiasts or of scoffers, of mystics
or of freethinkers." 3 The son of a preacher, he yet "exhibited in
his ninth year strong doubts as to the catechism." After a tolerably
free life as a student he turned Pietist at Strasburg, lectured on
astrology and palmistry, preached, and got into trouble with the
police. In 1698 he published under the pen-name of " Christianus
Democritus " his book, Gestduptes Papstthum der Protestirendcn
("The Popery of the Protestantizers Whipped"), in which he so
attacked the current Christian ethic of salvation as to exasperate
both Churches.4 The stress of his criticism fell firstly on the
unthinking Scripturalism of the average Protestant, who, he said,
while reproaching the Catholic with setting up in the crucifix a
God of wood, was apt to make for himself a God of paper.0 In his
repudiation of the " bargain " or " redemption " doctrine of the
historic Church he took up positions which were as old as Abailard,
and which were one day to become respectable ; but in his own life
lie was much of an Ishmaelite, with wild notions of alchemy and
gold-making ; and after predicting that he should live till 1808, he
died suddenly in 1734, leaving a doctrine which appealed only to
those constitutionally inclined, on the lines of the earlier English
Quakers, to set the inner light above Scripture.6

1 F.c. Hint. 17 Cent. sect, ii, pt. ii, ch. i, §§ 11, 14. It is noteworthy that the Pietists at
Halle did not scruple to ally themselves for a time with Thomasius, he being opposed to
the orthodox party. Kahnis, Internal Hist, of Ger. Protestantism, p. 114.

2 Pusey, as cited, p. 121. Cp. p. 113.

3 Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte ties 18. und 10. Jahrli. 2te Aufl. i, 164. (This matter is
not in the abridged translation.)

4 See the furious account of him by Mosheim, 17 C. sec. ii, pt. ii, ch. i, § 33.
■r' Hagenbach, last cit. p. 160.

fi Noack, Die Freidenker in der Religion, Th. iii, Kap. 1 ; Bruno Bauer, Einfluss des
englischen Quakerthums auf die deutsche Cidtur und auf das englisch-russische Projekt
einer Weltkirche, 1878, pp. 41-44.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 305

7. Among the pupils of Thomasius at Hallo was Theodore
Louis Lau, who, born of an aristocratic family, became Minister of
Finances to the Duke of Courland, and after leaving that post held
a high place in the service of the Elector Palatine. While holding
that office Lau published a small Latin volume of pcnsccs entitled
Meditationcs Thcologicce-Physicce, notably deistic in tone. This
gave rise to such an outcry among the clergy that lie had to leave
Frankfort, only, however, to be summoned before the consistory of
Konigsberg, his native town, and charged with atheism (1719). He
thereupon retired to Altona, where lie had freedom enough to publish
a reply to his clerical persecutors.1

8. While Thomasius was still at work, a new force arose of a
more distinctly academic cast. This was the adaptation of
Leibnitz's system by CHRISTIAN WOLFF, who, after building up a
large influence among students by his method of teaching," came into
public prominence by a rectorial address8 at Halle (1721) in which ho
warmly praised the ethics of Confucius. Such praise was naturally
held to imply disparagement of Christianity ; and as a result of the
pietist outcry Wolff was condemned by the king to exile from Prussia,
under penalty of the gallows/ all " atheistical " writings being at the
same time forbidden. Wolff's system, however, prevailed so com-
pletely, in virtue of its lucidity and the rationalizing tendency of the
age, that in the year 1738 there were said to be already 107 authors
of his cast of thinking. Nevertheless, he refused to return to Hallo
on any invitation till the accession (1710) of Frederick the Great,
one of his warmest admirers, whereafter he figured as the German
thinker of Ins age. His teaching, which for the first time popularized
philosophy in the German language, in turn helped greatly, by its
ratiocinative cast, to promote the rationalistic temper, though orthodox
enough from the modern point of view. Under the new reign, how-
ever, pietism and Wolflism alike lost prestige," and the age of anti-
Christian and Christian rationalism began. Thus the period of free-
thinking in Germany follows close upon one of religious revival.
The 0,000 theologians trained at Halle in the first generation of the
century had " worked like a leaven through all Germain-." ' Not
since the time of the Reformation had Germany such a large number
of truly pious preachers and laymen as towards the end of the first

i Prof, to Froncli tr. of the Mi-ilitittiones, 1770, pp. xii xvii. I.nn died in 1710.

2 Tholnek. Ahrins.n cited, p. 10. -; Trim*, in Kmdish. \1M.

1 Ha«enbaeh, tr. pp. '.',:> ■ ',>> : Saintcs, p. fil ; Kahnis, us cited, p. 1 1 1.

■• Ha«onbaeh, pp. :i7 :•;.). II is t.i be observed (Thohick. ,1 /<»•/*■*, p. i0 thai tin' Wolllian
philosophy wa.s rein-tated in I'm- ;i i by roynl inandnto in 17:d, :i yenv before the accession
of Frederick the Oreat. lint we know that Frederick championed him.

6 Tholnck, AUri-.H, as cited, p. o.

VOL. II X

306 GEEMAN FEEETHOUGHT IN THE

half of the eighteenth century."1 There, as elsewhere, religion
intellectually collapsed.

As to Wolff's rationalistic influence see Cairns, Unbelief in the
Eighteenth Century, 1881, p. 173 ; Puscy, pp. 115-19 ; Piinjer,
p. 529; Lechlor, pp. 418-19. "It cannot he questioned that,
in his philosophy, the main stress rests upon the rational "

(Kahnis, as cited, p. 28). " Francke and Lange (pietists)

saw atheism and corruption of manners springing up from
Wolff's school" (before his exile). Id. p. 113. Wolff's chief
offence lay in stressing natural religion, and in indicating, as
Tholuck observes, that that could be demonstrated, whereas
revealed religion could only be believed {Abriss, p. 18). lie
greatly pleased Voltaire by the dictum that men ought to be just
even though they had the misfortune to be atheists. It is noted
by Tholuck, however {Abriss, as cited, p. 11, note), that the
decree for Wolff's expulsion was inspired not by his theological
colleagues but by two military advisers of the king. Tholuck's
own criticism resolves itself into a protest against Wolff's pre-
dilection for logical connection in his exposition. The fatal
thing was that Wolff accustomed German Christians to reason.

9. Even before the generation of active pressure from English
and French deism there were clear signs that rationalism had taken
root in German life. On the impulse set up by the establishment of
the Grand Lodge at London in 1717, Freemasonic lodges began to
spring up in Germany, the first being founded at Hamburg in 1733. 2
The deism which in the English lodges was later toned down by
orthodox reaction was from the first pronounced in the German
societies, which ultimately passed on the tradition to the other parts
of the Continent. But the new spirit was not confined to secret
societies. Wolflianism worked widely. In the so-called Wcrthcim
Bible (1735) Johann Lorenz Schmid, in the spirit of the Leibnitz-
Wolffian theology, " undertook to translate the Bible, and to explain
it according to the principle that in revelation only that can be
accepted as true which does not contradict the reason."3 This of
course involved no thorough-going criticism; but the spirit of innova-
tion was strong enough in Schmid to make him undermine tradition
at many points, and later carried him so far as to translate Tindal's
Christianity as old as Creation. So far was he in advance of his
time that when his Wertheim Bible was officially condemned
throughout Germany he found no defenders/ The Wolffians were

1 Tholuck, Abriss, as cited, p. 6. 2 Kahnis, p. 55.

3 Piinjer, i, 511. Cp. Tholuck, Abriss, pp. 19-22.

1 Tholuck, Abriss, p. il. Schmid was for a time supposed to be the author of the
Wolfenbiittel Fragments of Reiuiarus (below, p. 327J.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 307

in comparison generally orthodox ; and another writer of the same
school, Martin Knutzen, professor at Konigsberg (1715-1751), under-
took in a youthful thesis De cetcmitatc mundi impossibili (1735) to
rebut the old Averroist doctrine, revived by modern science, of the
indestructibility of the universe. A few years later (1739) he pub-
lished a treatise entitled The Truth of Christianity Demonstrated by
Mathematics, which succeeded as might have been expected.

10. To the same period belong the first activities of JoiIANN
Christian Edelmann (1698-1767), one of the most energetic
freethinkers of ids age. Trained philosophically at Jena under the
theologian Budde, a bitter opponent of Wolff, and theologically in the
school of the Pietists, he was strongly influenced against official
orthodoxy through reading the Impartial History of the Church
and of Heretics, by Gottfried Arnold, an eminently anti-clerical
work, which nearly always takes the side of the heretics.1 In the
same heterodox direction he was swayed by the works of Dippel. At
this stage Edelmann produced his Unschuldige Wahrhciten ("Innocent
Truths "), in which he takes up a pronouncedly rationalist and lati-
tudinarian position, but without rejecting ' revelation "; and in 1736
he went to Berleburg, where he worked on the Berleburg translation
of the Bible, a Pietist undertaking, somewhat on the lines of Dippel's
mystical doctrine, in which a variety of incredible Scriptural narra-
tives, from the six days' creation onwards, are turned to mystical
purpose.2 In this occupation Edelmann seems to have passed some
years. Gradually, however, he came more and more under the
influence of the English deists ; and he at length withdrew from tho
Pietist camp, attacking his former associates for the fanaticism into
which their thought was degenerating. It was under the influence
of Spinoza, however, that he took his most important steps. A few
months after meeting with the Tractatus ho began (1710) tho first
part of his treatise Moses mil aufgedccktevi Angesichte (" Moses with
unveiled face"), an attack at once on the doctrine of inspiration and
on that of tho Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. The book was
intended to consist of twelve parts; but after the appearance of three
it was prohibited by the imperial fisc, and the published parts burned
by the hangman at Hamburg and elsewhere. Nonetheless. Edelmann
continue! his propaganda, publishing in 171! or 1712 The Divinity

i Unywrthruisc.hr Kirchcn- irvl Krt zrrhistnric. 1(100 17(10, -1 torn, fol.— fuller oil. 3 torn,
fol. 1710. Coniin re M . hcim's an 'rv account of it with Murdoch's note in defence : Keid's
ed. ]j. 501. Bruno li;i i< c describe it ;< epoeh-makin : {Kiitjlusx <hs eni/lischcn Qiiiiker-
thuinn p. !.!'. Tni- lii ■' >ry li;id ;i Ureal influence on Goethe in his teens, leading him, he
Bays, to the conviction til at he, like so many other men, should have a religion of his own,
which he [joe-i on to de icriho. It was a re-hash of Gnosticism. ( H'nh rlirit und Vichtuno,
li. viii ; Wrrkr, ed. IS','',, xi. lid xq.)

- Cl). llaijcnbach, Kirchcnijcxchichtfi, i, 171 ; L'itnjer, i, OT.

308 GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE

of Reason,1 and in 1741 Christ and Belial. In 1749 or 1750 his
works were again publicly burned at Frankfurt by order of the
imperial authorities ; and he had much ado to find anywhere in
Germany safe harbourage, till he found protection under Frederick
at Berlin, where he died in 1767.

Edelmann's teaching was essentially Spinozist and pantheistic,2
with a leaning to the doctrine of metempsychosis. As a pantheist he
of course entirely rejected the divinity of Jesus, pronouncing inspira-
tion the appanage of all ; and the gospels were by him dismissed as
late fabrications, from which the true teachings of the founder could
not be learned ; though, like nearly all the freethinkers of that age,
he estimated Jesus highly.3 A German theologian complains,
nevertheless, that he was " more just toward heathenism than toward
Judaism ; and more just toward Judaism than toward Christianity";
adding : What he taught had been thoroughly and ingeniously said
in France and England ; but from a German theologian, and that
with such eloquent coarseness, with such a mastery in expatiating
in blasphemy, such things were unheard of."4 The force of
Edelmann's attack may be gathered from the same writer's account
of him as a bird of prey " who rose to a " wicked height of opposi-
tion, not only against the Lutheran Church, but against Christianity
in general."

11. Even from decorous and official exponents of religion, how-
ever, there came naturalistic " and semi-rationalistic teaching, as
in the Reflections on the most important truths of religion' (1768-
1769) of J. F. W. Jerusalem, Abbot of Marienthal in Brunswick, and
later of Riddagshausen (1709-1789). Jerusalem had travelled in
Europe, and had spent two years in Holland and one in England,
where he studied the deists and their opponents. "In England
alone," he declared, "is mankind original."' Though really written
by way of defending Christianity against the freethinkers, in par-

1 Die Gbttlichlceit der Vernunft.

2 Xoack, Th. iii, Kap. 2: Saintes, pp. 85-SG ; Punier, p. 41-3. It is interesting to And
Edelmann supplying a formula latterly utilized by the so-called "New Theology" in
England — the thesis that " the reality of everything which exists is God," and that there
can therefore be no atheists, since he who recognizes the universe recognizes God.

3 Naigeon, by altering the words of Diderot, caused him to appear one of the exceptions ;
but he was not. See Rosenkranz, Diderot's Leben unci Werke. Vorb. p. vii.

4 Kahnis, pp. 128—29. Edelmann's Life was written by Pratje. Historische Nacl\richten
von Edelmann's Leben, 1755. It gives a list of replies to his writings (p. 205 sq.). Apropos
of the first issue of Strauss's Leben Jesu. a volume of E r inner ungen of Edelmann was
published at Clausthal in 1839 by W. Elster; and Strauss in his Dngmatik avowed
the pleasure with which he had made the acquaintance of so interesting a writer. A
collection of extracts from Edelmann's works, entitled Der neu eroffnete Edelmann, was
published at Bern in 1817; and the Vnschuldige Wahrheiten was reprinted in 1846. His
Autobiography, written in 1752. was published in 1849.

5 Betrachtungen iiber die vornehmsten Wahrheiten der Religion. Another apologetic
work of the period marked by rational moderation and tolerance was the Vertheidigten
Glauben der Christen of the Berlin court-preacher A. W. F. Sack (1751).

6 Art. by Wagenmann in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 309

ticular against Bolingbroke and Voltaire,1 the very title of his book
is suggestive of a process of disintegration ; and in it certain unedi-
fying Scriptural miracles are actually rejected." It was probably
this measure of adaptation to new needs that gave it its great
popularity in Germany and secured its translation into several other
languages. Goethe called him a " freely and gently thinking theo-
logian"; and a modern orthodox historian of the Church groups
him with those who " contributed to the spread of Rationalism by
sermons and by popular doctrinal and devotional works.'"' Jeru-
salem was, however, at most a semi-rationalist, taking a view of the
fundamental Christian dogmas which approached closely to that of
Locke.4 It was, as Goethe said later, the epoch of common sense ;
and the very theologians tended to a "religion of nature."5

12. Alongside of home-made heresy there had come into play a
new initiative force in the literature of English deism, which began
to be translated after 1710,° and was widely circulated till, in the
last third of the century, it was superseded by the French. The
English answers to the deists were frequently translated likewise,
and notoriously helped to promote deism' — another proof that it was
not their influence that had changed the balance of activity in
England. Under a freethinking king, even clergymen began guardedly
to accept the deistic methods ; and the optimism of Shaftesbury
began to overlay the optimism of Leibnitz ;H while a French scientific
influence began with La Mettrie,9 Maupertuis, and Kobinet. Even
the Leihnitzian school, proceeding on the principle of immortal
monads, developed a doctrine of the immortality of the souls of
animals'" — a position not helpful to orthodoxy. There was thus a
general stirring of doubt among educated people," and we find mention
in Goethe's Autobiography of an old gentleman of Frankfort who

1 Hafienbach, Kirchenaeschichte, i, 355. - Piinjer, i. 512.

'■' Kurz, Hist. <ij the. Christian Church from the Re/or mation. Entf. tr. ii. -111. A Jesuit,
A. Merz, wrote four replies to Jerusalem. One was entitled Frag ub (lurch die biblisclte

Simiilicitat ullein ein F reiidenker oder heist bekehret werden kuiine I" Can a Freethinker

or Deist be converted by Biblical Simplicity alone?"), 177.").

4 cp. Hagenbaeh, i, 353 ; tr. p. 1-20. Jerusalem was the father of the lifted youth whose
suicide (1775nnoved Goethe to write The Sorrows of Werther.K false presentment of the
real personality, which stirred Lessing (his affectionate friend) to publish a volume of the
dead youth's essays, in vindication of his character. The father had considerable
influence in purifying German style. Cp. Goethe, Wuhrheit und Uiclttung. Th. ii, H. vii ;
Werke, ed. IbOtJ, xi, 272 ; and Hagenbaeh, i, 3.01.

5 Goethe, as last cited, pp. •ii\H-VU.

G Lechler, Gesch. de.s ewlixchen Dcismus, pp. 117-52. The translations began with that
of Tindal f 1 74 1 >. which made: a great sensation.

7 1'usey, pp. 12."). 127, citing Twesti n ; llostwick, Ccrmiui Culture and Cltristiuuity, p. 3(1,
citing Krnesti. Thorschmid'a Frcidenker Jiibliotlick, issued in 17D5 o7, collected both
translations and refutations. Lechler, p. 151.

H Lange, (iesch. d-s Materialismits, i. 405 (Km!, tr. ii, 111', 17).

a Lange. l, 317, S.'J ' Kin,', tr. ii, 7(1, 137). "J Kange, i, :«hi !I7 'ii. 131 35).

!l Goethe tells of having seen in his boyhood, at Fruukfoi t, an irreligious French
romance publicly burned, and of having his interest in the hook thereby awakened. I'.ut
tins seems to have been during the French occupation, i Wuli rl« it und Dichtuuu, li. is ;
Werke, xi, USJ

310 GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE

avowed, as against the optimists, "Even in God I find defects (Fehler)."
On the other hand, there were instances in Germany of the
phenomenon, already seen in England in Newton and Boyle, of men
of science devoting themselves to the defence of the faith. The
most notable cases were those of the mathematician Euler and the
biologist von Haller. The latter wrote Letters (to his Daughter) On
tJie most important Truths of Revelation (1772)2 and other apologetic
works. Euler in 17-17 published at Berlin, where he was professor,
bis Defence of Revelation against the Reproaches of Freethinkers ;3
and in 17G9 his Letters to a German Princess, of which the argument
notably coincides with part of that of Berkeley against the free-
thinking mathematicians. Haller's position comes to the same
thing. All three men, in fact, grasped at the argument of despair — •
the inadequacy of the human faculties to sound the mystery of
things ; and all alike were entirely unable to see that it logically
cancelled their own judgments. Even a theologian, contemplating
Haller's theorem of an incomprehensible omnipotence countered in
its merciful plan of salvation by the set of worms it sought to save,
comments on the childishness of the philosophy which confidently
described the plans of deity in terms of what it declared to be the
blank ignorance of the worms in question.4 Euler and Haller,
like some later men of science, kept their scientific method for the
mechanical or physical problems of their scientific work, and brought
to the deepest problems of all the self-will, the emotionalism, and the
irresponsibility of the ignorant average man. Each did but express
in his own way the resentment of the undisciplined mind at attacks
upon its prejudices ; and Haller's resort to poetry as a vehicle for his
religion gives the measure of his powers on that side. Thus in
Germany as in England the " answer " to the freethinkers was a
failure. Men of science playing at theology and theologians playing
at science alike failed to turn the tide of opinion, now socially
favoured by the known deism of the king. German orthodoxy, says
a recent Christian apologist, fell " with a rapidity reminding one of
the capture of Jericho."' Goethe, writing of the general attitude to
Christianity about 1768, sums up that " the Christian religion
wavered between its own historic-positive base and a pure deism,
which, grounded on morality, was in turn to re-establish ethics."0

1 Id. B. iv, end.

- Translated into English 1780; 2nd ed. 1793. The translator claims for Haller great
learning (-2nd ed. p. xix). He seems in reality to have had very little, as lie represents
that Jesus in his day " was the only teacher who recommended chastity to men " (p. 82).

3 Rett una der Offenbarumj gegen die Eimviirfe der Freigeister. Haller wrote under a
similar title, 1775-76. 4 lianr, Gencli, dry chrifstl. Kirclic, iv, 599.

5 Gostwick, p. 15. c Wahrheit und Bichtung, 13. viii ; Werke, xi, 329.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 311

Frederick's attitude, said an early Kantian, had had " an
almost magical influence " on popular opinion (Willich,
Elements of the Critical Philosophy, 1798, p. 2). With this
his French teachers must have had much to do. Lord Morley
pronounces (Voltaire, -4th ed. p. 123) that French deism " never
made any impression on Germany," and that "the teaching of
Leibnitz and Wolff stood like a fortified wall against the French
invasion." This is contradicted by much German testimony ;
in particular by Lange's (Gesch. ties Mater, i, 318), though he
notes that French materialism could not get the upper hand.
Laukhard, who expressed the highest admiration for Tindal, as
having wholly delivered him from dogmatism, avowed that
Voltaire, whom everybody read, had perhaps done more harm
to priest religion than all the hooks of the English and German
deists together (Leben, 1792-1802, Th. i, p. 268).

Tholuck gravely affirms (Abriss, p. 33) that the acquaintance
with the French " deistery and frivolity" in Germany belongs
to a " somewhat later period than that of the English."
Naturally it did. The bulk of the English deistic literature
was printed before the printing of the French had begun !
French MSS. would reach German princes, but not German
pastors. But Tholuck sadly avows that the French deism (of
the serious and pre-Voltairean portions of which he seems to
have known nothing) had a "' frightful " iniluence on the upper
classes, though not on the clergy (p. 3l). Following him,
Kahnis writes (internal History, p. 41) that " English and
French Deism met with a very favourable reception in Germany
— the latter chiefly in the higher circles, the former rather
among the educated middle classes." (lie should have added,
' the younger theologians.") Baur, even in speaking disparag-
ingly of the French as compared with the English influence,
admits (Lehrbuch der Dogmcngcschiclite, 2te Auil. p. 317) that
the former told upon Germany. Cp. Tennemann, Bohn. tr.
pp. 385, 388. Hagenbach shows great ignorance of English
deism, but lie must have known something of German ; and lie
writes (tr. p. 57) that " the imported deism," both English and
French, " soon swept through the rifts of the Church, and gained
supreme control of literature." Cp. pp. 07 08. See Groom
Robertson's Jlobbes, pp. 225 20, as to the persistence of a
succession of Hobbes and Locke in Germany in the teeth of the
Wolffian school, which soon lost ground after 17-10. Jt is
further noteworthy that Bruckcr's copious Hislnrta C'rihea
Philosophic^ (1712 11), which as a mere learned record has
great merit, and was long the standard authority in Germany,
gives great praise to Locke and little space In Wolll. (See
Enfield's abstract, pp. Oil, 019 mj.) The Wolffian philosophy,
too, had been rejected and disparaged by both Herder and
Kant who were alike deeply inlluenced by Rousseau in the

312 GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE

third quarter of the century ; and was generally discredited,
save in the schools, when Kant produced the Critique of Pure
Reason, See below, pp. 337, 345.

13. Frederick, though reputed a Yoltairean freethinker par
excellence, may be claimed for Germany as partly a product of
the rationalizing philosophy of Wolff. In his first letter to Voltaire,
written in 1736, four years before his accession, he promises to
send him a translation lie has had made of the " accusation and
the justification " of Wolff, " the most celebrated philosopher of our
days, who, for having carried light into the darkest places of
metaphysics, and for having treated the most difficult matters in
a manner no less elevated than precise and clear, is cruelly accused
of irreligion and atheism"; and he speaks of getting translated
Wolff's Treatise of God, the Soul, and the World. When he became
a thoroughgoing freethinker is not clear, for Voltaire at this time
had produced no explicit anti- Christian propaganda. At first the
new king showed himself disposed to act on the old maxim that
freethought is bad for the common people. In 1713-44 he caused
to be suppressed two German treatises by one Gebhardi, a contributor
to Gottsched's magazines, attacking the Biblical miracles ; and in
1748 he sent a young man named Riidiger to Spandau for six
months' confinement for printing an anti-Christian work by one
Dr. Pott.1 But as he grew more confident in his own methods
he extended to men of his own way of thinking the toleration he
allowed to all religionists, save insofar as he vetoed the mutual
vituperation of the sects, and such proselytizing as tended to create
strife. With an even hand he protected Catholics, Greek Christians,
and Unitarians, letting them have churches where they would ;2 and
when, after the battle of Striegau, a body of Protestant peasantry
asked his permission to slay all the Catholics they could find, he
answered with the gospel precept, "Love your enemies."2

Beyond the toleration of all forms of religion, however, he never
went ; though he himself added to the literature of deism. Apart
from his verses we have from him the posthumous treatise Pensies
sur la lieligion, probably written early in his life, where the rational
case against the concepts of revelation and of miracles is put with
a calm and sustained force. Like the rest, he is uncritical in his
deism ; but, that granted, his reasoning is unanswerable. In talk
he was wont to treat the clergy with small respect ;4 and he wrote

1 Schlosser, Hist, of Eighteenth Cent., Eng. tr. 1S43, i, 150; Hagenbach, tr. p. 66.
- Hagenbach, tr. ]). 63. •'■ Id., Kirchengeschichte, i, ■2'd2.

4 Kabnis, p. 13; Tholuck, Abriss, p. 31.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 313

more denunciatory things concerning them than almost any freethinker
of the century.1 Bayle, Voltaire, and Lucretius were his favourite
studies ; and as the then crude German literature had no attraction
for him, he drew to his court many distinguished Frenchmen,
including La Mettrie, Maupertuis, D'Alemhert, D* Argons, and ahovo
all Voltaire, between whom and him there was an incurable incom-
patibility of temper and character, and a persistent attraction of
force of mind, which left them admiring without respecting each
other, and unable to abstain from mutual vituperation. Under
Frederick's vigorous rule all speech was free save such as he
considered personally offensive, as Voltaire's attack on Maupertuis ;
and after a stormy reign he could say, when asked by Prince William
of Brunswick whether he did not think religion one of the best
supports of a king's authority, "I find order and the laws sufficient.

Depend upon it, countries have been admirably governed when

your religion had no existence."2 Religion certainly had no part in
his personality in the ordinary sense of the term. Voltaire was
wont to impute to him atheism ; when La Mettrie died, the mocker,
then at Frederick's court, remarked that the post of his majesty's
atheist was vacant, but happily the Abbe de Trades was there to
till it. In effect, Frederick professed Voltaire's own deism ; but of
all the deists of the time he had least of the religious temperament
and most of sheer cynicism.

The attempt of Carlyle to exhibit Frederick as a practical
believer is a flagrant instance of that writer's subjective method.
He tells (Hist, of Fried rich, bk. xviii, ch. x) that at the beginning
of the battle of Leuthen a column of troops near the king sang
a hymn of duty (which Carlyle calls " the sound of Psalms") ;
that an officer asked whether the singing should be stopped,
and that the king said " By no means." His " hard heart
seems to have been touched by it. Indeed, there is in him, in
those grim days, a tone (!) as of trust in the Eternal, as of real
religious piety and faith, scarcely noticeable elsewhere in his
history. His religion — and he had in withered forms a good
de<il of it, if ice if ill look well - being almost always in a strictly
voiceless state, nay, ultra voiceless, or voiced the wrong way, as
is too well known." Then comes the assertion that a moment
after" the king said "to someone, Zielhen probahlj/, ' With men

1 See the extracts of I',iic:lil]cr, Zari urkriintr /■' n idrnki- r, IS'.H), PP. I.". 17.

- Thiebault, Mr* : Soni-riiim <!<■ Vinut Ann </.■ Si-jnur <i U.-rlin, :!<• edit. IM).">. i. l-2il -2*. Sir
i. 353 ~Ai, ii, 7.S S2, as to the baselessness of the stories (c.;/., 1'usey. Ilistnr. Intl. intti (irr.
Hatiitmtlixm, p. 1-2:1 thai Frederick changed his views in ol<l ai.'e. Thiebault, a strict
Catholic, is emphatic in his negation: "The persons who assert thai his principles!

became more religions have either lied or been them el\es mistaken." CarlyU)

naturally detests Thiebault. The rumour may have ari en out of the lact that in Ins
Es.umen rrituiiw d it Syxtvmr dv hi Xahtri- Frederick counter aniues ,1' 1 1 oil inch's impeach-
ment of Christianity. The attack on l;inns cave him a fellow lei-lini: with the (lunch.

314 GEKMAN FEEETHOUGHT IN THE

like these, don't you think I shall have victory this day ! ' "
Here, with the very spirit of unveracity at work before his eyes,
Carlyle plumps for the fable. Yet the story, even if true, would
give no proof whatever of religious belief.

In point of fact, Frederick was a much less " religious " deist
than Voltaire. He erected no temple to his unloved God. And
a perusal of his dialogue of Pompadour and the Virgin (Dialogues
des morts) may serve to dispose of the thesis that the German
mind dealt reverently and decently with matters which the
French mind handled frivolously. That performance outgoes
in ribaldry anything of the ago in French.

As the first modern freethinking king, Frederick is something of
a test case. Son of a man of narrow mind and odious character, he
was himself no admirable type, being neither benevolent nor con-
siderate, neither truthful nor generous ; and in international politics,
after writing in his youth a treatise in censure of Maehiavelli, he
played the old game of unscrupulous aggression. Yet he was not
only the most competent, but, as regards home administration, the
most conscientious king of his time. To find him a rival we must
go back to the pagan Antonines and Julian, or at least to St. Louis
of France, who, however, was rather worsened than bettered by
his creed.1 Henri IV of France, who rivalled him in sagacity and
greatly excelled him in human kindness, was far his inferior in devo-
tion to duty.

The effect of Frederick's training is seen in his final attitude to
the advanced criticism of the school of d'Holbach, which assailed
governments and creeds with the same unsparing severity of logic
and moral reprobation. Stung by the uncompromising attack,
Frederick retorts by censuring the rashness which would plunge
nations into civil strife because kings miscarry where no human
wdsdom could avoid miscarriage. He who had wantonly plunged
all Germany into a hell of war for his sole ambition, bringing
myriads to misery, thousands to violent death, and hundreds of
his own soldiers to suicide, could be virtuously indignant at the
irresponsible audacity of writers who indicted the whole existing
system for its imbecility and injustice. But he did reason on the
criticism ; he did ponder it ; he did feel bound to meet argument
with argument ; and he left his arguments to the world. The
advance on previous regal practice is noteworthy : the whole
problem of politics is at once brought to the test of judgment
and persuasion. Beside the Christian Georges and the Louis's of
his century, and beside his Christian father, his superiority in

1 Ci>. the argument of Faure, Hist, de Saint Louis, 1SG6, i, 21-2-13; ii, 597.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 315

judgment and even in some essential points of character is signal.
Such was the great deist king of the deist age ; a deist of the least
religious temper and of no very fine moral material to begin with.

The one contemporary monarch who in any way compares with
him in enlightenment, Joseph II of Austria, belonged to the same
school. The main charge against Frederick as a ruler is that he
did not act up to the ideals of the school of Voltaire. In reply to
the demand of the French deists for an abolition of all superstitious
teaching, he observed that among the 10,000,000 inhabitants of
France at most 200,000 were capable of philosophic views, and that
the remaining 15,800,000 were held to their opinions by " insur-
mountable obstacles."1 This, however, had been said by the deists
themselves (e.g., d'Holbach, pref. to Christianisme devoile) ; and
such an answer meant that he had no idea of so spreading instruc-
tion that all men should have a chance of reaching rational beliefs.
This attitude was his inheritance from the past. Yet it was under him
that Prussia began to figure as a first-rate culture force in Europe.

11. The social vogue of deistic thought could now be traced in
much of the German belles-lettres of the time. The young Jakou
VOX MAUVILLON (1743-1794), secretary of the King of Poland and
author of several histories, in his youth translated from the Latin
into French Holberg's Voyage of Nicolas Klimius (170G), which
made the tour of Europe, and had a special vogue in Germany.
Later in life, besides translating and writing abundantly and intel-
ligently on matters of economic and military science — in the hitter of
which he bad something like expert status — Mauvillon became a pro-
nounced heretic, though careful to keep his propaganda anonymous.

The most systematic dissemination of the new ideas was that
carried on in the periodical published by ClIKISTOPII Fuil'.imiciL
NlCOLAI (1733 1811) under the title of The General German Library
(founded 1705), which began with fifty contributors, and at the
height of its power had a hundred and thirty, among them being
Lessing, Eborhanl, and Moses Mendelssohn. In the period from
its start to the year 17'J2 it ran to 100 volumes ; and it has always
been more or less bitterly spoken of by later orthodoxy as tin' great
library of that movement. Nicolai, himself an industrious and
scholarly writer, produced among many other things a satirical
romance famous in its day, the Life and Opinions of Mo
Scbaldus Xulltanki.-r, ridiculing the bigots and persccidors the type
of Klotx, the antagonist of Lessing, and some of N'icwlai's less

l Ksmiu-n ih- VI-: ui orb iir.'-ju[)<\, 17«;;i. So- tin- p;i ;•••:.• iii 1. I /. \Urin<nn»

di'imix Lritmiz, |>. -..).

316 GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE

unamiable antagonists,1 as well as various aspects of the general
social and literary life of the time. To Nicolai is fully due the
genial tribute paid to him by Heine,2 were it only for the national
service of his " Library." Its many translations from the English
and French freethinkers, older and newer, concurred with native
work to spread a deistic rationalism, labelled Aufklcirung, or en-
lightenment, through the whole middle class of Germany.3 Native
writers in independent works added to the propaganda. ANDREAS
RlEM (1749-1807), a Berlin preacher, appointed by Frederick a
hospital chaplain,4 wrote anonymously against priestcraft as no
other priest had yet done. " No class of men," he declared, in
language perhaps echoed from his king, " has ever been so pernicious
to the world as the priesthood. There were laws at all times against
murderers and bandits, but not against the assassin in the priestly
garb. War was repelled by war, and it came to an end. The war
of the priesthood against reason has lasted for thousands of years,
and it still goes on without ceasing." 5 GEOEG SCHADE (1712-
1795), who appears to have been one of the believers in the immor-
tality of animals, and who in 1770 was imprisoned for his opinions
in the Danish island of Christiansoe, was no less emphatic, declaring,
in a work on Natural Religion on the lines of Tindal (1760), that
"all who assert a supernatural religion are godless impostors."6
Constructive work of great importance, again, was done by J. B.
BASEDOW (1723-1790), who early became an active deist, but
distinguished himself chiefly as an educational reformer, on the
inspiration of Rousseau's Emile,1 setting up a system which " tore
education away from the Christian basis," M and becoming in virtue
of that one of the most popular writers of his day. It is latterly
admitted even by orthodoxy that school education in Germany had
in the seventeenth century become a matter of learning by rote, and
that such reforms as had been set up in some of the schools of the
Pietists had in Basedow's day come to nothing. As Basedow was
the first to set up vigorous reforms, it is not too much to call him
an instaurator of rational education, whose chief fault was to be too
far ahead of his age. This, with the personal flaw of an unami-
able habit of wrangling in all companies, caused the failure of his
" Philanthropic Institute," established in 1771, on the invitation of

1 G. Weber, Gesch. der deutschen Literatur, lite Aufl. p. 99.

2 Zur Gesch.der Relig.und Philos. in Deiitschland— Werke, ed. 1876, iii, 63-64. Goethe's
blame (W. und 1)., B. vii) is passed on purely literary grounds.

s Hagenbach, tr. pp. 103-104; Cairns, p. 177.

4 This post be left to become secretary of the Academy of Painting.

5 Cited by Pttnjer, i, 545-46. e Id. p. 546.

7 Hagenbach, tr. pp. 100-103; Saiutes, pp. 91-9-2; Punjer, p. 536; Noaek, Th. iii, Kap. 7.
B Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte, i, 298, 351. 9 Id. i, 294 sq.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 317

the Prince of Dessau, to carry out his educational ideals. Quite a
number of other institutions, similarly planned, after his lead, by
men of the same way of thinking, as Canope and Salzmann, in
the same period, had no better success.

Goethe, who was clearly much impressed by Basedow, and
travelled with him, draws a somewhat antagonistic picture of
him on retrospect (Wahrhcit und Dichtung, 13. xiv). Ho
accuses him in particular of always obtruding his anti-orthodox
opinions ; not choosing to admit that religious opinions were
being constantly obtruded on Basedow. Praising Lavater for
his more amiable nature, Goethe reveals that Lavater was
constantly propounding his orthodoxy. Goethe, in fine, was
always lenient to pietism, in which he had been brought up,
and to which he was wont to make sentimental concessions.
He could never forget his courtly duties towards the established
convention, and so far played the game of bigotry. Hagenbach
notes (i, 298, note), without any deprecation, that after Basedow
had published in 1763-1761 his Philalethie, a perfectly serious
treatise on natural as against revealed religion, one of the many
orthodox answers, that by Pastor Goeze, so inflamed against
him the people of his native town of Hamburg that he could
not show himself there without danger. And this is the man
accused of "obtruding his views." Baur is driven, by way of
disparagement of Basedow and his school, to censure their self-
confidence — precisely the quality which, in religious toachers
with whom lie agreed, lie as a theologian would treat as a mark
of superiority. Baur's attack on the moral utilitarianism of the
school is still less worthy of him. {Gesch. der christl. Kirche,
iv, 595-96). It reads like an echo of Kahnis (as cited, p. 16 sq.).

Yet another influential deist was JoiiAXX Aug ['ST EBEEHAED
(1739-1809), for a time a preacher at Charlottenburg, but driven out
of the Church for the heresy of his New Apology of Sokrates ; or the
Final Salvation of the Heathen (1772). ' The work in effect placed
Sokrates on a level with Jesus," winch was blasphemy.8 But the
outcry attracted the attention of Frederick, who made Eberbard a
Professor of Philosophy at Halle, where later he opposed tho
idealism of both Kant and Fichte. Substantially of the same school
was the less pronouncedly deistic cleric SXEINBART,4 author of a
utilitarian System of Pure Philosophy, or Christian doctrine of
Happiness, now forgotten, who had hecn variously influenced by
Locke and Voltaire.5 Among the less heterodox but still rationalizing

1 Tho book is remembered in France by reason of Lberhard's amusinn mistake of
treating as a serious production of the. Sorbonno the skit in which Turcot derided the
Norbonne's findim; njjain t Mai-montel's HHivnrc - Hailciiliach. tr. p. UK).

■; Kberhard, however, is respeetf ully treated by LesMiiu in his di c;i ion on Leibnitz's

view as to eternal punishment. ' Noauk, Th. in, Kap. 8. " Saintes, pp. 'j-l'.Ki.

318 GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE

clergy of the period were J. J. Spalding, author of a work on The
Utility of the Preacher's Office, a man of the type labelled " Moderate "
in the Scotland of the same period, and as such antipathetic to
emotional pietists;1 and Zollikofer, of the same school — both
inferribly influenced by the deism of their day. Considerably more
of a rationalist than these was the clergyman W. A. Teller (1734-
1801), author of a New Testament Eexicon, who reached a position
virtually deistic, and intimated to the Jews of Berlin that he would
receive them into his church on their making a deistic profession
of faith.2

15. If it be true that even the rationalizing defenders of Chris-
tianity led men on the whole towards deism,3 much more must this
hold true of the new school who applied rationalistic methods to
religious questions in their capacity as theologians. Of this school
the founder was JOHANN SALOMO SEMLER (1725-1791), who, trained
as a Pietist at Halle, early thought himself into a more critical
attitude,4 albeit remaining a theological teacher. Son of a much-
travelled army chaplain, who in his many campaigns had learned
much of the world, and in particular seen something of religious
frauds in the Catholic countries, Semler started with a critical bias
which was cultivated by wide miscellaneous reading from his boy-
hood onwards. As early as 1750, in his doctoral dissertation
defending certain texts against the criticism of Whiston, he set forth
the view, developed a century later by Baur, that the early Christian
Church contained a Pauline and a Petrine party, mutually hostile.
The merit of his research won him a professorship at Halle ; and
this position he held till his death, despite such heresy as his
rejection from the canon of the books of Ruth, Esther, Ezra,
Nehemiah, the Song of Solomon, the two books of Chronicles, and
the Apocalypse, in his Freie U liter sachung des Canons (1771-1771)
— a work apparently inspired by the earlier performance of Richard
Simon.0 His intellectual life was for long a continuous advance,
always in the direction of a more rationalistic comprehension of
religious history ; and he reached, for his day, a remarkably critical

1 Cp. Hagenbach, Kircliengescliichte, i, 313, 363.

2 Id. i, 3;J7 ; tr. pp. 12 1-2.5 ; Saintes, p. 91 ; Kahnis, p. 45. Pusey (150-51, note) speaks of
Teller and Spalding as belonging, with Xicolai. Mendelssohn, and others, to a "secret
institute, whose object was to remodel religion and alter the form of government." This
seems to be a fantasy. 3 So Steffens. cited by Hagenbach, tr. p. 121.

1 V. Gastrow, Job. Salomo Semler, 1905, p. 4>. See t'usey, 140-11. note, for Semler's
account of the rigid and unreasoning orthodoxy against which ho reacted. (Citing
Soulier's Lebenschreibiuig, ii, 121-61.) Semler, however, records that Baumgarten, one of
the theological professors at Halle, would in expansive moods defend theism and make
light of theology {Lebenschreibiuig, i, 10-S). Cp. Tholuek, Abriss,as cited, pp. 12. 18. Pusey
notes that "many of the principal innovators had been pupils of Baumgarten " (p. 132,
citing Niemeyer).

5 Cp. Dr. G. Karo, Johann Salomo Semler, 1905, p. 25 ; Saintcs, pp. 129-31.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 319

view of the mythical element in the Old Testament.1 Not only did
he recognize that Genesis must have pre-Mosaic origins, and that
such books as the Proverbs and the Psalms were of later date and
other origin than those traditionally assigned:2 his historical sense
worked on the whole narrative. Thus he recognized the mythical
character of the story of Samson, and was at least on the way
towards a scientific handling of the New Testament.3 But in his
period and environment a systematic rationalism was impossible ;
he was always a "revelation-believing Christian"; his critical
intelligence was always divided against itself;4 and his powers were
expended in an immense number of works,'5 which failed to yield any
orderly system, while setting up a general stimulus, in despite of
their admitted unreadableness.0

In his latter days he strongly opposed and condemned the moro
radical rationalism of his pupil Bahrdt, and of the posthumous work
of Reimarus, here exemplifying the common danger of the intellectual
life, for critical as well as uncritical minds. After provoking many
orthodox men by his own challenges, he is roused to fury alike by
the genial rationalism of Bahrdt and by the cold analysis of
Reimarus ; and his attack on the Wolfenbiittel Fragments published
by Lessing is loaded with a vocabulary of abuse such as he had
never before employed' — a sure sign that he had no scientific hold
of his own historical conception. Like the similarly infuriated semi-
rational defenders of the historicity of Jesus in our own day, ho
merely "followed the tactic of exposing the lack of scientific know-
ledge and theological learning " of the innovating writer. Always
temperamentally religious, he died in the evangelical faith. But his
own influence in promoting rationalism is now obvious and unques-
tioned," and he is rightly to be reckoned a main founder of " German
rationalism " — that is, academic rationalism on theologico-historical
lines'1 — although he always professed to be merely rectifying orthodox
conceptions. In the opinion of Pusey "the revival of historical
interpretation by Semler became the most extensivo instrument of
the degradation of Christianity."

Among the oilier theologians of the time who exercised a similar
influence to the Wolffian, T6LLNER attracts notice by the comparative
courage with which, in the words of an orthodox critic, ho ' raised, as

1 Op. Gost'.vick p. 51 ; Piinjor, i, 561. - Karo. p. 11.

3 Op. Saintes. p. 13.! «q. * Op. Karo, pp. 3, R, IB. 23.

5 Ovnr a huii'lre.! and seventy in all. I'ilnjer, i, 5tj(); (in ;tro\v. p. B37.

f' Karo. pp. :, ■;. ' tin Lrnw. p. ' !3

~ I'm cv. p. 11-2; A. S. Fiirrar. C.rit. Hist. „f Frrrt Imuqlil . p. 313.

0 Op. Karo, p. 5 sq. ; Stiiudlin, cited by llioluck, Abnxs, p 3.'.

320 GEEMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE

much as possible, natural religion to revelation," and, "on the other
hand, lowered Scripture to the level of natural light." ' First he
published (1764) True Reasons why God has not furnished Revelation
with evident proofs,"2 arguing for the modern attenuation of the idea
of revelation ; then a work on Divine Inspiration (1771) in which he
explicitly avowed that " God has in no way, either inwardly or out-
wardly, dictated the sacred books. The writers were the real
authors"3 — a declaration not to be counterbalanced by further
generalities about actual divine influence. Later still he published
a Proof that God leads men to salvation even by his revelation in
Nature4 (1766) — a form of Christianity little removed from deism.
Other theologians, such as Ernesti, went far with the tide of
illuminism ; and when the orthodox Chr. A. Crusius died at Leipzig
in 1781, Jean Paul Eichter, then a student, wrote that people had
become " too much imbued with the spirit of illuminism " to be of his
school. " Most, almost all the students," adds Eichter, incline to
heterodoxy ; and of the professor Moras he tells that " wherever he
can explain away a miracle, the devil, etc., he does so." Of this
order of accommodators, a prominent example was Midi AE LIS
(1717-1791), whose reduction of the Mosaic legislation to motives of
every-day utility is still entertaining.

16. Much more notorious than any other German deist of his
time was Carl Friedrich Bahrdt (1711-1792), a kind of raw
Teutonic Voltaire, and the most popularly influential German free-
thinker of his age. In all he is said to have published a hundred
and twenty-six books and tracts,5 thus approximating to Voltaire in
quantity if not in quality. Theological hatred lias so pursued him
that it is hard to form a fair opinion as to his character ; but the
record runs that he led a somewhat Bohemian and disorderly life,
though a very industrious one. While a preacher in Leipzig in 1768
he first got into trouble — " persecution " by his own account ;
" disgrace for licentious conduct," by that of Ids enemies. In any
case, he was at this period quite orthodox in his beliefs.6 That there
was no serious disgrace is suggested by the fact that he was appointed
Professor of Biblical Antiquities at Erfurt; and soon afterwards, on
the recommendation of Sender and Ernesti, at Giessen (1771).
While holding that post he published his " modernized" translation
of the New Testament, done from the point of view of belief in

1 Kahnis, p. 116.

2 Wahre Grttnde warum Gott die Offenharung nicht mit augenscheinlichen Beiveiscn
versehen hat. ''• Die Giittliche Eingebung, 1771.

i lieioeis das Gott die Mensehen bereits (lurch wine Offenharuna in de.r Natur zur
SeligJceitfuhre. 5 Gostwick, p. 53 ; Pilnjer, i, 516, note.

6 Cp. Kahnis, pp. 132-36, as to Bahrdt's early morals.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 321

revelation, following it up by his New Revelations of Cod in Letters
and Tales (1773), which aroused Protestant hostility. After teaching
for a time in a new Swiss " Philanthropin " — an educational institu-
tion on Basedow's lines — he obtained a post as a district ecclesias-
tical superintendent in the principality of Turkheim on the Ilardt ;
whereafter he was enabled to set up a "Philanthropin " of his own
in the castle of Heidesheim, near Worms. The second edition of
his translation of the New Testament, however, aroused Catholic
hostility in the district ; the edition was confiscated, and be found it
prudent to make a tour in Holland and England, only to receive, on
his return, a missive from the imperial consistory declaring him
disabled for any spiritual oflice in the Holy German Empire. Seek-
ing refuge in Halle, he found Sender grown hostile ; but made the
acquaintance of Eborhard, with the result of abandoning the remains
of his orthodox faith. Henceforth he regarded Jesus, albeit with
admiration, as simply a great teacher, "like Moses, Confucius,
Sokrates, Sender, Luther, and myself";1 and to tins view he gave
effect in the third edition of his New Testament translation, which
was followed in 1782 by his Letters on the Bible in Popular Style
{Yolkston) , and in 1784 by his Completion (Ausfiihrung) of the Plan
and Aim of Jesus in Letters (1781), and his System of Moral Religion
(1787). More and more fiercely antagonized, lie duly retaliated on
the clergy in his Cliurch and Heretic Almanack (1781) ; and after for
a time keeping a tavern, he got into fresh trouble by printing anony-
mous satires on the religious edict of 1788, directed against all kinds of
heresy," and was sentenced to two years' imprisonment in a fortress
— a term reduced by the king to one year. Thereafter he ended not
very happily his troublous life in Halle in 1792.

The weakest part of Bahrdt's performance is now seen to be his
application of the empirical method of the early theological ration-
alists, who were wont to take every Biblical prodigy ;is a merely
perverted account of an incident which certainly happened. That
method — which became identified with the so-called " rationalism "
of Germany in that ago, and is not yet discarded by rationalizing
theologians —is reduced to open absurdity in ins hands, as when ho
makes Moses employ fireworks on Mount Sinai, and Jesus UhA the
five thousand by stratagem, without miracle. I >ui it was not by such
extravagances that he won and kept a bearing throughout Ids life.
It is easy to see on retrospect that the source; of his influence as a
writer lay above all things in his healthy oil ical el hie, his own mode
of progression being by way of simple common sense and natural

1 (ieschichte seines Lebins, etc. 1700 01, iv, 110. - Sec below, i>. IIU.

VOL. II V

322 GEEMAN FBEETHOUGHT IN THE

feeling, not of critical research. His first step in rationalism was to
ask himself " how Three Persons could he One God " — this while
believing devoutly in revelation, miracles, the divinity of Jesus, and
the Atonement. Under the influence of a naturalist travelling in his
district, lie gave up the orthodox doctrine of the Atonement, feeling
himself " as if new-horn" in being freed of what he had learned to
see as a pernicious and damnable error."1 It was for such writing
that he was hated and persecuted, despite his habitual eulogy of
Christ as " the greatest and most venerable of mortals." His offence
was not against morals, but against theology ; and he heightened
the offence by his vanity.

Bahrdt's real power may be inferred from the fury of some
of his opponents. " The wretched Bahrdt " is Dr. Pusey's
Christian account of him. Even F. C. Baur is abusive. The
American translators of Hagenbach, Messrs. Gage and Stucken-
berg, have thought fit to insert in their chapter-heading the
phrase " Bahrdt, the Theodore Parker of Germany." As
Hagenbach has spoken of Bahrdt with special contempt, the
intention can be appreciated ; but the intended insult may now
serve as a certificate of merit to Bahrdt. Bishop Hurst
solemnly affirms that "What Jeffreys is to the judicial history
of England, Bahrdt is to the religious history of German Pro-
testantism. Whatever he touched was disgraced by the vileness
of his heart and the Satanic daring of his mind" (History of
nationalism, ed. 18G7, p. 119 ; ed. 1901, p. 139). This concern-
ing doctrines of a nearly invariable moral soundness, which
to-day would be almost universally received with approba-
tion. Punjer, who cannot at any point indict the doctrines, falls
back on the professional device of classing them with the " plati-
tudes " of the Aufklcirung ; and, finding this insufficient to
convey a disparaging impression to the general reader, intimates
that Bahrdt, connecting ethic with rational sanitation, "does
not shrink from the coarseness of laying down " a rule for bodily
health, winch Punjer does not shrink from quoting (pp. o49-50).
Finally Bahrdt is dismissed as "the theological public-house-
keeper of Halle." So hard is it for men clerically trained to
attain to a manly rectitude in their criticism of anti-clericals.
Bahrdt was a great admirer of the Gospel Jesus ; so Cairns
(p. 178) takes a lenient view of his life. On that and his
doctrine cp. Hagenbach, pp. 107-10; Punjer, i, 51G-50 ;
Noack, Tli. iii, Kap. 5. Goethe satirized him in a youthful
Prolan, but speaks of him not unkindly in the Wahrheit and
Dichtuwj, As a writer lie is much above the German average.

17. Alongside of these propagators of popular rationalism stood

1 Geacliichte f.ciue.s Li.-Leiw, Kap. 22; ii, '223 sq.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 323

a group of companion deists usually considered together — GOTTIIOLD
Ephbaim Lesslng (1729-1781), Hermann Samuel Reimaeus
(1694-1768), and Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786). The last-
named, a Jew, " lived entirely in the sphere of deism and of natural
religion," ' and sought, like the deists in general, to give religion an
ethical structure ; but he was popular chiefly as a constructive theist
and a defender of the doctrine of immortality on non-Christian lines.
His Phcedon (1767), setting forth that view, had a great vogue.2 One
of His more notable teachings was an earnest declaration against any
connection between Church and State ; but like Locke and Rousseau
he so far sank below his own ideals as to agree in arguing for a State
enforcement of a profession of belief in a God'1 — a negation of his
own plea. With much contemporary popularity, he had no per-
manent influence ; and he seems to have been completely broken-
hearted over Jacobi's disclosure of the final pantheism of Lessing,
for whom he had a great affection.

See the monograph of Rabbi Schreiber, of Bonn, Moses
MendelssoJin's Vcrdienste inn die deutsclie Nation (Zurich, 1880),
pp. 41—12. The strongest claim made for Mendelssohn by
Rabbi Schreiber is that he, a Jew, was much more of a German
patriot than Goethe, Schiller, or Lessing. Heine, however, pro-
nounces that "As Luther against the Papacy, so Mendelssohn
rebelled against the Talmud " {Zur Gcsck. der Rel'uj. unci Philos.
in Deutschland : Werke, ed. 1876, iii, 65).

Lessing, on the other hand, is one of the outstanding figures in
the history of Biblical criticism, as well as of German literature in
general. The son of a Lutheran pastor, Lessing became in a con-
siderable measure a rationalist, while constantly resenting, as did
Goethe, the treatment of religion in the fashion in which he himself
treated non-religious opinions with which he did not agree.'1 It is
clear that already in his student days he had become substantially
an unbeliever, and that it was on this as well as other grounds that
he refused to become a clergyman." Nor was he unready to jeer at

1 Uatir, (lexch. der chr. Kirclie, iv, 507. - Translated into English in 17S9.

:; Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, Abschn. I— Werke, lsis, ]>. ii:i\i (Kn«. tr. 1KW, !>!>• 50-51);
Rousseau, font rut Social, liv. iv, ell. viii, near end; hoeke, as cited above, p. 117.
Cp. Harthohnes.s, Hist. cril. ilea doctr. reliy. de la vliilos. mode rue, lt>55, i, 145; liaur,
as last cited.

* See Ids Werlce, ed. lbW5, v, 317— .-Iks dem Briefe, die. nencslti Literatur helreO'end,
i'.lU-r Hrief.

'•> If Lessins's life were sketched in the spirit in which orthodoxy has handled that
of liahrdt. it could be made unedifyinK enoimli. liven Goethe remarks that Lessini!
"enjoyed himself in a disorderly tavern life" ( H'nh rlteit mid lHchlium, B. viii ; and all
that Hafjenbach maliciously charges against Basedow in the way id irregularity of study-
is true of him. On that and other points, usually closed over, see the ; ketch in Taylor's
Historic Survey uf Herman I'm try, 1S.M), i, :;:iJ :;7. All the while, I..-- in:; is an t- ■ entially
sound-hearted and estimable personality; and he would probably have been the hist man
to echo the tone of the orthodox toward, the personal life of the freethinkers who went
further in unbelief than he.

324 GERMAN FEEETHOUGHT IN THE

the bigots when they chanced to hate where he was sympathetic.1
On the side of religious problems, he was primarily and permanently
influenced by two such singularly different minds as Bayle2 and
Rousseau, the first appealing to and eliciting his keen critical faculty,
the second his warm emotional nature ; and he never quite unified
the result. From first to last he was a freethinker in the sense
that he never admitted any principle of authority, and was stedfastly
loyal to the principle of freedom of utterance. He steadily refused
to break with his freethinking friend Mylius, and he never sought to
raise odium against any more advanced freethinker on the score of
his audacity.8 In his Hamburg ische Dramaturgic, indeed, dealing
with a German play in which Mohammedanism in general, and one
Ismenor in particular, in the time of the Crusades are charged with
the sin of persecution, he remarks that " these very Crusades, which
in their origin were a political stratagem of the popes, developed
into the most inhuman persecutions of which Christian superstition
has ever made itself guilty : the true religion had then the most and
the bloodiest Ismenors." 4 In his early Eettung en (Vindications),
again, he defends the dubious Cardan and impersonally argues the
2)ros and cons of Christianity and Mohammedanism in a fashion
possible only to a skeptical mind.5 And in his youth, as in his last
years, he maintained that " there have long been men who dis-
regarded all revealed religions and have yet been good men.6 In his
youth, however, he was more of a Rousseauist than of an intellectual
philosopher, setting up a principle of "the heart" against every
species of analytic thought, including even that of Leibnitz, which
he early championed against the Wolfian adaptation of it.' The
sound principle that conduct is more important than opinion he was
always apt, on the religious side, to strain into the really contrary
principle that opinions which often went with good conduct were
necessarily to be esteemed. So when the rationalism of the day
seriously or otherwise (in Voltairean Berlin it was too apt to be
otherwise) assailed the creed of his parents, whom he loved and
honoured, sympathy in his case as in Goethe's always predetermined
his attitude;8 and it is not untruly said of him that he did prefer

1 E.g. his fable The Bull and the Calf {Fabeln, ii, 5), apropos of tbc clergy and Bayle.

2 Sime, Life of Lessing. 1877, i, 10-2.

3 E.g. bis early notice of Diderot's Lettre sur les Aveugles. Sime, i, 94.

* Dramaturgic, Stuck 7. 5 Sime, i, 103-109. c Sime, i, 73, 107; ii, 253.

7 In bis Gedanke. iiber die Herrnhuter, written in 1750. See Adolf Stabr's Lessing, sein
Leben und seine Werke, 7te Aufl. ii, 183 sq.

8 Julian Schmidt puts tbe case sympathetically: "He bad learned in his father's
house what value the pastoral function may have for the culture of the people. He was
bibelfest, instructed in tbe history of his church, Protestant in spirit, full of genuine
reverence for Luther, full of high respect for historical Christianity, though on reading
the Fathers he could say hard things of the Church." Gesch. der deutschen Litteratur
von Leibniz bis auf unsere Zeit, ii (ISSti), 326.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 325

the orthodox to the heterodox party, like Gibbon, " inasmuch as the
balance of learning which attracted his esteem was [then] on that
side." ' We thus find him, about the time when he announces to
his father that he had doubted concerning the Christian dogmas,2
rather nervously proving his essential religiousness by dramatically
defending the clergy against the prejudices of popular freethought as
represented by his friend Mylius, who for a time ran in Leipzig a
journal called the Frcigeist — not a very advanced organ.3

Lessing was in fact, with his versatile genius and his vast reading,
a man of moods rather than a systematic thinker, despite his power-
ful critical faculty ; and alike his emotional and his critical side
determined his aversion to the attempts of the " rationalizing "
clergy to put religion on a common-sense footing. His personal
animosity to Voltaire and to Frederick would also influence him ;
but he repugned even the decorous "rationalism " of the theologians
of his own country. When his brother wrote him to the effect that
the basis of the current religion was false, and the structure the
work of shallow bunglers, he replied that he admitted the falsity of
the basis, but not the incompetence of those who built up the system,
in which he saw much skill and address. Shallow bunglers, on the
other hand, he termed the schemers of the new system of com-
promise and accommodation.'1 In short, as he avowed in his
fragment on Bibliolatry, he was always " pulled this way and that "
in his thought on the problem of religion.'5 For himself, lie framed
(or perhaps adopted) a pseudo-theory of the Education of the Human
Race (1730), which lias served the semi-rationalistic clergy of our
own day in good stead ; and adapted Rousseau's catching doctrine
that the true test of religion lies in feeling and not in argument.'
Neither doctrine, in short, has a whit more philosophical value than
the other "popular philosophy" of the time, and neither was fitted
to have much immediate influence ; but both pointed a way to the
more philosophic apologists of religion, while baulking tho orthodox.8
If all this were more than a piece of defensive strategy, it was no
more scientific than the semi-rationalist theology which ho con-
temned. The ' education " theorem, on its merits, is indeed a

i Taylor, as cited, i». 301. '-' Sinie, i, 73.

•'■ Sec Les ;inn's rather crude comedy, Der Freifjrist, ami Kime's Life, i. II 12, 7'2, 77.

1 ('p. Iiis letters to his brother of which extracts arc given by Si inc. n, 101 02.

■' Sinie, li, 1S.S.

r- As to the authorship see Saintes, pp. 101-102 ; and Simo's Lift: of Lessing, i, 201 02,
where the counter-claim is rejected.

7 Zur (ieseluehle mi'l L't'-mtur, aus dein Iten I'.eitr. WerUe. vi. 1 12 «/. See- also in
his Tin- d'xiischi- -it re it eh ri/le,iDm Axiu-nnt't written a.-; tin a Pastor (loe/.c. C'|i. So h war/.,
Le<tsii,'l 'lis Tlif,b,<,ie, I • ,1 p;> I (.; r,l ; and I'liscy, as cited, p. iil. Hate.

M (,'oinp-in tnen ei ol I'u-ej f |ip. a , i.Vii, Cairns ( p. l'.i.j), lla;;enbach pp. 80-07), and
Saintes (p. \{.*) .

326 GERMAN FEEETHOUGHT IN THE

discreditable paralogism ; and only our knowledge of his affectional
bias can withhold us from counting it a mystification. On analysis
it is found to have no logical content whatever. " Christianity "
Lessing made out to he a " universal principle," independent of its
pseudo-historical setting ; thus giving to the totality of the admittedly
false tradition the credit of an ethic which in the terms of the case
is simply human, and in all essentials demonstrably pre-Christian.
His propaganda of this kind squares ill with his paper on The
Origin of Revealed Religion, written about 1860. There he professes
to hold by a naturalist view of religion. All " positive :' or dogmatic
creeds he ascribes to the arrangements that men from time to time
found it necessary to make as to the means of applying " natural "
religion. " Hence all positive and revealed religions are alike true
and alike false ; alike true, inasmuch as it has everywhere been
necessary to come to terms over different things in order to secure
agreement and unity in the public religion ; alike false, inasmuch
as that over which men came to terms does not so much stand close

to the essential {nicht sowohl neben clem Wesentlichen bestcht), but

rather weakens and oppresses it. The best revealed or positive religion
is that which contains the fewest conventional additions to natural
religion; that which least limits the effects of natural religion."1
This is the position of Tindal and the English deists in general; and
it seems to have been in this mood that Lessing wrote to Mendels-
sohn about being able to " help the downfall of the most frightful
structure of nonsense only under the pretext of giving it a new
foundation."2 On the historical side, too, he had early convinced
himself that Christianity was established and propagated " by
entirely natural means"" — this before Gibbon. But, fighter as he
was, he was not prepared to lay his cards on the table in the society
in which he found himself. In his strongest polemic there was
always an element of mystification;' and his final pantheism was
only privately avowed.

It was through a scries of outside influences that ho went so
far, in the open, as he did. Becoming the librarian of the great
Bibliothek of Wolfenbtittel, the possession of the hereditary Prince
(afterwards Duke) of Brunswick, he was led to publish the " Anony-
mous Fragments " known as the Wolfenbilttcl Fragments (1771-1778),

1 S'lnimtlichn Sch rif ten, el. Laehm inn, r-c>7, xi (2), 2i8. Sime (ii, 100) mistranslates
this passage ; anrl Schmidt (ii, 32'i) mutilates it by omissions. Fontancs {Lc Ch ristianisnw
in ' tenia: E'wl". nur Listing. 1 SIT . p. ITU paraphrases it very loosely. - Sime, ii, 190.

a Stalir, ii. 2:59; Sim.', ii. LS9.

4 See Sime, ii, 222, 2i! : Stahr. ii, 2">l. Hattner, an admirer, calls the early Christianity
of Reis'in a piece of sophistical dialectic, Liileraturgcschiclie ilea Ibten Jahrhunderls,
ed. J^72, iii, 533-89.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 327

wherein the methods of the English and French deists are applied
with a new severity to both the Old and. the Now Testament narra-
tives. It is now put beyond doubt that they were the work of
Eeimaeus,1 who had in 1755 produced a defence of "Natural
Religion " — that is, of the theory of a Providence — against La
Mettrie, Maupertuis, and older materialists, which had a great
success in its day." At his death, accordingly, Eeimarus ranked as
an admired defender of theism and of the belief in immortality."
He was the son-in-law of the esteemed scholar Fabricius, and was
for many years Professor of Oriental Languages in the Hamburg
Academy. The famous research which preserves Ids memory was
begun by him at the age of fifty, for his own satisfaction, and was
elaborated by him during twenty years, while he silently endured
the regimen of the intolerant Lutheranism of his day.1 As he left
the book it was a complete treatise entitled An Apology for the
Rational Worshipper of God ; but his son feared to have it published,
though Lessing offered to take the whole risk ; and it was only by
the help of the daughter, Elise Eeimarus,'1 Lessing's friend, that the
fragments came to light. As the Berlin censor would not give
official permission,6 Lessing took the course of issuing them piece-
meal in a periodical scries of selections from the treasures of the
Wolfenbiittel Library, which had privilege of publication. The
first, On the Toleration of Deists, which attracted little notice,
appeared in 1774 ; four more, which made a stir, in 1777 ; and only
in 1778 was "the most audacious of all," On the Aim of Jesus and
his Disciples,' published as a separate book. Collectively they con-
stituted the most serious attack yet made in Germany on the current
creed, though their theory of the true manner of the gospel history
of course smacks of the pro-scientific period. A generation later,
however, they were still the radical book of the anti-supcr-
naturalists "in Germany."

As against miracles in general, the Resurrection in particular,
and Biblical ethics in general, the attack of Rehnarus was
irresistible, but his historical construction is pre-scient ilic. The

1 Kt.si.hr, ii. 21:5. I>.~-inC sai.l the report to this elTeet wslh ii lie; hut. this am! other
mystitieations appear to have been by way of 1 1 ; 1 1 "i i 1 i 1 1 • - bis pronii >■ of sro'irj In the
Reilnsmi family. Cairns, pp. ■>():). -2(r.). (p. l-'iirrsir. Crit. I list . nf I'l rrth in/hi. imlr :<M

'<! See it suialvse-l bv liarlliolmess. llivt. ml. ilrs ilnrl r. nlm. <!>■ hi nhihii. minima;
i. 117 i',7; ami by Sebweil/.er, Thi'Qucy.t <>j tin- Historic ./. -yii\ Itran . ol \'mi I'm urn run ~u
Wrnh i. HtlO.

■ do twii-k. J). 17; I'.arthohne-s, i, ICC. His boo]; was I ra n- lal eil into Kndish i'i'lir
T'riiiciD'd Trnlhi i,( Sntnml lUliijimi Drfritil, ,1 n,i,l I, in tnitm in l',T,i ; inl<, Itnteh in
J7>. : in part into I'n ucli in 171', ; ii ml .even cili lions of the oiicin.il hail appesireil by IT'.'S.

• Ktuhr, ii. '.'II 1 1. ■'■ /■/. ii. '.'IV

i' The tsUetnont that, in l.e i tic's aiv. " in nor lb (li-rniiniy men unv able to think and
write U-i .ly " K'on\ b. arc. Hist, ill .V. T. Crit.. p. Me i lln ..• uiislestdini;.

'■ Con ilrm Zirrrl.r ,/. n , unit ■run r ./„,,,„ ,-, lim in ehweie. IV',s.

N Taj lor, Hixtm; Sura ;/ n/ C.i main Tnnni, i, :;■ :>.

328 GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE

method is, to accept as real occurrences all the non-miraculous
episodes, and to explain them by a general theory. Thus the
appointment of the seventy apostles — a palpable myth — is taken
as a fact, and explained as part of a scheme by Jesus to obtain
temporal power ; and the scourging of the money-changers from
the Temple, improbable enough as it stands, is made still more
so by supposing it to be part of a scheme of insurrection. The
method further involves charges of calculated fraud against the
disciples or evangelists — a historical misconception which
Lessing repudiated, albeit not on the right grounds. See the
sketch in Cairns, p. 197 sq., which indicates the portions of the
treatise produced later by Strauss. Cp. Punjer, i, 550-57 ;
Noack, Th. iii, Kap. 4. Schweitzer (Von Beimarus zit Wrede),
in his satisfaction at the agreement of Reimarus with his own
conception of an " eschatological " Jesus, occupied with "the
last things," gives Reimarus extravagant praise. Strauss rightly
notes the weakness of the indictment of Moses as a worker of
fraud (Voltaire, 2te Ausg. p. 407).

It is but fair to say that Reimarus's fallacy of method, which
was the prevailing one in his day, has not yet disappeared from
criticism. As we have seen, it was employed by Pomponazzi
in the Renaissance (vol. i, p. 377), and reintroduced in the
modern period by Connor and Toland. It is still employed by
some professed rationalists, as Dr. Conybeare. It has, however,
in all likelihood suggested itself spontaneously to many inquirers.
In the Phadrus Plato presents it as applied by empirical
rationalizers to myths at that time.

Though Lessing at many points oppugned the positions of the
Fragments, lie was led into a fiery controversy over them, in which
he was unworthily attacked by, among others, Semler, from whom
he had looked for support ; and the series was finally stopped by
authority. There can now be no doubt that Lessing at heart agreed
with Reimarus on most points of negative criticism,1 but reached a
different emotional estimate and attitude. All the greater is the
merit of his battle for freedom of thought. Thereafter, as a final
check to his opponents, he produced his famous drama Nathan the
Wise, which embodies Boccaccio's story of The Three Rings, and has
ever since served as a popular lesson of tolerance in Germany.'2 In
the end, lie seems to have become, to at least some extent, a pan-
theist;3 but he never expounded any coherent and comprehensive

• Stahr, ii, 253-51.

2 Cp. Introd. to Willis's trans, of Nathan. The play is sometimes attacked as being
grossly unfair to Christianity. (E.g. Crousle, Lessing, 1S63, p. 206.) The answer to this
complaint is given by Sime, ii, 252 sq.

;i See Cairns, Appendix, Note I; Willis, Spinoza, pp. 119-62; Sime, ii, 299-303; and
Stahr, ii, 219-30, giving the testimony of Jacobi. Cp. Punjer, i, 561-85. But Heine
laughingly adjures Moses Mendelssohn, who grieved so intensely over Lessing's Spinozism,
to rest uuiet in his grave ; " Thy nessing was indeed on the way to that terrible error

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 329

set of opinions,1 preferring, as he put it in an oft-quoted sentence,
the state of search for truth to any consciousness of possessing it."

He left behind him, however, an important fragment, which con-
stituted one of his most important services to national culture — his
Xcw Hypothesis concerning the evangelists as merely human
writers." He himself thought that he had done nothing " more
important or ingenious"3 of the kind; and though his results were
in part unsound and impermanent, he is justly to he credited with
the first scientific attempt to deduce the process of composition of
the gospels4 from primary writings by the first Christians. Holding
as he did to the authenticity and historicity of the fourth gospel, he
cannot be said to have gone very deep ; but two generations were to
pass before the specialists got any further. Lessing had shown
more science and more courage than any other pro-Christian scholar
of the time, and, as the orthodox historian of rationalism has it,
" Though he did not array himself as a champion of rationalism, he
proved himself one of the strongest promoters of its reign."5

18. Deism was now as prevalent in educated Germany as in
France or England ; and, according to a contemporary preacher,
" Berliner " was about 1777 a synonym for " rationalist." 6 Wieland,
one of the foremost German men of letters of his time, is known to
have become a deist of the school of Shaftesbury ; ' and in the leading
journal of the day he wrote on the free use of reason in matters of
faith. K Some acts of persecution by the Church show how far the
movement had gone. In 1771 we find a Catholic professor at
Mayence, Lorenzo Isenbiehl, deposed and sent back to the seminary
for two years on the score of " deficient tbeological knowledge,"
because lie argued (after Collins) that the text Isaiah vii, 14 applied
not to the mother of Jesus but to a contemporary of the prophet ;
and when, four years later, he published a book on the same thesis,

but tin- Highest, the Father in Heaven, saved him in time by death. He died a tfood deist,
like thee and Nicolai si nd Teller and the Universal German Library " (Zur Gescli. der llel.
und I'hiios. in beittxehl'iiul, 15. ii, near und.— Werke, ed. 1S70, iii, f>!>).

1 See in SUi.hr. ii, 1-1 S.">, the various characterizations of his indefinite philosophy.
Stahr's own account of him as anticipating the moral philosophy of Kant is as over-
strained as the others, Gastrow, an admirer, expresses wonder [John nn Saldino Sender,
p. IS"*! at the indifference of LessiuM to the critical philosophy in general.

- Shoe, ii, ch, xxix. Hives n Mood survey. ;! Letter to his brother, Feb., 1778.
< Strauss, Dux Leben Jexu (the second) Einleitnna, 5 11.

•' Hurst, Hixtoru of ltntionnlixm. 3rd ed. p. 130. "It was a popular belief, as an orHan
of pious opinion announced to its readers, that at his death the devil came and carried
him away like a second Faust." Sime, ii, 330.

6 Cited by Hurst, Hist, of nationalism, 3rd ed. p, 1 ■-'."">. Outside Berlin, however,
matters went otherwise till late in the century. Kur/, tells m,Vm-/i. tier ileutsehen
Literatiir, ii, 161 h) that "the indifference of the learned towards native literature was
so (jreut that even in the year 17*il Abbt could write that in Kinteln then' was nobody who
knew ' lie names ol .Mows Mendelssohn and Lessing."

V Karl lllllcbrand, Leetu res on Die Hist . of lleriiuin Thoiiilht. ISM), p. WX

- iJrutsrhe Mrrkur, Jan. and March, 17S.S [Werkr. ed. 17117, xmx. 1 1 1 1 : cited by
Stiiudliii, Ofscli. di r Hationalisnius und Sui>ernatitralismus, ls-.it;, p. '233).

330 GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE

in Latin, he was imprisoned. Three years later still, a young Jesuit
of Salzburg, named Steinbuhler, was actually condemned to death
for writing some satires on Roman Catholic ceremonies, and, though
afterwards pardoned, died of the ill-usage he had undergono in
prison. It may have been the sense of danger aroused by such
persecution that led to the founding, in 1780, of a curious society
which combined an element of freethimking Jesuitism with free-
masonry, and winch included a number of statesmen, noblemen, and
professors — Goethe, Herder, and the Duke of Weimar being among
its adherents. But it is difficult to take seriously the accounts given
of the order.2

The spirit of rationalism, in any case, was now so prevalent that
it began to dominate the work of the more intelligent theologians,
to whose consequent illogical attempts to strain out by the most
dubious means the supernatural elements from the Bible narratives'
the name of "rationalism " came to be specially applied,4 that being
the kind of criticism naturally most discussed among the clergy.
Taking rise broadly in the work of Sender, reinforced by that of the
English and French deists and that of Reimarus, the method led
stage by stage to the scientific performance of Strauss and Baur,
and the recent " higher criticism " of the Old and New Testaments.
Noteworthy at its outset as exhibiting the tendency of official
believers to make men, in the words of Lcssing, irrational philo-
sophers by way of making them rational Christians," this order of
" rationalism " in its intermediate stages belongs rather to the
history of Biblical scholarship than to that of freeth ought, since
more radical work was being done by unprofessional writers outside,
and deeper problems were raised by the new systems of philosophy.
Within the Lutheran pale, however, there were some hardy thinkers.
A striking figure of the time, in respect of Ins courage and thorough-
ness, is the Lutheran pastor J. II. SCHULZ,6 who so strongly
combated the compromises of the Semler school in regard to the
Pentateuch, and argued so plainly for a severance of morals from
religion as to bring about his own dismissal (1792). 7 Schulz's

1 Kurtz, Hist, of the Chr. Church. Ens*, tr. 1861, ii. 224.

- T. C. L'erthes, Das Deutsche Htaaisleben vor der Revolution, 262 ?<]., cited by Kalinis
pp. 5S-59.

'■'• See above, pp. 321, 328.

i Kant distinguishes explicitly between "rationalists," as thinkers who would not deny
the possibility of a revelation, and "naturalists," who did. See the Religion innrrhalb
(ley (irenze.n der blossen I'ermuift, Stuck iv. Th. i. This was in fact the standing signifi-
cance of the term in Germany for a generation.

■> better to his brother, February 2, 177-1.

c Known as Zopf-Sclmlz from 1 1 is wearing a pigtail in the fashion then common among
the laity. " An old insolent rationalist." Kurtz calls him (ii, 270).

7 Hagenbach, Kirchengeschiclite, i, 372; Gostwick, pp. 52,51.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 331

Philosophical Meditation on Theology and Religion1 (1784) is indeed
one of the most pronounced attacks on orthodox religion produced
in that age. But it is in itself a purely speculative construction.
Following the current historical method, he makes Closes the child
of the Egyptian princess, and represents him as imposing on the
ignorant Israelites a religion invented by himself, and expressive
only of his own passions. Jesus in turn is extolled in the terms
common to the freethinkers of the age ; hut his conception of God
is dismissed as chimerical ; and Schulz finally rests in tho position
of Edelmann, that the only rational conception of deity is that of
the "sufficient ground of the world," and that on this view no man
is an atheist."

Schulz's dismissal appears to have been one of tho fruits of tho
orthodox edict (17SS) of tho new king, Frederick William II, the
brother of Frederick, who succeeded in 1786. It announced him —
in reality a " strange compound of lawless debauchery and priest-
ridden superstition — as the champion of religion and the enemy
of freethinking ; forbade all proselytizing, and menaced with penalties
all forms of heresy, while professing to maintain freedom of con-
science. The edict seems to have been specially provoked by fresh
literature of a pronouncedly freethinking stamp, though it lays stress
on the fact that " so many clergymen have the boldness to disse-
minate the doctrines of the Socinians, Deists, and Naturalists under
the name of Aufklarung." The work of Schulz would be one of the
provocatives, and there were others. In 1785 had appeared the
anonymous Moroccan Letters," wherein, after the model of the
Persian Letters and others, the life and creeds of Germany are
handled in a quite Voltairean fashion. Tho writer is evidently
familiar with French and English deistic literature, and draws
freely on both, making no pretence of systematic treatment. Such
writing, quietly turning a disenchanting light of common sense on
Scriptural incredibilities and Christian historical scandals, without
a trace of polemical zeal, illustrated at once the futility of Kant's
claim, in the second edition of his Critique of Pure lieason, to
counteract "freethinking unbelief" by transcendental philosophy.
And though the writer is careful to point to the frequent association
of Christian fanaticism with regicide, bis very explicit appeal for a

i philnsoiihiirhi: 11,-lnirhtiui'i iihrr Thi-idnyir und ll,li<v<<n iihrrlfiuv' . <•'"'
Jihlisrhi- insimih rhi-it, 17-1. J l'iitjj.-r. i, Ml l."i.

■ Colnriiluc llinura phia I. it, ruriit. Hi. i\\ !',<>lm <■<]. p. 71.

* Sec tlx- -li-Uils in II:it!<-ril>;Lf')i. Kirr'm ii<i.-srlnrht<\ i, :;.-,- 7 ' : K ilmi '. p. M.

■' Murol-k/niinrhr lirirfr. An* <l-,,i Anihi rhr„. I r.n : ' i l.-n ' ' 17

Li:UurH purport to !><■ written liy one ol tin; Moroerun nnoa- \ at \ i.-ium m IV-.!.

332 GEEMAN FEEETHOUGHT IN THE

unification of Germany,1 his account of the German Protestant
peasant and labourer as the most dismal figure in Germany, Holland,
and Switzerland,2 and his charge against Germans of degrading their
women,3 would not enlist the favour of the authorities for his work.
Within two years (1787) appeared, unsigned, an even more strongly
anti-Christian and anti-clerical work, The In Part Only True System
of the Christian Religion* ascribed to Jakob von Mauvillon,5 whom
we have seen twenty-one years before translating the freethinking
romance of Holberg. Beginning his career as a serious publicist
by translating Eaynal's explosive history of the Indies (7 vols.
1774-78), he had done solid work as a historian and as an economist,
and also as an officer in the service of the Duke of Brunswick and
a writer on military science. The True System is hostile alike to
priesthoods and to the accommodating theologians, whose attempt
to rationalize Christianity on historical lines it flouts in Lessing's
vein as futile. Mauvillon finds unthinkable the idea of a revelation
which could not be universal ; rejects miracles and prophecies as
vain bases for a creed ; sums up the New Testament as planless ;
and pronounces the ethic of Christianity, commonly regarded as its
strongest side, the weakest side of all. He sums up, in fact, in
a logical whole, the work of the English and French deists.6 To
such propaganda the edict of repression was the official answer. It
naturally roused a strong opposition ; ' but though it ultimately
failed, through the general breakdown of European despotisms, it
was not without injurious effect. The first edict was followed in
a few months by one which placed the press and all literature,
native and foreign, under censorship. This policy, which was
chiefly inspired by the new king's Minister of Eeligion, Woellner,
was followed up in 1791 by the appointment of a committee of
three reactionaries — Hermes, Hilmer, and Woltersdorf — who not
only saw to the execution of the edicts, but supervised the schools
and churches. Such a regimen, aided by the reaction against the
Eevolution, for a time prevented any open propaganda on the part
of men officially placed ; and we shall see it hampering and humiliat-
ing Kant ; but it left the leaven of anti-supernaturalism to work all the
more effectively among the increasing crowd of university students.

1 Brief e, xxi. 2 P. 49. 3 P. 232.

i Das zum Theil einzige wahre System cler christlichen Rtligion. It had been composed
in its author's youth under the title False Reasonings of the Christian Religion ; and the
MS. was lost through the bankruptcy of a Dutch publisher.

■> Noack. Th. Ill, Kap. 9, p. 194.

G Mauvillon further collaborated with Mirabeau, and became a great admirer of the
French Revolution. He left freethinking writings among his remains. They are not
described by Noack, and I have been unable to meet with them.

7 It was a test of the deptli of the freethinking spirit in the men of the day. Semler
justified the edict ; liahrdt vehemently denounced it. Hagenbach, i, 372.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 333

Many minds of the period, doubtless, are typified by Herder,
who, though a practising clergyman, was clearly a Spinozistic theist,
accommodating himself to popular Christianity in a genially lati-
tudinarian spirit.1 "When in his youth he published an essay
discussing Genesis as a piece of oriental poetry, not to he treated
as science or theology, he evoked an amount of hostility which
startled him.'2 Learning his lesson, he was for the future guarded
enough to escape persecution. He was led by his own tempera-
mental bias, however, to a transcendental position in philosophy.
Originally in agreement with Kant,3 as against the current meta-
physic, in the period before the issue of the hitter's Critique of Pure
Reason, he nourished his religious instincts by a discursive reading
of history, which he handled in a comparatively scientific yet above
all poetic or theosophic spirit, while Kant, who had little or no
interest in history, developed his thought on the side of physical
science.4 The philosophic methods of the two men thus hecamo
opposed ; and when Herder found Kant's philosophy producing a
strongly rationalistic cast of thought among the divinity students
who came before him for examination, he directly and sharply
antagonized it5 in a theistic sense. Yet his own influence on his
age was on the whole latitudinarian and anti-theological ; he opposed
to the apriorism of Kant the view that the concepts of space and
time are the results of experience and an abstraction of its contents ;
his historic studies had developed in him a conception of the process
of evolution alike in life, opinion, and faculty ; and orthodoxy and
philosophy alike incline to rank him as a pantheist.

19. Meanwhile, the drift of the age of Aufkliirung was apparent
in the practically freethinking attitude of the two foremost men
of letters in the new Germany — GOETHE and SCHILLER. Of the
former, despite t'he bluster of Carlyle, and despite the aesthetic
favour shown to Christianity in Wilhelm Meister, no religious
ingenuity can make more than a pantheist,' who, insofar as he

1 Cp. Crabb Robinson's l>i'ir>/, iii, IS; Martineau, Stuthi of Spinoza, p. :i-\S ; Villi-;,
Sinn,..:. i, pp. K/i-tW. lii-hop Hurst laments [Hint, of Rationalism, 3rd ed. p. It".) that
Herder's early views as to the mission of Christ "were, in common wilii many other
evangelical views, doomed to an unhappy obscuration upon the advance of his later
years by frequent intercourse with more skeptical minds."

- On tii.- clerical opposition to him at Weimar on this score see Diintzcr, I. iff of (So, tin-,
En«. tr. iv,:;. i. :;17.

'■' Cp. Kronen bertf, Herder s 1'liilosophie. nach ihrem Knttcickiluiifisaanu. Isv.l.

4 Kror, .-iii. iii:, p. !X).

5 Stuekeiibei-c, Ln'r of Immamtel Kant, lSvJ, pp. :M S7; Kroiiciil.cn:, H,rd,rs 1'tiilo-
sopliie, pi). !il, l(j:i.

,; Kahilis, ]). 7s, and Krdmann, as there cited. Krdmann linds the panthei in .if Herder
to be. not Spino/l-lic as lie supposed, hut, akin to that ol Kruno and In - Italian ucce-sors.

• Tin; chief sample passages in bis works are the p,.eni has C.ttliehi and tin- pe.cb
of Faust in rej.lv to (iretchen in the Harden scene. It wa - tie urmi . d pantbei in of
Goethe's poem I'mmethi-ut that, according to .lacobi. drew from !.>■■ -in;: Ais avowal of
a pantheistic leaning. The poem has even an alhei ,ih- riu,: ; but we have < ioethe's own

334 GEKMAN FEEETHOUGHT IN THE

touched on Biblical questions, copied the half-grown rationalism
of the school of Semler.1 "The great Pagan" was the common
label among his orthodox or conformist contemporaries.2 As a boy,
learning a little Hebrew, he was already at the critical point of view
in regard to Biblical marvels,3 though he never became a scientific
critic. He has told how, in his youth, when Lavater insisted that
he must choose between orthodox Christianity and atheism, he
answered that, if he were not free to be a Christian in his own
way (wie ich es bislier geliegt hiittc), he would as soon turn atheist
as Christian, the more so as he saw that nobody knew very well
what either signified.4 As he puts it, he had made a Christ and
a Christianity of his own.5 His admired friend Friiulein von
Klettenberg, the " Beautiful Soul " of one of his pieces, told him
that he never satisfied her when he used the Christian terminology,
which he never seemed to get right ; and he tells how ho gradually
turned away from her religion, which he had for a time approached,
in its Moravian aspect, with a too passionate zeal.6 In his letters
to Lavater, he wrote quite explicitly that a voice from heaven would
not make him believe in a virgin birth and a resurrection, such tales
being for him rather blasphemies against the great God and his
revelation in Nature. Thousands of pages of earlier and later
writings, he declared, were for him as beautiful as the gospel.7
Nor did he ever yield to the Christian Church more than a Platonic
amity ; so that much of the peculiar hostility that was long felt for
his poetry and was long shown to his memory in Germany is to be
explained as an expression of the normal malice of pietism against
unbelievers.8 Such utterances as the avowal that he revered Jesus
as he revered the Sun,9 and the other to the effect that Christianity
has nothing to do with philosophy, where Hegel sought to bring it —
that it is simply a beneficent influence, and is not to be looked to for
proof of immortality lu — are clearly not those of a believer. To-day
belief is glad to claim Goethe as a friend in respect of his many
concessions to it, as well as of his occasional flings at more

account of the influence of Spinoza on him from his youth onwards (Wahrheit und
Dichtung, Th. Ill, 15. xiv ; Th. IV, 14. xvi). See also his remarks on the "natural"
religion of "conviction" or rational inference, and that of "faith" (Glaube) or revela-
tionisrn, in B. iv (Werke, ed. 18(5(5, xi, 134); also Kestner's account of his opinions at
twenty-three, in DUntzer's Life, Eng. tr. i, 185; and again his letter to Jacobi, January (i,
1813, quoted by DUntzer, ii. 290.

1 See the Alt-Testametitliche.i Appendix to the West-Oeatliclier Divan.

2 Heine, Zur Gesch, tier litl, a. lJhil. in Deutscltland (Werke, ed. 1876, iii, 9-2).

3 Wahrlieit und Dichtung. Th. I, 15. iv ( Werke, ed. 1880, xi, 1-23).

4 LI. Th. Ill, B. xiv, par. 20 (Werke, xii, 159). '» Id. pp. 165, 186.
c Id. p. 181. "' Cited by liaur, Gench. der chrintl. Kirche, v, 50.

H Compare, as to the hostility he aroused, Diintzer, i, 152, :517. 329-30, -151 ; ii, 291 note,
455. 461 ; Hckermann, Ge.nprdche mit Goethe, Miirz 6, 18:50; and Heine, last cit. p. 93.
u Eckermann, .Miirz 11, 1832. lu Id. Feb. 4, 1829-

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTUEIES 335

consistent freethinkers. But a "great pagan " he remains for the
student. In the opinion of later orthodoxy his " influence on
religion was very pernicious." 1 He indeed showed small concern
for religious susceptibilities when he humorously wrote that from
his youth up ho believed himself to stand so well with his God as
to fancy that he might even "have something to forgive Him."'2

One passage in Goethe's essay on the Pentateuch, appended
to the West-Oestlicher Divan, is worth noting here as illus-
trating the ability of genius to cherish and propagate historical
fallacies. It rims : " The peculiar, unique, and deepest theme
of the history of the world and man, to which all others are
subordinate, is always the conflict of belief and unbelief. All
epochs in which belief rules, under whatever form, are illus-
trious, inspiriting, and fruitful for that time and the future. All
epochs, on the other hand, in which unbelief, in whatever form,
secures a miserable victory, even though for a moment they
may flaunt it proudly, disappear for posterity, because no man
willingly troubles himself with knowledge of the unfruitful "
(first ed. pp. 424-25). Goethe goes on to speak of the four
latter books of Moses as occupied with the theme of unbelief,
and of the first as occupied with belief. Thus his formula was
based, to begin with, on purely fabulous history, into the nature
of which his poetic faculty gave him no true insight. (See
his idyllic recast of the patriarchal history in Th. I, B. iv of
the Wahrheit unci Dichtung.) Applied to real history, his
formula has no validity save on a definition which implies
either an equivoque or an argument in a circle. If it refer,
in the natural sense, to epochs in which any given religion is
widely rejected and assailed, it is palpably false. The Renais-
sance and Goethe's own century were ages of such unbelief ;
and they remain much more deeply interesting than the Ages
of Faith. St. Peter's at Rome is the work of a reputedly
unbelieving pope. If on the other hand his formula be meant
to apply to belief in the sense of energy and enthusiasm, it is
still fallacious. The crusades were manifestations of energy
and enthusiasm ; but they were profoundly " unfruitful," and
they are not deeply interesting. The only sense in which
Goethe's formula could stand would be one in which it is
recognized that all vigorous intellectual life stands for ' belief "
— that is to say, that Lucretius and Voltaire, Paine and
d'llolbach, stand for "belief" when confidently attacking
beliefs. The formula is thus true only in a strained and
non-natural sense ; whereas if is sure to he read and to be
believed, by thoughtless admirers, in its natural and false

1 Hurst, Hint, of Ittitintirtlixin, lir.t c<l. )). i:.().

'<■ Wahrhnt mid hichlunu, Th. Ill, Ji. viii ; \\'erk<\ xi, :;:u.

336 GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE

sense, though the whole history of Byzantium and modern
Islam is a history of stagnant and unfruitful belief, and that
of modern Europe a history of fruitful doubt, disbelief, and
denial, involving new affirmations. Goethe's own mind on the
subject was in a state of verbalizing confusion, the result or
expression of his temperamental aversion to clear analytical
thought (" Above all," he boasts, " I never thought about
thinking ") and his habit of poetic allegory and apriorism.
" Logic was invincibly repugnant to him " (Lewes, Life of
Goethe, 3rd ed. p. 38). The mosaic of his thinking is suffi-
ciently indicated in Lewes's sympathetically confused account
(id. pp. 523-27). Where he himself doubted and denied
current creeds, as in his work in natural science, he was
most fruitful1 (though he was not always right — e.g., his
polemic against Newton's theory of colour) ; and the per-
manently interesting teaching of his Fmist is precisely that
which artistically utters the doubt through which he passed
to a pantheistic Naturalism.

20. No less certain is the unbelief of Schiller (1759-1805), whom
Hagenbach even takes as " the representative of the rationalism of
his age." In his juvenile Bothers, indeed, he makes his worst villains
freethinkers ; and in the preface he stoutly champions religion against
all assailants ; but hardly ever after that piece does he give a favour-
able portrait of a priest.2 He himself soon joined the Aufklarung ;
and all his aesthetic appreciation of Christianity never carried him
beyond the position that it virtually had the tendency (Anlage) to
the highest and noblest, though that was in general tastelessly
and repulsively represented by Christians. He added that in a
certain sense it is the only aesthetic religion, whence it is that it
gives such pleasure to the feminine nature, and that only among
women is it to be met with in a tolerable form.3 Like Goethe, he
sought to reduce the Biblical supernatural to the plane of possibility,4
in the manner of the liberal theologians of the period ; and like him
he often writes as a deist,5 though professedly for a time a Kantist.
On the other hand, he does not hesitate to say that a healthy nature
(which Goethe had said needed no morality, no Natur-recht,6 and no
political metaphysic) required neither deity nor immortality to
sustain it.7

1 Cp., however, the estimate of Krause, ahove, p. 207. Virchow. Guthe als Naturf or seller,
1861, Roes into detail on the biological points, without reaching any general estimate.

'2 Remarked by Hagenbach, tr. p. 238.

8 Letter to Goethe, August 17, 179.5 ( Brief 'weclisel, No. 87). The passage is given in
Carlyle's essay on Schiller. ■" In Die Sendung Moses. 5 See the Philosophische Brief e.

6 Carlyle translates, "No Rights of Man," which was probably the idea.

7 Letter to Goethe, July 9, 1796 (Briefivechsel, No. 188). "It is evident that he was
estranged not only from the church but from the fundamental truths of Christianity"
(Rev. W. Baur, Religious Life of Qermany, Eng. tr. 1872, p. 22). F. C. Baur has a curious

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 337

21. The critical philosophy of IMMANUEL Kant (1724-1804)
may be said to represent most comprehensively the outcome in
German intelligence of the higher freethought of the age, insofar as
its results could be at all widely assimilated. In its most truly
critical part, the analytic treatment of previous theistic systems in
the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), he is fundamentally anti-theo-
logical ; the effect of the argument being to negate all previously
current proofs of the existence and cognizableness of a " supreme
power " or deity. Already the metaphysics of the Leibnitz- Wolff
school were discredited ; l and so far Kant could count on a fair
hearing for a system which rejected that of the schools. Certainly
he meant his book to be an antidote to the prevailing religious
credulity. " Henceforth there were to be no more dreams of ghost -
seers, metaphysicians, and enthusiasts."2 On his own part, however,
no doubt in sympathy with the attitude of many of his readers, there
followed a species of intuitional reaction. In his short essay What
is Freethinking ?6 (1781) he defines Aufklarung or freethinking as
the advance of men from their self-imputed minority"; and
minority " as the inability to use one's own understanding without
another's guidance. " Sapere aude ; dare to use thine own under-
standing," he declares to be the motto of freethought : and he dwells
on the laziness of spirit which keeps men in the state of minority,
letting others do their thinking for them as the doctor prescribes
their medicine. In this spirit he justifies the movement of rational
criticism while insisting, justly enough, that men have still far to go
ere they can reason soundly in all things. If, he observes, ' we ask
whether we live in an enlightened {aufgeklcirt) age the answer is,
No, but in an age of enlightening {aufklarung)." There is still great
lack of capacity among men in general to think for themselves, free
of leading-strings. " Only slowly can a community (Publikum)
attain to freethinking." But he repeats that " the age is the age of
aufklarung, the age of Frederick the Great": and he pays a high
tribute to the king who repudiated even the arrogant pretence of
" toleration," and alone among monarchs said to his subjects,
" Reason as you will ; only obey ! "

But the element of apprehension gained ground in the aging

pane in which he seeks to show that, though Schiller and Goothe cannot be called Chris-
tian in a natural sense, the me was not, made un-Christian by them to such an extent as is
commonly supposed ((reach, der christl. Kir die, v, 46).

1 (.'p. Tieftrunk, as cited by Stuekenbers, Life <>j Immanuel Kant, p. 225.

- f'l.]>..ui;. In his early e-ssay Triiicme einex (Jeixterseherx, erldutert durdi Traume
der Metapliysik (17W) this attitude is clear. It ends with an admiring quotation from
Voltaire's Cundide.

'■'■ lieiintwortung der Frage : Wan iut Aufklarung t in the Berliner Monatsdirift, Dec.
1781, rep. in Kant's Vorziiglidie kleine Hchriften, lbliJ. lid. i.

VOL. II Z

338 GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE

freethinker. In 1787 appeared the second edition of the Critique,
with a preface avowing sympathy with religious as against free-
thinking tendencies ; and in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
he makes an almost avowedly unscientific attempt to restore the
reign of theism on a basis of a mere emotional and ethical necessity
assumed to exist in human nature — a necessity which he never
even attempts to demonstrate. With the magic wand of the
Practical Reason, as Heine has it, be reanimated the corpse of
theism, which the Theoretic Reason had slain.1 In this adjustment
he was perhaps consciously copying Rousseau, who had greatly
influenced him,2 and whose theism is an avowedly subjectivist pre-
dication. But the same attitude to the problem had been substan-
tially adopted by Lessing;8 and indeed the process is at bottom
identical with that of the quasi-skeptics, Pascal, Huet, Berkeley, and
the rest, who at once impugn and employ the rational process,
reasoning that reason is not reasonable. Kant did but set up the
practical" against the "pure" reason, as other theists before him
had set up faith against science, or the " heart " against the " head,"
and as theists to-day exalt the "will" against " knowledge," the
emotional nature against the logical. It is tolerably clear that
Kant's motive at this stage was an unphilosophic fear that
Naturalism would work moral harm4 — a fear shared by him with
the mass of the average minds of his age.

The same motive and purpose are clearly at work in his treatise
on Religion within the bounds of Pure [i.e. Mere] Reason (1792-
1791), where, while insisting on the purely ethical and rational
character of true religion, he painfully elaborates reasons for con-
tinuing to use the Bible (concerning which he contends that, in view
of its practically " godly " contents, no one can deny the possibility of
its being held as a revelation) as " the basis of ecclesiastical instruc-
tion " no less than a means of swaying the populace.5 Miracles, he
in effect avows, are not true ; still, there must be no carping criticism
of the miracle stories, which serve a good end. There is to be no
persecution ; but there is to bo no such open disputation as would
provoke it.fa i\gain and again, with a visible uneasiness, the writer

1 For an able argument vindicating the unity of Kant's system, however, see Prof.
Adamson, The Philosophy of Kant, 1879, p. -11 «;., as against Lange. With the verdict in Die
text compare that of Heine, Zu r Gesch. der lielig. u. Philos. in Deutschland, B. iii ( Werke,
as cited, iii, 81-S2); that of Prof. (>. Santayana, The Life, of Reason, vol. i. 1905, p 01 sq.;
and that of Prof. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison. The Philosophy if Religion in Kant and Hegel,
rej). in vol. entitled The Philosophical Radicals and Other Essays, 1007, pp. -til, '206.

- Stuckcnberg. mi. '±-l~>, 332.

3 Cp.Haym, Herder nach seinem Leben da rgestellt, lS77,i, 33, IS ; Kronenberg, Herder's

Philosophic, p. 10.

4 Op. Hagenbach, Ens. tr. p. 223.

5 Religion innerhalb der Qrenzen der blossen Vernunft, Stiick iii, Abth. i, § 5; Abth. ii
(ed. 1703, pp. 115-16, 188-89). G Work cited, Stuck ii, Abschn. ii, Allg. Anna. p. 10b sq.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTUEIES 339

returns to the thesis that even "revealed" religion cannot do without
sacred hooks which are partly untrue.1 The doctrine of the Trinity
he laboriously metamorphosed, as so many had done before him, and
as Coleridge and Hegel did after him, into a formula of three modes
or aspects of the moral deity" which his ethical purpose required.
And all this divagation from the plain path of Truth is justified in
the interest of Goodness.

All the while the book is from beginning to end profoundly
divided against itself. It indicates disbelief in every one of the
standing Christian dogmas — Creation, Fall, Salvation, Miracles,
and the supernatural basis of morals. The first paragraph of the
preface insists that morality is founded on the free reason, and that
it needs no religion to aid it. Again and again this note is sounded.
" The pure religious faith is that alone which can serve as basis for a
universal Church ; because it is a pure reason-faith, in which every-
one can participate." i But without the slightest attempt at justifi-
cation there is thrown in the formula that " no religion is thinkable
without belief in a future life."4 Thus heaven and hell" and Bible
and church are arbitrarily imposed on the " pure religion " for the
comfort of unbelieving clergymen and the moralizing of life. Error
is to cast out error, and evil, evil.

The process of Kant's adjustment of his philosophy to social
needs as he regarded them is to be understood by following the
chronology and the vogue of his writings. The first edition of
the Critique of Pure Reason " excited little attention " (Stucken-
berg, Life of Kant, p. 308) ; but in 1787 appeared the second
and modified edition, with a new preface, clearly written with a
propitiatory eye to the orthodox reaction. "All at once the
work now became popular, and the praise wras as loud and as
fulsome as at first the silence bad been profound. The literature
of the day began to teem with Kantian ideas, with discussions

of the now philosophy, and with the praises of its author

High officials in Berlin would lay aside the weighty affairs of
Stale to consider the Kritik, and among them were found warm
admirers of flic work and its author." Id. p. 369. Cp. Heine,
licL und Phil. in Deutschland, B. iii- — Werke, iii, 75, 82.

1 /•;.</. Stiick iv, Th. i, preamble (p. 221, ed. cited).

- Ill . Stuck iii . A bth, ii. Alii-;. Amu. : " This belief," lie avows frankly enough, " involves

no mystery " (p. I'i'.n. In a note to the second edition he suenests that there must be a

..'i rea ion for the i lea of a. Trinity, found as it, is iunom; so many uneient and

primitive peoples. The speculation is in itself evasive, lor lie does not slivo the slightest

reason for thinking the (ioths capable of such metaphysic.

;; Stiick iii, Ablli. l, .' r> ; pp. I.'j7, V.i'.K ' Stiick iii, Abth. ii, p. 17H.

■' Kant explicitly concurs in War burton's thesis that the .Jewish lawgiver purposely
omitted all mention ol a future state from tin- I'ontateuch ; since such belief must he
supposed to have been current in Jewry. I'.ut he ejoes further, and pronounces thali
simple Judaism contains "absolutely no reli/;ious belief." To this complexion can
philo-ophic compromise come.

340 GEKMAN FKEETHOUGHT IN THE

This popularity becomes intelligible in the light of the new
edition and its preface. To say nothing of the alterations in
the text, pronounced by Schopenhauer to be cowardly accom-
modations (as to which question see Adamson, as cited, and
Stuckenberg, p. 461, note 94), Kant writes in the preface that
he had been " obliged to destroy knowledge in order to make
room for faith"; and, again, that "only through criticism can
the roots be cut of materialism, fatalism, atheism, freethinking
unbelief {freigeisteriscken Unglauben), fanaticism and super-
stition, which may become universally injurious ; also of
idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous rather to the
Schools, and can hardly reach the general public." (Meiklejohn
mistranslates : " which are universally injurious " — Bohn ed.
p. xxxvii.) This passage virtually puts the popular religion and
all philosophies save Kant's own on one level of moral dubiety.
It is, however, distinctly uncandid as regards the " freethinking
unbelief," for Kant himself was certainly an unbeliever in
Christian miracles and dogmas.

His readiness to make an appeal to prejudice appears again
in the second edition of the Critique when he asks : " Whence
does the freethinker derive his knowledge that there is, for
instance, no Supreme Being?" (Kritik der reinen Vernunft,
Transc. Methodenlehre, 1 H. 2 Absch. ed. Kirchmann, 1879,
p. 587 ; Bohn tr. p. 458.) He had just before professed to be
dealing with denial of the "existence of God" — a proposition
of no significance whatever unless " God " be defined. He now
without warning substitutes the still more undefined expression
"Supreme Being" for "God," thus imputing a proposition
probably never sustained with clear verbal purpose by any
human being. Either, then, Kant's own proposition was the
entirely vacuous one that nobody can demonstrate the impossi-
bility of an alleged undefined existence, or he was virtually
asserting that no one can disprove any alleged supernatural
existence — spirit, demon, Moloch, Krishna, Bel, Siva, Aphrodite,
or Isis and Osiris. In the latter case he would be absolutely
stultifying his own claim to cut the roots of " superstition " and
" fanaticism " as well as of freethinking and materialism ; for, if
the freethinker cannot disprove Jehovah, neither can the Kantist
disprove Allah and Satan ; and Kant had no basis for denying,
as he did with Spinoza, the existence of ghosts or spirits. From
this dilemma Kant's argument cannot be delivered. And as he
finally introduces deity as a psychologically and morally neces-
sary regulative idea, howbeit indemonstrable, lie leaves every
species of superstition exactly where it stood before — every
superstition being practically held, as against " freethinking
unbelief," on just such a tenure.

If he could thus react against freethinking before 1789, he
must needs carry the reaction further after the outbreak of the

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 341

French Revolution ; and his Religion innerhalb der Grcnzcn der
blossen Yernunft (1792-1794) is a systematic effort to draw the
teeth of the Aufklarung, modified only by his resentment of the
tyranny of the political authority towards himself. Concerning
the age-long opposition between rationalism (Verstandcsauf-
klcirung) and intuitionism or emotionalism (Gefiihlsphilosophie),
it is claimed by modern transcendentalists that Kant, or Herder,
or another, has effected a solution on a plane higher than either.
(E.g. Kronenberg, Herder's Philosophic, 1889, p. 6.) The true
solution certainly must account for both points of view — no
very difficult matter ; but no solution is really attained by
either of these writers. Kant alternately stood at the two
positions ; and his unhistorical mind did not seek to unify
them in a study of human evolution. For popular purposes
lie let pass the assumption that a cosmic emotion is a clue to
the nature of the cosmos, as the water-finder's hazel-twig is
said to point to the whereabouts of water. Herder, recognisant
of evolution, would not follow out any rational analysis.

All the while, however, Kant's theism was radically irreconcilable
with the prevailing religion. As appears from his cordial hostility
to the belief in ghosts, he really lacked the religious temperament.
" He himself," says a recent biographer, "was too suspicious of the
emotions to desire to inspire any enthusiasm with reference to his
own heart." This misstates the fact that his ' Practical Reason"
was but an abstraction of his own emotional predilection ; but it
remains true that that predilection was nearly free from the
commoner forms of pious psychosis ; and typical Christians have
never found him satisfactory. " From my heart," writes one of his
first biographers, " I wish that Kant had not regarded the Christian
religion merely as a necessity for the State, or as an institution to
be tolerated for the sake of the weak (which now so many, following
his example, do even in the pulpit), but had known that which is
positive, improving, and blessed in Christianity."2 He had in fact
never kept up any theological study ;'! and his plan of compromise
had thus, like those of Spencer and Mill in a later day, a fatal
unreality for all men who have discarded theology witli a full know-
ledge of its structure, though it appeals very conveniently to tlioso
disposed to retain it as a means of popular influence. All his
adaptations, therefore, failed to conciliate the mass of the orthodox ;
and even after the issue of the second Critique [Kritik der praklischen
Vemunft) ho had been the subject of discussion among the reac-

1 Stuckcnbcrtf. lAff of riniii'iiinH Hunt, p. :j-29.

- Morow ki, / > > rxinUuii'j den Lcbcnx and Cluirnktcrs Tiiunanuel Kant's, 1801, cited by

Stuekenbc.n-J. i>. -YA. '■'• Stuckenben;, pi>. 30'J-GO.

342 GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE

tionists.1 But that Critique, and the preface to the second edition
of the first, were at bottom only pleas for a revised ethic, Kant's
concern with current religion being solely ethical;2 and the force of
that concern led him at length, in what was schemed as a series of
magazine articles,3 to expound his notion of religion in relation to
morals. When he did so he aroused a resentment much more
energetic than that felt by the older academics against his philo-
sophy. The title of his complete treatise, Religion within the
Boundaries of Mere Reason, is obviously framed to parry criticism ;
yet so drastic is its treatment of its problems that the College of
Censors at Berlin under the new theological regime vetoed the
second part. By the terms of the law as to the censorship, the
publisher was entitled to know the reason for the decision ; but on
his asking for it he was informed that " another instruction was on
hand, which the censor followed as his law, but whose contents he
refused to make known."4 Greatly incensed, Kant submitted the
rejected article with the rest of his book to the theological faculty of
his own university of Konigsberg, asking them to decide in which
faculty the censorship was properly vested. They referred the
decision to the philosophical faculty, which duly proceeded to license
the book (1793). As completed, it contained passages markedly
hostile to the Church. His opponents in turn were now so enraged
that they procured a royal cabinet order (October, 1794) charging
him with ' distorting and degrading many of the chief and funda-
mental doctrines of the Holy Scriptures and of Christianity," and
ordering all the instructors at the university not to lecture on the
book/ Such was the reward for a capitulation of philosophy to the
philosophic ideals of the police.

Kant, called upon to render an account of his conduct to the
Government, formally defended it, but in conclusion decorously said :
" I think it safest, in order to obviate the least suspicion in this
respect, as your Royal Majesty's most faithful subject, to declare
solemnly that henceforth I will refrain altogether from all public
discussion of religion, whether natural or revealed, both in lectures
and in writings." After the death of Frederick William II (1797)
and the accession of Frederick William III, who suspended the edict
of 1788, Kant held himself free to speak out again, and published
(1798) an essay on " The Strife of the [University] Faculties,"
wherein he argued that philosophers should be free to discuss all

1 Rtuckenborg, p. 361. 2 Op. F. C. P.anr, Gesch. der christl. Kirche, v, 63-66.

'■'■ The first, on " Radical Evils," appeared in a Berlin monthly in April, 17-J-2, and was
then reprinted separately.

1 Btiuckenberg, p. 361. 5 Ueberweg, ii, 111; Sfcuckenberg, p. 363.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTUKIES 343

questions of religion so long as they did not handle Biblical theology
as such. The belated protest, however, led to nothing. By this
time the philosopher was incapable of further efficient work ; and
when he died in 1S0-4 the chief manuscript he left, planned as a
synthesis of his philosophic teaching, was found to be hopelessly
confused.1

The attitude, then, in which Kant stood to the reigning religion
in his latter years remained fundamentally hostile, from the point
of view of believing Christians as distinguished from that of ecclesi-
astical opportunists. What were for temporizers arguments in
defence of didactic deceit, were for sincerer spirits fresh grounds for
recoiling from the whole ecclesiastical field. Kant must have made
more rebels than compliers by his very doctrine of compliance.
Religion was for him essentially ethic ; and there is no reconciling
the process of propitiation of deity, in the Christian or any other
cult, with his express declaration that all attempts to win God's
favour save by simple right-living are sheer fetichism.2 He thus
ends practically at the point of view of the deists, whose influence
on him in early life is seen in his work on cosmogony.3 He had,
moreover, long ceased to go to church or follow any religious usage,
even refusing to attend the services on the installation of a new
university rector, save when he himself held the office. At the close
of his treatise on religion, after all his anxious accommodations, ho
becomes almost violent in his repudiations of sacerdotalism and
sectarian self-esteem. He did not like the singing in the churches,
and pronounced it more bawling. In prayer, whether public or
private, he had not the least faith ; and in his conversation as well
as his writings he treated it as a superstition, holding that to address
anything unseen would open the way for fanaticism. Not only did
lie argue against prayer ; he also ridiculed it, and declared that a
man would be ashamed to be caught by another in the attitude of
prayer." One of his maxims was that " To kneel or prostrate him-
self on the earth, oven for the purpose of symbolizing to himself
reverence for a heavenly object, is unworthy of man."1 So too ho
held that the doctrine of the Trinity had no practical value, and he
had a "low opinion " of the Old Testament.

Yot his effort at compromise had carried him to positions which
are the negation of some of his own most emphatic ethical teachings.
Like Plato, he is finally occupied in discussing the " right fictions"

1 St 1 •l:-)ln< r;I. |)J) Ml -liOO.

•i It"liui'in iini'.rliulb <l*r (J-rnnxnn /It hlnsxi'n Vsriamft. Stuck iv, 'l'h. 2.

'■'■ ('.]). SMlt:ki:ni)i:r^, [). .',',1 \ Sutil I 'n .'l.jlt;- I 'a Hi soil, a-, ci Lc il.

1 Stuekuuljur::, vi>. :J1U, 310, -JO 1 , ItiS.

344 GEEMAN FEEETHOUGHT IN THE

for didactic purposes. Swerving from thoroughgoing freethought for
fear of moral harm, he ends by sacrificing intellectual morality to
what seems to him social security. His doctrine, borrowed from
Lessing, of a " conceivable " revelation which told man only what he
could find out for himself, is a mere flout to reason. While he
carries his " categorical imperative," or a priori conception of duty,
so extravagantly far as to argue that it is wrong even to tell a false-
hood to a would-be murderer in order to mislead him, he approves
of the systematic employment of the pulpit function by men who do
not believe in the creed they there expound. The priest, with Kant's
encouragement, is to " draw all the practical lessons for his congrega-
tion from dogmas which he himself cannot subscribe with a full con-
viction of their truth, but which he can teach, since it is not altogether
impossible that truth may be concealed therein," while he remains
free as a scholar to write in a contrary sense in his own name. And
this doctrine, set forth in the censured work of 1793, is repeated in
the moralist's last treatise (1798), wherein he explains that the
preacher, when speaking doctrinally, " can put into the passage under
consideration his own rational views, whether found there or not."
Kant thus ended by reviving for the convenience of churchmen, in a
worse form, the medieval principle of a "twofold truth." So little
efficacy is there in a transcendental ethic for any of the actual
emergencies of life.

On this question compare Kant's Beligion innerhalb der
Grenzen der blossen Vemunft, Stuck iii, Abth. i, § 6 ; Stiick iv,
Th. ii, preamble and §§ i, 3, and 4 ; with the essay Ueber ein
vermeintes Becht mis Menschenliebe zu lilgen (1797), in reply to
Constant — rep. in Kant's Vorzilgliche klcine Schriften, 1833,
Bd. ii, and in App. to Rosenkranz's ed. of Werke, vii, 295
— given by T. K. Abbott in his tr. of the Critique of Judgment.
See also Stuckenberg, pp. 341-45, and the general comment of
Baur, Kirchengeschichte des 19 ten Jahrhunderts, 1862, p. 65.
' Kant's recognition of Scripture is purely a matter of expedi-
ence. The State needs the Bible to control the people ; the
masses need it in order that they, having weak consciences, may
recognize their duty ; and the philosopher finds it a convenient
vehicle for conveying to the people the faith of reason. Were
it rejected it might be difficult, if not impossible, to put in its
place another book which would inspire as much confidence."
All the while " Kant's principles of course led him to deny
that the Bible is authoritative in matters of religion, or that

it is of itself a safe guide in morals Its value consists in the

fact that, owing to the confidence of the people in it, reason can
use it to interpret into Scripture its own doctrines, and can thus

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 345

make it the means of popularizing rational faith. If anyone
imagines that the aim of the interpretation is to obtain the real
meaning of Scripture, he is no Kantian on this point " (Stucken-
berg, p. 3-11).

22. The total performance of Kant thus left Germany with
a powerful lead on the one hand towards that unbelief in religion
which in the last reign had been fashionable, and on the other hand
a series of prescriptions for compromise ; the monarchy all the while
throwing its weight against all innovation in doctrine and practice.
In 1799 Fichte is found expressing the utmost alarm at the combina-
tion of the European despotisms to " rout out freethought " ;l and
so strong did the official reaction become that in the opinion of
Heine all the German philosophers and their ideas would have been
suppressed by wheel and gallows but for Napoleon,2 who intervened
in the year 1S05. The Prussian despotism being thus weakened,
what actually happened was an adaptation of Kant's teaching to the
needs alike of religion and of rationalism. The religious world was
assured by it that, though all previous arguments for theism were
philosophically worthless, theism was now safe on the fluid basis of
feeling. On the other hand, rationalism alike in ethics and in
historical criticism was visibly reinforced on all sides. Herder, as
before noted, found divinity students grounding their unbelief on
Kant's teaching. Staudlin begins the preface to his History and
Spirit of Skepticism (1794) with the remark that " Skepticism begins
to be a disease of the age "; and Kant is the last in his list of
skeptics. At the close of the century " the number of Kantian
theologians was legion," and it was through the Kantian influence
that " the various anti-orthodox tendencies which flourished during
the period of Illumination were concentrated in Rationalism" — in
the tendency, that is, to bring rational criticism to bear alike on
history, dogma, and philosophy. Borowski in 1804 complains that
"beardless youths and idle babblers" devoid of knowledge "appeal
to Kant's views respecting Christianity."4 These views, as we have
seen, were partly accommodating, partly subversive in the extreme.
Kant regards Jesus as an edifying ideal of perfect manhood, " belief "
in whom as such makes a man acceptable to God, because of follow-
ing a good model. While he thus treats the historical account of
Jesus as of no significance, except as a shell into which the practical
reason puts the kernel, his whole argument tends to destroy faith

1 Letter of May 22, 1700, reproduced by Heine.

- Zur ihmch. ilir Itil. u. l'hilos. in Veutschland. Werke, as cited, iii, 00, 08.

3 Stuekeiibere;, p. 311. i J,/, p. 357,

346 GERMAN FEEETHOUGHT IN THE

in the historic person of Jesus as given in the gospel, treating the
account itself as something whose truthfulness it is not worth while
to investigate."1 In point of fact we find his devoted disciple
Erhard declaring : " I regard Christian morality as something
which has been falsely imputed to Christianity ; and the existence
of Christ does not at all seem to me to be a probable historical fact "
— this while declaring that Kant had given him " the indescribable
comfort of being able to call himself openly, and with a good con-
science, a Christian."2

While therefore a multitude of preachers availed themselves of
Kant's philosophic licence to rationalize in the pulpit and out of it
as occasion offered, and yet others opposed them only on the score
that all divergence from orthodoxy should be avowed, the dissolution
of orthodoxy in Germany was rapid and general ; and the anti-
supernaturalist handling of Scripture, prepared for as we have seen,
went on continuously. Even the positive disparagement of Chris-
tianity was carried on by Kantian students ; and Hamann, dubbed
" the Magician of the North " for his alluring exposition of emotional
theism, caused one of them, a tutor, to be brought before a clerical
consistory for having taught his pupil to throw all specifically
Christian doctrines aside. The tutor admitted the charge, and with
four others signed a declaration " that neither morality nor sound
reason nor public welfare could exist in connection with Christianity."3
Hamann's own influence was too much a matter of literary talent
and caprice to be durable ; and recent attempts to re-establish his
reputation have evoked the deliberate judgment that he has no
permanent importance.4

Against the intellectual influence thus set up by Kant there was
none in contemporary Germany capable of resistance. Philosophy
for the most part went in Kant's direction, having indeed been so
tending before his day. Eationalism of a kind had already had a
representative in Chr. A. Crusius (1712-1775), who in treatises on
logic and metaphysics opposed alike Leibnitz and Wolff, and taught
for his own part a kind of Epicureanism, nominally Christianized.
To his school belonged Platner (much admired by Jean Paul Eichter,
his pupil) and Tetens, " the German Locke," who attempted a
common-sense answer to Hume. His ideal was a philosophy " at
once intelligible and religious, agreeable to God and accessible to the

1 Stuckenberg, p. 351. "It is only necessary," adds Stuckenberg (p. 46S, note 142), " to
develop Kant's bints in order to get the views of Strauss in bis Lebun Jesu."

- III. p. 375. Erhard stated that Pestalozzi shared his views on Christian ethics.

:; Stuckenberg, p. 358.

4 Cp. Weber, Gesch. der deutschen Literatur, lite Aufl. p. 119; R. Unger, Hamann und
die Aufklariui'j, 1911,

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTUEIES 347

people." ' Platner on the other hand, leaning strongly towards a
psychological and anthropological view of human problems,2 opposed
first to atheism" and later to Kantian theism4 a moderate Pyrrhonic
skepticism ; here following a remarkable lead from the younger
Beausobre, who in 175-3 had published in Erench, at Berlin, a
treatise entitled Le Pyrrhonismc Raisonnable, taking up the position,
among others, that while it is hard to prove the existence of God
by reason it is impossible to disprove it. This was virtually the
position of Kant a generation later ; and it is clear that thus early
the dogmatic position was discredited.

23. Some philosophic opposition there was to Kant, alike on
intuitionist grounds, as in the cases of Ilamann and Herder, and on
grounds of academic prejudice, as in the case of Kraus ; but the
more important thinkers who followed him were all as heterodox as
he. In particular, Joiiaxx Gottlieu Fichte (1762-1814), who
began in authorship by being a Kantian zealot, gave even greater
scandal than the Master had done. Fichte's whole career is a kind
of " abstract and brief chronicle " of the movements of thought in
Germany during his life. In his boyhood, at the public school of
P fort a, we find him and Ids comrades already influenced by the new
currents. " Books imbued with all the spirit of free inquiry were
secretly obtained, and, in spite of the strictest prohibitions, great
part of the night was spent in their perusal. The works of Wieland,
Lessing, and Goethe were positively forbidden ; yet they found their
way within the walls, and were eagerly studied."" In particular,
Fichte followed closely the controversy of Lessing with Goeze ; and
Lessing's lead gave him at once the spirit of freethought, as distinct
from any specific opinion. Never a consistent thinker, Fichte in
bis student and tutorial days is found professing at once determinism
and a belief in " Providence," accepting Spinoza and contemplating
a village pastorate. ,J But while ready to frame a plea for Christianity
on the score of its psychic adaptation to ' the sinner," he swerved
from the pastorate when it came within sight, declaring that ' no
purely Christian community now exists." About the age of
twenty-eight he became an enthusiastic convert to the Kantian
philosophy, especially to the Critique of Practical Ilea son, and
threw over determinism on what appear to bo grounds of empirical
utilitarianism, failing to face the philosophical issue. Within a

i Uartiiolmi1' -. Hi t. frit, rtr* ilnrtr. ri'liij. dr la plains, miidrrnr, 1H55, i, l.'W-lO.
- In den utmli m! a " history ot I) it: human conscience " [S'i'iic An III rajHiloyic, 171)0) Platner
seem- to have n nlici paled the modern scientific approach tu religion.

■■ (i, wriir.hv. iihi r dim At hn.smus, 17->1. ' lull rbtich tlrr Ltujik and Mt'taphytiilc, 1705.

•' W. Smith, Mfiiioir <>> lurhtr, 2nd ed. p. 10.

6 id. pp. hi, i:j, -it), i-'i, ij, etc. ' Itl, pp. 31 :;■").

348 GEEMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE

year of his visit to Kant, however, he was writing to a friend that
" Kant has only indicated the truth, but neither unfolded nor proved
it," and that he himself has " discovered a new principle, from which

all philosophy can easily be deduced In a couple of years we

shall have a philosophy with all the clearness of geometrical demon-
stration." * He had in fact passed, perhaps under Spinoza's influence,
to pantheism, from which standpoint he rejected Kant's anti-rational
ground for affirming a God not immanent in things, and claimed, as
did his contemporaries Schelling and Hegel, to establish theism on
rational grounds. Kejecting, further, Kant's reiterated doctrine that
religion is ethic, Fichte ultimately insisted that, on the contrary,
religion is knowledge, and that " it is only a currupt society that
has to use religion as an impulse to moral action."

But alike in his Kantian youth and later he was definitely
anti-revelationist, however much he conformed to clerical prejudice
by attacks upon the movement of freethought. In his " wander-
years " he writes with vehemence of the " worse than Spanish
inquisition " under which the German clergy are compelled to
cringe and dissemble," partly because of lack of ability, partly
through economic need.2 In his Versuch einer Kritik oiler Offen-
barung ("Essay towards a Critique of all Revelation"), published
with some difficulty, Kant helping (1792), he in effect negates the
orthodox assumption, and, in the spirit of Kant and Lessing, but
with more directness than they had shown, concludes that belief in
revelation is an element, and an important element, in the moral
education of humanity, but it is not a final stage for human thought." *
In Kant's bi-frontal fashion, he had professed4 to " silence the
opponents of positive religion not less than its dogmatical defenders ";
but that result did not follow on either side, and ere long, as a
professor at Jena, he was being represented as one of the most
aggressive of the opponents. Soon after producing his Critique of
ail Revelation he had published anonymously two pamphlets vindi-
cating the spirit as distinguished from the conduct of the French
Revolution ; and upon a young writer known to harbour such ideas
enmity was bound to fall. Soon it took the form of charges of
atheism. It does not appear to be true that he ever told his
students at Jena : " In five years there will be no more Christian
religion: reason is our religion ";'"' and it would seem that the first

1 Smith, p. 94. 2 Id. p. 34.

3 Adamson, Fichte, 1881, p. 32; Smith, as cited, pp. 61-65

4 Lietter to Kant, cited by Smith, p. 63.

5 Asserted by Stuckenberg, Life of Kant, p. 386.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 349

charges of atheism brought against him were purely malicious.1
But his career henceforth was one of strife and friction, first with
the student-blackguardism which had been rife in the German
universities ever since the Thirty Years' War, and which he partly
subdued; then with the academic authorities and the traditionalists,
who, when he began lecturing on Sunday mornings, accused him of
attempting to throw over Christianity and set up the worship of
reason. He was arraigned before the High Consistory of Weimar
and acquitted ; but his wife was insulted in the streets of Jena ; his
house was riotously attacked in the night ; and he ceased to reside
there. Then, in his Wissenschaftslehre (" Doctrine of Knowledge,"
1794-95) he came into conflict with the Kantians, with whom his
rupture steadily deepened on ethical grounds. Again he was accused
of atheism in print ; and after a defence in which he retorted the
charge on the utilitarian theists he resigned.

In Berlin, where the new king held the old view that the wrongs
of the Gods were the Gods' affair, he found harbourage ; and sought
to put himself right with the religious world by his book Die
Bestimmung des Menschen ("The Vocation of Man," 1800), wherein
he speaks of the Eternal Infinite Will as regulating human reason
so far as human reason is right — the old counter-sense and the old
evasion. By this book he repelled his rationalistic friends Schelling
and the Schlegels ; while his religious ally Schleiermacher, who
chose another tactic, wrote on it a bitter and contemptuous review,
and " could hardly find words strong enough to express his
detestation of it."2 A few years later Fichte was writing no less
contemptuously of Schelling ; and in his remaining years, though
the Napoleonic wars partly brought him into sympathy with his
countrymen, from whom he had turned away in angry alienation,
he remained a philosophic Ishmael, warring and warred upon all
round. He was thus left to figure for posterity as a religionist
" for his own hand," who rejected all current religion while angrily
dismissing current unbelief as " freethinking chatter."' If Ids philo-
sophy be estimated by its logical content as distinguished from its
conflicting verbalisms, it is fundamentally as atheistic as that of
Spinoza.1 That he was conscious of a vital sunderance between his

1 Op. Robins. A lii'd nrr of the Faith, 1SC2, pt. i, pp. 132-33 ; Adamson, Fichte, pp. 50-67;
W. Smith. Memoir of Fichte, pp. 100-107.

- Adam-.on. pp. 71. 7.'i.

:; (irintdxii'/e. <l>-. '/e'lenwo rtigen Zeitallers, Kite Vorlcs. cd. 1m).;, pp. SOO-.MO.

1 Compare tin- complaints of Hurst,, Hist, of Itntioii/ilixiii, 3rd cd. pp. 13li-37. and of
Coleridge, Jliht/rnjihifi Litem riu, Holm cd. p. 72. Kiehte's theory, says Coleridge (after
praising him as the destroyer of Spino/.isni), " degenerated into a crude ruoismiix, a
boastful and hyperstoie hostility to Nature, as lifeless, godless, and altogether unholy,

350 GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE

thought and that of the past is made clear by his answer, in 1805,
to the complaint that the people had lost their "religious feeling"
(Beligiositdt). His retort is that a new religious feeling has taken
the place of the old j1 and that was the position taken up by the
generation which swore by him, in the German manner, as the last
had sworn by Kant.

But the successive philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and
Hegel, all rising out of the " Illumination " of the eighteenth
century, have been alike impermanent. Nothing is more remark-
able in the history of thought than the internecine strife of the
systems which insisted on " putting something in the place " of
the untenable systems of the past. They have been but so many
" toppling spires of cloud." Fichte, like Herder, broke away from
the doctrine of Kant ; and later became bitterly opposed to that of
his former friend Schelling, as did Hegel in his turn. Schleier-
macher, hostile to Kant, was still more hostile to Fichte ; and
Hegel, detesting Schleiermacher2 and developing Fichte, give rise
to schools arrayed against each other, of which the anti-Christian
was by far the stronger. All that is permanent in the product of
the age of German Rationalism is the fundamental principle upon
which it proceeded, the confutation of the dogmas and legends of
the past, and the concrete results of the historical, critical, and
physical research to which the principle and the confutation led.

21. It is true that the progressive work was not all done by the
Rationalists so-called. As always, incoherences in the pioneers led
to retorts which made for rectification. One of the errors of bias of
the early naturalists, as we have noted, was their tendency to take
every religious document as genuine and at bottom trustworthy,
provided only that its allegations of miracles were explained away
as misinterpretations of natural phenomena. So satisfied were
many of them with this inexpensive method that they positively
resisted the attempts of supernaturalists, seeking a way out of their
special dilemma, to rectify the false ascriptions of the documents.
Bent solely on one solution, they were oddly blind to evidential
considerations which pointed to interpolation, forgery, variety of
source, and error of literary tradition ; while scholars bent on saving
" inspiration " were often ready in some measure for such recogni-
tions. These arrests of insight took place alternately on both sides,
in the normal way of intellectual progress by alternate movements.

while his religion consisted in the assumption of a mere ordo orrtinans, which we were
permitted exoterice to call God." Heine Us last cited, p. 75) insists that Fichte's Idealism
is " more Godless than the crassest Materialism."

1 (Jrundziioe, as cited, p. 50J. - Cp. fcieth Pringle-Pattison, as cited, p. 2S0, note.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 351

All the while, it is the same primary force of reason that sets up
the alternate pressures, and the secondary pressures are generated
by, and are impossible without, the first.

25. The emancipation, too, was limited in area in the German-
speaking world. In Austria, despite a certain amount of French
culture, the rule of the Jesuits in the eighteenth century was too
effective to permit of any intellectual developments. Maria Theresa,
who knew too well that the boundless sexual licence against which
she fought had nothing to do with innovating ideas, had to issue
a special order to permit the importation of Montesquieu's Esprit
des Lois ; and works of more subversive doctrine could not openly
pass the frontiers at all. An attempt to bring Lessing to Vienna in
1 7 7 i , with a view to founding a new literary Academy, collapsed
before the opposition ; and when Prof. Jahn, of the Vienna
University — described as " freethinking, latitudinarian, anti-super-
naturalistic " — developed somewhat anti-clerical tendencies in his
teaching and writing, he was forced to resign, and died a simple
Canon.1 The Emperor Joseph II in his day passed for an
unbeliever ; but there was no general movement. Austria, in
a time of universal effervescence, produced only musicians, and
showed zest only for pleasure."8 Yet among the music-makers
was the German-born Beethoven, the greatest master of his age.
Kindred in spirit to Goethe, and much more of a revolutionist than
he in all things, Beethoven spent the creative part of his life at
Vienna without ceasing to be a freethinker.4 " Formal religion he
apparently had none." He copied out a kind of theistic creed
consisting of three ancient formulas : " I am that which is ": I am
all that is, that was, that shall be ": " He is alone by Himself ; and
to Him alone do all things owe their being." Beyond this his
beliefs did not go. When his friend Moscheles at the end of his
arrangement of Fidclio wrote : " Fine, with God's help," Beethoven
aided, "O man, help thyself."" His reception of the Catholic
sacraments in extremis was not his act. lie had left to mankind
a purer and a more lasting gift than either the creeds or the
philosophies of his age.

1 Kurtz, Hist, of the Clir. Church, EnR.tr. 1801, ii, 225. Jahn was well in advance of

his ;■.:;<■ in his explanation of .Joshua's cosmic miracle as tin: mistaken literalizin^ of a
' |Kicti<; pJini i'. Sec tin- passage in his Introduction to the Jiook of .Joshua, cited
by ltowlai : William , Tin ■ H'-hn-W l'n;,hvts, ii (l.sTl), HI. note Si.

- It. N. I Jain, (iiisturiis \'a a Hurl his Co/ltcm/iora rics. [S'JI, i, -Jm lis.

■"■ A. Sorel, /,' Eiirni,!'. ft la real ution fm nniisc. i (ISsfij, p. 15s,

4 Sen artirh-s on Ueeihoven by Maci'arren in Dictionary of Universal liivj rapliy, and
by drove in the Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

5 Clrovc, art. cited, ed. I'JOl, i, :2:il.

Chapter XIX

FEEETHOUGHT IN THE EEMAINING EUEOPEAN

STATES

§ 1. Holland

HOLLAND, so notable for relative hospitality to freethinking in the
seventeenth century, continued to exhibit it in the eighteenth,
though without putting forth much native response. After her
desperate wars with Louis XIV, the Dutch State, now monarchically
ruled, turned on the intellectual side rather to imitative belles lettres
than to the problems which had begun to exercise so much of
English thought. It was an age of " retrogression and weakness." 1
Elizabeth Wolff, nee Bekker, one of the most famous of the
numerous Dutch women-writers of the century (1738-1804), is
notable for her religious as well as for her political liberalism ; 2 but
her main activity was in novel-writing ; and there are few other
signs of freethinking tendencies in popular Dutch culture. It was
impossible, however, that the influences at work in the neighbouring
lands should be shut out ; and if Holland did not produce innovating
books she printed many throughout the century.

In 1708 there was published at Amsterdam a work under the
pseudonym of " Juan di Posos," wherein, by way of a relation of
imaginary travels, something like atheism was said to be taught ;
but the pastor Leenhof had in 1703 been accused of atheism for his
treatise, Heaven on Earth, which was at most Spinozistic.3 Even
as late as 1714 a Spinozist shoemaker, BOOMS, was banished for
his writings ; but henceforth liberal influences, largely traceable to
the works of Bayle, begin to predominate. Welcomed by students
everywhere, Bayle must have made powerfully for tolerance and
rationalism in his adopted country, which after his time became a
centre of culture for the States of northern Europe rather than a
source of original works. Holland in the eighteenth century was
receptive alike of French and English thought and literature,

1 .Tonckbloet, Reknopte Geschicdenis cler nederl. Lctterkunde, ed. 1880, p. 282.

2 11. pp. 315-16.

3 Cp. Trinius, Frcydenker-Lexicon, pp. 336-37 ; Colerus, Vie de Sirinoza, as cited, p. lviii.

352

FREETHOUGHT IN HOLLAND 353

especially the former;1 and, besides reprinting many of the French
deists' works and translating some of the English, the Dutch cities
harboured such heretics as the Italian Alberto Eadicati, Count
PASSERANO, who, dying at Rotterdam in 1736, left a collection of
deistic treatises of a strongly freethinking cast to be posthumously
published.

The German traveller Alberti,2 citing the London Magazine, 1732,
states that Passerano visited England and published works in
English through a translator, Joseph Morgan, and that both were
sentenced to imprisonment. This presumably refers to his anony-
mous Philosophical Dissertation upon Death, "by a friend to truth,"
published in English in 1732.'' It is a remarkable treatise, being
a hardy justification of suicide, "composed for the consolation of
the unhappy," from a practically atheistic standpoint. Two years
earlier he had published in English, also anonymously, a tract
entitled Christianity set in a True Light, by a Pagan Philosopher
newly converted; and it may be that the startling nature of the
second pamphlet elicited a prosecution which included both. The
pamphlet of 1730, however, is a eulogy of the ethic of Jesus, who
is deistically treated as a simple man, but with all the amenity
which the deists usually brought to bear on that theme. Passerano's
Recueil des pieces curieuscs sur les maticres les plus intcressants,
published with his name at Rotterdam in 1736, 4 includes a transla-
tion of Swift's ironical Project concerning babies, and an Histoirc
abregec de la profession sacerdotale, which was published in a
separate English translation.0 Passerano is noticeable chiefly for
the relative thoroughness of his rationalism.0 In the Recueil he
speaks of deists and atheists as being the same, those called atheists
having always admitted a first cause under the names God, Nature,
Eternal Germs, movement, or universal soul.7

In 1737 was published in French a small mystification con-
sisting of a Sermon preche dans la grande Assemblee des Quakers

1 See Texte, Ron sura it and. the Cosmopolitan Spirit, Eng. tr. p. 29.

- liriefe, ]-:,2. p. 431.

•"■ Tliis is the basis of l'ope"s reference to "illustrious Passoran " in his Epilogue In the
Satires, lT.'JS, ii. l-.il. Tim Rev. J. Bramstone's satire, The Wt.n of Taste (ITS.)), spells the
name " I'a-aran," whence may he interred Die extent of the satirist's knowledge of his topic.

: Ueprinti Lin French, at London in 1749, in a more complete and correct edition,
publi-hcrl by J. Brindley.

5 The copy in the Briti-.ii Museum is dated 17:37, and the title-page describes Passerano
as "a l'iemonta -e exile now in Holland, a Christian Freethinker." It is presumably
a re-i-sue.

r' Warburton in a note on Pope (Epiloaite, as cited) characteristically alleges that

I'a erano had been bani-died from Piedmont "for his impieties, and lived in tile utmost

mi cry, yet fearer] to practise his own precepts ; anil at last died a peni tent." The source
ol the e allegations may -i-rvc as warrant for disbelieving I hem, Warburton, it will bo
ob if r veil, ays nothing of an impribonment in Luglaud.

7 London ed. 1719, pp. -1 1 ±:>.

VOL. n 2a

354 SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTUEIES

de Londres, par Ie fameux Frere E. E., and another little tract,
La Religion Muhamedane compare' e a la paienne de Vlndostan,
par Ali-Ebn-Omar. " E. E." stood for Edward Elwall, a well-
known Unitarian of the time, who, as we saw, was tried at
Stafford Assizes in 1726 for publishing a Unitarian treatise, and
who in 1742 published another, entitled The Supernatural

Incarnation of Jesus Christ proved to be false and that our

Lord Jesus Christ was the real son of Joseph and Mary. The
two tracts are both by Passerano, and are on deistic lines,
the text of the Sermon being (in English) " The Eeligion of the
Gospel is the true Original Eeligion of Eeason and Nature."
The proposition is of course purely ethical in its bearing.

The currency given in Holland to such literature tells of growing
liberality of thought as well as of political freedom. But the con-
ditions were not favourable to such general literary activity as
prevailed in the larger States, though good work was done in
medicine and the natural sciences. Not till the nineteenth century
did Dutch scholars again give a lead to Europe in religious thought.

§ 2. The Scandinavian States

1. Traces of new rationalistic life are to be seen in the Scan-
dinavian countries at least as early as the times of Descartes.
There, as elsewhere, the Eeformation had been substantially a fiscal
or economic revolution, proceeding on various lines. In Denmark
the movement, favoured by the king, began among the people ; the
nobility rapidly following, to their own great profit ; and finally
Christian III, who ruled both Denmark and Norway, acting with
the nobles, suppressed Catholic worship, and confiscated to the
crown the "castles, fortresses, and vast domains of the prelates."1
In Sweden the king, Gustavus Vasa, took the initiative, moved by
sore need of funds, and a thoroughly anti-ecclesiastical temper,2 the
clergy having supported the Danish rule which he threw off. The
burghers and peasants promptly joined him against the clergy and
nobles, enabling him to confiscate the bishops' castles and estates,
as was done in Denmark ; and he finally secured himself with the
nobles by letting them reclaim lands granted by their ancestors to
monasteries.3 His anti-feudal reforms having stimulated new life
in many ways, further evolution followed.

In Sweden the stimulative reign of Gustavus Vasa was followed

1 Koch, Histor. View of the European Nations, Eng. tr. 3rd ed. p. 103. Cp. Crichton
and Wheaton, ScaJidinavia, 1837, i, 383-96 ; Otte, Scandinavian History, 1874, pp. 222-24 ;
Villiers, Essay on the Eeformation, Eng. tr. 1S36, p. 10j. But cp. Allen, Histoire de
Danemork, Fr. tr. i, 208-300.

2 Otte, pp. 232-36; Criohton-Wheaton, i, 398-100; Geijer, Hist, of the Swedes, Eng. tr. i, 125.
s Koch, p. 104; Geijer, i, 129.

THE SCANDINAVIAN STATES 355

by a long period of the strife which everywhere trod on the heels of
the Reformation. The second successor of Gustavus, his son John,
had married a daughter of the Catholic Sigismund of Poland, and
sought to restore her religion to power, causing much turmoil until
her death, whereafter he abandoned the cause. His Catholic son
Sigismund recklessly renewed the effort, and was deposed in conse-
quence ; John's brother Charles becoming king. In Denmark,
meanwhile, Frederick II (d. 1588) had been a bigoted champion of
Luthoranism, expelling a professor of Calvinistic leanings on the
Eucharist, and refusing a landing to the Calvinists who fled from
the Netherlands. On the other hand he patronized and pensioned
Tycho Brahe, who, until driven into banishment by a court cabal
during the minority of Christian IV, did much for astronomy,
though unable to accept Copernicanism.

In 1G11 there broke out between Sweden and Denmark the
sanguinary two-years' " War of Calmar," their common religion
availing nothing to avert strife. Thereafter Gustavus Adolphus of
Sweden, as Protestant champion in the Thirty Years' War, in
succession to Christian IV of Denmark, fills the eye of Europe till
his death in 1632 ; eleven years after which event Sweden and
Denmark were again at war. In 1660 the latter country, for lack
of goodwill between nobles and commoners, underwent a political
revolution whereby its king, whose predecessors had held the crown
on an elective tenure, became absolute, and set up a hereditary line.
The first result was a marked intellectual stagnation. " Divinity,
law, and philosophy were wholly neglected ; surgery was practised
only by barbers ; and when Frederick IV and his queen required
medical aid, no native physician could be found to whom it was

deemed safe to entrust the cure of the royal patients The only

name, after Tycho Brahe, of which astronomy can boast, is that of
Peter Horrebow, and with him the cultivation of the science
became extinct," '

2. For long, the only personality making powerfully for culture
was riOLBERG,2 certainly a host in himself. Of all the writers of
his age, the only one who can be compared with him in versatility
of power is Voltaire, whom lie emulated as satirist, dramatist, and
historian ; but all his dramatic genius could not avail to sustain
against the puritanical pietism which then flourished, the Danish

1 Criohton-Wheaton, ii. 'Ml.

- I.ir.'.i:' Hoiben,'. liaron Holberfi, horn nt Her«nn, Norway, liM. After a youth of
poverty and :;'•:■ hi' I'Uli'.l at Copenhagen in 17H.ii-, professor of metaphysics, and
attained the chair of eloquence in 17-0. Made liarou by Kin:: Frederick V of Denmark at
In-, accession in 1717. I). 1751.

356 SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

drama of which he was the fecund creator. After producing a
brilliant series of plays (1722-1727) he had to witness the closing
of the Copenhagen Theatre, and take to general writing, historical
and didactic. In 1741 he produced in Latin his famous Subterranean
Journey of Nicolas Klimius, one of the most widely famous perform-
ances of its age.2 He knew English, and must have been influenced
by Swift's Gulliver's Travels, which his story frequently recalls.
The hero catastrophically reaches a " subterranean " planet, with
another social system, and peopled by moving trees and civilized
and socialized animals. With the tree-people, the Potuans, the tale
deals at some length, giving a chapter on their religion,3 after the
manner of Tyssot de Patot in Jacques Masse. They are simple
deists, knowing nothing of Christianity ; and the author makes
them the mouthpieces of criticisms upon Christian prayers, Te
Deums, and hymn-singing in general. They believe in future recom-
penses, but not in providential government of this life ; and at various
points they improve upon the current ethic of Christendom.4

There is a trace of the tone of Frederick alike in the eulogy of
tolerance and in the intimation that anyone who disputes about
the character of the deity and the properties of spirits or souls is
" condemned to phlebotomy " and to be detained in the general
hospital {iiosocomium) ." It was probably by way of precaution that
in the closing paragraph of the chapter the Potuans are alleged to
maintain that, though their creed " seemed mere natural religion, it
was all revealed in a book which was sent from the sky some
centuries ago "; but the precaution is slight, as they are declared to
have practically no dogmas at all. It is thus easy to read between
the lines of the declaration of Potuan orthodoxy : " Formerly our
ancestors contented themselves to live in natural religion alone ;
but experience has shown that the mere light of nature does not
suffice, and that its precepts are effaced in time by the sloth and
negligence of some and the philosophic subtleties of others, so that
nothing can arrest freethinking (libertatcm cocjitandi) or keep it
within just bounds. Thence came depravation ; and therefore it
was that God had chosen to give them a written law."6 Such a
confutation of " the error of those who pretend that a revelation
is unnecessary " must have given more entertainment to those in

1 Nicolai Kliinii Iter Subterraneum novam telluris theoriam ac historiam quintcr.

monarchies exhibens, etc. Dr. Gosse, in art. Holbekg, Encyc. Brit., makes the mistake

of calling the book a poem. It is in Latin prose, with verse passages.

2 It was published thrice in Danish, ten times in German, thrice in Swedish, thrice in
Dutch, thrice in English, twice in French, twice in Russian, and once in Hungarian.

B Cap. vi, De reliyione genti* Potnance. > Cp. pp. 75-7S, ed. 1751.

5 Cap. vi, p. 69 ; cp. cap. viii, Be Academia, p. 101. 6 Id. p. 77.

THE SCANDINAVIAN STATES 357

question than satisfaction to the defenders of the faith. But a
general tone of levity and satire, maintained at the expense of
various European nations, England included,1 together with his
popularity as a dramatist, saved Holberg from the imputation of
heresy. His satire reached and was realized by the cultured few
aloDc : the multitude was quite unaffected ; and during the reign of
Christian VI all intellectual efforts beyond the reign of science were
subjected to rigorous control.2 As a culture force, Protestantism had
failed in the north lands as completely as Catholicism in the south.

3. In Sweden, meantime, there had occurred some reflex of the
intellectual renascence. Towards the middle of the seventeenth
century there are increasing traces of rationalism at the court of the
famous Christina, who already in her youth is found much interested
in the objections of "Jews, heathens, and philosophers against
Christian doctrine " ; and her invitation of Descartes to her court
(1649) implies that Sweden had been not a little affected by the
revulsion of popular thought which followed on the Thirty Years'
War in Germany. Christina herself, however, was a remarkable
personality, unfeminine, strong-willed, with a vigorous but immature
intelligence ; and she did much of her early skeptical thinking for
herself. In the course of a few7 years, the newT spirit had gone so far
as to make church-going matter for open scoffing at the Swedish
court;4 and the Queen's adoption of Romanism, for which she
prepared by abdicating the crown, appears to have been by way of
revulsion from a state of mind approaching atheism, to which she
had been led by her freethinking French physician, Bourdelot, after
Descartes's death." It has been confidently asserted that she really
cared for neither creed, and embraced Catholicism only by way of con-
formity for social purposes, retaining her freethinking views.0 It is
certain that she was always unhappy in her Swedish surroundings.
But her course may more reasonably be explained as that of a mind
which could not rest in deism or face atheism, and sought in Catho-
licism the sense of anchorage which is craved by temperaments ill-
framed for the discipline of reason. The author of the Illstoire des
intrigues (jalantcs dc la rcinc Christine de Suede (1697), who seems to
have been one of her suite, insists that while she loved bigots no
more than atheists,'" and although her religion had been shaken in

i He hurl vi; ited K i: :'ht rid in his youth.

- Crichton-Wlieaton, ii, :;i-i. On p. 15!) a sonicwlmt contrary statement is made, which
ohscnres the facts. Cp. Schlo ,ser, iv, l:;, as to Christian's lnarlinet methods.
'■■ (ieijer, i. \V1\. ' hi. p. :ii:i ; Otte, p. W-i.

5 (Jeijer, i, IS! '.. f.'p. Itanke, Hist, nf llir Popes, Em,*, tr. ed. 1908, ii, IJ'.K) ; iii, 3-1.1 lii.
c Crichton-Whoaton, ii, bti b'J, and rets. ' Cp. liauko, as cited, ii, 107.

358 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

her youth by Bourdelot and other freethinkers, she was regular in all
Catholic observances ; and that once, looking at the portrait of her
father, sbe said he had failed to provide for the safety of his soul,
and thanked God for having guided her aright.1

Her annotations of Descartes are of little importance ; but it is
noteworthy that she accorded to his orthodox adherents a declara-
tion that he had " greatly contributed " to her " glorious conversion "
to the Catholic faith.2 Whatever favour she may have shown to
liberty of thought in her youth, no important literary results could
follow in the then state of Swedish culture, when the studies at even
the new colleges were mainly confined to Latin and theology.3 The
German Pufendorf, indeed, by his treatises On the Law of Nature
and Nations and On the Duty of Man and Citizen (published at
Lund, where he was professor, in 1672-73), did much to establish
the utilitarian and naturalistic tendency in ethics which was at work
at the same time in England ; but his latent deism had no great influ-
ence even in Germany, his Scripture-citing orthodoxy countervailing
it, although he argued for a separation of Church and State.4

4. That there was, however, in eighteenth-century Sweden a con-
siderable amount of unpublished rationalism may be gathered from
the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, himself something of a free-
thinker in his very supernaturalism. His frequent subacid allusions
to those who " regarded Nature instead of the divine," and " thought
from science,"5 tell not merely of much passive opposition to his own
prophetic claims (which he avenged by much serene malediction and
the allotment of bad quarters in the next world), but of reasoned
rejection of all Scriptural claims. Thus in his Sapientia Angelica de
Divina Providentia6 (17G-A) he sets himself to deal with a number
of the ways in which " the merely natural man confirms himself in
favour of Nature against God" and "comes to the conclusion that
religion in itself is nothing, but yet that it is necessary because it
serves as a restraint." Among the sources of unbelief specified are
ethical revolt alike against the Biblical narratives and against the
lack of moral government in the world ; the recognition of the
success of other religions than the Christian, and of the many

. She was, in fact, a neurotic egoist. Cp. Ranke, ii, 394, 405.
'2 Bouillier, Hist, de la philoa. ca rtes., i, 4 19-50. 3 Geijer, i, 312.

4 See his treatise, Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion in Reference to Civil
Society. Eng. tr. by Crull, 1698.

5 Heaven and Hell, 1758, 5S 353, 354, 461. G Translated as The Divine Providence.
7 JS 235-264.

THE SCANDINAVIAN STATES 359

heresies within that ; and dissatisfaction with the Christian dogmas.
As Swedenborg sojourned much in other countries, he may be
describing men other than his countrymen ; but it is very unlikely
that the larger part of his intercourse with his fellows counted for
nothing in this account of contemporary rationalism.

With his odd mixture of scripturalism and innovating dogmatism,
Swedenborg disposes of difficulties about Genesis by reducing Adam
and Eve to an allegory of the " Most Ancient Church," tranquilly
dismissing the orthodox belief by asking, " For who can suppose that
the creation of the world could have been as there described?"1
His own scientific training, which had enabled him to make his
notable anticipation of the nebular theory,2 made it also easy for
him to reduce to allegory the text of what he nevertheless insisted
on treating as a divine revelation ; and his moral sense, active where
he felt no perverting resentment of contradiction by reasoners,3 made
him reject the orthodox doctrine of salvation by faith, even as he
did the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. On these points he seems
to have had a lead from his father, Bishop Jasper Svedberg,4 as he
had in his overwhelming physiological bias to subjective vision-
making. But a message which finally amounted to the oracular
propounding of a new and bewildering supernaturalism, to be taken
on authority like the old, could make for freethought only by rousing
rational reaction. It was Swedenborg's destiny to establish, in virtue
of his great power of orderly dogmatism, a new supernaturalist and
scripturalist sect, while his scientific conceptions were left for other
men to develop. In his own country, in his own day, he had little
success qua prophet, though always esteemed for his character and
his high secular competence ; and he finally figured rather as a
heresiarch than otherwise.5

5. According to one of Swedenborg's biographers, the worldliness
of most of the Swedish clergy in the middle of the eighteenth
century so far outwent even that of the English Church that the
laity were left to themselves ; while " gentlemen disdained the least
taint of religion, and except on formal occasions would have been
ashamed to he caught church-going."1 But this was a matter
rather of fashion than of freethought ; and there is little trace of

i Work cited, 5-211.

v I), rultu ft amove I ><i . 17!.".. tr. as The Worship and Love of God, ed. 18S5, p. 18.
'■'• " \\ Inn lit- was contradicted lie kept silence." Documents eonci ruing tiicedenhvrg, ed.
by Dr. Tafel, 1-7., 1-77. H, Mil.

4 ('[). Swedenborg's letter to Heyer, in T>ocuments, as cited, ii, 279.

5 For many years lie seldom went to church, brine nimble to listen peacefully to the
trinitarian doctrine he heard there. Docunientu, a.s cited, ii, fj(>().

C W. \\ lute, Swedenborg : Itiu Life and Writings, ed. 1807, i, 188.

360 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

critical life in the period. In the latter part of the eighteenth
century, doubtless, the aristocracies and the cultured class in the
Scandinavian States were influenced like the rest of Europe by the
spirit of French freethought,1 which everywhere followed the vogue
of the French language and literature. Thus we find Gustavus III
of Sweden, an ardent admirer of Voltaire, defending him in company,
and proposing in 1770, before the death of his father prevented it, to
make a pilgrimage to Ferney.2 It is without regard to this testimony
that Gustavus, who was assassinated, is said to have died "with the
fortitude and resignation of a Christian."3 He was indeed flighty
and changeable,4 and after growing up a Voltairean was turned for
a year or two into a credulous mystic, the dupe of pseudo-Sweden-
borgian charlatans ;5 but there is small sign of religious earnestness
in his fashion of making his dying confession.6 Claiming at an
earlier date to believe more than Joseph II, who in his opinion
"believed in nothing at all," he makes light of their joint parade of
piety at Home,' and seems to have been at bottom a good deal of an
indifferentist. During his reign his influence on literature fostered
a measure of the spirit of freethought in belles lettres ; and in the
poets J. II. Kjellgren and J. M. Bellman (both d. 1795) there is to
be seen the effect of the German Au/Harung and the spirit of
Voltaire.8 Their contemporary, Tomas Thoren, who called himself
Torild (d. 1812), though more of an innovator in poetic style than in
thought, wrote among other things a pamphlet on The Freedom of
the General Intelligence. But Torild's nickname, " the mad mogister,"
tells of his extravagance ; and none of the Swedish belletrists of that
age amounted to a European influence. Finally, in the calamitous
period which followed on the assassination of Gustavus III, all
Swedish culture sank heavily. The desperate energies of Charles XII
had left his country half-ruined in 1718 ; and even while Linnaius
and his pupils were building up the modern science of botany in the
latter half of the century the economic exhaustion of the people was
a check on general culture. The University of L'psala, which at
one time had over 2,000 students, counted only some 500 at the
close of the eighteenth century.9

1 Schweitzer, Geschichte tier skanclinamsclien Literatur, ii, 175, 2-25; C.-F. Allen,
Histoire de Danemark, Fr. tr. ii, 1900-1901 ; ii. X. Bain, Gustavus Vasa and his Contem-
poraries, 1894, i. 226.

- Correspondance de Grimm, ed. 1820-1831, vii, 229. :! Crichton-Wheaton, ii, 206.

■4 Writing to his mother on his first visit to Paris, he takes her, ostensibly as a libre
esprit, into his confidence, disparaging Mariuonlel and Grimm as vain. Joseph II in turn
pronounced Gustavus "a conceited fop, an impudent braggart" (Bain, as cited, i, 266).
Both monarchs set up an impression of want of balance, and the mother of Gustavus,
Who forced him to break with her, does the same.

o Bain, as cited, i, 224-31. u Id, ii, 208-12. " Id. i, 267-68.

6 Cp. Bain, ii, 272, 2s7, 203-96. a Crichton-Wheaton, ii, 335.

THE SCANDINAVIAN STATES 361

6. In Denmark, on the other hand, the stagnation of nearly
a hundred years had been ended at the accession of Frederick V in
1716.1 National literature, revivified by Holberg, was further
advanced by the establishment of a society of polite learning in
1763 ; under Frederick's auspices Danish naturalists and scholars
were sent abroad for study ; and in particular a literary expedition
was sent to Arabia. The European movement of science, in short,
had gripped the little kingdom, and the usual intellectual results
began to follow, though, as in Catholic Spain, the forces of reaction
soon rallied against a movement which had been imposed from
above rather than evolved from within.

The most celebrated northern unbeliever of the French period
was Count Struensee, who for some years (1770-72) virtually ruled
Denmark as the favourite of the young queen, the king being half-
witted and worthless. Struensee was an energetic and capable
though injudicious reformer: he abolished torture; emancipated
the enslaved peasantry ; secured toleration for all sects ; encouraged
the arts and industry ; established freedom of the press ; and
reformed the finances, the police, the law courts, and sanitation.2
His very reforms, being made with headlong rapidity, made his
position untenable, and his enemies soon effected his downfall and
death. The young queen, who was not alleged to havo been a
freethinker, was savagely seized by the hostile faction and put on
her trial on a charge of adultery, which being wholly unproved, the
aristocratic faction proposed to try her on a charge of drugging her
husband. Only by the efforts of the British court was she saved
from imprisonment for life in a fortress, and sent to Hanover, where,
three years later, she died. She too was a reformer, and it was
on that score that she was hated by the nobles. :! Both she and
Struensee, in short, were the victims of a violent political reaction.
There is an elaborate account of Struensee's conversion to Christianity
in prison by the German Dr. Munter,'1 which makes him out by
his own confession an excessive voluptuary. It is an extremely
suspicious document, exhibiting strong political bias, and giving
Struensee no credit for reforms ; the apparent assumption being

1 Crichton-Whcaton, ii, 322. Cp. pp. 1G1-63. Schlosscr, iv, 15.

'* Crichton-Wheaton, ii, l'JO ; Otic, p. 322 ; C.-V . Allen, as cited, ii, 191 201 ; Schlosscr,
iv, 31'.) s(j.

:i Cp. Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters from Sweden, Norway, mid Denmark, 17%, IX.
xviii. One; of tin: grounds on which the queen was charged with unohastity was, that she
had established a. hospital for foundlings.

■; Trans, from the German, 1771; 2nd ed. 182o. See it also in the work. Converts from
Infidelity, by Andrew Orichton ; vols, vi and vii of Constable's Miscellany, ls27. This
singular compilation includes lives of iioyle, liuuyau, liallur, and others, who were never
" infidels."

362 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

that the conversion of a reprobate was of more evidential value
than that of a reputable and reflective type.

In spite of the reaction, rationalism persisted among the cultured
class. Mary Wollstonecraft, visiting Denmark in 1795, noted that
there and in Norway the press was free, and that new French publi-
cations were translated and freely discussed. The press had in fact
been freed by Struensee, and was left free by his enemies because
of the facilities it had given them to attack him.1 " On the subject
of religion," she added, " they are likewise becoming tolerant, at
least, and perhaps have advanced a step further in freethinking.
One writer has ventured to deny the divinity of Jesus Christ, and
to question the necessity or utility of the Christian system, without
being considered universally as a monster, which would have been
the case a few years ago." 2 She likewise noted that there was in
Norway very little of the fanaticism she had seen gaining ground,
on Wesleyan lines, in England.3 But though the Danes had " trans-
lated many German works on education," they had " not adopted
any of their plans"; there were few schools, and those not good.
Norway, again, had been kept without a university under Danish
rule ; and not until one was established at Christiania in 1811 could
Norwegian faculty play its part in the intellectual life of Europe.
The reaction, accordingly, soon afterwards began to gain head.
Already in 1790 "precautionary measures" had been attempted
against the press;4 and, these being found inefficient, an edict was
issued in 1799 enforcing penalties against all anonymous writers —
a plan which of course struck at the publishers. But the great
geographer, Malte-Brun, was exiled, as were Heiberg, the dramatic
poet, and others ; and again there was " a temporary stagnation in
literature," which, however, soon passed away in the nineteenth
century. Meantime Sweden and Denmark had alike contributed
vitally to the progress of European science ; though neither had
shared in the work of freethought as against dogma.

§ 3. The Slavonic States

1. In Poland, where, as we saw, Unitarian heresy had spread
considerably in the sixteenth century, positive atheism is heard of
in 1688-89, when Count LlSZlXSKi (or Lyszczynski), among whose
papers, it was said, had been found the written statement that there
is no God, or that man had made God out of nothing, was denounced

1 Crichton-Wheaton, ii, 190-91. 2 Work cited, Letter vii.

3 Id. Letter viii, near end. i Crichton-Wheaton, ii, 324.

THE SLAVONIC STATES 363

by the bishops of Posen and Kioff, tried, and found guilty of denying
not only the existence of God but the doctrine of the Trinity and the
Virgin Birth. After being tortured, beheaded, and burned, his ashes
were scattered from a cannon.1 The first step was to tear out his
tongue, "with which he had been cruel towards God"; the next to
burn his hands at a slow fire. It is all told by Zulaski, the leading
Inquisitionist." But even had a less murderous treatment been
meted out to such heresy, anarchic Poland, ridden by Jesuits, was
in no state to develop a rationalistic literature. The old king, John
Sobieski, made no attempt to stop the execution, though he is
credited with a philosophical habit of mind, and with reprimanding
the clergy for not admitting modern philosophy in the universities
and schools.3

2. In Russia the possibilities of modern freethought emerge only
in the seventeenth century, when Muscovy was struggling out of
Byzantine barbarism. The late-recovered treasure of ancient folk-
poesy, partly preserved by chance among the northern peasantry,
tells of the complete rupture wrought in the racial life by the
imposition of Byzantine Christianity from the south. As early as
the fourteenth century the Strigolniks, who abounded at Novgorod,
had held strongly by anti-ecclesiastical doctrines of the Paulician
and Lollard type;1 but orthodox fanaticism ruled life in general
down to the age of Peter the Great. In the sixteenth century we
find the usual symptom of criticism of the lives of the monks ;6 but
the culture was almost wholly ecclesiastical ; and in the seventeenth
century the effort of the turbulent Patriarch Nikon (IGO0-IG8I), to
correct the corrupt sacred texts and the traditional heterodox prac-
tices, was furiously resisted, to the point of a great schism.6 He
himself had violently denounced other innovations, destroying
pictures and. an organ in the manner of Savonarola ; but his own
elementary reforms were found intolerable by the orthodox,7 though
they were favoured by Sophia, the able and ambitious sister of

1 Reclaimer! that the remarks penned by him in an anti-atheistic work, challenging

its argument, represented not unbelief but the demand for a better proof, which he under-
took to produce. See Krasinski, Sketch of the lieliyious History of the, Slavonic Nations,
18/51, pp. -2-i-l'j. It is remarkable that the Pope, Innocent XI, bitterly censured the

f-vi-r 111 ion

.ecution.

a Fletcher, History of Poland, 1831, p. Ml
■'• Fletcher, I "

4 Hard wick, Clni reh History: Middle Aye, 1853, pp. 38(j 87.

■"• \,. Sichler, Hist, de to lift. Hussr, 1HK7, pp. 88-S'J, 13'J. Cp. Uambaud, Hist, dc Russie,
2e edit. pp. -21!), -i:'.K etc. (Kng. tr. i, 30!), 3-21, 3-28).

e It. N. Haiti, The First Itonnniors, 1905, pp. 136-51 : Kamhailrt, P. 333 (tr. i, II I -17). The
struggle (lfi.71) elicited old forms of heresy, going hack to Manicheisin and Cnosticism. In
this furious schism Nikon destroyed irregular ikons or sacred images; and savage perse-
cutions resulted from his insistence that the faithful should use three lingers instead of
two in cro ing them elves. Many resisted to tins death.

v I'rince Serge Wolkonsky, Hussion History and Literature, 1897, pp. 98-101.

364 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

Peter.1 The priest Kriezanitch (1617-1678), who wrote a work on
" The Eussian Empire in the second half of the Seventeenth
Century," denounced researches in physical science as "devilish
heresies";2 and it is on record that scholars were obliged to study
in secret and by night for fear of the hostility of the common people.
Half-a-century later the orthodox majority seems to have remained
convinced of the atheistic tendency of all science;4 and the friends
of the new light doubtless included deists from the first. Not till
the reforms of Peter had begun to bear fruit, however, could free-
thought raise its head. The great Czar, who promoted printing and
literature as he did every other new activity of a practical kind, took
the singular step of actually withdrawing writing materials from the
monks, whose influence he held to be wholly reactionary.5 In 1703
appeared the first Eussian journal; and in 1724 Peter founded the
first Academy of Sciences, enjoining upon it the study of languages
and the production of translations. Now began the era of foreign
culture and translations from the French.6 Prince Kantemir, the
satirist, who was with the Eussian embassy in London in 1733,
pronounced England, then at the height of the deistic tide, " the
most civilized and enlightened of European nations." ' The fact
that he translated Fontenelle on The Plurality of Worlds tells
further of his liberalism.8 Gradually there arose a new secular
fiction, under Western influences ; and other forms of culture slowly
advanced likewise, notably under Elisabeth Petrovna. At length, in
the reign of Catherine II, called the Great, French ideas, already
heralded by belles lettres, found comparatively free headway. She
herself was a deist, and a satirist of bigots in her comedies ;9 she
accomplished what Peter had planned, the secularization of Church
property ;10 and she was long the admiring correspondent of Voltaire,
to whom and to D'Alembert and Diderot she offered warm invita-
tions to reside at her court. Diderot alone accepted, and him she
specially befriended, buying his library when he was fain to sell it,
and constituting him its salaried keeper. In no country, not excepting
England, was there more of practical freedom than in Eussia under

i Morrill, History of Russia, 1902, p. 14 ; Bain, p. 201. 2 Cp. Wolkonsky, p. 101.

:i (J. E. Turner, Studies in Russian Literature, 1SS2, p. 2.

4 Id. pp. 16, 17, 25, 26, 40; Sichler, p. 148.

5 Sichler, p. 139. Peter's dislike of monks won him the repute of a freethinker.
Morrill, J). 97. He was actually attacked as "Antichrist" in a printed pamphlet on the
score of his innovations. Personally, he detested religious persecution, and was willing
to tolerate anybody but Jews ; but he had to let persecution take place ; and even to
consent to removing statues of pagan deities from his palace. Bain, pp. 304-309.

6 Cp. Bain, p. 392.

7 Turner, p. 22. Kantemir was the friend of Bolingbroke and Montesquieu in Paris.
H Sichler, p. 147. ,J Turner, pp. 40-41.

10 See the passages cited by Kambaud, p. 4S2. from her letter to Voltaire.

ITALY 365

her rule:1 and if after the outbreak of the Revolution she turned
political persecutor, she was still not below the English level. Her
half-crazy son Paul II, whom she had given cause to hate her, undid
her work wherever he could. But neither her reaction nor his rule
could eradicate the movement of thought begun in the educated
classes; though in Russia, as in the Scandinavian States, it was
not till the nineteenth century that original serious literature
ilourished.

§ I. Italy

1. Returning to Italy, no longer the leader of European thought,
but still full of veiled freethinking, we find in the seventeenth century
the proof that no amount of such predisposition can countervail
thoroughly bad political conditions. Ground down by the matchless
misrule of Spain, from which the conspiracy of the monk Campanella
vainly sought to free her, and by the kindred tyranny of the papacy,
Italy could produce in its educated class, save for the men of science
and the students of economics, only tritlers, whose unbelief was of a
piece with their cynicism. While Naples and the south decayed,
mental energy had for a time flourished in Tuscany, where, under
the grand dukes from Ferdinando I onwards, industry and commerce
had revived ; and even after a time of retrogression Ferdinando II
encouraged science, now made newly glorious by the names of
Galileo and Torricelli. But again there was a relapse; and at the
end of the century, under a bigoted duke, Florence was priest-ridden
and, at least in outward seeming, gloomily superstitious ; while, save
for the better conditions secured at Naples under the viceroyalty of
the Marquis of Carpi,2 the rest of Italy was cynically corrupt and
intellectually superficial.3 Even in Naples, of course, enlightenment
was restricted to the few. Burnet observes that there are societies
of men at Naples of freer thoughts than can be found in any other
place of rtaly"; and he admits a general tendency of intelligent
Italian:, to recoil from Christianity by reason of Catholic corruption.
But at the same time he insists that, though the laity speak with
scorn of the clergy, yet they are masters of the spirits of the
people." Yet it only needed the breathing time and the improved
conditions under the Bourbon rule in the eighteenth century to set
up a wonderful intellectual revival.

2. hirst came the great work of VlCO, the Trinciplcx of a New

1 S.'niic. !',',,)■ ,hi x Lrhm <h:r Uniterm Cnlharina II: W'rrkr, ed. K'l.t, v, -J:;:)-!!);

I:. i il/» id. pp. I-j

'■ S. -Hi . >'> i: nvua' - h, ilrry, iv, I'd. Rnttcnlmii, IfM'i, pj). 1-7 :<l.

'■'■ Z.-itT. Untnirr if Itnlv, pp. 120-32, I'M; 1'roctor, Hist. «/ Italy, 2ud ud. pp. 210, 26S.

* liurueti, an cited, pp. I'.'.j .il .

366 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Science (1725), whereof the originality and the depth — qualities in
which, despite its incoherences, it on the whole excels Montesquieu's
Spirit of Laws — place him among the great freethinkers in philo-
sophy. It was significant of much that Yico's hook, while constantly
using the vocabulary of faith, grappled with the science of human
development in an essentially secular and scientific spirit. This is
the note of the whole eighteenth century in Italy.1 Vico posits
Deity and Providence, but proceeds nevertheless to study the laws
of civilization inductively from its phenomena. He permanently
obscured his case, indeed, by insisting on putting it theologically,
and condemning Grotius and others for separating the idea of law
from that of religion. Only in a pantheistic sense has Vico's formula
any validity ; and he never avows a pantheistic view, refusing even
to go with Grotius in allowing that Hebrew law was akin to that of
other nations. But a rationalistic view, had he put it, would have
been barred. The wonder is, in the circumstances, not that he makes
so much parade of religion, but that he could venture to undermine
so vitally its pretensions, especially after he had found it prudent to
renounce the project of annotating the great work of Grotius, De Jure
Belli ct Pads, on the score that (as he puts it in his xlutobiography)
a good Catholic must not endorse a heretic.

Signor Benedetto Croce, in his valuable work on Yico {The
Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, Eng. tr. 1913, pp. 89-91),
admits that Yico is fundamentally at one with the Naturalists :

Like them, in constructing his science of human society, he
excludes with Grotius all idea of God, and witli Pufendorf con-
siders man as without help or attention from God, excluding
him, that is, from revealed religion and its God." Of Yico's
opposition to Grotius, Signor Croce offers two unsatisfactory
explanations. First: "Yico's opposition, which he expresses

with his accustomed confusion and obscurity, turns upon

the actual conception of religion Religion means for

Yico not necessarily revelation, but conception of reality."
This reduces the defence to a quibble ; but finally Signor
Croce asks himself " Why — if Yico agreed with the natural-
right school in ignoring revelation, and if lie instead of it
deepened their superficial immanental doctrine — why he put
himself forward as their implacable enemy and persisted in
boasting loudly before prelates and pontiffs of having formu-
lated a system of natural rights different from that of the three
Protestant authors and adapted to the Roman Church." The
natural suggestion of " politic caution " Signor Croce rejects,

1 Prof. Flint, -who insists on the (loop piety of Vico, notes that ho "appears to have had
strangely little interest in Christian oystematie theoloyy" (Vico, ISSi, p. 70).

ITALY 367

declaring that " the spotless character of Vico entirely precludes
it ; and we can only suppose that, lacking as his ideas always
icere in clarity, on this occasion he indulged his tendency to
confusion and nourished his illusions, to the extent of conferring
upon himself the flattering style and title of Defensor Ecclcsice,
at the very moment when he was destroying the religion of the
Church by means of humanity."

It is very doubtful whether this equivocal vindication is more
serviceable to Vico's fame than the plain avowal that a writer
placed as he was, in the Catholic world of 1720, could not be
expected to be straightforward upon such an issue. Vico com-
ported himself towards the Catholic Church very much as
Descartes did. His own declaration as to his motives is
surely valid as against a formula which combines " spotless
character" with a cherished "tendency to confusion." The
familiar " tendency to hedge " is a simpler conception.

3. It is noteworthy, indeed, that the " New Science," as Vico
boasted, arose in the Catholic and not in the Protestant world. We
might say that, genius apart, the reason was that the energy which
elsewhere ran to criticism of religion as such had in Catholic Italy
to take other channels. By attacking a Protestant position which
was really less deeply heterodox than his own, Vico secured Catholic
currency for a philosopheme which on its own merits Catholic
theologians would have scouted as atheism. As it was, Vico's
sociology aroused on tire one hand new rationalistic speculation as
to the origin of civilization, and on the other orthodox protest on
the score of its fundamentally anti-Biblical character. It was thus
attacked in 1749 by Damiano Romano, and later by Finetti, a
professor at Padua, apropos of the propaganda raised by Vico's
followers as to the animal origin of the human race. This began
with Vico's disci [ile, Emmanuele Duni, a professor at Rome, who
published a seines of sociological essays in 1763. Thenceforth for
many years there raged, " under the eyes of Pope and cardinals," an
Italian debate between the Ferini and Antifcrini, the affirmers and
deniers of the animal origin of man, the latter of course taking up
their ground on the Bible, from which Finetti drew twenty-three
objections to Vico.' Duni found it prudent to declare that ho had
" no intention of discussing the origin of the world, still less that of
the Hebrew nation, but solely that of the Gentile nations "; but even
when thus limited the debate set up far-reaching disturbance. At
this stage Italian sociology doubtless owed something to Montesquieu
and Rousseau ; but the fact remains that the Scienzn Nitom was a

1 Siciliani, Hal liinnovanwuto tlclla jilusojia pusitiva in Ilalia, 187 1 , pp. U7-11.

368 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

book " truly Italian ; Italian par excellence." l It was Vico, too,
who led the way in the critical handling of early Roman history,
taken up later by Beaufort, and still later by Niebuhr ; and it was
he who began the scientific analysis of Homer, followed up later by
F. A. Wolf.2 By a fortunate coincidence, the papal chair was held at
the middle of the century (1740-1758) by the most learned, tolerant,
and judicious of modern popes, Benedict XIV,3 whose influence was
used for political peace in Europe and for toleration in Italy ; and
whom we shall find, like Clement XIV, on friendly terms with a
freethinker. In the same age Muratori and Giannone amassed their
unequalled historical learning ; and a whole series of Italian writers
broke new ground on the field of social science, Italy having led the
way in this as formerly in philosophy and physics.4 The Hanoverian
Dr. G. W. Alberti, of Italian descent, writes in 1752 that " Italy is
full of atheists "f and Grimm, writing in 1765, records that according
to capable observers the effect of the French freethinking literature
in the past thirty years had been immense, especially in Tuscany.

4. Between 1737 and 1798 may be counted twenty-eight Italian
writers on political economy ; and among them was one, CESARE
BECCARIA, who on another theme produced perhaps the most
practically influential single book of the eighteenth century,7 the
treatise on Crimes and Punishments (1761), which affected penal
methods for the better throughout the whole of Europe. Even
were he not known to be a deist, his strictly secular and rationalist
method would have brought upon him priestly suspicion ; and he
had in fact to defend himself against pertinacious and unscrupulous
attacks,8 though he had sought in his book to guard himself by
occasionally "veiling the truth in clouds."9 As we have seen,
Beccaria owed his intellectual awakening first to Montesquieu and
above all to Helvetius — another testimony to the reformative virtue
of all freethought.

1 Siciliani, p. 36.

2 Introduction (by Mignet?) to the Princess Belgiojoso's ti*. La Science Nouvelle, 1844,
p. cxiii. Cp. Flint, Vico, 231.

3 Ganganelli, Papst Clemens XIV, seine Briefe unci seine Zeit, vorn. Verfasser des
Romischen Briefe (Von Reumont), 1847, pp. 35-36, and p. 155, note.

4 See the Storia della economia pubblica in Italia of G. Peechio, 18-29. p. 61 sq., as to the
claim of Antonio Serra (Breve trattato, etc. 1613) to be the pioneer of modern political
economy. Cp. Hallam, Lit. of Europe, iii, 164-66. Buckle (1-vol. ed. p. 122, note) has
claimed the title for William Stafford, whose Compendious or briefe Examination of
certain ordinary Complaints (otherwise called A Briefe Conceipt of English Policy)
appeared in 1581. But cp. Ingram {Hist, of Pol. Econ, 1888, pp. 43-45) as to the prior
claims of Bodin. 3 Briefe, as before cited, p. 408.

6 Correspondence litteraire, ed. 1829-31, vii, 331. Cp. Von Reumont, Ganganelli, p. 33.

7 The Lei delittie clelle pene was translated into 22 languages. Peechio, p. 144.

8 See in the 6th ed. of the Lei delitti (Harlem, 1766) the appended Bispostaaduno scritto,
etc., Parte prima, Accuse d'empietd.

9 See his letter to the Abbe Morellet, cited by Mr. Farrer in ch. i of his ed. of Crimes
and Punishments, 1880, p. 5. It describes the Milanese as deeply sunk in prejudices.

ITALY 369

Of the aforesaid eight-and-twenty writers on economics, probably
the majority were freethinkers. Among them, at all events, were
Count ALGAROTTI (1712-1764), the distinguished sesthetician, one
of the group round Frederick at Berlin and author of II Neictonian-
ismo per le dame (1737) ; FLLANGIERI, whose work on legislation
(put on the Index by the papacy) won the high praise of Franklin ;
the Neapolitan abbate FERDIXANDO Galiaxi, one of the brightest
and soundest wits in the circle of the French philosophes ; the other
Neapolitan abbate Axtonio Gexovesi (1712-1769), the " redeemer
of the Italian mind," 1 and the chief establisher of economic science
for modern Italy.2 To these names may be added those of ALFIERI,
one of the strongest anti-clericalists of his age ; BETTIXELLI, the
correspondent of Voltaire and author of The Resurrection of Italy
(1775) ; Count DAXDOLO, author of a French work on The New
Men (1799) ; and the learned GiAXXOXE, author of the great anti-
papal History of the Kingdom of Naples (1723), who, after more than
one narrow escape, was thrown in prison by the king of Sardinia,
and died there (1718) after twelve years' confinement.

To the merits of Algarotti and Genovesi there are high contem-
porary testimonies. Algarotti was on friendly terms with Cardinal
Ganganelli, who in 1769 became Pope Clement XIV. In 1751 the
latter writes3 him : " My dear Count, Contrive matters so, in spite
of your philosophy, that I may see you in heaven ; for I should be
very sorry to lose sight of you for an eternity. You are one of those
rare men, both for heart and understanding, whom we could wish to
love even beyond the grave, when we have once had the advantage
of knowing them. No one lias more reasons to be convinced of the
spirituality and immortality of the soul than you have. The years
glide away for the philosophers as well as for the ignorant ; and
what is to be the term of them cannot but employ a man who thinks.
Own that I can manage sermons so as not to frighten away a bcl
esprit ; and that if every one delivered as short and as friendly
sermons as I do, you would sometimes go to hear a preacher. But

barely hearing will not do the amiable Algarotti must become as

good a Christian as he is a philosopher: then should I doubly be his
friend and servant."1

In an earlier letter, Ganganelli writes : "The Pope [Benedict XIV]
is ever great and entertaining for his bans mots. He was saying the

' jvr.-hio. ,,. :-:.

- (p. Mm illcjcii. I.ilrraturr <•/ I'nlitici! Kcono/nu, IHJ.">, p. CI; I'.huiqni. Hist. tie
V rrnnrnriie. ;j<./i t i<i 111 . it- i'-ii t. i i. t:ij.

" A- to tliii ^emiineiu --s o! ttie Ciinuliinelli letters, oriuinaUv niueh disputed, sec Von
.: (, 1'iii'xt CAmii'iix XIV; urine Uriel.- it ml srine Znt. 1M7, pp. W -14.

1 I.' '•.. Ivi, Kii^.tr. 1777, i, ! 1! iJ. No. Ixxii in V >n lii uuiuiit ; (Jm uuin 'i, :-17.

vol. ii 2n

370 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

other day that he had always loved you, and that it would give him
very great pleasure to see you again. He speaks with admiration of

the king of Prussia whose history wTill make one of the finest

monuments of the eighteenth century. See here and acknowledge
my generosity ! Eor that prince makes the greatest jest possible of
the Court of Rome, and of us monks and friars. Cardinal Querini
will not be satisfied unless he have you with him for some time at
Brescia. He one day told me that he would invite you to come and
dedicate his library There is no harm in preaching to a philo-
sopher w7ho seldom goes to hear a sermon, and who will not have
become a great saint by residing at Potsdam. You are there three
men whose talents might be of great use to religion if you wrould
change their direction — viz. Yourself, Mons. de Voltaire, and M. de
Maupertuis. But that is not the ton of the age, and you are resolved
to follow the fashion." * Ganganelli in his correspondence reveals
himself as an admirer of Newton 2 and somewhat averse to religious
zeal.3 Of the papal government he admitted that it was favourable
" neither to commerce, to agriculture, nor to population, which
precisely constitute the essence of [public felicity," while suavely
reminding the Englishman of the " inconveniences " of his own
government.4 To the learned Muratori, who suffered at the hands
of the bigots, he and Pope Benedict XIV gave their sympathy.5

But Ganganelli's own thinking on the issues between reason and
religion was entirely commonplace. Whatever," he wrote, departs
from the account given of the Creation in the book of Genesis has
nothing to support it but paradoxes, or, at most, mere hypotheses.
Moses alone, as being an inspired author, could perfectly acquaint us
with the formation of the world, and the development of its parts.

Whoever does not see the truth in what Moses relates was

never born to know it."u It was only in his relation to the bigots
of his own Church that his thinking was rationalistic. " The Pope,"
he writes to a French marquis, " relies on Providence ; but God does
not perform miracles every time he is asked to do it. Besides, is he
to perform one that Rome may enjoy a right of seignory over the
Duchy of Parma ?"7 At his death an Italian wrote of him that " the
distinction he was able to draw between dogmas or discipline and
ultramontane opinions gave him the courage to take many oppor-

1 Lett, xiii, 1749. Eng. tr. i, 44-46 ; No. cxiv in Von Reumont's translation.
'^ Lett, vi and xiv ; Nos. ix and xxii in Von Reumont.
a Lett, xxx, p. 83; No. xxxiv in Von Reumont.

4 Lett, xci ; No. xcii in Von Keumont. ~> Lett, cxlvi ; No. xiii in Von Reumont.

c Leu. lxxxii, 1753 or 1751 ; No. Ixi in Von Reumont.

"' Lett, exxiv, 176'..'. This letter is not in Von Reumont's collection, and appears to be
regarded by bini as spurious — or unduly indiscreet.

ITALY 371

tunities of promoting the peace of the Stato." His tolerance is
sufficiently exhibited in one of his letters to Algarotti : " I hope that
you will preach to me some of these days, so that each may have
his turn."1 Freethought had achieved something when a Roman
Cardinal, a predestinate Pope, could so write to an avowed free-
thinker. Concerning Galiani we have the warm panegyric of
Grimm. If I have any vanity with which to reproach myself,"
he writes, it is that which I derive in spite of myself from the
fact of the conformity of my ideas with those of the two rarest men
whom I have the happiness to know, Galiani and Denis Diderot.""
Grimm held Galiani to be of all men the best qualified to write
a true ecclesiastical history. But the history that would have
satisfied him and Grimm was not to be published in that age.

Italy, however, had done her full share, considering her heritage
of burdens and hindrances, in the intellectual work of the century ;
and in the names of Galvani and Yolta stands the record of one
more of her great contributions to human enlightenment. Under
Duke Leopold II of Tuscany the papacy was so far defied that books
put on the Index were produced for him under the imprint of
London;'5 and the papacy itself at length gave way to the spirit of
reform, Clement XIV consenting among other things to abolish the
Order of Jesuits (1773), after his predecessor had died of grief over
his proved impotence to resist the secular policy of the States
around him.4 In Tuscany, indeed, the reaction against the French
Revolution was instant and severe. Leopold succeeded his brother
Joseph as emperor of Austria in 1790, but died in 1792 ; and in
his realm, as was the case in Denmark and in Spain in the same
century, the reforms imposed from above by a liberal sovereign
were found to have left much traditionalism untouched. x\fter
1792, Ferdinando III suspended some of his father's most liberal
edicts, amid the applause of the reactionaries ; and in 1799, after
the first short stay of the revolutionary French army, out of its
one million inhabitants no fewer than 22,000 were prosecuted for
"French opinions."' Certainly some of the "French opinions"
were wild enough ; for instance, the practice among ladies of dressing
alia ghigliottina, with a red ribbon round the neck, a usage borrowed
about 1795 from France.0 As Quinet sums up, the revolution was
too strong a medicine for the Italy of that age. The young abbato

1 Lett. Ixxxiii, 17.",t; No. Ixxiii in Von Reumont. -: Corr. Lilt, as cited, vii, 101.

'■'■ /idler, u. 473. ' Zcller, pp. 17M-71).

'" Julien Luchaire, Esmi sur revolution intrllectuelle tie V Untie ile Isir, a ls:ii), lOOfi, p. 3.
G i'arini wrote a re pro vi ml (Me on 1, Me subject. (Henri HaiivcUe, Litte future 1 tiitieiuie,
l'JOO, p. 371.) Ho was out; of those, disillusioned by the course of the Revolution. (Id. p. 375.)

372 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

Monti, the chief poet of the time, was a freethinker, but he alter-
nated his strokes for freedom with unworthy compliances.1 Such
was the dawn of the new Italian day that has since slowly but
steadily broadened, albeit under many a cloud.

§ 5. Spain and Portugal

1. For the rest of Europe during the eighteenth century, we have
to note only traces of receptive thought. Spain under Bourbon
rule, as already noted, experienced an administrative renascence.
Such men as Count Araxda (1718-99) and Aszo y del Eio (1742-
1814) wrought to cut the claws of the Inquisition and to put down
the Jesuits ; but not yet, after the long work of destruction accom-
plished by the Church in the past, could Spain produce a fresh
literature of any far-reaching power. When Aranda was about to
be appointed in 1766, his friends the French Encyclopedistes prema-
turely proclaimed their exultation in the reforms he was to accom-
plish ; and he sadly protested that they had thereby limited his
possibilities. Nonetheless he wrought much, the power of the
Inquisition in Spain being already on the wane. Dr. Joaquin
Villanueva, one of the ecclesiastical statesmen who took part in its
suppression by the Cortes at Cadiz in 1813, tells how, in his youth,
under the reign of Charles III, it was a current saying among the
students at college that while the clever ones could rise to important
posts in the Church, or in the law, the blockheads would be sure to
find places in the Inquisition. It was of course still powerful for
social terrorism and minor persecution ; but its power of taking life
was rapidly dwindling. Between 1746 and 1759 it had burned only
ten persons ; from 1759 until 1781 it burned only four ; thereafter
none,4 the last case having provoked protests which testified to the
moral change wrought in Europe by a generation of freethought.

In Spain too, as elsewhere, freethought had made way among
the upper classes ; and in 1773 we find the Duke d'Alba (formerly
Huescar), ex-ambassador of Spain to France, subscribing eighty
louis for a statue to Voltaire. " Condemned to cultivate my reason
in secret," he wrote to D'Alembert, " I see this opportunity to give
a public testimony of my gratitude to and admiration for the great
man who first showed me the way."5

1 Hauvette, pp. 391-93.

2 Coxe, Memoirs of tlie Bourbon Kings of Spain, ed. 1815, iv, 408.
a Villanueva, Vida Literaria, London, 18-25.

4 Buckle, iii, 517-18 (1-vol. ed. 599-60J). The last victim seems to have been a woman
accused of witchcraft. Her nose was cut oif before her execution. See the Marok-
kanisclie Brief e, 1785, p. 36 ; and Buckle's note 27-2.

s Letter of D'Alembert to Voltaire, 13 mai, 1773.

SPAIN AND PORTUGAL 373

2. Still all freethinking in Spain ran immense risks, oven under
Charles III. The Spanish admiral Solano was denounced by his
almoner to the Inquisition for having read Eaynal, and had to
demand pardon on his knees of the Inquisition and God.1 Aranda
himself was from first to last four times arraigned before the
Inquisition,'2 escaping only by his prestige and power. So eminent
a personage as P. A. J. Olavides, known in France as the Count of
Pilos (172G-1S03), could not thus escape. He had been appointed
by Charles III prefect of Seville, and had carried out for the king
the great work of colonizing the Sierra Morena,8 of which region he
was governor. At the height of his career, in 1776, he was arrested
and imprisoned, " as suspected of professing impious sentiments,
particularly thoso of Voltaire and Eousseau, with whom lie had
carried on a very intimate correspondence." He had spoken
unwarily to inhabitants of the new towns under his jurisdiction
concerning the exterior worship of deity in Spain, the worship of
images, the fast days, the cessation of work on holy days, the
offerings at mass, and all the rest of the apparatus of popular
Catholicism. Olavides prudently confessed his error, declaring that
he had " never lost his inner faith." After two years' detention he
was forced to make his penance at a lesser auto da fe in presence
of sixty persons of distinction, many of whom were suspected of
holding similar opinions, and were thus grimly warned to keep their
counsel. During four hours the reading of his process went on, and
then came the sentence. He was condemned to pass eight years
in a convent ; to be banished forever from Madrid, Seville, Cordova,
and the new towns of the Sierra Alorena, and to lose all his property ;
he was pronounced incapable henceforth of holding any public
employment or title of honour; and he was forbidden to mount a horse,
to wear any ornament of gold, silver, pearls, diamonds, or other
precious stones, or clothing of silk or fine linen. On hearing his
sentence he fainted. Afterwards, on his knees, lie received absolution.
Escaping some time afterwards from Ids convent, lie reached France.
After some years more, he cynically produced a work entitled The
Gospel Triiuuphaut, or tlic Philosopher Converted, which availed to
procure a repeal of his sentence ; and ho returned into favour.''' In
his youth he "had not the talent to play the hypocrite." In the
end he mastered (,1k; art as few had done.

'■'>. Another grandee, Don Christophe Xiinenez de Gongora, Duke
oi Almoduhar, published a free and expurgated translation of

1 Grimm, C.rr. Lilt, x, :i!).'i. - Uoronte, ii, Ml. :i As to which see Buckle, i>. (',07.

1 I. Ion Hi' . ii. Ml. ' /'/. ii, 011-17,

374 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

Kaynal's History of the Indies under another title ;* and though he
put upon the book only an anagram of his name, he presented copies
to the king. The inquisitors, learning as much, denounced him as
" suspected of having embraced the systems of unbelieving philo-
sophers"; but this time the prosecution broke down for lack of
evidence.2 A similar escape was made by Don Joseph Nicholas
d'Azara, who had been minister of foreign affairs, minister plenipo-
tentiary of the king at Eome, and ambassador extraordinary at Paris,
and was yet denounced at Saragossa and Madrid as an "unbelieving
philosopher."3 Count Eicla, minister of war under Charles III, was
similarly charged, and similarly escaped for lack of proofs.4

4. In another case, a freethinking priest skilfully anticipated
prosecution. Don Philip de Samaniego, "priest, archdeacon of
Pampeluna, chevalier of the order of St. James, counsellor of the
king and secretary-general, interpreter of foreign languages," was
one of those invited to assist at the auto da fe of Olavides. The
impression made upon him was so strong that he speedily prepared
with his own hand a confession to the effect that he had read many
forbidden books, such as those of Voltaire, Mirabeau, Eousseau,
Hobbes, Spinoza, Montesquieu, Bayle, D'Alembert, and Diderot ;
and that he had been thus led into skepticism ; but that after serious
reflection he had resolved to attach himself firmly and forever to the
Catholic faith, and now begged to be absolved. The sentence was
memorable. He was ordered first to confirm his confession by oath ;
then to state how and from whom he had obtained the prohibited
books, where they now were, with what persons he had talked on
these matters, what persons had either refuted or adopted his views,
and which of those persons had seemed to be aware of such doctrines
in advance ; such a detailed statement being the condition of his
absolution. Samaniego obeyed, and produced a long declaration in
which he incriminated nearly every enlightened man at the court,
naming Aranda, the Duke of Almodobar, Eicla, and the minister
Florida Blanca ; also General Eicardos, Count of Truillas, General
Massones, Count of Montalvo, ambassador at Paris and brother of
the Duke of Sotomayor ; and Counts Campomanes, Orreilly, and
Lascy. Proceedings were begun against one and all ; but the under-
taking was too comprehensive, and the proofs wero avowed to be

i Grimm is evidently in error in his statement (Correspondance, e<3. 1829-31, x, 301) that
on(! of the main grievances against Olavides was his having caused to be made a Spanish
translation of Kaynal's book, which was never published. No such offence is mentioned
by Lilorente. The case of Almodobar had been connected in French rumour with that of
Olavides.

- Llorente, ii, 532. 3 Id. ii, 531-35. » Id. pp, 517-48.

SPAIN AND POETUGAL 375

insufficient. What became of Saraaniego, history saith not. A
namesake of his, Don Felix-Maria de Samaniego, one of the leading
men of letters of the reign of Charles IV, was arraigned before the
Inquisition of Logrogno as " suspected of having embraced the errors
of modern philosophers and read prohibited books," but contrived,
through his friendship with the minister of justice, to arrange the
matter privately.''1

5. Out of a long series of other men of letters persecuted by the
Inquisition for giving signs of enlightenment, a few cases are
preserved by its historian, Llorente. Don Benedict Bails, professor
of mathematics at Madrid and author of a school-book on the subject,
was proceeded against in his old age, towards the end of the reign of
Charles III, as suspected of "atheism and materialism." He was
ingenuous enough to confess that he had " had doubts on the
existence of God and the immortality of the soul," but that after
serious reflection he was repentant and ready to abjure all his errors.
He thus escaped, after an imprisonment. Don Louis Cagnuelo,
advocate, was forced to abjure for having written against popular
superstition and against monks in his journal The Censor, and was
forbidden to write in future on any subject of religion or morals.
F. P. Centeno, one of the leading critics of the reigns of Charles III
and Charles IV, was an Augustinian monk ; but his profession did
not save him from the Inquisition when he made enemies by his
satirical criticisms, though he was patronized by the minister Florida
Blanca. To make quite sure, he was accused at once of atheism
and Lutheranism. He had in fact preached against ceremonialism,
and as censor he had deleted from a catechism for the free schools
of Madrid an article affirming the existence of the Limbo of children
who had died unbaptized. Despite a most learned defence, he was
condemned as " violently suspected of heresy " and forced to abjure,
whereafter ho went mad and in that state died.3

G. Another savant of the same period, Don Joseph do Clavijo y
Faxardo, director of the natural history collection at Madrid, was in
turn arraigned as having ' adopted the anti-Christian principles of
modern philosophy." He had been the friend of Buffon and Voltaire
at Paris, had admirably translated Button's Natural History, with
notes, and was naturally something of a deist and materialist.
Having the protection of Aranda, he escaped with a secret penance
and abjuration.1 Don Thomas Iriarte, chief of the archives in the

1 Morcntc. ii.5in-.j0. 2 M. ii, 472-73. :; Td. pp. 130-40.

-i /,/. ii.nu 12. Ijliircnto montinns that Cbivijn erlitod a journal nnniftl Thr Ttunki'r,
"at a tint" '.vhcii liarilly anyonu was t') Liu foun<l who thought." A Frenchman, Lankly

376 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

ministry of foreign affairs, was likewise indicted towards the end of
the reign of Charles III, as " suspected of anti-Christian philo-
sophy," and escaped with similarly light punishment.1

7. Still in the same reign, the Jesuit Francisco de Ista, author-
of an extremely popular satire against absurd preachers, the History
of the famous preacher Fray Gcrondif, published under the pseudonym
of Don Francisco Lobon de Salazar — a kind of ecclesiastical Don
Quixote — so infuriated the preaching monks that the Holy Oflice
received " an almost infinite number of denunciations of the book."
Ista, however, was a Jesuit, and escaped, through the influence of
his order, with a warning.2 Influence, indeed, could achieve almost
anything in the Holy Office, whether for culprits or against the
uninculpable. In 1796, Don Eaymond de Salas, a professor at
Salamanca, was actually prosecuted by the Inquisition of Madrid
as being suspected of having adopted the principles of Voltaire,
Rousseau, and other modern philosophers, he having read their
works. The poor man proved that he had done so only in order to
refute them, and produced the theses publicly maintained at Sala-
manca by his pupils as a result of his teachings. The prosecution
was a pure work of personal enmity on the part of the Archbishop
of Santiago (formerly bishojD of Salamanca) and others, and Salas
was acquitted, with the statement that he was entitled to reparation.
Again and again did his enemies revive the case, despite repeated
acquittals, he being all the while in durance, and at length lie had
to " abjure," and was banished the capital. After a time the matter
was forced on the attention of the Government, with the result that
even Charles IV was asked by his ministers to ordain that hence-
forth the Inquisition should not arrest anyone without prior intima-
tion to the king. At tins stage, however, the intriguing archbishop
successfully intervened, and the ancient machinery for the stifling
of thought remained intact for the time/

8. It is plain that the combined power of the Church, the orders,
and the Inquisition, even under Charles III, had been substantially
unimpaired, and rested on a broad foundation of popular fanaticism
and ignorance. The Inquisition attacked not merely freethought
but heresy of every kind, persecuting Jansenists and Molinists as
of old it had persecuted Lutherans, only with less power of murder.

having assorted, in his Voyage d'l'Jxpaane, that the Thinker was without merit, the his-
torian comments that if Langle is right in the assertion, it will be the sole verity in his
book, but that, in view of his errors on all other matters, it is probable that he is wrong
there also. l Llorente, p. 449.

'2 Id. ii, 450-51. The book was prohibited, but a printer at Bayonne reissued it with
an additional volume of the tracts written for and against it.

3 Id. ii, 469-72.

SPAIN AND PORTUGAL 377

That much the Bourbon kings and their ministers could accomplish,
but no more. The trouble was that tho enlightened administration
of Charles III in Spain did not build up a valid popular education,
the sole security for durable rationalism. Its school policy, though
not without zeal, was undemocratic, and so left the priests in control
of the mind of the multitude ; and throughout the reign the eccle-
siastical revenues had been allowed to increase greatly from private
sources.1 Like Leopold of Tuscany, he was in advance of his
people, and imposed his reforms from above. When, accordingly,
the weak and pious Charles IV succeeded in 1788, throe of the
anti-clerical Ministers of his predecessor, including Aranda, were
put under arrest," and clericalism resumed full sway, to the extent
even of vetoing the study of moral philosophy in the universities.3
Mentally and materially alike, Spain relapsed to her former state
of indigence ; and the struggle for national existence against Napoleon
helped rather traditionalist sentiment than the spirit of innovation.

9. Portugal in the same period, despite the anti-clerical policy
of the famous Marquis of Pombal, made no noticeable intellectual
progress. Though that powerful statesman in 1761 abolished
slavery in the kingdom,4 he too failed to see the need for popular
education, while promoting that of the upper classes.0 His expul-
sion of the Jesuits, accordingly, did but raise up against him a new
set of enemies in the shape of the Jacobcos, " the Llessed," a species
of Catholic Puritan, who accused him of impiety. His somewhat
forensic defence6 leaves the impression that he was in reality a
deist ; but though he fought the fanatics by imprisoning the Bishop
of Coimbra, their leader, and by causing Moliere's Tart life to be
translated and performed, he does not seem to have shown any
favour to the deistical literature of which the Bishop had composed
a local Index Expurgatorius.' In Portugal, as later in Spain,
accordingly, a complete reaction set in with the death of the
enlightened king. Dom Joseph died in 1777, and Pombal was at
once disgraced and his enemies released, tho pious Queen Maria
and her Ministers subjecting him to persecution for some years. Jn
178-'j, the Queen, who became a religious maniac, and died insane,"
is found establishing new nunneries, and so adding to one of the
main factors in the impoverishment, moral and financial, of Portugal.

I; id

.!•-, ]>. Kl-

1 hi. p. (',!

■>.

: /(/. )i. (113,

i ill"!

if. tii, Tin

'.Mi

rqu

,-- I,f l',,U ■'..

d, :>.ud Lil. I-;

71, I . :>.V>.

/''■ l

i. -JHJ.

- /.'/. pp. ll\

1-liJ.

•■ Id. IK i2(;j,

" 1<I. p.:jv.;>.

378 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

§ 6. Switzerland

During the period we have been surveying, up to the French
Revolution, Switzerland, which owed much of new intellectual life
to the influx of French Protestants at the revocation of the Edict
of Nantes,1 exhibited no less than the other European countries the
inability of the traditionary creed to stand criticism. Calvinism by
its very rigour generated a reaction within its own special field ; and
the spirit of the slain Servetus triumphed strangely over that of his
slayer. Genevan Calvinism, like that of the English Presbyterians,
was transmuted first into a modified Arminianism, then into
" Arianism " or Socinianism, then into the Unitarianism of modern
times. In the eighteenth century Switzerland contributed to the
European movement some names, of which by far the most famous
is Eousseau ; and the potent presence of Voltaire cannot have failed
to affect Swiss culture. Before his period of influence, indeed, there
had taken place not a little silent evolution of a Unitarian and
deistic kind ; Socinianism, as usual, leading the way. Among the
families of Italian Protestant refugees who helped to invigorate the
life of Switzerland, as French Protestants did later that of Germany,
were the Turrettini, of whom Francesco came to Geneva in the last
quarter of the sixteenth century. One of his sons, Benedict, made
a professor at twenty-four, became a leading theologian and preacher
of orthodox Calvinism, and distinguished himself as an opponent of
Arminianism.2 Still more distinguished in his day was Benedict's
son Francois (1623-1G87), also a professor, who repeated his father's
services, political and controversial, to orthodoxy, and combated
Socinianism, as Benedict had done Arminianism. But Francois's
son Jean-Alphonse, also a professor (whose Latin work on Christian
evidences, translated into French by a colleague, we have seen
adopted and adapted by the Catholic authorities in France), became
a virtual Unitarian3 (1671-1737), and as such is still anathematized
by Swiss Calvinists. Against the deists, however, he was industrious,
as his grandfather, a heretic to Catholicism, had been against the
Arminians, and his father against the Socinians. The family evolu-
tion in some degree typifies the theological process from the sixteenth
to the eighteenth century ; and the apologetics of Jean-Alphonse

1 Cp. P. Godet, Hist. lift, de la Suisse francaise, 1000.

2 E.deBude, Vie de Francois Turrettini, 1871, pp. 12-18. 15. Turrettini was commis-
sioned to write a history of the Information at Geneva, which however remains in MS.
He was further commissioned in 16-21 to no to Holland to obtain financial help for the city,
then seriously menaced by Savoy; and obtained 30,000 florins, besides smaller sums from
Hamburg and Bremen.

8 Cp. Bade, as cited, pp. 21 (birth-date wrong), 201 ; and the Avis de VEditeur to the
Traite de la Veritc de la lieligion Ch ritienne of J. A, Turrotin, Paris, 1753,

SWITZEELAND 379

testify to the vogue of critical deism among the educated class at
Geneva in tho days of Voltaire's nonage. He (or his translator)
deals with the " natural " objections to tho faith, cites approvingly
Locke, Lardner, and Clarke, and combats Woolston, but names no
other English deist. The heresy, therefore, would seem to be a
domestic development from the roots noted by Viret nearly two
centuries before. One of Turrettini's annotators complacently
observes that though deists talk of natural religion, none of them
has ever written a book in exposition of it, the task being left to the
Christians. The writer must have been aware, on the one hand,
that any deist who in those days should openly expound natural
religion as against revealed would be liable to execution for
blasphemy in any European country save England, where, as it
happened, Herbert, Hobbes, Blount, Toland, Collins, Shaftesbury,
and Tindal had all maintained the position, and on the other hand
he must have known that the Ethica of Spinoza was naturalistic.
The false taunt merely goes to prove that deists could maintain
their heresy on the Continent at that time without the support of
books. But soon after Turrettini's time they give literary indication
of their existence even in Switzerland ; and in 1763 we find Voltaire
sending a package of copies of his treatise on Toleration by the hand
of "a young M. Turretin of Geneva," who "is worthy to see the
brethren, though he is the grandson of a celebrated priest of Baal.
He is reserved, but decided, as are most of the Genevese. Calvin
begins in our cantons to have no more credit than the pope."2 For
this fling there was a good deal of justification. When in 1763 the
Council of Geneva officially burned a pamphlet reprint of the
Vicaire Savoyard from Rousseau's Emile there was an immediate
public protest by " two hundred persons, among whom there were
three priests";'5 and some five weeks later "a hundred persons

came for the third time to protest They say that it is permissible

to every citizen to write what ho will on religion ; that he should
not be condemned without a hearing ; and that tho rights of men
must be respected."4 All this was not a sudden product of tho
freethinking influence of Voltaire and Rousseau, which had but
recently begun. An older leaven had long been at work. The
1'rinciprs du Droit Natural of J. J. Burlamaqui (1748), save for its

i Work cited, i. H, nolr.

'•* hettre ;i Damilaville, I! decembre, 17<".:i. The reserved youth limy have been either
,Ican-Alj>honse, grandson of the Soeinian professor, who was horn in 1733 and died child-
less, or some other member of the numerous Turrettini clan,

•'• Voltaire to Damilaville, 1-2 juillet, I7t>:j. " 11 taut <|iie vons saehie/.." explains Voltaire
" que Jean Jacques n'a etc eondnmne que puree qn'on u'aiiue pa; sa per onue."

1 Voltaire to [Juniilaville, -J] au^uste, 17i;:j,

380 EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY

subsumption of deity as the originator of all human tendencies, is
strictly naturalistic and utilitarian in its reasoning, and clearly
exhibits the influence of Hobbes and Mandeville.1 Voltaire, too, in
his correspondence, is found frequently speaking with a wicked
chuckle of the Unitarianism of the clergy of Geneva,2 a theme on
which D'Alembert had written openly in his article Geneve in the
Encyclopedic in 1756.3 So early as 1757, Voltaire roundly affirms
that there are only a few Calvinists left : " tous les honnetes gens
sont deistes par Christ." 4 And when the younger Salchi, professor
at Lausanne, writes in 1759 that " deism is become the fashionable

religion Europe is inundated with the works of deists ; and their

partisans have made perhaps more proselytes in the space of eighty
years than were made by the apostles and the first Fathers of the
Church,"" he must be held to testify in some degree concerning
Switzerland. The chief native service to intellectual progress thus
far, however, was rendered in the field of the natural sciences,
Swiss religious opinion being only passively liberalized, mainly in
a Unitarian direction.

1 Cp. i, 2, 16, 56, 58. 65, OS, 70. 71. 73, 04 ; ii, 230, etc.

2 For instance : "Jo mo recommande contr'oux [les pretres] n, Diou le pere, car pour
lefils, vous savez qu'il a aussi pou de credit que sa mere a Geneve" (Lettre a D'Alembert,

25 mars, 1753) Uno republique ou tout le monde est ouvertement socinien, exceptes

ceux qui font anabaptistes ou moravos. Figurez-vous, mon chef ami, qu'il n'y a pas
actuellomont uti chretion do Geneve a Berne ; cela fait fremir ! " (To the same, 8 fev. 177(5.)

3 On this see cho correspondence of Voltaire and D'Alembert, under dates 8, 28, and 29
Janvier. 1757. ' Lettre a D'Alembert, 27 aout, 1757.

Lettres sur le Ddisme, 1750, p. (5. Cp. pp. 81, 91, KM, 105, 112.

Chapter XX

EARLY FREETHOUGHT IN THE UNITED STATES

1. PERHAPS the most signal of all the proofs of the change wrought
in the opinion of the civilized world in the eighteenth century is the
fact that at the time of the War of Independence the leading states-
men of the American colonies were deists. Such were BENJAMIN
Franklin, the diplomatist of the Revolution ; Thomas Paine, its
prophet and inspirer; WASHINGTON, its commander ; and JEFFERSON,
its typical legislator. But for these four men the American Revolu-
tion probably could not have been accomplished in that age ; and
they thus represent in a peculiar degree the power of new ideas, in
fit conditions, to transform societies, at least politically. On the
other hand, the fashion in which their relation to the creeds of their
time has been garbled, alike in American and English histories,
proves how completely they were in advance of the average thought
of their day ; and also how effectively the mere institutional influence
of creeds can arrest a nation's mental development. It is still one
of the stock doctrines of religious sociology in England and America
that deism, miscalled atheism, wrought the Reign of Terror in the
French Revolution ; when as a matter of fact the same deism was
at the head of affairs in the American.

2. The rise of rationalism in the colonies must be traced in the
main to the imported English literature of the eighteenth century ;
for the first Puritan settlements had contained at most only a
fraction of freethought ; and the conditions, so deadly for all
manner even of devout heresy, made avowed unbelief impossible.
The superstitions and cruelties of the Puritan clergy, however, must
have bred a silent reaction, which prepared a soil for the deism of
the next age.1 " The perusal of Shaftesbury and Collins," writes
Franklin with reference to his early youth, " had made me a skeptic,"
after being " previously so as to many doctrines of Christianity." 2

1 John Wesley in his Journal, dating May, 1737, speaks of having everywhere met
many more "converts to infidelity" than " converts to l'opery," with apparent reference
to ( Itiroliiin..

- Such it the wording of the passage in the Autnhionrniihy in the Kdinburgh edition of
lbOl), I). ■■.':',. which follows the French translation of tin- original MS. In the edition of tin:
AuUibititjravhv and LftU-rs in the Minerva Library, edited hy Mr. l'.ettany (1SJI1, p. 11),
which follows Mr. Higelow's edition of lh7i), it runs : " lining then, from rending Shaftesbury
and Collins, become a real doubter in many points of our religious doctrine "

382 EARLY FREETHOUGHT IN

This was in his seventeenth or eighteenth year, about 1720, so that
the importation of deism had been prompt.1 Throughout life he
held to the same opinion, conforming sufficiently to keep on fair
terms with his neighbours,2 and avoiding anything like critical
propaganda ; though on challenge, in the last year of his life, he
avowed his negatively deistic position.3

3. Similarly prudent was JEFFERSON, who, like Franklin and
Paine, extolled the Gospel Jesus and his teachings, but rejected the
notion of supernatural revelation.4 In a letter written so late as
1822 to a Unitarian correspondent, while refusing to publish another
of similar tone, on the score that he was too old for strife, he
declared that he " should as soon undertake to bring the crazy
skulls of Bedlam to sound understanding as to inculcate reason into
that of an Athanasian."5 His experience of the New England
clergy is expressed in allusions to Connecticut as having been " the
last retreat of monkish darkness, bigotry, and abhorrence of those
advances of the mind which had carried the other States a century
ahead of them "; and in congratulations with John Adams (who had
written that " this would be the best of all possible worlds if there
were no religion in it "), when " this den of the priesthood is at last
broken up."6 John Adams, whose letters with their ' crowd of
skepticisms " kept even Jefferson from sleep,7 seems to have figured
as a member of a Congregationalist church, while in reality a
Unitarian.8 Still more prudent was Washington, who seems to
have ranked habitually as a member of the Episcopal church ;
but concerning whom Jefferson relates that, when the clergy, having
noted his constant abstention from any public mention of the
Christian religion, so penned an address to him on his withdrawal
from the Presidency as almost to force him to some declaration, he
answered every part of the address but that, which he entirely
ignored. It is further noted that only in his valedictory letter to
the governors of the States, on resigning his commission, did he
speak of the "benign influence of the Christian religion"9 — the
common tone of the American deists of that day. It is further

1 Only in 1781, however, appeared the first anti-Christian work published in America.
Ethan Allen's Reason the only Oracle of Man. As to its positions see Conway, Life of
Paine, ii, 192-93. 2 Autobioyraiihy, Bettany's ed. pp. 56, 65, 71, 77, etc.

3 Letter of March 9, 1790. Id. p. 636.

4 Cp. J. T. Morse's Thomas Jefferson, pp. 339-10.

5 MS. cited by Dr. Conway, Life of Paine, ii, 310-11.

6 Memoirs of Jefferson, 1829, iv, 300-301. The date is 1S17. These and other passages
exhibiting Jefferson's deism are cited in Rayner's Sketches of the Life, etc., of Jefferson,
1832, pp. 513-17.

7 Memoirs of Jefferson, iv, 331. 8 Dr. Conway, Life of Paine, ii, 310.

9 Extract from Jefferson's Journal under date February 1, 1800, in the Memoirs, iv, 512.
Gouverneur Morris, whom Jefferson further cites as to Washington's unbelief, is not a
very good witness ; but the main fact cited is significant.

THE UNITED STATES 383

established that Washington avoided the Communion in church.1
For the rest, the broad fact that all mention of deity was excluded
from the Constitution of the United States must be historically
taken to signify a profound change in the convictions of the leading
minds among the people as compared with the beliefs of their
ancestors. At the same time, the fact that they as a rule dissembled
their unbelief is a proof that, even where legal penalties do not
attach to an avowal of serious heresy, there inheres in the menace
of mere social ostracism a power sufficient to coerce the outward
life of public and professional men of all grades, in a democratic
community where faith maintains and is maintained by a compe-
titive multitude of priests. With this force the freethought of our
own age has to reckon, after Inquisitions and blasphemy laws have
become obsolete.

4. Nothing in American culture-history more clearly proves the
last proposition than the case of Thomas PAINE, the virtual founder
of modern democratic freethought in Great Britain and the States."
It does not appear that Paine openly professed any heresy while he
lived in England, or in America before the French Revolution. Yet
the first sentence of his Age of Reason, of which the first part was
written shortly before his imprisonment, under sentence of death
from the Robespierre Government, in Paris (1793), shows that he
had long held pronounced deistic opinions.3 They were probably
matured in the States, where, as we have seen, such views were often
privately held, though there, as Franklin is said to have jesuitically
declared in his old age, by way of encouraging immigration :
Atheism is unknown ; infidelity rare and secret, so that persons
may live to a great age in this country without having their piety
shocked by meeting witli either an atheist or an infidel." Paine did
an unequalled service to the American Revolution by his Common
Sense and his series of pamphlets headed The Crisis : there is, in
fact, little question that but for the intense stimulus thus given by
him at critical moments the movement might have collapsed at an
early stage. Yet he seems to have had no thought there and then
of avowing his deism. It was in part for the express purpose of
resisting the ever-strengthening attack of atheism in France on deism

1 Compare tin; testimony niven l>y the lav. Dr. Wilson, of Albany, in 1S31 , as cited by

R. U. Owen in bis Discussion i,n the A uthenttrit >i of I lie liilrfe wild ( ). I iachcler <l don,

ed. Is i(), I). ■!:,[). .villi the replies on I in- other side I lip. ii:i :iU. Wash melon's death-bed
attitude was that ol a deist. See all toe available data tor his supposed orthodoxy in
Sparkss Life <>J Wash uigtun. \~,:,1. app. iv.

- So lar as i know n, 1'aine was tie- lit- ' writer to use the expression, "the religion of
Humanity." See Conway's Li.le nj 1'iiiiie. n, liljli. To 1'aine s mil ueiiee, too. appears to
be line toe fo'.mdin ; ol the lira American An U-Slavvry Society. Id. l, 51 dJ., Ill), SO, etc.

" (Jp. Conway's Life of I'timc, n, -mi, Mi.

384 EARLY FBEETHOUGHT IN

itself that he undertook to save it by repudiating the Judaeo-Christian
revelation ; and it is not even certain that he would have issued the
Age of Reason when it did appear, had he not supposed he was going
to his death when put under arrest, on which score he left the
manuscript for publication.1

5. Its immediate effect was much greater in Britain, where his
Rights of Man had already won him a vast popularity in the teeth
of the most furious reaction, than in America. There, to his profound
chagrin, he found that his honest utterance of his heresy brought on
him hatred, calumny, ostracism, and even personal and political
molestation. In 1797 he had founded in Paris the little " Church of
Theo-philanthropy," beginning his inaugural discourse with the
words : " Eeligion has two principal enemies, Fanaticism and
Infidelity, or that which is called atheism. The first requires to be
combated by reason and morality ; the other by natural philosophy."2
These were his settled convictions ; and he lived to find himself
shunned and vilified, in the name of religion, in the country whose
freedom he had so puissantly wrought to win.3 The Quakers, his
father's sect, refused him a burial-place. He has had sympathy and
fair play, as a rule, only from the atheists whom he distrusted and
opposed, or from thinkers who no longer hold by deism. There is
reason to think that in his last years the deistic optimism which
survived the deep disappointments of the French Revolution began
to give way before deeper reflection on the cosmic problem,4 if not
before the treatment he had undergone at the hands of Unitarians
and Trinitarians alike. The Butlerian argument, that Nature is as
unsatisfactory as revelation, had been pressed upon him by Bishop
Watson in a reply to the Age of Reason; and though, like most
deists of his age, he regarded it as a vain defence of orthodoxy, he
was not the man to remain long blind to its force against deistic
assumptions. Like Franklin, he had energetically absorbed and given

1 A letter of Franklin to someone who had shown him a freethinking manuscript,
advising against its publication (Bettany's ed. p. 620), has been conjecturally connected
with Paine, but was clearly not addressed to him. Franklin died in 1790, and Paine was
out of America from 17S7 onwards, lint the letter is in every way inapplicable to the Age
of lie i son. The remark: "If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be with-
out it ? " could not be made to a devout deist like Paine.

2 Conway. Life of Paine, ii, 254-55.

8 See Dr. Conway's chapter, "The American Inquisition," vol. ii, ch. xvi ; also pp. 361-02,
374,379. The falsity of the ordinary charges against Paine's character is finally made
clear by Dr. Conway, ch. xix, and pp.371, 3S3, 419, 423. Cp. the author's pamphlet, Thomas
Paine : An Investigation (Bonner). The chronically revived story of his death-bed remorse
for his writings— long ago exposed (Conway, ii, 420)— is definitively discredited in the latest
reiteration. That occurs in the Life and Letters of Dr. Ii. 11. Thomas (1905), the mother
of whose stepmother was the Mrs. Mary Hinsdale, nee Roscoe, on whose testimony the
legend rests. Dr. Thomas, a Quaker of the highest character, accepted the story without
question, but incidentally tells of the old lady (p. 13) that " her wandering fancies had ail
the charm of a present fairy-tale to us." No further proof is needed, after the previous
exposure, of the worthlessness of the testimony in question. '] Conway, ii, 371.

THE UNITED STATES 3S5

out the new ideals of physical science : his originality in the inven-
tion of a tubular iron bridge, and in the application of steam to
navigation,1 being nearly as notable as that of Franklin's great
discovery concerning electricity. Had the two men drawn their
philosophy from the France of the latter part of the century instead
of the England of the first, they had doubtless gone deeper. As it
was, temperamental optimism had kept both satisfied with the
transitional formula ; and in the France of before and after the
Revolution they lived pre-occupied with politics.

6. The habit of reticence or dissimulation among American public
men was only too surely confirmed by the treatment meted out to
Paine. Few stood by him ; and the vigorous deistic movement set
up in his latter years by Elihu Palmer soon succumbed to the con-
ditions," though Palmer's book, The Principles of Nature (1802, rep.
by Richard Garble, 1819), is a powerful attack on the Judaic and
Christian systems all along the line. George Houston, leaving
England after two years' imprisonment for his translation of
d'Holbach's Eeee Homo, went to New York, where he edited the
Minerva (182:2), reprinted his book, and started a freethougbt
journal, The. Correspondence. That, however, lasted only eighteen
month-. All the while, such statesmen as Madison and Monroe,
the latter Paine's personal friend, seem to have been of his way of
thinking," though the evidence is scanty. Thus it came about
that, save for the liberal movement of the Hicksite Quakers,1 the
American deism of Paine's day was decorously transformed into the
later Unitarianism, the extremely rapid advance of which in the
next generation is the best proof of the commonness of private
unbelief. The influence of Priestley, who, persecuted at home,
went to end his days in the States, had doubtless much to do with
the Unitarian development there, as in England ; but it seems
certain that the whole deistic movement, including the work of
Paine and Palmer, had tended to move out of orthodoxy many of
those who now, recoiling from the fierce hostility directed against
the outspoken freethinkers, sought a more rational form of creed
than that of the orthodox churches. The deistic tradition in a
manner centred in the name of Jefferson, and the known deism of
that leader would do much to make fashionable a heresy which
combined his views with a decorous attitude to the Sacred Books.

1 Sec tin' details in Conway's Lift', ii, -2S0-S1, and lintr. Ho had also a scheme for a
gunjxr.s l< r in itor id. and 1, 1\ ) . and various other remarkable plans.

- Conway, ii. ij'L'-TI. '•'• Testimonies quoted by it. L). Owen, as cited, pp. -231-J'2.

; ( mway, ii. Hi.

vol. ii 2c

Chapter XXI
FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The Reaction

All over the civilized world, as we have seen, the terrors of the
French Revolution evoked an intellectual no less than a political
reaction, its stress being most apparent and most destructive in
those countries in which there had been previously the largest
measure of liberty. Nowhere was it more intense or more disastrous
than in England. In countries such as Denmark and Spain, only
lately and superficially liberalized, there was no great progress to
undo : in England, though liberty was never left without an indomit-
able witness, there was a violent reversal of general movement, not
to be wholly rectified in half a century. Joined in a new activity
with the civil power for the suppression of all innovating thought,
the Church rapidly attained to an influence it had not possessed
since the days of Sacheverel and a degree of wealth it had not before
reached since the Reformation. The wealth of the upper class was
at its disposal to an unheard-of extent, there being apparently no
better way of fighting the new danger of democracy ; and dissent
joined hands with the establishment to promote orthodoxy.

The average tone in England in the first quarter of the century
may be gathered from the language held by a man so enlightened,
comparatively speaking, as Sydney Smith, wit, humourist, Whig, and
clergyman. In 1801 we find him, in a preface never reprinted,
prescribing various measures of religious strategy in addition " to the
just, necessary, and innumerable invectives which have been levelled
against Rousseau, Voltaire, D'Alembert, and the whole pande-
monium of those martyrs to atheism, who toiled with such
laborious malice, and suffered odium with such inflexible profli-
gacy, for the wretchedness and despair of their fellow creatures."1
That this was not jesting may be gathered from his daughter's
account of his indignation when a publisher sent him " a work of
irreligious tendency," and when Jeffrey admitted " irreligious

1 Memoir of Sydney Smith, by his daughter. Lady Holland, od. 18G9, p. 49. Lady Holland
remarks on the same page that her father's religion had in it "nothing intolerant."

386

THE REACTION 387

opinions " to the Edinburgh Review. To the former he writes that
every principle of suspicion and fear would be excited in me by a
man who professed himself an infidel"; and to Jeffrey: "Do you
mean to take care that the Review shall not profess infidel principles ?
Unless this is the case I must absolutely give up all connection with
it." All the while any semblance of "infidelity " in any article in
the Review must have been of the most cautious kind.

In the Catholic countries, naturally, the reaction was no less
violent. In Italy, as we saw, it began in Tuscany almost at once.
The rule of Napoleon, it is true, secured complete freedom of the
Press as regarded translation of freethinking books, an entire liberty
of conscience in religious matters, and a sharp repression of
clericalism, the latter policy going to the length of expelling all the
religious orders and confiscating their property.'2 All this counted
for change ; but the Napoleonic rule all the while choked one of the
springs of vital thought — to wit, the spirit of political liberty; and
in 1814-15 the clerical system returned in full force, as it did all
over Italy. Everywhere freethought was banned. All criticism of
Catholicism was a penal offence; and in the kingdom of Naples
alone, in 1825, there were 27,012 priests, 8,455 monks, 8,185 nuns,
20 archbishops, and 73 bishops, though in 1807 the French influence
had caused the dissolution of some 250 convents.'1 At Florence the
Censure forbade, in 1817, the issue of a new edition of the translated
work of Cabanis on Let Rapports dit physique ct die moral; and
Mascagni, the physiologist, was invited to delete from his work a
definition of man in which no notice was taken of the soul.' It was
even proclaimed that the works of Voltaire and Rousseau were not to
be read in the public libraries without ecclesiastical permission ; but
this veto was not seriously treated." All native energy, however, was
either cowed or cajoled into passivity. If, accordingly, the mind of
Italy was to survive, it must be by the assimilation of the culture of
freer States ; and this culture, reinforced by the writings of Leopardi,
generated a new intellectual life, which was a main factor in the
ultimate achievement of Italian liberation from Austrian rule.

Spain, under Charles IV, became so thoroughly re-clericalized at
the very outbreak of the Revolution that no more leeway seemed
possible; but even in Spain, early in the nineteenth century, the
government found means to retrogress yet further, and the minister
Cahallero sent an order to the universities forbidding the study of

l Memoir of S'/'Uuy Smith, p. I l_\

- .lulic.'i Luehaire, Ensai sur I'cclutirin intcUccturlb' ilc V Italic, 100C, pp. ', 7.
'■'■ Dr. K:un;i«c. \onk\aii'l lluewayvoj Italy, l->»;8, pp. Til. in.. l;i. lunmuc describes tho
help...- -ne,.; ol tin: better niiiKls before ls:j<). ' Lucliaire, pp. o.j. oii. ' Id.V-'M.

388 FEEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

moral philosophy. Tho king, he justly declared, did not want
philosophers, but good and obedient subjects.1

In France, where the downfall of Napoleon meant the restoration
of the monarchy, the intellectual reaction was really less powerful
than in England. The new spirit had been too widely and continu-
ously at work, from Voltaire onwards, to be politically expelled ; and
the revolutions of 1830 and 1818 gave the proof that even on the
political side the old spirit was incapable of permanent recovery. In
Germany, where freethinking was associated not with the beaten
cause of the Revolution but in large measure with the national
movement for liberation from the tyranny of Napoleon,2 the religious
reaction was substantially emotional and unintellectual, though it
had intellectual representatives, notably Schleiermacher. Apart
from his culture-movement, the revival consisted mainly in a new
Pietism, partly orthodox, partly mystical ;3 and on those lines it ran
later to the grossest excesses. But among the educated classes of
Germany there was the minimum of arrest, because there tho intel-
lectual life was least directly associated with the political, and the
ecclesiastical life relatively the least organized. The very separate-
ness of the German States, then and later so often deplored by
German patriots, was really a condition of relative security for
freedom of thought and research ; and the resulting multiplicity of
universities meant a variety of intellectual effort not then paralleled
in any oilier country/ What may be ranked as the most important
effect of the reaction in Germany — the turning of Kant, Fichte, and
Hegel in succession to the task of reconciling rational philosophy
with religion in the interests of social order — was in itself a rational-
istic process as compared with the attitude of orthodoxy in other
lands. German scholarship, led by the re-organized university of
Berlin, was in fact one of the most progressive intellectual forces in
Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century ; and only
its comparative isolation, its confinement to a cultured class,
prevented it from affecting popular thought as widely as deism had
done in the preceding century. Even in the countries in which
popular and university culture were less sharply divided, the German
influence was held at bay like others.

1 Doblado (Blanco White), Letters from Spain, 1822. p. 358.

- Thus the traveller and belletrist J. G. Seume, a zealous deist and opponent of atheism,
and a no less zealous patriot, penned many fiercely freethinking maxims, as : " Where
were the most so-called positive religions, there was always the least morality"; "Grotius
and the Bible are the best supports of despotism "; " Heaven has lo--t us the earth ": " The
best apostles of despotism and slavery are the mystics." Apokryphen, 180(1-1807, in
SammtlichK We.rke, is:!'.), iv, 157. 173, 177. 210.

■; C. II. (,'oltrell. Ut'litiimis Movements of Germany, 1819, p. 12 sq.

4 Cp. the author's Evolution of States, pp. 138-39.

THE FORCES OF RENASCENCE 389

But in time the spirit of progress regained strength, the most
decisive form of recovery being the new development of the struggle
for political liberty from about 1830 onwards. In England the
advance thenceforward was to be broadly continuous on the political
side. On the Continent it culminated for the time in the explosions
of 1848, winch were followed in the Germanic world by another
political reaction, in which freethought suffered ; and in France,
after a few years, by the Second Empire, in which clericalism was
again fostered. Rut these checks have proved impermanent.

The Forces of Renascence

As with the cause of democracy, so with the cause of rationalism,
the forward movement grew only the deeper and more powerful
through the check ; and the nineteenth century closed on a record of
freethinking progress which may be said to outbulk that of all the
previous centuries of the modern era together. So great was the
activity of the century in point of mere quantity that it is impossible,
within the scheme of a " Short History," to treat it on even such a
reduced scale of narrative as has been applied to the past. A
detailed history on national lines from the French Revolution
onwards would mean another book as large as the present. On
however large a scale it might be written, further, it would involve
a recognition of international influences such as had never before
been evolved, save when on a much smaller scale the educated world
all round read and wrote Latin. Since Goethe, the international
aspect of culture upon which lie laid stress has become ever more
apparent ; and scientific and philosophical thought, in particular, are
world-wide in their scope and hearing. It must here suffice, there-
fore, to take a series of broad and general views of the past century's
work, leaving adequate critical and narrative treatment for separate
undertakings. The most helpful method seems to be that of a con-
spectus (1) of the main movements and forces that during the
century affected in varying degrees the thought of the civilized
world, and (2) of the main advances made and the point reached in
the culture of the nations, separately considered. At the same time,

1 Wiicn I Lrni planner 1 the treatment of the nineteenth century in the fir -• edition of
tin- book, it wit-, known to me that Mr. Alfred W. IVnn had m hand a work on Thr lliatuni
(,f Emjh ■>< Hili ,„.il ;-,/;/ in tin- Sutrtmitli C, ntury; uiiiUlie lumwle Un in ade me the more
resolved to ,.!■■ ii my own record conden ed. Duly published in lone, I ..unmiiuis, ■> \ nls.),
Mr. Henri bo ii; amply lullille t exp, ctatimi.-, ; an i to it i \\mild r, ■:'. r rverj render who
Keeks a fuller ■- ir\ ey than the pre eiit. [! i fre-dmes . of thoujim and \ h,*mir ol execution
will more li mil repay him. Kveii Mr. Itenn';. cop inn work. In i\\ ever e \ . , " : m; a it, lines
u lan;e amount ot pace to n prcliniiuarj -c.irvey of the eighteenth eiiitur.\ leaves rnmu
foi i ■ in mo :rapn on toe uirieteeiifh, to i\ nolliini! ol the culture In Lory

of a -lo/.,:; ot! >-v enunlrie .

390 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

the forces of rationalism may be discriminated into Particular and
General. We may then roughly represent the lines of movement, in
non-chronological order, as follows : —
I. — Forces of criticism and corrective thought bearing expressly on religious beliefs.

1. In Great Britain and America, the new movements of popular freethought
begun by Paine, and lasting continuously to the present day.

2. In France and elsewhere, the reverberation of the attack of Voltaire,
d'Holbach, Dupuis, and Volney, carried on most persistently in Catholic
countries by the Freemasons, as against official orthodoxy after 1815.

3. German " rationalism," proceeding from English deism, moving towards
naturalist as against supernaturalist conceptions, dissolving the notion of the
miraculous in both Old and New Testament history, analysing the literary
structure of the sacred books, and all along affecting studious thought in other
countries.

4. The literary compromise of Lessing, claiming for all religions a place in a
scheme of " divine education."

5. In England, the neo-Christianity of the school of Coleridge, a disinte-
grating force, promoting the " Broad Church " tendency, which in Dean Milman
was so pronounced as to bring on him charges of rationalism.

G. The utilitarianism of the school of Bentham, carried into moral and social
science.

7. Comtism, making little direct impression on the " constructive " lines laid
by the founder, but affecting critical thought in many directions.

8. German philosophy, Kantian and post-Kantian, in particular the Hegelian,
turned to anti-Christian and anti-supernaturalist account by Strauss, Vatke,
Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, and Marx.

9. German atheism and scientific "materialism" — represented by Feuerbach
and Biichner (who, however, rejected the term " materialism " as inappropriate).

10. Revived English deism, involving destructive criticism of Christianity, as
in Hennell, F. W. Newman, R. W. Mackay, \V. R. Greg, Theodore Parker, and
Thomas Scott, partly in co-operation with Unitarianism.

11. American transcendentalism or pantheism — the school of Emerson.

12. Colenso's preliminary attack on the narrative of the Pentateuch, a
systematized return to Voltairean common-sense, rectifying the unscientific
course of the earlier " higher criticism " on the historical issue.

13. The later or scientific " higher criticism " of the Old Testament— repre-
sented by Kuenen, Wellhausen, and their successors.

14. New historical criticism of Christian origins, in particular the work of
Strauss and Baur in Germany, Renan and Havet in France, and their successors.

15. Exhibition of rationalism within the churches, as in Germany, Holland,
and Switzerland generally ; in England in the Essays and Reviews ; later in
multitudes of essays and books, and in the ethical criticism of the Old Testa-
ment ; in America in popular theology.

1G. Association of rationalistic doctrine with the Socialist movements, new
and old, from Owen to Bebel.

17. Communication of doubt and moral questioning through poetry and
belles-lettres — as in Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Clough, Tennyson, Carlyle, Arnold,
Browning, Swinburne, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Victor Hugo, Leconte de Lisle,
Leopardi, and certain French and English novelists.

POPULAR PROPAGANDA AND CULTURE 39 L

II. — Modem Science, physical, mental, and moral, sapjying the bases of all
sujici'naturalist systems,

1. Astronomy, newly directed by Laplace.

2. Geology, gradually connected (as in Britain by Chambers) with

3. Biology, made definitely non-deistic by Darwin.

4. The comprehension of all science in the Evolution Theory, as by Spencer,
advancing on Comto.

5. Psychology, as regards localization of brain functions.

G. Comparative mythology, as yet imperfectly applied to Christism.

7. Sociology, as outlined by Comte, Buckle, Spencer, Wimvood Reade, Le>ter
Ward, Giddings, Tarde, Durkheim, and others, on strictly naturalistic lines.

S. Comparative Hierology ; the methodical application of principles insisted
on by all the deists, and formulated in the interests of deism by Lessing, but
latterly freed of his implications.

'J. Above a'.l, the later development of Anthropology (in the wide English
sense of the term), which, beginning to take shape in the eighteenth century,
came to new life in the latter part of the nineteenth ; and is now one of the
most widely cultivated of all the sciences — especially on the side of religious
creed and psychology.

On the other hand, we may group somewhat as follows the general
forces of retardation of freethought operating throughout the
century : —

1. Penal laws, still operative in Britain and Germany against popular free-
ht propaganda, and till recently in Britain against any endowment of
freethought.

•2. Class interests, involving in the first half of the century a social conspiracy
against rationalism in England.

3. Commercial pressure thus set up, and always involved in the influence of
churches.

4. In England, identification of orthodox Dissent with political Liberalism —
a sedative.

5. Concessions by the clergy, especially in England and the United States —
to many, another sedative.

(J. Above all, the production of new masses of popular ignorance in the
industrial nations, and continued lack of education in the others.

7. On this basis, business-like and in large part secular-minded organization
of the endowed churches, as against a freethought propaganda hampered by the
previously named causes, and in England by laws which veto all direct endow-
ment of anti-Christian heresy.

It remains to make, with forced brevity, the surveys thus outlined.
Section 1.— Popular Propaganda and Cdltcrk

1. If any one circumstance more than another differentiates the
life of to-day from that of older civilizations, or from thai of previous
centuries of the modem era, it is the diffusion of rationalistic views
among the common people." In no other era is to he found tin:

392 FKEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTUEY

phenomenon of widespread critical skepticism among the labouring
masses : in all previous ages, though chronic complaint is made
of some unbelief among the uneducated, the constant and abject
ignorance of the mass of the people has been the sure foothold of
superstitious systems. Within the last century the area of the
recognizably civilized world has grown far vaster ; and in the
immense populations that have thus arisen there is a relative
degree of enlightenment, coupled with a degree of political power
never before attained. Merely to survey, then, the broad movement
of popular culture in the period in question will yield a useful notion
of the dynamic change in the balance of thought in modern times,
and will make more intelligible the special aspects of the culture
process.

This vital change in the distribution of knowledge is largely to
be attributed to the written and spoken teaching of a line of men
who made popular enlightenment their great aim. Their leading
type among the English-speaking races is THOMAS PAINE, whom
we have seen combining a gospel of democracy with a gospel of
critical reason in the midst of the French Revolution. Never before
had rationalism been made widely popular. The English and French
deists had written for the middle and upper classes. Peter Annet
was practically the first who sought to reach the multitude ; and
his punishment expressed the special resentment aroused in the
governing classes by such a policy. Of all the English freethinkers
of the earlier deistical period he alone was selected for reprinting by
the propagandists of the Paine period. Paine was to Annet, however,
as a cannon to a musket, and through the democratic ferment of his
day he won an audience a hundredfold wider than Annet could have
dreamt of reaching. The anger of the governing classes, in a time
of anti-democratic panic, was proportional. Paine would have been
at least imprisoned for his Rights of Man had he not tied from
England in time ; and the sale of all his books was furiously pro-
hibited and ferociously punished. Yet they circulated everywhere,
even in Protestant Ireland,1 hitherto affected only under the surface
of upper-class life by deism. The circulation of Bishop Watson's
Apology in reply only served to spread the contagion, as it brought
the issues before multitudes who would not otherwise have heard of
them.2 All the while, direct propaganda was carried on by trans-
lations and reprints as well as by fresh English tractates. Diderot's
Thoughts on Religion, and Freret's Letter from TJirasijbulus to

1 Locky, Hint, of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, ed. 189:2, iii, oti-2.
- Ci>. Conway's Life of Paine, ii, -Ij-l-ii'J.

POPULAR PROPAGANDA AND CULTURE 393

Leucippus, seem to have been great favourites among the Painites,
as was Elihu Palmer's Principles of Nature ; and Volney's Ruins
of Empires had a large vogue. Condorcet's Esquissc had been
promptly translated in 1795 ; the translation of d'Holbach's System
of Nature reached a third edition in 1817;1 that of Raynal's History
had been reprinted in 1801; and that of Helvetius On the Mind in
1810; while an English abridgment of Bayle in four volumes, on
freethinking lines, appeared in 182G.

2. Meantime, new writers arose to carry into fuller detail the
attacks of Paine, sharpening their weapons on those of the more
scholarly French deists. A Life of Jesus, including his Apocryphal
History,1 was published in 1818, with such astute avoidance of all
comment that it escaped prosecution. Others, taking a more daring
course, fared accordingly. George Houston translated the Ecce
Homo of d'Holbach, first publishing it at Edinburgh in 1799, and
reprinting it in London in 1813. For the second issue lie was
prosecuted, lined £200, and imprisoned for two years in Newgate.
Robert Wedderburn, a mulatto calling himself "the Rev.," in reality
a superannuated journeyman tailor who officiated in Hopkins Street
Unitarian Chapel, London, was in 1820 sentenced to two years'
imprisonment in Dorchester Jail for a " blasphemous libel " con-
tained in one of his pulpit discourses. His Letters to the Rev.
Solomon Herschell (the Jewish Chief Rabbi) and to the Archbishop
of Canterbury show a happy vein of orderly irony and not a little
learning, despite his profession of apostolic ignorance ; and at the
trial the judge admitted his defence to be exceedingly well drawn
up." His publications naturally received a new impetus, and passed
to a more drastic order of mockery.

3. As the years went on, the persecution in England grew still
fiercer ; but it was met with a stubborn hardihood which wore out
even the hitter malice of piety. One of the worst features of the
religious crusade was that it affected to attack not unbelief hut

vice," such being the plea on which Wilberforce and others prose-
cuted, during a porio 1 of more than twenty years, the publishers
and booksellers who issued the works of Paine." But even that
dissembling device did not ultimately avail. A name not to be

1 This translation, issued I>y " Sherwood, Neely. anil Join";. Paternoster How, and all
booksellers," purports to In; "with additions." The. translation, however, lias altered
d'Holhacn's atheism to deism.

- I',y \\ . H ultman . To.' book is " embellished with a. leu i of .!,• us" a conventional
reli'iio'is picture. Uuttmau's opinion, may be divined from the la I. sentence of his
preface, alluding; to "ihe bit; h pre ten Lion and in Hated stiie ol the In es of Clin t, which
i.-.-.ue periodically from the KmMi; h pre ..-'

•; Cp. Ounumif . 'J Hrliijimi, pp. ■::■)- -Mi.

394 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

forgotten by those who value obscure service to human freedom is
that of Richard Carlile, who between 1819 and 1835 underwent
nine years' imprisonment in his unyielding struggle for the freedom
of the Press, of thought, and of speech.1 John Clarke, an ex-
Methodist, became one of Carlile's shopmen, was tried in 1824 for
selling one of his publications, and " after a spirited defence, in
which he read many of the worst passages of the Bible," was
sentenced to three years' imprisonment, and to find securities for
good behaviour during life. The latter disability he effectively
anticipated by writing, while in prison, A Critical Review of the
Life, Character, and Miracles of Jesus, wherein Christian feelings
were treated as Christians had treated the feelings of freethinkers,
with a much more destructive result. Published first, strangely
enough, in the Neicgate Magazine, it was republished in 1825 and
1839, with impunity. Thus did a brutal bigotry bring upon itself
ever a deadlier retaliation, till it sickened of the contest. Those
who threw up the struggle on the orthodox side declaimed as before
about the tone of the unbeliever's attack, failing to read the plain
lesson that, while noisy fanaticism, doing its own worst and vilest,
deterred from utterance all the gentler and more sympathetic spirits
on the side of reason, the work of reason could be done only by the
harder natures, which gave back blow for blow and insult for insult,
rejoicing in the encounter. Thus championed, freethought could
not be crushed. The propagandist and publishing work done by
Carlile was carried on diversely by such free lances as ROBERT
TAYLOR (ex-clergyman, author of the Diegcsis, 1829, and The
Devil's Pulpit, 1830), Charles Southwell (1814-1860), and
William Hone,2 who ultimately became an independent preacher.
Southwell, a disciple of Robert Owen, who edited The Oracle of
Reason, was imprisoned for a year in 1840 for publishing in that
journal an article entitled " The Jew Book"; and was succeeded in
the editorship by George JACOB HOLYOAKE (1817-1906), another
Owenite missionary, who met a similar sentence ; whereafter George
Adams and his wife, who continued to publish the journal, were
imprisoned in turn. Matilda Roalfe and Mrs. Emma Martin about

1 See Harriet Martineau's History of the Peace, ed. 1877, ii, 87, and Mrs. Carlile Camp-
bell's The Battle of the Press (Bonner, 1899), passim, as to the treatment of those who
acted as Carlile's shopmen. Women were imprisoned as well as men — e.g. Susanna
Wright, as to whom see Wheeler's Dictionary, and last ref. Carlile's wife and sister
were likewise imprisoned with him; and over twenty volunteer shopmen in all went
to jail.

'2 Hone's most important service to popular culture was his issue of the Apocryphal
New Testament, which, by co-ordinating work of the same kind, gave a fresh scientific
basis to the popular criticism of the gospel history. As to his famous trial for blasphemy
on the score of his having published certain parodies, political in intention, see bk. i,
ch. x (by Knight) of Harriet Martineau's History of the Peace.

POPULAR PROPAGANDA AND CULTURE 395

the same period underwent imprisonment for like causes.1 In this
fashion, by the steady courage of a much-enduring band of men and
women, was set on foot a systematic Secularist propaganda — the
name having relation to the term " Secularism," coined by Ilolyoake.

4. In this evolution political activities played an important part.
Henry Hetherington (1792-1819), the strenuous democrat who in
1830 began the trade union movement, and so becamo the founder
of Chartism, fought for the right of publication in matters of free-
thought as in politics. After undergoing two imprisonments of six
months each (1832), and carrying on for three and a half years the
struggle for an untaxed Press, which ended in his victory (1831), he
was in 1S10 indicted for publishing Haslam's Letters to the Clergy
of all Denominations, a freethinking criticism of Old Testament
morality. lie defended himself so ably that Lord Denman, the
judge, confessed to have "listened with feelings of great interest
and sentiments of respect too "; and Justice Talfourd later spoke of
the defence as marked by "great propriety and talent." Neverthe-
less, he was punished by four months' imprisonment.2 In the
following year, on the advice of Francis Place, lie brought a test
prosecution for blasphemy against Moxon, the poet-publisher, for
issuing Shelley's complete works, including Queen Mab. Talfourd,
then Serjeant, defended Moxon, and pleaded that there ' must be
some alteration of the law, or some restriction of the right to put
it in action"; but the jury were impartial enough to find the
publisher guilty, though he received no punishment.'1 Among other
works published by Hetherington was one entitled A Hunt after
tlie Devil, "by Dr. P. Y." (really by Lieutenant Lecount), in which
the story of Noah's ark was subjected to a destructive criticism.

5. flolyoake had been a missionary and martyr in the movement
of Socialism set up by Robert OWEN, whose teaching, essentially
scientific on its psychological or philosophical side, was the first
effort to give systematic effect to democratic ideals by organizing
industry. It was in the discussions of the Association of all
Classes of all Nations," formed by Owen in 1835, that the word

Socialism " first became current.5 Owen was a freethinker in all
things ;'' and his whole movement was so penetrated by an anti-
theological spirit that the clergy as a rule became its bitter enemies,
though such publicists as Macaulay and .John Mill also combined

l Holyoukc, Sixty Years i,f an AuUntur'n TAfe, i, lO'.-H). Sec p. Ill as to other cases
-- An. by Holycake in In, I. ,,f Sat. Hum. Op. Si.rh/ Ytarx. per index.
:; Articles in Dirt. t,J Sal. Iliny. i Ilolyoake, Sixty Yntrs, i, 17.

' Kirkup, llistani i>f Socialism, W.)l, p. iil.

'■ " From an early alio lie had lost all belief in the prevailim! forms- of reliiji
(Kirkup, p. .7.1).

396 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

with them in scouting it on political and economic grounds.1 Up
till the middle of 1817 he had on his side a large body of " respect-
able " and highly-placed philanthropists, his notable success in his
own social and commercial undertakings being his main recom-
mendation. His early Essays on the Formation of Character,
indeed, were sufficient to reveal his heterodoxy ; but not until, at
his memorable public meeting on August 21, 1817, he began to
expatiate on "the gross errors that have been combined with the
fundamental notions of every religion that has hitherto been taught
to men " '2 did he rank as an aggressive freethinker. It was in his
own view the turning-point of his life. He was not prosecuted ;
though Brougham declared that if any politician had said half as
much lie would have been "burned alive"; but the alienation of
"moderate" opinion at once began; and Owen, always more fervid
than prudent, never recovered his influence among the upper classes.
Nonetheless, " his secularistic teaching gained such influence among
the working classes as to give occasion for the statement in the
Westminster Bevietv (1839) that his principles were the actual creed
of a great portion of them."3

Owen's polemic method — if it could properly be so called — was
not so much a criticism of dogma as a calm impeachment of religion
in a spirit of philanthropy. No reformer was ever more entirely free
from the spirit of wrath : on this side Owen towers above com-
parison. " There is no place found in him for scorn or indignation.
He cannot bring himself to speak or think evil of any man. He
carried out in his daily life his own teaching that man is not the
proper object of praise or blame. Throughout his numerous works
there is hardly a sentence of indignation — of personal denunciation
never. He loves the sinner, and can hardly bring himself to hate
the sin."4 He had come by his rationalism through the influence
rather of Rousseau than of Voltaire ; and he had assimilated the
philosophic doctrine of determinism — of all ideals the most difficult
to realize in conduct — with a thoroughness of which the flawed
Rousseau was incapable. There was thus presented to the world
the curious case of a man who on the side of character carried
rationalism to the perfection of ideal " saintliness," while in the
general application of rational thought to concrete problems he was
virtually unteachable. For an absolute and immovable conviction

1 Reformers of almost all schools, indeed, from the first regarded Owen with more or
less genial incredulity, some criticizing him acutely without any ill-will. See Podmore's
Hubert Owen, 1906, i, 23si-12. Southey was one of the first to detect his lack of religious
belief. Id. p. 2-2-2, n.

2 l'odmore, i, 2 1(1. :i Kirkup, as cited, p. t'A. 4 Podmore, ii, 010.

POPULAR PROPAGANDA AND CULTURE 397

in his own practical rightness was in Owen as essential a constituent
as his absolute benevolence. These were the two poles of his per-
sonality. He was, in short, a fair embodiment of the ideal formed
by many people — doctrine and dogma apart — of the Gospel Jesus.
And most Christians accordingly shunned and feared or hated him.

Such a personality was evidently a formidable force as against
the reinforced English orthodoxy of the first generation of the nine-
teenth century. The nature of Owen's propaganda as against
religion may bo best sampled from his lecture, " The New Religion:
or, Religion founded on the Immutable Laws of the Universe,
contrasted with all Religions founded on Human Testimony,"
delivered at the London Tavern on October 20, 1830 :2 — ■

" Under the arrangements which have hitherto existed for
educating and governing man, four general characters have been
produced among the human race. These four characters appear to
be formed, under the past and present arrangements of society, from
four different original organizations at birth

" Xo. 1. May ho termed the conscientious religious in all countries.

" Xo. 2. Unbelievers in the truth of any religion, but who strenu-
ously support the religion of their country, under the conviction that,
although religion is not necessary to insure their own good conduct,
it is eminently required to compel others to act right.

" Xo. 3. Unbelievers who openly avow their disbelief in the truth
of any religion, such as Deists, Atheists, Skeptics, etc., etc., but who
do not perceive the laws of nature relative to man as an individual,
or when united in a social state.

" Xo. -1. Disbelievers in all past and present religions, but believers
in the eternal unchanging laws of the universe, as developed by facts
derived from all past experience ; and who, by a careful study of these
facts, deduce from them the religion of nature.

" Class Xo. 1 is formed, under certain circumstances, from those
original organizations which possess at birth strong moral and weak

intellectual faculties Class Xo. 2 is composed of those individuals

who by nature possess a smaller quantity of moral and a larger

quantity of intellectual faculty Class Xo. 3 is composed of men

of strong moral and moderate intellectual faculty Class Xo. 4

comprises those who, by nature, possess a high degree of intellectual
ami moral faculty "

Thus all forms of opinion were shown to proceed cither from
intellectual or moral defect, save the opinions of Owen. Such

' " 1 : ■■. ' v lordinarv i-l f complacency," "autocratic action," " arrogance," arc anion;: the
ex pre- -ion- u-,cd oi hi in by his ablest, hioi;raj>her. U'odmorc, ii, fill .) Of him mi till I he
Hai 'I. ;i ■ ol Ktnerson hv himself, " the children of the (iods do not iiruuc "— tin- lueultj being
absent.

- Pamphlet .-old at l£d., and "to be iiad of all the Booksellers."

398 FEEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

propositions, tranquilly elaborated, were probably as effective in pro-
ducing irritation as any frontal attack upon any dogmas, narratives,
or polities. But, though not even consistent (inasmuch as the
fundamental thesis that " character is formed by circumstances " is
undermined by the datum of four varieties of organization), they
were potent to influence serious men otherwise broadly instructed
as to the nature of religious history and the irrationality of dogma ;
and Owen for a generation, despite the inevitable failure and frustra-
tion of his social schemes, exercised by his movement a very wide
influence on popular life. To a considerable extent it was furthered
by the popular deistic philosophy of GEORGE and ANDREW COMBE
— a kind of deistic positivism — which then had a great vogue;1 and
by the implications of phrenology, then also in its most scientific
and progressive stage. When, for various reasons, Owen's move-
ment dissolved, the freethinking element seems to have been absorbed
in the secular party, while the others appear to have gone in large
part to build up the movement of Co-operation. On the whole, the
movement of popular freethought in England could be described as
poor, struggling, and persecuted, only the most hardy and zealous
venturing to associate themselves with it. The imprisonment of
Holyoake (1842) for six months, on a trifling charge of blasphemy,
is an illustration of the brutal spirit of public orthodoxy at the
time.2 Where bigotry could thus only injure and oppress without
suppressing heresy, it stimulated resistance ; and the result of the
stimulus was a revival of popular propaganda which led to the
founding of a Secular Society in 1852.

6. This date broadly coincides with the maximum domination
of conventional orthodoxy in English life. From about the middle
of the century the balance gradually changes. In 1852 we find the
publisher Henry Bohn reissuing the worthless apologetic works of
the Rev. Andrew Fuller, with a "publisher's preface" in which
they are said to "maintain an acknowledged pre-eminence," though
written " at a period of our national history when the writings of
Volney and Gibbon, and especially of Thomas Paine, fostered by
the political effects of the French Revolution, had deteriorated the
morals of the people, and infused the poison of infidelity into the
disaffected portion of the public." We have here still the note of
early-nineteenth-century Anglican respectability, not easily to be
matched in human history for hollowness and blatancy. Fuller is

1 Of George Combo's Constitution of Man (1828), a deistic work, over 50,000 copies were
sold in Britain within twelve years, and 10,000 in America. Advt. to 1th ed. 1839. Combe
avows that his impulse came from the phrenologist Spurzheim.

'- See the details in his Last Trial by Jury for Atheism in England.

POPULAR PROPAGANDA AND CULTURE 399

at once ono of tho most rabid and one of the most futile of tho
thousand and one defenders of the faith. A sample of his mind
and method is the verdict that " If the light that is gone abroad on
earth would permit the rearing of temples to Venus, or Bacchus, or
any of the rabble of heathen deities, there is little doubt but that
modern unbelievers would in great numbers become their devotees ;
but, seeing they cannot have a God whose worship shall accord with
their inclinations, they seem determined not to worship at all." l
In the very next year the same publisher began the issue of a
reprint of Gibbon, with variorum notes, edited by " An English
Churchman," who for the most part defended Gibbon against his
orthodox critics. This enterprise in turn brought upon the pious
publisher a fair share of odium. But the second half of the century,
albeit soon darkened by new wars in Europe, Asia, and America,
was to be for England one of Liberalism alike in politics and in
thought, free trade, and relatively free publication, with progress in
enlightenment for both the populace and the educated " classes.

7. In 1S58 there was elected to the presidency of the London
Secular Society the young CHARLES BRADLAUGH, one of the
greatest orators of his age, and one of the most powerful personali-
ties ever associated with a progressive movement. Early experience
of clerical persecution, which even drove the boy from his father's
roof, helped to make him a fighter, but never infirmed his humanity.
In the main self-taught, lie acquired a large measure of culture in
French and English, and his rare natural gift for debate was
sharpened by a legal training. A personal admirer of Owen, he
never accepted his social polity, but was at all times the most
zealous of democratic reformers. Thenceforward the working masses
in England were in large part kept in touch with a freethought
which drew on the results of the scientific and scholarly research
of the time, and wielded a dialectic of which trained opponents
confessed the power.' [n the place of tho bland dogmatism of
Owen, and the calm assumption that all mankind coidd and should
1)0 schoolmastered into happiness and order, there came the alert
recognition of the absoluteness of individualism as regards convic-
tion, and its present pre-potency as regards social arrangements.
Every thesis was brought to the test of argument and evidence;
and in due course many who bad complained that Owen would not

1 The a.,- ,„l its Omn WUnest, 1790. rep. in Holm's oil. of The 1'rinri ,i'tl Works and
lienunns of the Iter. Andre, i) Fuller, l\rrl, ))J>. Kill :17.

~ Sec I'rof. Klint' ; tribute to the, reasoning power of lSntdl;ui:!ll and Holyoakc in IliK
Anti-Thristic Theories, Itli ed. pp. .US I'.).

400 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

argue, complained that the new school argued everything. The
essential thing was that the people were receiving vitally needed
instruction ; and were being taught with a new power to think for
themselves. Incidentally they were freed from an old burden by
Bradlaugh's successful resistance to the demand of suretyship from
newspapers, and by his no less successful battle for the right of
non-theistic witnesses to make affirmation instead of taking the
oath in the law courts.1

The inspiration and the instruction of the popular movement
thus maintained were at once literary, scientific, ethical, historical,
scholarly, and philosophic. Shelley was its poet ; Voltaire its first
story-teller ; and Gibbon its favourite historian. In philosophy,
Bradlaugh learned less from Hume than from Spinoza ; in Biblical
criticism — himself possessing a working knowledge of Hebrew — he
collated the work of English and French specialists, down to
and including Colenso, applying all the while to the consecrated
record the merciless tests of a consistent ethic. At the same time,
the whole battery of argument from the natural sciences was turned
against traditionalism and supernaturalism, alike in the lectures of
Bradlaugh and the other speakers of his party, and in the pages of
his journal, The National lie former. The general outcome was an
unprecedented diffusion of critical thought among the English
masses, and a proportionate antagonism to those who had wrought
such a result. When, therefore, Bradlaugh, as deeply concerned
for political as for intellectual righteousness, set himself to the task
of entering Parliament, he commenced a struggle which shortened
his life, though it promoted his main objects. Not till after a series
of electoral contests extending over twelve years was he elected for
Northampton in 1880 ; and the House of Commons in a manner
enacted afresh the long resistance made to him in that city.2 When,
however, on his election in 1880, the Conservative Opposition began
the historic proceedings over the Oath question, they probably did
even more to deepen and diffuse the popular frcethought movement
than Bradlaugh himself had done in the whole of his previous
career. The process was furthered by the policy of prosecuting and
imprisoning (1883) Mr. G. W. Foote, editor of the Freethinker,
under the Blasphemy Laws — a course not directly ventured on as
against Bradlaugh, though it was sought to connect him with the
publication of Mr. Foote's journal.

1 See Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonnor's Charles Bradlaugh, i, 140. 2S8-S0.

- For a full record see i'art II of Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner's Charles Bradlaugh,

POPULAR PROPAGANDA AND CULTURE 401

To this day it is common to give a false account of the origin
of the episode, representing Bradlaugh as having " forced " his
opinions on the attention of the House. Rather he strove unduly
to avoid wounding religious feeling. Wont to make affirmation by
law in the courts of justice, he held that the same law applied to
the oatli of allegiance," and felt that it would be unseemly on his
part to use the words of adjuration if he could legally affirm. On
this point ho expressly consulted the law officers of the Crown, and
they gave the opinion that he had the legal right, which was his
own belief as a lawyer. The faction called tho " fourth party,"
however, saw an opportunity to embarrass tho Gladstone Govern-
ment by challenging the act of affirmation, and thus arose the
protracted struggle. Only when a committee of the House decided
that lie could not properly affirm did Bradlaugh propose to take
the oath, in order to take his seat.

The pretence of zeal for religion, made by the politicians who
had raised the issue, was known by all men to be tho merest
hypocrisy. Lord Randolph Churchill, who distinguished himself
by insisting on the moral necessity for a belief in ' some divinity or
other," is recorded to have professed a special esteem for Mr. (now
Lord) Morley, the most distinguished Positivist of his time.1 Tho
whole procedure, in Parliament and out, was so visibly that of tho
lowest political malice, exploiting the crudest religious intolerance,
that it turned into active freethinkers many who had before been
only passive doubters, and raised the secularist party to an intensity
of zeal never before seen. At no period in modern British history
had there been so constant and so keen a platform propaganda of
unbelief ; so unsparing an indictment of Christian doctrine, history,
and practice ; such contemptuous rebuttal of every Christian pre-
tension ; such asperity of spirit against the creed which was once
more being championed by chicanery, calumny, and injustice. In
those the years of indignant warfare were sown tho seeds of a
more abundant growth of rationalism than had ever before been
known in the Ihilish Islands. With invincible determination
Bradlaugh fought his case through Parliament and the law courts,
incurring debts which forced upon him further toils that clearly
shortened his life, hut never yielding for an instant in Ins battle
with the bigotry of half the nation. Liberalism was shamed by
many defections; Conservatism, with the assent of Mr. Hal four,
was solid for injustice;" and in the entire Church of l'higland less

1 After lini'llnil^ii ],;,,] -.■cur. rl hi ■ cut, the nnhle Innl ( ven soii.'llit hi !)c(|ll!lill1imci'.
- Tie j nun \ Jim;; (Jut) i; i- Villi vc luci libel's, alter l--,e, |>ri\atcly prolWsee! -\ in pa I hy.

vol. ii 2u

402 FEEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTUEY

than a dozen priests stood for tolerance. But the cause at stake
was indestructible. When Bradlaugh at length took the oath and
his seat in 1886, under a ruling of the new Speaker (Peel) which
stultified the whole action of the Speaker and majorities of the
previous Parliament, and no less that of the law courts, straight-
forward freethought stood three-fold stronger in England than in
any previous generation. Apart from their educative work, the
struggles and sufferings of the secularist leaders won for Great
Britain the abolition within one generation of the old burden of
suretyship on newspapers, and of the disabilities of non-theistic
witnesses ; the freedom of public meeting in the London parks ; the
right of avowed atheists to sit in Parliament (Bradlaugh having
secured in 1888 their title to make affirmation instead of oath) ;
and the virtual discredit of the Blasphemy Laws as such. It is
probable also that the treatment meted out to Mrs. Besant — then
associated with Bradlaugh in freethought propaganda — marked the
end of another form of tyrannous outrage, already made historic in
the case of Shelley. Secured the custody of her children under a
marital deed of separation, she was deprived of it at law (1879) on
her avowal of atheistic opinions, with the result that her influence
as a propagandist was immensely increased.

8. The special energy of the English secularist movement in
the ninth decade was partly duo to the fact that by that time there
had appeared a remarkable amount of modern freethinking literature
of high literary and intellectual quality, and good " social " status.
Down to 1870 the new literary names committed to the rejection of
Christianity, apart from the men of science who kept to their own
work, were the theists Hennell, F. W. Newman, W. B. Greg, E. W.
Mackay, Buckle, and W. E. H. Lecky, all of them influential, but
none of them at once recognized as a first-rate force. But with the
appearance of Lecky's History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit
of nationalism in Europe (1865), lacking though it was in clear-
ness of thought, a new tone began to prevail ; and his History of
European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869), equally
readable and not more uncompromising, was soon followed by a
series of powerful pronouncements of a more explicit kind. One of
the first of the literary class to come forward with an express
impeachment of Christianity was MOXCURE DANIEL CONWAY,
whose Earthward Pilgrimage (1870) was the artistic record of a
gifted preacher's progress from Wesleyan Methodism, through
Unitarianism, to a theism which was soon to pass into agnosticism.
In 1871 appeared the remarkable work of WiNWOOD EEADE, The

POPULAR PROPAGANDA AND CULTURE 403

Martyrdom of Man, wherein a rapid survey of ancient and medieval
history, and of the growth of religion from savage beginnings, leads
up to a definitely anti-theistic presentment of the future of human
life with the claim to have shown "that the destruction of Chris-
tianity is essential to the interests of civilization."1 Some eighteen
editions tell of the acceptance won by the book. Less vogue, but
some startled notice, was won by the Duke of Somerset's Christian
Theology and Modern Scepticism (1872), a work of moderate
rationalism, but by a peer. In 1S73 appeared HERBERT SPENCER'S
Introduction to the Stud;/ of Sociology, wherein the implicit anti-
supernaturalism of that philosopher's First Principles was advanced
upon, in the chapter on " The Theological Bias," by a mordant
attack on that Christian creed.

That attack had been preceded by Matthew Arnold's Literature
and Dogma (1872), wherein the publicist who had censured Colenso
for not writing in Latin described the Christian doctrine of the
Trinity as "the fairy-tale of three Lord Shaftesburys." Much
pleading for the recognition by unbelievers of the value of the Bible
faded to convince Christians of the value of such a thinker's Chris-
tianity. A more important sensation was provided in 1873 by the
pi ■-• humous publication of Mill's Autobiography, and, in the following
year, by his Three Essays on Religion, which exhibited its esteemed
author as not only not a Christian but as never having been one,
although he formulated a species of limited liability theism, as
unsatisfactory to the rationalists as to the orthodox. Still the fresh
manifestations of freethinking multiplied. On the one hand the
massive treatise entitled Supernatural Religion (187-1), and on the
oi her the freethinking essays of Prof. W. K. Clifford in the Fortnightly
■". the most vigorously outspoken ever yet written by an
English academic, showed that the whole field of debate was being
reop 'lie 1 with a new power and confidence. The History of English
Thought in llo'. Eighteenth Century, by Leslie Stephen (1876), set
up the same impression from another side; yet another social
sensation was created by the appearance of Viscount Ambep.LEY'S
Awily. of Religious Uelirf (1877) ; and all the while the " Higher
Criticism " proceeded within the pale of the Church.

The literary situation was now so changed that, whereas from 1850
to 1 -~-|J the "sensations" in the religions world were those made by
rational: -' ic attacks, I hereaft er t hey were those made by new defences.
JI. Dnmimond's Xulural L<m in tin: Spiritual World (LS83), Mr.

i W< rk cil.-d, ).. VJ1.

404 FEEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Balfour's Defence of Philosophic Doubt (1879) and Foundations of
Belief (1895), and Mr. Kidd's Social Evolution (1894), were successively
welcomed as being declared to render such a service. It is doubtful
whether they are to-day valued upon that score in any quarter.

9. In the first half of the century popular forms of freethought
propaganda were hardly possible in other European countries. France
had been too long used to regulation alike under the monarchy
and under the empire to permit of open promotion of unbelief in the
early years of the Restoration. Yet as early as 1828 we find the
Protestant Coquerel avowing that in his day the Bourbonism of the
Catholic clergy had revived the old anti-clericalism, and that it wTas
common to find the most high-minded patriots unbelievers and
materialists.1 But still more remarkable was the persistence of deep
freethinking currents in the Catholic world throughout the century.
About 1830 rationalism had become normal among the younger
students at Paris ;'2 and the revolution of that year elicited a charter
putting all religions on an equality.3 Soon the throne and the
chambers were on a footing of practical hostility to the Church.
Under Louis Philippe men dared to teach in the College de France
that " the Christian dispensation is but one link in the chain of
divine revelations to man." "' Even during the first period of reaction
after the restoration numerous editions of Yolney's Ruines and of
the Abrege6 of Dupuis's Origine de tons les Cultcs served to maintain
among the more intelligent of the proletariat an almost scientific
rationalism, which can hardly be said to have been improved on by
such historiography as that of Renan's Vie de Jesus. And there
were other forces, over and above freemasonry, which in Fiance and
other Latin countries has since the Revolution been steadily anti-
clerical. The would-be social reconstructor CHARLES FOURIER
(1772-1837) was an independent and non-Christian though not an
anti-clerical theist, and his system may have counted for something
as organizing the secular spirit among the workers in the period of
the monarchic and Catholic reaction. Fourier approximated to
Christianity inasmuch as he believed in a divine Providence ; but
like Owen he had an unbounded and heterodox faith in human

1 Coquerel, Essai sur Vhistoire gene rale rfv christianisme, 1828, pref.

2 Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, Diary in France, 1845, pp. 75-77.

3 "The miserable and deistieal principle of the equality of all religions" (id. p. 188).
Cp. pp. 151, 153. ' Id. ))]). 15. 37, 15, LSI, 185, 190.

■~> Id. ])}). 157 i;i. As to the general vogue of rationalism in France at that period, see
pp. 35, 201 : and compare Saisset, Fssnis sur la philosophieet la religion, 1815 ; The Progress
oflteligious Thought an illustrated in the Protestant Church of France, by Dr. J. K. Heard,
18lil; and Wilson's article in Essays rind Herieujs. As to Switzerland and Holland, see
Pearson, Infidelity, its Aspects, etc., 1853, pp. 5(HM!1, 575-84.

>': Louis Philippe sought to suppress this book, of which many editions had appeared
before 1830. Sue lllanco White's Life, 1615, ii, 168,

POPULAR PROPAGANDA AND CULTURE 405

goodness and perfectibility; and ho claimed to have discovered the
" plan of God " for men. But Fourier was never, like Owen, a
popular force ; and popular rationalism went on other lines. At no
time was the proletariat of Paris otherwise than largely Voltairean
after the Revolution, of which one of the great services (carried on
by Napoleon) was an improvement in popular education. The rival
non-Christian systems of SAINT- SlMON (1760-1823) and AUGUSTE
COAITE (1798-1857) also never took any practical hold among them ;
but throughout the century they have been fully the most free-
thinking working-class population in the work!.

As to Fourier see the CEuvrcs Choisies de Fourier, ed. Ch. Gide,
pp. 1-3, 9. Cp. Solidarite : Vuc Syntketique sur la doctrine de
Ch. Fourier, par Ilippolyte Renaud, 3e edit. 1846, ch. i : "Pour
ramener l'homme a la foi " [en Dieu] , writes Renaud, " il faut
lui oi'frir aujourd'hui une foi complete et composee, une foi
solidement assise sur le temoignage de la raison. Pour cela il
faut que la flambeau cle la science dissipe toutes les obscurites "
(p. 9). This is not propitious to dogma ; but Fourier planned
and promised to leave priests and ministers undisturbed in his
new world, and even declared religions to be "much superior to
uncertain sciences." Gide, introd. to (Fuvres Choisies, pp. xxii-
xxiii, citing Manuscrits, vol. de 1853-1856, p. 293. Cp. Dr. Ch.
Pellarin, Fourier, sa vie et so. theorie, 5e edit. p. 143.

Saint-Simon, who proposed a "new Christianity," expressly
guarded against direct appeals to the people. See Weil, Saint-
Siiuon et sun CEuvre, 1894, p. 193. As to the Saint- Simonian
sect, see an interesting testimony by Renan, Les Apotres, p. 148.

The generation after the fall of Napoleon was pre-eminently the
period of new schemes of society ; and it is noteworthy that they
were all non-Christian, though all, including even Owen's, claimed
to provide a " religion," and the French may seem all to have been
convinced by Napoleon's practice that some kind of ctdt must be
provided for the peoples. Owen alone rejected alike supernaturalism
and cultus ; and his movement left the most definite rationalistic
traces. All seem to have been generated by the double, influence of
(1) the social failure of the French Revolution, which left so many
anxious foi' another and better effort at reconstruction, and (2) of the
spectacle of the rule of Napoleon, which seems to have elicited new
ideals of beneficent autocracy. Owen, Fourier, Saint-Simon, and
Comte were all alike would-be founders of a new society or social
religion. It seems probable that this proclivity to systematic recon-
struction, in a world which still carried a panic-memory of one
great social overturn, helped to lengthen the rule of orthodoxy.

40G FBEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Considerably more progress was made when freethought became
detached from special plans of polity, and grew up anew by way
of sheer truth-seeking on all the lines of inquiry.

In France, however, the freethinking tradition from the eighteenth
century never passed away, at least as regards the life of the great
towns. And while Napoleon III made it his business to conciliate
the Church, which in the person of the somewhat latitudinarian
Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, had endorsed his coup d'etat of 1851, 1
even under his rule the irreversible movement of freethought revealed
itself among his own ministers. Victor Duruy, the eminent his-
torian, his energetic Minister of Education, was a freethinker, non-
aggressive towards the Church, but perfectly determined not to
permit aggression by it.2 And when the Church, in its immemorial
way, declaimed against all forms of rationalistic teaching in the
colleges, and insisted on controlling the instruction in all the
schools,3 his firm resistance made him one of its most hated
antagonists. Even in the Senate, then the asylum of all forms
of antiquated thought and prejudice, Duruy was able to carry his
point against the prelates, Sainte-Beuve strongly and skilfully
supporting him.4 Thus in the France of the Third Empire, on
the open field of the educational battle-ground between faith and
reason, the rationalistic advance was apparent in administration no
less than in the teaching of the professed men of science and the
polemic of the professed critics of religion.

10. In other Catholic countries the course of popular culture in
the first half of the century was not greatly dissimilar to that seen
in France, though less rapid and expansive. Thus we find the
Spanish Inquisitor-General in 1815 declaring that " all the world
sees with horror the rapid progress of unbelief," and denouncing
the errors and the new and dangerous doctrines " which have
passed from other countries to Spain.5 This evolution was to some
extent checked ; but in the latter half of the century, especially in
the last thirty years, all the Catholic countries of Europe were more
or less permeated with demotic freethought, usually going hand in
hand with republican or socialistic propaganda in politics. It is
indeed a significant fact that freethought propaganda is often most
active in countries where the Catholic Church is most powerful.
Thus in Belgium there are at least three separate federations,

1 Prof. E. Lavisso, TJn Ministre : Victor Duruy, 1895 (rep. of art. in Bevue de Paris,
Jan v. 15 and Mars 1, 1895), p. 117.

•j T<1. pp. 09-105. 3 777. pp. 107-118. < Id. pp. 118-27.

5 Llorente, Hist. crit. de V Inquisition de VJ-Jspagne, 2e edit, iv, 153.

POPULAR PROPAGANDA AND CULTURE 407

standing for hundreds of freethinking "groups"; in Spain, a few
years ago, there were freethought societies in all the large towns,
and at least half-a-dozen freethought journals ; in Portugal there
have been a number of societies — a weekly journal, 0 Sccolo, of
Lisbon, and a monthly review, 0 Livre Exame. In France and
Italy, where educated society is in large measure rationalistic, the
Masonic lodges do most of the personal and social propaganda ; but
there are federations of freethought societies in both countries. In
Switzerland freethought is more aggressive in the Catholic than in
the Protestant cantons.1 In the South American republics, again,
as in Italy and France, the Masonic lodges are predominantly
freethinking ; and in Peru there was, a few years ago, a Freethought
League, with a weekly organ. As long ago as 185G the American
diplomatist and archaeologist, Squier, wrote that, " Although the
people of Honduras, in common with those of Central America in
general, are nominally Catholics, yet, among those capable of
reflection or possessed of education, there are more who are destituto
of any fixed creed — Rationalists or, as they are sometimes called,
Freethinkers, than adherents of any form of religion."2 That the
movement is also active in the other republics of the southern
continent may be inferred from the facts that a Positivist organiza-
tion has long subsisted in Brazil ; that its members were active in
the peaceful revolution which there substituted a republic for a
monarchy ; and that at the Freethought Congresses of Rome and
Paris in 1904 and 1905 there was an energetic demand for a
Congress at Buenos Aires, which was finally agreed to for 190C.

While popular propaganda is hardly possible save on political
lines, freethinking journalism lias counted for much in the most
Catholic parts of Southern Europe. The influence of such journals
is to tie measured not by their circulation, which is never great, but
by their keeping up a habit of more or less instructed freethinking
among readers, to many of whom the instruction is not otherwise
easily accessible. Probably the least ambitious of them is an
intellectual force of a higher order than the highest grade of popular
religious journalism ; while some of the stronger, as De Dcujeraad
of Amsterdam, have ranked as high-class serious reviews. In the
more free and progressive countries, however, freethought affects
all periodical literature; and in France it partly permeates the
ordinary newspapers, in England, whore a series of monthly or
weekly publications of an emphatically freethinking sort has been

I Ilii'H'n-l ol Oil. Kulpiii : iii !,]'.• Aim iinirh <!,- l.ihic I'mxrr, I'.HXi.
- Squiur, Solan on CridraL Anuria , ls:0, \i. -1-i'l.

408 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

nearly continuous from about 1810, l new ones rising in place of
those which succumbed to the commercial difficulties, such
periodicals suffer an economic pinch in that they cannot hope for
much income from advertisements, which are the chief sustenance
of popular journals and magazines. The same law holds elsewhere ;
but in England and America the high-priced reviews have been
gradually opened to rationalistic articles, the way being led by the
English Westminster Beview1 and Fortnightly Revieio, both founded
with an eye to freer discussion.

Among the earlier freethinking periodicals may be noted The
Republican, 1819-26 (edited by Carlilc) ; The Deist's Magazine,
1820 ; The Lion, 1828 (Carlile) ; The Prompter, 1830 (Garble) ;
The Gauntlet, 1833 (Carlile) ; The Atheist and Republican,
1811-42 ; The Blasphemer, 1842 ; The Oracle of Reason (founded
by Southwell), 1842, etc.; The Reasoner and Herald of Progress
(largely conducted by Holyoake), 1846-1861 ; Cooper 's Journal ;
or, unfettered Thinker, etc., 1850, etc.; The Movement, 1843 ;
The Freethinker's Information for the Beople (undated : after
1840) ; Freethinker's Magazine, 1850, etc.; London Investigator,
1854, etc. Bradlaugh's National Reformer, begun in 1860,
lasted till 1893. Mr. Foote's Freethinker, begun in 1881, still
subsists. Various freethinking monthlies have risen and fallen
since 1880 — e.g., Our Corner, edited by Mrs. Besant, 1883-88 ;
The Liberal and Progress, edited by Mr. Foote, 1879-87; the
Free Revieio, transformed into the University Magazine, 1893-
1898. The Reformer, a monthly, edited by Mrs. Bradlaugh
Bonner, subsisted from 1897 to 1904. The Literary Guide,
which began as a small sheet in 1885, flourishes. Since 1900,
a popular Socialist journal, The Clarion, has declared for
rationalism through the pen of its editor, Mr. R. Blatchford
(" Nunquam "), whose polemic has caused much controversy.
For a generation back, further, rationalistic essays have appeared
from time to time not only in the Fortnightly Bcvieiv (founded
by G. II. Lewes, and long edited by Mr. John (now Lord)
Morley, much of whose writing on the French idiilosophes
appeared in its pages), but in the Nineteenth Century, wherein
was carried on, for instance, the famous controversy between
Mr. Gladstone and Prof. Huxley. In the early 'seventies, the
Cornhill Magazine, under the editorship of Leslie Stephen,

1 Before 1840 the popular frecthought propaganda had been partly carried on under
cover of Radicalism, as in Carlile's Republican, and Lion, and in various publications of
William Hone. Cp. H.B. Wilson's article " The National Church," in Essays and Iievieivs,
9th ed. p. 152.

2 Described as "our chief atheistic organ" by the late F. W. Newman "because Dr.
James Martineau declined to continue writing for it, because it interpolated atheistical

articles between his theistic articles" (Contributions to the early history of the late

Cardinal Newman, 1891, p. 103). The review was for a time edited bv .1. S. .Mill, and for
long after him by Dr. John Chapman. It lasted into the twentieth century, under the
editorship of Dr. Chapman's widow, and kept a free platform to the end.

POPULAR PROPAGANDA AND CULTURE 409

issued serially Matthew Arnold's Literature and Dogma and
St. Paul and Protestantism. In the latter years of the
century quite a number of reviews, some of them short-lived,
gave space to advanced opinions. Put propaganda has latterly
become more and more a matter of all-pervading literary
influence, the immense circulation of the sixpenny reprints of
the R. P. A. having put the advanced literature of the last
generation within the reach of all.

11. in Germany, as we have seen, the relative selectness of
culture, the comparative aloofness of the ' enlightened " from the
mass of the people, made possible after the War of Independence
a certain pietistic reaction, in the absence of any popular propa-
gandist machinery or purpose on the side of the rationalists. In
the opinion of an evangelical authority, at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, " through modern enlightenment (Aufklarung)
the people had become indifferent to the Church ; the Bible was
regarded as a merely human book, the Saviour merely as a person
who had lived and taught long ago, not as one whose almighty
presence is with his people still." According to the same authority,
" before the war, the indifference to the word of God which prevailed
among the upper classes had penetrated to the lower; but after it,
a desire for the Scriptures was everywhere felt." ' This involves
an admission that the " religion of the heart " propounded by
Schleiermacher in his addresses On Religion" to the educated among
its despisers " >f (1799) was not really a Christian revival at all.
Schleiermacher himself in 1803 declared that in Prussia there was
almost no attendance on public worship, and the clergy had fallen
into profound discredit. A pietistic movement had, however, begun
during the period of the French ascendancy ;" and seeing that the
frecthinking of the previous generation had been in part asso-
ciated with French opinion, it was natural that on this side anti-
French feeling should promote a reversion to older and more
"national" forms of feeling. Thus after the fall of Napoleon the
tone of the students who had fought in the war seems to have been
more religious than that of previous years.6 Inasmuch, however,
as the enlightenment " of the scholarly class was maintained, and

1 Pastor W. Baur, Hamburg, Religious Life in (lermany during the Wars of Tmle-
iii nil <■ a re, Knu. tr. 187-2, i>. II . II. .1. Kose and I'usey, in their controversy as to the causes
of dermaii rationalism, were substantially at one on this point oi' fact. Kose, Letter to the
Jlishop of London. IS"), pp. !'.), 1 .00, 101. - hi. p. IS1.

- Irhir ,lv Religion: liedm an die (jcbildeten unter ihren I'erachtern. These aro
discusser] hereinafter

[ Inehtenbertjer, Hist, of Cue. Theol. in tlte. Nineteenth Cent. Kntf. tr. I SSI), pp. 1-2-2 23.

' Sec the same volume, passim.

,; Karl von Kaumer, Cunt rib. to the Hist, of the (termini ( 'nirer.sit ies, I'.ir!. 1 r. IS-iD, ]). 7'.).
rI'li(! intellectual tone of W. I'.anr and K. von Kauiner certainly protects them from any
charge of " enlightenment."

410 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

applied anew to critical problems, the religious revival did not turn
back the course of progress. "When the third centenary comme-
moration, in 1817, of the Reformation approached, the Prussian
people were in a state of stolid indifference, apparently, on religious
matters." x Alongside of the pietistic reaction of the Liberation
period there went on an open ecclesiastical strife, dating from an
anti-rationalist declaration by the Court preacher Reinhard at
Dresden in 1811,2 between the rationalists or " Friends of Light"
and the Scripturalists of the old school ; and the effect was a general
disintegration of orthodoxy, despite, or it may be largely in virtue
of, the governmental policy of rewarding the Pietists and discouraging
their opponents in the way of official appointments. The Prussian
measure (1817) of forcibly uniting the Lutheran and Calvinistic
Churches, with a neutral sacramental ritual in which the eucharist
was treated as a historical commemoration, tended to the same
consequences, though it also revived old Lutheran zeal;4 and when
the new revolutionary movement broke out in 1848, popular feeling
was substantially non-religious. " In the south of Germany
especially the conflict of political opinions and revolutionary
tendencies produced, in the first instance, an entire prostration of
religious sentiment." The bulk of society showed entire indifference
to worship, the churches being everywhere deserted ; and atheism
was openly avowed, and Christianity ridiculed as the invention of
priestcraft."0 One result was a desperate effort of the clergy to
"effect a union among all who retained any measure of Christian belief,
in order to raise up their national religion and faith from the lowest
state into which it has ever fallen since the French Revolution."

But the clerical effort evoked a counter effort. Already, in 1846,
official interference with freedom of utterance led to the formation of
a "free religious" society by Dr. Rupp, of Konigsberg, one of the
"Friends of Light" in the State Church; and ho was followed by
Wislicenus of Halle, a Hegelian, and by Uhlich of Magdeburg.6 As
a result of the determined pressure, social and official, which ensued
on the collapse of the revolution of 1848, these societies failed to
develop on the scale of their beginnings ; and that of Magdeburg,
which at the outset had 7,000 members, has latterly only 500 ;
though that of Berlin has nearly 4,000.7 There is further a
Freidenker Bund, with branches in many towns ; and the two

1 Laing, Notes of a Traveller, 1812, p. 181.

2 C. H.Cotterill, lielig. Movements of Germany in the Nineteenth Century, 1819. pp. 39-10.

3 Id. )>]). 27-28, 41-42. 4 Op. Laing, as cited, pp. 206-207, 211.
5 Cottcrill, as cited, p. 81. G Cotterill, as cited, pp. 43-17.

"i Rapport de Ida Altmann, in Almanach de Libre 1'ensee, 1906, p. 20.

POPULAR PROPAGANDA AND CULTURE 411

organizations, with their total membership of some fifty thousand,
may bo held to represent the militant side of popular frecthought in
Germany. This, however, constitutes only a fraction of the total
amount of passive rationalism. There is a large measure of
enlightenment in both the working and the middle classes ; and the
ostensible force of orthodoxy among the official and conformist
middle class is in many respects illusory. The German police laws
put a rigid check on all manner of platform and press propaganda
which could he indicted as hurting the feelings of religious people;
so that a jest at the Holy Coat of Treves could even in recent years
send a journalist to jail, and the platform work of the militant
societies is closely trammelled. Yet there are, or have been, over a
dozen journals which so far as may be take the frecthought side ;
and the whole stress of Bismarckian reaction and of official ortho-
doxy under the present Kaiser has never availed to make the tone of
popular thought pietistic. KAKL MAKX, the prophet of the German
Socialist movement (1818-1883), laid it down as part of its mission
"to free consciousness from the religious spectre"; and his two
most influential followers in Germany, BEBEL and LlEBKNECHT,
were avowed atheists, the former even going so far as to avow
officially in the Reichstag that " the aim of our party is on the
political plane the republican form of State ; on the economic,
Socialism ; and on the plane which we term the religious, atheism ";
though the party attempts no propaganda of the latter order.
Christianity and Social-Democracy," said Bebcl again, are
opposed as fire and water."3

Some index to the amount of popular frecthought that normally
exists under the surface in Germany is furnished, further, by the
strength of the German frecthought movement in the United States,
where, despite the tendency to the adoption of the common speech,
there grew up in the last quarter of the nineteenth century many
German freethinking societies, a Gorman federation of atheists, and
a vigorous popular organ, TJcr Frcidenlcer.

Thus, under the sounder moral and economic conditions of the
life of the proletariate in Germany, straightforward rationalism, as
apart from propaganda, is becoming among them more and more
the rule. The bureaucratic control of education forces religious

1 Tin' principal liavu Ix-cn : T>ox frtic Wort and Vrankfnrtfr Xrifinm, Frankfort-on-
Mn.it); Ihr Freitlnikt-r, I-'riedrichsha^en, near Berlin; Ihr frrirrtitiiiiscx Soiititiinxbltttt,
Brcslau ; Uii-fn ii: lirmeunlr, M.uvlelnin! ; Ihr Athfixt, N u rein I iere ; M,n irlu-nt um, (lot>h;i ;
IV 'hrlu- Xritinm, Berlin; lirrlinrr Vi,ll:x;:riht,iii. Berlin; \'<>rinirts (Socialist,), Berlin;
ItV , r /.< it mm. Bremen ; llu rttint): rhr Z, Hhiki, K.'iniu In n; ; Kiiiiiinrhf. /.< Hhiui. Cologne.

- SUiHeni'irm, Jj>r mii'lrrw- Uwjlfiubv in tlt'.ti untricit Staiitlrii, 11)01, l>. 11. :l lit. p. ■J.S.

412 FEEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

teaching in the common schools; and there is no "conscience
clause" for unbelieving parents.1 A Protestant pastor at the end
of the century made an investigation into the state of religious
opinion among the working Socialists of some provincial towns and
rural districts, and found everywhere a determined attitude of
rationalism. The formula of the Social Democrats, " Religion is a
private matter," he bitterly perceives to carry the implication a
private matter for the fools"; and while he holds that the belief in
a speedy collapse of the Christian religion is latterly less common
than formerly among the upper and middle classes, he complains
that the Socialists are not similarly enlightened.2 Bebel's drastic
teaching as to the economic and social conditions of the rise of
Christianity,8 and the materialistic theory of history set forth by
Marx and Engels, he finds generally accepted. Not only do most
of the party leaders declare themselves to be without religion, but
those who do not so declare themselves are so no less. Nor is the
unbelief a mere sequel to the Socialism : often the development is
the other way.5 The opinion is almost universal, further, that the
clergy in general do not believe what they teach.6 Atheists are
numerous among the peasantry ; more numerous among the workers
in the provincial towns ; and still more numerous in the large towns ; '
and while many take a sympathetic view of Jesus as a man and
teacher, not a few deny his historic existence" — a view set forth in
non-Socialist circles also.9

12. Under the widely-different political conditions in Russia
and the Scandinavian States it is the more significant that in all
alike rationalism is latterly common among the educated classes.
In Norway the latter perhaps include a larger proportion of work-
ing people than can be so classed even in Germany ; and rationalism
is relatively hopeful, though social freedom is still far from perfect.
It is the old story of toleration for a dangerously well-placed free-
thought, and intolerance for that which readies the common people.
In Russia rationalism has before it the task of transmuting a system
of autocracy into one of self-government. In no European country,
perhaps, is rationalism more general among the educated classes ;

1 A. D. McLaren, An Australian in Germany, 1911, pp. 181, 184.

2 Studemund, Der moderne Unylaube in den unteren Stilnden, 1901, pp. 17, 21.

3 Glossen zu Yves Gityot's and Siaismund Lacroix's "Die wahre Gestalt des
Christentuma."

i Studemund, p. 22. 5 j,j. p. 23.

G Id. p. 27. 7 i,i. ))». 37-38.

* Id. pp. 40-42. Cp. p. 43. Pa-tor Studemund cites other inquirers, notably Rade,
Gebhardt, Lorenz, and Dietz^en, all to the eame effect.

'■> i:.(j. Pastor A. KaKhot'fs Waft u-ixsni vir van Jesus? 1901. Since that date the
opinion ha- found new and powerful biipporlers in Germany.

POPULAR PROPAGANDA AND CULTURE 413

and in none is there a greater mass of popular ignorance.1 The
popular icon-worship in Moscow can hardly he paralleled outside of
Asia. On the other hand, the aristocracy became Voltairean in the
eighteenth century, and has remained more or less incredulous
since, though it now joins hands with the Church ; while the demo-
cratic movement, in its various phases of socialism, constitutionalism,
and Nihilism, lias been markedly anti-religious since the second
quarter of the century.'2 Subsidiary revivals of mysticism, such as
are chronicled in other countries, are of course to be seen in Russia ;
but the instructed class, the intclUgucntia, is essentially naturalistic
in its cast of thought. This state of things subsists despite the
readiness of the government to suppress the slightest sign of official
heterodoxy in the universities." The struggle is thus substantially
between the spirit of freedom and that of arbitrary rule ; and the
fortunes of freethought go with the former.

13. " Free-religious " societies, such as have been noted in
Germany, may be rated as forms of moderate freethought propa-
ganda, and are to bo found in all Protestant countries, with all
shades of development. A movement of the kind has existed for
a number of years back in America, in the New England States and
elsewhere, and may be held to represent a theistic or agnostic
thought too advanced to adhere even to the Unitarianism which
during the two middle quarters of the century was perhaps the
predominant creed in New England. The Theistic Church con-
ducted by the Rev. Charles Yoysey after his expulsion from the Church
of England in 1S71 to his death in 1912, and since then by the Rev.
Dr. Walter Walsh, is an example. Another type of such a gradual and
peaceful evolution is the South Place Institute (formerly "Chapel")
of London, where, under the famous orator W. J. Fox, nominally
a Unitarian, there was preached between 182-1 and 1852 a theism
tending to pantheism, perhaps traceable to elements in the doctrine
of Priestley, and passed on by Mr. Fox to Robert Browning.4 In
18G-1 the charge passed to Moxci.'KK D. Conway, under whom the
congregation quietly advanced during twenty years from Unitarianism
to a non-scriptural rationalism, embracing the shades of philosophic
theism, agnosticism, and anti-theism. In Conway's Lessons for lite

1 " Tin- people in the country do not read ; in the towns they read little. The journals

are little ei renin ted. In Kussin one never sees n. calmirin, an art i :in, a lal rer reading

a new- pa pi r " I v:i n Strannik, /," /«■//. sV-c ruxsii cimti'in imrn in/1, I'.'l):!. |>. 5).

■■'('],. !■;. I,.-i\imie. hitniilKrlinn a fhixtnirc tin niltiiixmr riissr. IsM), pp. 1 10. lid, -1>\ ;
Arn ido. /,/• Silnlii-mr, I'reneli trans, pp. :;7, .',-'. lil, li .;, 77, v''>. etc.; TiUlminirov, l..i
Urn i<-, v. ■!•.*).

■'■ Tikhoinirov, Lo HussO; pp. :JA7 -in. :j:}S :;'.).

* Cp. I'rie.-Ui y. /•/■■■■■<./ i,n tltr FirHt frinciiih s of Corrnuw lit, -2nd ed. 1771, I)]). &i7-61,
and Conway's ('i-utriin nj History <>J Smith 1'tnir, pp. d:j, 77, bU.

414 FKEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Day will be found a series of peculiarly vivid mementos of that
period, a kind of itinerary, more intimate than any retrospective
record. The latter part of his life, partly preserved in one of the
most interesting" autobiographies of the century, was spent between
England and the United States and in travel. After his first with-
drawal to the States in 1884 the Institute became an open platform
for rationalist and non-theological ethics and social and historical
teaching, and it now stands as an " Ethical Society " in touch with
the numerous groups so named which have come into existence in
England in the last dozen years on lines originally laid down by
Dr. Felix Adler in New York. At the time of the present writing
the English societies of this kind number between twenty and thirty,
the majority being in London and its environs. Their open
adherents, who are some thousands strong, are in most cases non-
theistic rationalists, and include many former members of the
Secularist movement, of which the organization has latterly
dwindled. On partly similar lines there were developed in pro-
vincial towns about the end of the century a small number of
"Labour Churches," in which the tendency was to substitute a
rationalist humanitarian ethic for supernaturalism ; and the same
lecturers frequently spoke from their platforms and from those of
Ethical and Secularist societies. Of late, however, the Labour
Churches have tended to disappear. All this means no resumption
of church-going, but, by the confession of the Churches, a completer
secularization of the Sunday.

14. Alongside of the lines of movement before sketched, there has
subsisted in England during the greater part of the nineteenth century
a considerable organization of Unitarianism. In the early years of
the nineteenth century it was strong enough to obtain the repeal
(1813) of the penal laws against anti-Trinitarianism, whereafter the
use of the name " Unitarian " became more common, and a sect so
called was founded formally in 1825. When the heretical preachers
of the Presbyterian sect began openly to declare themselves as
Unitarians, there naturally arose a protest from the orthodox, and
an attempt was made in 1833 to save from its new destination the
property owned by the heretical congregations.1 This was frustrated
by the Dissenters' Chapels Act of 1844, which gave to each group
singly the power to interpret its trust in its own fashion. Thence-
forward the sect prospered considerably, albeit not so greatly as in

1 Sec Rev. Joseph Hunter, An Historical Defence of the Trustees of Lady Henley's
Foundations, 1831; The History, Opinions, and Present Legal Position of the English
Presbyterians (official), 1831 ; An Examination and Defence of the Principles of Pro-
testant Dissent, by the Rev. W. Hamilton Drummond, of Dublin, 1812.

POPULAR PROPAGANDA AND CULTURE 415

the United States. During tho century English Unitarianism has
been associated with scholarship through such names as John Kenrick
and Samuel Sharpe, the historians of Egypt, and J. J. Taylor ; and,
loss directly, with philosophy in tho person of Dr. James Martineau,
who, however, was rather a coadjutor than a champion of the sect.
In the United States tho movement, greatly aided to popularity by
the eloquent humanism of the two Channings, lost the prestige of the
name of Emerson, who had been ono of its ministers, by the inability
of his congregation to go the whole way with him in lus opinions.
In 1853 Emerson told tho young Moncuro Conway that " the
Unitarian Churches were stated to be no longer producing ministers
equal to their forerunners, but were more and more finding their best
men in those coming from orthodox Churches," who " would, of
course, have some enthusiasm for their new faith." J Latterly
Unitarians have been entitled to say that tho Trinitarian Churches
are approximating to their position.'2 Such an approach, however,
involves rather a weakening than a strengthening of the smaller
body ; though some of its teachers are to the full as bigoted and
embittered in their propaganda as tho bulk of the traditionally
orthodox. Others adhere to their ritual practices in the spirit of
use and wont, as Emerson found when he sought to rationalize in
his own Church the usage of the eucharist.'5 On the other hand,
numbers have passed from Unitarianism to thoroughgoing ration-
alism ; and some whole congregations, following more or less the
example of that of South Place Chapel, have latterly reached a
position scarcely distinguishable from that of the Ethical Societies.

15. A partly similar evolution has taken place among the Pro-
testant Churches of France, Switzerland, Hungary, and Holland.
French Protestantism could not but be intellectually moved by the
intense ferment of the Revolution ; and, when finally secured against
active oppression from the Catholic side, could not but develop an
intellectual opposition to tho Catholic Reaction after 1815. In
Switzerland, always in intellectual touch with Franco and Germany,
the tendencies which had been stamped as Socinian in the days of
Voltaire soon reasserted themselves so strongly as to provoke
fanatical reaction.'1 The nomination of Strauss to a chair of theo-
logy at Zurich by a Radical Government in 1839 actually gave rise
to a violent revolt, inflamed and led by Protestant clergymen. Tho

1 Oonwav, Auti>bir»irri)ihy, KX).r>, i. VXi.

- So I'rof. William Jam.- . The. Will to Hrlirrr. etc., 1S07, |>. 1:;:!.
;t Conway, Enu-rsmi at llmm. ■anil. Ahmad, 1KH:J, r.h. vii.

1 Ha«enbach, Kirrlwiiannr-liichtr. ilim IH. ini'l IH.Jahriiiinrtrrts, ISIS, ii, 1-2-2. Nationalism
m;ciii-> to have spread soonest in tin- canton of Zurich. ./'/. ii, 1-7.

416 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Executive Council were expelled, and a number of persons killed in
the strife. In the canton of Aargau in 1841, again, the cry of
religion in danger" sufficed to bring about a Catholic insurrection
against a Liberal Council ; and yet again in 1844 it led, among the
Catholics of the Valais canton, to the bloodiest insurrection of all.
Since these disgraceful outbreaks the progress of Rationalism in
Switzerland has been steady. In 1847 a chair was given at Berne
to the rationalistic scholar Zeller, without any such resistance as
was made to Strauss at Zurich. In 1892, out of a total number of
3,151 students in the five universities of Switzerland and in the
academies of Fribourg and Neuchatel, the number of theological
students was only 374, positively less than that of the teaching staff,
which was 431. Leaving out the academies named, which had no
medical faculty, the number of theological students stood at 275 out
of 2,917. The Church in Switzerland has thus undergone the
relative restriction in power and prestige seen in the other European
countries of long-established culture. The evolution, however,
remains negative rather than positive. Though a number of pastors
latterly call themselves libres pcnseurs or penseurs libres, and a move-
ment of ethical culture (morale socialc) has made progress, the forces
of positive freethought are not numerically strong. An economic
basis still supports the Churches, and the lack of it leaves rationalism
non-aggressive."

A somewhat similar state of things exists in Holland, where the
" higher criticism " of both the Old and New Testaments made
notable progress in the middle decades of the century. There then
resulted not only an extensive decay of orthodoxy within the
Protestant Church, but a movement of aggressive popular free-
thought, which was for a number of years well represented in
journalism. To-day, orthodoxy and freethought are alike less
demonstrative ; the broad explanation being that the Dutch people
in the mass has ceased to lie pietistic, and lias secularized its life.
Even in the Bible-loving Boer Republic of South Africa (Transvaal),
in its time one of the most orthodox of the civilized communities of
the world, there was seen in the past generation the phenomenon of
an agnostic ex-clergyman's election to the post of president, in the
person of T. F. Burgers, who succeeded Pretorius in 1871. His
election was of course on political and not on religious grounds ; and
panic fear on the score of his heresy, besides driving some fanatics

1 Groto, Sercn Letters concerning the Volitics of Switzerland, pp. 31-:!.";. Hagenbach
(Kirchenr/pschiclile, ii. 1-27-28) shows no shame over the insurrection at Zurich. But cp.
Beard, in Voices of the Church in lie ply to Dr. Strauss, 1845. pp. 17-18.

'l Cp. the rapport of C'h. Fulpius in the Almanack de Libre 1'ensve, 1900.

POPULAE PROPAGANDA AND CULTURE 417

to emigrate, is said to have disorganized a Boer expedition under his
command ; but his views were known when he was elected. In
the years 1899 4902 the terrible experience of the last Boer War, in
South Africa as in Britain, perhaps did more to turn critical minds
against supernaturalism than was accomplished by almost any other
agency in the same period. In Britain the overturn was by way of
the revolt of many ethically-minded Christians against the attitude
of the orthodox churches, which were so generally arid so unscrupu-
lously belligerent as to astonish many even of their freethinking
opponents." As regards the Boers and the Cape Dutch the resultant
unbelief was among the younger men, who harassed their elders
with challenges as to the justice or the activity of a God who per-
mitted the liberties of his most devoted worshippers to be wantonly
destroyed. Among the more educated burghers in the Orange Free
State commandos unbelief asserted itself with increasing force and
frequency.''1 An ethical rationalism thus motived is not likely to bo
displaced ; and the Christian churches of Britain have thus the
sobering knowledge that the war which they so vociferously
glorified4 has wrought to the discredit of their creed alike in their
own country and among the vanquished.

1G. The history of popular freethought in Sweden yields a good
illustration, in a compact form," of the normal play of forces and
counter-forces. Since the day of Christina, as wo saw, though there
have been many evidences of passive unbelief, active rationalism has
been little known in her kingdom down till modern times, Sweden
as a whole having been little touched by the great ferment of the
eighteenth century. The French Revolution, however, stirred the
waters there as elsewhere. Tegner, the poet-bishop, author of the
once-famous FritJiiof's Saga, was notable in his day for a deter-
mined rejection of the evangelical doctrine of salvation ; and his
letters contain much criticism of the ruling system. But the first
recognizable champion of freethought in Sweden is the thinker
and historian E. G. Geijer (d. 1817), whose history of his native
land is one of the best European performances of his generation.

1 (i. M. Thi'iil, South Africa (" Story of the Nations" scrips), pp. :uo. 31.1. Mr. Theal's
view of the mental processes of U iu liners is somewhat a priori, ami his explanation seems
in part ineoiisistenl with his own narrative.

- An Kn-jli-h aequaintauee of my own at C'ape Town, who hefore the war not only was
an orthodox heiiever, hut found his chief weekly plciisiirc in attending ehun-h, was so
astounded ny I i.i , i I if the clergy on the war that lie severed ids connection,

one" for all. Ti.-m- I, did the same in Km/land.

1 v. rile on ' ' . ■ ri [i ;; of pergonal te Li monies spo I n . ly ::i ven to me in South
Africa, -ome of them hv I'liTiiynn'ii of ' the hutch Itefor d Cnurch.

; See the evidem-e collected in the pamphlet Tin Churcli---; •nut the ll'.ir, hy Alfred
"•! irli . .V« <>■ Aw <>:!: -e, I on.,.

" i-'nv the -urvey here reduced to outline 1 a.m indohted to two S-.\e n li Iri. ml .

VOL. 11 iiK

418 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

In 1820 he was prosecuted for his attack upon the dogmas of the
Trinity and redemption — long the special themes of discussion in
Sweden — in his book Thorild ; but was acquitted by the jury.
Thenceforth Sweden follows the general development of Europe.
In 1811 Strauss's Leben Jesu was translated in Swedish, and
wrought its usual effect. On the popular side the poet Wilhelm
von Braun carried on an anti-Biblical warfare ; and a blacksmith
in a provincial town contrived to print in 1850 a translation of
Paine's Age of Reason. Once more the spirit of persecution blazed
forth, and he was prosecuted and imprisoned. H. B. Palmaer
(d. 1851) was likewise prosecuted for his satire, The Last Judgment
in Cocaigne (Krakwinkel), with the result that his defence extended
his influence. In the same period the Stockholm curate Nils Ignell
(d. 1861) produced a whole series of critical pamphlets and a
naturalistic History of the Development of Man, besides supplying
a preface to the Swedish translation of Kenan's Vic de Jesus.
Meantime translations of the works of Theodore Parker, by V. Pfeiff
and A. F. Akerberg, had a large circulation and a wide influence ;
and the courage of the gymnasium rector N. J. Cramer (d. 1893),
author of The Farewell to the Church, gave an edge to the movement.
The partly rationalistic doctrine of Victor Eydberg (d. 1895) was in
comparison uncritical, and was proportionally popular.

On another line the books of Dr. Nils Lilja (d. 1870), written for
working people, created a current of rationalism among the masses ;
and in the next generation G. J. Leufstedt maintained it by popular
lectures and by the issue of translations of Colenso, Ingersoll,
Biichner, and Penan. Hjalmar Stromer (d. 1886) did similar
platform work. Meantime the followers of Parker and Eydberg
founded in 1877 a monthly review, The Truthsceker, which lasted
till 1891, and an association of " Believers in Reason," closely
resembling the British Ethical Societies of our own day. Among its
leading adherents has been K. P. Arnoldson, the well-known peace
advocate. Liberal clerics were now fairly numerous ; Positivism,
represented by Dr. Anton Nystrom's General History of Civilization,
played its part ; and the more radical freethinking movement,
nourished by new translations, became specially active, with the
usual effect on orthodox feeling. AUGUST STRINDBERG, author and
lecturer, was prosecuted in 1881 on a charge of ridiculing the
eucharist, but was declared not guilty. The strenuous Victor
LENNSTRAND, lecturer and journalist, prosecuted in 1888 and later for
his anti-Christian propaganda, was twice fined and imprisoned, with
the result of extending his influence and discrediting his opponents.

POPULAR PROPAGANDA AND CULTURE 419

Utilitarian Associations," created by his activity, were set up in
many parts of the country; and his movement survives his death.

17. Only in tho United States lias the public lecture platform
been made a means of propaganda to anything like tho extent seen
in Britain ; and the greatest part of the work in the States has thus
far been done by the late Colonel INGERSOLL, the leading American
orator of the last generation, and the most widely influential platform
propagandist of the last century. No other single freethinker, it is
believed, has reached such an audience by public speech ; and
between his propaganda and that of the freethought journals there
has been maintained for a generation back a large body of vigorous
freethinking opinion in all parts of tho States. Before the Civil War
this could hardly be said. In the middle decades of the century the
conditions had been so little changed that after the death of Presi-
dent LINCOLN, who was certainly a non-Christian deist, and an
agnostic deist at that,1 it was sought to be established that ho was
latterly orthodox. In his presidential campaign of 18G0 he escaped
attack on his opinions simply because his opponent, Stephen A.
Douglas, was likewise an unbeliever.2 Tho great negro orator,
Frederick Douglas, was as heterodox as Lincoln.'5 It is even
alleged that President Grant 4 was of tho same cast of opinion.
Such is the general drift of intelligent thought in the United States,
from Washington onwards ; and still the social conditions impose
on public men the burden of concealment, while popular history is
garbled for the same reasons. Despite the great propagandist
power of the late Colonel Ingersoll, therefore, American freethought
remains dependent largely on struggling organizations and journals,2
and its special literature is rather of the popularizing than of the
scholarly order. Nowhere else has every new advance of ration-
alistic science been more angrily opposed by tho priesthood ; because
nowhere is the ordinary prejudice of tho priest more voluble or
better-hottomed in self-complacency. As late as 1891 the Methodist
Bishop Keener delivered a ridiculous attack on the evolution theory
before tho (Ecumenical Council of Methodism at Washington,
declaring that it had been utterly refuted by a certain " wonderful
deposit of tho Ashley bods." G Various professors in ecclesiastical
colleges have boon driven from their posts for accepting in turn the
discoveries of geology, biology, and tho " higher criticism " — for

1 Op. Lamon's l.ifr of Lincoln, ami .1. 1$. kemslmx'tf's Abraham Lincoln : Was lie a
Christiun ' (New York, IH'J.i.)

14 Heuishnrg, pp. aiS-l'J. '■'■ Personal information. ' Kemslnin,'. p. :W-1.

5 Of these the Sew York Trulhsee.ke.r lias been the mo- t energetic and successful.
c White, Warfare, i, 81.

420 FEEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

instance, Woodrow of Columbia, South Carolina ; Toy of Louisville ;
Winchell of Vanderbilt University ; and more than one professor in
the American college at Beyrout.1 In every one of the three former
cases, it is true, the denounced professor has been called to a better
chair ; and latterly some of the more liberal clergy have even com-
mercially exploited the higher criticism by producing the " Rainbow
Bible." Generally speaking, however, in the United States sheer
preoccupation with business, and lack of leisure, counteract in a
measure the relative advantage of social freedom ; and while culture
is more widely diffused than in England, it remains on the whole
less radical in the "educated" classes so-called. So far as it is
possible to make a quantitative estimate, it may be said that in the
more densely populated parts of the States there is latterly less of
studious freethinking because there is less leisure than in England ;
but that in the Western States there is a relative superiority, class
for class, because of the special freedom of the conditions and the
independent character of many of the immigrants who constitute
the new populations.2

Section 2. — Biblical Criticism

It is within the last generation that the critical analysis of the
Jewish and Christian sacred books has been most generally carried
on ; but the process has never been suspended since the German
Aufhldrung arose on the stimuli of English and French deism.

1. At the beginning of the century, educated men in general
believed in the Semitic myths of creation, as given in Genesis : long
before the end of it they had more or less explicitly rectified their
beliefs in the light of new natural science and new archaeology. The
change became rapid after 1SG0 ; but it had been led up to even
in the period of reaction. While in France, under the restored
monarchy, rationalistic activity was mainly headed into historical,
philosophical, and sociological study, and in England orthodoxy
predominated in theological discussion, the German rationalistic
movement went on among the specialists, despite the liberal
religious reaction of Schleiermacher,'' who himself gave forth such

1 White, Warfare, i, 84, 86, 311, 317, 318.

2 Tins view is not inconsistent with the fact that popular forms of crcrlulity arc also
found specially flourishing in the West. Cp. Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 3rd ed.
ii, 832-33.

:; As to the absolute predominance of rationalistic unbelief (in the orthodox sense of
tiie word) in educated Germany in the first third of the century, see the Memoirs of
F. Perthes, Eng. tr. 2nd ed. ii, 210—45,255,266-75. Despite the various reactions claimed
by Perthes and others, it is clear that the tables have never since been turned. Cp.
Pearson, Infidelity, pp. 551-50, 569-7-i. Schleiermacher was charged on his own side with
making fatal concessions. Kahnis, Internal Hist, of German Protestantism, Eng. tr. 1856
pp. 210-11 ; liobins, A Defence of the Faith, 1862, i, Ibl ; and Quinet as there cited.

BIBLICAL CRITICISM 421

an uncertain sound. His case and that of his father, an army
chaplain, tell signally of the power of the mere clerical occupation
to develop a species of emotional belief in one who has oven attained
rationalism. When the son, trained for the church, avowed to his
father (1787) that he had lost faith in the supernatural Jesus, the
father professed to mourn bitterly, but three years later avowed that
he in his own youth had preached Christianity for twelve years while
similarly disbelieving its fundamental tenet.1 He professionally
counselled compromise, which the son duly practised, with such
succors that, whereas he originally addressed his Discourses on
Iielifjion (1799) to " the educated among its despisers," he was able
to say in the preface to the third edition, twenty years later (1821),
that the need now was to reason with the pietists and literalists, the
ignorant and bigoted, the credulous and superstitious.2 In short, he
and others had been able to set up a fashion of poetic religion
among deists, but not to lighten the darkness of orthodox belief.

The ostensible religious revival associated with Schleiermacher's
name was in fact a reaction of temperament, akin to the romantic
movement in literature, of which Chateaubriand in France was the
exponent as regarded religious feeling. The German "rationalism"
of the latter part of the eighteenth century, with its stolid translation
of the miraculous into the historical, and its official accommodation
of the result to the purposes of the pulpit, had not reached any firm
scientific foundation; and Schleiermacher on the other side, pro-
testing that religion was a matter not of knowledge but of feeling,
attracted alike the religious emotionalists, the seekers of compromise,
and. the romantics. His personal and literary charm, and his toler-
ance of mundane morals, gave him a German vogue not unlike that
of Chateaubriand in Franco. His intellectual cast and ultimate
philosophic bias, however, together with Ins freedom of private life,'
ultimatelv alienate 1 him from the orthodox, and thus it was that he
die 1 ' H-j ! ) in the odour of heresy. Heresy, in fact, he had preached
from the outset; and it was only in a highly emancipated society
thai his teaching could have been fashionable. The statement that
by his biscnu /v-t.s " with one stroke he overthrew the card-castle of
rationalism and the oid fortress of orthodoxy"' is literally quite

1 I . . ■■' ' « nn'i, i,, r !., I. <i : In lirii-f. a, lw;<). i, \1. s I. Tin- hi tiler's 1H 1 ,-v ■ . wil h their

- II'. rl.r, 1 |:s, i. I in.

..[,.: p :'! ! p.n 1 i-ef . :i ; ! , hi ; )•■■] ii .»:1 v. i : . i IV ui i Iruii >v. . " lie I. 'Ion :<•! to

I * j-i r i ■<■ I. i-ii . i : wlii'-h inti'lji ■:. ;i i i art,. I > : 1 1 n it m >rn lily," ivi'jtu'd. Ih.

(:-»:iiii.-i in it1 ' Lie i '.■■ii !"•!•::, t. Ilitl. <■■/ (!■■!•. Tlifu!. in I hr Xi lO'lrfiil h < \ ul. Kn>! .

t.r. I --'i. i . i ,. !')! I'll. U V i. ■ of i-our ■■ hi ; ciVi-mm 1 diameter tli;it <li -u4\ anta |.;il Schleier-

I' '■< .

422 FEEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

false, for the old compromising pseudo-rationalism survived a long
while, and orthodoxy still longer ; and it is quite misleading inasmuch
as it suggests a resurgence of faith. The same historian proceeds
to record that some saw in the work " only a slightly disguised
return to superstition, and others a brilliant confession of unbelief."
" The general public saw in the Discourses a new assault of
romanticism upon religion. The clergy in particular were pain-
fully aroused, and did not dissemble their irritation. Spalding
himself could not restrain his anger." Schleiermacher's friend
Sach, who had passed the Discourses in manuscript, woke up to
denounce them as unchristian, pantheistic, and denuded of the ideas
of God, immortality, and morality.1

In England the work would have been so denounced on all sides ;
and the bulk of Schleiermacher's teaching would there have been
reckoned revolutionary and "godless." He was a lover of both
political and social freedom ; and in his Two Memoranda on the
Church Question in regard to Prussia (1803) he made " a veritable
declaration of war on the clerical spirit."2 Eecognizing that eccle-
siastical discipline had reached a low ebb, he even proposed that civil
marriage should precede religious marriage, and be alone obligatory ;
besides planning a drastic subjection of the Prussian Church to State
regulation. :i In his pamphlet on The So-called Epistle to Timothy, ot
which he denied the authenticity, he played the part of a " destruc-
tive " critic.' He " saw with pain the approach of the rising tide of
confessionalism " — that is, the movement for an exact statement of
creed.0 Nor can it be said that, despite his attempts in later life to
reach a more definite theology, Schleiermacher really held firmly any
Christian or even theistic dogma. He seems to have been at bottom
a pantheist;6 and the secret of his attraction for so many German
preachers and theologians then and since is that he offered them in
eloquent and moving diction a kind of profession of faith which
avoided alike the fatal undertaking of the old religious rationalism to
reduce the sacred narratives to terms of reason, and the dogged
refusal of orthodoxy to admit that there was anything to explain
away. Philosophically and critically speaking, his teaching has no
lasting intellectual substance, being first a negation of intellectual
tests and then a belated attempt to apply them. It is not even
original, being a development from Rousseau and Lessing. Put it
had undoubtedly a freeing and civilizing influence for many years;

1 Lii.-htenbcracv. as cited, p. KO. - Id. p. 100.

■' Id. pp. 1-23--M. ' Id. p. 110. 5 ia, p. 120.

fi Strauss, Die Ilalben mid die (iuiism, 1865, p. 18.

BIBLICAL CRITICISM 423

and it did little harm save insofar as it fostered the German
proclivity to the nehulous in thought and language, and partly
encouraged the normal resistance to the critical spirit. All irration-
alism, to he sure, in some sort spells self-will and lawlessness ; hut
the orthodox negation of reason was far more primitive than Schleier-
macher's. From that side, accordingly, he never had any sympathy.
When, soon after his funeral, in which his coffin was borne and
followed by troops of students, his church was closed to the friends
who wished there to commemorate him, it was fairly clear that his
own popularity lay mainly with the progressive spirits, and not
among the orthodox ; and in the end his influence tended to merge
in that of the critical movement.1

2. Gradually that had developed a greater precision of method,
though there were to be witnessed repetitions of the intellectual
anomalies of the past, so-called rationalists losing the way while
supernaturalists occasionally found it. It has been remarked by
Reuss that Paulus, a clerical " rationalist," fought for the Pauline
authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the very year in which
Tholuck, a reconverted evangelical, gave up the Pauline authorship
as hopeless ; that when Schleiermacber, ostensibly a believer in
inspiration, denied the authenticity of the Epistle to Timothy, the
[theological] rationalist Wegscheider opposed him; and that the
rationalistic Eichhorn maintained the Mosaic authorship of the
Pentateuch long after the supernaturalist Vater had disproved it.2
Still the general movement was inevitably and irrevocably ration-
alistic. Beginning with the Old Testament, criticism gradually saw
more and more of mere myth where of old men had seen miracle,
and where the first rationalists saw natural events misconceived.
Soon the process readied the New Testament, every successive step
being resisted in the old fashion; and much laborious work, now
mostly forgotten, was done by a whole company of scholars, among
whom Paulus, Eichhorn, Do Wette, G. L. Bauer, Wegscheider,
Brctsehneider, and Gabler were prominent." The train as it were
exploded on the world in the great Life of Jesus by S'lR.U'SS (1835),
a year after the death of Schleiermacber.

This was in some respects the high-water mark of rational
critical science for the century, inasmuch as it represented the

i ]■•,,!• i- tin i:.t. nt lii- work cp. Hum; Kirchrmirxrhichtt ih s lut, n .hihrli. p. 15; Kalmis,
a- 1 , \ ,-iii : ; I'll. i I. n i; />.-<•< 'n,,,,i. nt i.f J'ltmlnnii in (I, niftiui. I>'.ti, I>U. i. Hi. iii ; hk. ii,
,-h. ii ; I.;. :.'■ nil IV. r. ;i i cited ; and itlt. by liev. I'. .1. Smith in Tltrt.l. lOririr, July, 1,M','.I.

- U. i ■■-. Hi-.l'ifi) <■( tin: C'lu'ju, Eui;. tr. IH'JO, p. ^b7. Cp. Strauss, hUnliititm) in OdH
L<-l„ I, ./, hi, ■ Hi.

See a i;.it1 account ol tlio dovulopment in Str. diss's Introductions to his two Lives
,,f J,

424 FKEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTUBY

fullest use of free judgment. The powerful and orderly mind of
Strauss, working systematically on a large body of previous unsys-
tematic criticism, produced something more massive and coherent
than any previous writer had achieved. It was not that he applied
any new principle. Criticism had long been slowly disengaging
itself from the primary fallacy of taking all scriptural records as
standing for facts, and explaining away the supernatural side. Step
by step it was recognized that not misinterpretation of events but
mythology underlay much of the sacred history. Already in 1799 an
anonymous and almost unnoticed writer1 had argued that the entire
gospel story was a pre-existent conception in the Jewish mind. In
1802 G. L. Bauer had produced a treatise on Hebrew Mythology,2 in
which not only was the actuality of myth in Bible narrative insisted
on, but the general principle of animism in savage thought was clearly
formulated. Sender had seen that the stories of Samson and Esther
were myths. Even Eichhorn — who reduced all the Old Testament
stories to natural events misunderstood, accepted Noah and the
patriarchs as historical personages, and followed Bahrdt in making
Moses light a fire on Mount Sinai — changed his method on coming
to the New Testament, and pointed out that only indemonstrable
hypotheses could be reached by turning supernatural events into
natural where there was no outside historical evidence. Other
writers — as Krug, Gabler, Kaiser, Wegscheider, and Horst — ably
pressed the mythical principle, some of them preceding Bauer. The
so-called natural " theory — which was not at all that of the
" naturalises " but the specialty of the compromising "rationalists"
— was thus effectively shaken by a whole series of critics.

But the power of intellectual habit and environment was still
strikingly illustrated in the inability of all of the critics to shake off
completely the old fallacy. Bauer explained the divine promise to
Abraham as standing for the patriarch's own prophetic anticipation,
set up by a contemplation of the starry heavens. Another gave up
the supernatural promise of the birth of the Baptist, but held to the
dumbness of Zechariah. Krug similarly accepted the item of the
childless marriage, and claimed to be applying the mythical principle
in taking the Magi without the star, and calling them oriental
merchants. Kaiser took the story of the fish with a coin in its
mouth as fact, while complaining of other less absurd reductions of
miracle to natural occurrences. The method of Paulus,3 the " Chris-

1 In a volume entitled Offcnbarung und Mytluilooie.

- J-fpbraische Hytholoaie. ties nit en it ml nencn Testaments.

" Kcanyclicncommentnr, J'iOO-ISOl; Lebcn Jatt, lb-S.

BIBLICAL CRITICISM 425

tian Evemeros " — who loyally rejected all miracles, but got rid of
them on the plan of explaining, e.g., that when Jesus was supposed
to bo walking on the water he was really walking on the bank — was
still popular, a generation after Schleiermacher's Rcden. The
mythical theory as a whole went on hesitating among definitions
and genera — saga and legend, historical myth, mythical history,
philosophical myth, poetic myth — and the differences of the mytho-
logical school over method arrested the acceptance of their funda-
mental principle.

3. No less remarkable was the check to the few attempts which
had been made at clearing the ground by removing the Fourth
Gospel from the historical field. Lessing had taken this gospel as
peculiarly historical, as did Fichte and Schleiermacher and the main
body of critics after him. Only in England (by Evanson) had the
case been more radically handled. In 13:20 Bretschneider, following
up a few tentative German utterances, put forth, by way of hypo-
thesis, a general argument l to the effect that the whole presentment
of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel is irreconcilable with that of the
Synoptics, that it could not be taken as historical, and that it could
not therefore be the work of the Apostle John." The result was a
general discussion and a general rejection. The innovation in theory
was too sudden for assimilation : and Bretschneider, finding no
support, later declared that he had been "relieved of his doubts" by
the discussion, and had thus attained his object. Strauss himself,
in his first Lebcn Jesu, failed to realize the case; and it was not till
the second (1363) that he developed it, profiting by the intermediate
work of F. C. Baur.

1. But as regards the gospel history in general, the first Ziehen
■Jesu is a great " advance in force " as compared with all preceding
work. Himself holding undoubtingly to the vital assumption of the
rationalizing school that the central story of Jesus and the disciples
and the crucifixion was history, he yet applied the mythical principle)
systematically to nearly all the episodes, handling the case with the
calmness of a great judge and the skill of a great critic. Even
Strauss, indeed, paid the penalty which seems so generally to attach
to the academic discipline —the lack of ultimate! hold on life. After
showing that much of the gospel narrative was mere myth, and
leaving utterly problematical all the rest, he saw ill to begin and end
with the announcement that nothing really mattered —that the ideal

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426 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Jesus was unaffected by historic analysis, and that it was the ideal
that counted.1 In a world in which nine honest believers out of ten
held that the facts mattered everything, there could be no speedy or
practical triumph for a demonstration which thus announced its own
inutility. Strauss had achieved for New Testament criticism what
Kant and Fichte and Hegel had compassed for rational philosophy
in general, ostensibly proffering together bane and antidote. As in
their case, however, so in his, the truly critical work had an effect
in despite of the theoretic surrender. Among instructed men,
historical belief in the gospels lias never been the same since Strauss
wrote ; and he lived to figure for his countrymen as one of the most
thoroughgoing freethinkers of his age.

5. For a time there was undoubtedly "reaction," engineered
with the full power of the Prussian State in particular. The pious
Frederick William IV, already furious against Swiss Radicalism in
1817, was moved by the revolutionary outbreaks of 1848 to a fierce
repression of everything liberal in theological teaching. ' This
dismal period of Prussian history was the bloom-period of the
Hengsterbergan theology"2 — the school of rabid orthodoxy. In
1854, Eduard Zeller, bringing out in book form his work on the Acts
of the Apostles (originally produced in the Tubingen Theological
Journal, 1848-51), writes that " The exertions of our ecclesiastics,
assisted by political reaction, have been so effectual that the majority
of our theologians not only look with suspicion or indifference on
this or that scientific opinion, but regard scientific knowledge in
general with the same feelings"; and he leaves it an open question
' whether time will bring a change, or whether German Protestantism
will stagnate in the Byzantine conditions towards which it is now
hastening with all sail on."3 For his own part, Zeller abandoned
the field of theology for that of philosophy, producing a history
of Greek philosophy, and one of German philosophy since Leibnitz.

G. Another expert of Baur's school, Albrecht Schwegler, author of
works on Montanism, the Post-Apostolic Age, and other problems
of early Christian history, and of a Handbook of the History of
Philosophy which for half a century had an immense circulation,
was similarly driven out of theological research by the virulence of
the reaction,1 and turned to the task of Roman history, in which lie
distinguished himself as lie did in every other lie essayed. The

1 Das Ziehen Jesu. pref. to first erl. end.

- Hausrath, I> avid Friedrich Strnuss und die Theologie seiner Zvit, 1S78, ii, -33-31.

3 Fret', to work cited. Enff. tr. 1S75, i, 86, 89.

4 laelitenbtTtur. as cited, p. 391,

BIBLICAL CRITICISM 427

brains were being expelled from tbo chairs of theology. But this
very fact tended to discredit the reaction itself ; and outside of the
Prussian sphere of inlluenco German criticism went actively on.
Gustav Volkmav, turning his back on Germany in 185-1, settled in
Switzerland, and in 1863 became professor at Zurich, where he
added to his early Bcligion Jesit (1857) and other powerful works
his treatises on the Origin of the Gospels (1806), The Gospels (1869),
Commentary on the Apocalypse (1860-65), and Jesus Nazarenus
(1881) — all stringent critical performances, irreconcilable with ortho-
doxy. Elsewhere too there was a general resumption of progress.

To this a certain contribution was made by BRUNO BAUER
(1809-1882), who, after setting out as an orthodox Hegelian, out-
went Strauss in the opposite direction. In 1838, as a licentiate at
Bonn, lie produced two volumes on The Belie/ion of the Old Testa-
ment, in which the only critical element is the notion of a " historical
evolution of revelation." Soon lie had got beyond belief in revela-
tion. In 18-10 appeared his Critique of the Gospel History of John,
and in 18-11 his much more disturbing Critique of the Gospel
History of the Synoptics, wherein there is substituted for Strauss's
formula of the " community-mind " working on tradition, that of
individual literary construction. AYeisso and Wilcke had convinced
him that Mark was the first gospel, and Wilcke in particular that
it was no mere copy of an oral tradition but an artistic construction.
As he claimed, this was a much more "positive" conception than
Strauss's, which was fundamentally ' mysterious."1 Unfortunately,
though lie saw that the new position involved the non-historicity of
the Gospel Jesus, lie left his own historic conception "mysterious,"
giving no reason why the " Urevangelist " framed his romance.
Bauer was non-anthropological, and left his theory as it began, one
of an arbitrary construction by gospel-makers. Immediately after
his book appeared that of Ghillany on Human Sacrifice among the
ancient Hebrews (1842), which might have given him clues; but
they seem to have had for him no significance.

As it was, his book on the Synoptics raised a great storm ; and
when the official request for the views of the university faculties as
to the continuance of his licence evoked varying answers, Bauer
settled the mutt'')- by a violent attack on professional theologians in
general, and was duly expelled." Ifor the rest of his long life he
was a freelance, doing some relatively valid work on the I'auline
problem, but, pouring out his turbid spirit in a variety of political

1 Kritilc tlrrrrmiti. Ccsrh. ihr .S'i/?ioyi/i/.vc. cl. Is Id, Vorrede, ]>]>. v xiii.
- liiiur, Kirrhriiii'srh. tin I'Jlrn .inluii. ,,,,. :;• - ..

428 FEEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTUEY

writings, figuring by turns as an anti-Semite (1843), a culture-
historian,1 and a pre-Bismarckian imperialist, despairing of German
unity, but looking hopefully to German absorption in a vast empire
of Eussia.2 Naturally he found political happiness in 1870, 3 living
on, a spent force, to do fresh books on Christian origins,4 on German
culture-history, and on the glories of imperialism.

7. In 1861, after an abstention of twenty years from discussion
of the problem, Strauss restated his case in a Life of Jesus,
adapted for the German People. Here, accepting the contention of
F. C. Baur that the proper line of inquiry was to settle the order of
composition of the synoptic gospels, and agreeing in Baur's view
that Matthew came first, he undertook to offer more of positive
result than was reached in his earlier research, which simply dealt
scientifically with the abundant elements of dubiety in the records.
The new procedure was really much less valid than the old. Baur
had quite unwarrantably decided that the Sermon on the Mount
was one of the most certainly genuine of the discourses ascribed to
Jesus;0 and Strauss, while exhibiting a reserve of doubt6 as to all
" such speeches," nonetheless committed himself to the certain"
genuineness alike of the Sermon and of the seven parables in the
thirteenth chapter of Matthew.' Many scholars who continue to
hold by the historicity of Jesus have since recognized that the
Sermon is no real discourse, but a compilation of gnomic sayings or
maxims previously current in Jewish literature. Thus the certain-
ties of Baur and Strauss pass into the category of the cruder
certainties which Strauss impugned ; and the latter left the life of
Jesus an unsolved enigma after all his analysis.

As he himself noted, the German New Testament criticism of
the previous twenty years had " run to seed "? in a multitude of
treatises on the sources, aims, composition, and mutual relations of
the Synoptics, as if these were the final issues. They had settled
nothing; and after a lapse of fifty years the same problems are
being endlessly discussed . The scientific course for Strauss would
have been to develop more radically the method of his first Life :
failing to do this, he made no new contribution to the problem,
though he deftly enough indicated how little difference there was,
save in formula, between Baur's negations and his own.

1 Gesch.der Politik, Kidtur, und Auflduruno ties T-Aen Jahrh. i Bde. 1S13-13; Gesch.
tier franzos. Revolution, 3 Bde. 1817.

2 Bussland und tins Gerinanenthttm, 18-17. :; Liehtenber^ev, p. 373.

■* Vhilo. Strauss. Benan, und dan Urch ristenthum, 1871 ; Christ it a und die Cdsaren, 1S77.

3 1)>i Christ< nihil in inn! dip chr. Kirrlie, 1854, p. 34.

g Das I.rhi n Jenufiir das deutsehe I'olk h, trh, itet. i 11, 3te Anil. p. 254. 1st par.
7 Id. ih. H ('!). Christianity and M'jtlioltjay, pt. iii. div. ii, ? C.

!) 1'ref. to second Lobcn Jesu, oil. cited, p. xv,

BIBLICAL CRITICISM 429

Something of the explanation is to be detected in the sub-title,
Adapted for the German People." From his first entrance into
the arena he had met with endless odium theologicum ; being at
once deprived of his post as a philosophical lecturer at Tubingen,
and virulently denounced on all hands. His proposed appointment
to a chair at Zurich in 1839, as we have seen, led there to something
approaching a revolution. Later, he found that acquaintance with
him was made a ground of damage to his friends ; and though he
had actually been elected to the Wirtemberg Diet in ISIS by his
fellow citizens of Ludwigsburg town, after being defeated in his
candidature for the now parliament at Frankfort through the
hostility of the rural voters, lie had abundant cause to regard himself
as a banned person in Germany. A craving for the goodwill of the
people as against the hatred of the priests was thus very naturally
and justifiably operative in the conception of his second work ; and
this none the less because his fundamental political conservatism
had soon cut short his representation of radical Ludwigsburg. As
he justly said, the question of the true history of Christianity was
not one for theologians alone. But the emotional aim affected the
intellectual process. As previously in his Life of Ulrich von Hutten,
he strove to establish the proposition that the new Reformation he
desired was akin to the old; and that the Germans, as the "people
of the Reformation," would show themselves true to their past by
casting out the religion of dogma and supornaturalism. Such an
attempt to identify the spirit of freethought with the old spirit of
Bihliolatry was in itself fantastic, and could not create a genuine
movement, though the book had a wide audience. The Glaubcns-
lehre, in which he made good his maxim that the true criticism of
dogma is its history," is a sounder performance. Strauss's avowed
desire to write a hook as suitable to Germans as was Renan's Vic
de Jcsuh to Frenchmen was something less than scientific. The
right hook would be written for all nations.

bike most other Germans, Strauss exulted immensely over the
war of 1870. in what is now recognized as the national manner,
he wrote two boastful open-letters to Renan explaining that what-
soever Germany did was right, and whatsoever Franco did was
wrong, and that the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine was altogether
just. These letters form an important contribution to the vast
cairn of self-praise raised by latter-day German culture. But
Strauss's literary life ended on a nobler note and in a higher warfare.
After all his efforts at popularity, and all his fraternization with his
people on the ground of racial animosity (not visible in his volume

430 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

of lectures on Voltaire, written and delivered at the request of the
Princess Alice), his fundamental sincerity moved him to produce
a final "Confession," under the title of The Old and the Neiu Faith
(1872). It asked the questions : " Are we still Christians ? " ;
Have we still religion?"; "How do we conceive the world?";
"How do we order our life?"; and it answered them all in a
calmly and uncompromisingly naturalistic sense, dismissing all that
men commonly call religious belief. The book as a whole is
heterogeneous in respect of its two final chapters, " Of our Great
Poets" and "Of our Great Musicians," which seem to have been
appended by way of keeping up the attitude of national fraternity
evoked by the war. But they could not and did not avail to
conciliate the theologians, who opened fire on the book with all
their old animosity, and with an unconcealed delight in the definite
committal of the great negative critic to an attitude of practical
atheism. The book ran through six editions in as many months,
and crystallized much of the indefinite freethinking of Germany
into something clearer and firmer. All the more was it a new
engine of strife and disintegration ; and the aging author, shocked
but steadied by the unexpected outburst of hostility, penned a
quatrain to himself, ending: "In storm hast thou begun; in storm
shalt thou end."

On the last day of the year he wrote an " afterword" summing
up his work and his position. He had not written, lie declared, by
way of contending with opponents ; he had sought rather to com-
mune with those of his own way of thinking ; and to them, he felt,
he had the right to appeal to live up to their convictions, not com-
promising with other opinions, and not adhering to any Church. For
his " Confession " he anticipated the thanks of a more enlightened
future generation. "The time of agreement," he concluded, ' will
come, as it came for the Lebcn Jesu ; only this time I shall not live
to see it."1 A little more than a year later (1871) he passed away.

It is noteworthy that he should have held that agreement had
come as to the first Lebcn Jesu. He was in fact convinced that
all educated men — -at least in Germany — had ceased to believe in
miracles and the supernatural, however they might affect to conform
to orthodoxy. And, broadly speaking, this was true : all New
Testament criticism of any standing had come round to the
naturalistic point of view. But, as we have seen, the second
Leben Jesu was far enough from reaching a solid historical footing ;

1 Zeller, David Frie&rich Strauss, 2te Aufl. p. 113.

BIBLICAL CRITICISM 431

and the generation which followed made only a piecemeal and
unsystematic advance to a scientific solution.

8. And it was long before even Strauss's early method of
scientific criticism was applied to the initial problems of Old
Testament history. The investigation lagged strangely. Starting
from the clues given by Hobbes, Spinoza, and Simon, and above
all by the suggestion of Astruc (1753) as to the twofold element
implied in the God-names Jehovah and Elohim, it had proceeded,
for sheer lack of radical skepticism, on the assumption that the
Pentateuchal history was true. On this basis, modern Old Testa-
ment criticism of a professional kind may be said to have been
founded by Eichhorn, who hoped by a quasi-rationalistic method
to bring back unbelievers to belief.1 Of his successors, some, like
Ilgen, were ahead of their time ; some, like Do Wette, failed to
make progress in their criticism ; some, like Ewald, remained
always arbitrary ; and some of the ablest and most original, as
Vatke, failed to coordinate fully their critical methods and results.'2
Thus, despite all the German activity, little sure progress had been
made, apart from discrimination of sources, between the issue of the
Critical Bemarks on the Hebrew Scriptures of the Scotch Catholic
priest, Dr. GEDDES, in 1800, and the publication of the first part of
the work of Bishop Colexso on The PentatcucJi (1862). This, by
the admission of KUENEN, who had begun as a rather narrow
believer,3 corrected the initial error of the German specialists by
applying to the narrative the common-sense tests suggested long
before by Voltaire/ That academic scholarship thus wasted two
generations in its determination to adhere to the reverent "
method, and in its aversion to the " irreverence " which proceeded
on the simple power to see facts, is a sul'licient comment on the
Kantian doctrine that it was the business of scholars to adapt
the sacred hooks to popular needs. Tampering with the judgment
of their Hocks, the German theologians injured their own.

As of old, part of the explanation lay in the malignant resistance
of orthodoxy to every new advance. We have seen how Strauss's
appointment to a chair at Zurich was met by Swiss pietism. The
same spirit sought to revert, even in " intellectually free" Germany,
to its old methods of repression. The authorities of Berlin discussed

t,f (Jltl Trsliiiiiriil Criticism, Is!):!, p. Id. Kiehhorn seems to lmvc
only ill second-haml, yet, without him, it mijjlit be contended,
-. . i .. ■ ii completely lo 1. Lo science. I hi. p. S.',.)
irve.vs, wliicn are tho-e ol a liberal ecclesiastic -a point of view on

licii he ha- since notably iniviiiice 1. - (,'heyne, pp, l~7 yy,

1 Kucnen, '1'hf //■ ctti-tich, Km;. lr introd. pp. xiv xvii.

1 ("1

levrn

■, V<,

mull-

known

A ■

rin:'.-

■ WOI

A -trie

.'. .

.rk u

ouid

- Se

C Or

. ( : i i f

:yne ■

432 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

with Neander the propriety of suppressing Strauss's Leben Jesu ;
and after a time those who shared his views were excluded even
from philosophical chairs.2 Later, the brochure in which Edgar
Bauer defended Ids brother Bruno against his opponents (1812) was
seized by the police ; and in the following year, for publishing The
Strife of Criticism with Church and State, the same writer was
sentenced to four years' imprisonment. In private life, persecution
was carried on in the usual ways ; and the virulence of the theo-
logical resistance recalled the palmy days of Lutheran polemics.
In the sense that the mass of orthodoxy held its ground for the
time being, the attack failed. Naturally the most advanced and
uncompromisingly scientific positions were least discussed, the
stress of dispute going on around the criticism which modified
without annihilating the main elements in the current creed, or
that which did the work of annihilation on a popular level of
thought. Only in our day is German "expert " criticism beginning
openly to reckon with propositions fairly and fully made out by
German writers of three or more generations back. Thus in 1781
Corodi in his Gcschichte des CJiiliasmus dwelt on the pre-Hebraic
origins of the belief in angels, in immortality, and heaven and hell,
and on the Persian derivation of the Jewish seven archangels ;
Wegscheider in 1819 in Ins Institutes of Theology indicated further
connections of the same order, and cited pagan parallels to the
virgin-birth ; J. A. L. Richter in the same year pointed to Indian
and Persian precedents for the Logos and many other Christian
doctrines ; and several other writers, Strauss included, pointed to
both Persian and Babylonian influences on Jewish theology and
myth.8 The mythologist and Hebraist E. Korn (who wrote as
" F. Nork "), in a series of learned and vigorous but rather loosely
speculative works,4 indicated many of the mythological elements in
Christianity, and endorsed many of the astronomical arguments of
Dupuis, while holding to the historicity of Jesus. "

When even these theses were in the main ignored, more mordant
doctrine was necessarily burked. Such subversive criticism of religious
history as Ghillany's Die Mensciicnojjfer der alien llebrder (1812),
insisting that human sacrifice had been habitual in early Jewry, and

1 Dr. Beard, in Voices of the Church in Reply to Strauss, 1845, pp. 16-17.

- Zeller, D. F. Strauss, Kng. tr. 1879, p. 5(5.

3 Sec Gunkel, Zum reliaionsoeschichtliehen Verstcindnis des Neuen Testaments, 1003,
pp. 1-2. note.

■> My then der alien Ferser als Quellen christlichcr Glaubenslehren, 1835; Der Mystagog,
oder JJeutung der Geheimenlelcren, Symbole unci Feste der cliristliclien Kirche, 1838;
Itabbinische Quellen unci Parallelen zu neutesiamentlichen SchriftstelUm, 1839; Uiblische
Mytlioloyie des alien unci neuen Testaments, 1812; Der Festkalender, 1817, etc.

5 Der Mystayoy, 18-38, p. vii, note, ami p. -ill.

BIBLICAL CRITICISM 433

that ritual cannibalism underlay the paschal eucharist, found even
fewer students prepared to appreciate it than did the searching
ethico-philosophical criticism passed on the Christian creed by
Feuerbach. F. Daumer,1 who in 1S12 published a treatise on the
same lines as Ghillany's (Der Feuer unci Molochdicnst), and followed
it up in 1847 with another on the Christian mysteries, nearly as
drastic, wavered later in his rationalism and avowed his conversion
to a species of faith. Hence a certain setback for his school. In
France the genial German revolutionist and exile Ewerbeck published,
under the titles of Q/i'est ce que la Beligion ? and Qu'est ce que la
Bible ? (1850), two volumes of very freely edited translations from
Feuerbach, Daumer, Ghillany, Liitzelberger (on the simple humanity
of Jesus), and Bruno Bauer, avowing that after vainly seeking a
publisher for years he had produced the books at his own expense.
He had, however, so mutilated the originals as to make the work
ineffectual for scholars, without making it attractive to the general
public ; and there is nothing to show that his formidable-looking
arsenal of explosives had much effect on contemporary French
thought, which developed on other lines.

Old Testament criticism, nevertheless, lias in the last generation
been much developed, after having long missed some of the first
lines of advance. After Colenso's rectification of the fundamental
error as to the historicity of the narrative of the Pentateuch, so long
and so obstinately persisted in by the German specialists in contempt
of Voltaire, the " higher criticism " proceeded with such substantial
certainty on the scientific lines of KUENEN and Welliiausen that,
whereas Professor Robertson Smith had to leave the Free Church of
Scotland in 1881" for propagating Kuenen's views, before the century
was out Canons of the English Church were doing the work with the
acquiescence of perhaps six clergymen otit of ten ; and American
preachers were found promoting an edition of the Bible which
exhibited some of the critical results to the general reader. Heresy
on this score bad become merchandise." Nevertheless, the pro-
fessional tendency to compromise (a result of economic and other
pressures) keeps most of the ecclesiastical critics far short of the
outspoken utterances of M. M. KALISCII, who in his Commentary on
Leviticus (18G7-72) repudiates every vestige of the doctrine of
inspiration." Later clerical critics, notably Canon Driver, use

1 Si : N'orl< preamble on //>. FY. IMunw.r, cin l;urznviluirr Molnchsft'iiirjry, in hi;
liihli rhr Mi,th(,b,uir, |;d. i.

- Alter i)ein:i acquitted in 1SS0, The first charge was founded on his liritiuiuirn article
" liiblc " ; the eeond on the article " i [ebrcw Ijanijtia^u and Literature," whieh appeared
tier the acquittal.

■• These utterance ; were noted for their" vigour and independence" by Kuoncn, and also

VOL. n 2l?

434 FBEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTUBY

language on that subject which cannot be read with critical respect.1
But among students at the end of the century the orthodox view
was practically extinct. Whereas the defenders of the faith even a
generation before habitually stood to the " argument from prophecy,"
the conception of prophecy as prediction has now become meaningless
as regards the so-called Mosaic books ; and the constant disclosure of
interpolations and adaptations in the others has discredited it as
regards the "prophets" themselves. For the rest, much of the
secular history still accepted is tentatively reduced to myth in the
Geschichte Israels of Hugo Winckler (1895-1900). The peculiar
theory of Dr. Cheyne is no less " destructive."

9. In New Testament criticism, though the strict critical method
of Strauss 's first book was not faithfully followed, critical research
went on continuously ; and the school of F. C. Baur of Tubingen in
particular imposed a measure of rational criticism on theologians in
general. Apart from Strauss, Baur was probably the ablest Chris-
tian scholar of his day. Always lamed by his professionalism, he yet
toiled endlessly to bring scientific method into Christian research.
His Paulus, dcr Apostel Jesu Christi, 1845; Kritische Unter-
suchiingen Tiber die Kanonisclwn Evang elien, 1847 ; and Das Chris-
tenthum und die christliche Kirche dcr drci ersten Jalirkundertc,
1853, were epoch-marking works, which recast so radically, in the
name of orthodoxy, the historical conception of Christian origins,
that he figured as the most unsettling critic of his time after Strauss.
With his earlier researches in the history of the first Christian sects
and his history of the Church, they constitute a memorable mass of
studious and original work. In the case of the Tubingen school as
of every other there was " reaction," with the usual pretence by
professional orthodoxy that the innovating criticism had been dis-
posed of; but no real refutation has ever taken place. Where Baur
reduced the genuine Pauline epistles to four, the last years of the
century witnessed the advent of Van Maxex, who, following up
earlier suggestions, wrought out the thesis that the epistles are all
alike supposititious. This may or may not hold good ; but there lias
been no restoration of traditionary faith among the mass of open-
minded inquirers. Such work as Zeller's Contents and Origin of the
Acts of the Apostles (1854), produced in Baur's circle, has substantially

l>v Dr. Cheyne, who remarks that the earlier work of Kalisch on Exodus (IS.jS) was some-
what behind the critical standpoint of contemporary investigators on the Continent.
(Founders of Old Testament Criticism, p. •>()!.)

1 Sec his Introduction to the Study of the Old Testament, pref. "It is the spirit of
compromise that I chiefly dread for our younger students," wrote Dr. Cheyne in 1893
{Founders, p. 217). His courteous criticism of Dr. Driver does not fail to point the moral
in that writer's direction.

BIBLICAL CRITICISM 435

held its ground ; and such a comparatively " safe " book of the next
generation as Weizsiicker's Apostolic Age (Eng. tr. of 2nd ed. 1893)
leaves no doubt as to the untrustworthiness of the Acts. Thus at
the close of the century the current professional treatises indicated a

Christianity " stripped not only of all supernaturalism, and therefore
of the main religious content of the historic creed, but even of credi-
bility as regards large parts of the non-supernaturalist narratives of
its sacred books. The minute analysis and collocation of texts which
lias occupied so much of critical industry has but made clearer the
extreme precariousness of every item in the records. The amount of
credit for historicity that continues to be given to them is demon-
strably unjustifiable on scientific grounds ; and the stand for a

Christianity without dogma " is more and more clearly seen to
be an economic adjustment, not an outcome of faithful criticism.

10. The movement of Biblical and other criticism in Germany
has had a significant effect on the supply of students for the theo-
logical profession. The numbers of Protestant and Catholic theo-
logical students in all Germany have varied as follows : — Protestant :
1831, 1,147 : 1851, 1,631 ; 1860, 2,520 ; 187G, 1,539 ; 1882-83, 3,168.
Catholic: 1831,1,801; 1840,866; 1850,1,393; 1860,1,209; 1880,
619. ' Thus, under the reign of reaction which set in after 1848
there was a prolonged recovery ; and again since 1876 the figures
rise for Protestantism through financial stimulus. When, however,
we take population into account, the main movement is clear. In
an increasing proportion, the theological students come from the
rural districts (69-4 in 1861-70), the towns furnishing ever fewer;'2
so that the conservative measures do but outwardly and formally
affect the course of thought ; the clergy themselves showing less and
less inclination to make clergymen of their sons.' Even among the
Catholic population, though that has increased from ten millions in
1830 to sixteen millions in 1880, the number of theological students
lias fallen from eleven to four per 100,000 inhabitants.4 Thus, after
many ' reactions" and much Bismarckism, the Zcit-Gcist in
Germany was still pronouncedly skeptical in all classes in 1881,'
when the church accommodation in Berlin provided only two per
cent, of the population, and even that provision outwent the demand.

1 Conrad, Thr German Vnirersities for (he Last Fifty Years, Knj,'. tr. 1SK5, p. 71. Set!
I). 1(H) as to tlic financial measures taken ; and p. 105 as to the essentia lly financial nature
Of the " reaction."

* /./. i>. lo.i. :; Id.]). 101. ' Td.v.U-2. Sec pp. 118 10 as to Austria. •" hi. pp. 07-98.

r' White, Warfare, i, -2:i!). In February. lull, on a riven Sunday, out of n Protestant
population of over two millions, mil; :;.",, um persons attended church in lierlin. Art. on
"Creeds, Heresy-Huntinu, and Sece- ion in German Protestantism Today," in llilibert
Journal for July, 101 i , p. 111.

436 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

And though there have been yet other alleged reactions since, and
the imperial influence is zealously used for orthodoxy, a large propor-
tion of the intelligent workers in the towns remain socialistic and
freethinking ; and the mass of the educated classes remain unorthodox
in the teeth of the socialist menace. Reactionary professors can
make an academic fashion : the majority of instructed men remain
tacitly naturalistic.

Alongside of the inveterate rationalism of modern Germany, how-
ever, a no less inveterate bureaucratism preserves a certain official
conformity to religion. University freedom does not extend to open
and direct criticism of the orthodox creed. On the other hand, the
applause won by Yirchow in 1877 on his declaration against the
doctrine of evolution, and the tactic resorted to by him in putting
upon that doctrine the responsibility of Socialist violence, are
instances of the normal operation of the lower motives against
freedom in scientific teaching.1 The pressure operates in other
spheres in Germany, especially under such a regimen as the present.
Men who never go to church save on official occasions, and who
have absolutely no belief in the Church's doctrine, nevertheless
remain nominally its adherents ;2 and the Press laws make it
peculiarly difficult to reach the common people with freethinking
literature, save through Socialist channels. Thus the Catholic
Church is perhaps nowhere — save in Ireland and the United States
— more practically influential than in nominally "Protestant"
Germany, where it wields a compact vote of a hundred or more in
the Reichstag, and can generally count on well-filled churches as
beside the half-empty temples of Protestantism.

Another circumstance partly favourable to reaction is the simple
maintenance of all the old theological chairs in the universities. As
the field of scientific work widens, and increasing commerce raises
the social standard of comfort, men of original intellectual power
grow less apt to devote themselves to theological pursuits even
under the comparatively free conditions which so long kept German
Biblical scholarship far above that of other countries. It can hardly
be said that men of the mental calibre of Strauss, Baur, Volkmar,
and Wellhausen continue to arise among the specialists in their
studies. Harnack, the most prominent German Biblical scholar of

1 See H leckel's Freedom in Science an I Teaching, Eng. tr. with pref. by Huxley, 1S79,
pp. xix, xxv, xxvii. HO-'M ; and Clifford.

- lHiclmer, for straightforwardly renouncing his connection with the State Church a
generation ago, was blamed by many who held li is philosophic opinions. In our own day,
there has arisen a considerable Austrittsbmveijuvg, or "Withdrawal Movement"; while
creedie s clerics strive to remain inside a Church bent on ejecting them. A. D. McLaren,
in Hibbert Journal for July, 1014, art. cited.

BIBLICAL CRITICISM 437

our day, despite his great learning, creates no such impression of
originality and insight, and, though latterly forced forward by more
independent minds, exhibits often a very uncritical orthodoxy. Thus
it is a priori possible enough that the orthodox reactions so often
claimed have actually occurred, in the sense that the experts have
reverted to a prior type. A scientifically-minded " theologian " in
Germany has now little ollicial scope for his faculty save in the
analysis of the Hebrew Sacred Books and the New Testament docu-
ments as such ; and this has been on the whole very well done,
short of the point of express impeachment of the historic delusion ;
but there is a limit to the attraction of such studies for minds of a
modern cast. Thus there is always a chance that chairs will be
filled by men of another type.

11. On a less extensive scale than in Germany, critical study of
the sacred books made some progress in England, France, and
America in the first half of the century ; though for a time the
attention even of the educated world was centred much more upon
the Oxford " tractarian " religious reaction than upon the movement
of rationalism. The reaction, associated mainly with the name of
John Henry Newman, was rather against the political Erastianism
and aesthetic apathy of the Whig type of Christian than against
German or other criticism, of which Newman knew little. But
against the attitude of those moderate Anglicans who were disposed
to disestablish the Church in Ireland and to modernize the liturgy
somewhat, the language of the " Tracts for the Times " is as authori-
tarian and anti-rationalistic as that of Catholics denouncing free-
thought. Such expressions as "the filth of heretical novelty''1 are
meant to apply to anything in the nature of innovation ; the causes
at stake are ritual and precedent, the apostolic succession and the
status of the priest, not the truth of revelation or the credibility
of the scriptures. The third Tract appeals to the clergy to " resist
the alteration of even one jot or tittle " of the liturgy ; and concern-
ing the burial service the line of argument is : " Do you pretend you
can discriminate the wheat from the tares? Of course not." All
attempts even to modify the ritual are an 'abuse of reason"; and
the true believe)' is adjured to stand fast in the ancient ways.2 At
a pinch he is to consider what Reason says; which surely, as
well as Scripture, was given us for reliyious ends";'1 but the only
reason' thus recognized is one which accepts the whole apparatus
of revelation. Previous to and alongside of this single-minded

i Tract! for the Times, vol. ii, e<l. ls.'JO; Records of the Church, N"o. xxiv.
- Tracts for the Tunes, No. 3. ;; LI. No. 3'2.

438 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

reversion to the ideals of the Dark Ages — a phenomenon not uncon-
nected with the revival of romanticism by Scott and Chateaubriand
— there was going on a movement of modernism, of which one of the
overt traces is Milman's History of the Jews (1829), a work to-day
regarded as harmless even by the orthodox, but sufficient in its time
to let Newman see whither religious " Liberalism " was heading.

Other and later researches dug much deeper into the problems
of religious historiography. The Unitarian C. C. HENNELL pro-
duced an Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838), so
important for its time as to be thought worth translating into
Gorman by Strauss ; and this found a considerable response from
the educated English public of its day. In the preface to his second
edition (1811) Hennell spoke very plainly of " the large and probably
increasing amount of unbelief in all classes around us "; and made
the then remarkably courageous declarations that in Ins experience
"neither deism, pantheism, nor even atheism indicates modes of
thought incompatible with uprightness and benevolence "; and that
" the real or affected horror which it is still a prevailing custom to
exhibit towards their names would be better reserved for those of
the selfish, the cruel, the bigot, and other tormentors of mankind."
It was in the circle of Hennell that MARIAN EVANS, later to
become famous as GEORGE Eliot, grew into a rationalist in despite
of her religious temperament ; and it was she who, when Hennell's
bride gave up the task, undertook the toil of translating Strauss's
Leben Jesu — though at many points she " thought him wrong." ' In
the churches he had of course no overt acceptance. At this stage,
English orthodoxy was of such a cast that the pious Tregelles,
himself fiercely opposed to all forms of rationalism, had to complain
that the most incontrovertible corrections of the current text of the
New Testament were angrily denounced."

In the next generation Theodore PARKER in the United States,
developing his critical faculty chiefly by study of the Germans, at
the cost of much obloquy forced some knowledge of critical results
and a measure of thcistic or pantheistic rationalism on the attention
of the orthodox world ; promoting at the same time a semi-philo-
sophic, semi-ethical reaction against the Calvinistic theology of
Jonathan Edwards, theretofore prevalent among the orthodox of
New England. In the old country a number of writers developed
new movements of criticism from thcistic points of view. F. W.

1 Cross's Life, 1-vol. ed. p. 70.

2 Account of the Printed Text of the Greek N. T., 1851, pref. and pp. 17, 112-13, 266.

BIBLICAL CRITICISM 439

NEWMAN, the scholarly brother of John Henry,1 produced a book
entitled The Soul (1819), and another, Phases of Faith (1853), which
had much influence in promoting rationalism of a rather rigidly
theistic cast. 11. W. MACKAY in the same period published two
learned treatises, A Sketch of the Rise and Progress of Christianity
(1851), notably scientific in method for its time ; and The Progress
of the Intellect as Exemplified in the Religious Development of the
Greeks and Hebrews (1850), which won the admiration of Buckle ;
George Eliot " translated Eeuerbach's Essence of Christianity
(1851) under her own name, Marian Evans; and W. R. GREG,
one of the leading publicists of his day, put forth a rationalist study
of The Creed of Christendom : Its Foundations Contrasted ivith its
Superstructure (1850), which lias gone through many editions and
is still reprinted. In 1861 appeared The Prophet of Nazareth, by
Evan Powell Meredith, who had been a Baptist minister in Wales.
The book is a bulky prize essay on the theme of New Testament
eschatology, which develops into a deistic attack on the central Chris-
tian dogma and on gospel ethics. Another zealous tlieist, THOMAS
SCOTT, whose pamphlet-propaganda on deistic lines had so wide an
inlluence during many years, produced an English Life of Jesus (1871),
which, though less important than the works of Strauss and less
popular than those of Renan, played a considerable part in the
disintegration of the traditional faith among English churchmen.
Still the primacy in critical research on scholarly lines lay with
the Germans ; and it was the results of their work that were
co-ordinated, from a theistic standpoint," in the anonymous work,
Supernatural Religion (1871-77), a massive and decisive perform-
ance, too powerful to be disposed of by the episcopal and other
attack's made upon it." Since its assimilation the orthodox or
inspirationist view of the gospels has lost credit among competent
scholars even within the churches. The battleground is now
removed to the problem of the historicity of the ostensible origins
of the cult ; and scholarly orthodoxy takes for granted many positions
which iift\r years ago were typical of " German rationalism."

12. In France systematic criticism of the sacred hooks recom-
menced in the second half of the century with such writings as

other, Charles Robert, became an atheist. This, sis well as his psychic
i mi illirienlly severe treatment at 1,1 n- hands of his tliei Lie brother in
n to He latter- Cunt ribiitimm Clurili/ In Ihr Eiirlij llistririjof tliclida
mil, IV.lI.
in I'll" i by the I car tic I ail lb or, who before his death disclosed I lis name

timonie of I'lhdderer, Tlir I >m !,,,,,„, n I „f Thrnltiwi since Kmit, Knti. tv.
.1 Or. Samuel David on, lidrud. to tin: Sticln of Ihr Srio Testament,

1 A tl.
infirmity.

ird b

Die in! ro
Corduml

Si ir i

- I , i ' ' •
-W. 11. ('

■'■ See 1

is:*), !>. :;'
prof, to -h

lie te

ide'd

440 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

those of P. LAEROQUE (Examen Critique cles doctrines de la religion
chrctiennc, I860) ; GUSTAVE d'Eichthal (Les Evangiles, ptie. i,

1863) ; and ALPHONSE PEYRAT (llistoire elcmcntaire ct critique de
Jesus, 1864) ; whereafter the rationalistic view was applied with
singular literary charm, if with imperfect consistency, by RENAN in
his series of seven volumes on the origins of Christianity, and with
more scientific breadth of view by Ernest HAVET in his Christianisme
ct scs Origines (1872, etc.). Renan's Vie de Jesus (1863) especially
has been read throughout the civilized world. It has been quite
justly pronounced, by German and other critics, a romance ; but no
other "life" properly so called has been anything else, Strauss's
first Life being an analysis rather than a construction ; and the
epithet was but an unwitting avowal that to accept the gospels,
barring miracles, as biography — which is what Renan did — is to be
committed to the unhistorical. He began by accepting the fourth
as equipollent with the synoptics ; and upon this Strauss in his
second Life confidently called for a recantation, which came in due
course. But Renan, in his fitful way, had critical glimpses which
were denied to Strauss — for instance, as to the material of the
Sermon on the Mount. The whole series of the Origines, which
wound up with Marc Aurele (1882), has a similar fluctuating value,
showing on the whole a progressive critical sense. The Saint Paul,
for example, at the close suddenly discards the traditional view pre-
viously accepted in Les Apotres, and recognizes that the ministry
of Paul can have been no more than a propaganda of small conven-
ticles, whose total membership throughout the Empire could not
have been above a thousand. But Renan's total service consisted
rather in a highly artistic and winning application of rational
historical methods to early Christian history, with the effect of dis-
placing the traditionist method, than in any lasting or comprehen-
sive solution of the problem of the origins. Havet's survey is both
corrective and complementary to his. Renan's influence on opinion
throughout the world, however, was enormous, were it only because
he was one of the most finished literary artists of his time.

Section 3. — Poetry and General Literature

1. The whole imaginative literature of Europe, in the generation
after the French Revolution, reveals directly or indirectly the trans-
mutation that the eighteenth century had worked in religious thought.
Either it reacts against or it develops the rationalistic movement.
In France the literary reaction is one of the first factors in the

POETKY AND GENEEAL LITERATURE 441

orthodox revival. Its leader and type was Chateaubriand, in whose
typical work, the Genie du Christian! sme (1802), lies the proof that,
whatever might be the " shallowness " of Voltairism, it was pro-
fundity beside the philosophy of the majority who repelled it. On
one who now reads it with the slightest scientific preparation, the
book makes an impression in parts of something like fatuity. The
handling of the scientific question at the threshold of the inquiry is
that of a man incapable of a scientific idea. All the accumulating
evidence of geology and palaeontology is disposed of by the grotesque
theorem that God made the world out of nothing witli all the marks
of antiquity upon it — the oaks at the start bearing " last year's nests "
— on the ground that, " if the world were not at once young and old,
the great, the serious, the moral would disappear from nature, for
these sentiments by their essence attach to antique things." l In
the same fashion the fable of the serpent is with perfect gravity
homologated as a literal truth, on the strength of an anecdote about
the charming of a rattlesnake with music." It is humiliating, but
instructive, to realize that only a century ago a " Christian reaction,"
in a civilized country, was inspired by such an order of ideas ; and
that in the nation of Laplace, with his theory in view, it was the
fashion thus to prattle in the taste of the Dark Ages.'1 The book is
merely the eloquent expression of a nervous recoil from everything
savouring of cool reason and clear thought, a recoil partly initiated
by the sheer stress of excitement of the near past ; partly fostered
by the vague belief that freethinking in religion had caused the
Revolution ; partly enhanced by the tendency of every warlike
period to develop emotional rather than reflective life. What was
really masterly in Chateaubriand was the style ; and sentimental
pietism had now the prestige of fine writing, so long the specialty of
the other side. Yet a generation of monarchism served to wear out
the ill-based credit of the literary reaction ; and belles lettrcs began
to be rationalistic as soon as politics began again to be radical.
Thus the prestige of the neo-Christian school was already spent
before the revolution of 1848 ;4 and the inordinate vanity of Chateau-
briand, who died in that year, had undone his special influence still
earlier. lie had created merely a literary mode and sentiment.

2. The literary history of Franco since his death decides the
question, so far as it can be thus decided. From 1818 till our own
day it has been predominantly naturalistic and non-religious. Alter

i I'tic. i. liv. i. an. v. - Id. i. liv. iii, eh. ii.

■ It, is further to be remembered, however, Unit Mr. Matthew Arnold saw lit to defend
Chateau In ian i, culling hi in " Mreat," when his fiune was be mi; undone, by common si u u.
1 C. Word.-. worth, Diary in France, 1610. pp. 00-00, 1-1, -Mi.

442 FEEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTUEY

Guizot and the Thierrys, the nearest approach to Christianity by
an influential French historian is perhaps in the case of the very
heterodox Edgar Quinet. MlCHELET was a mere heretic in the
eyes of the faithful, Saisset describing his book Du Pretre, de la
Femme, ct de la Famille (1845), as a " renaissance of Voltaireanism." !
His whole brilliant History, indeed, is from beginning to end ration-
alistic, challenging as it does all the decorous traditions, exposing the
failure of the faith to civilize, pronouncing that " the monastic Middle
Age is an age of idiots " and the scholastic world which followed it
an age of artificially formed fools,2 flouting dogma and discrediting
creed over each of their miscarriages.3 And he was popular, withal,
not only because of his vividness and unfailing freshness, but because
his convictions were those of the best intelligence around him. In
poetry and fiction the predominance of one or other shade of free-
thinking is signal. Balzac, who grew up in the age of reaction,
makes essentially for rationalism by his intense analysis ; and after
him the difficulty is to find a great French novelist who is not frankly
rationalistic. George Sand will probably not be claimed by ortho-
doxy ; and BEYLE, CONSTANT, FLAUBERT, MERIMEE, ZOLA,

Daudet, Maupassant, and the De Goxcourts make a list
against which can be set only the names of M. Bourget, an artist
of the second order, and of the distinguished decadent Huysmans,
who became a Trappist after a life marked by a philosophy and
practice of an extremely different complexion.

3. In French poetry the case is hardly otherwise. BERAXGER,
who passed for a Yoltairean, did indeed claim to have " saved from
the wreck an indestructible belief";4 and Lamartine goes to the
side of Christianity; but de Musset, the most inspired of decadents,
was no more Christian than Heine, save for what a critic has called
'la banale religiosity de VEspoir en Dieu";5 and the pessimist
Baudelaire had not even that to show. De Alusset's absurd attack
on Voltaire in his Byronic poem, Holla, well deserves the same
epithets. It is a mere product of hysteria, representing neither
knowledge nor reflection. The grandiose theism of VICTOR HUGO,

1 Essnis sur la philosophie et In religion, 1845, p. 193.

- Histoire, ton;, vii, lienaittsancp., introd. J G.

;; M. Faguet writes (Etudes sur le XIXe Steele, p. 35-2) that "Michelet croit a Fame plus
qu'a Dieu, encore que profondement deiste. Les theories philosophiques modernes lui
etaient penibles." This may be true, though hardly any evidence is offered on the latter
head : but when M. Fagnet write-;, " K-i-il Chretien? Je n'en sais rieu mais il sympa-
thise avec la pensee ehretienne," he seems to ignore the preface to the later editions of the
Histoire. du In revolution fraurnise. To pronounce Christianity, as Michelet there does,
essentially anti-democratic, and therefore hostile to tiie Revolution, was, for him, to
condemn it.

1 Letter to Sainte-Beuve, cited by Levallois, Sainte-Beuve, lb~2, p. 11.

5 Lanson, Hint, de la litt.francaise, p. 951.

POETRY AND GENERAL LITERATURE 443

again, is stamped only with his own imago and superscription ; and
in his great contemporary LECOXTE DE LlSLE we have one of the
most convinced and aggressive freethinkers of the century, a fine
scholar and a self-controlled pessimist, who felt it well worth his
while to write a little Popular History of Christianity (1871) which
would have delighted d'Holhach. It is significant, on the other
hand, that the exquisite religious verse of Verlaine was the product
of an incurable neuropath, like the later work of Iluysmans, and
stands for decadence pure and simple. While French belles lettres
thus in general made for rationalism, criticism was naturally not
behindhand. Sainte-Beuve, the most widely appreciative though
not the most scientific or just of critics, had only a literary sympathy
with the religious types over whom lie spent so much effusive
research;1 Ed.MOND SCHERER was an unbeliever almost against
his will ; TAIXE, though reactionary on political grounds in his
latter years, was the typical French rationalist of his time ; and
though M. Brunetiere, whose preferences were all for Bossuet, made
" the bankruptcy of science " the text of his very facile philo-
sophy, the most scientific and philosophic head in the whole line of
French critics, the late EMILE HenxequiN, was wholly a rationalist ;
and even the rather reactionary Jules Lemaitre did not maintain his
early attitude of austerity towards Renan.

1. In England it was due above all to Shelley that the very age
of reaction was confronted with unbelief in lyric form. His imma-
ture Queen Mab was vital enough with conviction to serve as an
inspiration to a whole host of unlettered freethinkers not only in its
own generation but in the next, its notes preserved, and greatly
expanded, the tract entitled The Necessity of Atheism, for which he
was expelled from Oxford ; and against his will it became a people's
book, the law refusing him copyright in his own work, on the
memorable principle that there could be no protection " for a book
setting forth pernicious opinions. Whether he might not in later
lite, had he survived, have passed to a species of mystic Christianity,
reacting like Coleridge, but with a necessary difference, is a question
raised by parts of the Hellas. Gladstone seems to have thought

i " r/incrcdulitc de Sainte-lieuve ('tail; sincere, radieale el absoluo. Kile a etc
invariable i:l invincible pendant trente ans. Voila la verile " ■lules kevallois, Suiiitc-
!;■ if.-. I -11, pre I . ]i. x xxiii i. Al. Levallois, who writes as a i heist, was one of Sainte- Heave's
secretaries. M. Zola, who spoke of the famous erkie's rationalism as "une negation
n'o-anl eonclure," admitted later that it was hardly possible lor him to speak more
boldly than he did I h<,ri< itinit k [At It ni irt-n, l-Sl, pp. :;ll. :;■>:, _M, And Al. Lavk e has
shown :i • cited above, p. -10' i J with what courage he supported Duniy in the Senate a 14a i list
the attacks of the exa perated clerical party. See al o his letter of IM17 to Louis Yiardot
in tlie tinint-projiDS to that writer's Lilifi: i'..rninin : Avnlmjie tl'itii Iiivrrilulr, tie edit.
1-d, p.:;.

444 FEEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTUEY

that he had in him such a potentiality. But Shelley's work, as
done, sufficed to keep for radicalism and rationalism the crown of
song as against the final Tory orthodoxy1 of the elderly Wordsworth
and of Southey ; and Coleridge's zeal for (amended) dogma came
upon him after his hour of poetic transfiguration was past.

And even Coleridge, who held the heresies of a modal
Trinity and the non-expiatory character of the death of Christ,
was widely distrusted by the pious, and expressed himself
privately in terms which would have outraged them. Miracles,
he declared, " are supererogatory. The law of God and the
great principles of the Christian religion would have heen the
same had Christ never assumed humanity. It is for these
things, and for such as these, for telling unwelcome truths, that
I have been termed an atheist. It is for these opinions that
William Smith assured the Archbishop of Canterbury that I
was (what half the clergy are in their lives) an atheist. Little
do these men know what atheism is. Not one man in a
thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to
be an atheist. I repeat it. Not one man in ten thousand lias
goodness of heart or strength of mind to be an atheist."
Allsopp's Letters, etc., as cited, p. 47. But at other times
Coleridge was a defender of the faith, while contemning the
methods of the evidential school. Id. pp. 13-14, 31.

On the other side, Scott's honest but unintellectual romanticism,
as we know from Newman, certainly favoured the Tractarian reac-
tion, to which it was aesthetically though hardly emotionally akin.
Yet George Eliot could say in later life that it was the influence of
Scott that first unsettled her orthodoxy;" meaning, doubtless, that
the prevailing secularity of his view of life and his objective handling
of sects and faiths excluded even a theistic solution. Scott's ortho-
doxy was in fact nearly on all fours with Ins Jacobitism — a matter
of temperamental loyalty to a tradition.1' But the far more potent
influence of BYRON, too wayward to hold a firm philosophy, but too
intensely alive to realities to be capable of Scott's feudal orthodoxy,
must have counted much for heresy even in England, and was one
of the literary forces of revolutionary revival for the whole of Europe.
Though he never came to a clear atheistical decision as did Shelley,'

1 That Wordsworth was not an orthodox Christian is fairly certain. Both in talk and
in poetry he put forth a pantheistic doctrine. Cp. Benn, Hist, of Eng. Rationalism, i,

•2-27-20; and Coleridge's letter of Aug. 8, 1820, in Allsopp's Letters, etc.. of S. T. Coleridge,
3rd ed. 1864, pp. 56-57. - Leslie Stephen, George Eliot, p. 27.

:i Mr. Benn (Hist, of Eng. Rationalism, i, 226. 300 sq.) lias some interesting discussions
on Scott's relation to religion, but does not take full account of biographical data and of
Scott's utterances outside of las novels. The truth probably is that Scott's brain was one
with "watertight compartments."

1 At the age of twenty-five we find him writing to Gilford : "I am no bigot to infidelity,
and did not expect that because I doubted the immortality of man I should be charged
with denying the existence of God" (letter of June IS, 1813).

POETRY AND GENERAL LITERATURE 445

and often in private gave himself out for a Calvinist, he so handled
theological problems in his Cain that he, like Shelley, was refused
copyright in his work ; ! and it was widely appropriated for free-
thinkers' purposes. The orthodox Southey was on the same grounds
denied the right to suppress his early revolutionary drama, Wat
Tyler, which accordingly was made to do duty in Radical propa-
ganda by freethinking publishers. Keats, again, though he melo-
diously declaimed, in a boyish mood, against the scientific analysis
of the rainbow, and though he never assented to Shelley's impeach-
ments of Christianity, was in no active sense a believer in it, and
after his long sickness met death gladly without tho " consolations "
ascribed to creed."

5. One of the best-beloved names in English literature, Charles
Lamb, is on several counts to be numbered with those of the free-
thinkers of his day — who included Godwin and Hazlitt — though he
had no part in any direct propaganda. Himself at most a Unitarian,
but not at all given to argument on points of faith, he did his work
for reason partly by way of tho subtle and winning humanism of
such an essay as New Year's Eve, which seems to have been what
brought upon him the pedantically pious censure of Southey,
apparently for its lack of allusion to a future state ; partly by his
delicately-entitled letter, TJie Tombs in the Abbey, in which he
replied to Southey's stricture. "A book which wants only a sounder
religious feeling to bo as delightful as it is original" had been
Southey's pompous criticism, in a paper on Infidelity!' In his reply,
Lamb commented on Southey's life-long habit of scoffing at the
Church of Rome, and gravely repudiated the test of orthodoxy for
human character.

Lamb's words are not generally known, and are worth
remembering. " I own," he wrote, " I never could think so
considerably of myself as to decline the society of an agreeable
or worthy man upon difference of opinion only. The impedi-
ments ainl the facilitations to a sound belief are various and
inscrutable as the heart of man. Some believe upon weak
principles ; others cannot feel the efficacy of the strongest.
One of the most candid, most upright, and single-meaning men
I ever knew was the late Thomas Ilolcroft. 1 believe he never
said one thing and meant another in his life; and, as near as
I can guess, he never acted otherwise than with the most

1 liy the Court of Chancery, in 1K-2J, the year in which copyright was refused to tho
I.t-rtiin ■■■ of l)r. Lawi-em-,.. Harriet Marlineau. History <<f tin /V.«r, ii, 87,

- W. Sharp, Lift- of .SYrvr/i, IMJ-J, pp. 8'i S7. !»(), 117 IS.

" On reading Lamb's severe rejoinder, Southey, in distress, apologized, and I, ami) at
once relenn 1 ' /.(/-■ a ml l.rtter of John Hickman, hy Orlo Williams, I'.JU, p. •2-£i). Hence
the curtailment of Lamb's letter in the ordinary editions of his works.

446 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

scrupulous attention to conscience. Ought we to wish the
character false for the sake of a hollow compliment to Chris-
tianity ? " Of the freethinking and unpopular Hazlitt, who had
soured towards Lamh in his perverse way, the essayist spoke
still more generously. Of Leigh Hunt he speaks more critically,
hut with the same resolution to stand by a man known as a
heretic. But the severest flout to Southey and his Church is
in the next paragraph, where, after the avowal that " the last
sect with which you can remember me to have made common
profession were the Unitarians," he tells how, on the previous
Easter Sunday, he had attended the service in Westminster
Abbey, and when he would have lingered afterwards among the
tombs to meditate, was " turned, like a dog or some profane
person, out into the common street, with feelings which I could
not help, but not very congenial to the day or the discourse. I
do not know," he adds, " that I shall ever venture myself again
into one of your churches."

These words were published in the London Magazine in 1825 ;
but in the posthumous collected edition of the Essays of Elia all
the portions above cited were dropped, and the paragraph last
quoted from was modified, leaving out the last words. The
essay does not seem to have been reprinted in full till it appeared
in E. II. Shepherd's edition of 1878. But the original issue in
tbe London Magazine created a tradition among the lovers of
Lamb, and his name has always been associated with some
repute for freethinking. There is further very important testi-
mony as to Lamb's opinions in one of Allsopp's records of the
conversation of Coleridge : —

" No, no ; Lamb's skepticism has not come lightly, nor is he
a skeptic [sic : Query, scoffer ?] . The harsh reproof to Godwin
for his contemptuous allusion to Christ before a well-trained
child proves that he is not a skeptic [? scoffer] . His mind,
never prone to analysis, seems to have been disgusted with the
hollow pretences, the false reasonings and absurdities of the
rogues and fools with whom all establishments, and all creeds
seeking to become established, abound. I look upon Lamb as
one hovering between earth and heaven ; neither hoping much
nor fearing anything. It is curious that he should retain many
usages which he learnt or adopted in the fervour of his early
religious feelings, now that his faith is in a state of suspended
animation. Believe me, who know him well, that Lamb, say
what he will, has more of the essentials of Christianity than
ninety-nine out of a hundred professing Christians. He has all
that -would still have been Christian had Christ never lived or
been made manifest upon earth." (Allsopp's Letters, etc., as
cited, p. 4G.) In connection with the frequently cited anecdote
as to Lamb's religious feeling given in Leigh Hunt's Autobio-
graphy (rep. p. 253), also by Hazlitt {Winter slow, essay ii, ed.

POETRY AND GENERAL LITERATURE 447

1902, p. 39), may be noted the following, given by Allsopp :
' After a visit to Coleridge, during which the conversation had

taken a religious turn, Leigh Hunt expressed his surprise

that such a man as Coleridge should, when speaking of Christ,
always call him Our Saviour. Land), who had been exhilarated
by one glass of that gooseberry or raisin cordial which he has
so often anathematized, stammered out : ' Ne-ne-never mind
what Coleridge says ; he is full of fun.' "

6. While a semi-Bohemian like Lamb could thus dare to chal-
lenge the reigning bigotry, the graver English writers of the first
half of the century who had abandoned or never accepted orthodoxy
felt themselves for the most part compelled to silence or ostensible
compliance. It was made clear byCarlyle's posthumous Bcminisccnccs
that he had early turned away from Christian dogma, having in fact
given up a clerical career because of unbelief. Later evidence abounds.
At the age of fifteen, by his own account, he had horrified his mother
with the question : " Lid God Almighty come down and make wheel-
barrows in a shop'?"1 Of his college life lie told: "I studied the
evidences of Christianity for several years, with the greatest desire to
be convinced, but in vain. I read Gibbon, and then first clearly saw
that Christianity was not true. Then came the most trying time of
my life."" Goethe, he claimed, led him to peace; but philosophic
peace lie never attained. " He was contemptuous to those who held
to Christian dogmas; he was angry with those who gave them up;
he was furious with those who attacked them. If equanimity be the
mark of a Philosopher, he was of all great-minded men the least of a
Philosopher." ' To all freethinking work, scholarly or other, he was
hostile with the hostility of a man consciously in a false position.
Strauss's Lcbcn Jcsu he pronounced, quite late in life, a revolu-
tionary and ill-advised enterprise, setting forth in words what all wise
men had in their minds for fifty years past, and thought it fittest to
hold their peace about."1 lie was, in fact, so false to his own
doctrine of veracity as to disparage all who spoke out ; while
privately agreeing with Mill as to the need for speaking out." Even
AIM did so only partially in his lifetime, as in his address to the
St. Andrews students (1SG7), when, "in the reception given to the
Address, he was most struck by the vociferous applause of the
divinity students at the freethought passage."' In the first
half of the century such displays of courage were rare indeed. Only

1 H'i'li'iiti Alliii'jlKiin: A Dviry, 1!*J7, p. ■-!•",:!. ('p. p. -1WH.

- II. ii. ■!:,->. ' Uliii^iiitm. .i- i-ii.- I, p. i:>\.

1 /•/. ii. -J I 1. (' nivlc -;ii 1 !!:.■ s;mi" lii in;-! L<i Mnni-uiv I'miwav,

•■ (.'p. I 'nil. I'ain ~ /. ,S'. Mill, PP. 1.j7, l'Jl ; Kroii l.-\, l,.m-l,n Li/r of C,i rhjlr, i, i:H.

^ Uaiii, p. 1 -.

448 FKEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTUBt

after the death of Eomilly was it tacitly avowed, by the publication
of a deistic prayer found among his papers, that he had had no belief
in revelation.1 Much later in the century, HARRIET MARTINEAU,
for openly avowing her unbelief, incurred the angry public censure
of her own brother.

Despite his anxious caution, Carlyle's writing conveyed to sus-
ceptible readers a non-Christian view of things. We know from a
posthumous writing of Mr. Froude's that, when that writer had gone
through the university and taken holy orders without ever having
had a single doubt as to his creed, Carlyle's books " taught him that
the religion in which he had been reared wTas but one of many
dresses in which spiritual truth had arrayed itself, and that the
creed was not literally true so far as it was a narrative of facts.'"
It was presumably from the Sartor Resartus and some of the Essays,
such as that on Voltaire — perhaps, also, negatively from the general
absence of Christian sentiment in Carlyle's works — that such lessons
were learned ; and though it is certain that many non-zealous Chris-
tians saw no harm in Carlyle, there is reason to believe that for
multitudes of readers he had the same awakening virtue. It need
hardly be said that his friend Emerson exercised it in no less degree.
Mr. Froucle was remarkable in his youth for his surrender of the
clerical profession, in the teeth of a bitter opposition from his family,
and further for his publication of a freethinking romance, The Nemesis
of Faith (1849) ; but he went far to conciliate Anglican orthodoxy
by his History. The romance had a temporary vogue rather above its
artistic merits as a result of being publicly burned by the authorities
of Exeter College, Oxford, of which he was a Fellow.3

7. This attitude of orthodoxy, threatening ostracism to any avowed
freethinker who had a position to lose, must be kept in mind in esti-
mating the English evolution of that time. A professed man of science
could write in 1838 that " the new mode of interpreting the Scriptures
which has sprung up in Germany is the darkest cloud which lowers
upon the horizon of that country The Germans have been con-
ducted by some of their teachers to the borders of a precipice, one
leap from which will plunge them into deism." He added that in
various parts of Europe " the heaviest calamity impending over the
w7hole fabric of society in our time is the lengthening stride of bold
skepticism in some parts, and the more stealthy onwards-creeping

1 See Brougham's letters in the Correspondence of Macvev Napier, 1S79, pp, 33:5-37.
Brougham is deeply indignant, not at the fact, but at the indiscreet revelation of it— as
also at the similar revelation concerning Pitt (p. 331).

2 My Relations with Carlyle, 1903, p. '2.
;< Morning Post, March 9, 1849.

POETRY AND GENERAL LITERATURE 449

step of critical cavil in others."1 Such declamation could terrorize
the timid and constrain the prudent in such a society as that of early
Victorian England. The prevailing note is struck in Macaulay's
description of Charles Blount as " an infidel, and the head of a small
school of infidels who were trouhled with a morbid desire to make
converts." " All the while, Macaulay was himself privately " infidel ";'
but ho cleared his conscience by thus denouncing those who had the
courage of their opinions. In this simple fashion some of the sanest
writers in history were complacently put below the level of the
commonplace dissemblers who aspersed them ; and the average
educated man saw no baseness in the procedure.

The opinion deliberately expressed in this connection by the
late Professor Bain is worth noting : —

" It can at last be clearly seen what was the motive of
Carlyle's perplexing style of composition. We now know what
his opinions were when he began to write, and that to express
them would have been fatal to his success ; yet he was not a
man to indulge in rank hypocrisy. He accordingly adopted a
studied and ambiguous phraseology, which for long imposed
upon the religious public, who put their own interpretation
upon his mystical utterances, and gave him the benefit of any
doubt. In the Life of Sterling he threw off the mask, but still
was not taken at his word. Had there been a perfect tolerance
of all opinions, he would have begun as he ended ; and his
strain of composition, while still mystical and high-flown,
would never have been identified with our national orthodoxy.

" I have grave doubts as to whether we possess Macaulay's
real opinions on religion. His way of dealing with the subject
is so like the hedging of an unbeliever that, without some good
assurance to the contrary, I must include him also among the
imitators of Aristotle's 'caution.'

" When Sir Charles Lyell brought out his Antiquity of Man,
he too was cautious. Knowing the dangers of his footing, lie
abstained from giving an estimate of the extension of time
required by the evidences of human remains. Society in
Lou Ion, however, would not put up with this reticence, and he
had to disclose at dinner parties what he had withheld from the
public -namely, that in his opinion the duration of man could
not be less than .00,000 years" (Practical Essays, p. 271.)

'■ a, nii'imi. l,v Hi -.■: Hawkins, M.D., K.K.S.. F.H.CM'.. Inspector of I'risons, late
I'rofc or ;,- Kin« ; Coll, •«(,. etc., 1-:;-. p. 171. - llixtt>ni. Hi. xix. Si wU'iit-'s .■<!. ii. 111.

me ' ' ■ ■ a Hiii: ; ail' I we find HroiiHiam privately denouncing liinl for his
rem irk Ii -ay on It mi;.- < lit 'tun/ <>f tlir I'nj,,- , mil par.] that to try "without thi' help of
! to pro vi the immortality of man " ii vain. " It is next thiet; to preaching

atiei-m." 10111 llrou:! im I. .-tier of October -ID. !*!<). in Cnrrrspnihlrnc,- ,./ M.nrry
.V 1,, 1. r. p. ::.;.'.'. who at 1 tie -ame lime holly in-iUteil thai ( 'uvier ha. I made an advance in
Natural i n >] . ". hj pro\ im; tnat tiiere must liave been o/ic divine interpo.-ition alter tho
creal on of tin; world — to creaii: pi-Hi-.s. H<1. p. :j.'J7.)

VOL. II. 2(.t

450 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

8. Thus for a whole generation honest and narrow-minded
believers were trained to suppose that their views were triumphant
over all attacks,1 and to see in " infidelity " a disease of an ill-
informed past ; and as the Church had really gained in conventional
culture as well as in wealth and prestige in the period of reaction,
the power of mere convention to override ideas was still enormous.
But through the whole stress of reaction and conservatism, even
apart from the positive criticism of creed which from time to time
forced its head up, there is a visible play of a new spirit in the most
notable of the serious writing of the time. Carlyie undermined
orthodoxy even in his asseveration of unreasoned theism ; Emerson
disturbs it alike when he acclaims mystics and welcomes evolu-
tionary science ; and the whole inspiration of Mill's Logic no less
than of his Liberty is something alien to the principle of authority.
Of Ruskin, again, the same may be asserted in respect of his many
searching thrusts at clerical and lay practice, his defence of Colenso,
and the obvious disappearance from his later books of the evangelical
orthodoxy of the earlier.2 Thus the most celebrated writers of
serious English prose in the latter half of the century were in a
measure associated with the spirit of critical thought on matters
religious. In a much stronger degree the same thing may be
predicated finally of the writer who in the field of English belles
lettres, apart from fiction, came nearest them in fame and influence.
Matthew Arnold, passing insensibly from the English attitude of
academic orthodoxy to that of the humanist for whom Christ is but
an admirable teacher and God a ' Something not ourselves which
makes for righteousness," became for the England of his later years
the favourite pilot across the bar between supernaturalism and
naturalism. Only in England, perhaps, could his curious gospel of
church-going and Bible-reading atheism have prospered, but there
it prospered exceedingly. Alike as poet and as essayist, even when
essaying to disparage Colenso or to confute the Germans where
they jostled his predilection for the Fourth Gospel, he was a
disintegrator of tradition, and, in his dogmatic way, a dissolver of
dogmatism. When, therefore, beside the four names just mentioned
the British public placed those of the philosophers Spencer, Lewes,
and Mill, and the scientists Darwin, Huxley, Clifford, and Tyndall,
they could not but recognize that the mind of the age was divorced
from the nominal faith of the Church.

1 In 1830, for instance, we find a Scottish episcopal O.D. writing that "Infidelity lias
had its day; it. depend upon it. will never be revived -so man or genius wilt, kvkr
writk anothkk WORD in its SUPPORT." Morehead, Dialogues on Natural mill Revealed
lieli'jion, p. 266. - Cp. the author's Modern Humanists, pp. 1S9-94.

POETRY AND GENERAL LITERATURE 451

9. In English fiction, the beginning of the end of genuine faith
was apparent to the prophetic eyes of Wilberforce and Robert Hall,
of whom the former lamented the total absence of Christian senti-
ment from nearly all the successful fiction even of his day;1 and
the latter avowed the pain with which he noted that Miss Edge-
worth, whom he admired for her style and art, put absolutely no
religion in her books," while Hannah More, whoso principles were
so excellent, had such a vicious style. With Thackeray and
Dickens, indeed, serious fiction might seem to bo on the side of
faith, both being liberally orthodox, though neither ventured on
religious romance ; but with GEORGE ELIOT the balance began to
lean the other way, her sympathetic treatment of religious types
counting for little as against her known rationalism. At the end
of the century almost all of the leading writers of the higher fiction
were known to be either rationalists or simple theists ; and against
the heavy metal of Mr. Meredith, Mr. Conrad, Mr. Hardy, Mr.
Bennett, Mr. Moore (whose sympathetic handling of religious
motives suggests the influence of Iluysmans), and the didactic-
deistic Mrs. Humphry- Ward, orthodoxy can but claim artists of the
third or lower grades. The championship of some of the latter
may be regarded as the last humiliation of faith.

In 1905 there was current a vulgar novel entitled When it
icas Dark, wherein was said to be drawn a blood-curdling
picture of what woidd happen in the event of a general sur-
render of Christian faith. Despite some episcopal approbation,
the book excited much disgust among the more enlightened
clergy. The preface to Miss Marie Corelli's Miyhty Atom may
serve to convey to the many readers who cannot peruse the
works of that lady an idea of the temper in which she vindicates
her faith. Another popular novelist of a low artistic grade, the
late Mr. Seton-Merriman, lias avowed his religious soundness
in a romance with a Russian plot, entitled The Sowers. Refer-
ring to the impressions produced by great scenes of Nature, ho
writes : "These places and these times are good for convalescent
atheists and such as pose as unbelievers — the cheapest form of
notoriety " (p. 168). The novelist's own Christian ethic is thus

indicated: "He had Jewish blood in his veins, which

carried with it the usual tendency to cringe. It is in the blood ;
it is part of that which the people who stood without Pilate's

1 rrarlir.il Viru r,f th<: Pn-ruiliii'i Itrlioimm S>i ',-m 1707). Sth <•<!. i>. :!C,s. \\ ilherforee
point • wit ii chatlrin to the -uperiority of Mohammeda n writers in the-e mutters.

- "In point of tendency I should das-, her hook-, imiiiiw 'lie mo I in-! licious I ever
read." delineatini,' Hood characters in every a peel, "ami all this without the remotest
iillu -ion to Ciiri tianitv. the oulv true religion." ('iiei in (). (iri^'orv's Urol' Mctiiair tj
Jtuhrrt Hull, is;.;, ,,. -)_!. The context tell how Mi s KdHeworth avowed that she had not
thought religion nc.ee -a.ry in hooks meant for the upper classes.

452 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

palace took upon themselves and their children" (p. 59). But
the enormous mass of modern novels includes some tolerable
pleas for faith, as well as many manifestoes of agnosticism.
One of the works of the late " Edna Lyall," We Two, was
notable as the expression of the sympathy of a devout, generous,
and amiable Christian lady with the personality and career of
Mr. Bradlaugh.

10. Among the most artistically gifted of the English story-
writers and essayists of the last generation of the century was
Richard Jefferies (d. 1887), who in The Story of My Heart (1883)
has told how "the last traces and relics of superstitions acquired
compulsorily in childhood " finally passed away from his mind,
leaving him a Naturalist in every sense of the word. In the Eulogy
of Richard Jefferies published by Sir Walter Besant in 1888 it is
asserted that on his deathbed Jefferies returned to his faith, and
" died listening with faith and love to the words contained in the
Old Book." A popular account of this " conversion " accordingly
became current, and was employed to the usual purpose. As has
been shown by a careful student, and as was admitted on inquiry
by Sir Walter Besant, there had been no conversion whatever,
Jefferies having simply listened to his wife's reading without hinting
at any change in his convictions.1 Despite Ids biographer's express
admission of his error, Christian journals, such as the Spectator,
have burked the facts ; one, the Christian, lias piously charged dis-
honesty on the writer who brought them to light ; and a third, the
Salvationist War Cry, has pronounced his action " tho basest form
of chicanery and falsehood."2 The episode is worth noting as
indicating the qualities which still attach to orthodox propaganda.

11. Though Shelley was anathema to English Christians in his
own day, his fame and standing steadily rose in the generations
after his death. Nor has the balance of English poetry ever reverted
to the side of faith. Even Tennyson, who more than once struck at
rationalism below the belt, is in his own despite the poet of doubt as
much as of credence, however he might wilfully attune himself to the
key of faith ; and the unparalleled optimism of Browning evolved
a form of Christianity sufficiently alien to the historic creed.3 In
Clough and Matthew Arnold, again, we have the positive
record of surrendered faith. Alongside of Arnold, SWINBURNE put

1 Art. "The Faith of Richard Jefferies," by H. S. Salt, in Westminster Review, August,
1905. rep. as pamphlet by the R. P. A., 1006.

- The writer of these scurrilities is Mr. Bramwell Booth, War Cry, May 27, 1905.

3 Cp. Mrs. Sutherland Orr's article on "The Religious Opinions of Robert Browning"
in the Contemporary Review, December, 1891, p. 878 ; and tho present writer's Tennyson
and Browning as 'Teachers, 1903.

POETRY AND GENERAL LITERATURE 453

into his verse the freethinking temper that Leconte de Lisle reserved
for prose; and the ill-starred but finely gifted James Thomson
( B.Y.") was no less definitely though despairingly an unbeliever.
Among our later poets, finally, the balance is pretty much the same.
Mr. Watson has declared in worthily noble diction for a high
agnosticism, and the late John Davidson defied orthodox ethics in
the name of his very antinomian theology ;' while on the side of the
regulation religion — since Mr. Yeats is but a stray Druid — can be
cited at best the regimental psalmody of Mr. Kipling, lyrist of
trumpet and drum ; the stained-glass Mariolatries of the late
Francis Thompson ; the declamatory orthodoxy of Mr. Noyes ; and
the Godism of W. E. Henley, whereat the prosaic godly look askance.
12. Of the imaginative literature of the United States, as of that
of England, the same generalization broadly holds good. The
incomparable Hawthorne, whatever his psychological sympathy
with the Puritan past, wrought inevitably by his art for the loosen-
ing of its intellectual hold ; PoE, though he did not venture till his
days of downfall to write his Eureka, thereby proves himself an
entirely non-Christian theist; and Emeeson'S poetry, no less than
his prose, constantly expresses his pantheism ; while his gifted
disciple TlloKEAU, in some ways a more stringent thinker than his
master, was either a pantheist or a Lucretian theist, standing aloof
from all churches." The economic conditions of American life have
till recently been unfavourable to the higher literature, as apart from
fiction; but the unique figure of WALT WHITMAN stands for a
thoroughly naturalistic view of life;3 Mr. HOWELLS appears to be
at most a theist ; Mr. IlENEY JAMES has not even exhibited the
bias of his gifted brother to the theism of their no less gifted father;
and some of the most esteemed men of letters since the Civil War,
as Dr. Wendell Holmes and Colonel Wentworth IIrigtnson,
have hecn avowedly on the side of rationalism, or, as the term goes
in the States, " liberalism." Though the tone of ordinary conversa-
tion is more often reminiscent of religion in the United States than
in Englan I, the novel and the newspaper have been perhaps moi
thoroughly secularized there than here ; and in tho public honoui

e

1 Apropos of Li.-- Tlirnl ri-crut . which lie pronounced "the most profound and original
of Kntfli h book-." .Mi-. Davidson in ;i newspaper article proclaimed liimsell <>n soeio-
political grounds an anti-Christian. " I take the first resolute step out of Christendom,"
was hi; claim ' hmly Chrnniclr, Dec. ml er ■-'(). H!(;.V.

- See Tulkf nilh l.iiu V mi. I.J CI. \\ oodl.uiT, 1MK), pp. <X\ <M.

■' It \\\v~ in In , "'.<{ a tie that \\ hitman tended iniht to " thei/e " Nature. In conversation

with Dr. Moncure ( on v. ay lie once U: ed the ex pre -ion that " the spectacle of a mouse is

to tanner a sex till ion of infidels." Dr. Conwa j- rcplii d : "And the si ill it of the

cal play inn u i th tin in on e is; enough to set them on their lect anain "; whereat \\ hitman

tolerantly smiled.

451 FKEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTUEY

done to so thorough a rationalist as the late Dr. Moncure Conway at
the hands of his alma mater, the Dickinson College, West Virginia,
may be seen the proof that the official orthodoxy of his youth has
disappeared from the region of his birth,

13. Of the vast modern output of belles lettres in continental
Europe, finally, a similar account is to be given. The supreme
poet of modern Italy, LEOPARDI, is one of the most definitely
rationalistic as veil as one of the greatest philosophic poets in
literature ; CARDUCCI, the greatest of his successors, was explicitly
anti-Christian ; and despite all the claims of the Catholic socialists,
there is little modern Catholic literature in Italy of any European
value. One of the most distinguished of modern Italian scholars,
Professor A. de Guberxatis, has in his Letture sopra la mitologia
vedica (1874) explicitly treated the Christian legend as a myth. In
Germany we have seen Goethe and Schiller distinctly counting
for naturalism ; and of Jean Paul Eichter (1763-1825) an orthodox
historian declares that his "religion was a chaotic fermenting of
the mind, out of which now deism, then Christianity, then a new
religion, seems to come forth." * The naturalistic line is found to be
continued in HEIXRICH VOX KLEIST, the unhappy but masterly
dramatist of Dor Zerbrochene Krug, one of the truest geniuses of
his time ; and above all in HEIXE, whose characteristic profession
of reconciling himself on his deathbed with the deity he imaged as
the Aristophanes of heaven"2 serves so scantily to console the
orthodox lovers of his matchless song. His criticism of Kant and
Fichte is a sufficient clue to his serious convictions ; and that God
is all that there is " 3 is the sufficient expression of his pantheism.
The whole purport of his brilliant sketch of the History of Religion
and Philosophy in Germany (1831 ; 2nd ed. 1852) is a propaganda
of the very spirit of freethinking, which constitutes for Germany
at once a literary classic and a manifesto of rationalism. As he
himself said of the return of the aged Schelling to Catholicism, we
may say of Heine, that a deathbed reversion to early beliefs is a
pathological phenomenon.

The use latterly made of Heine's deathbed re-conversion by
orthodoxy in England is characteristic. The late letters and
conversations in which he said edifying things of God and the
Bihle are cited for readers who know nothing of the context,
and almost as little of the speaker. He had similarly praised
the Bible in 1830 (Letter of July, in B. iii of his volume on

1 Kahnis, Internal Hint, of Ger. Protestantism, Eng. ti\ 1856, p. 78.

2 Gestantlnitise, end (Werke, ed. 1876, iv, 59).

3 Zur Uesch. der Relit), unci Pliilos. in Werke, ed. cited, iii, 80.

POETEY AND GENEEAL LITEEATUEE 455

Borne — Werke, vii, 1G0). To the reader of the whole it is clear
that, while Heine's verbal renunciation of his former pantheism,
and his characterization of the pantheistic position as a " timid
atheism," might have been made independently of his physical
prostration, his profession of the theism at which he bad
formerly scoffed is only momentarily serious, even at a time
when such a reversion would have been in no way surprising.
His return to and praise of the Bible, the book of bis childhood,
during years of extreme suffering and utter helplessness, was
in the ordinary way of physiological reaction. But inasmuch
as his thinking faculty was never extinguished by bis tortures,
he chronically indicated that his religious talk was a half-
conscious indulgence of the overstrained emotional nature, and
substantially an exercise of his poetic feeling — always as large
a part of his psychosis as bis reasoning faculty. Even in
deathbed profession be was neither a Jew nor a Christian, his
language being that of a deism " scarcely distinguishable in
any essential element from that of Voltaire or Diderot "
(Strodtmann, Heine's Leben unci Werke, 2te Aufl. ii, 38G).
' My religious convictions and views," he writes in the preface

to the late Iiomancero, " remain free of all churchism I have

abjured nothing, not even my old heathen Gods, from whom I
have parted in love and friendship." In his will he peremptorily
forbade any clerical procedure at his funeral ; and his feeling
on that side is revealed in his sad jests to his friend Meissner
in 1850. " If I could only go out on crutches !" he exclaimed ;
adding: ''Do you know where I should go? Straight to
church." On his friends expressing disbelief, he went on :
Certainly, to church ! Where should a man go on crutches ?
Naturally, if I could walk without crutches, I should go to the
laughing boulevards or the Jardin Mabille." The story is told
in England icithout the conclusion, as a piece of "Christian
Evidence."

But even as to his theism Heine was never more than
wilfully and poetically a believer. In 1819 we find him jesting
about " God " and " the Gods," declaring he will not offend the
hi her Gott, whose vultures he knows and respects. " Opium
is also a religion," he writes in 1850. "Christianity is useless

for the healthy for the sick it is a very good religion." " If

the German people in their need accept the King of Prussia,
why should not 1 accept the personal God '.' " And in speaking
of the postscript to the liomancc.ro he writes in 1851 : ' Alas, I
had neither time nor mood to say there what 1 wanted— namely,
that 1 die as a Poet, who needs neither religion nor philosophy,
and has nothing to do with either. The Poet understands very
well the symbolic idiom of Religion, and the abstract jargon of
Philosophy ; but neither the religious gentry nor those of philo-
sophy will ever understand the Poet." A few weeks before his

456 FEEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

death he signs a New Year letter, "Nebuchadnezzar II,
formerly Prussian Atheist, now Lotosflower-adorer." At this
time ho was taking immense doses of morphia to make his
tortures bearable. A few hours before his death a querying
pietist got from him the answer: "God will pardon me; it is
his business." The Gcstandnisse, written in 1854, ends in
absolute irony; and his alleged grounds for giving up atheism,
sometimes quoted seriously, are purely humorous (Wcrke, iv, 33).
If it be in any sense true, as he tells in the preface to the
Bomancero, that " the high clerisy of atheism pronounced its
anathema " over him — that is to say, that former friends
denounced him as a weak turncoat — it needed only the publi-
cation of his Life and Letters to enable freethinkers to take an
entirely sympathetic view of his case, which may serve as a
supreme example of " the martyrdom of man." On the whole
question see Strodtmann, as cited, ii, 372 sq., and the Gesland-
nisse, which should be compared with the earlier written
fragments of Brief c i'tber Deutscliland (Werke, iii, 110), where
there are some significant variations in statements of fact.

Since Heine, German belles lettrcs has not been a first-rate
influence in Europe ; but some of the leading novelists, as AuEK-
BACH and HEYSE, are well known to have shared in the rational
philosophy of their age ; and the Christianity of Wagner, whose
precarious support to the cause of faith lias been welcomed chiefly
by its heteroclitc adherents, counts for nothing in the critical scale.1

14. But perhaps the most considerable evidence, in belles lettres,
of the predominance of rationalism in modern Europe is to bo found
in the literary history of the Scandinavian States and Russia. The
Russian development indeed had gone far ere the modern Scan-
dinavian literatures had well begun. Already in the first quarter
of the century the poet Poushkine was an avowed heretic ; and
Gogol even let Ids art suffer from his preoccupations with the
new humanitarian ideas ; while the critic BlELlXSKV, classed by
Tourguenief as the Lessing of Russia," was pronouncedly ration-
alistic," as was his contemporary the critic GrANOVSKY, reputed
the finest Russian stylist of his day. At tins period belles leltres
stood for every form of intellectual influence in Russia,5 and all
educated thought was moulded by it. The most perfect artistic
result is the fiction of the freethinker TOURGUENIEF, the Sophocles

1 Sot: Rrnest Newman's Study of Wagner, 1S90, p. 390, note, as to the vagueness of
Wagnerians on the subject.

- Tikhoaiirov, La Itussie, 2e edit. p. 313.

:; See Comte de Vogue's Le ruman russe, p. 21S, its to his propaganda of atheism.

* Arnaudo, Le. Xihilisme et les Xihilistes, French tr. 50. •"> Tikhomirov, p. 344.

(; "II LTourgueniefJ etait libre-penseur. et detestat l'apparat religieux d'une inaniere
toute partieuliere." I. Pavlovsky, Souvenirs sur Tourauenief, lbb'7, p. 242.

THE NATURAL SCIENCES 457

of the modern novel. His two great contemporaries, Dostoyevsky
and Tolstoy, count indeed for supernaturalism ; but the truly
wonderful genius of the former was something apart from his philo-
sophy, which was merely childlike ; and the latter, the least masterly
if the most strenuous artist of the three, made his religious converts
in Russia chiefly among the uneducated, and was in any case sharply
antagonistic to orthodox Christianity. It does not appear that the
younger writer, Potapenko, a fine artist, is orthodox, despite his
extremely sympathetic presentment of a superior priest ; and the
still younger Gorky is an absolute Naturalist.

15. In the Scandinavian States, again, there are hardly any
exceptions to the freethinking tendency among the leading living
men of letters. In the person of the abnormal religionist Soren
Kierkegaard (1813-1855) a new force of criticism began to stir
in Denmark. Setting out as a theologian, Kierkegaard gradually
developed, always on quasi-religious lines, into a vehement assailant
of conventional Christianity, somewhat in the spirit of Pascal,
somewhat in that of Feuerbach, again in that of Ruskin ; and in
a temper recalling now a Berserker and now a Hebrew prophet.
The general effect of his teaching may be gathered from the mass
of the work of HENRIK IBSEN, who was his disciple, and in parti-
cular from Ihsen's Brand, of which the hero is partly modelled on
Kierkegaard.1 Ibsen, though his Brand was counted to him for
righteousness by the Churches, showed himself a thorough-going
naturalist in all his later work ; BJORNSOX was an active freethinker ;
the eminent Danish critic, GEORG BRAXDES, early avowed himself
to the same effect ; and his brother, the dramatist, EDWARD
BRAXDES, was elected to the Danish Parliament in 1871 despite
his declaration that he believed in neither the Christian nor the
Jewish God. Most of the younger litterateurs of Norway and
Swedt'ii seem to be of the same cast of thought.

Section -1. The Natural Sciences

1. The power of intellectual habit and tradition had preserved
among the majority of educated men, to the end of the eighteenth
century, a notion of deity either slightly removed from that of the
ancient Hebrews or ethically purified without being philosophically
transformed, though the astronomy of Copernicus, Galileo, and
Newton had immensely modified the Hebraic conception of the

i See tlic arti<;l<; " Vu I'rectirseur d'Henrik 1 1> i.-n, Soeren Kierkegaard," in the llei'itr <h:
I'arii, July 1, I'JOl.

458 EREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

physical universe. We have seen that Newton did not really hold
by the Christian scheme — he wrote, at times, in fact, as a pantheist
— but some later astronomers seem to have done so. When, how-
ever, the great Laplace developed the nebular hypothesis, previously
guessed at by Bruno and outlined by Kant, orthodox psychological
habit was rudely shaken as regards the Biblical account of creation ;
and like every other previous advance in physical science this was
denounced as atheistic1 — which, as we know, it was, Laplace having
declared in reply to Napoleon that he had no need of the God
hypothesis. Confirmed in essentials by all subsequent science,
Laplace's system widens immensely the gulf between modern cosmo-
logy and the historic theism of the Christian era ; and the subse-
quent concrete developments of astronomy, giving as they do such
an insistent and overwhelming impression of physical infinity, have
made the "Christian hypothesis"2 fantastic save for minds capable
of enduring any strain on the sense of consistency. Paine had
brought the difficulty vividly home to the common intelligence ; and
though the history of orthodoxy is a history of the success of insti-
tutions and majorities in imposing incongruous conformities, the
perception of the incongruity on this side must have been a force of
disintegration. The freethinking of the French astronomers of the
Revolution period marks a decisive change ; and as early as 1826
we find in a work on Jewish antiquities by a Scotch clergyman a
very plain indication3 of disbelief in the Hebrew story of the stopping
of the sun and moon, or (alternatively) of the rotation of the earth.
It is typical of the tenacity of religious delusion that a quarter of
a century later this among other irrational credences was contended
for by the Swiss theologian Gaussen,4 and by the orthodox majority
elsewhere, when for all scientifically trained men they had become
untenable. And that the general growth of scientific thought was
disintegrating among scientific men the old belief in miracles may
be gathered from an article, remarkable in its day, which appeared
in the Edinburgh Eevieio of January, 1814 (No. 46), and was
" universally attributed to Prof. Leslie,"5 the distinguished physicist.

1 Prof. A. D. White, Hist, of the Wa rfa re of Science with Theology, 1896, i, 17, 22.

2 The phrase is used by a French Protestant pastor. La verite chretienne et la doute
mode rite (Conferences), 1879, pp. 24-25.

:; Antiquities of the Jeivs, by William Brown, D.D., Edinburgh, 1826, i, 121-22. Brown
quotes "from a friend" a demonstration of the monstrous consequences of a stoppage of
the earth's rotation.

1 Theopneustia : The Plenary Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, Eng. trans. Edin-
burgh. 1850, pp. 2111-19. Gaussen elaborately argues that if eighteen minutes were allowed
for the stoppage of the earth's rotation, no shock would occur. Finally, however, he
argues that there may have been a mere refraction of the sun's rays— an old theory,
already set forth by Brown.

5 Dr. C. It, Edmonds, Introd. to rep. of Leland's View of the Dcistical Writers, Tegg's
ed. 1837, p. xxiii,

THE NATURAL SCIENCES 459

Reviewing the argument of Laplace's essay, Sur les probabilities, it
substantially endorsed the thesis of Hume that miracles cannot be
proved by any testimony.

Leslie's own case is one of the milestones marking the slow
recovery of progress in Britain after the Revolution. His appoint-
ment to the chair of Mathematics, after Playfair, at Edinburgh
University in 1805 was bitterly resisted by the orthodox on the
score that he was a disbeliever in miracles and an "infidel" of the
school of Hume, who had been his personal friend. Nevertheless
he again succeeded Playfair in the chair of Physics in 1819, and
was knighted in 1832. The invention of the hygrometer and the
discovery of the relations of light and heat had begun to count for
more in science than the profession of orthodoxy.

2. From France came likewise the impulse to a naturalistic
handling of biology, long before the day of Darwin. The prota-
gonist in this case was the physician P.-J.-G. CABANIS (1737-
180s), the colleague of Laplace in the School of Sciences. Growing
up in the generation of the Revolution, Cabanis had met, in the
salon of Madame Helvetius, d'Holbach, Diderot, D'Alembert,
Condorcet, Laplace, Condillac, Yolney, Franklin, and Jefferson, and
became the physician of Alirabeau. His treatise on the Rapports
du physique et du morale de Vhommc (1796-1802) l might be
described as the systematic application to psychology of that
" positive " method to which all the keenest thought of the eighteenth
century had been tending, yet with much of the literary or rhetorical
tone by which the French writers of that age had nearly all been
characterized. For Cabanis, the psychology of Helvetius and
Condillac had been hampered by their ignorance of physiology;"
and he easily put aside the primary errors, such as the ' equality of
minds" and the entity of "the soul," which they took over from
previous thinkers. His own work is on the whole the most search-
ing and original handling of the main problems of psycho-physiology
that had yet been achieved; and to this day its suggestiveness has
not been exhausted.

Unit Cabanis, in li is turn, made the mistake of Helvetius and
Condillac. Not content with presenting the results of his study in
the province in which lie was relatively master, he undertook to
reach ultimate truth in those of ethics and philosophy, in which lie
was not so. In the preface to the llitpports he bus down an

1 The work <•',!! -M-- of twelve " Memo ires " or treatises, six of which were read in 179li-
17.(7 at, liie In-litute. They appeared in hook form in lMfci.

- llipir, )•;.<, ler .Menion-e, : u. near end. (Kd. lbU, l>. 7:3.1 Cp. I'rt'-f. <PP- l'i-17).

460 FREETHOTJGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

emphatically agnostic conviction as to final causes: "ignorance the
most invincible," he declares, is all that is possible to man on that
issue.1 But not only does he in his main work freely and loosely
generalize on the phenomena of history and overleap the ethical
problem : he penned shortly before his death a Lettre sur les causes
premieres, addressed to Fauriel,2 in which the aging intelligence is
seen reverting to a priori processes, and concluding in favour of a
" sort of stoic pantheism " J with a balance towards normal theism
and a belief in immortality. The final doctrine did not in the least
affect the argument of the earlier, which was simply one of positive
science ; but the clerical world, which had in the usual fashion
denounced the scientific doctrine, not on the score of any attack by
Cabanis upon religion, but because of its incompatibility with the
notion of the soul, naturally made much of the mystical,4 and
accorded its framer authority from that moment.

As for the conception of " vitalism " put forward in the Letter
to Fauriel by way of explanation of the phenomena of life, it is but
a reversion to the earlier doctrine of Stahl, of which Cabanis had
been a partisan in his youth.5 The fact remains that he gave an
enduring impulse to positive science,0 his own final vacillation failing
to arrest the employment of the method he had inherited and im-
proved. Most people know him solely through one misquotation,
the famous phrase that " the brain secretes thought as the liver
secretes bile." This is not only an imperfect statement of his
doctrine : it suppresses precisely the idea by which Cabanis differen-
tiates from pure ' sensationalism." What he taught was that
"impressions, reaching the brain, set it in activity, as aliments
reaching the stomach excite it to a more abundant secretion of

gastric juice The function proper to the first is to perceive

particular impressions, to attach to them signs, to combine different
impressions, to separate them, to draw from them judgments and
determinations, as the function of the second is to act on nutritive
substances," etc' It is after this statement of the known processus,
and after pointing out that there is as much of pure inference in the
one case as in the other, that he concludes : " The brain in a manner
digests impressions, and makes organically the secretion of thought "

i Ed. cited, p. 54. Cp. p. 207, note. - Not published till 18-24.

•"• Ueberweg, ii, 330. i Cp. Luebaire, as cited, p. 36.

5 Lange, Gesch. den Materialismus, ii, 131.

c " Since Cabanis, the referring back of mental functions to the nervous system has
remained dominant in physiology, whatever individual physiologists may have thought
about final causes" (Lange, ii, 70). Compare the tribute of Cabanis's orthodox editor
Cerise (ed. 1843, Introd. pp. xlii-iii).

7 Rapports, lie llemoire, near end. (Ed. cited, p. 122.)

THE NATUEAL SCIENCES 461

and this conclusion, he points out, disposes of tho difficulty of those
who " cannot conceive how judging, reasoning, imagining, can ever
be anything else than feeling. The difficulty ceases when one
recognizes, in these different operations, the action of the brain
upon the impressions which are passed on to it." The doctrine is,
in short, an elementary truth of psychological science, as distin-
guished from the pseudo-science of the Ego considered as an entity.
To that pseudo-science Cabanis gave a vital wound ; and his derided
formula is for true science to-day almost a truism. The attacks
made upon Ins doctrine in the next generation only served to
emphasize anew the eternal dilemma of theism. On the one hand
his final "vitalism" was repugnant to those who, on traditional
lines, insisted upon a distinction between " soul " and " vital force ";
on the other hand, those who sought to make a philosophic case
for theism against him made tho usual plunge into pantheism, and
were reproached accordingly by the orthodox.1 x\ll that remained
was the indisputable "positive" gain.

3. In England the influence of the French stimulus in physiology
was seen even more clearly than that of the great generalization of
Laplace. Professor William Lawrence (1783-1867), the physiologist,
published in 1816 an Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and
Physiology, containing some remarks on the nature of life, which
elicited from the then famous Dr. Abernethy a foul attack in his
Physiological Lectures delivered before the Collego of Surgeons.
Lawrence was charged with belonging to the party of French physio-
logical skeptics whose aim was to loosen those restraints on which
the welfare of mankind depends." 1 In the introductory lecture of
his course of 1817 before the College of Physicians, Lawrence
severely retaliated, repudiating the general charge, but reasserting
that the dependence of life on organization is as clear as the deriva-
tion of daylight from the sun. The war was adroitly carried at
once into the enemy's territory in the declaration that " The pro-
found, the virtuous, and fervently pious Pascal acknowledged, what
all sound theologians maintain, that the immortality of the soul,

1 See the already cited introduction of Cerise, who solved the problem religiously by
positing " n force which executes the plans of God without our knowledge or intervention"
(p. xix1. He goes on to lament the pantheism ol Dr. Dubois (whose Kxtimt n tirs doctrines
rlr Cabnni.t, G'tll, i't ISronssnis (1.S1-2) was put forward as a vindication of the "spiritual"
principle;, and of the German school of physiology represented by Oken and Burdaeh.

- Lawrence's Lecturumtn VlnjninlofjiJ. Xoolnou. aiol th<: Sot iiral History <>f M<in, ,Sth ed.
IS 10. pj) ! 'i. The aspersion of Abernethy is typi'-ul of the orthodox malignity of tho
time. < ':> 1' i ni - in his preface had expressly eon tended for the all- importance of morals.
The orlholox Dr. Cerise, who edited his hook in ISIS, while acknowledging the high
chara-ter of Cabanis, thought lit to speak of "the in r ■•>■, Lli • i " as " iutere ted in abasing
man " in trod. p. xxi i. On tiie core o I fear of dom irali /.at ion, the champions of "spirit "
themselves exhibited the maximum of basene .

462 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

the great truths of religion, and the fundamental principles of morals
cannot be demonstrably proved by mere reason ; and that revelation
alone is capable of dissipating the uncertainties which perplex those
who inquire too curiously into the sources of these important
principles. All will acknowledge that, as no other remedy can be
so perfect and satisfactory as this, no other can be necessary, if we
resort to this with firm faith." L The value of this pronouncement
is indicated later in the same volume by subacid allusions to " those
who regard the Hebrew Scriptures as writings composed with the
assistance of divine inspiration," and who receive Genesis "as a
narrative of actual events." Indicating various "grounds of doubt
respecting inspiration," the lecturer adds that the stories of the
naming of the animals and their collection in the ark, " if we are to
understand them as applied to the living inhabitants of the whole
world, are zoologically impossible."2 On the principle then govern-
ing such matters Lawrence was in 1822, on the score of his heresies,
refused copyright in his lectures, which were accordingly reprinted
many times in a cheap stereotyped edition, and thus widely diffused.3

This hardy attack was reinforced in 1819 by the publication of
Sir T. C. Morgan's Sketches of the Philosophy of Life, wherein the
physiological materialism of Cabanis is quietly but firmly developed,
and a typical sentence of his figures as a motto on the title-page.
The method is strictly naturalistic, alike on the medical and on the
philosophic side; and "vitalism " is argued down as explicitly as is
anthropomorphism.4 As a whole the book tells notably of the
stimulus of recent French thought upon English.

4. A more general effect, however, was probably wrought by the
science of geology, which in a stable and tested form belongs to the
nineteenth century. Of its theoretic founders in the eighteenth
century, Werner and Dr. JAMES HUTTON (1726-1797), the latter
and more important0 is known from his Investigation of the Prin-
ciples of Knowledge (1794) to have been consciously a freethinker on
more grounds than that of his naturalistic science ; and his Theory
of the World (1795) was duly denounced as atheistic.0 Whereas the
physical infinity of the universe almost forced the orthodox to
concede a vast cosmic process of some kind as preceding the shaping

1 Lawrence's Lectures, p. 9, note. ~ Id. pp. 168-69.

3 Yet Lawrence was created a baronet two months before his death. So much progress
had been made in half a century.

4 Work cited, pp. 355 sq., 375 sq. The tone is at times expressive of a similar attitude

towards historical religion— e.ri- : "Human testimony is of so little value that it cannot

be received with sufficient caution. To doubt is the beginning of wisdom." Id. p. 269.

■> Cp. Whewell, Hist, of tlie Inductive Sciences, 3rd ed. iii, 505.

e White, as cited, i, 222-23, gives a selection of the language in general use among
theologians on the subject.

THE NATURAL SCIENCES 463

of the earth and solar system, the formation of these within six
days was one of the plainest assertions in the sacred hooks ; and
every system of geology excluded such a conception. As the evidence
accumulated, in the hands of men mostly content to deprecate
religious opposition,1 there was duly evolved the quaint compromise
of the doctrine that the Biblical six "days" meant six ages — a
fantasy still cherished in the pulpit. On the ground of that absurdity,
nevertheless, there gradually grew up a new conception of the
antiquity of the earth. Thus a popular work on geology such as
The Ancient World, by Prof. Ansted (1847), could begin with the
proposition that " long before the human race had been introduced
on the earth this world of ours existed as the habitation of living
things different from those now inhabiting its surface." Even the
thesis of " six ages," and others of the same order, drew upon their
supporters angry charges of "infidelity." Hugh Miller, whose
natural gifts for geological research were chronically turned to con-
fusion by his orthodox bias, was repeatedly so assailed, when in
point of fact he was perpetually tampering with the facts to salve
the Scriptures.2 Of all the inductive sciences geology had been most
retarded by the Christian canonization of error.'1 Even the plain
fact that what is dry land had once been sea was obstinately dis-
torted through centuries, though Ovid1 had put the observations of
Pythagoras in the way of all scholars ; and though Leonardo da
Vinci had insisted on the visible evidence ; nay, deistic habit could
keep even Voltaire, as wo saw, preposterously incredulous on the
subject. When the scientific truth began to force its way in the
teeth of such authorities as Cuvier, who stood for the "Mosaic"
doctrine, the effect was proportionately marked ; and whether or
not the suicide of Miller (1856) was in any way due to despair on
perception of the collapse of his reconciliation of geology with
Genesis,' the scientific demonstration made an end of revelationism
for many. What helped most to save orthodoxy from humiliation
on the scientific side was the attitude of men like Professor Baden

1 The early policy of the Geological Society of London (1S07), which professed to seek

for facts and to disclaim theories as premature (cp. Whewell, iii, 12S ; Hackle, iii, 392), was
at least as nine)] socially as scientifically prudential.

Sri tin i <eellent monograph of W. M. Mackenzie, Hitah Milli-r: A Critical Stmhj,
i;#).">, c'n. vi ; and cp. Spencer's essay on Illmjical Geolnrw— Essays, vol. i; and Baden
l'owell s Christianity without. Judaism, 1SY7, p. 2ol ■-'/. Miller's friend Dick, the Thurso
li • being a freethinker, escaped such error. (Mackenzie, pp. Iiil-til.l

- Cp. the details given by Whewell, iii, lOfi-lOS, 111-13, .".OS -.",07. as to early theories of a
so'in i or Ier. all of which came to nothing. Steno, a Dane resident in Italy in the seven-
teenth ' ■■ titurv, had reached non -Scriptural and just view- on sevi nil points, ("'p. White,
/// f.i.fttf Warfan of Scv no- with TUt'ulyii, \.i\~>. Leonardo da Vinci and Frascatorio
hud reached them -till earlier. Above, vol. i, p. 371.

• .1/. tamj.ri lib. xv.

'• He had n t completer] n work on the ubjeet at his death. C P- Mackenzie, Ilnyh
Miller, as cited, pp. 131 3.5, J 10 17.

464 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Powell, whoso scientific knowledge and habit of mind moved him
to attack the Judaism of the Bibliolaters in the name of Christianity,
and in the name of truth to declare that " nothing in geology bears
the smallest semblance to any part of the Mosaic cosmogony,
torture the interpretation to what extent we may." * In 1857 this
was very bold language.

5. Still more rousing, finally, was the effect of the science of
zoology, as placed upon a broad scientific foundation by CHARLES
DARWIN. Here again steps had been taken in previous generations
on the right path, without any general movement on the part of
scientific and educated men. Darwin's own grandfather, ERASMUS
Darwin, had in his Zoonomia (1794) anticipated many of the
positions of the French LAMARCK, who in 1801 began developing
the views he fully elaborated in 1815, as to the descendance of all
existing species from earlier forms.'2 As early as 1795 GEOFFROY
SAINT-HlLAIRE had begun to suspect that all species are variants
on a primordial form of life ; and at the same time (1794-95)
Goethe in Germany had reached similar convictions.3 That views
thus reached almost simultaneously in Germany, England, and
France, at the time of the French Revolution, should have to wait
for two generations before even meeting the full stress of battle,
must be put down as one of the results of the general reaction.
Saint- Ililaire, publishing his views in 1828, was officially overborne
by the Cuvier school in France. In England, indeed, so late as
1855, we find Sir David Brewster denouncing the Nebular Hypo-
thesis : "that dull and dangerous heresy of the age An omni-
potent arm was required to give the planets their position and
motion in space, and a presiding intelligence to assign to them the
different functions they had to perform." ' And Murchison the
geologist was no less emphatic against Darwinism, which he rejected
till his dying day (1871).

6. Other anticipations of Darwin's doctrine in England and else-
where came practically to nothing,0 as regarded the general opinion,
until Robert Chambers in 1844 published anonymously his
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a work which found
a wide audience, incurring bitter hostility not only from the clergy
but from some specialists who, like Huxley, were later to take the

1 Christianity and Judaism, pp. '256-57.

- See Charles Darwin's Historical Sketch prefixed to the Origin of Species.

3 Meding, as cited by Darwin. 6th ed. i, p. xv. Goethe seems to have had his general
impulse from Kielmeyer, who also taught Cuvier. Virchow, Gbthe als Naturforscher,
1861, Beilage x.

4 Memoirs of Netoton, i, 131. Cp. More Worlds than One, 1S54, pp. vi, 2-26.
"' See Darwin's Sketch, as cited.

THE NATURAL SCIENCES 465

evolutionist view on Darwin's persuasion. Chambers it was that
brought the issue within general knowledge ; and he improved his
position in successive editions. A hostile clerical reader, Whewell,
admitted of him, in a letter to a less hostile member of his profes-
sion, that, " as to the degree of resemblance between the author and
the French physiological atheists, he uses reverent phrases : theirs
would not lie tolerated in England"; adding: " You would be sur-
prised to hear the contempt and abhorrence with which Owen and
Sedgwick speak of the Vestiges." 1 Hugh Miller, himself accused of
infidelity " for his measure of inductive candour, held a similar
tone towards men of greater intellectual rectitude, calling the
liberalizing religionists of his day "vermin" and "reptiles,"2 and
classifying as "degraded and lost"3 all who should accept the new
doctrine of evolution, winch, as put by Chambers, was then coming
forward to evict his own delusions from the field of science. The
young Max Midler, with the certitude born of an entire ignorance
of physical science, declared in 1S5G that the doctrine of a human
evolution from lower types " can never be maintained again," and
pronounced it an "unhallowed imputation."4

7. "Contempt and abhorrence" had in fact at all times consti-
tuted the common Christian temper towards every form of critical
dissent from the body of received opinion ; and only since the
contempt, doubled with criticism, began to be in a large degree
retorted on the bigots by instructed men lias a better spirit prevailed.
Such a reaction was greatly promoted by the establishment of the
Darwinian theory. It was after the above-noted preparation,
popular and academic, and after the theory of transmutation of
species had been definitely pronounced erroneous by the omniscient
Whewell,'' that Darwin produced (1859) his irresistible arsenal of
arguments and facts, the Origin of Species, expounding systematically
the principle of Natural Selection, suggested to him by the economic
philosophy of Malthus, and independently and contemporaneously
arrived at by Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace. The outcry was enormous ;
and the Church, as always, arrayed itself violently against the new
truth. Bishop Wiiherforce pointed out in the (Jiittrterl i/ 7/
that " the principle of natural selection is absolutely incompatible
with the word of God,"fi which was perfectly true; and at a famous

1 I„<-U< r r.l March I-'!-',:- in l.if, of Win in 7, by Mrs. Stuir I >..■;■ :H .. -Jm.1 e,l. |ss-J,
pp, :;; 1:1. Ill ' ■..• :il he Inm :i - to Oivi n. In- liutlli"! lui-ilv in hi im t. pomi

with tin: ;. ili in- hi • i \'i f-'xiii s. See the L i Jr. i if Sir Hi rliD nl iiimi, WW iW W

■J M;i W,. :./,.• Ilui/h M/iirr. p. I-:,. :; ]-\.ot- I'rinis <■ III,, ■Crrntor, end.

' (,.ri.,r.i I , p ,

•"< Hi '. i ' Hi' Im! . ::r i • i. iii. 17 I <i: l.ifi . ii ;ili >ve cit. !. \\ in well is

Haiti to in' '.'■ i-i'W i i to ;i!]o\v a copy ol llm <)ri<)iu of S/in-ii n to he planM in the Trinity
Colli ••• i. iorai '. . W hitc, i, tl. ii While, i, 7(1 .'•■(/.

VOL. II 12 J J

466 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

meeting of the British Association in 1860 he so travestied the
doctrine as to goad Huxley into a fierce declaration that he would
rather be a descendant of an ape than of a man who (like the
Bishop) plunged into questions with which he had no real acquaint-
ance, only to obscure them and distract his hearers by appeals to
religious prejudice.1 The mass of the clergy kept up the warfare
of ignorance ; but the battle was practically won within twenty
years. In France, Germany, and the United States leading theolo-
gians had made the same suicidal declarations, entitling all men to
say that, if evolution proved to be true, Christianity was false.
Professor Luthardt, of Leipzig, took up the same position as Bishop
Wilberforce, declaring that " the whole superstructure of personal
religion is built upon the doctrine of creation";2 leading American
theologians pronounced the new doctrine atheistic ; and everywhere
gross vituperation eked out the theological argument.3

8. Thus the idea of a specific creation of all forms of life by an
originating deity — the conception which virtually united the deists
and Christians of the eighteenth century against the atheists — was
at length scientifically exploded. The principle of personal divine
rule or providential intervention had now been philosophically
excluded successively (l) from astronomy by the system of Newton ;
(2) from the science of earth-formation by the system of Laplace
and the new geology ; (3) from the science of living organisms by
the new zoology. It only needed that the deistic conception should
be further excluded from the human sciences — from anthropology,
from the philosophy of history, and from ethics — to complete, at
least in outline, the rationalization of modern thought. Not that
the process was complete in detail even as regarded zoology.
Despite the plain implications of the Origin of Species, the doctrine
of the Descent of Man (1871) came on many as a shocking surprise
and evoked a new fury of protest. The lacuna) in Darwin, further,
had to be supplemented ; and much speculative power has been
spent on the task by HAECKEL, without thus far establishing
complete agreement. But the desperate stand so long made on the
score of the "missing link" seems to have been finally discredited
in 1894; and the Judaeo-Christian doctrine of special creation and

1 Edward Clodd, Thomas Henry Huxley, 1902, pp. 10-20.

2 Luthardt, Fundamental Truths of Christianity, Eng. tr. 1865, p. 74.

:; See the many examples cited by White. As late as 1885 the Scottish clergyman
Dr. Lee is quoted as calling the Darwinians "gospellers of the cutter," and charging on
their doctrine "utter blasphemy against the divine and human character of our incarnate
Lord" (White, i, 83). Carlyle is quoted as calling Darwin "an apostle of dirt-worship."
His admirers appear to regard him as having made amends by admitting that Darwin
was personally charming.

THE NATURAL SCIENCES 467

providential design appears, even in the imperfectly educated society
of our day, to be already a lost cause.

As we have seen, however, it was not merely the clerical class
that resisted the new truth : the men of science themselves were
often disgracefully hostile; and that "class" continued to give a
sufficiency of support to clericalism. If the study of the physical
sciences be no guarantee for recognition of new truth in those
sciences, still less is it a sure preparation for right judgment in
matters of sociology, or, indeed, for a courageous attitude towards
conventions. Spencer in his earlier works used the language of
deism1 at a time when Comto had discarded it. It takes a rare
combination of intellectual power, moral courage, and official
freedom to permit of such a directly rationalistic propaganda as was
carried on by Professor CLIFFORD, or even such as has been accom-
plished by President ANDREW WHITE in America under the com-
paratively popular profession of deism. It was only in his leisured
latter years that Huxley carried on a general conflict with orthodoxy.
In middle age he frequently covered himself by attacks on professed
freethinkers ; and he did more than any other man of his time in
England to conserve the Bible as a school manual by his politic
panegyric of it in that aspect at a time when bolder rationalists
were striving to get it excluded from the State schools.'2 Other men
of science have furnished an abundance of support to orthodoxy by
more or less vaguely religious pronouncements on the problem of
the universe ; so that Catholic and other obscurantist agencies are
able to cite from them many quasi-scientihe phrases3 — taking care
not to ask what bearing their language has on the dogmas of the
Churches. Physicists who attempt to be more precise are rarely
found to be orthodox ; and the moral and social science of such
writers is too often a species of charlatanism. But the whole
tendency of natural science, which as such is necessarily alien to
supernaturalism, makes for a rejection of the religious tradition ;
and the real leaders of science are found more and more openly
alienated from the creed of faith. We know that Darwin, though
the son and grandson of freethinkers, was brought up in ordinary
orthodoxy by his mother, and " gave up common religious belief
almost independently from his own reflections."1 All over the

1 T'ji. the Education, small t-A. m>. 11, !•">.

- [ am inform" 1 on ::oo<l authority thn t in later life Huxley chancer! hi- \ie\vs on tho
subject. Ife h;oi abundant cause. As early ns 1ST!) he is found coiuji lain inn ijuvf. to Klin,
tr. of Itaecke] ■ Frfdntn in Sntnrr mid Tfnrlihin. p. xvii i of the mi- o] "falsities at
pri "nt foj ' ■ I r, lion t !;<■ yoiui:: in the name of tin- ( 'huvrh."

: See a eiioic" co'.l.ction hi 1 .-in | !>•: What Mm »i Scimrr -</y ./ ilCndand
Itrti'ii ■». hv A. K. I'ro.-l r; Catholic Truth Society.

- Life and J. ''Iters ,,f Chnrlrx Durum, cd. ib-s, hi, 17'.).

468 FEEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

world that has since been an increasingly common experience among
scientific men.

Section 5. — The Sociological Sciences

1. A rationalistic treatment of human history had been explicit
or implicit in the whole literature of Deism ; and had been attempted
with various degrees of success by Bodin, Vico, Montesquieu, Mande-
ville, Hume, Smith, Voltaire, Volney, and Condorcet, as well as by
lesser men. So clear had been the classic lead to naturalistic views
of social growth in the Politics of Aristotle, and so strong the
influence of the new naturalistic spirit, that it is seen even in the
work of Goguet (1769), who sets out as biblically as Bossuet ; while
in Germany Herder and Kant framed really luminous generalizations ;
and a whole group of sociological writers rose up in the Scotland of
the middle and latter parts of the century." Here again there was
reaction ; but in France the orthodox Guizot did much to promote
broader views than his own ; EusEBE SALVEETE in his essay Dc la
Civilisation (1813) made a highly intelligent effort towards a general
view ; and Chaeles COMTE in his Traitc dc Legislation (1826) made
a marked scientific advance on the suggestive work of Herder. As
we have seen, the eclectic Jouffroy put human affairs in the sphere
of natural law equally with cosmic phenomena. At length, in the
great work of AUGUSTS COMTE, scientific method was applied so
effectively and concretely to the general problem that, despite his
serious fallacies, social science again took rank as a solid study.

2. In England the anti-revolution reaction was visihle in this as
in other fields of thought. Hume and Gibbon had set the example
of a strictly naturalistic treatment of history ; and the clerical
Robertson was faithful to their method ; but Hallam makes a stand
for supernaturalism even in applying a generally scientific critical
standard. The majority of historical events he is content to let
pass as natural, even as the average man sees the hand of the doctor
in his escape from rheumatism, but the hand of God in his escape
from a railway accident. Discussing the defeat of Barbarossa at

Legnano, Hallam pronounces that it is not "material to allege

that the accidental destruction of Frederic's army by disease enabled

the cities of Lombardy to succeed in their resistance Providence

reserves to itself various means by which the bonds of the oppressor
may be broken ; and it is not for human sagacity to anticipate

1 It i.s doubtful whether C. A. Walckenacr should bo so described. His Essai sur
V hint oire tie V expiree humtiine ( L798) has real sei en title value.
- See the author's Buckle and his Critics, 1895.

THE SOCIOLOGICAL SCIENCES 469

whether the army of a conqueror shall moulder in the unwholesome
marshes of Home or stiffen with frost in a Russian winter."

But Hallam was nearly the last historian of distinction to vend
such nugatory oracles as either a philosophy or a religion of history.
Even the oracular Carlyle did not clearly stipulate for " special
providences" in his histories, though he leant to that conception;
and though Eanke also uses mystifying language, he writes as a
Naturalist ; while Michelet is openly anti-clerical. Grote was wholly
a rationalist ; the historic method of his friend and competitor,
Bishop Thirl wall, was as non-theological as his ; Macaulay, what-
ever might he his conformities or his bias, wrote in his most secular
spirit when exhibiting theological evolution ; and George Long
indicated his rationalism again and again.2 It is only in the writings
of the most primitively prejudiced of those German historians who
eliminate ethics from historiography that the "God" factor is
latterly emphasized in ostensibly expert historiography.

3. All study of economics and of political history fostered such
views, and at length, in England and America, by the works of
DRAPER and BUCKLE, in the sixth and later decades of the century,
the conception of law in human history was widely if slowly
popularized, to the due indignation of the supernaturalists, who saw
the last great field of natural phenomena passing like others into
the realm of science. Draper's avowed theism partly protected him
from attack ; but Buckle's straightforward attacks on creeds and on
Churches brought upon him a peculiarly fierce hostility, which was
unmollified by his incidental avowal of belief in a future life and his
erratic attacks upon unbelievers. For long this hostility told against
his sociological teaching. Spencer's Principles of Sociology never-
theless clinched the scientific claim by taking sociological law for
granted ; and the new science has continually progressed in accept-
ance. In the hands of all its leading modern exponents in all
countries— Lester Ward, Giddings, Guyau, Letourneau, Tarda,
Ferri, Durkheim, Do Greef, Gumplowicz, Lilienfeld, Scbaflle— it
has been entirely naturalistic, though some Catholic professors
continue to inject into it theological assumptions. it cannot bo
said, however, that a general doctrine of social evolution is even
yet fully established. The problem is complicated by the profoundly
contentious issues of practical politics ; and in the resulting diffidence
of official teachers there arises a notable opening for obscurantism,

i Europe il uriiia Hir Middle An,-, i itli ed. i. :i77.

- ('p. in , Decline i,f tiie It'inimi Uepitblic, IV, I, i. :!|:, 17 ; unci noli: oil II. t 17 of his trails
IuUou ol I'luturch's Jirutus, I'.olm c;d. of I, ices, vol. iv.

470 FEEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

which has been duly forthcoming. In the first half of the century
such an eminent Churchman as Dean Mihnan incurred at the hands
of J. II. Newman and others the charge of writing the history of
the Jews and of early Christianity in a rationalistic spirit, presenting
religion as a " human " phenomenon.1 Later Churchmen, with all
their preparation, have rarely gone further.

4. Two lines of scientific study, it would appear, must be
thoroughly followed up before the ground can be pronounced clear
for authoritative conclusions — those of anthropological archaeology
(including comparative mythology and comparative hierology) and
economic analysis. On both lines, however, great progress has been
made ; and on the former in particular the result is profoundly dis-
integrating to traditional belief. The lessons of anthropology had
been long available to the modern world before they began to be
scientifically applied to the "science of religion." The issues raised
by Fontenelle and De Brosses in the eighteenth century were in
practice put aside in favour of direct debate over Christian history,
dogma, and ethic ; though many of the deists dwelt on the analogies
of ' heathen " and " revealed " religion. As early as 1821 Benjamin
Constant made a vigorous attempt to bring the whole phenomena
under a general evolutionary conception in his work De la Religion?
But it was not till the treasure of modern anthropology had been
scientifically massed by such students as Theodor Waitz (Anthro-
pologie tier Naturvolker, 6 Bde. 1859-71) and Adolf Bastian (Der
Mensch in der Geschiclitc, 3 Bde. 18G0), and above all by Sir Edward
Tylor, who first lucidly elaborated the science of it all, that the
arbitrary religious conception of the psychic evolution of humanity
began to be decisively superseded.

In 1871 Tylor could still say that " to many educated minds
there seems something presumptuous and repulsive in the view that
the history of mankind is part and parcel of the history of nature ;
that our thoughts, wills, and actions accord with laws as definite as
those which govern the motion of waves, the combination of acids
and bases, and the growth of plants and animals."' But the
old repulsion had already been profoundly impaired by biological
and social science ; and Tylor's book met with hardly any of the
odium that had been lavished on Darwin and Buckle. " It will

1 See The Dynamic* of Religion, pp. 227-33.

- It is difficult to understand the claim made for Hegel by his translator, the Rev. E. B.
Speirs, that any student of his lectures on the Philosophy of Religion "will be constrained
to admit that in them we have the true 'sources' of the evolution principle as applied to
the study of religion" (edit. pref. to trans, of work cited, i, p. viii). To say nothing of
Fontenelle and De Brosses, Constant had laid out the whole subject before Ilegel.

:; Primitive Culture, i, 2.

PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS 471

make mo for the future look on religion — a belief in the soul, etc. —
from a different point of view," wrote Darwin ! to Tylor on its appear-
ance. So thoroughly did the book press home the fact of the evolu-
tion of religious thought from savagery that thenceforward the
science of mythology, which had never yet risen in professional
hands to the height of vision of Fontenelle, began to be decisively
adapted to the anthropological standpoint.

In the hands of Spencer" all the phenomena of primitive mental
life — beliefs, practices, institutions — are considered as purely natural
data, no other point of view being recognized ; and the anthro-
pological treatises of Lord Avebury (Sir John Lubbock) are at the
same standpoint. When at length the mass of savage usages which
lie around the beginnings of historic religion began to be closely
scanned and classified, notably in the great latter-day compilations
of Sir J. G. Frazer, what had appeared to be sacred peculiarities
of the Christian cult were seen to be but variants of universal
primitive practice. Thenceforth the problem for serious inquirers
was not whether Christianity was a supernatural revelation — the
supernatural is no longer a ground of serious discussion — but
whether the central narrative is historical in any degree whatever.
The defence is latterly conducted from a standpoint indistinguishable
from the Unitarian. But an enormous amount of anthropological
research is being carried on without any reference to such issues,
the total eil'ect being to exclude the supernaturalist premiss from
the study of religion as completely as from that of astronomy.

Section G. — Philosophy and Ethics

1. The philosophy of Kant, while giving the theological class
a new apparatus of defence as against common-sense freethinking,
forced none the less on theistic philosophy a great advance from the
orthodox positions. Thus his immediate successors, Fichte and
Schelling, produced systems of which one was loudly denounced as
atheistic, and the other as pantheistic,' despite its dualism. Neither
seems to have had much influence on concrete religious opinion
outside the universities;'1 and when Schelling in old age turned
Catholic obscurantist, the gain to clericalism was not great. Hegel
in turn loosely wrought out a system of which the great merit is to
substitute the conception of existence as relation for the nihilistic
idealism of Fichte and flic unsolved dualism of Schelling. This

1 Lijr.inl !.-'■■ r i. \:,\. - I'rincijih :n of Si icvAo'J !J , ^ vols. lS7ii %.

■'• Cj). SaiuVc.-j, Jlitt. crlt. dii ration'ili&me en Allcmaunc, i>. 3-J. ' Id. i>i>. U----i.

472 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

system he latterly adapted to practical exigencies1 by formulating,
as Kant had recently done, a philosophic Trinity and hardily defining
Christianity as " Absolute Eeligion " in comparison with the various
forms of " Natural Religion." Nevertheless, he counted in a great
degree as a disintegrating influence, and was in a very practical way
anti-Christian. More explicitly than Kant, he admitted that the
Aufkldrung, the freethinking movement of the past generation, had
made good its case so far as it went ; and though, by the admission
of admirers, he took for granted without justification that it had
carried its point with the world at large,2 he was chronically at
strife with the theologians as such, charging them on the one hand
with deserting the dogmas which he re-stated,3 and on the other
declaring that the common run of them " know as little of God as
a blind man sees of a painting, even though he handles the frame." i
Of the belief in miracles he was simply contemptuous. " Whether
at the marriage of Cana the guests got a little more wine or a little
less is a matter of absolutely no importance ; nor is it any more
essential to demand whether the man with the withered hand was
healed ; for millions of men go about with withered and crippled
limbs, whose limbs no man heals." On the story of the marks
made for the information of the angel on the Hebrew houses at the
Passover he asks : " Would the angel not have known them without
these marks'?", adding: " This faith has no real interest for Spirit." '"
Such writing, from the orthodox point of view, was not compensated
for by a philosophy of Christianity which denaturalized its dogmas,
and a presentment of the God-idea and of moral law which made
religion alternately a phase of philosophy and a form of political
utilitarianism.

As to the impression made by Hegel on most Christians,
compare Hagenbach, German Rationalism (Eng. tr. of Kirchen-
gcschichte), pp. 364-69; Renan, Etudes d'histoire religieuse,
5e edit. p. 406 ; J. D. Morell, Histor. and Crit. View of the
Spec. Philos. of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed.
1847, ii, 189-91 ; Robins, A Defence of the Faith, 1862, pt. i,
pp. 13-5-41, 176 ; Eschenmenger, Die Ilegel'sche Eeligions-
philosophie, 1834 ; quoted in Beard's Voices of the Church, p. 8 ;
Leo, Die Ilcgelingen, 1838 ; and Reinhard, Lehrbuch der
Gescliichte der Philosopliie, 2nd ed. 1839, pp. 753-54 — also cited
by Beard, pp. 9-12.

1 As to Hegel's mental development op. Dr. Beard on "Strauss, Hegel, and their
Opinions," in Voices of the. Church in Meply to Strauss, 1845, pp. 3-1.
* E. Caird, Heael, 1883, p. 91.

•"' K.(j. Philos. of Itclviitm, introd. Eng. tr. i, 3S-10.
<• Id. p. 41. Cp. pp. 216-17. s Id. p. 219.

PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS 473

The gist of Hegel's rehabilitation of Christianity is well set
forth by Prof. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison in his essay on The
Philosophy of Religion in Kant and Hegel (rep. in The Philos.
Radicals and other Essays, 1907), ch. iii. Considered in con-
nection with his demonstration that in politics the Prussian
State was the ideal government, it is seen to be even more of
an arbitrary and unvcridical accommodation to the social
environment than Kant's Religion innerhalb der Grcnzen der
blossen Vemunft. It approximates intellectually to the process
by which the neo-Platonists and other eclectics of the classic
decadence found a semblance of allegorical or symbolical justifi-
cation for every item in the old theology. Nothing could be
more false to the spirit of Hegel's general philosophy than the
representing of Christianity as a culmination or " ultimate " of
all religion ; and nothing, in fact, was more readily seen by his
contemporaries.

We who look back, however, may take a more lenient view
of Hegel's process of adaptation than was taken in the next
generation by Haym, who, in his Hegel und seine Zeit (1857),
presented him as always following the prevailing fashion in
thought, and lending himself as the tool of reactionary govern-
ment. Hegel's officialism was in the main probably whole-
hearted. Even as Kant felt driven to do something for social
conservation at the outbreak of the French devolution, and
Fichte to shape for his country the sinister ideal of The Closed
Industrial State, so Hegel, after seeing Prussia shaken to its
foundations at the battle of Jena and being turned out of his
own house by the looting French soldiers, was very naturally
impelled to support the existing State by quasi-philosophico-
religious considerations. It was an abandonment of the true
function of philosophy ; but it may have been done in all .tiood
faith. An intense political conservatism was equally marked
in Strauss, who dreaded demagogy," and in Schopenhauer,
who left his fortune to the fund for the widows and families of
soldiers killed or injured in the revolutionary strifes of 1848.
It came in their case from the same source -an alarmed
memory of social convulsion. The fact remains that Hegel
had no real part in the State religion which he crowned with
formulas.

Not only does Hegel's conception of the Absolute make deity
simply the eternal process of the universe, and the divine conscious-
ness indistinguishable from the total consciousness of mankind,1 hut
his abstractions lend themselves equally to all creeds;" and some of
the most revolutionary of tlio succeeding movements of German

l C]>. Morell.as citn'l, and |>i>. l'.r, -a; ; aixl K.miitIki.cIi, us summarize! by ll.iur, l\ii
chmurnchiclitn lU-n I'Jlt-n Jultrli. ]>. :j'.KJ. - C]<. Micliulct as ciu ■<( by .Morcll, ii, l'.JiMU.

474 FEEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

thought — as those of Vatke, Strauss,1 Feuerhach, and Marx — pro-
fessedly founded on him. It is certainly a striking testimony to the
influence of Hegel that five such powerful innovators as Vatke in
Old-Testament, Bruno Bauer and Strauss in New-Testament
criticism, Feuerbach in the philosophy of religion, and Marx in
social philosophy, should at first fly the Hegelian flag. It can hardly
have been that Hegel's formulas sufficed to generate the criticism
they all brought to bear upon their subject matter ; rather we must
suppose that their naturally powerful minds were attracted by the
critical and reconstructive aspects of his doctrine ; but the philo-
sophy which stimulated them must have had great affinities for
revolution, as well as for all forms of the idea of evolution.

2. In respect of his formal championship of Christianity Hegel's
method, arbitrary even for him, appealed neither to the orthodox
nor, with a few exceptions,8 to his own disciples, some of whom, as
Ruge, at length definitely renounced Christianity.4 In 1854 Heine
told his French readers that there were in Germany "fanatical
monks of atheism " who would willingly burn Voltaire as a besotted
deist ;5 and Heine himself, in his last years of suffering and of
revived poetic religiosity, could see in Hegel's system only atheism.
BRUNO Bauer at first opposed Strauss, and afterwards went even
further than he, professing Hegelianism all the while.6 SCHOPEN-
HAUER and Hartmaxn in turn being even less sustaining to ortho-
doxy, and later orthodox systems failing to impress, there came in
due course the cry of " Back to Kant," where at least orthodoxy had
some formal semblance of sanction.

Hartmann's work on The Self -Decomposition of Christianity' is
a stringent exposure of the unreality of what passed for " liberal
Christianity" in Germany a generation ago, and an appeal for a
"new concrete religion" of monism or pantheism as a bulwark
against Ultramontanism. On this monism, however, Hartmann
insisted on grounding his pessimism ; and with this pessimistic
pantheism he hoped to outbid Catholicism against the ' irreligious "
Strauss and the liberal Christians — in his view no less irreligious.

1 As to Strauss cp. Beard, as above cited, pp. 21-22, 30 ; and Zeller, David, Friedrich
Strauss, Eng. tr. pp. 35, 47-48, 71-72, etc.

- As to Vatke see l'lleiderer, as cited, p. 252 sq.; Cheyne, Founder* of O. T. Criticism,
1S93, p. 135.

" E.g. Dv, Hutchison Stirling. See bis trans, of Scbwegler's Handbook of the History
of Philosophy , 6th ed. p. 433 s/[.

4 Baur, last cit. p. 389. "' Gextandnisse. Werke, iv, 33. Cp. iii, 110.

G Cp. Hagenbach, pp. 369-72; Farrar. Crit.Hist.tif Freethought, pp. 3b7-SS. On Bauer's
critical development and academic career see Baur, Kirchengcsch. des 19ten Jahrh.
pp. 3M6-89.

i Die Selbstzersetzung des Christenthums und die Religion der Zukimft, 2te Aufl, 1874
trans, in Bng. as Tlie Religion of tlie Future, 1886.

PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS 475

It does not seem to have had much acceptance. On the whole, the
effect of all German philosophy has probably been to make for
the general discredit of theistic thinking, the surviving forms of
Hegelianism being little propitious to current religion. And though
Schopenhauer and NIETZSCHE can hardly be said to carry on the
task of philosophy either in spirit or in effect, yet the rapid intensi-
fication of hostility to current religion which their writings in
particular manifest1 must be admitted to stand for a deep revolt
against the Kantian compromise. And this revolt was bound to
come about. The truth-shunning tactic of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel
— aiming at the final discrediting of the Aufklarung as a force that
had done its work, and could find no more to do, however it be
explained and excused — was a mere expression of their own final
lack of scientific instinct. It is hard to believe that thinkers who
had perceived and asserted the fact of progression in religion could
suppose that true philosophy consisted in putting a stop on a priori
grounds to the historical analysis, and setting up an " ultimate " of
philosophic theory. The straightforward investigators, seeking
simply for truth, have passed on to posterity a spirit which, correct-
ing their inevitable errors, reaches a far deeper and wider compre-
hension of religious evolution and psychosis than could be reached
by the verbalizing methods of the self-satisfied and self-sufficing
metaphysicians. These, so far as they prevailed, did but delay the
advance of real knowledge. Their work, in fact, was fatally shaped
by the general reaction against the Revolution, winch in their case
took a quasi-philosophic form, while in France and England it
worked out as a crude return to clerical and political authoritarianism."
3. From the collisions of philosophic systems in Germany there
emerged two great practical freethinking forces, the teachings of
LUDWIG FEUERBACH (1801-76), who was obliged to give up Ins
lecturing at Erlangen in 1S30 after the issue of his Thoughts upon
Death and Immortality, and LlTDWIG BfJCIINER, who was deprived
of his chair of clinic at Tubingen in 18oo for his Fore'1 and Matter.
The former, originally a Hegelian, expressly broke away from Ins
master, declaring that, whereas Hegel belonged to the ' Old Testa-
ment " of modern philosophy, bo himself would set forth the New,
wherein Hegel's fundamentally incoherent treatment of deify (as
the total process of things on the one hand, and an objective

1 S';<; Schopenhauer's dialo'lnes on Itrniiimi and I m innrln! it </. and his ussay on The-
Chri una Su ■'■hi Knii. tr. li\ T. li. Saund r . an I Nirtz die's Antichrist. The latter
v. ,;■,.,- : i:;i ed Oy I lie '.V rile I- in /.'- - ( yx in Unci' ilium vul. ii.

- J'rof. Seth I'rin^li'-l'iiLti ion, who |ia--i:, many hist eriliei :n- on their work (/'/((Vox.
,i U, i<i. in Kunt an I Hi ikL, fc|). witu Vhc, 1'hti ■ iplucat li.idicid I, don-, not seem to
buojiuct this dotLTUiiuation.

476 FEEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTUEY

personality on the other) should he cured.1 Feuerbach accordingly,
in his Essence of Christianity (1841) and Essence of 'Religion (1851),
supplied one of the first adequate modern statements of the positively
rationalistic position as against Christianity and theism, in terms of
philosophic as well as historical insight — a statement to which there
is no characteristically modern answer save in terms of the refined
sentimentalism of the youthful Eenan,2 fundamentally averse alike
to scientific precision and to intellectual consistency.

Feuerbach's special service consists in the rebuttal of the meta-
physic in which religion had chronically taken refuge from the
straightforward criticism of freethinkers, in itself admittedly un-
answerable. They had shown many times over its historic falsity,
its moral perversity, and its philosophic self-contradiction ; and the
more astute official defenders, leaving to the less competent the task
of re-vindicating miracles and prophecy and defending the indefen-
sible, proceeded to shroud the particular defeat in a pseudo-philo-
sophic process which claimed for all religion alike an indestructible
inner truth, in the light of which the instinctive believer could again
make shift to affirm his discredited credences. It was this process
which Feuerbach exploded, for all who cared to read him. He had
gone through it. Intensely religious in his youth, he had found in
the teaching of Hegel an attractive philosophic garb for his intuitional
thought. But a wider concern than Hegel's for actual knowledge,
and for the knowledge of the actual, moved him to say to his
teacher, on leaving : " Two years have I attached myself to you ;
two years have I completely devoted to your philosophy. Now I
feel the necessity of starting in the directly opposite way : I am
going to study anatomy."3 It may have been that what saved him
from the Hegelian fate of turning to the end the squirrel-cage of
conformist philosophy was the personal experience which put him
in fixed antagonism to the governmental forces that Hegel was
moved to serve. The hostility evoked by his Thoughts on Death
and Immortality completed his alienation from the official side of
things, and left him to the life of a devoted truth-seeker — a career
as rare in Germany as elsewhere. The upshot was that Feuerbach,
in the words of Strauss, " broke the double yoke in which, under
Hegel, philosophy and theology still went."4

For the task he undertook he had consummately equipped

1 liaur gives a good summary, Kirchcnaescliichte, pp. 390-94.

2 " M. Feuerbach et la nouvelle eoole hegelienne," in Etudes d'histoire religieuse.
'■'• A. Kohut, Liulwig Feuerbach, vein Leben und seine Werke, 1909, p. 48.

i Die Halben und die Ganzen, p. 50. "Feuerbach a mine le systeme de Hegel et fond6
la positivisme." A. Levy, La philosophic de Feuerbach et son influence sur la litt.
allemande, 1904, introd. p. xxii.

PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS 477

himself. In a scries of four volumes (History of Modem Philosophy
from Bacon to Spinoza, 1S33 ; Exposition and Criticism of the
Lcibnitzian Philosophy, 1837 ; Pierre Dayle, 1838 ; On Philosophy
and Christianity, 1839) ho explored the field of philosophy, and
re-studied theology in the light of moral and historical criticism,
hefore he produced his masterpiece, Das Wesen des Christcnthuvis .
Here the tactic of Hegel is turned irresistibly on the Hegelian
defence; and religion, defiantly declared by Hegel to be an affair of
self-consciousness,1 is shown to be in very truth nothing else.
Such as are a man's thoughts and dispositions, such is his God ;
so much worth as a man has, so much and no more has his God.
Consciousness of God is self-consciousness ; knowledge of God is
self -knowledge." ' This of course is openly what Hegelian theism
is in effect — philosophic atheism ; and though Feuerbach at times
disclaimed the term, lie declares in his preface that " atheism, at
least in the sense of this work, is the secret of religion itself ; that

religion itself in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else

than the truth and divinity of human nature." In the preliminary
section on The Essence of Religion he makes his position clear once
for all : " A God who has abstract predicates has also an abstract

existence Not the attribute of the divinity, but the divincness or

deity of the attribute, is the first true Divine Being. Tims what
theology and philosophy have held to be God, the Absolute, the
Infinite, is not God ; but that which they have held not to be God,
is God — namely the attribute, the quality, whatever lias reality.
Hence, he alone is the true atheist to whom the predicates of the
Divine Being — for example, love, wisdom, justice are nothing: not

he to whom merely the subject of these predicates is nothing These

have an intrinsic, independent reality ; they force their recognition
upon man by their very nature ; they are self-evident truths to him ;

they approve, they attest themselves The idea of God is dependent

on the idea of justice, of benevolence "

This is obviously the answer to Baur, who, after paying tribute
to the personality of Feuerbach, and presenting a tolerably fair
summary of his critical philosophy, can find no answer to it save
the inept protest that it is one-sided in respect of its reduction of
religion to the subjective (the very course insisted on by a hundred
defenders ! i, that if favours the communistic and other extreme
tendencies of the time, and that it brings everything "under the

1 K.n. "All knowli-iitic. nil conviction, ;tll piety... .is li:i «-<\ on t In |>ri 'iciplo Unit in the
spirit, as such, tin' con cion ni'j- ill find I'M t; immediately wall Lhr con rion ness of
itsi-lf." /'/.(" i,t It. Ha. Kn«. ir. mt rod. i, i-j t:;.

- Ewtencc <>j Christianity, Knd. tr. IcOl, p. l_.

478 FKEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

rude rule of egoism."1 Here a philosophic and an aspersive mean-
ing are furtively comhined in one word. The scientific subjectivism
of Feuerbach's analysis of religion is no more a vindication or
acceptance of "rude egoism" than is the Christian formula of
" God's will " a condonation of murder. The restraint of egoism by
altruism lies in human character and polity alike for the rationalist
and for the irrationalist, as Baur must have known well enough after
his long survey of Church history. His really contemptible escape
from Feuerbach's criticism, under cover of alternate cries of " Com-
munism " and "egoism" — a self-stultification which needs no
comment — is simply one more illustration of the fashion in which,
since the time of Kant, philosophy in Germany as elsewhere has
been chronically demoralized by resort to non-philosophical tests.
Max Stirner" (pen-name of Johann Caspar Schmidt, 1806-1856)
carried the philosophic "egoism" of Feuerbach about as far in
words as might be ; but his work on the Ego (Der Einzige unci sein
Eigenthum, 1845) remains an ethical curiosity rather than a force.2

4. Arnold Huge (1802-1880), who was of the same philoso-
phical school," gave his life to a disinterested propaganda of democracy
and light ; and if in 1870 he capitulated to the new Empire, and
thereby won a small pension for the two last years of his life, he
was but going the way of many another veteran, dazzled in his old
age by very old fires. His Addresses on Religion, its Rise and Fall :
to the educated among its Reverers* (1869) is a lucid and powerful
performance, proceeding from a mythological analysis of religion to
a cordial plea for rationalism in all things. The charge of
"materialism" was for him no bugbear. "Truly," he writes, "we
are not without the earth and the solar system, not without the
plants and the animals, not without head. But whoever has head
enough to understand science and its conquests in the field of nature
and of mind (Geist) knows also that the material world rests in the
immaterial, moves in it, and is by it animated, freed, and ensouled ;
that soul and idea are incarnate in Nature, but that also logic, idea,
spirit, and science free themselves out of Nature, become abstracted
and as immaterial Power erect their own realm, the realm of spirit
in State, science, and art.""

5. On Feuerbach's Essence of Religion followed the resounding
explosion of Biichner's Force and Matter (1855), which in large

1 Kircliengpschichte rles 19ten Jalirhunderts, pp. 303-01.

2 Cp. A. Levy, as cited, ch. iv. :; T<1 . eh. ii.

4 Reden ttber Religion, ihr Entstphnn uiul Vergclien, an <li", Gebildcten untcr ihren
Verehrarn—a, parody of the title of the famous work of Sehleiermaeher.

5 Work cited, p. 119.

PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS 479

measure, but with much greater mastery of scientific detail, does for
the plain man of his century what d'Holbach in his chief work
sought to do for his day. Constantly vilified, even in the name of
philosophy, in the exact tone and spirit of animal irritation which
marks the religious vituperation of all forms of rationalism in
previous ages ; and constantly misrepresented as professing to
explain an infinite universe when it does but show the hollowness
of all supernaturalist explanations,1 the book steadily holds its
ground as a manual of anti-mysticism.2 Between them, Feuerbach
and Buchner may be said to have framed for their age an atheistic
System of Nature," concrete and abstract, without falling into the
old error of substituting one apriorism for another. Whosoever
endorses Baur's protest against the " one-sidedness " of Feuerbach,
who treats of religion on its chosen ground of self-consciousness, has
but to turn to Biichner's study of the objective world and see whether
his cause fares any better.

G. In France the course of thought had been hardly less revolu-
tionary. Philosophy, like everything else, had been affected by the
legitimist restoration ; and between Victor Cousin and the other
" classic philosophers " of the first third of the century orthodoxy
was nominally reinstated. Yet even among these there was no firm
coherence. Maine de Biran, one of the shrinking spirits who passed
gradually into an intolerant authoritarianism from fear of the per-
petual pressures of reason, latterly declared (.1821) that a philosophy
which ascribed to deity only infinite thought or supreme intelligence,
eliminating volition and love, was pure atheism ; and this pronounce-
ment struck at the philosophy of Cousin. Nor was this species of
orthodoxy any more successful than the furious irrationalism of
Joseph De Maistre in setting up a philosophic form of faith, as
distinct from the cult of rhetoric and sentiment founded by Chateau-
briand. Cousin was deeply distrusted by those who knew him, and
at the height of his popularity he was contemned by the more com-
nds around him, such as Sainte-Beuve, Comte, and Edgar
Quinef." The latter thinker himself counted for a measure of
rationalism, though he argued for theism, and undertook to make
good the historicity of -Jesus against those who challenged it. For

ly rejected the term " materialism " because of its mi loading impli-
■.'■<:.:.<)• i. tin 11.-. ( p. in Air . Brad laugh 1 former's Charles liradiauuh the discus-
sion in i':. ii, en. i. ? :; U,y J. M. H.i.

- Wl ili liie nognain work rif Cart, Volt and Mni.KpnmiT have gone out of print,

I'/i -h.'.-T . n f'ii '. iigiun and a:'ain. ronl.inur- to I"' republished.

(•p. i il I) .... re/,"-.- Littf niirrs, I--.I, pp. l::u :■:.. 1717:;: Li'vy-Ilruhl, 77/.-

Philu ■/,.''-'/ i.f Aii'iin.tr Cumtr, Kng. lr. VJ I'.i, p. \'.K>; and I'll. Adam, I. a I'hlinsiaihic en
France, ISJl, p. ■!!- .

480 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

the rest, even among the ostensibly conservative and official philo-
sophers, Theodore Jouffroy, an eclectic, who held the chair of moral
philosophy in the Faculte des Lettres at Paris, was at heart an
unbeliever from his youth up,1 and even in his guarded writings was
far from satisfying the orthodox. " God," he wrote,2 "interposes as
little in the regular development of humanity as in the course of the
solar system." He added a fatalistic theorem of divine predeter-
mination, which he verbally salved in the usual way by saying that
predetermination presupposed individual liberty. Eclecticism thus
fell, as usual, between two stools ; but it was not orthodoxy that
would gain. On another line Jouffroy openly bantered the authori-
tarians on their appeal to a popular judgment which they declared
to be incapable of pronouncing on religious questions.3

7. On retrospect, the whole official French philosophy of the
period, however conservative in profession, is found to have been at
bottom rationalistic, and only superficially friendly to faith. The
Abbe Felice de Lamennais declaimed warmly against L' indifference
en matierc de religion (4 vols. 1818-24), resorting to the old Catholic
device, first employed by Montaigne, of turning Pyrrhonism against
unbelief. Having ostensibly discredited the authority of the senses
and the reason (by which he was to be read and understood), he
proceeded in the customary way to set up the ancient standard of
the consensus universalis, the authority of the majority, the least
reflective and the most fallacious. This he sought to elevate into
a kind of corporate wisdom, superior to all individual judgment ; and
he marched straight into the countersense of claiming the pagan
consensus as a confirmation of religion in general, while arguing for
a religion which claimed to put aside paganism as error. The final
logical content of the thesis was the inanity that the majority for
the time being must be right.

Damiron, writing his Essai sur Vhistoire de la philosophic en
France an XIXc Steele in 1828, replies in a fashion more amiable
than reassuring, commenting on the " strange skepticism " of Lamen-
nais as to the human reason.4 For himself, he takes up the parable
of Lessing, and declares that where Lessing spoke doubtfully, men
had now readied conviction. It was no longer a question of
whether, but of when, religion was to be recast in terms of fuller
intelligence. " In this religious regeneration we shall be to the

1 Adam, as cited, pp. 2-27-30.

- In his Melangpfi philosophiquen (1S33). EnR. trans, (incomplete) by George Ripley,
Philos. Ksntiij/t of Tli. Jouffroy, Edinburgh, 1839, ii, 32. Ripley, who was one of the
American transcendentalist group and a member of tiie Brook Farm Colony, indicates
his own semi-rationalism in his Introductory Note, p. xxv.

'■• Melanges yhiloHOphiqu.es, trans, as cited, ii, 0.3. i Ussai, cited, i, 232, 237.

PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS 481

Christians what the Christians were to the Jews, and the Jews to
the patriarchs : we shall he Christians and something more." The
theologian of the future will be half-physicist, half-philosopher.
We shall study God through nature and through men ; and a new
Messiah will not be necessary to teach us miraculously what we
can learn of ourselves and by our natural lights." Christianity has
been a useful discipline; but "our education is so advanced that
henceforth we can be our own teachers ; and, having no need of an
extraneous inspiration, we draw faith from science."1 "Prayer is
good, doubtless," but it "has only a mysterious, uncertain, remote
action on our environment."2 All this under Louis Philippe, from
a professor at the Ecole Normale. Not to this day has oflicial
academic philosophy in Britain ventured to go so far. In France
the brains were never out, even under the Restoration. Lamennais
himself gave the proof. His employment of skepticism as an aid
to faith had been, like Montaigne's, the expression of a temperament
slow to reach rational positions, but surely driven thither. As a
boy of twelve, when a priest sought to prepare him for communion,
he had shown such abnormal incredulity that the priest gave him
up ; and later he read omnivorously among the deists of the
eighteenth century, Rousseau attracting him in particular. Later
he passed through a religious crisis, slowly covering ground which
others traverse early. He did not become a communicant till he
was twenty-two ; ho entered the seminary only at twenty-seven ;
and he was ordained only when he was nearly thirty-two.

Yet he had experienced much. Already in 1808 Ins Reflexions
sur I'etat de Veglise had been suppressed by Napoleon's police; in
181-1 he had written, along with his brother, in whose seminary he
taught mathematics, a treatise maintaining the papal claims ; and
in the Hundred Days of 1815 lie took flight to London. His mind
was always at work. His Essay on Indifference expressed his need
of a conviction ; with unbelief he could reckon and sympathize ;
with indifference he could not ; but when the indifference was by
his own account the result of reflective unhelief he treated it in the
same fashion as the spontaneous form. At bottom, his quarrel was
with reason. Yet the very element in Ins mind which prompted
his anti-rational polemic was ratiocinative ; and as he slowly reached
clearness of thought he came more and more info conflict with
Catholicism. It was all very well to flout the individual reason in
the name of the universal ; hut to give mankind a total infallibility

1 id. ),]>. 211-u - id. p \>-zi.

vol,. II '2 I

482 FEEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTUEY

was not the way to satisfy a pope or a Church which claimed a
monopoly of the gift. In 1824 he was well received by the pope ;
but when in 1830 he began to write Liberal articles in the journal
L'Avenir, in which he collaborated with Lacordaire, the Comte de
Montalembert, and other neo-Catholics, offence was quickly taken,
and the journal was soon suspended. Lamennais and his disciples
Lacordaire and Montalembert went to Eome to plead their cause,
but were coldly received ; and on their way home in 1832 received
at Munich a missive of severe reprimand.

Bendering formal obedience, Lamennais retired, disillusioned,
with his friends to his and his brother's estate in Brittany, and
began his process of intellectual severance. In January, 1833, he
performed mass, and at this stage he held by his artificial distinction
between the spheres of faith and reason. In May of that year he
declared his determination to place himself "as a writer outside of
the Church and Catholicism," declaring that " outside of Catholicism,
outside faith, there is reason ; outside of the Church there is
humanity; I place myself (je me renferme) in this sphere."1
Still he claimed to be simple fiddle en religion, and to combine
"fidelity in obedience with liberty in science."2 In January of
1834, however, he had ceased to perform any clerical function ; and
his Paroles (Tun Croyant, published in that year, stand for a faith
which the Church reckoned as infidelity.

Lacordaire, separating from his insubordinate colleague, pub-
lished an Examen de la plxilosopliie de M. de Lamennais, in which
the true papal standpoint was duly taken. Thenceforth Lamennais
was an Ishmaelite. Feeling as strongly in politics as in everything
else, he was infuriated by the brutal suppression of the Polish rising
in 1831-32 ; and the government of Louis Philippe pleased him as
little as that of Charles X had done. In 1841 he was sentenced to
a year's imprisonment for his brochure Le pays ct le gouvernement
(1840). Shortly before his death in 1854 he claimed that he had
never changed: " I have gone on, that is all." But he had in effect
changed from a Catholic to a pantheist;3 and in 1848, as a member
of the National Assembly, he more than once startled his colleagues
by "an affectation of impiety."' On his deathbed he refused to
receive the cure of the parish, and by his own wish he was buried
without any religious ceremony, in the fosse commune of the poor
and with no cross on his grave.

1 Corre.ipondance, 185S-86, letter of May 2G, 1833.

- Letters of August 1 and November 25.

;- Cp. Cla. Adam, La Philosophie en France, 1894, p. 105. 4 Id. p. 84.

PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS 483

Such a type does not very clearly belong to rationalism ; and
Lamennais never enrolled himself save negatively under that flag.
Always emotional and impulsive, he had in his period of aggressive
fervour as a Churchman played a rather sinister part in the matter
of the temporary insanity of Auguste Comte, lending himself to the
unscrupulous tactics of the philosopher's mother, who did not stick
at libelling her son's wife in order to get him put under clerical
control.1 It was perhaps well for him that he was forced out of the
Church ; for his love of liberty was too subjective to have qualified
him for a wise use of power. But the spectacle of such a tempera-
ment forced into antagonism with the Church on moral and social
grounds could not but stimulate anti-clericalism in France, what-
ever his philosophy may have done to promote rational thinking.

8. The most energetic and characteristic philosophy produced
in the new France was that of AUGUSTE COMTE, which as set forth
in the Cours de Philosophic Positive (1830-42) practically reaffirmed
while it recast and supplemented the essentials of the anti-theo-
logical rationalism of the previous age, and in that sense rebuilt
French positivism, giving that new name to the naturalistic principle.
Though Comte's direct following was never large, it is significant
that soon after the completion of his Cours we find Saisset lamenting
that the war between the clergy and the philosophers, " suspended
by the great political commotion of 1830," had been "revived with
a new energy."' The later effort of Comte to frame a politico-
ecclesiastical system never succeeded beyond the formation of a
politically powerless sect ; and the attempt to prove its consistency
with his philosophic system by claiming that from the first he had
harboured a plan of social regulation3 is beside the case. A man's
way of thinking may involve intellectual contradictions all through
his life: and Comte's did. Positivism in the scientific sense cannot
be committed to any one man's scheme for regulating society and
conserving "cultus"; and Comte's was merely one of the many
evoked in France by the memory of an age of revolutions. It
belongs, indeed, to the unscientific and unphilosophic side of his
mind, the craving for authority and the temper of ascendency, which
connect witli ins admiration of the medieval Church.. Himself
philosophically an atheist, he condemned atheists because they
mostly contemned his passion for regimentation. By reason of this
idiosyncrasy and of the habitually dictatorial tone of his doctrine,

1 r,iUn', A it'iusli' Cmnt'-rl ',i philm ,,!,,. iinsitir,; pp. ll:'„ l-.V, -v,.
- Article id i-,11. rep. in />m/i> .w< r In /jlulosnjihir rt In niitiimi. 1M5, p. I.
:; Si-.- M. I,.-vy-i'.i'ulil's I'lulosoyhu 'J Auuuxtt- Cumtr, Kiih. tr. pp. 10 l.>. M. Li' vy-Uruhl
really doti not attempt to uiuct Littrc a ai'cuniunt, which he put: usiile.

484 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

he has made his converts latterly more from the religious than from
the freethinking ranks. But both in France and in England his
philosophy tinged all the new thought of his time, his leading
English adherents in particular being among the most esteemed
publicists of the day. Above all, he introduced the conception of
a " science of society " where hitherto there had ruled the haziest
forms of " providentialism." In France the general effect of the
rationalistic movement had been such that when TAINE, under the
Third Empire, assailed the whole "classic" school in his Philo-
sophes classiques (1857), his success was at once generally recog-
nized, and a non-Comtist positivism was thenceforth the ruling
philosophy. The same thing has happened in Italy, where quite
a number of university professors are explicitly positivist in their
philosophic teaching.1

9. In Britain, where abstract philosophy after Berkeley had
been mainly left to Hume and the Scotch thinkers who opposed
him, metaphysics was for a generation practically overriden by the
moral and social sciences ; Hartley's Christian Materialism making
small headway as formulated by him, though it was followed up by
the Unitarian Priestley. The reaction against the Revolution,
indeed, seems to have evicted everything in the nature of active
philosophic thought from the universities in the first decade of the
nineteenth century ; at Oxford it was taught in a merely traditionary
fashion, in lamentable contrast to what was going on in Germany ;2
and in Scotland in the 'thirties things had fallen to a similar level.3
It was over practical issues that new thought germinated in England.
The proof of the change wrought in the direction of native thought
is seen in the personalities of the men who, in the teeth of the
reaction, applied rationalistic method to ethics and psychology.
BENTHAM and JAMES Mill were in their kindred fields among the
most convinced and active freethinkers of their day, the former
attacking both clericalism and orthodoxy;4 while the latter, no less
pronounced in his private opinions, more cautiously built up a
rigorously naturalistic psychology in his Analysis of the Human
Mind (1829). Bentham's utilitarianism was so essentially anti-
Christian that he could hardly have been more disliked by discerning
theists if he had avowed his share in the authorship of the atheistic
Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion, which, elaborated

1 Cp. Prof. T5otta's chapter in Ueberweg's Hist, of Pliilos. ii, 513-16.

2 Veitch's Memoir of Sir William Hamilton, 1869, p. 54. Cp. Hamilton's own Discus-
sions, 1852, i>. 287 (rep. of article of 1839). a Veitch, p. 214.

4 In his Church of Englandism and its Catechism Examined (1818), and Not Paul but
Jesus (1823), by " Gamaliel Smith."

PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS 485

from his manuscript by no less a thinker than GEORGE GrtOTE,

was published in 1822.' Pseudonymous as that essay is, it seeks
to guard against the risk of prosecution by the elaborate stipulation
that what it discusses is always the intluence of natural religion on
life, revealed religion being another matter. But this is of course
the merest stratagem, the whole drift of the book being a criticism
of the effects of the current religion on contemporary society. It
greatly intluenced J. S. Mill, whose essay on The Utility of Religion
echoes its beginning; and if it had been a little less drab in style it
might have intluenced many more.

But Bentham's ostensible restriction of his logic to practical
problems of law and morals secured him a wider influence than was
wielded by any of the higher publicists of his day. Tbe whole
tendency of his school was intensely rationalistic ; and it indirectly
affected all thought by its treatment of economics, which from
Hume and Smith onwards had been practically divorced from
theology. Even clerical economists, such as Malthus and Chalmers,
alike orthodox in religion, furthered naturalism in philosophy in
spite of themselves by their insistence on the law of population,
which is the negation of divine benevolence as popularly conceived.
A not unnatural result was a religious fear of all reasoning what-
ever, and a disparagement of the very faculty of reason. This,
however, was sharply resisted by the more cultured champions of
orthodoxy," to the great advantage of critical discussion.

10. When English metaphysical philosophy revived with Sir
William Hamilton,' it was on the lines of a dialectical resistance to
the pantheism of Germany, in the interests of faith ; though Hamil-
ton's dogmatic views were always doubtful. Admirably learned,
and adroit in metaphysical fence, he always grounded his theism on
the alleged " needs of our moral nature " — a declaration of philo-
sophical bankruptcy. The vital issue was brought to the front
after his death in the Hampton Lectures (1858) of his supporter
Dean Manuel ; and between them they gave the decisive proof that
the orthodox cause bad been philosophically lost while being socially
won, since their theism emphasized in the strongest way the
tive criticism of Kant, leaving deity void of all philosophically
cognizable qualities. Hamilton and Mansel alike have received

auchiuiip. S.t Thr Miimr It'. rl:t of Cnrtir (irolr,

h, ■,,,,- u,n, May HI, I. -T.J; J. S. .Mill's Autobunjraiihy,

in tin: Sinrin nth Cnhiii/, ii, tVJO ; and Lilr mid
ihri kv.l i-d. p. 1.7).

ll-O-'M) ; ami prulc ■■ i > i - 1 ; 1 1 Iectim'S at K.iinluirnh
; ( p. \ i itch' Mi moir, pp. I'Jj 1)7.

1 i'ri'l. ■!■ thr- )i-.-

f"l j t i- i IjV 1 i'' ill ' ■

; i . \
r I'.iti

■in of Philip n
:. 1 -?:;. p. 1- ; .1

p. r;.)'; ami Tlim 1
- Cp. M 'I'll. Si.

Corr. of Whuli: >/
:t Article- in Hit

.' '17-

nv k.

: Mill

/; ir'ntu

hum \\ ii t. • - ■ I \- .
huruh it' fi- a:

486 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

severe treatment at the hands of Mill and others for the calculated
irrationalism and the consequent immoralism of their doctrine,
which insisted on attributing moral bias to an admittedly Unknow-
able Absolute, and on standing for Christian mysteries on the
skeptical ground that reason is an imperfect instrument, and that
our moral faculties and feelings "demand" the traditional beliefs.
But they did exactly what was needed to force rationalism upon
open and able minds. It is indeed astonishing to find so constantly
repeated by trained reasoners the old religious blunder of reasoning
from the inadequacy of reason to the need for faith. The disputant
says in effect : " Our reason is not to be trusted ; let us then on that
score rationally decide to believe what is handed down to us": for
if the argument is not a process of reasoning it is nothing ; and if
it is to stand, it is an assertion of the validity it denies. Evidently
the number of minds capable of such self-stultification is great ; but
among minds at once honest and competent the number capable of
detecting the absurdity must be considerable ; and the invariable
result of its use down to our own time is to multiply unbelievers in
the creed so absurdly defended.

It is difficult to free Mansel from the charge of seeking to confuse
and bewilder ; but mere contact with the processes of reasoning in
his Bampton Lectures is almost refreshing after much acquaintance
with the see-saw of vituperation and platitude which up to that
time mostly passed muster for defence of religion in nineteenth-
century England. He made for a revival of intellectual life. And
he suffered enough at the hands of his co-religionists, including
F. D. ^Maurice, to set up something like compassion in the mind of
the retrospective rationalist. Accused of having adopted "the
absolute and infinite, as defined after the leaders of German meta-
physics," as a "synonym for the true and living God," he protested
that lie had done "exactly the reverse. I assert that the absolute
and infinite, as defined in the German metaphysics, and in all other
metaphysics with winch I am acquainted, is a notion which destroys
itself by its own contradictions. I believe also that God is, in some
manner incomprehensible by me, both absolute and infinite ; and
that those attributes exist in Ilim without any repugnance or contra-
diction at all. Hence I maintain throughout that the infinite of
■philosophy is not the true infinite." ' Charged further with borrowing

1 Hampton Lectures on The Limits of Religious Thought, -1th eel. pref. p. xxxvi, note.
After thus declaring all metaphysics to he profoundly delusive. Mansel shows at his worst
[Philosophy of the Conditioned, 1866, p. 1S8) by disparaging Mill as an incompetent meta-
physician.

PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS 487

without acknowledgment from Newman, the Dean was reduced to
crediting Newman with " transcendent gifts " while claiming to have
read almost nothing by him,1 and winding up with a quotation from
Newman inviting men to seek solace from the sense of nescience in
blind belief.

It was said of Hamilton that, " having scratched his eyes out in
the bush of reason, he scratched them in again in the bush of faith ";
and when that could obviously be said also of his reverend pupil,
the philosophic tide was clearly on the turn. Within two years of
the delivery of Mansel's lectures his and Hamilton's philosophic
positions were being confidently employed as an open and avowed
basis for the naturalistic First Principles (1SG0-G2) of Herbert
SPENCER, wherein, with an unfortunate laxity of metaphysic on
the author's own part, and a no less unfortunate lack of consistency
as regards the criticism of religious and anti-religious positions," the
new cosmic conceptions are unified in a masterly conception of
evolution as a universal law. This service, the rendering of which
was quite beyond the capacity of the multitude of Spencer's meta-
physical critics, marks him as one of the great influences of his age.
Strictly, the book is a " System of Nature" rather than a philosophy
in the sense of a study of the grounds and limitations of knowledge ;
that is to say, it is on the former ground alone that it is coherent
and original. But its very imperfections on the other side have
probably promoted its reception among minds already shaken in
theology by the progress of concrete science ; while at the same
time such imperfections give a hostile foothold to the revived forms
of theism. In any case, the "agnostic" foundation supplied by the
despairing dialectic of Hamilton and Mansel has always constituted
the most effective part of the Spencerian case.

11. The effect of the ethical pressure of the deistic attack on the
intelligence of educated Christians was fully seen even within the
Anglican Church before the middle of the century. The unstable
Coleridge, who ha 1 gone round the whole compass of opinion" when
lie began to wield an influence over the more sensitive of the younger
Churchmen, was strenuous in a formal affirmation of the doctrine
of the Trinity, but no less anxious to modify the doctrine of Atone-

i Id. p. xxxviii.

- S pi •!) i-»t hii n vi\vi"l in hi - Auiohin'iriiphv (ii. 7."> ) what mi. 'lit he snnni/.i 1 by critical

p-fiili-r •' it In- role tnc 1 n- v Part, i.t l-'irsl 1'riiiri i„\ < in nr.hr to una nl ;it:n in-t the

. . . 'I . nioti Yi- It'll him In mi-1 pn lit it: 1 i ni." a inl 1 in-rc u a ■

■ . ■ if i . -.: . i, .- hi in the M't ni Till ili-iv:,'iinl ot hi-; ili a\ own ! nl mnli-riali m, nl which

, . 'irpri I-. The broad tact remain tint:. i< •)■ pni.|.'i:i ial rca ons hr •■<•: tort h at,

ti ,. ., -j ,. • . ■ i,i y li-ni n ct ut concln inn which con] i properly be reached only

- i .■. i. il at nil.

\ u, hi* tlin'!na-'.ioim, which lasted till hi- death, cp. tin: iuithor's Xew A'smh/.s
toward: n C nival Method, 1-VJ7, PI). HI 17, 11'.) .jl, Hi's fi'J.

488 FKEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTUKY

ment on which the conception of the Trinity was historically
founded. In the hands of Maurice the doctrine of sacrifice became
one of example to the end of subjective regeneration of the sinner.
This view, which was developed by John the Scot — perhaps from
hints in Origen1 — and again by Bernardino Ochino,2 is specially
associated with the teaching of Coleridge ; but it was quite inde-
pendently held in England before him by the Anglican Dr. Parr
(1747-1825), who appears to have been heterodox upon most points
in the orthodox creed,8 and who, like Servetus and Coleridge and
Hegel, held by a modal as against a "personal" Trinity. The
advance in ethical sensitiveness which had latterly marked English
thought, and which may perhaps be traced in equal degrees to the
influence of Shelley and to that of Bentham, counted for much in
this shifting of Christian ground. The doctrine of salvation by
faith was by many felt to be morally indefensible. Such Unitarian
accommodations presumably reconciled to Christianity and the
Church many who would otherwise have abandoned them ; and the
only orthodox rebuttal seems to have been the old and dangerous
resort to the Butlerian argument, to the effect that the God of
Nature shows no such benign fatherliness as the anti-sacrificial
school ascribe to him.4 This could only serve to emphasize the
moral bankruptcy of Butler's philosophy, to which Mansel, in an
astonishing passage of his Bampton Lectures, :' had shown himself
incredibly blind.

The same pressure of moral argument was doubtless potent in
the development of " Socinian " or other rationalistic views in the
Protestant Churches of Germany, Holland, Hungary, Switzerland,
and France in the first half of the century. Such development had
gone so far that by the middle of the century the Churches in
question were, to the eye of an English evangelical champion, pre-
dominantly rationalistic, and in that sense "infidel."0 Eeactions
have been claimed before and since ; but in our own age there is
little to show for them. In the United States, again, the ethical
element probably predominated in the recoil of Emerson from
Christian orthodoxy even of the Unitarian stamp, as well as in the
heresy of THEODORE Parker, whose aversion to the theistic ethic

1 Baur, Die cliristliche Lehre der Versohnung, 183S, pp. 51-63, 124-31.

- Benrath, Bernardino Ochino, Eng. tr. pp. 21S-S7.

'■'■ Field's Memoirs of Parr, 1828, ii. 363, 374-79.

1 See Pearson's Infidelity .its Aspects, Causes, and Agencies, 1853, p. 215 sq. The position
of Maurice and Parr (associated with other and later names) is there treated as one of the
prevailing forms of "infidelity," and called spiritualism. In Germany the orthodox
made the same dangerous answer to the theistic criticism. See the Memoirs of F.
Bert lies, Eng. tr. 2nd. ed. ii, 242-13. J Ed. cited, pp. 158-59.

c Pearson, as cited, pp. 560-62, 568-79, 581-84.

MODERN JEWRY 489

of Jonathan Edwards was so strong as to make him blind to the
reasoning power of that stringent Calvinist.

12. A powerful and wholesome stimulus was given to English
thought throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century by the
many-sided intluence of JOHN STUART Mill, who, beginning by
a brilliant System of Logic (1843), which he followed up with a less
durable exposition of the Principles of Political Economy (1848),
became through his shorter works On Liberty and on various
political problems one of the most popular of the serious writers of
his age. It was not till the posthumous issue of his Autobiography
and his Tlircc Essays on Religion (1874) that many of his readers
realized how complete was his alienation from the current religion,
from his childhood up. In his Examination of Sir William
Hamilton's Philosophy (18G5), indeed, he had indignantly repudiated
the worship of an unintelligibly good God ; but he had there seemed
to take for granted the God-idea ; and save in inconclusive passages
in the Liberty (1859) he had indicated no rejection of Christianity.
But though the Liberty was praised by Kingsley and contemned by
Carlyle, it made for freethinking no less than for tolerance ; and
his whole life's work made for reason. ' The saint of rationalism "
was Gladstone's1 account of him as a parliamentarian. His post-
humous presentment to the world of the strange conception of a
limited-liability God, the victim of circumstances — a theorem which
meets neither the demand for a theistic explanation of the universe
nor the worshipper's craving for support — sets up some wonder as
to his philosophy ; but was probably as disintegrative of orthodoxy
as a more philosophical performance would have been.

Section 7.- — Modern Jewry

In the culture-life of the dispersed -lews, in the modern period,
there is probably as much variety of credence in regard to religion
as occurs in the life of Christendom so called. Such names as those
of Spinoza, Jacubi, Moses Mendelssohn, Heine, and Karl Marx tell
sufficiently of Jewish service to freethought ; and each one of these
must have had many disciples of his own race. Deism among the
educated Jews of Germany in the eighteenth century was probably
common/ The famous Rabbi IJlijah of Wilna (d. 1797), entitled
the Gaon, the great one," set up a movement of relatively ration-
alistic pietism that led to the establishment in 1S().'{ of a Rabbinical

i I. .■•'.-!■ in W. N. Courtney's.;. ,S'. Mill. !--'». I>. II.!.

.'• ( p. S<r)icf:til<:r, litwlinn in Jiul'ii/iin, ls'.iti, j»i>. .7.1, VI. SrlierhUT write, v. it.li a market)
Judaic prejudice.

490 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

college at Walosin, which has flourished ever since, and had in 1888
no fewer than 400 students, among whose successors there goes on
a certain amount of independent study.1 In the freer world outside
critical thought has asserted itself within the pale of orthodox
Judaism ; witness such a writer as Nachman Krochmal (1785-1840).
whose posthumous Guide to the 'Perplexed of the Time2 (1851),
though not a scientific work, is ethically and philosophically in
advance of the orthodox Judaism of its age. Of Krochmal it has
been said that he " was inspired in his work by the study of Hegel, just
as Maimonides had been by the study of Aristotle."3 The result is
only a liberalizing of Jewish orthodoxy in the light of historic study,4
such as went on among Christians in the same period ; but it is
thus a stepping-stone to further science.

To-day educated Jewry is divided in somewhat the same propor-
tions as Christendom into absolute rationalists and liberal and
fanatical believers ; and representatives of all three types, of different
social grades, may be found among the Zionists, whose movement
for the acquisition of a new racial home has attracted so much
attention and sympathy in recent years. Whether or not that
movement attains to any decisive political success, Judaism clearly
cannot escape the solvent influences which affect all European
opinion. As in the case of the Christian Church, the synagogue in
the centres of culture keeps the formal adherence of some who no
longer think on its plane ; but while attempts are made from time
to time to set up more rationalistic institutions for Jews with the
modern bias, the general tendency is to a division between devotees
of the old forms and those who have decided to live by reason.

Section 8. — The Oriental Civilizations
We have already seen, in discussing the culture histories of
India, China, and Moslem Persia, how ancient elements of rationalism
continue to germinate more or less obscurely in the unpropitious
soils of Asiatic life. Ignorance is in most oriental countries too
immensely preponderant to permit of any other species of survival.
But sociology, while recognizing the vast obstacles to the higher
life presented by conditions which with a fatal facility multiply the
lower, can set no limit to the possibilities of upward evolution.
The case of Japan is a sufficient rebuke to the thoughtless iterators
of the formula of the " unprogressiveness of the East." While a

1 Id. pp. 117-18.

2 This title imitates that of the famous More Nebuchim of Maimonides.
:i Zunz, cited by Schechter, p. 79.

4 Whence Krochmal is termed the Father of Jewish Science. Id. p. 81.

THE ORIENTAL CIVILIZATIONS 491

cheerfully superstitious religion is there still normal among the
mass, the transformation of the political ideals and practice of the
nation under the influence of European example is so great as to
be unparalleled in human history ; and it has inevitably involved
the substitution of rationalism for supernaturalism among the great
majority of the educated younger generation. The late YUKICHI
FCKUZAWA, who did more than any other man to prepare the
Japanese mind for the great transformation effected in his time, was
spontaneously a freethinker from his childhood:' and through a
long life of devoted teaching lie trained thousands to a naturalist
way of thought. That they should revert to Christian or native
orthodoxy seems as impossible as such an evolution is seen to be
in educated Hindostan, where the higher orders of intelligence are
probably not relatively more common than among the Japanese.
The final question, there as everywhere, is one of social reconstruc-
tion and organization ; and in the enormous population of China
the problem, though very different in degree of imminence, is the
same in kind. Perhaps the most hopeful consideration of all is that
of the ever-increasing inter-communication which makes European
and American progress tend in every succeeding generation to tell
more and more on Asiatic life.

As to Japan, Professor B. II. Chamberlain pronounced
twenty years ago that the Japanese " now bow down before
the shrine of Herbert Spencer" {Things Japanese, 3rd ed. 1898,
p. 321. Cp. Religious Systems of the World, 3rd ed. p. 103),
proceeding in another connection (p. 352) to describe them as
essential!)/ an undevotional people. Such a judgment would he
hard to sustain. The Japanese people in the past have exhibited
the amount of superstition normal in their culture stage (cp. tire
Voyages da C. I'. Thunbcrg an Japan, French tr. 179(5, iii, 200) ;
and in our own day they differ from Western peoples on this
side merely in respect of their greater general serenity of
temperament. There were in Japan in IS9! no fewer than
71,831 Buddhist temples, and 190,803 Shinto temples and
shrines: and the largest temple of all, costing "several million
dollars," was built in the last dozen years of the nineteenth
century. To the larger shrines there are habitual pilgrimages,
the numbers annually visiting one leading Buddhist shrine
reaching from 200,000 to 250,000, while at the Shinto shrine
of Kompira the pilgrims are said to number about !)(>(),()()()
each year. (See '/'he Hrolntimi of /In' Japanese, 1903, by
\j. Gulick, an American missionary organizer.)

i .| J Aft' "f W. Viiki <-)u Fukiwim i, by A lUro Miyaniori, ivvi i 1 \>y I'ruf. K. II.
Vickcrs, Tokyo. V.M>. VV- -'la.

492 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Professor Chamberlain appears to have construed " devo-
tional" in the light of a special conception of true devotion.
Yet a Christian observer testifies, of the revivalist sect of
Nichirenites, "the Ranters of Buddhism," that "the wildest
excesses that seek the mantle of religion in other lands are by
them equalled if not excelled " (Griffis, The Mikado's Empire,
1876, p. 163); and Professor Chamberlain admits that "the
religion of the family binds them [the Japanese in general,
including the ' most materialistic '] down in truly sacred bonds ";
while another writer, who thinks Christianity desirable for
Japan, though he apparently ranks Japanese morals above
Christian, declares that in his travels he was much reassured
by the superstition of the innkeepers, feeling thankful that his
hosts were "not Agnostics or Secularists," but devout believers
in future punishments (Tracy, Rambles through Japan without
a Guide, 1892, pp. 131, 276, etc.).

A third authority with Japanese experience, Professor W. G.
Dixon, while noting a generation ago that " among certain
classes in Japan not only religious earnestness but fanaticism
and superstition still prevail," decides that " at the same time
it remains true that the Japanese are not in the main a very
religious people, and that at the present clay religion is in lower
repute than probably it has ever been in the country's history.
Religious indifference is one of the prominent features of new
Japan" {The Land of the Morning, 1882, p. 517). The recon-
ciliation of these estimates lies in the recognition of the fact
that the Japanese populace is religious in very much the same
way as those of Italy and England, while the more educated
classes are rationalistic, not because of any essential" in-
capacity for "devotion," but because of enlightenment and lack
of countervailing social pressure. To the eye of the devotional
Protestant the Catholics of Italy, with their regard to externals,
seem " essentially " irreligious ; and vice versa. Such formulas
miss science. Two hundred years ago Charron, following
previous schematists, made a classification in which northerners
figured as strong, active, stupid, warlike, and little given to
religion ; the southerners as slight, abstinent, obstinate, unwar-
like, and superstitious; and the "middle" peoples as between
the two. La Sagesse, liv. i, ch. 42. The cognate formulas
of to-day are hardly more trustworthy. Buddhism triumphed
over Shintoism in Japan both in ancient and modern times
precisely because its lore and ritual make so much more appeal
to the devotional sense. (Cp. Chamberlain, pp. 358-62 ;
Dixon, ch. x ; Religious Systems of the World, pp. 103, 111;
Griffis, p. 166.) But the aesthetically charming cult of the
family, witli its poetic recognition of ancestral spirits (as to
which see Lafcadio Hearn, Japan : An Attempt at Interpreta-
tion, 1904), seems to hold its ground as well as any.

THE ORIENTAL CIVILIZATIONS 493

So universal is sociological like other law that we find in
Japan, among some freethinkers, the same disposition as
among some in Europe to decide that religion is necessary for
the people. Professor Chamberlain (p. 352) cites Fukuzawa,
"Japan's most representative thinker and educationist," as
openly declaring that " It goes without saying that the main-
tenance of peace and security in society requires a religion.
For this purpose any religion will do. I lack a religious
nature, and have never believed in any religion. I am thus
open to the charge that I am advising others to be religious
while I am not so. Yet my conscience does not permit me to

clothe myself with religion when I have it not at heart Of

religions there are several kinds — Buddhism, Christianity, and
what not. From my standpoint there is no more difference

between those than between green tea and black See that

the stock is well selected and the prices cheap " {Japan

Herald, September 9, 1897). To this view, however, Fukuzawa
did not finally adhere. The Eev. Isaac Dooman, a missionary
in Japan who knew him well, testifies to a change that was
taking place in his views in later life regarding the value of
religion. In an unpublished letter to Mr. Robert Young, of
Kobe, Mr. Dooman says that on one occasion, when conversing
on the subject of Christianity, Fukuzawa remarked: "There
was a time when I advocated its adoption as a means to elevate
our lower classes ; but, after finding out that all Christian
countries have their own lower classes just as bad, if not worse
than ours, I changed my mind." Further reflection, marked
by equal candour, may lead the pupils of Fukuzawa to see that
nations cannot be led to adore any form of " tea " by the mere
assurance of its indispensableness from leaders who confess
they never take any. His view is doubtless shared by those
priests concerning whom " it may be questioned whether in
their fundamental beliefs the more scholarly of the Shinshiu
priests differ very widely from the materialistic agnostics of
Europe" (Dixon, p. 516). In this state of things the Christian
thinks he sees his special opportunity. Professor Dixon writes
(p. 518), in the manner of the missionary, that "decaying
shrines and broken gods are to be seen everywhere. Not only
is there indifference, but there is a rapidly-growing skepticism.

The masses too are becoming affected by it Shintoism

and Buddhism are doomed. What is to take their place ?

It must be either Christianity or Atheism. We have the

brightest hopes that the former will triumph in the near

future "

The American missionary before cited, Mr. Gulick, argues
alternately that the educated .Japanese are religious and that
they are not, meaning that they have " religious instincts,"
while rejecting current creeds. The so-called religious instinct

494 FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

is in fact simply the spirit of moral and intellectual seriousness.
Mr. Gulick's summing-up, as distinct from his theory and
forecast, is as follows: "For about three hundred years the
intelligence of the nation has been dominated by Confucian
thought, which rejects active belief in supra-human beings.

The tendency of all persons trained in Confucian classics

was towards thoroughgoing skepticism as to divine beings and
their relation to this world. For this reason, beyond doubt,
has Western agnosticism found so easy an entrance into Japan.

Complete indifference to religion is characteristic of the

educated classes of to-day. Japanese and foreigners, Christians
and non-Christians alike, unite in this opinion. The impression
usually conveyed by this statement, however, is that agnos-
ticism is a new thing in Japan. In point of fact, the old

agnosticism is merely reinforced by the agnosticism of the

West " {The Evolution of the Japanese, pp. 286-87). This may
be taken as broadly accurate. Cp. the author's paper on
Freethought in Japan" in the Agnostic Annual for 1906.
Professor E. H. Parker notes {China and Religion, 1905, p. 263)
that " the Japanese in translating Western books are beginning,
to the dismay of our missionaries, to leave out all the Chris-
tianity that is in them."

But a very grave danger to the intellectual and moral life of
Japan has been of late set up by a new application of Shintoism,
on the lines of the emperor-worship of ancient Rome. A recent
pamphlet by Professor Chamberlain, entitled The Invention of a
New Religion (P.P. A.; 1912), incidentally shows that the Japanese
temperament is so far from being "essentially" devoid of
devotion as to be capable of building up a fresh cultus to order.
It appears that since the so-called Restoration of 1868, when
the Imperial House, after more than two centuries of seclusion in
Kyoto, was brought from its retirement and the Emperor publicly
installed as ruler by right of his divine origin, the sentiment of
religious devotion to the Imperial House has been steadily incul-
cated, reaching its height during the Russo-Japanese War, when the
messages of victorious generals and admirals piously ascribed their
successes over the enemy to the " virtues of the Imperial Ancestors."
In every school throughout the Empire there hangs a portrait of
the emperor, which is regarded and treated as is a sacred image in
Russia and in Catholic countries. The curators of schools have
been known on occasion of fire and earthquake to save the imperial
portrait before wife or child ; and their action has elicited popular
acclamation. On the imperial birthday teachers and pupils assemble,
and passing singly before the portrait, bow in solemn adoration.

THE ORIENTAL CIVILIZATIONS 495

The divine origin of the Imperial House and the grossly mythical
history of the early emperors are taught as articles of faith in
Japanese schools precisely as the cosmogony of Genesis has been
taught for ages in the schools of Christendom, Some years ago
a professor who exposed the absurdity of the chronology upon which
the religion is based was removed from his post, and a teacher who
declined to bow before a casket containing an imperial rescript was
dismissed. His life was, in fact, for some time in danger from the
fury of the populace. So dominant has Mikado-worship become
that some Japanese Christian pastors have endeavoured to reconcile
it with Christianity, and to be Mikado-worshippers and Christ-
worshippers at the same time.1 All creeds are nominally tolerated
in Japan, but avowed heresy as to the divine origin of the Imperial
House is a bar to public employment, and exposes the heretic to
suspicion of treason. The new religion, which is merely old
Shintoism revised, has been invented as a political expedient, and
may possibly not long survive the decease of Mutsu Hito, the late
emperor, who continued throughout his reign to live in comparative
seclusion, and has been succeeded by a young prince educated on
European lines. But the cult has obtained a strong hold upon the
people ; and by reason of social pressure receives the conventional
support of educated men exactly as Christianity does in England,
America, Germany, and Russia.

Thus there is not " plain sailing " for freethought in Japan. In
such a political atmosphere neither moral nor scientific thought has
a good prognosis ; and if it be not changed for the better much of
the Japanese advance may be lost. Rationalism on any large scale
is always a product of culture ; and culture for the mass of the
people of Japan has only recently begun. Down till the middle of
the nineteenth century nothing more than sporadic freethought
existed.2 Some famous captains were irreverent as to the omens ;
and in a seventeenth-century manual of the principles of govern-
ment, ascribed to the great founder of modern feudalism, Iyeyasu,
the sacrifices of vassals at the graves of their lords are denounced,

1 Pamphlet cited, p. 10.

2 A curious example of sporadic freethought occurs in a pamphlet published towards
the cud of tlie eighteenth century. In 1771 a writer named MotoDri bewail a propaganda
in favour of Shintbism with the publication of a tract entitled S)>irit of Strnifiliti'iiinp.
This tract emphatically asserted the divinity of the Mikado, and elicited a reply from
another writer named Ichikawa, who wrote : "The .Japanese word Aw//// ((hid) was simply
a title of honour ; but in consequence of its having been used to translate the Chinese
character sJun (s lien) a meaning has come to be attached to it which it did not originally
posses-. Tli e ancestors of the Mikados were not (bids, but men, and were no doubt worthy
to be reverenced for their virtues; but their acts were not miraculous nor supernatural.
If the ancestors of living men were not human beings, they are more likely to have been
birds or beasts than Gods." Art.: "The Kcvival of Pure Shinto," by Sir 11. N. Satow, in
'Trans. Asiatic Society of Julian.

496 FEEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTUEY

and Confucius is even cited as ridiculing the burial of effigies in
substitution.1 But, as elsewhere under similar conditions, such
displays of originality were confined to the ruling caste.2 I have
seen, indeed, a delightful popular satire, apparently a product of
mother-wit, on the methods of popular Buddhist shrine-making ;
but, supposing it to be genuine and vernacular, it can stand only for
that measure of freethought which is never absent from any society
not pithed by a long process of religious tyranny. Old Japan, with
its intense feudal discipline and its indurated etiquette, exhibited
the social order, the grace, the moral charm, and the intellectual
vacuity of a hive of bees. The higher mental life was hardly in
evidence ; and the ethical literature of native inspiration is of no
importance.3 To this day the educated Chinese, though lacking in
Japanese " efficiency " and devotion to drill of all kinds, are the
more freely intellectual in their habits of mind. The Japanese
feudal system, indeed, was so immitigably ironbound, so incompar-
ably destructive of individuality in word, thought, and deed, that
only in the uncodified life of art and handicraft was any free play of
faculty possible. What has happened of late is the rapid and docile
assimilation of western science. Another and a necessarily longer
step is the independent development of the speculative and critical
intelligence ; and in the East, as in the West, this is subject to
economic conditions.

A similar generalization holds good as to the other Oriental
civilizations. Analogous developments to those seen in the latter-
day Mohammedan world, and equally marked by fluctuation, have
been noted in the mental life alike of the non-Mohammedan and the
Mohammedan peoples of India ; and at the present day the thought
of the relatively small educated class is undoubtedly much affected
by the changes going on in that of Europe, and especially of England.
The vast Indian masses, however, are far from anything in the
nature of critical culture ; and though some system of education for
them is probably on the way to establishment,4 their life must long
remain quasi-primitive, mentally as well as physically. Buddhism
is theoretically more capable of adaptation to a rationalist view of
life than is Christianity ; but its intellectual activities at present
seem to tend more towards an "esoteric" credulity than towards
a rational or scientific adjustment to life.

1 Lafcadio Hoarn, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, 190J, p. 313; cp. p. 46.

2 Thus Die third emperor of the Ming dynasty in China (1425-1435), referring to the
belief in a future life, makes the avowal: "I am fain to sigh with despair when I see that
in our own day men are just as superstitious as ever" (Prof. E. II. Parker, China and
Iteligioii, 1905, p. 99). 8 See Hearn, as cited, passim.

4 Cp. Sir F. S. P. Lely, Suggestions for the Better Governing of India, 1906, p 59.

THE ORIENTAL CIVILIZATIONS 497

Of the nature of the influence of Buddhism in Burmah,
where it has prospered, a vivid and thoughtful account is given
in the work of II. Fielding, The Soul of a People, 1898. At its
best the cult there deifies the Buddha; elsewhere, it is inter-
woven with aboriginal polytheism and superstition (Davids,
Buddhism, pp. 207-211 ; Max Miiller, Anthro. Bel, p. 132).

Within Brahmanism, again, there have been at different
times attempts to set up partly naturalistic reforms in religious
thought — e.g. that of Chaitanya in the sixteenth century ; but
these have never been pronouncedly freethinking, and Chaitanya
preached a " surrender of all to Krishna," very much in the
manner of evangelical Christianity. Finally he has been deified
by his followers. (Miiller, Xat. Bel. p. 100 ; Phys. Bel. p. 356.)

More definitely freethinking was the monotheistic cult set
up among the Sikhs in the fifteenth century, as the history
runs, by Nanak, who had been iniiuenced both by Parsees and
by Mohammedans, and whose ethical system repudiated caste.
But though Nanak objected to any adoration of himself, he
and all his descendants have been virtually deified by his
devotees, despite their profession of a theoretically pantheistic
creed. (Cp. De la Saussaye, Manual of I he Science of Beligion,
Eng. tr. pp. 659-62; Miiller, Phys. Bel. p. 355.) Trumpp
(Die Beligion cler Sikhs, 1881, p. 123) tells of other Sikh sects,
including one of a markedly atheistic character belonging to
the nineteenth century; but all alike seem to gravitate towards
Hinduism.

Similarly among the Jainas, who compare with the Buddhists
in their nominal atheism as in their tenderness to animals and
in some other respects, there has been decline and compromise ;
and their numbers appear steadily to dwindle, though in India
they survived while Buddhism disappeared. Cp. De la Saussaye,
Manual, pp. 557-63 ; Rev. J. Eobson, Hinduism, 1871, pp. 80-
86 ; Tiele, Outlines, p. 111. Finally, the Brahmo-Somaj move-
ment of the nineteenth century appears to have come to little in
the way of rationalism (Mitchell, Hinduism, pp. 221-16 ; De la
Saussaye, pp. 669-71 ; Tiele, p. 160).

The principle of the interdependence of the external and the
internal life, finally, applies even in the case of Turkey. The notion
that Turkish civilization in Europe is unimprovable, though partly
countenanced by despondent thinkers even among the enlightened
Turks, had no justification in social science, though bad politics
may ruin the Turkish, like other Moslem States; and although
Turkish freethinking has not in general passed the theistic stage,"

1 See article on "Tin; Future of Turkey" in the Contemjiorurii Review, April, 1899, by
"A Turki-h Official. "

- Vet. )i c, rly a.s the date of the Crimean War, it was noted by an observer that " yountf
Turkey m;ikes profession of atheism.'' Ubicini, La Tun/nte act utile, IS:*}, ]>■ MA. Cp. Sir
VOL. II 2lv

498 FEEETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTUEY

and its spread is grievously hindered by the national religiosity,
which the age-long hostility of the Christian States so much tends
to intensify, a gradual improvement in the educational and political
conditions would suffice to evolve it, according to the observed laws
of all civilization. It may be that a result of the rationalistic
evolution in the other European States will be to make them intel-
ligently friendly to such a process, where at present they are either
piously malevolent towards the rival creed or merely self-seeking as
against each other's influence on Turkish destinies.

In any case, it cannot seriously be pretended that the mental
life of Christian Greece in modern times has yielded, apart from
services to simple scholarship, a much better result to the world at
large than has that of Turkey. The usual reactions in individual
cases of course take place. An American traveller writing in 1856
notes how illiterate Greek priests glory in their ignorance, " asserting
that a more liberal education has the effect of making atheists of
the youth." He adds that he lias known several deacons and
others in the University [of Athens] that were skeptics even as to
the truth of religion," and would gladly have become laymen if they
could have secured a livelihood.2 But there was then and later in
the century no measurable movement of a rationalistic kind.
At the time of the emancipation the Greek priesthood was "in general
at once the most ignorant and the most vicious portion of the com-
munity ";3 and it remained socially predominant and reactionary.
" Whatever progress has been made in Greece has received but
little assistance from them."4 Liberal-minded professors in the
theological school were mutinied against by bigoted students,'" a type
still much in evidence at Athens ; and the liberal thinker Theophilus
Ka'ires, charged with teaching " atheistic doctrines," and found guilty
with three of his followers, died of jail fever while his appeal to the
Areopagus was pending.0

Thus far Christian bigotry seems to have held its own in what
once was Hellas. On the surface, Greece shows little trace of
instructed freethought ; while in Bulgaria, by Greek testimony,
school teachers openly proclaim their rationalism, and call for the
exclusion of religious teaching from the schools.' Despite the

G. Campbell. A Very accent View of Turkey, 2nd ed. 1878, p. 65. Vambery makes some-
what light of such tendencies (Der Islam im 19ten Jahrlnaidert, 1875, pp. 185, 187); but
admits cases of atheism even among mollahs, as a result of European culture (p. 101).

1 Ubicini (p. 344), with Vambery and most other observers, pronounces the Turks the
most religious people in Europe.

- If. M. Baird, Modern Greece, New York, 1856, pp. 123-24.

■■< Id., p. 3-20. i Id. p. 339. •"• Id. p. 86. 6 id. p. 340.

7 Prof. Noocles Karasis, Greeks and Bulgarians in tlie Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries, London, 1007, pp. 15-17, citing a Bulgarian journal.

CONCLUSION 499

political freedom of the Christian State, there has thus far occurred
there no such general fertilization by the culture of the rest of
Europe as is needed to produce a new intellectual evolution of any
importance. The mere geographical isolation of modern Greece
from the main currents of European thought and commerce is
probably the most retardative of her conditions ; and it is hard to
see how it can be countervailed. Italy, in comparison, is pulsating
with original life, industrial and intellectual. But, given either a
renascence of Mohammedan civilization or a great political recon-
struction such as is latterly on foot, the whole life of the nearer East
may take a new departure ; and in such an evolution Greece would
be likely to share.

CONCLUSION

Axv fuller survey of the intellectual history of the nineteenth
century will but reveal more fully the signal and ever-widening
growth of rational thought among all classes of the more advanced
nations, and among the more instructed of the less advanced. The
retrospect of the whole past tells of a continuous evolution, which
in the twentieth century proceeds more extensively than ever before.
There has emerged the curious fact that in our own country a
measure of rational doubt has been almost constantly at work in
the sphere in which it could perhaps least confidently be expected —
to wit, that of poetry. From Chaucer onwards it is hard to find
a great orthodox poet. Even Spenser was as much Platonist as
Christian ; and Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Burns,
Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson, Arnold,
and Browning (to name no others) in their various ways bailie the
demand of faith. Latterly, the sex which has always been reckoned
the more given to religion has shown many signs of adaptation to
the higher law. In Britain, as in France, women began to appear
in the ranks of reason in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth
the number has increased at a significant rate. Already in the
fierce battles fought in the time of reaction after the French Bevolu-
tion women took their place on the side of freedom ; and Frances
Wright (Madame d'Arusmont) played a notable; part as a free-
thinking publicist and philanthropist.2 Since her day the names of

1 In tin- Kdinbim,'h Mirror of 177!) (No. :!()) Henry Mackenzie Kpeaks of women free-
thinker - ii . n. new phenomenon .

- "She bought :>. 000 acres in Tennessee, ami peopled them with slave families she
piircini.se. 1 and redeemed " (Wheeler, I Sinn. Diet.).

500 CONCLUSION

Harriet Martineau and George Eliot tell of the continual gain of
knowledge ; and women rationalists are now to be counted by
thousands in all the more civilized countries.

The same law holds of public life in general. Gladstone eagerly
maintained in his latter years that politicians, in virtue of their
practical hold of life, were little given to skepticism ; but the facts
were and are increasingly against him. The balance of the evidence
is against the ascription of orthodoxy to either of the Pitts, or to
Fox ; and we have seen that the statesmen of the American Revolu-
tion, as of the French, were in general deists. Garibaldi1 in Italy,
and Gambetta in France, were freethinkers ; Lincoln and his
opponent, Douglas, were deists ; towards the close of the century,
in New Zealand, Sir Robert Stout and the late Mr. John Ballance,
avowed rationalists, were among the foremost politicians of their
generation ; and in the English Cabinet rationalism began to be
represented in the person of Lord Morley.

While such developments have been possible in the fierce light
of political strife, the process of disintegration and decomposition
has proceeded in society at large till unbelief can hardly be reckoned
a singularity. Within the pale of all the Christian Churches
dogmatic belief has greatly dwindled, and goes on dwindling : and
Christianity " is made to figure more and more as an ethical
doctrine which has abandoned its historical foundations, while
preserving formulas and rituals which have no part in rational
ethics. The mythical cosmogony out of which the whole originally
grew is no longer believed in by any educated person, though it is
habitually presented to the young as divine truth. Thousands of
clergymen, economically gripped to a false position, would gladly
rectify their professed creeds, but cannot ; because the political and
economic bases involve the consent of the majority, and changes
cannot be made without angry resistance and uproar among the
less instructed multitude of all classes. The Protestant Churches
collectively dread to figure as repudiating the historic creed; while
the Roman Catholic Church, conscious of the situation, maintains
a semblance of rigid discipline and a minimum standard of instruc-
tion for its adherents, counting on holding its ground while the
faculty of uncritical faith subsists. Only by the silent alienation of
the more thoughtful and sincere minds from the priesthood can the
show of orthodoxy be maintained even within the Catholic pale.
In all orders alike, nevertheless, the "practice" of religion decays

1 See Lord Morley's Life of Gladstone, 1903, ii. 110-11, as to tbo embarrassment felt in
English eilieial circles at the time of Garibaldi's visit.

CONCLUSION 501

with the theory. The Churches are constantly challenged to justify
their existence by social reforms and philanthropic works : no other
plea passes as generally valid ; and it is only by reason of a general
transference of interest from religious to social problems that the
decay of belief is disguised. " Piety," in the old sense, counts rela-
tively for little ; and while orthodoxy is still a means of advantage
in political life, religion counts for nothing in international relations.
In the war of 1S99-1902, " Bible-loving " England forced a quarrel
on the most Bible-loving race in the world ; and at the time of the
penning of these lines six nations are waging the greatest war of all
time irrespectively of racial and religious ties alike, though all alike
ollicially claim the support of Omnipotence. In Berlin a popular
preacher edifies great audiences by proclaiming that " God is not
neutral "; and his Emperor habitually parades the same faith, with
the support of all the theologians of Germany — the State supremely
guilty of the whole embroilment, and the deliberate perpetrator of
the grossest aggression in modern history. On the side of the Allies
Christianity " is less systematically but still frequently invoked.
On both sides the forms of prayer are officially practised by the
non-combatants, very much as the Romans in their wars main-
tained the practice of augury from the entrails of sacrificed victims ;
and " family prayer" is said to be reviving.

Everywhere, nevertheless, the more rational, remembering how
in the " ages of faith " deadly wars were waged for whole generations
in the very name of religion, recognize that Christianity furnishes
neither control for the present nor solution for the future; and,
that the hope of civilization lies in the resort of the nations to
human standards of sanity and reciprocity. The ties which hold
are those of fellow-citizenship.

There can be no doubt among rationalists that if modern civiliza-
tion escapes the ruin which militarism brought upon those of all pre-
vious eras, the principle of reason will continually widen its control,
latterly seen to be everywhere strengthening apart from the dan-
gerous persistence of militarist ideals and impulses. When it
controls international relations, it will be dominant in the life of
thought. In the words of a great fighter for frcethought, " Xo man
ever saw a religion die " ; and there are abundant survivals of pre-
Christian paganism in Europe after two thousand years of Chris-
tianity : but it seems likely that when the history of the twentieth
century is written it will be recognized that what has historically
figured as religion belongs in all its forms to the past.

The question is sometimes raised whether the age of decline will

502 CONCLUSION

be marked by movements of active and persecuting fanaticism.
Here, again, the answer must be that everything depends upon the
general fortunes of civilization. It is significant that a number of
clerical voices proclaim a revival of religion as a product of war,
while others complain that the state of struggle has a sterilizing
effect upon religious life. While organized religions subsist, there
will always be adherents with the will to persecute ; and from time
to time acts of public persecution occur, in addition to many of a
private character. But in Britain public persecution is latterly
restricted to cases in whicli the technical offence of " blasphemy "
is associated with acts which come under ordinary police jurisdic-
tion. After the unquestionable blasphemies of Arnold and Swin-
burne had to be officially ignored, it became impossible, in the present
stage of civilization, that any serious and decent literary indictment
of the prevailing creeds should be made a subject of persecution ;
and before long, probably, such indictments will be abandoned in the
cases of offenders against police regulations.

The main danger appears to lie in Catholic countries, and from
the action of the Catholic hierarchy. The common people every-
where, save in the most backward countries, are increasingly disin-
clined to persecution. In Ireland there is much less of that spirit
among the Catholic population than among that of Protestant Ulster.
But the infamous execution of Francisco Ferrer in Spain, in 1909,
which aroused passionate reprobation in every civilized country, was
defended in England and elsewhere with extravagant baseness by
Catholic litterateurs, who, with their reactionary priests, are the
last to learn the lesson of tolerance. The indignation everywhere
excited by the judicial murder1 of Ferrer, however, gives promise that
even the most zealous fanatics of the Catholic Church will hesitate
again to rouse the wrath of the nations by such a reversion to the
methods of the eras of religious rule.

1 On the whole case see The Life, Trial, and Death of Francisco Ferrer, by William
Archer: Chapman & Hall, 1911; and The Martyrdom of Ferrer, by Joseph McCabe :
it. P. A., 1910.

INDEX

ABAILARD. i, 307, 308 n., 311 sq.

Abassides, the. i, 252, 255

Abauzit, ii. 243

Abbadie, ii, 141, 250, 252

Abbas Eflendi, i, 274

Abbot, Archbishop, ii, 11, 22

Abdera, i, 157

Aben-Ezra, i, 335

Abernethv, ii. 401

Aboul-ala cl Marri, i, 2G1

Abraham and Isaac, i, 102

Abraxas, i. 228

Abstractions, deification of, i, 198

Abubacer, i, 270

Abyssinia, magic and religion in, i, 46

Academic thought in England, i, 1G4.

1G5, 321
Academic, the French, ii, 227 sq.
Academv, the New, i, 1S7 ; of Florence, |

i, 371"
Achamoth, i, 22S
Aconzio, i. 392, 4G3, 4G9, 470
Acton, Lord, i, 4G1
Adamites, the, i, 41S
Adams, John, ii, 382

George, ii, 394

Adamson, Professor, ii, 43 n.\ cited, ii,

Go n., 105. 338 n.
Addison, ii. 151
Adler. Felix, ii, ill
Adonai, i. 105
Adonis, i. 75. 101
Afdal-i-kashi. i. 2G5
^Ericas Svlvius, l, 3G7, 370 n., 415,

lis n.
/Enesidemus, i. 181 n., 190
Aerius. i. 239
/Rschylus. i. 130 sq., 148
Africa, Islam in, i, 27G

— unbelief in, i. 3 1. 35, 38. 39
African tribe . religion of, i. 23, 31
Agathon. i. 1G2 n.
Agni, cult of. i. 48
Agnosticism. Chinese, i. 83 sq.

- of Chaucer, i, 310 17
( I reek, i. 1 13. 1 10, 152, 101
.' rohainiiiedan, i, 255. 203

A. b ird. i. 282
Agur, i. 110

50:.

Ahriman (Angra Mainyu), i, G3, 111

Ahura Mazda, i. 05 sq.

Aikenhead. ii, 181

Akbar, i. 275

Akerberg, ii, 418

Akhunaton, i, 72 sq.

Akkadian religion, i, Gl sq.

Ala-ud-Dawla, i. 2G7

Alba, Duke d'. ii, 372

Alberti, cited, ii, 157 n., 190, 36S

Albertus Magnus, i, 319, 302, 377 n.

of Saxony, i, 3G0

Albigenses, i, 282, 299 sq.
Aleiati. i, 453
Alexander IV. i, 322

VI, i. 373

of Aphrodisias, i, 37G

Alexandria, religion at, i, 1S9, 22G

library of, i, 253 n.

culture at, i, 188

Alfarabi, i. 2G7

Alfieri. ii. 309

Alfonso X, the Wise, i, 321, 325, 338-39

II, i. 33G

of Naples, i, 3G0

de Spina, i. 370 n., 37G

Algarotti, ii. 3G9

Algazel, i. 259, 203, 2GG, 2G7, 270

Algebra, ii, 13

Algeria, freethought in, i, 270

Alhazen, i, 2G8

Alison, cited, ii, 250

Ali Sved, l, 272 n.

Alkaios, i, 200

Alkibiades, i. 159, 1G0

Al Kindi, i. 2G7

Al Kindy, i, 258

AUbutt, Professor T. C, cited, i, 40;

ii, 103 n.
Allegory, freethinking, i. 145, 101, 191
Ulen, kthan, ii. 382 n.
\llingham, cited, ii. I 17
\llix. ii, 98, 252
Ml opp. cited, ii, 111,1 10
Mmodobar, Duke of, ii. 373
Mmoravides and Almohades, i. 209
Mpha be I ic '.'.! it.ing. age i if, i . 105, 19 1

\l.-led. il. 291 sq.

Uyattes, i, 130

504

INDEX

Amadeo dc' Landi, i, 368

Amalrich (Amaury) of Bena, i, 317, 333

Amazons, myth of, i, 173, 1S5

Amberley, ii, 403

Ambrose, i, 233, 393

American colonies, revolt of. ii, 281

Amen-Ra, i, 09, 72

Ames, ii, 74

Ammianus Marcellinus, i, 234

Ammonios Saccas, i, 226

Amos, i, 104 sq.

Amsterdam, ii, 133, 138

Amun, i, 62

Anabaptists, the, i, 436, 454 ; ii, 1, 2

Anaita, i, 67

Anatomy, i, 259 n.

Anax, i, 125 n.

Anaxagoras, i, 136, 152 sq.

Anaximandros, i, 136, 138 ; ii, 47

Anaximenes, i, 136, 13S, 152

Ancestor-worship, i, 83

Andamanese, religion and ethics of, i,

93 ; food supply of, i, 94
Andre, ii, 122

Angels, belief in, i, 110, 111
Angerio, i, 411
Anglo-Saxons, i, 113
Ani, papyrus of. i. 109
Annet, ii, 169-70, 200, 392
Anomeans, the, i, 242
Anselm. St., i, 307, 308 n., 309 sq.

■ of Laon, i, 315 n.

Ansted, ii. 463

Anstruther. ii, 104, 116, 182

Anthome, Nicholas, i, 453

Anthropomorphism, i, 182, 195 ; ii, 29

Antichthon, i, 150

Anti-clericalism in India, i, 55 ; Pauli-

cian. i, 2S0, 293. 295 ; of Troubadours,

i, 300 sq.; Italian, i, 323, 327, 366;

medieval, i. 331 sq.; English, 346.

348 ; French, i, 351, 353 ; German,

i, 361 ; in the Renaissance, i, 366 sq.
Antinomianism and religion, i, 2, 18,

333. 446
Antisthcr.es, i, 183
Antonines, the, i, 217
Anytas, i. 171
Aphrodite, i. 124
Ajristos, early use of word, i, 1. 127 n.,

235
Apocalypse, i, 225 n.
Apollo," i, 124. 145
Apollonius of Tvana, i, 238 n.
Apologetics, Christian, i, 235, 310, 350,

370, 107, 482 sq.; ii, 79 sq., 97 sq.,

124 sq., 137. 115. 156. 162 sq., 179,

210, 214
Apostolici, i. 336, 400
Apotheosis, imperial, i, 185, 208, 209

Apthorp, ii, 205

Apuleius, i. 212 ; cited, i, 77

Aquinas, Thomas, i, 318 sq., 359, 360,

376 '■>.

Arabs, influence of, on Europe, i, 268,

301 sq., 315 sq., 362, 366; influence

of on negro life, i, 276 ; civilization

of, i, 249, 251, 268 sq.; science of,

i, 256, 258, 268 sq. ; decadence of, i,

258 sq., 269 sq.; persecution of, ii, 56;

Himvarite, i, 112. 116
Aranda", Count, ii, 372, 373, 377
Arcadia, religion in, i, 45
Archelaos, i, 136, 160, 163
Archilochos, i, 124 n., 145
Argotti, ii, 54
Aristarchos, i, 188
Aristippos, i. 1S3
Aristo, i, 184
Aristodemos. i, 170
Aristophanes, i, 152, 167, 171
Aristotle, i, 131, 149, 152, 16S, 177 sq.,

257, 307, 471 ; in Campaspe, ii, 3
Aristotelianism, i, 307, 317, 318,469-70;

ii, 63
Arius and Arianism, i, 77, 229 sq.; ii,

151. 153-54
Ark, the Hebrew, i, 101
Arkesilaos, i, 1S7
Arminianism, i, 462 sq.; ii, 22, 133, 137,

378
Arminius, i, 455, 462
Armstrong, E., cited, i, 408
Arnaldo of Villanueva, i, 339
Arnauld, ii, 125, 129, 142
Arnobius, i. 215, 225
Arnold of Brescia, i, 295

the legate, i, 303

Gottfried, ii, 294, 307

Matthew, i, 457; ii. 255, 403,

40S. 441 n., 450, 452
Arnoldson, K. P., ii, 41S
Artaxerxes Mnemon, i, 07
Artemis, i, 124
Artemon, i, 230
Arts, effect of, on religion, i, 95-96 ;

affected by religion, i, 365
Aryabhata, i, 57
Aryans, i, 48 sq.

Asceticism, i, 54, 216, 227, 243 sq.
Ascham, i, 467 ; ii, 2
Aselli, ii. 66
Asgill, ii, 152. 166 n.
Ashari, Al. i. 259
Ashtorcths, i. 79, 81
Asmodeus, i. Ill
Asoka, i, 59. 60
Aspasia, i, 155
Assassins, the, i, 266
Asser, i. 284

INDEX

505

Associations, religious, in Greece, i, 189
"Assurance.-' doctrine of, i, 455
Assyria, religion of, i, 47. 03 sq.
Astrology, i, 401 ; Chaldean, i, 03 ;
Greek, i, 1SS ; Roman, i. 212 ; me-
dieval, i, 327 ; Italian, i, 373 ; Rabe-
lais on. i. 3S2, 334 : Renaissance, i.
401 ; and Protestantism, i, 449 ; as-
sailed by Gassendi, ii. 67-6S
Astronomy, Arab, i. 270, 275 ; Hindu,
i. 56-57 ; Greek, i. 137, 1SS ; Baby-
lonian, i, 02-63, 95, 137 ; Modern, ii,

41, q.

Astruc, ii, 23G »., 239, 25G. 431

Asvamedha. rite of, i, 53

Aszo y del Rio. ii, 372

Ate::, cult of, i. 73, 74 sq.

Athanusius, i. 77

Athanasianism, i. 235

Atheism and atheist, use of words, i, 1,
4. 225

Atheism, Arab, i, 249 sq., 25G ; Brah-
manic, i, 51 sq.; Buddhistic, i. 56. 58;
among Sikhs, ii, 42S ; in Phoenicia,
i. 79 : in Greece, i, 17, 142, 15G, 159,
1G0. 173. 1S3, 1S4, 1S9; at Rome, i,
211: under Islam, i, 249. 256 ; in
modern Germany, i, 437 ; ii. 296 ; in
medieval Italy, i, 325 ; in Renais-
sance Italy, i, 374 ; in France, i,
3S9, 473 ; "ii. 219. 221, 231, 267, 273,
•275. 27S : in the Netherlands, ii, 135 :
in Poland, ii, 308 ; in England, ii,
2. 3. G sq., 72, 79, 97, 150, 151, 1G5 ;
in Scotland, ii, 181, 1S2 ; in the
French Revolution, ii, 274 sq., 2S7 ;
ri>e of modern, i, 466 ; in Turkey, i,
272 : in Japan, ii, 420

Athenaeus. cited, i, 176

Athenagoras, i, 225 n., 230

Ath.'ne, l. 124

Athens, culture of, i, 133, 148, 152 sq.

Athi ;, early use of word, i, 127

Al mi ■ thi Iry, i. 80, 157. 312

Atl i, i. 291 )i
I i in et Xicolcttc, i, 300-301

Audra, ii. 291

Aui rb ich. ii. 450

Aufkhirunq, the, ii, 331, 333, 409, 472,
474

Aug.-burg, Peace of, ii. 19

Australian, freethought, ii. 412

Austria, freethought in. ii, 305 s^.

Austrittsbeicegang , ii, 436?!.

Autocracy and freethought, i. 212

Auxerre, Bishop of, ii. 264, 269

Avebury, Lord. i. 30-31, 93; ii, 4'

Avempace. i, 270, 310

Avenar, ii, 0

Averroe's and Averroism, i. 270 sq.
316, 31S sq., 324. 330. 338. 346,
301, 369. 376. 379, 404 ; ii, 34

Aviccbron, i, 316

Avicenna, i, 205. 267

Avignon, the papacy at, i, 354 sq..
443

Azara, ii, 374

Aztec religion, i, S3 sq.

302,
300,

39S,

B

AALS, i, 78-79, 124
ab sect, i, 273 sq.

abylon, religion of, i, 47, 111 ; free-
thought in, i, G2-G5 ; science in, i,
62-63, 95, 122
acchic mysteries, i, 200
achaumont, cited, ii, 221 n., 235 n.,
239 n., 240 n., 242 n., 244
aeon. Francis, ii, 25 sq., 04; on ra-
tionales, i, 5 ; on education, i, 37S ;
on Demokritos, i, 158, 177 n.; method
of, i, 178 n.; on second causes, i,
472 ; on atheists, ii, 4, 2S2 ; on reli-
gious wars, ii, 13 ; and persecution,
ii, 23 : and Aristotle, ii. 03 ; and
Herbert, ii. 70 ; and Spinoza, ii, 134 ;
cited, ii, 271

John, ii, 54

Roger, i. 319, 313 sq., 354

Baden Powell, Rev., cited, ii, 13, 17S,
403 sq.

Baerlein, H., i, 202

Bagehot, W., criticized, ii. 19S

Bahrdt. ii. 319, 320 sq., 424

Bails, ii. 375

Bain. Professor, ii. 404 ; quoted, i,
174 n., 178. 109, 149

Bainham, i. 458

Bains, i. 150

Baird, If. M., cited, ii, 493

Baker, Sir S., i, 35

Balfour, A. J., ii. 401. 404

Balguv, ii, 173. 174. 193

AU21H1

no, St., i. 1, 215, 225. 231

232,

Ball, .John. i. 350

2 '■■ ', \ .

235, 2S7, 290 : ii, 1 19

Ballance, ii, 500

A u .

is. i, 20!. 207 .;.. -i\:\

Baltus, ii. 220

Au lard

rated, i . 2->7 n.

Balzac, ii, 4 12

Au hi '

citi i. i. 200 n.

Bandino. i. 409 n

. Roman, i. 199

Banier, Abb.', i. 1

Au t.i r-

d'Orlac, i, 300 n.

Bantu, i he, i. 22

Au-tral

ian aborigines, religion of,

i. 32,

Ban van, i , 4 29
Baptism, i, 280

506

INDEX

Barante, ii, 284 sq.
Bardesanes, i, 227
Barmekides, the, i, 257
Barneveldt, i, 4G3
Barrington, ii, 173
Barrow, ii, 104
Barth, cited, i, 50
Barthez. ii, 243
Barthogge, ii, 87
Bartholmess, ii, 43 n.
Bartoli, cited, i, 32S n., 353
Basedow, ii, 315 sq., 323 n.
Basel, University of , i, 447
Basil, Emperor, i, 279
Basileus, i, 125 n.
Basilides, i, 228
Bastian, A., ii, 470
Bataks, the, i, 23
Bathenians, the, i, 255
Baudeau, ii, 244
Baudelaire, ii, 442
Baudrier, President, i, 387 n.
Bauer, A., quoted, i, 156 n.

Bruno, ii, 427 sq., 474

Edgar, ii, 432

G. L., ii, 423, 424

Baume-Desdossat, ii, 239

Baumgarten, ii, 31S n.

Baur, P. C, ii, 325, 354 ; cited, i, 410,

436; ii, 311, 317, 336 n., 344, 425,

428, 434, 477 sq., 479

Rev. YV., cited, ii, 336 %., 409 n.

Baxter, i, 350 n.\ ii, 71, 82, 84

Bavle, i. 2, 466 ; ii, 139 sq., 150, 154,

282, 352
Beard, C, cited, i, 464
Beaufort, ii, 257, 368
Beaumont, J., ii, 138
Beating of idols, i, 23 sq.
Bcausobre, ii, 239, 347
Bebel, August, ii, 411, 412

Heinrich, i, 435

Beccaria, ii, 266, 368

Beda, i, 429

Bede, i, 313

Beethoven, ii, 351

Beghards and Beguins, i, 333, 335, 339,

406
Beha, i, 274
Bekker, ii, 138

Belgium, freethought in, ii, 406 sq.
"Believers in Reason," ii, 350
Belisaire, ii, 259 sq.
Bellarmin, Cardinal, i, 462 ; ii, 22, 57,

119 n.
Bellay, Guillaume de, i, 383

Jean du, i, 382

Joachim du, i, 390

Bellman, ii, 360

Bel Merodach, i, 62, 64

Benedict XIV, Pope, ii, 368, 369, 370
Benn, A., ii, 389 n., 444 n.\ cited, i,

137 n., 138 n., 146 n., 158, 170 n.,

178 n., 179-80, 187 ; criticized, ii, 211
Bennet, Benjamin, ii, 88 n.

A., ii, 451

Bentham, ii, 267, 484 sq.

Bentley, ii, 97, 155 ; cited, i, 8 n.

Beranger, ii, 442

Berault, ii, 98

Berengar, i, 2S9 sq., 440

Bergier, ii, 245, 250, 253, 256, 275, 287

Berington, Rev. J., cited, i, 300

Berkeley, i, 8 m.; ii, 91, 105, 124, 150,

151-52, 162 sq., 168 ; and Hume, ii,

180, 251, 252
Berlin, churchgoing in, ii, 438 n.
Bernard, St., i, 295, 312, 313

J.-F., ii, 238

Sylvester, i, 312

Berquin, i, 429

Berruyer, ii, 215

Berthelot, ii, 122

Berti, cited, ii, 61 n.\ quoted, ii, 62

Besant, Mrs., ii, 402, 408, 452

Sir W., ii, 452

Bettinelli, ii, 368

Bcvan, E. R., cited, i, 186

Beverland, ii, 36

Beyle, ii, 442

Beza, i, 450 ; ii, 34, 64

Bezold, i, 404, 435 n., 441

Bhagavat Gita, the, i, 59

Biandrata, i, 420-21, 425, 453, 46S ; ii, 37

Bibliolatry, i, 403, 439, 454, 457 ; ii, 25,

26, 32, 35, 61, 209
Bickell, i, 115
Biddle, ii, 78, S3
Bielfeld, cited, ii, 303 n.
Bielinsky, ii, 456
Biology/ii, 207, 459 sq., 464 sq.
Bion. l. 1S4
Biran, ii, 479
Birch, W. J., ii, 18 n.
Bjornson, ii, 457
Black Death, i, 34, 328-29
Blackmore, ii, 173
Blackstone, Sir W., ii, 195-96
Blanchard, ii, 257
Blasphemy, i, 167 ; ii, 5, 8, 73 n., 76,

99, 147, 149, 159, 170
Blatchford. ii, 408
Blceckly, H., i, 171 n., 172
Blind, ideas of the. i, 39
Blount, Charles, ii, 96 sq., 99, 115,

149-50. 243, 449

Sir T. P., ii, 96 n.

Blunt, cited, i. 158

Bluntschli, ii, 35

Boas, Professor, cited, ii, 12

INDEX

507

Boccaccio, i, 327 sq.; ii, 328

Bocher, Joan, ii, 1

Bodin, i, 1, 390 ; ii, 4, 468

Boeheim, i, 406 n.

Boethius, i, 246-47, 348 ; ii, 34

Bogomilians, the, i. 281

Bohemia. Reformation in, i, 415 sq.

Bohemian Brethren, the, i, 419

Bohn, H., ii. 398

Bohnn, ii, 99 n.

Boileau, ii. LS3

Boindin, ii, 222, 24S n., 257, 258

Boissier, cited, i, 195, 198 n., 205 n.

Bolde, ii, 110

Boleslav, i. 422

Bolingbroke, ii, 143, 154, 1G4, 178,

196 sq., 223, 232-33, 253
Bolsec, i, 442. 446
Bonamy. ii, 257

Bonaventure Desperiers, i, 379 sq., 391
Boncerf, ii, 290
Boniface, St., i, 282
Bonner. Mrs., ii, 338
Book of the Dead, the, i, 70
Booth, B., ii, 452 n.
Booms, ii, 352
Borowski. cited, ii, 341, 345
Borthwick, F., ii. 182 n.
Bos Homes, i. 297
Bossuet, ii, 05 9i., 126, 131, 142, 146,

213. 250, 251

cited, ii, 123

Bouchier, Jean, i, 459
Boagre, origin of word, i, 2S1
Bouillier, cited, i, 377 n.\ ii, 121 n.
Boulainvilliers, ii, 213, 237-38, 241
Boulanger, ii, 240, 246-4S
Bourdelot, ii. 357
Bourdin, ii. 65
Bourget, ii, 385
Bourgeville, i, 173
Bourne, cited, ii, 108 u., 114 n.
Bouterwek, cited, ii, 40, 41 n.
, i, 5 ; ii, 91, 155
- lectures, ii, 97, 166
Boy-o, ii. 1.48
Bradke, Von, cited, i, 49
Bradford, Bishop, ii, 98
Bradlaugh, ii, 399 sq.
Bradley, J., ii. 98
]•'". 11., i, 140
A. C.. ii, 15 16
Bnihe, Tyeho, ii. 355
Brahiiiiinisii), i, 51 sq.; schisms in, i,

51 ; ii, 197 ; Dravidian influence on,

i, 56 n.
Brahnio-Somaj movement, ii, 428
Brandos, G., ii. 157

I-:., ii, 157

Braun, ii. 1 18

Breasted, J. H., cited, i, 74

Breitburg, ii, 136 11.

Breitinger, ii, 234 n.

Brethren of the Free Spirit, i, 2, 317,

333, 335, 362, 446

Sincere (of Purity), i, 256

Bohemian, i, 419

of the Common Lot, i, 438

Bretschneider, ii, 423, 425

Brett, Prof., ii, 66 n.

Brewster, cited, ii, 110, 112, 113, 151,

178, 464
Briconnet, i, 428
Bridges, Dr., i, 344 11.
Brihaspati, i, 53, 54
Brissot de Warville, ii, 244
"Broad Church," ii, 375
Brooke, ii, 20

Brougham, ii, 44S n., 449 n.
Brown, ii, 194

W., ii, 45S n.

Browne, Sir T., i, 3, 11 ; ii, 100 sq.

Bishop, ii, 150

E. G.. cited, i, 261

Browning, ii, 413, 452

quoted, ii, 231

Brunetiere, ii. 443

Brunetto Latini, i, 348, 398 n.

Bruno, Giordano, i, 21, 411 n., 451,

469 ; ii, 43 sq., 134, 458
Bryce, cited, i, 18, 294
Bucer, i, 447
Buchanan, ii, 283
Buchner, ii, 418, 436 n., 478 sq.
Buckingham, ii, 97
Buckle, i, 13, 480 ; ii, 402, 469 ; cited,

i, 272, 306, 311, 356, 391 ?;., 481 n.;

ii, 66, 105, 173, 224-25, 227, 228,

256, 269 n.
Buckley, i, 130 n.
Buddeus, i, 11

Buddha, traditions of, i, 55 sq.
Buddhism, i, 52 n. , 55 sq., 149 ; ii,

491 sq., 197
Bude, i, 388

Pudge, Dr. Wallis, i, 70,75
Budny, ii, 37

Buffier, ii, 130, 215, 219 n.
Buffon, ii, 207, 262, 261
Bulgarians, i, 281 ; ii, 498
Bull, Dr., ii, 111
Bullen, cited, ii, 100 n.
Burckhardt, cited, i, 131, 328 n., 367 n.,

369, 409
Burners, ii, 416
1 Jurghloy, cited, i,
Buridan, i. 360
Burigny, ii, 225,

218, 25S
! Burke, ii, 205, 209

168

226, 23S, 211, 21;

508

INDEX

Burke, V. K., cited, i, 340-41

Burlamaqui, ii, 379

Burleigh, Walter, i. 346 n.

Burnet, Bishop, cited, i, 6, 432 ».,
4G0 n.\ ii, 78, 111, 153, 166 ; ii, 365

Dr. J., cited, i, 122, 142, 149, 151,

192

Dr. T., ii, 109. 115, 176, 182

Burns, i, 352 ; ii, 208-209

Bury, A., ii. Ill

: J. B., i, 10, 126 n.. 247 n.

Richard dc, i, 334

Busher, Leonard, ii, 24

Busone da Gubbio, i, 328 n.

Bussy, ii, 142

Butler, ii, 143, 168, 179, 251, 252

Byron, ii, 444

Byzantium, civilization of, i, 246 ; free-
thought in, i, 277 sq.

CABALLERO, ii, 387

Cabanis, ii, 387, 459 sq., 462

Cadell, Mrs. A. M., i, 264 n.

Cselestius, i, 229, 232

Caesar, i, 206 sq., 212

Cagnuelo, ii, 375

Caird, E., i, 441

Cairns, ii, 265, 274 n.

Calas, ii, 220

Calderon, ii, 39

Calendar, reform of, i, 262, 457

Callidius, ii, 33

Callimachus, i. 184

Calovius, i, 457

Calvert, A. F., cited, i, 95

Calvin, i, 2, 379, 383, 392. 40S n.. 414,

431, 439, 442 sq., 455
Calvinism, i, 442 sq., 462 ; ii, 22, 378 sq.
Cambridge university in 18th century,

ii, 167
Cambyses, i, 66, 76
Camden, cited, ii, 5 n.
Campanella, ii, 309
Campanus, i, 435
Cannibalism, i, 43
Cantatapiedra, Martinez de, ii, 39
Cantu, i, 13 ; cited, i, 411 n.
Caraffa, Cardinal, i, 408, 412
Cardan, i, xv. 349 n.
Carducci, ii. 454
Carlile, ii, 394, 408
Carlvle, ii, 232, 270 n., 313 sq., 447,

448, 449, 450, 466 n., 469, 489
Carmelites, the, i, 330
Carneades, i, 187, 200
Carnesecchi, i, 412
Caroline. Queen, ii. 165 n.
Carpi, Marquis of, ii, 365
Carpocrates. i, 228
Carra, ii, 243

Carranza, ii, 44

Carriere, cited, i, 390 n.; ii, 49 n.

Carrol, ii. 109

Cartaud, ii, 291

Cartesianism, ii, 103 sq., 121, 128, 133

Casaubon. Isaac, i, 464

Meric, ii, 86

Casimir the Great, i, 423

Cassels, W. R., ii, 439 n.

Cassini, ii, 178

Castalio, i, 392, 442, 446

Castelli, ii, 58

Castelnau, ii. 45

Castillon, ii, 239, 241

Casuistry, ii, 74

Cataneo, ii, 218, 280

Cathari, i, 292, 296

Catherine the Great, ii, 260, 364

Catholic Church and civilization, i.

192-93
Cato, i, 199, 200-201
Cavalcanti, the two, i, 325 and n.
Cavoli, i, 411
Caxton, i, 353
Cecco d'Ascoli, i, 327
Cellario, i, 412
Celso, i. 392
Celsus, i, 236 sq.
Censorship, Roman, i, 212
Centeno, ii, 375
Cerinthus, i. 225 n.
Cerise, ii, 461 n.
Cerutti, ii, 280
Cervantes, ii, 39, 40
Cesalpini, ii, 63 n.
Chaeremon, i, 211
Chaitanya, ii, 497
Chaldea, science in, i, 180
Chalmers, ii, 485 ; cited, i, 85
Chaloner, ii, 78

Chamberlain, B. H., cited, ii, 491 sq.
Chambers, R., ii, 464 sq.
Chamfort, ii, 259, 279, 2SS
Champion, i, 476 n., 479 ; ii, 233
Chandragupta, i, 59
Channing, ii, 344
Chapman. G., ii, 13, 17

Dr. John, ii, 408 n.

Charlemagne, i, 24. 293
Charles II, ii, 73, 84

Ill of Spain, ii, 377

IV of Spain, ii, 377

IV, Emperor, i. 415

V, i, 341, 401, 408, 412, 414 ; ii,

32
Charleton, W., ii, 81, 82
Charron, i, 480 sq.; cited, ii, 492
Chastellain, i, 429
Chateaubriand, ii, 421, 43S. 441
Chatelet, Marquise du, ii, 230

INDEX

509

Chatham. See Pitt
Chatterton, ii. 199

Chaucer, i. 346 sq.

Chaumette. ii. 278

Chazars, the, i, '292 n.

Cheffontaines, i. 47.1

Chelsum, ii. 205

Chenier. A., ii. 254

Chesterfield, cited, ii, 1G5 u.

Chevne. Dr., ii. 431 n.. 434

cited, i. 105 »., 10t3, 107, 112, 115 ;

ii. 107 ».. 175-70

Chillingworth, ii. 10G

China, thought in, i, 82 sq.

evolution of, i, 130

Chivalry and religion, i, 356 sq.

Choiseul, ii. 236

Cholmeley, ii, 12

Chosroes, i. 2 10 n.

Christian TI of Denmark, ii, 138

111. 0. 351

Christianity, theory of, i, IS ; rise of, i,
210. 216; hostility of to freethought,
i. 221; in Egypt, i, 77; strifes of, i,
215-10 ; and conduct, i, IS, 19, 223 ;
and cruelty, i. 172 ; and war, ii. 500

Christie. R.,*i, 3S3 n., 3S6 : ii. 51, 53 n.

Christina, Queen, ii, 121, 357 sq.

Chronolo^v, Biblical, criticism of, ii, 9

Chrvsostom, i, 239 »., 241, 242

Chubb, ii. 101

Chuen-Aten, i. 72 .s^.

Church, popular hostility to, ii, 75

Church, Dean, cited, ii. 28

Churchill, Lord Randolph, ii, 401

Chwang-T-/.e, i. S6

Cicero, i. 168, 175, 199, 202 sq.

Clairaut, ii. 177

Clarke, i. 8 n.; ii, 98, 101, 105, 150, 100,
168, 196

John, ii . 39 1

W. R., i. 232

Clarkson. ii . 70

Claudim i f Turin, i. 282, 298 n.

of Savov, i, 468

Clavel. ii. 129 ».

Clayton, BPhop, ii, 189

I - be.-, i. IM ; in Cdinpaspe, ii, 3

Clemen - Alex mdrimu

Ronianu s. i, 2^7

Clemem IV. i. 313

- VII. i. 3-2. 108

— XIV. ii. 3i i

i, 175, 225. 220

Clitomachos, i, 187

Clootz, ii. 244. 27S

Clough. ii, 452

Cobbett, i, 404

Coger. ii. 282

Coiti, i, 39

Colbert, ii, 07, 142

Cole. P., ii. 5

Colenso, i, 3S, 108 : ii, 418, 431, 433

Coleridge, i, 231 ; ii, 9. 349 n., 443-44,

4 10, 447, 450, 487 sq.
Colet, i. 401 n.
" Coilegiants," the, ii, 136 n.
Colletet. ii. 122
Collins, Anthony, i, 7, 21 ; ii. 113, 133,

150 n.. 154 sq., 106, 174, 225

W. E., cited, i. 306

Prof. J. C, ii, 232-33

Columbus, i, 345

Combe, G. and A., ii, 398

Comenius, i, 5 ; ii, 30

Comines, i, 350

Communism, primitive, and ethics, i, 93

in the Reformation, i, 418, 425

Comparison of creeds, effect of, i, 44,

135, 198
Comte, Auguste, ii, 405, 467, 46S, 479,

483 sq.

— Charles, ii, 46S ; cited, ii, 2S1 n.
Comtism, ii, 405, 483 sq.

Conches. See William

Concordat, Napoleon's, ii. 293

Condillac, ii, 235, 201, 205, 459

Condoreet, ii. 227. 243, 274, 285, 46S

Confucianism, ii, 111,494

Confucius, i, 82 sq.; ii, 111

Connor, ii, 115

Conrad, Joseph, ii, 451

the Inquisitor, i. 305 n.

of Waldhausen, i. 115

Conservatism, savage, i, 22 ; chiefs and,
i. 4 1 ; and interaction of commu-
nities, i, 44 ; and economics, i, 64 ;
of Confucius and Lao Tsze, i, 84 ; of
Romans, i. 203

Constance. Council of, i, 366, 417

Constans, i, 2 10 n.

Constant, P., i, :'.! ; ii, 4 12, 470 n.

Constantine, i. 233

Copronymus, i, 281

Constantius, i, 23!. 2 ID n.

Conway, M. D., ii, 402, 4 13 m/., 153 h.,
151

— cited, i, 220 ;;.: ii, 3S4 n.

V. C.
e, Mi.-

Conp,

.1. (

irnhert, ii

, 2*0 n.

\. M.. i. 395

.. ii, 201
01

, 33 sq.

125 /:

510

INDEX

Copernicus, i, 441, 456, 457, 477 n.\ ii,

32, 41 sq., 47
Coping, John, ii, 5
Coquereau, ii, 291
Coquerel. ii, 404
Coras, i, 393
Corelli. Miss, ii, 451
Corneille, i, 2 ; ii, 122
Cornelius Agrippa, i, 402
Cornford, P. M., i, 13, 139
Cornill, i, 112
Cornutus, i, 191
Corodi, ii, 432

Corporate culture, i, 122-23, 139
Cosimo dei Medici, i, 372
Cosmas Indicopleustes, i, 241
Cosmology, ancient, i, 80, 118, 125
Cotta, i, 203

Cotterill, J. M., i, 238 n.
Counter-Reformation, the, ii, 56
Cousin, i, 313, 321 n.; ii, 52 n., 124 n.,

479
Coward, ii, 152, 166
Cowell, Professor, cited, i, 264
Cowper, ii, 207
Craig, ii, 116, 150 n.
Craik, cited, ii, 149 n.
Cramer, ii, 418
Cranmer, i, 459
Crates, in Campasjie, ii, 3
Creation, doctrine of, i, 118
Creator-Gods, i, 62, 90, 182
Credulity, evolution of, i, 91 sq.
Cremonini, ii, 57, 63 n.
Crequi, Madame de, ii, 223 n.
Croce, on Vico, ii, 366 sq.
Cromwell, i, 206 «.; ii, 73, 78
Crotus, i, 434, 435
Crousaz, cited, ii, 165
Cruelty, Christian and pagan, i, 172,

246 ; Moslem, i, 264
Crusades, effects of, i, 47 n., 295
Crusius, ii, 346
Cudworth, i, 4 ; ii, 87, 95, 101 n., 104,

149-50
Cuffelaer, ii, 258
Culverwel, ii, SO

Cumberland, i, 30 ; ii, 80, 103, 104
Cuper, Franz, ii, 136
Curnier, cited, ii. 210 n.
Curtius, E., cited, i, 127
Cuvier, ii, 449 n., 463, 464
Cybele, cult of, i, 64
Cynics, the, i, 183
Cyrano de Bergerac, ii, 123
Cyrenaics, the, i, 183
Cyril, i, 235, 239
Cyrus, i, 64, 65, 66
Czechowicz, ii, 37

D'AGUESSEAU, ii, 258

Daille, ii, 120

Daillon, ii, 138

D'Alba, ii, 372

D'Alembert, ii, 177, 235, 236 n., 258,

271 sq., 286, 372
Dalton, cited, i, 41 n.
Damilaville, ii, 267, 291
Damiron, ii, 480
Damon, i, 154
Dandolo, ii, 367
Dante, i, 324, 325 sq., 330 n.
Danton, ii, 279
Daoud, i, 101

Darboy, Archbishop, ii, 406
Dareios, i, 65, 66
D'Argens, ii, 225, 238, 242, 262
D'Argenson, ii, 223, 235 sq., 258, 281,

282 n., 286, 288 n.
Darigrand, ii, 291
"Dark Ages," the, i, 277 n.
Darmesteter, cited, i, 68
D'Arusmont, Madame, ii, 499
Darwin, C, ii, 207, 450, 464, 465, 466,

467

E., ii, 207, 464

Darwinism, early, ii, 365, 366
Daudet, ii, 442
Daumer, ii, 433
David, King, i, 101

of Dinant, i, 317, 333

Davides, i, 421 ; ii, 37
Davids, Rhys, cited, i, 55, 58
Davidson, J., ii, 453
Davies, J. C, ii, 201

Archbishop, ii, 98

Sir John, ii, 21

Davis, ii, 205

Deaf-mutes, beliefs of, i, 42

De Brosses, ii, 246, 250, 470

Decameron, The, i, 350 sq.

Decharme, i, 13. 127, 132

De Crousaz, ii, 237 n.

Deffand, Madame du, ii, 223 n.

Degeneration in religion, i,87,91s2.,243

D'Eichthal, ii, 440

Deification, i, 185, 208, 209

"Deism" and "deist," use of words, i,

4, 466 ; ii, 91

early Italian and French, i. 328

English, ii, 25, 28, 31, 69 sq.,

147 sq.

French, ii, 223 sq.

German, ii, 302 sq., 329 sq.

American, ii, 317 sq.

Scottish, ii, 182

"Z)«is/e," introduction of word, i, 1

Dekker. ii, 17

De la Chambre, ii, 226

De la Chapelle, ii, 226

INDEX

511

Delamare, cited, ii, 141

Delambre, ii, -251

De la Serre. ii. -225. 226, 23S

Deleyre. ii. 230

Delisle de Sales, ii. 212, 200

Delmedigo, E. and J. S., i, 370

De Lolme, ii. 200

De Longue. L. P., ii. 238

Delphi, oracle of. i, 135, 1SG

De Maillet. ii, 239, 262 sq.

Demeter, i. 153

Demetrius Phalereus, i, 1S3

Poliorketes, i. 186

Democracy and freethought, i, 151.

155, 160. 167 ; ii, 200. 277 sq., 2S2 sq.
Demokritos. i, 136, 157 sq., 181
Demonax. i, 100
Denk, i. 436
Denman, Lord. ii. 305
Denmark, culture history of, ii. 354 sq.,

457
Denyse, ii. 215

D'Epinav, Madame, ii, 223 n.
De Prades, ii, 224, 230, 269 sq.
De Roches, ii, 234 n.
Dersdon, ii, 88
Descartes, i, 470 ; ii, 36, 64 sq., 72, 73,

121, 133, 134. 150
Descentede Saint Paul aux Enfers, i, 326
Desdouits, Professor, ii, 40 sq.
Desforges, ii. 201
Des Fourneilles, ii, 104
Desgabets, ii, 128
Deshoulieres, Madame, ii, 142
Deslandes, i. 7, 236, 237, 23S ; ii, 214, 225
Desmoulins, ii, 254
Destutt de Tracy, ii, 254
De Thou, i. 4 32 n.
Deukalion, i. 173
Deurh iff. ii. L38
Dens ex Machina, i, 163
Devienne. i . 477
I »e Villars, ii, 125
D'Holbach, ii, TT, 221. 242-13, 245, 210,

253, 271 •'/•. 2-5. 303
Diagoras. i, 130 n., 150
Dick, ii, 463 n.
Dickens, ii, 151
Dickinson. T. L., cited, i, 100
Diderot, ii, 218. 226, 220, 217. 248,

2 10. 251, 250. 261, 261, 266 n..

267 '/.. 2-5 sq.. 364. 37

200 n.\ ii. 100. 221, 223 u
Dikai irclios, i, 1-1
Dill. Sir S., i. 216 n.
Dillon. Dr.. cited, i. 1 12, 1 l:
Diodoros, cite rl. i, 71, 72
1 o f:i:cs of Apollonia, i. 13S n.. 151
Paertius. i, 138 n., 111.1 15, 183
the Iiabvlonian, i. 181 n.

cited, i,

i78

115

Diogenes the Peripatetic, i. 188
Dionysios. the younger, i, 175, 176

the Areopagite. i, 220 n.

Dionysos, i, 125, 134, 145, 164

Diopeitb.es, i, 154

Dippel. J. Conrad, ii, 304

1 lissent, English, and Liberalism, ii, 326

Dissenters' Chapels Act, ii, 334

Divination, Hebrew, i, 90

Dixon, Prof., cited, ii, 492 sq.

Doddridge, ii. 173

Dodwell, H., senr., ii, 153

H., junr., ii, 170

W., cited, ii, 101

Dolcino, i, 337

Dolet, i, 21, 380. 3S3, 385 sq.

D'Olivet, ii, 145

Dollinger, i. 331 n.

Dominic, St., i, 333. 340

Dominicans, i, 333, 334, 335 ; ii, 43

Domitian, i, 214

Domitius, i, 206 n.

Donatists, the, i, 232

Dooman. ii. 403

Dostoyevsky, ii, 457

Douglas, S. A., ii, 419

Douglass, Frederick, ii, 419

Dove, Dr. John, ii, 21, 79

J., ii, 201

Drama, freethought in, i, 133, 14S, 161,

302 ; Elizabethan, ii, 16 ; Spanish,

ii, 39
Draper, i, 13 ; ii. 469
Drews, A., i, 13. 168
Driver, Canon, ii, 433, 434 n.; cited, i,

105, 106. 112 _
Droz, cited, ii. 275
Drummond, 11.. ii, 403
Drunkenness, Protestant, i, 455
Drvden, ii, 90 n.. 03 sq., 100
Dualism, i. 68, 151. 174. 227, 255, 280
Du Barry, Madame de, ii, 236
Dubois, Dr., ii, 461 n.
Duchatel, Bishop, i, 3S3, 3S4, 387
Du Chatelet, Marquise, ii, 230
Ducket, ii, 167
Duclos, ii. 215. 258, 291
Dudgeon, ii. 184, 201
Duels, veto on, i, 283 n.
Dujardin, i, 108
Dulaurens, ii, 237 n.
Dumarsais. ii, 238, 243, 248, 272
Dunbar, \V., quoted, ii. 183
Duni, i i, 367
Dunlop, P.. cited, ii. 172

Mrs., ii. 275 n.
Duns Scot us. i. 336, 350
Du Pin, ii. Ill
Dupuis, ii, 271, 101
Durand, i, 360

512

INDEX

Durkheim, ii. 4G9
Duruy, ii, 227 n., 406
Duvernet, ii, 222 n., 244, 290

Earthquakes, i, 27S

Eberhard, ii, 260 n., 315, 317

Ebionites, i, 225

Ecclesiastes, i, 114 sq., 207

"Eckhart, i, 362

Economic causation, i, 36, 41, 60, 71 sq.,
77, 87, 233 sq., 287 sq., 292 sq., 305-
306. 339, 311, 357. 377, 404 sq., 414,
423 sq., 427 sq.. 431 sq.; ii, 160, 171,
216

Ecphantos, i, 150

Edelmann, ii, 307 sq.

Edersheim, cited, i, 118

Edgeworth, Miss, ii, 451

Education and Protestantism, i, 436

in England in eighteenth century,

ii, 200

Edwards, T., cited, ii, 77-7S

Jonathan, ii, 438

John, ii, 98, 109, 110

Egypt, ancient, religion of, i, 69 sq.;
freethought in, i, 70 ; influence of
on Greece, i, 121, 129 ; influence of
on Gnosticism, i, 227 ; modern, i,
22, 274-75

Eichhom, ii, 423, 424, 431

Elcesaites, i, 227

Elcatic School, i, 136, 141 sq., 146 sq.

Elements, the four, i, 140

Eleusinian mysteries, i, 159

Elias, i, 334

Eliezer, Rabbi, i, 334

Elijah and Elisha, i, 102

Rabbi, ii, 489

Eliot. George, ii, 438, 439, 444, 451, 500

Elizabeth, Queen, ii, 4, 11

St., i, 305 n.

Ellis, C, ii, 98

Sir A. B., cited, i, 23, 25

W., cited, i, 23, 34

Elohim, i, 98 ; ii, 256

Elwall. ii, 162, 354

Emerson, ii, 100, 450, 453, 4SS

Emes, ii, 98

Emin, Khalif, i, 257

Emlyn, ii, 188

Empedokles, i, 153

Encyclopedic, ii, 234 sq., 258, 270

Engels, ii, 412

England, medieval, freethought in, i,
297-98, 312 sq.', torture in, 322 n.\
Tudor, freethought in, i, 453 sq.; ii,
1 sq.; Reformation in, i, 431 sq.; ii,
1 sq.; loth century, freethought in,
i, 393 sq.; 17th century, freethought
in, ii, 69 S^.; 18th century, free-

thought in, ii, 147 sq.; 19th century,
freethought in, ii, 386 sq., 431, 433

English influence on France, ii, 223,
250 ; on Germany, ii, 309, 311 sq.

Ennius, i, 151, 199 sq.

Enoch, Book of the Secrets of, i, 221

Enrique IV, i, 340

Ephesos, i, 124

Ephoros, i, 180

Epic, rise of, i, 126

Epicharmos, i. 152. 199

Epictetus, i, 189, 215, 392, 476

Epicureanism, i, 118, 181 sq., 200,
201 sq., 322, 325, 366 ; ii, 67, 143

Epicurus, i, 157, 181 sq., 186, 212

Erasmus, i, 370, 403, 406, 429, 440,
450, 461

Erastianism, ii, 71 n.

Eratosthenes, i, 188

Erdmann, cited, i, 314, 345

Erhard, ii, 346

Erigena. See John Scotus

Esoteric religion, i, 71, 87, 191

Esprit fort, use of term, i, 6

Essays and Reviews, ii, 325

Essenes, i, 14S

Essex, Earl of, ii, 2

Esteve, P., ii, 239

Estienne, i, 391. 473 n.

Ethical Societies, ii, 414

Ethics, progress in, i, 132, 1S4 ; ii, 34,
116, 343 ; of Chinese, i, 85; of Greeks,
i, 127, 133; of Hebrews, i. 104, 221; of
primitive peoples, i, 28, 93 : of Phoe-
nicians, i, SI ; of Romans, i, 215 ;
of Mexicans, i, 91 ; of early Chris-
tians, i, 220, 223, 244 ; of Moham-
med, i, 253

Etruscan religion, i, 197, 199, 200

Eucharist, doctrine of the, i, 2S6,
289 sq., 417-18, 420. 440

Euchite heresy, i, 280 n., 293

Euchdes, i, 149 n., 1S4

Eudemus, i, 138

Eudo, i. 295

Eugenius IV, i, 357

Euler, ii, 177, 310

Eunomians, i. 247

Euripides, i, 127 n., 148, 161 sq., 171,
199

Eusebius, i, 241, 431

Evans, Marian, ii. 43S, 439

Evanson, ii, 201-203, cited, 205

Evelyn, cited, ii, 168

Evemerism among Semites, i, 79-80,
102 ; among Greeks, i. 169, 185 ;
among Christians, i, 225 ; among
Romans, i, 199

Evemeros, i, 79, 184

Everlasting Gospel, the, i, 335 sq.

INDEX

513

Evolution theorv, i. 13S. 158 ; ii, 207

Ewald, ii, 431

Ewerbeck, ii, -133

Exeter, i. 408

Eye. S.. ii. 98

Ezel, i, 274

FABKICIUS, i, 11

Faguet, cited, ii, 442 )i.

Fairbanks, i, 137 n., 144 n.

Falkland, ii, 100

" Family of Love,'' ii, 4

Farel. i* 428

Farinata degli Uberti, i, 325

Farrar. A. S.. i. 14-15

cited, i. 308 »., 321 n.\ ii. 175

Fathers, the Christian, i, 215, 21G

Fatimids. the, i, 25G n.

Fauriel, ii. 400

Faxardo, ii. 375

Fave, La. ii, 44

Feargal, i. 282, 36S

Fear in religion, i. 44

Federation, i. 137

Fenelon. i. 303 ; ii, 120, 130, 142. 140,

213, 250, 252
Ferdinand, King, i, 340
Ferdinando II. Duke, ii, 305

III. ii. 371

Fergu>on. ii. 180

Ferini and Antiferini, ii, 307

Ferrand. Mdlle.', ii. 205

Ferrer, Francisco, ii, 502

Fcrri, ii, 4013

Fetishism, i, 25. 30

Feuerbach. ii. 474. 475 sq.

Fichte. ii. 315, 317 sq., 425, 471 sq.,

Fiji, unbelief in. i, 30 n., 43 ; religion

Filangieri. ii. 309

Finetti. ii. 307

Finlay. quoted, i, 278 n.

Finow. i. 38

Florentine), cited, i. 370

Firdausi. i. 202

Firniieus Mat emus, i, 233

Firrnin. ii. Ill

Fi~ch<-r. Kimo, quoted, ii, 00

F i-lier. Lidiop, ii. 1

Dr. L., quoted, i. 19
Fit/ :erald. i. 201
Flad.-. ii. 33
Flagellants, i. 330
Flaeder. civilization of, i, 2; early

freetlioutdit in. i, 295. 297
Flanb. rt. i. 1 10 ; ii. 1 12

Flft.rbrr. 11, 19

Yh-ury. ii. 215

Flint j'rofe-or, cited, ii, 35, 300n..399 n.
VOL. II

Florence, culture of, i, 325 sq., 407 ; ii,

305, 387
Florimond de Boemond, i, 479 sq.
Fliigel, i. 250 n.

Fogy's Weekly Journal, quoted, ii, 157

Fontane, cited, i, 50

Fontanier, ii, 122

Fontenelle, ii, 54, 130 n., 142-43, 227 n.,
235, 240, 250, 470

Food supply and religion, i, 94-5

Foote, G. \V.. ii, 400, 408

Forbes, Lord President, ii, 104, 1S5,
252

Forbonnais. ii, 245

Forchhammer, i, 171 )i

Forgiveness, ethic of. i. 221

Forgery, priestly, i, 72, 101, 230 n.,
243 "

Fotherby, Bishop, ii, 24

Foucher, ii, 25S

Founders, religious, i, 08

Fourier, ii, 404 n.

Fourth Gospel, ii. 425

Fowler. Dr., ii. 28, 30 n., 105, 111

Dr. Warde, i. 195-90, 200 n., 202,

204, 209

Fox, C. J., ii. 200

W. J., ii, 413

Foxe, i, 3. 395. 459

Fracastorio, i, 371 n.; ii, 403 n.

France, early freethought in, i, 291 sq.,
290 sq., 299 sq., 317 sq., 351 sq.;
Reformation in. i, 427 sq.; influence
of, on Germany, ii, 309,311; influence
of, on Italy, i, 351 n.; ii, 371 ; free-
thought in, i, 379 sq., 473 sq.; ii,
117 sq., 141 sq., 213 sq.,388 ; culture-
history of, i, 317 sq., 351 sq,, 379 sq.,
427 sq.. 473 sq.; ii, 420, 440 sq.

Francis, King, i, 383, 389, 427

of Assisi, i. 333

Franciscans, i. 333 sq., 339, 409

Franck. Sebastian, i, 442

Francklin. T., ii. 180, 203

Francois do Rues, i, 351

Franklin, B., ii. 381 sq., 384 n.

Fraticelli, the, i, 317. 337

Fraud in religion, i. 20 sq., 108, 109,
175. 230 n., 243, 250
! Fra/.rr. Sir J. G., i, 101 n., 471
J Frederick II, Ihnperor. i. 323. 324
- of Aragon, i, 339
- the Gnat, ii, 2 18 n., 201 n., 209.
287. 305, .11 1, 312 sq.
■ William, ii, 331, 342
IV, ii. 120
V, of Denmark, ii. 301

Free Church of Sent land , ii, 1 10 .-'</.

Frrrma n , cited . i . 20 1

Freemasonry, i. 358; ii, 300, 330

514

INDEX

" Free religious " societies, ii, 410, 413
Freeseekers, sect of, G
Free Spirit. See Brethren
"Freethinker," origin of word, i. 1, 4,

6 sq.; meaning of word, i, 4 sq.,

7 sq.

Freethinker, early journal, i, 7

Freethought, meaning of, i, 1 sq., 8 sq.;
and conduct, i, 17 sq.; continuity of,
i, 36 sg., 400 s?.; histories of, i, 10 sq.;
psychology of, i, 8 sq., 15, 39; resist-
ance to, i, 22 sq.; in religion, i, 36 n.;
primitive, i, 2G, 33 sq.; early Arab,
i, 112, 116; Babylonian, i, 62-65 ;
Chinese, i, 82 sq.; Christian, i, 218 sq.;
Egyptian, i, 69 sq.; Greek, i, 128 sq.;
Hebrew, i, 104, 111 sq.; Hindu, i,
49 sq.; in 4th and 5th centuries, i,
235 ; in medieval schools, i, 2S2,
307 sq.; in medieval England, i,
342 sq.; in the Eenaissance, i, 365 sq.;
in England in the 15th century, i,
393 sq.; in Tudor England, i, 458 sq.;
ii, i, sq.; in Austria, ii, 351 ; in
France in the 16th and 17th centuries,
i, 473 sq.; ii, 117 sq., 141 sq.; in
France in the 18th century, ii, 213
sq.; in France in the 19th century, ii,
404 sq.; in England in the 16th cen-
tury, ii, 1 sq.; in England in the 17th
century, ii, 69 sq.; in Englaud in the
18th century, ii, 147 sq.; in England
in the 19th century, ii, 392 sq.; in Ger-
manv, i. 361 sq., 434 sq.; ii. 294 sq..
388, 409 sq., 420 sq„ 448, 454 «7.; in
Holland, i, 398 sq.; ii, 132 sq., 352 sq.;
in Italy, i, 322 sq.; ii, 365 sq., 387,
454 ; in Spain and Portugal, i, 338 sq.,
470 sq.; ii, 372 sq.; in Switzerland,
ii, 378 sq.; in Scandinavia, ii, 354 sq.,
412 sq.; in the Slavonic States, ii,
362 sq.. 412 sq.; in South Africa, ii.
416 sq.; in South America, ii, 407;
in the United States, ii, 3S1 sq.; in
Catholic countries to-day, ii, 406 sq.;
in the Catholic Church, ii, 5 ; in
Oriental countries to-day. ii, 490 sq.;
Phoenician, i, 79. 80; Peruvian, i,
90; psychology of, i, 8 sq., 16 sq.;
Roman, i, 199 sq.; under Tslam, i.
248 sq., 272; in Persia, i, 273

Free-will, doctrine of. i, 8, 232, 254,
270; ii, 150 71.

Frei-geist, use of word, i, 6 ; ii, 301

Freke, ii, 114 n.

French Revolution, effect on English
freethought of, ii, 209, 386 sq.

Freret, ii, 241 n., 243, 215, 248. 289

Preron, ii, 258

Fresnoy, L. du. ii, 206

Freudenthal, i, 142
"Friends of God," i, 362
"Friends of Light," ii, 339
Frith, Mrs. I., ii, 43 n.
Froissart, i, 356
Fromman, ii, 298
Fronto, i, 236
Froude, i, 3 n.; ii, 448
Fry, ii, 106
Fuegians, i. 98
Fukuzawa, ii, 491, 493
Fuller, cited, ii, 22 n., 23 n.,

Andrew, ii, 210, 398

Furnival, F. J., cited, ii, 19

24

G ABLER, ii, 423, 424

Gabriele de Salo, i, 369

Gaetano of Siena, i, 369

Gaidi, ii, 221

Gainsford, ii, 11

Galen, i, 471

Galeotto Marcio, i, 369

Galiani, ii, 369, 371

Galileo, i, 377-78, 401, 456; ii, 42,

57 sq.,65
Galitzin, Prince von, ii, 286
Galton, cited, i, 31
Galvani, ii, 371
Gambetta, ii, 500
Ganganelli, ii, 369 sq., 371
Garasse, i, 480 n., 482 sq.; ii, 55. 56
Garat, ii, 280
Garbe, Prof., cited, i, 51
Garcilasso, cited, i, 90
Gardiner, cited, i, 396, 405 ; ii. 22, 23,

79
Garibaldi, ii, 500
Garlon, ii, 291

Gassendi, ii, 64, 65, 66 sq., 104, 138, 150
Gastrell, ii, 98
Gauchat, ii, 165, 226, 250 n.
Gaul, Christian, freethought in, i, 236 ;

vice in, i, 245
Gaultier, ii, 217
Gaunilo, i. 310
Gaussen, ii, 458
Gautama. See Buddha
Gautier, ii, 250 n.
Gazier, ii, 275 n., 292 n.
Gazzali, i, 259. 263. 266, 267, 270
Gebhardi, ii, 312
Gebhart, discussed, i, 409
Gebler, criticized, ii, 59
Geddes, Dr., ii, 431
Gegenbauer, Theophilus, ii, 295
Geijer, ii, 417
Gemistos Plethon, i, 371
Genard, ii, 291
Genesis, criticism of. i, 450; ii, 115,

463. Sec Pentateuch

INDEX

515

Genest, ii, 214

Geneva, thought in, i, 2, 446 ; ii, 379

Gennadios, i, 372

Genovesi, ii, 3G9

Gentilis, Yalentinus, i, 451, 453

Gentillet, i, 468

Geoflrin, Madame, ii, 223 »., 272 n.

Geoffroy d'Estissac, i, 381

Geographical causation, i, 134, 197

Geology, i, 371 ; ii, 206

George III. ii, 200

Georgios Trapezuntios, i, 372

Gerbert, i, 301 n.

Gerhard, Bishop, i. 291, 336 n.

Germany, Reformation in, i, 403 sq.;

freethought in. i. 361 sq., 434 sq.; ii,

294 sq., 388, 409 sq., 420 sq., 454 sq.
Gerson, i. 363, 417
Gervinus, ii, 15
Geryon, i, 185
Geulincx, ii, 13S
Gewissener, ii. 296
Ghailan of Damascus, i, 254
Ghibellines, i, 325
Ghillany, ii, 427, 432
Giannone, ii, 368, 369
Gibbon, i, 139, 178,204-205, 209,246%.,

262; ii, 229, 398, 399, 447, 468
Gibson. Bishop, ii, 159
Giddings, ii, 469
Gilbert, i, 456

— Claude, ii. 214, 237
Gildon, ii, 98, 16S
Gilman, Arthur, quoted, i, 260
Giorgio di Novara, i, 369
Giraldus Cambrensis, i, 310-311
Girard, i, 127, 131, 167
Gladiatorial games, i. 245
Gladstone, i, 202 n.; ii, 205-206. 255,

489
Glanvill, i, 3 ; ii, 102-106, 138
Glave, E. J., cited, i, 36
Glisson. ii, 103
Gnost icism, i. 191 . 225 sq.
Go, the chief, i, 39
Gobel, ii, 278

"Goddess of Reason,*' ii, 274, 278
God-idea, evolution of, i, 197
God-names, Semitic, i, 102
Godwin, ii, 445
Goethe, ii, 48. 317, 333 sq., 447, 161 ;

cited, ii. 309, 310, 323 n., 389
Goeze, ii, 317
Gogol, ii, 398
( loguet, 1 1 , 379
Golden Rule, i, 85, 137
Goldsmith, ii, 195
Goliards, i, 299, 326
Gomates, i, 67
Gomperz, i, 123

Goncourt, dc, ii, 442

Gouiondzki, i, 425

Good, Dr. T., ii, 87

Goodman, ii, 98

Gordon, T., ii, 201

Gorgias, i, 168

Gorky, ii, 457

Gorla?us, ii, 35

Gospels, freethought in, i, 218 sq.; order
of, ii, 425, 427-28

Gostwick, cited, ii, 165

Gottschalk, i, 283, 284 sq.

Gouge, R., ii, 89 n.

Gouvest, ii, 239

Graf, i, 108

Gramond, ii, 53

Granovsky, ii, 456

Grant, Sir A., i, 178 n.

General, ii, 408

R., cited, ii, 178

Grapius, ii, 259

Grassi, ii, 59

Gratz, i, 115

Gray, cited, ii, 195

Greece, freethought in, i, 120 sq.

modern, freethought in, ii, 498

Greef, de, ii, 469

Greek civilization, i, 120 sq., 192; reli-
gion, i, 100, 123 sq., 191 ; influence
in India, i, 56 ; influence on Jews,
i, 116 ; influence on Rome, i, 194,
200 sq.; influence on Saracens, i, 255

Green, J. R., cited, i, 404 n., 439, 460;
ii, 17, 200; criticized, ii, 42-43

Greene, ii, 6-7, 16

Greg, W. R., ii, 402, 439

Gregoire, Abbe, ii, 276, 292 u.

- Bishop, ii, 292
Gregorovius, cited, i, 374 n.
Gregory VII, i, 289, 294

- IX, i, 305, 323, 376

- XIII, i, 457
Greissing, ii. 298
Greville, ii, 45
Gnbaldo, i, 451, 453
Griffis, cited, ii, 492
Grimm, Jakob, cited, i. 39

M., cited, ii, 231 n., 240, 256 ».,

266, 267. 273. 275 n.. 368. 371, 374 n.
Gringoire, i, 381, 4 27
Gronvelle, ii, 280
Grosart, Dr., ii, 27
( Irosley, ii, 291
Grosse, ii. 298

Gro: stete, Robert, i, 320, 315
Grote, ii, 469, 485; quoted, i, 129-30,

133, 115, 169,
( irotius, i, 163 ;
< '■ riirt . Jacques,
( i ruppe, i , 42

182

70, 366

i, 142 sq.

516

INDEX

Guardati. i, 368
Gubernatis, ii, 454
Gueroult de Pival, ii, 241
Guoudeville. ii, 237
Guibert, ii, 291

de Nogent, i, 323

Guicciardini, i. 375
Guillaume de Lorris, ii, 351
Guiot, i, 300
Guirlando, i. 46S
Guizot, ii, 442 ; cited, i, 431
Gulick, cited, ii. 493-94
Gumplowicz. ii, 469
Gustavus Vasa, ii, 354

Til. ii, 360

Gutschmid, cited, i, 6S
Guyau, ii. 469
Guvon, Madame, ii, 146
Abbe, ii, 228

HADI, Khalif, i, 257

Haeckel. ii, 466

Hafiz, i, 266

Hagenbach, i, 13 ; ii, 311

Ha'hn, i, 13

Haigh, cited, i, 131, 133, 161 u., 163,

166
Hale. Sir M., ii, 101. 176
Hall, Bishop, ii, 74, 105

Joseph, ii, 162

Robert, ii. 451

Hallam, ii. 468 sq.; cited, i, 357. 369-70,

392 n., 461 ; ii. 52 n., 63 n., 80
Haller, Von, ii. 261, 310
Halley, ii, 151, 173, 178
Halvburton, ii, 181-82 ; cited, ii, 166 v...

168
Hamann, ii, 346
Hamilton, ii, 485 sq.
Hammurabi, i, 61
Hamond, ii, 5
Hampden. Dr., quoted, i. 229 n.. 307 n.,

308, 309, 312 n.

Richard, ii, 93

Hancock, ii, 98

Hanyfism, i. 249 sq.

Hanyfites, the, i, 219 u., 255

Hardy, ii. 451

Harnack, cited, i. 231 n.; criticized, i,

233 n.; ii, 436
Haroun Alraschid, i, 257
1 [arrington, ii, 78
Harriott, i. 156 ; ii, 9, 12-13
Harris, \\. 98
Harrison. F., i, 313 n.
Hartley, ii, 485
Hartmann, ii. 474
1 fartung, i. 166
Harvey, ii, 30, 66
Gabriel, ii, 7

Haruspices, i, 199

Hasan-al-Basri, i, 254

Haslam, ii, 395

Hassall, cited, ii, 197

Hassan, i, 266

Hatch, quoted, i, 174 n., 226 n.

Hattem, P. van, ii, 138

Haureau, i, 345 n.

Hausrath, cited, ii, 426

Havet, i, 107-8 ; ii, 440

Hawaii, freethought in, i, 38

Hawkins, B., quoted, ii, 448-49

Hawthorne, ii, 453

Hayitians, the, i, 256 n,

Havm, ii, 473

Haynes, E. S. P., i, 14, 288

Hazlitt, ii, 445, 446

Hcaly, John, cited, i, 3

Hebert, ii, 278

Hebrews, religion and ethics of, i, 97 sq.;

mythology of, i, 102 sq.; freethought

among, i, 111 sq.
Hegel, i, 12, 231 ; ii, 350, 470 n., 471 sq.,

475, 476, 477, 490
Heiberg, ii, 362
Heine, ii. 442. 454 sq., 474, 489; quoted,

ii, 328, 338, 345, 474
Heiric, i. 318 n.
Hekataios, i, 144, 147
Helchitsky. i, 418-19
Helena, i, 128

266, 285, 459 ; ii,
210. 243. 265 sq.,

314

Hell, theories of, i.

4. S. 77. 203
Helvetius. ii. 207

368, 459
Hemming, ii. 6
Henlev. ii. 453
Hennell. 0. C, ii. 402, 438
Hennequin, ii, 443
Henotheism, i. 50
Henry, the monk, i. 295

of Clairvaux, i. 297

IV, of France, i, 481 ;

| V, of England, i, 394

i VIII, i, 396, 427, 432. 45S

P. E., cited, i, 414. 445 n., 446.

449 n.
Hensel, i, 457
Herakleides, i. 145, 191
Herakleitos, i. 130, 13G, 14 I sq.
(author of De lucre dibilibus), i,

185
Herbert of Chcrburv. Lord, ii, 25, 69 sq.,

98
Herder, ii, 311, 33
Here, i, 124
Hermeias, i. 177
Hermippos, i, 155

i. 154 n.

Hermits, Hindu, i

345, 350, 468

INDEX

517

Hermogenes, i, 214
Hermotimos, i, 136

Herodotos, i, 35 »., -15, G7, 121, 125 n.,

147. 15G
Hesiod, i. SO. 125 .«/., 144
Hethorington, ii. 395
Hettner, :. 2G1 . 32G n.
Hctzer, i, 435
Hewley. Lady, ii, 1G0
Hexameter, origin of, i. 12G
Heyse, ii. I5G
Hey wood, Thomas, ii, 1G
Hibbert. Julian, ii. 272 n.
Hiekes. Dr.. ii. 1 L3
Hicksites. the, ii. 385
Hiero. i, 152
Hicrocles, i. 22G. 23S
Hierology, ii, 71, 102, 181
Hieronymos, i, 151 n.
Higginson. Colonel T. W., ii, 153
Higher Criticism, the, ii, 25G, 330
High Priests, i. Ill
Hiketas. Sec Lketas
Hildebrand, i, 294
Hillel, i, 117. 218

I [ilton. ii, G
Hincmar, i, 28 1
Hinduism, i, 48 •*'/.
Hinsdale, Mrs., ii. 381 n.

II ipparchia, i, 183 n.
Hipparchos, i. 188

] 1 ippias, i. 1G8

Hippo, i, 15G

Hippokrates, i, 1G9. 180. 171

Hitopadesa, the, i. 54

Hittites, i, 13G

Hobbo. ii. 28, G3, Gl. 71 sq., 90, 103,

L3t. 150 ».. 253. 255. 282, 380
ng, Prof., criticized, ii, 175
Holbach. Sec d'Holbach
1 lol berg, i i . 355 ■-"'/.
Flolcrott, ii, 1 15
Holdsworth, Dr., ii. 158
Holkot, Kobcrl . i, 33!
Holland. See Netherlands

- (!. .J., ii, 253
Holmes, O. \\'.. ii. 153
"' Holy," carls meaning of, i, 103
Holyoake, (1." .1., ii, 391 sq., 108
1 lome, 1 1 . Sic Kaincs

- John. ii. 1KG
Homer, i, 99- 100, 123, 1 15, 107
Homeric poems, i. 100, 120, 121, 12G

,sry., 135, 152, 1G1
Honduras, Preethought in, ii, 107
Hone, ii. 391

1 [orioriu - of Autun, i. 313
Hooker. i,391 ; ii.25; cited, i,3; ii,13, 1 1
Hooper, cited, i. :;. 159
Horace, i. 209, 215 ; ii, 33

Horrebow, ii. 355

Hosea, i, 101 sq.

Hosius, i, 420

1 lotinan. ii, 283

Houston, ii. .38,5. 393

i louteville. ii, 215

Howe, ii, 82, 91

1 low ells, ii, 453

llowiit, Dr., 31-2

Huard, ii, 210,249 n.

1 luarte, i, 471 sq.; ii. 5G

Huber, Marie, it, 233, 238, 219

Huet, ii, V26 si]., 131. 217, 250, 252

1 Lugo, Victor, ii. 442

Hull, John, ii, 21

Humanists. Creek, i, 147; German,
i, 403 ; Italian, i, 327 sq.

Hume, i, 204 ; ii, 10-11, G7, 102, 174.
178, 180-1, 205 n., 468, 484; cited,
ii, 195

Humiliati, i, 334

Humphrey of Gloucester, i, 39G

Hungary, thought in, i, 421; reforma-
tion in, i, 419 sq.

Hunt, Leigh, ii, 446, I 17

Hunter, J., cited, ii, 1G1

Hurst, Bishop, i, 5, 11 ; cited, ii, 294,
322, 333 n., 335

Huss. i, 308, 3G0, 3GG, 415 sq., 423

Hutcheson, P., ii, 183 sq., IN!)

Hutchinson, Mrs., cited, ii, 75, 79

J., ii, 150, 185

Roger, i, 458-59

1 [uttman, ii, 393 n.

Hutton. ii, 20G, 462

Huxley, ii, 171, 450, 464 sq., 466, 467 ;
cited, ii, 2G3

I Iuysinalis, ii, 113, 151

Hyde, ii, 257

J [ygiainon, i, 162 n.

1 Lyksos, the. i, 73

1 lypatia, i. 233

Iijn Ezra, i. 316

Ihn Gebriol, i. 31G
! ll.n Ivhaldun. i, 208, 271-72

1 bscn, i i . 157

Ichikawa, ii, 195 n.

Iconoclasm, savage, i, 21 ; Byzantine, i,
277 89 ; in the West, i, 282

Picas, doctrine of, i. I 17. 307 •■"/.

Idolatry, i, ('>:',, G5, G7 ; early opposition
to, i. 03; Christian opposition to, i,
225 : Christian, i, 225. -1 12, 277 sq.

Fgnell, ii, 1 18

Iketas, i, 150

llgen. ii, 131

Hive, J., ii, 200

Imberl .ii. 2N9

Imitfitia ( 'In isti, i, 3G3

518

INDEX

Immaculate Conception, i, 336
Immortality, belief in, i, 99, 100, 116-
17, 330 n.; savage ideas of, i, 33;
theories of, ii, 153 ; denial of, in
India, i, 53, 58 ; Hebrew, i, 109, 113,
117, 207; Greek, i, 187; Roman, i,
206, 207, 210 ; Christian, i, 224 ;
Arab, i, 253, 262; Italian, i, 322,
325, 369, 370, 376 ; Spanish, i, 339,
340 ; French, i, 361 ; ii, 119, 230 ;
Polish, i, 424 ; English, i, 458-59,
460 ; ii, 8, 76, 196 ; of animals, ii,
309, 316
Imperialism and freethought, ii, 171.

195
Impostors, the Three, i, 27, 323 sq., 339,

445
Incas, rationalistic, i, 90
Index Expurgatorius, i, 376, 412, 414,

479; ii, 58, 61, 63, 121, 218
India, freethought in, i, 49, 53, 55, 275 ;
magic in, i, 45 ; religious evolution
in, i, 48 sq., 92 ; ii, 496 sq.
Indra, cult of, i. 49
Indulgences, i, 406, 417
Industrialism, ii, 195 ; and freethought,

ii, 171, 195
Infanticide, Arab, i, 253
" Infidel," use of word, i, 1, 3, 8
"Infidelity," use of word, i, 1, 3, 4, 8 ;

ii, 96
Ingelo, ii, 86-87
Ingersoll, ii, 418, 419
Inglis, Sir R., ii, 61
Innocent II, i, 296

Ill, i, 299, 302

IV, i, 322

VIII, i, 372

Inquisition, the, i, 297. 299, 302, 305,
306, 322, 335 n., 337 sq., 350, 36S,
376, 387, 399, 409, 414, 423, 469, 475;
ii, 39, 40, 46, 48, 59, 146, 372 sq.
Institutions, power of, in religion, i,
36, 41, 59, 61 ; lack of rationalist, i,
36, 41
Intolerance, Greek, i, 152, 154, 159,
170 sq., 174. 184 ; Roman, i, 206, 213 ;
Christian, i, 172, 232 sq., 240. (See
Persecution.)
Intuitionism, ii, 341
Ionia, culture of, i, 123 sq., 135 sq., 180
Ireland, ancient, culture in, i, 283-84 ;
toleration in, ii, 172 ; Protestantism
in, i, 433; freethought in, ii, 188 sq.
Irenseus, i, 232
Iriarte, ii, 375
Isabella, i, 340-41
Isaiah, i, 63, 105, 107
Isenbiehl, ii, 329
Isis, cult of, i, 77

Islam, i, 248 sq.

Ismailites, the, i, 261, 266

Israel, relative freethought in, i, 104 sq.

Ista, ii, 376

Italy, freethought in, i, 3, 322 sq.,
365 sq.] ii, 365 sq., 387, 454; influ-
ence of, on Europe, i, 466 sq.; refor-
mation in, i, 407 sq.

Iyeyasu, ii, 495

JAAFER, i, 257
Jabarites, the, i, 255
Jacob, i, 102
Jacobeos, the, ii, 377
Jacobi, ii, 333 n., 489
Jacques de Bourgogne, i, 447
Jahedians, the, i, 266 n.

Jahn, ii, 351

Jainism, i, 57 ; ii, 497

Jamblichos, i, 235

James, Epistle of, i, 224

James I. of England, ii, 4 n., 19, 21 sq.

James, Prof. W., i, 16 n.

Henry, ii, 453

Jami, i, 266

Jamin, ii, 252

Jannes, P. de la, ii, 291

Jansenists, ii, 121, 125, 129, 213, 216,
227, 269, 277

Japan, freethought in, ii, 490 sq.; re-
form in, i, 22

Jean d'Olive, i, 344

le Clopinel, i, 351

de Caturce, i, 386

de Boysonne. i, 386

Jeanne d'Arc, i, 395

Jeannin, i, 481

Jefferies, R., ii. 452

Jefferson, ii, 382, 385

Jeffrey, ii, 386

Jehovah. See Yahweh

Jenghiz Khan, i, 260

Jeremiah, 1, 104

Jerome, St., i, 240

Jerome of Prague, i, 417, 423

Jerusalem, J.F. W., ii, 308

the Younger, 309 n.

Jesuits, i, 421, 422, 469 ; ii, 2, 32, 58 n.,
60, 65, 121, 125, 143, 145, 227, 236,
245, 251, 277

Jesus, i, 21 ; the Pauline, i, 219; bio-
graphy and teachings of, i, 220-21 ;
horoscope of, i, 327 n.

Jevons, P.B., criticized, i, 45

Jewel, Bp., cited, i. 3

Jews in Middle Ages, i, 302, 315 sq.,
379: persecutions of, i, 342; modern,
ii, 489 sq.

Joachim, Abbot, i, 335

Job, i, 111 sq., 242

INDEX

o

L9

Joel, i. 10G

John the Scot, i. 283 sq., 308, 309 ; ii,
488

of Baeonthorpe, i, 346 n.

of Gaunt, i, 349

of Jandun, i. 359

of Parma, i, 336

of Salisbury, i, 310, 314, 315, 376

Pannonicus, i, 419

Pirnensis, i. 423

■ Sobieski. ii. 363

of Wesel, i. 406

Wessel, i. 406

Zapoyla, i. 420

Zimisees. Emperor, i, 281

Pope, XII. i. 294

Pope, XXI. i, 377 n.

Pope, XXIII, i, 417

Johnston, Sir H. H., cited, i, 276
Johnstone, John, ii, 183
Joinville, i. 317. 356

Jonas al Aswari, i. 254

Jonson, Bun. ii, 16, 20; cited, i, 3, 6;

ii, 21
Joseph, myth of. i. 102
Joseph II. 'ii. 315. 351. 360
Joshua, i. 102
Jouffroy. ii. 468, 479
Journalism, freethinking, ii, 400. 407,

408, 111. 419
Jousse, ii. 291
Jovinian. i, 239
Jowett. cited, i
Juan de Parata
"Juan di Posos
Judas, i. 172 n.
Julian, i, 1S9. 217. 238
" Julianites," i. -159
Julius III. i. 411
Junod, 11. A., i. 25. 31, 34
Jurieu. ii. 140. 282
Justinian, i. 2 10 ».. 255
Justin Mart vr. i. 236, 24 1
Juvenal, i. lis. -210. 223

KA'AHA, the, i. 248
Kadarites, i. 251, 270
Kadesh, i. 103

" . freethought among, 39
Kafirs of Hindu Kush, i, 40
Kahnis, cited, ii, 300 n., 306, 308, 311,

421 n.
K aires, ii, 498
Kai cr, ii. 12 1
Kn am, the, i. 259
Kali eh, ii. 133
K.in:,-. L'.nl. ii. 1^0, 207
Kant, ii. 31 1. 331. 33,3. 337 sq., 458,

tGs. 171 '/.. 175 ; cited, ii, 330 n.
Kanti tnir, ii. 361

229-30
ida. i. 339
ii, 214. 352

Kantsa, i, 52
Kapila, i, 52

Karaites, i, 315

Karians, i, 124

Karma, doctrine of, i, 56

Karmathians, the, i, 260

Earn cades, i, 187, 200

Kasimirski, i, 249 u.

Kautsky, i, 416 ?;.

Keane, cited, i, 95

Keats, ii, 445

Keener, Bishop, ii, 419

Kenrick, ii, 415

Kepler, i, 263, 456; ii, 43

Kerberos, i. 185

Kctt, ii, 5, 7 n.

Ketzer, origin of word, i, 292

Kharejites, the, i, 254

Kharvakas, the, i, 51, 53

Kidd, B., ii, 404

Kidder, ii, 93

Kiellgren, ii, 360

Kielmeyer, ii, 464 n.

Kierkegaard, ii, 457

Kindi, Al, i, 267

Kindy, Al, i, 258

King and Hall, cited, i, 74-75

King. Archbishop, ii, 150, 154

Kings, deification of, i, 185, 208, 209

Kingslev, Miss, on fetishism, i, 25

— Charles, ii, 489
Kipling, ii, 453
Kirke, Edward, cited, ii, 2
Kirkup, cited, ii, 395 n.
Kleist, ii. 454
Klitomachos, i, 187
Knaggs, ii, 98
Knight, ii. 185
Knutzen, Matthias, ii, 296 sq., 297 n.

Martin, ii. 307

Koerbagh, ii. 36

Kohclcth, i, 10!), 114 sq.

Koran, the, i. 248 n., 249 sq.

Korn, ii. 432

Kortholt, i. 324 ; ii, 297

Krako, Rolf, i, 40

K i'a linos, i. 157

Kraus, ii, 317

Krause, E., cited, ii, 207

Kriezanitch, ii, 36 1

Krishna myth , i. 56

Kritias, i. 160, 171

Krochinal, ii. 190

Kronos, i. 125

K ropf, ci ted, i , '■'>'■) ii.

K rug. ii. 42 1

Ktesiloehos, i. 167 n.

Kueiien, i. 106. 250. 251 »..

K lima rila . i, 53

Kurtz, eiled, ii. 296, 330 n.

il. 133

520

INDEX

Kurz, cited, ii, 329 11.
Kuvper, ii, 130
Kyd, ii, 12, 1G

LA BARRE, ii, 230

Labitte, cited, i, 483 ii.

La Bletterie, ii, 257, 289

Labouderie, i, 478

Labour churches, ii, 414

La Bruyere, ii, 142, 143 sq.; cited, i,

47 n.
Lachares, i, 186
Lacordaire, ii, 482
Lactantius, i, 215, 225, 235, 241
Lafayette, ii, 227, 283
Lafitau, cited, i, 30
La Fontaine, ii, 142
Lafuente, ii, 39
Lagrange, ii, 177, 254
La Harpe, ii, 217, 290
Laing, cited, ii, 410
Lalande, i, 11 ; ii, 254
Lamarck, ii, 207, 2G3, 4G4
Lamartme, ii, 442
Lamb, C, ii, 445 sq.
Lambert, Francois, i, 437
Lamennais, ii, 480 sq.
La Mettrie, ii, 194, 239, 260 sq., 313
Lami, ii, 122, 141 n., 214
La Mothe lc Vayer, i, 483 ; ii, 117,

118 sq.
Landau, cited, i, 350 n.
Lane, cited, i, 22, 275

M. A., i, 277 7i.

Laney, Bishop, ii, 90

Lang, A., criticized, i, 44 n, 90, 93, 94,

98, 99; cited, i, 37
Lange, i, 10, 178, 180; ii, G4, 148 n.,

175, 201 sq., 2GS, 297 n., 311, 4G0 n.
Langland, i, 348

Languedoc, civilization in, i, 299 sq.
Lanjuinais, ii, 290
Lanson, cited, i, 354 ; ii, 124, 144,

217 ii., 230 n.
Lao-Tsze, i, 82, 84 sq.
La Peyrere, ii, 19G sq.
Laplace, i, 181 ; ii. 177, 254, 274, 458
La Placette, ii, 120
La Primaudayo, ii, G
Lardncr, ii, 201-202
La Pochette, ii. 229
Larroquc, ii, 440
Lassen, ii, 298
Lasson. Dr., cited, i, 3G3
Latimer, ii, 1
Latini, Brunetto, i, 32G
Latitudinarians, i, 4G9 ; ii, 115
Lau. ii, 305
Laukhard, ii, 311
Lavater, ii, 331

Lavergne, Leonce de, cited, ii, 276
Law, William, ii, 110, 1G8, 173 n., 179
Lawrence, W., ii, 445 n., 461 sq.
Lea, H. C, cited, i, 298, 305 n., 306,

357
Le Breton, ii. 270 n.
Lechler, i, 13 ; ii, 28
Lecky, i, 13-14; ii, 402; quoted, i,

318 n., 392 n.; ii, 18, 19, 172, 209 n.,

254
Le Clerc, i, 464 ; ii, 75, 97, 116 n., 137,

150
Leconte de Lisle, ii, 443, 453
Lecount, ii, 395
Le Dantec, cited, ii. 125 ii.
Lee, Dr.. ii. 466

Sir Sidney, ii, 71 n.

Leechman, ii, 185

Leenhof, ii, 352

Lefevre, i, 380. 428, 429

Legate, ii, 21. 23

Legge, Dr.. cited, i, 82, 83, 85

Leibnitz, i, 390 n.; ii, 29, 150, 174, 175,

264, 298 sq., 309, 337
Leicester. Lollardry in, i, 349
Leland, ii, 1G8, 170, 197
Lemaitre, ii, 443
Le Monnier, ii, 178
Lenglet du Fresnoy, ii, 2G2, 290
Lenient, C, cited, i, 299, 332 «., 353
Lennstrand, ii, 418
Lenormant, cited, i, G8 n.
Leo the Armenian, i, 280

the Isaurian, i, 255, 277-78

X, Pope, i, 377

Leonardo da Vinci, i, 370 ; ii, 4G3
Leopardi. ii. 387, 454
Leopold II of Tuscany, ii. 371
Leslie, C, ii, 97. 154 «., 269

Prof., ii, 458 sq.

Lessing, i, 328, 471 ; ii. 229. 309 n., 315,

323 sq., 338, 344, 351, 425
Le Tcllicr, ii. 142
Letourneau, ii, 469
Le Trosne, ii, 291
Leufstcdt, ii, 418
Leukippos, i. 13G, 157
Leukothea, i, 143
Levallois, cited, ii, 143 n.
Levellers, the, ii, 77
Levesque. See Burigny and Pouilly
Levi ben Gershom, i, 317

David, ii, 49 n.

Levites, origin of, i, 45, 111
Levy, A., cited, ii. 476
Levy-Bruhl, ii. 483 n.
Lewes, G. H., ii, 33G, 403, 450

John, ii, 5

L'Hopital, i, 391

Libanius, i, 215 ; quoted, i, 231

INDEX

521

Libertin, use of word, i, 2

Libertini. or " libertines," use of word,

i, 2. 445, 153, 159, 182; tenets of, i,

445 >'v.
Libraries, public, i, 208 n.
Lichtenstein, cited, i, 35
Lidgould, ii. 98
Liebkneeht, ii. 411
Lieh-Tsze, i. SG

Lightfoot, Bishop, cited, i, 148, 223
Lilienfeld. ii. 409
Lilja. ii. : LS
Li Hie. cited, i. 55 n.
Lilly. :. 572 ; ii. 2 sq., 11, 1G
Lincoln, President, ii, 410
Linguet, ii. 252, 2'JO
Lipsius, i. 393
Liszinski, ii. 3G2-63
Littre. cited, i. 355. 356
Livy. i, 19G. 19S. 200. 209
Llorente. i. 342 n.
Loi eek, i . 1G5

Localization of Gods, i, 40 sq.
I. . :ke, ii. 98, 10G, 107 sq.. 129, 130. 138.

147. 150 n., 174, 300 ; cited, ii,

154-55. 182
Lodge, ii. 1G
Loescher, ii. 29S

1. . -. the, i, Si. 130. 174 ; ii. 137
Lokavata, i. 53
Lollards, i. 348. 394 sq., 40G
Long, G., ii. 4G9 ; cited, i, 20G u.
Longrais, ii, 244
Lope de Vega, ii. 39
Lord's Prayer, the. i, 222-23
Lorenzo dei Medici, i, 373
Louis. Saint, i. 317. 427 ; ii. 31 1

- Philippe, ii, 104 n.
— XI. i. 427, 428

XI 1. i, 127. 128

- XIV. ii. 123. 11G, 21G

- XV. ii. 2-7

..oun-bury. Prof., cited, i. 310-17
.owtkIcs. Miss, cited, i, 170
Si e A\ ■ iury
. i. ls.3, 1-S n., 1S9, 190. 211,
2 12. 238
jUeilius, i, 203 n.
jucretius, i. 1-2 s3, 201 sq., 205; in-

aidovieus Vivos, i. 170 : ii, 0 1
/ullv. 11. 17

aitbanlt, Prof., ii. 100
/itb.r. i. :{i;(;. 105 100. ! 17, 121, 127,
i /., ! 19, 150, 154,
155 ; ii. 0 1
aitberu in in . mora i - of, ii . 29 1
.iitzdb rgi-r, n . Y-'t-'i
aiz ic. ii, 191. 2'',] u.
. ii, 152

Lydgate, cited, i, 397
Lydia, civilization in, i, 13G
Lyell, ii, 449
Lyons, ii, 15G n.
Lysimachos, i, 183 n.
Lyttleton, ii, 173

MA' AVI, i. 201

Mabad al Jhoni. i, 254

Mablv. ii, 254, 284, 290

Macaulay, ii, 395. 449, 469; cited, i,

47 ;:.: ii, 152, 172. 204 n. ; criticized,

ii. 90 ii., 181 n., 449
McClellan. i, 233
McCosh, cited, ii, 184 n.
McCrie, i. 408 n.. 112 n.. 413
Macdonald, 1). P., i, 218 n., 250 n.,

257

Rev. J., cited, i. 30 n.

Machiavelli, i. 332, 373 sq.; ii, 0-7

Mclntvre, Prof., ii, 43 n.

Mackay, R. W., i, 12; ii, 402, 439;

quoted, i. 137 »., 147 n., 227 n.
Mackenzie, George, ii, 85, 181
Maclaurin, ii. 178
Macolano, ii, Gl n.
Macrobius, i, 240
Madhavaehara, i, 54
Madison, ii, 385
Magi, i, 0G, G7, 148
Magian religion, i, OG sq.
Magic, Savage, i, 35 ; Christian, i, 242,

2-7; and religion, i. 15. 10. 401; in

Middle Ages, i, 320
Magna Graecia, culture of. i, 151
Magyars, the, i, 280 n.
Mababbarata, the. i. 59
Mahafl'v, quoted, i. 120. 129. 132. 101.

172
Mahdi, Khalif. i. 257
Mahmoud, Sultan, i, 201. 202
Mai lict. ii, 200

Maimonides, i, 302. 315-10, 190
Maine de Iiiran, ii, 179
Mai.-tre. J. de. ii, 479
Maitland, i. 349 n.
Major, John, ii. 283
MakriM, i, 208
Malaehi. i, 115
Malebranche, ii. 1.28 sq.
Male>herbes, ii, 235 30, 25:). 2-9
Malberbe. ii. 122
.Mabl;, l. 202

Mallet On I 'an, ii. 279 -.7., 2-1 sq.
Malto Pnm. ii. 3f>2
Mail bus 1. 17',) ; 11. 105, 185
Mainnnn, 1. 257 58
Mandard. 11. 7
M 1: , villi:, ii, 157. 191, 200. 205. 0-0,

1118

522

INDEX

Manfred, i, 325

Manichseism, i, 228, 229, 280, 293

Mansel, ii, 485 sq.

Mansour, Khalif, i, 25G

Marcion and Marcionites, i, 227

Marcus Aurelius, i, 211, 215, 217

Mardouk-nadinakhe, i, 47

Marechal, Svlvain, i, 11 ; ii, 244, 289

Margat, ii, 290

Margherita de Trank, i, 337

Marguerite of Navarre, i, 2, 380, 386,
389, 428, 429

, the Second, i, 4S0

Maria Theresa, ii. 260, 351

Mariner, cited, i, 38

Marini, ii, 61

Mariolatry, i, 336

Marius, i, 206

Marlowe, ii, 4, 7 sq., 16

Marmontei, ii, 259 sq.; cited, 222 «.,
280 n.

Marot, i, 380, 38S

Marri, El, i, 261

Marriage, ancient, i, 243-44

Mars, i, 197

Marsiglio of Padua, i, 359 ; ii, 283

Marsilio Ficino, i, 30S, 370 n., 371, 372

Marsy, ii, 239, 290

Marten, ii, 78

Martha, Prof, i, 1S7

Martin Marprelate. ii, 7

Martin, Mrs. Emma, ii, 394

Henri, ii. 286 n.

St., i, 233 n.

Martineau, J., ii, 415 ; cited, ii, 135 n.

Harriet, ii, 448, 500

Martyrs, i, 243 n.

Marx, ii', 411, 412, 474, 489

Mary of Hungary, i, 420

Queen of England, ii, 1 n.

Mary and Jesus, myth of, i, 102

Mascagni, ii, 387

Masillon, ii, 142

Maspero, cited, i, 74

Mass, the. i, 287

Massey, cited, ii, 200

Massinger, ii, 17

Masson, Prof., ii, 105

Mastricht, ii, 133

Masuccio, i, 287 n., 3G8

Materialism, in India, i, 53, 54 ; in
Persia, i, 273 ; in Egypt, i, G9 ; in
Greece, i, 125, 153, 157 ; in Italy, i,
36S, 371 ; in England, ii, 72, 104,
148, 150, 166; in Prance, ii, 261 sq.

Mathematics, rise of, i, 149 ; English
in 18th century, ii, 177-78

Mathew, John, cited, i, 33

Matter, doctrines concerning, i,146n.,
150, 316

Matthew Paris, i, 305 n., 315 n.
Matthias of Janow, i, 415

Corvinus, i, 419

Maultrot, ii, 221

Maupassant, ii, 442

Maupeou, ii, 140

Maupertuis, ii, 262, 264

Maurice, i, 314 ; ii, 486, 488 ; cited, i,

247 7t.
Maury, L-F. A., cited, ii, 241 n.
j Mauvillon, ii, 315, 332
Maximillian II, ii, 32
Maximus Tyrius, i, 215
Maxwell, ii." 104
Maver, ii, 178

Mazarin, ii, 117 n,, 122, 123
Mazdeism, i, 65 sq.
Medes, the, i, 66

Medicine, Renaissance, i, 378, 382
Meister, ii, 242, 244, 246, 248, 266 n.,

269 n., 286 n.
Melanchthon, i, 401, 408 n., 436, 437,

441, 447, 449, 450, 454 ; ii, 32
Melissos, i, 146
Menander, i, 186
Mencius, i, 86
Mendelssohn, Moses, ii, 315, 323, 328 n.,

489
Mendicant Friars, i, 333
Menippus, i, 189
Menzel, cited, i. 362 n., 438, 455
Menzies, Dr., cited, 1, 82, 84, 98
Mercier dela Riviere, ii, 244
Meredith, George, ii, 451

E.P., ii. 439

Merimee, ii, 442

Merivale, criticized, i, 207

Merodach, i, 64

Merry, Dr. WWW, i, 167 ii.

Mersenne, i, 4, 73 n.. 324, 484

Meslier, ii, 219 sq., 225, 273. 285

Mesopotamia, cults of, i, 47 ; religious

evolution in, i, 61 sq.
Messianism, i, 117
Metempsychosis, i, 15S
Metrodoros, i, 161

(the second), i, 182

Meung, Jean de, i, 351

Mexico, religions of , i, S8 sq.

Mev, ii. 290

Meyer, E., cited, i, 64-5, 66-7, 68, 125 n.,

126, 131, 155 n.; criticized, i, 81

Louis, ii, 133

Mezentius, i, 40
Mezieres, i, 329
Mezzanotte, i, 370 n.
Michael, Emperor, i, 27S-79

Scotus, i, 324

Michaelis, ii, 320

Michelet, ii, 277, 442, 469 ; cited, i,

INDEX

523

157, 158.

14G

304, 327 n., 333, 355 n., 405, 451 sq.

460 n.; ii, 256
" Middle Ages," the, i, 277 n.
Middleton, i, 288, 472 ; ii,

190 sq.
Mikado-worship, ii, 494 sq.
Miletos. i, 124, 136, 137, 147
Militarism and thought, i, 203
Militz, i, 415

Mill, James, ii, 434 ; cited, i, 3G0
J. S., ii, 266, 395, 403, 408 n., 447,

450, 485, 4S6, 4S9
Millar. J., ii, 186
Miller, Hugh, ii, 463. 465
Millet, ii, 211, 254
Milman, ii, 438, 470 ; cited, i, 233, 245,

299 n., 31S. 362
Milner, Rev. J., ii. 109, 110
Milton, ii, 105, 106
Minnesingers, i, 361
Minoan civilization, i, 120, 121
Mino CeLo, i. 392
Minucius Felix, i. 245
Mirabaud, ii, 206, 242, 243, 246, 263
Mirabeau, the elder, ii, 244

the vouuger. ii, 254, 273 n.

Miracles, 'i, 204, 241 n.; ii, 95, ISO, 191,

338, 444, 472
Miriam, i. 102
MirzaAli, i. 273-74
Mithra.i, 67. 68. 223
Mithraism. i, 67, 68, 229, 240
Mitra. cult of, i, 48
Moabite Stone, i, 105 n.
Mocenigo, ii, 45, 46
Moffat, cited, i. 34, 35
Mohammed, i, 27, 243 sq.
Mohammedanism, freethought under.

248 sq.
Moktader, i. 260
Molech. i, 103
Moleschott, ii, 479 n.
Molesworth, ii. 189
Moliere, i, 2. 475 ; ii. 122-23
Molina, i, 456 ; ii. 125
Molinihts, ii, 146, 213
Molinos. ii, 116
Mollio, i, 411

Molvneux, i. 6; ii. 101. 183
Momm.-,en. i. 191 n., 195, 197, 19s
Monaldeschi, ii. 353 n .
Mouarehir-in and religion, i, 17. 125
Monasteries, di.-holution of, in England,

i. 158
Monboddo. Lord. ii. 207

: . mlt, i i , 25S
Monk, ii, 167
Monolatry, i, 57, 98, 249
Moriothci.-m, in Mesopotamia, i. 61 sq.;

Arab, i, 254 sq.; Persian, i. (',7 ; Egyp-

tian, i, 69; in China, i, 82-83 ; Mexi-
can, i, 89,90; Peruvian, i,90; alleged

primitive, i, 94 ; Hebrew, i, 97,

100, 118; Greek, i, 178, 181, 184;

Roman, i, 209 ; later Pagan, i, 240;

of Mohammed, i, 24S sq.
Monroe, ii, 385

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, ii, 164
Montaigne, i, 2, 393, 465, 474, 475 sq.;

ii, 18, 67, 95, 100, 139 n. , 268. 480, 481 ;

cited, i, 2
Montalembert, ii, 4S2 ; cited, i, 303 n.,

305 n.
Montesquieu, ii, 217 sq., 245, 257, 351,

366, 36S, 468
Monti, Pompeo de, i, 412

Abbate, ii, 371-72

Moore, G., ii, 451

Moors. See Arabs

Morabethin, ii, 269 n.

More, Sir T., i, 177, 396, 460-61 : ii, 1

Henry, ii, 65, 81, 88, 102, 104

Hannah, ii. 451

Morehead, ii, 450 n.

Morellet, ii, 254

Morelly, ii, 239

Morgan, Professor de, cited, ii. 13

Morgan, T., ii, 169

Sir T. C., ii, 462

Morin, i. 324

Morlev, Lord, i, 452 ; ii, 256. 401, 40S ;

cited, ii, 149 «., 228,261, 267, 272,

285 n., 2S6?i., 287 n., 311
Mornay, de, i. 2, 473 ; ii, 18
Moroccan Letters, ii, 331
Morris. Rev. J., ii, 109

Gouverneur, ii, 382 n.

Morton, Bishop, ii, 6, 13

Morus. ii, 320

Moschus. i. 80

Moses, i. 102

Mosheim. cited, i, 211, 226, 229 n., 151 ;

ii, 74, 303
Motadhed, i, 259
Motamid, i. 259
Motasim, i, 253
Motawakkel, i, 258
Motazilites, the, i,

328 n.
Motecallomin, the, i, 267, 270, 328 n.
Moxon, ii. 395
Mozdar, i, 257
Muggleton, ii. 78
Muir, Dr.. cited, i, 50
Midler, ,!., ii, 293

- K. ()., i, 121 n., 123, 131. 133
Max, ( ited, i, 51,

'■ized. i, IS n., 51, 9t

ii. 465
Munter, ii, 361

sq., 272, 316,

s. 115 ; eriti-
162 n., 165 ;

524

INDEX

Muratori, ii, 368

Murchison, ii, 467

Murimuth, i. 335

Murray, Prof. G., cited, i, 122, 135 n.,
164-65, 166, 171 n.

Musaeus, ii, 297

Musgrave, i, 165

Musset, de, ii, 442

Mutianus, i, 434 sq.

Myeenean civilization, i, 120

Mylius, ii, 324, 325

Mysteries, Eleusinian, i, 183 n.; Pytha-
gorean, i, 129; Bacchic, i, 200, 210

Mystery-plays, Christian, i, 302

Mysticism, i, 229 n.; Greek, i, 146,
189 ; Christian, i, 218, 335, 362 ;
Arab, i, 265. 267, 270

Mythology, ii, 246, 319, 424 sq., 470 sq.

NABONIDOS, i, 64

Nadaillac, cited, i, 88 n.

Naigeon, ii, 224, 242, 267, 272 sq.

Nanak, ii, 497

Nantes, revocation of Edict of, ii, 141-42

Napier, ii, 1S2

Naples, freethought in, i, 366-67 ; ii,

365 ; reaction in, ii, 387
Napoleon, ii, 292 sq., 3S7 sq., 458

Ill, ii, 406

Narrien, i, 150

Nashe, ii, 7, 16

Natalius, i, 230

Natura naturans, i, 318, 472 ; ii, 3, 207

"Naturalist," use of word, i, 1-2

Naude, Gabriel, i, 391 n.; ii, 117 sq.

Naylor, James, ii, 83

Neander, cited, i, 287, 28S, 446; ii, 431

Nebo, i, 47

Necker, ii, 275, 280

"Negative criticism," i, 10-17 ; ii, 197

Neo-Platonism, i, 76, 189, 191, 226

Nero, i, 213

Nestorians, the, i, 241

Netherlands, i, 398 sq., 414, 461 sq.;

ii, 33 sq., 132 sq., 352 sq., 407
Netzahualpilli, i, 90
Netzahuatlcoyotl, i, 41, 89
Nevill, ii, 78

" New Christians," the, i, 342
Newman, J. H., ii, 127 n., 170, 437,

470, 487

■ F. W., ii, 402, 408, 439

C. R., ii, 439 n.

New Testament, criticism of, ii, 148,

211, 219, 230, 245, 308, 318, 321, 327

sq., 423 sq.
Newton, ii, 61, 106, 110-11, 112 sq.,

150, 174, 178, 202-203, 457 sq.
New Zealand, freethought in, ii, 500 ;

superstition in, i, 46

Nichirenites, ii, 492
Nicholas I, Pope, i, 285

IV, Pope, i, 344

V, Pope, i, 367

the painter, i, 297 n.

of Amiens, i, 311

Nichols, Dr., ii, 98

James, ii. 22 n.

Nicholson, or Lambert, ii, 1

E. B., i, 220 71.

R. A., cited, i, 250, 251 n., 252

W., ii, 201

Nicolai, ii, 315 sq.

Nicolaus of Autricuria, i, 361, 368

of Cusa, i, 367, 368, 398 ; ii, 42,

47 n.
Nicoletto, Vernias, i, 369
Niebuhr, ii, 368
Nietzsche, ii, 474
Nifo, i, 369
Niketas. See Iketas
Nikias, i, 174
Nikon, ii, 363
Nilus, St., i, 392
Ninon de l'Enclos, ii, 223 n.
Niphus. See Nifo
Nirvana, doctrine of, i, 56
Nizolio, i, 469

Nominalism, i, 283, 307 sq., 358, 360
Nonconformity in England, ii, 160 sq.
Norris, John, ii, 104
Norway, freethought in, ii, 412, 457
Nourisson, ii, 255
Nous, doctrine of, i, 154
Noyes, ii, 453
Numa, i, 374

Numbers, doctrine of, i, 149, 228
Ny strom, ii, 418

Obscenity and religion, i, 357 sq.

Occam. See William

Ochino, i, 409, 453, 468 ; ii, 488

Ogilvic, cited, ii, 207

Oglethorpe, ii, 267 n.

Okeanos, i, 125

O'Keefe, ii, 201

Olavides, ii, 373

Oldeastle, i, 349

Oldfield, ii, 98

Old Testament, criticism of, i, 316 ; ii,

97, 131, 132, 134, 156, 167, 211, 256,

307, 318, 321, 359, 431 sq.
Olivetan, i, 379
Omar, the Khalif, i, 251
Omar Khayyam, i, 262 sq.
Omens, belief in, i, 174, 198, 199, 206
Oracles, i, 136, 157 sq., 174, 186
Orano, cited, i, 411 n.
Origen, i, 226, 236 sq.; ii, 488
Orleans, Duchessed', cited, ii, 145

INDEX

O'iO

Ormazd. See Ahura Mazda
Ormsby, cited, ii, 40
Orpheus, i, 125 n.
Orpkicism, i. MS n., 149
Ortlieb, i, 333

Orvieto, heresy at. i, 295, 299
Orzeehowski, i. 425
Osborn. Major, cited, i. 255 n.

Francis, cited, ii. 11

Ostrorog, i. 423
Overton, ii. 79
Ovid. i. 209 ; ii. 4G3

Pare. Gian, ii. 1

Pacini, ii. 371

Paris, university of. i, 329, 354,

361
Parker, Archdeacon, ii, 91

Theodore, ii. 438, 488

Prof., cited, ii, 494, 496 n.

Parkes, Prof., cited, ii, 42G
Parlement of Paris, ii, '287
Parmcnides, i, 13G, 14G
Parr, ii, 488
Parsees, the. i, 111, 272

355,

Owen, Rev. John, i, 11 : cited, i, 191 n., Parsons, ii. 9

301 ;:.. 328 ;:.. 352, 36S, 37 1 n., j Parthians, the. i, GS

377 n., 477 n., 479, 480 n., 483; ii, Parvisk, ii. 1G7

43 »., 52 ;:.. 125 n. Pascal, i. 178 ; ii. 85. 121. 124 sq., 251

Robert, ii. 395 sq., 399, 405 ! Paschasius Radbert, i, 28G

Sir Richard, ii. 465 I Pasiphae, i, 185

Oxford in 16th century, ii, 64 ; in ISth j Passerano, ii. 353

century, ii. 157 J Pastoret, ii. 21 1

Ozanam, cited, i, 230 n. '• Pastoris, i. 424

Patericke, i. 3S4-85

PACHACAMAC. i. 90 I Paterini, i, 29G. 322. 406

Padua, school of. i. 330. 379 '. Patin, Gui, i, 389 : ii. 57 n., GG. 117 sq.,

Paganism, suppression of, i. 234 ; late, j 132 n.

and Christianitv, i. 217 Professor, i. 131

Pagitt. ii, 79 | Patot, Tyssot de. ii. 21 1. 227

Paine, ii. 210 sq., 382 sq., 392, 393, 398, ' Pattison, Mark, i. 112, 452, 468 n.\ ii,

418. 45-!

Painting. Italian, i, 3G5. 370

Palaiphatos. i. 185

Paleario, i, 412

Palestrina, i. 4G9

Paley, ii. 210. 252; cited, ii. 207. 252

Palissot. ii. 25S

Palmaer. ii. 118

Palmer. Herbert, ii. 27

Prof., i, 248 n., 249 n., 250

Klihu. ii, 385

Panini. i. 53

Panko-mi.-m. i. 1 1 1

Panm adcus, i, 119

Panth'-i^m. medieval, i. 2. 2s5 : Indian,
i.4-m.: Babylonian, i, 62 ; Kgyptian,
i. 69, 7'i ; Chinese, i . SI: Creek, i,
130. 132. 137. 1 12. 11 1. 150, 162,
1-1 : Mo,, rim. i. 270; Jewim, i. 31G ;
flrrman. i. 333. 39-i : ii. 303. 30s ».,
32-i ; Roman, i. 209. 210 n.. 212 ;
i . >f> ; Snfi. i, 265. 266 :

. i . 31m Italian,

i. 37:1 ; ii. !9. 52. 63 ii.. 366 : in 1 he

N' h.-rl.i . i. 39- 99 : ii. 135. 13S ;

' ' >■ !.' v., . i. 101, 119; Kngli.-di, ii.

1 1- 19. 1G5 ■ S.- ,t'-li, .. 1 • :

Paolo (Oovio. j. :)7t n.

.'b.:. i. 29! Ih: powi r of.
i. -9-. 302 '/.; ho-tilitv to. i, 295.
312 . .. 322. 325. 331 ■•/.. I 19 ■,,/., 122,

126 n.. 127. 179
Paul, i. 219, 224. 21 1

of Samosata, i. 230

II, of Russia, ii, 365

II, Pope. i. 370

Ill, Pope, i. 3-2, 111; ii. 41

IV. Pope, i, 112

V. Pope. ii. 57

Herbert, ii. 166 n.

'auli. i. 397

Gregorius, i, 125

'aulicians, the. i. 2, 279 v,\, 291 sq.
309. 10C

'aulus. ii, 123. 121 sq.

'authier, cited, i. 83

'avlovsky. cited, ii. 156 n.

'azinany. i. 122

'ear .1 lishop. ii. 9

'easant wars, i, 106 n., 117, 119, 136

'- en, k. i. 391 sq.; ii. 1 1

'cdro II. i. 33s

- do Osma. i. 310

'eel. Spenki r, il. 102

'eele. ii. 0',

'eiree, n. 161

't-la iani in. i. 231 sq.. 277, 31 I

Vlagius, i. 229

'oil.;. m. Prof.. I. 200 II.

'••lleticr, ii. 122 ii.

'.-lli.-ii-r. i. 3-9

I i

526

INDEX

Pentateuch, criticism of, i, 316; ii, 131,
132, 137, 167, 197, 256, 423 sq.,
431 sq.

Pereira, i, 470

Pericles, i, 153 sq.

Perier, Madame, ii, 134

Perkins, W., ii, 74

Perrault, cited, ii, 120

Perrons, i, 13; cited, i, 2 n., 368 n.,
381 ; ii, 120 n., 123 n.

Perrin, i, 443

Persecution, primitive, i, 36 n.; Chris-
tian, i, 172, 232 sq., 240, 280, 291,
295, 296 sq., 302 sq., 337, 349, 385,
386, 387, 388, 410 sq., 419, 428 sq.;
ii, 1 sq., 22 sq., 83, 122, 141-42, 181,
188-90, 200, 214, 216, 222, 231, 233,
235, 274, 289 sq., 502 (see Inquisition) ;
Mohammedan, i, 257, 259, 261, 271 ;
Greek, i, 142, 152, 154, 159, 170 sq.,
193 ; Roman, i, 206, 207, 210, 216

Persia, religions of, i, 65 sq.; influence
of, on Hebrews, i, 110, 149 ; free-
thought in, i, 66, 265 ; culture-history
of, i, 148, 265, 272 sq.

Peru, ancient freethought in, i, 41, 90 ;
religion of, i, 88 ; modern freethought
in, ii, 407

Perugino, i, 370

Pessimism, i, 130

Pestalozzi, ii, 346 n.

Peter the Hermit, i, 295

the Great, ii, 364

of Alliaco, i, 345

de Brueys, i, 295

Martyr, i, 409

■ von Mastricht, ii, 133

of St. Cloud, i, 353

of Vaux, i, 298

Petit, Claude, ii, 122

Petrarch, i, 328 n., 329 sq.

Petrie, W. M. F., cited, i, 72, 75, 76 %.,
109

Petrobrussians, the, i, 295

Petronius, i, 211

Peucer, i, 457

Peyrat, ii, 440

Peyrere, ii, 132 sq.

Pfaff, ii, 298

Pfander, i, 166

Pfeiff, ii, 418

Pfeiffer, i, 457

Pheidias, i, 156

Pherekydes, i, 148

Philanthropic Institute, ii, 316, 321

Philip II, i, 341, 414, 472

Philips, A., i, 7

Philiskos, i, 200

Phillips, Stephen, quoted, ii, 53

Philo, i, 117, 118 «.; cited, 183 n., 223

Philolaos, i, 149, 150

Phoenicia, religious evolution in, i,

78 sq., 100 : freethought in, i, 79-80
Photinus, i, 231, 242
Photius, i, 278
Phrenology, ii, 398
Physiology, ii, 459 sq.
Pico della Mirandola, i, 371, 372-73,

440
Pierre Aureol, i, 359

d'Ailly, i, 327 n., 360-61

Piers Ploughman, Vision of, i, 348

Pietism, ii, 300 sq., 305

Pietro of Abano, i, 326, 376

Pighius, i, 439

Pilkington, Bishop, cited, ii, 13

Pindar, i, 128-29

Pinkerton, cited, i, 284

Pirnensis, i, 423

Pitt, the elder, ii, 169

the younger, ii, 205-206

Pius II, i, 367, 415

IV, i, 412

V, i, 412, 469

Place, Francis, ii, 395

Platner, ii, 346

Plato, i, 146, 147, 167, 168 sq., 174 sq.,

179, 226, 307 ; in Campaspe, ii, 3
Platonism, i, 226 sq., 371 sq.
Playfair, cited, ii, 177-78
Pliny, i, 188, 210, 212
Plotinus, i, 76, 226
Plutarch, i, 153, 155, 172 n., 191-92,

227 n.
Poe, ii, 453

Poetry, Greek, i, 126; Roman, i, 197,215
Poets, freethinking of, 499
Poland, culture-history of, i, 422 sq.;

ii, 37 sq., 362 sq.
Pole, Cardinal, i, 374 n.
Polignac, ii, 139, 215
Pollard, A. F., cited, i, 437
Pollock, Sir F., ii, 213 n.
Polybius, i, 191, 374 n.
Polynesians, the, i, 23, 34
Polytheism, i, 44 sq., 65, 70, 225;

Christian, i, 242
Pomare, i, 38
Pombal, ii, 377

Pompadour, Madame de, ii, 235
Pompeius, i, 206 n.
Pompignan, Lefranc de, ii, 258
Pomponazzi, i, 376 sq., 378
Pomponius Lcetus, i, 378
Poole, R. L., cited, i, 309, 359, 360 n.
Pope, ii, 149 «., 164-65, 190, 198, 232-

33, 259
Popham, ii, 10
Porphyry, i, 226, 238-39
Porteous, Bishop, cited, ii, 210

INDEX

527

Portugal, heresy in, i, 339 ; freethought
in, ii. 377 sj., 407

Porzios, i. 409 n.

Posidonius, i, 240

Positivism, ii. 4S3 sq.

Postell, 1. 38;), 473

Potapenko, ii. 457

Pott, Dr., ii. 31-2

Pougens, ii, 220

Pouilly, Levesque do, ii, 257

Poushkine. ii, 398

Powell. K. ]'... cited, ii. 135 n.; criti-
cized, ii, 136-37

Prof. Baden, ii, 463 sq.

Pragmatic Sanction, the, i, 427

Prat. Chaneellier du, i, 423

Praxeas, i. 230

Prayer, popular view of, i. 36; the
L ird's, i. 122 ; theories of, ii. ISO

Preaching, earlv, i, 217 n.

Predestination, "i. 231-32. 254,277, 2S5,
2SS, 446-47, 455-56, 462

Premoutval. ii. 239. 249

Presbyterians, the. ii. 1G0

Press Licensing Act, ii, 84, 99

Prideaux. ii. 98

Priestcraft, ancient, i, 26, 62, 65, 67. 70,
101. I'M

Priesthoods, evolution of, i, 60, 62, 68,
70. 72. 7G. S9, 134

Priestley, i. 193; ii, 179, 202, 209-10,
385, -113. 4S4

Pringle-Pattison, Prof. A. S., ii, 473,
475 n.

Printing, rise of , i. 386, 439

Proclus, i, 241

Prodigies, ancient belief in. i, 198. 204.
209

Prodikos, i, 168

Progress, i. 1 14 ; ii. 68

Prophecy, i, 106, 107

Prophets. Hebrew, i. 10 i sq., 215

Prostitution, religious, i. 62

Protagoras, i, 130. 157. 159

Protestantism in Italy, i, 408 sq.; in
England, i. 354 ; fortunes of, i, 3S9,
413. 120 .-■</., 12 1 sq., 432, 137, 1 10 sq.,
45) sq.. 462 sq.; ii, 32. 1 11-12; and
oceulti-in, i. 101 (see Reformation)

roudhon, ii, 277

rovonce, civilization of, i, 299 sq.

rovidence, popular view of, i. 36

snhns, the, i, 106

sanum I .oh us, i, 1 20

sychology, ii, 159 sq.

toletnv. i , 18s, 225 n.

uffei dorf, ii, 302. 366

ulci, i . 36S

, in it, freethou 'lit, in, i.

Piinjer, cited, ii, 266, 322
Purgatory, doctrine of, i, 287
Puritanism, ii, 20, 73, 75
Pusev, cited, ii, 175, 301, 304, 318 ».,

319, 322
Puy. Pishop of, ii, 226
Pyrrho, i, 181
Pyrrhonism, i, 190
Pvthagoras, i, 136, 141 n., 144, 14S sq.;

"ii, 463
Pythagoreanism, i, 14S sq.

Quakers, i, 270; ii, 83. 114

Quatraincs du Deiste, i, 481

Quosnay, ii, 244

Quetzalcoatl, i, 88

Quietism, ii. 146

Quinet, i, 132; ii, 371, 442, 179

PvABAN-US, i, 283, 287 n., 288
Rabelais, i, 381 sq., 388, 391, 456; ii,

118
Rabia, i, 265
Race-character, theories of, i, 65, 81,

121-23, 179, 194 sq., 248, 341, 362 n.,

363, 409, 413, 431
Racine, ii, 142
Rae, E., cited, i, 33
Raleigh, ii, 7 sq.
Ramessu III, i. 72
Ramsay, Chevalier de, ii, 213, 252

of Ochtertyre, cited, ii,183n.; ii, 1S7

W. M., cited, i, 125 n.

Ramus, i, 383 ; ii. 64

Ranchon, Abbe, ii, 225

Randall, ii, 23 n.

Ranke, ii, 469; cited, i, 405, 439 n.,

457 u.
Raoul de Houdan, i, 300
Rapin, i, 482 n.
Rappolt. ii, 297

Rashdall, Dr., cited, i, 313, 379
Rastus, i, 21

national Catechism, The, ii, 106-107
Rationalism and Rationalist, use of

terms, i, 5. 8; ii, 79, 1 If], 330
R Ltramnus, i, 28G
Raumer, K. von, ii, 109 n.
Rawley, ii, 12

Rawlinson, Canon, cited, i, 68
Ray, John, ii. 9s
Ravmond Bcrenger, i, 301
— of Sohoiidc, i, 399. l76
- Archbishop, of Toledo, i. 338
Ravnal. ii. 2 13, 251, 286 n.. 287, 288
Reade, \\ in wood, ii, 402 sq.
Realism, philosophic, i, 117, 307 sq.,

Reason, deification of. i. 215 ; ii . 27 1 sq.,
278 ; religious defence of, i, 283

528

INDEX

Reboulet, ii, 291

Recared, i, 338

Rechenberg, ii, 298

Reeve, John, ii, 78

Reformation, the, politically considered,
i,403sg.; in Britain, i, 431 sq., 458 sq.;
in France, i. 427 sq.; in Germany, i,
403.S7., 434 sq.; in Hungary, i, 419 sq.;
in Italy, i, 407 sq.; in the Nether-
lands, i, 414 ; in Poland, i, 422 sq.;
in Spain, i, 413 ; in Scandinavian
States, ii, 354 sq.

Reformers, anti-pagan, i, 234

Regis, ii, 128

Regnard, ii, 143

Reid, W. H., ii, 210

Reimarus, ii, 319, 327 n.

Reimmann, i, 11, 483 n.

Reinach, i, 120 11.

Reinhard, ii, 410

Reinhold, i, 457

Reiser, ii, 298

Religion and conquest, i, 44-46, 205,
251 ; psychology of, i, 26 sq.; of lower
races, influence of, i, 45, 93 ; and
sexual licence, i, 18 n., 103, 244, 292,
455 ; and self-interest, i. 113-14 ;
dehumanizing power of, i, 172-73

Remigius. i, 286

Remusat, i, 321 n.

Renaissance in Italy, freethought in, i,
365 sq.; in France, i, 379 sq.; in
England, i, 393 sq.

Renan, ii, 418, 429, 439, 440, 476; on
Semitic monotheism, i, 102 ; on
Roman freethought, i, 212 ; on Job,
i. 112 ; on Koheleth, i. 115 ; on
Mahometan conquest, i. 251 n.; on
Motazilism, i, 254 n.; on Gazzali, i,
267 n.; on medieval Jews. i. 316 ; on
Italian freethought, i, 326 ; on The
Tliree Rings, i, 328 n.; on Petrarch,
i, 329 ; on the Franciscans, i, 336

Renaud, cited, ii, 405

Renee. Princess, i, 411

Renouvicr. i, 121 n.

Reuchlin. i, 403. 406

Reu>s. ii. 423

Renter. II.. cited, i. 13, 283 n.

Revelation of the Monk of Evesham, i,
397

Reville, Dr. A., i, 89 n., 98

Revolution, French, ii, 255, 274 sq,,
386 •-*'/.; American, ii, 317

Rewandites, the, i, 256

Reynard the Fox, i. 301, 353, 361

Rheticus, i. 457

Richardson, cited, ii, 190

Richelieu, i. 126, !31 ; ii, 118, 119, 123

Richter, J. P., ii, 346, 454

Richter, J. A. L., ii, 432

Riddle, i, 14, 15

Riem, ii, 315

Rihoriho, i, 38

Rings, The Three, i, 32S

Ripiey, G., ii, 480 n.

Ritchie, cited, ii, 187

Ritual and ritualism, i, 29

Rivadeau, i, 393

Rivarol, ii, 275, 2S0 sq., 287; cited, ii,

215 n.
Roalfe, Matilda, ii, 394
Robertson, W., ii, 186, 468

Prof. Croom, cited, ii, 65 n.

Robespierre, ii, 254, 278
Robinet, ii, 240, 263, 265
Robins, S.. cited, i. 285, 318
Rocquain. ii, 227 n.
Rodwell, i, 249 n.
Rohde, cited, i. 99-100
Rolf Krake, i, 40
Romano, ii. 367

Roman religion, i, 194 sq., 207 sq.;
culture, i. 197 ; freethought, i, 199 sq.;
law. i, 215
Rome, papal, i. 294, 331
Romilly, ii. 286, 448

Ronsard. i. 390

Roos, i, 468

Roscelin, i. 2S9, 307 sq.

Rosenkranz. cited, ii. 149 n., 267-68

Rose, Roman de la. i, 351

Rossi. M. A. de, i. 379

Rousseau, J. B., ii, 222

J. J., ii. 227. 229 n.. 245, 254 sq.,

278. 285. 287, 288, 311, 338, 396, 481

Roustan. ii. 256

Royal Societv, i, 4 ; ii. 79. 155

Riidiger, ii. 312

Rudrauf, ii. 298

Ruffheacl. ii. 232-33

Ruge, ii. 474, 478

Rum Bahadur, i, 24

Rupp. ii, 410

Ru-kin. ii. 450

Russia, culture history of, ii. 363 sq.,
412 sq., 4 56 sq.

Rust. ii. 97

Rutebceuf, i. 300

Ruth. Bool: of. i. 1 17

Rutherford, i'i. 182

Rydberg, ii. 418

Ryssen. ii. 36 n.

Rvswyck, i, 399. 404

SABATIER, i, 344 71.
Sabbath, origin of. i
Sabcllius. i. 231
Sach, ii, 422
Sack, ii, 30S 11.

110-11

INDEX

529

Sacraments, Mexican, i. 88, 89

Sacred books, i, 42, 54. 92, 135. 193,
216. 250; ii. 176. See Old Testa-
ment and- New Testament

Sacrifices, causation of, i. 51. 94 .-■'/.;
early disbelief in, i. 41, 43, 52, 86,
109 ; human, i. 11. 12 n., 51. 63, SI,
82, 86. 88, 91, 99

Sadducees. i. 116

Sadi, i. 266

Saga, i, 463

Sahagun, i, 91

St. Bartholomew, massacre of. i, 391,
475

Sainte-Beuve. ii. 406, 443, 479 ; cited,
i. 479 ; ii, 123 n.

St. Cvres, Viscount, cited, ii, 117— IS

St. Evremond. ii. 34, 143. 225

St. Glain, ii. 141 n.

St. Hilaire, B.. cited, i. 58
Geoffroy, ii, 461

St. Simon, ii, 405

Saintsburv, cited, i. 352; ii. 281 n.

Saisset. i."l2; cited, ii, 442, 483

Saladin, i, 328

Salas, ii, 376

Salaville, ii, 273

Salazar, ii, 376

Salchi, ii, 250 n.. 380

Sale, i, 249 n.

Sales, Deslisle de, ii, 242

Sallier. ii, 257

Sallustius Philosophus, i, 119

Salvemini de Castillon. ii. 243

Salverte, ii, 468

Salvian, i, 236, 244. 245

Samaniego, ii, 374

Samaritans, i, 110 n.

Samoans, religion of , i, 37

Samoyedes. the. i, 33

Samson, i. 80, 102

Sanchez, i, 470, 474 sq.

Sanchoniathon, i, 79

Sand, George, ii, 442

Sanderson, Bishop, ii, 74

Sandys, J. E., i, 164. 165

Sankara, i. 53

Sankhya philosophy, i. 51

Saracen culture, i. 253 sq.; m Spain, i.
263 sq. (see Arabs)

Satan, i, 111. 113

Satire, medieval, i, 332, 353

Satow. Sir E., cited, ii. 495 n.

Saturnalia, the. i, 45

Saturninus, i, 227

Satyre Menippte, i. 131

Saul, i, 102

Saunderson, ii, 151

Savages, freethought among, i, 26.
33 ></.; religion of. i. 27, 29 sq.;

VOL. II

ethics of, i, 28 ; mental life of, i, 22 sq.

Savile, ii. 111

Saviour-Gods, i, 88

Savonarola, i, 370, 375. 407 *q.

Sayce, cited, i. 62. 64, 81

Sayous. i, 13

Sbinko, i, 416

Scaevola, i, 203 ».

Scaliger. cited, i, 468, 469 n.

Scandinavia, freethought in ancient, i,
39-40 ; in modern, ii, 355 sq.. 412 sq.,
457

Scaurus, i, 209

Sceptic. See Skeptic

Schade, ii, 315

Schaffle, ii, 469

Schechter, cited, i, 379

Schelling, ii, 349. 350, 454, 471

Scherer, E.. i, 108 ; ii, 254, 443

Schiller, ii, 336

Schism, the Great Papal, i, 331

Scioppius, ii, 49 sq,

Scipio Aemilianus, i, 201

Schlegel. A., ii. 349; quoted, i, 162

Schleiermacher, ii, 349, 350, 387. 409,
420 sq., 425

Schmidt. W. A., i. 12; cited, i. 192,
208 n., 213 n.

J. L., ii, 306

— — Julian, cited, ii, 324 n.

Scholastics, the, i, 283 sq., 307 sq.

Schoner, ii, 38

Schoone. i, 165

Schopenhauer, ii, 474, 475

Schopp, ii, 49 sq.

Schrader, i, 125

Schuckburgh, cited, i. 199

Schulz, ii. 330 sq.

Schiirer, i, 149

Schwartz, ii. 298

Schwegler, i, 194 n., 197 ; ii. 426

Schweinfurth, i, 31

Schweizer, cited, i, 40 n.

Science in ancient India, i, 57 ; in Baby-
lon, i, 62-63, 95. 122 ; in Greece, i,
137. 138, 143, 149, 160, 169. 179-80;
Christian contempt for, i, 241 ; Sara-
cen, i, 254, 258 n., 268 ; Provencal, i,
302; Spanish, i, 339 ; Renaissance, i,
371, 375. 377. 102 ; and the Reforma-
tion, i, 456 sq.; Bacon and, ii, 30;
rise of modern, ii, 41 sq., 56, 105,
260 sq.. 309, 457 sq.

philosophy in, ii. 484

Scot. Reginald, i, 3 ; ii. 4, 133
- W., ii. 98

Scotland. Reformation in, i, 405, 433;
freethought in. ii, 85, 178. 181 sq.,
208-209

Scott. Temple, ii, 156 n.

!2M

530

INDEX

Scott, Thomas, ii, 11, 439

Walter, ii, 437, 444

W. R., cited, ii, 189, 198

Scudery, Mademoiselle de, ii, 142
Scylla, i, 185

Secularism,, ii, 395, 399 sq.
Sedgwick, ii, 465
Sedillot, cited, i, 251 n.
Segarelli, i, 336 sq.
Segidi, the chief, i, 39
Seguierde Saint-Brisson, ii, 242
Selden, ii, 20, 71 «., 74-75
Self-interest and religion, i, 113-14
Sellar, cited, i, 202, 209 n.
Sembat, i, 280 n.
Semele, i, 125

Semites, religions of i, 44, 45, 97 sq.;
theories concerning, i, 64, 81, 102, 248
Semitic influence on Greeks, i, 120 sq.
Semler, ii, 318 sq., 321, 330, 424
Seneca, i, 209, 215, 245, 476
Sergius, i, 280

Sermon on the Mount, the, i, 221
Serra, ii, 368 n.
Serre, De la, ii, 225
Servetus, i, 231, 408, 442, 447 sq., 467
Seton-Merriman, ii, 451
Seume, ii, 388 n.
Sevigne\ Madame de, i, 2 n.; ii, 128,

142, 250 n.
Sextus Empiricus, i, 26 «., 159?i., 189-
90, 391, 476 ; ii, 9, 39

Shaftesbury, ii, 99, 143, 149, 152, 154,
164, 184, 189, 194, 225, 268, 309;
cited, i, 6, 7

Shakespeare, i, 20, 475; ii, 15 sq.

Sharpe, i, 112 ; ii, 415

Shelley, i, 201 ; ii, 48, 395, 400, 443 sq.,
445

Sherlock, W., i, 4; ii, 91-92, 113

Shiites, the, i, 254 sq.

Shintoism, ii, 491 sq.

Shirazi, J. V. M., cited, i, 263, 273 n.

Sibylline books, i, 206 n.

Sichel,W., cited and discussed, ii, 164 n.,
197 »., 198

Sicily, culture of, i, 301, 318

Sidgwick, H., cited, ii, 74 n.

Sidney, A., ii, 78

'Sir P., ii, 45

Sifatites, the, i, 255

Sigismund III, i, 426

Sikhs, ii, 197

Simeon Duran, Rabbi, i, 328

son of Gamaliel, i, 116

Simon de Montfort, i, 304, 305. 325

of Tournay, i, 311, 315

Richard, ii, 93, 131 sq.

Simonides, i, 152

Simpson, cited, ii, 210

Simson, ii, 151, 183
Sinclar, G., ii, 168
Sismondi, quoted, i, 303, 304, 305 n.,

312 n.
Sixtus VI, i, 376
Skarzinski, criticized, ii, 188 n.
Skeat, Prof., cited, i, 347
Skeats, cited, ii, 160 n.
Skelton, cited, ii, 192
Skeptic, meaning of word, i, 5, 11
Skepticism, academic, i, 187 sq.; Pyr-
rhonic, i, 11-12, 181, 474 sq.; ii, 119 ;
dialectic, among Christians, i, 465,
474, 480; ii, 120, 125, 126 sq., 163,
480 ; popular, among Christians, i, 36,
465
Skytte, ii, 297
Slave Coast, priests of, i, 35
Slavery, Christianity and, i, 224; Paine

and, ii, 383 n.
Slavonic States, culture history of, ii,

362 sq.
Sloane, Prof., cited, ii, 273 n., 278«.
Smalbroke, ii, 173

Smith, Adam, ii, 178, 185, 186, 187 sq.,
196, 244

Bosworth, i, 253 n.

Elisha, cited, ii, 159

■ Henry, ii, 5

John, ii, 81

— — Joseph, ii, 156

S., i, 6

Sydney, ii, 386 sq.

W. Robertson, i, 51, 103 ; ii, 433

Smyrna, ancient, i, 124
Social causation, i, 91 sq., 113, 246, 269,
354-55, 365 sq.; ii, 146, 151, 170 sq.,
178, 200, 386 sq., 391 sq.
Socialism, ii, 411 sq.
Socinianism, i, 392 ; ii, 35, 37, 106 sq.,

138, 151, 488. See Unitarianism
Sociology, i, 375 ; ii, 468 sq.
Sokrates, i, 153, 160, 168 sq.; ii, 288
Solano, ii, 373
Solomon, i, 101, 242

ben Gebirol, i, 316

Somers, ii, 112
Somerset, Duke of, ii, 403
Sophia, Princess, ii, 363
Sophists, the. i, 168
Sophocles, i, 127 n., 148, 162 n.
Sorbonne. the, i, 384. 429 ; ii, 125, 260.
264
\ Sorcery, belief in, i, 22
j Sorel, cited, ii. 351
Soury, cited, ii, 267
| South Africa, freethought in, ii, 417
South America, freethought in, ii, 407
South, Dean, ii, 92-93, 114
Southey, ii, 396 n„ 444, 445

INDEX

531

168; ii

268 sq.

372 sq.
333 sq.

93

IS*!

376

South Place Institute, ii. 113 sq
Southwell, ii, 394, 408
Sozzini, the, i, 392, 421, 467

37 sq.
Spain, culture history of. i.

337 sq., 470 sq.; ii, 38 sq.

387 sq.; freethought in, i.

470 sq.; ii, 372 sq., 406; Moors in,

i, 26S sq., 333; ii. 38; Reformation

in, i, 113
Spalding, ii, 3 IS, 422
Speirs, Rev. E.. ii, 470 n.
Spencer and Gillen, i. 3i

J., ii, 102, 249

H., ii, 403, 150. 46

Spenser, ii, 45 n., 199

Speusippos, i. 1S4

Spiegel, cited, i. CS u.

Spina. Alfonso, i, 370 n.

Spinoza, i. 4. 10, 316. 464 ; ii, 29, 97,

107, 127. 129, 133 sq.; and Toland,

ii, 148, 253, 4S9 ; and Leibnitz, ii.

289 sq.
Spinozism, ii, 129. 131. 135, 138, 168,

297, 347-48, 349 «., 352, 400
"Spirit of Liberty." the sect, i. 337
Spiritualcs, the sect, i, 2, 445
Sprat, i, 4

Sprenger, cited, i. 249 n., 250 n.
Squier, cited, ii, 407
Stafford, W., ii, 368 71.
Stahelin, i, 392 n.
Stahl, ii, 460
Stancari, i, 425
Stanhope, Dr., ii, 98

Lady Hester, ii, 206

Stationers' Company, ii, 99

Statius, i. 211

Staudlin, i. 12 ; ii, 345

Stebbing, ii, 173

Steele, ii, 151

Stcinbart, ii. 317

Steinbuhlcr, ii, 330

Steno, ii. 463 n.

Stephen Battory, King, i, 426

Sir J., cited, i. 356 n.\ ii, 179. 251

- Sir Leslie, i. 13 ; ii. 403, 408 ;

cited, ii. 104. 153 u.. 161 n., 108, 251;

criticized, ii, 148 n., 150 ?i . , 155. 171,

172 sq., 179 a.. 203 n., 251
Sterling. i, 17.S u.
StesichoroK. i. 128
Stevenson. R. I-., cited, i. 46

Stewart.

H.

F..

cited

i, '

Sir

.1..

ii .

8] 71.

Stillingf

eet

i. '

; ii, '

'.', £■

Stilpo. i

IS

',

Stirling,

Dr

II

. ii. 1

7)

" Stirnei

. M

ax.'

' ii. 178

Stoici in

i

180

. 203.

209

211

91. 109. 1G8

392

Stosch, ii, 297

Stout, Sir R., ii, 501

Stow, cited, ii, 5 n., 23 n.

Strabo. i, 173 n., 180 n., 191

Strannik, cited, ii, 413 u.

Strasburg Cathedral, i, 361 n.

Strato, i, 184

Strauss, ii, 415, 423 sq., 425 sq., 428 sq.,

432, 439, 447, 474, 476
Strigolniks, the, ii, 363
Strindbcrg, ii, 418
Stromer, ii, 418
Strowsky. cited, i, 393 n.. 480 n.. 481,

483 n.; ii, 117 n.
Struensec, ii, 361 sq.
Strutt, ii, 166, 194
Stuart, Dean, ii, 81

Stubbs, Bishop, cited, i, 341, 433, 439 n.
Stuckeuberg, cited, ii, 339, 341, 343
Studemund, cited, ii, 411, 412
Suarez. i, 363 ; ii, 282
Suckling, Sir J., ii, 31
Sudan, magic and religion in, i, 46
Suetonius, i, 212, 213
Sufiism, i, 265, 273
Sulla, i, 206 u.
Sully, Prof., cited, i, 42
Sun-Gods, worship of, i, 69, 73, 78, 89,

102, 124, 153
Sunnites, the, i. 254
Svedberg, ii, 359
Sweden, culture history of, ii, 354 sq.,

417 sq.
Sweden borg. ii, 358 sq.
Swift, i, 167 ; ii, 151 sq.; cited, i, 7
Swinburne, ii, 452 sq., 502
Switzerland, reformation in, i, 2, 410,

438 sq.; freethought in, ii, 378 sq.,

416 ; bigotry in, ii, 415 sq.
Sykes, A. A., ii, 173 ; quoted, ii, 192-93
Sylvanus, i, 280
Svlvester II, i, 301 u.
— Bernard, i, 312
Svmonds, J. A., cited, i, 365 7!., 410
Synge, ii, 154 n., 189

TAHARI, cited, i, 257 n.
Taborites, the, i, 418
Tacitus, i, 212, 213
Tailbe, ii, 221
Tailhmdier, cited, i, 28-1
Taine, ii. 144. 443, 484
Talbot, A. 1L, i, 264 n.
Talfourd, ii. 395

Talmud, thought in, i. 116, 221 : criti-
cism of, i, 379
Tamerlane, i. 260
Tammuz, i. 101
Tanquelin . i, 295
Taoui in. i. 87

532

INDEX

Tarde, ii, 326, 380

Tasmanians, religion of. i, 100

Tatian, i, 227

Tau, i, 84, 87

Tauler, i, 362

Tayler, ii, 415

Taylor, Jeremy, ii. 74, 101

Robert, ii, 391

Tegner, ii, 417

Telesio, ii, 64

Tell-el-Amarna. i. 73

Teller, ii. 318

Templars, the Knights, i, 340, 356-58

Temple, Sir W., ii, 87, 111

Ten Brink, cited, ii, 34

Ten, theories of, i. 150

Tenison, ii, 9S

Tenneman. cited, ii, 108

Tennyson, ii. 101 n.. 452

Teodori, i, 411

Tercier, ii, 236

Terrasson, ii, 221

Tertullian, i, 150 7J., 229, 232. 235, 244

Tetens. ii, 346

Tetzel, i, 406

Teuffel. i, 194-95. 197

Texte, cited, ii, 165

Thacker, Elias, ii, 5

Thackeray, ii, 451

Thales, i , 135 sq.

Thallos, i, 80

Thamamians, the, i, 266 n.

Theagenes, i, 152

Theal. cited, i, 22; ii. 417

Theil. M. du. ii, 255

Theodora, i. 245

Theodore of Mopsuestia, i, 242

Theodoric, i, 246, 247

Theodoros, i, 183

Theodosius II. i. 239

Theodotos, i, 229

Theophilanthropy, ii, 382

Theophrastos, i,"l86

Thiebault, ii. 270;;.. 313 n.

Thierrys. the two. ii. 442

Thirhvall.ii, 469; cited, i, 27. 121 n.. 173

Thirty-nine Articles, the. i. 460

Thirty Years' War. ii, 75, 295, 300

Tholuck, i. 12: ii, 423; cited, ii. 249.

296, 301, 305 sq., 311
Thomas Aquinas, i. 318 sq.. 359. 360;

ii, 282
Thomas a Kempis. i. 363
Thomas. Dr. R. H.. ii. 384 n.

A. L.. ii. 25S. 291

Thomasius. Jenkin. i. 11 : ii, 29S ; cited.

ii, 69 n.. 296
- — Christian, ii, 302 sq.
Thompson. F.. ii, 453
Thomson. B.. cited, i, 36 v., 41 it.

criticized.

Thomson, J., ii, 452

Thonga, the, i, 25, 31

Thonrakians, i, 280 u.

Thoreau, ii, 453

Thoth, i, 110

Thotmes III, i, 75

Thrakians, the, i, 121 n.. 15'

Thukydides, i, 156 n., 173

Thunder-Gods, i, 97

Tiberius, i, 213

Ticknor, cited, i, 341

Tiele. cited, i. 66, 69-70. 71 :
i, 46-47, 60. 71

Tielenus, ii, 70

Tii, Queen, i, 74, 75

Tilley, A. A., cited, i. 428

Tillotson, ii, 88. 113

Tindal, ii, 152, 158, 174, 175, 306

Tithes, ii, 20-21

Tocco, i, 13

Tocqueville, de, cited, ii. 126 n. , 254

Toland, i, 6; ii, 98-99, 132, 147 sq.,
174, 175

Toleration, beginnings of. in England,
ii, 24, 77 ; Bayle and, ii, 140; begin-
nings of, in France, ii, 221, 231, 233,
291 ; in Germany, ii, 312

Tollner, ii, 319

Tolstoy, i, 419; ii. 457

Toltecs, the, i, 88

Tomkyns, Martin, ii, 201

Tonga Islands, freethought in. i. 38

Torild, ii, 360

Torquemada. i. 342

Torricelli, ii, 365

Torture, ecclesiastical, i.

Totemism and Greek
139-40

Toulmin, G. H.. ii. 201

Joshua, ii, 202

Tourguenief, ii, 456 sq.

Tourneur, ii, 20

Towers, ii, 82

Toy, ii, 420

Tractarianism, ii. 437 sq.

Tracv. cited, ii. 192

Transubstantiation, i. 286. 428

Transvaal, freethought in. ii. 416

Trapezuntios, i. 372

Trapp, ii, 198

Travers, ii, 14

Trebonian, i, 245

Tregelles. ii. 438

Trenchard. ii. 152

Triads, i. 69

Tribbechov. i. 11 ; ii. 298

Trie. i. 449

Trinity, dogma of. i. 77. 226. 231. 24:
286." 307, 312. 42.1. 425. 447; ii, 331
444, 487 sq. Sec Unitarianism

321-22
philosophy

INDEX

533

Trinius, i. 11

Trouveres and Troubadours, i, 300 sq.,
326, 361

Trumpp, cited, ii, 497

Turgot, ii, 221, 214. 251, 200. -276 n.,
288

Turkey, civilization of. ii. 197 sq.; free-
thought in, i, 272 ; ii. 197 sq.

Turlupins. i, 333

Turner, ii, 201

Turpin. ii. 291

Turrcttini. the, i, 458 ; ii. 225. 378 sq.

Twelve, sacred number, i. 97. 124 n.

Twofold truth, doctrine of. i. 271, 321,
346, 360. 361, 377, 478; ii. 28, 108,
134

Tylor, Sir E., ii, 470 sq.; cited, i. 22,
31

Tyndale. cited, i. 3

Tyrannos. i. 125 n.

Tyrrell, i. 166

Tvrwhitt. i. 165

Tvssot dc Patot, ii, -211. 227

UBALDINI, i, 325 n.

Ubicini, cited, ii, 497 a.

Ueberweg, quoted, i, 176-77. 284.

309
Uhlich, ii. 410
Uitenbogaert, i, 463
Uladislaus II, i, 419
Ullmann, i. 249 n.
Ulrich von Hutteu, i, 403. 101 n., 406.

438
Undereyck, ii, 298
Underhill. E. B.. ii, 77 n.
Unitarianism, early, i. 242. 328. 401.

447 sq.; in England, i. 459 ; ii. 12.

21, 77, 83, 100 sq.. 153-54. 161. 179.

201 sq., 413, 414 sq.. 471 ; in Germany,

i. 135 sq.; in Hungary, i. 120; in

Ireland, ii. 188 : in Poland, i. 421 sq.;

i;, 36 ,s</.. 159 sq.; in Scotland, ii.

208-209 ; in Italy, i. 468 : in Holland.

ii, 35: in Switzerland, ii. 378 sq..

■115; in America, ii. 385, 413
United States, freethought in. ii. 381 sq.,

111. 119; German freethinkers in.

ii, 411
Universalism. ancient, i, 50. 63. 77. 79
Universities, low eld) of culture in. ii.

195; French, i. 3,55 ; German, i. 404.

116. 155 ; Swiss, i. 1 17
Upanishads. philosophy of. i. 52 si/.
Urban VIII. ii. 59
Urstitius, ii. 12
Urwick. ii. 82 ,i.

Usury and the Church i. 295. :;12 ,;.
Utilitarianism, i. 215: ii. 191
" Utilitarian Association-.'' i;. lis

i VAIR, Guillaumc du, i, 393

Valentinus, i, 228
; Gentilis. i. 451, 153

Valerius Maximus, i. 175

Valla, Lorenzo, i. 366-67, 377
I Vallee, i, 391

I Vambery, cited, i. 273 ; ii. 198 u.
[ Van den Endc. ii, 134
i Vandeul, Mmc. dc. ii. 271
1 Vanini, i. 21. 475 ; ii, 51 sq.

Van Mancn, ii. 421

Van Mildert, i, 11. 15

Van Vloten, i, 251 u.

Varro, i, 195. 203 n.
' Varuna, i. 49 sq.
j Vasari, cited, i. 370 u.

Vassor, ii, 145
| Vater, ii, 423
j Vatke, ii, 474

Vaudois. the, i, 298, 388
' Vaughan, cited, ii, 79
i Vauvenargues. ii, 246
i Vedanta, i, 55

i Vedas. i. 29, 18; translations of, i
30 ii.; skepticism in, i, 30, 49-50
attacks on, i. 52-53

Vejento, i. 213

Velasquez, ii, 40

Venus Cloacina, i. 82

Verbalism. Greek, i, 146-47

Vergilius. St., i. 282, 368

Verlaine, ii. 443

Vernes, Maurice, i, 10S

Vernet, Jacob, ii, 225

Veron, John, i. 159

Verrall. i. 162-63; ii.

Viau, ii, 122

Vickers. K. 11.. cited.

Vico, i. 26 u.. 375; ii, 365 so., 168

Vigilantius. i, 239. 298 n.

Villani. (',.. i, 322

Villanucvn . Dr. J .. ii. 372

Villari. cited, i. 372. 108

Villemain. ii, 217

Villeneuve. Marquis dc. ii. 278 ».

9 I

i. 397
365 sq.

\

incci

t.

1. }

., cited

. i ,

138

\

inci.

Lc

inai

do da. i

. 37

0; ii.

\

irchow.

ii. -J

36

\

iret.

i. 166

\

irgil,

i.

20 1 .

20!)

\

i rg i 1 1

Mi

.the

■-( ioddc

-.->.

, 88.

\

ives.

. 4

70

\

oelke

. i

V

ogt. ii, ■

7H i

.

V

olkm

ir.

ii. ■

•j!7. 436

V

olne\

. ii

. 21

1 . 271.

01.

168

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371

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iltaii

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. 21

. 13:;.

>77.

323.

1 13.

It:

1 17 u..

157

. 159

165,

19

i. 1!

7. 198,

199

. 213

220.

534

INDEX

222 53., 227 sq., 237 sq., 246, 252 sq.,
256, 257 sq., 263, 273, 284, 291, 431,
468 ; cited, i, 6 ; ii, 236, 248, 273 n.,
379, 380

Vorstius, ii, 22

Voult6, i, 388

Voyage de Robertson, ii. 241

Voysey, ii, 413

Vroes, ii, 225. 238

WADIA, Prof., ii, 288 n.
Wagner, Richard, ii, 456

Tobias, ii, 298

Wahabi sect, i, 275

Wait/, ii, 170

Walckenaer. ii, 14.5, 468 n.

Waldenses, i, 298, 338, 411. 115

Waldus, i, 298

Walid, i, 256

Wallace, A. R., ii, 465

■ Dr. Robert, ii, 185

Prof. W., cited, i, 182 n., 183 n.

Wallis, Dr., ii, 114

Walpole, ii, 171

Walsh, Rev. W., ii, 413

Walter von der Vogehveide, i, 362

Walther, cited, ii, 295

Walwyn, ii, 79

War in South Africa, effect of, ii, 417

religious, i, 338, 392

and English deism, ii, 170-71

and German, 501

Warburton, ii, 156, 166, 173, 339 n.,

353 n.
Ward, Mrs. Humphry, ii, 451

Lester, ii. 469

Rev. R.. ii. 89 n.

Warren. Albertus, ii, 90

Warton, cited, ii, 166

Warville. ii. 244

Washington, ii. 3S2 sq.

Wasil Ibn Atta, i, 254

Waterland, ii. 116 n., 158, 173

Wathek, Khalif, i, 258

Watkinson, Archdeacon, cited, ii, 203 n.

Watson, Bishop, ii. 210, 253, 38 1 . 392

W., ii, 453

Watts. C. i, 11

H. E., cited, ii, 10

Isaac, ii, 90, 201-202

Wazon, Bishop, i, 294

Weber. A., cited, i. 45. 52 7!.. 51, 55 n., 56

Em., ii. 298

Wedderburn, ii. 393

YVegscheider, ii. 423. 424, 432

Weipall, A. E. P.. cited, i, 74

Weisse. ii, 427

Weizsiicker, ii. 435

Wellbausen. ii. 433. 136 ; quoted, i.

104. 130

74,

467

187

ii, 43 n.,
394, 416; ii,

Wen, Emperor, i. 86

Wenderborn, cited, ii, 205 n.

Werner, ii, 462

Wesley, ii, 195 ; cited, ii, 381 n.

Wesleyanism, ii, 195

Westphalia, Peace of, ii, 295

Wette. de, ii. 167, 423, 431

Wheeler, J. M., i, 11

Whewell, ii, 465; cited, ii, 30 n.

105
Whinfleld, i. 264 n., 265
Whiston, ii. 151, 153-54, 161, 176
White, A. D., i, 14, 42, 457 n.\ ii,

Thomas, ii, 102

Whitehead, ii, 167
Whitfield, ii, 195
Whitman, ii, 453
Whittaker, T., i, 108,

45 n.. 49 n.
Wiclif, i, 334, 319 sq

280
Wieland, ii, 329
Wielmacker, ii, 2
Wier, i, 479; ii, 33, 138
Wightman, ii, 21, 23
Wilamowitz, i, 125 n.
Wilberforce, ii, 393, 451 ; cited, ii,
205-206

Bishop, ii, 465

WTilcke, ii, 427

Wildman, ii, 78

Wilkes, ii, 200

Wilkins, Bishop, ii, 87, 88

"Will to believe," i, 16. 176. 360

William of Auvergne, i, 319 n.

of Conches, i, 312

of Occam, i, 354, 358-59

of St. Amour, i, 334

Williams, David, ii, 203

Rowland, cited, i, 111 u.

Speaker, cited, i, 467

■ T.. cited, i, 24

Willich, cited, ii, 311

Wilson, H. H., cited.

Winchell. ii. 420

Winckler. ii. 434

Wireker, i, 361 n.

Wisdom of Solomon, i

Wise.ii, 98, 165 n.

Wislicenus. ii, 410

Witchcraft, belief in.
449 ; ii. 19, 33, 81.
assailed, i. 479, ii, 4

Witt. John de. ii. 134

Witty. John, ii. 115

Wolf. F. A., ii. 368

Wolff and Wolffianism
337

■ Elizabeth, ii. 352

Wolfms, ii. 298

ii. 283

58

116

i, 376, 390, 402,
101, 102, 372 «.;
, 33, 67, 138

305 sq.. 312.

INDEX

535

Wollstonecraft, Mary, ii, 101 n., 207-
208, 275 n.

Wolseley, SirC, ii, 87, 90, 93

Wolsey, Cardinal, i, 432. 453

Women, freethought among, i. 374 n.,
339; ii, 124 n., 207-20S, 223 n., 253,
499-500; orthodoxy among, ii, 171;
position of early Christian, i, 245 ;
exclusion of, from sacra, i, 196; in
Babism, i, 274 ; community of. i, 418

Wood, Anthony a, cited, ii, 12. 9G n.

Woodrow, ii, 420

Woodward, ii. 115. 176-77

Woolston, ii, 157, 159

Woort, ii, 2

Wordsworth, ii, 444

Bishop, cited, ii, 401

Wright, Prances, ii, 499

Susanna, ii, 394 n.

Wriothesley, cited, i, 389

Writing, antiquity of, i, 105 »., 194

XEXOPHANES. i. 13G, 141-42, 141
Xenophon, i. 199

YAHWEH, i. 97. 101, 103. 104 sq., Ill
Yaska, i, 52

I Yazur Veda, i, 54
! Yeats, ii, 453
| Yezid III, i, 256
| Young, ii, 172

Yuncas, the, i, 90
! Yvon, Abbe, i, 235

I

j ZAID, i, 248, 249

Zanchi, i, 467
1 Zapoyla, i, 420
j Zarathustra, i, 67, 68
I Zebrzydowski, i, 424
! Zeller, ii, 416. 426, 434 ; cited, i, 171 n.
; Zephaniah, i. 111
j Zendavesta, i, 67
i Zendekism (Arab atheism) , i, 249 sq. , 256

Zeuo (the elder), i, 136, 146

(the Stoic), i, 180 sq., 186

Zeus, i, 124, 130 sq.

Ziska, i, 417 sq.

Zola, ii, 442, 443 n.

Zollikofer, ii, 318

Zoroastrianism, i, 68

Zosimus, i, 245

Zulus, freethought among, i, 3S

Zwicker, ii, 35-0, 114, 137

Zwingli, i, 408, 420, 440

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