A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

imprisoned. (Book rep. 1822 and 1839.) Of the 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 he was an Anglican vicar. [894] During the first half of the eighteenth century, despite the movement at the end of the 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 congregation at Stoke Newington for his "Arian or Unitarian opinions," published in 1722 A Sober Appeal to a Turk or an Indian, concerning the plain sense of the Trinity, in reply to the treatise of Dr. Isaac Watts on The Christian Doctrine of the Trinity. A second edition of Tomkyns's book appeared in 1748, with a further reply to Watts's Dissertations of 1724. The result seems to have been an unsettlement of the orthodoxy of the hymn-writer. There is express testimony from Dr. Lardner, a very trustworthy witness, that 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. [895] 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; [896] 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. [897] As Priestley derived his determinism from Collins, [898] 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 Antipædobaptist 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 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 congregation, at a single defence-meeting in an inn, collected £150 to meet his costs. [899] Five years later he had given up the belief in eternal punishment, though continuing to believe in "long protracted" misery for sinners. [900] 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 1805 a vigorous tractate, Second Thoughts on the Trinity, recommended to the Right Reverend 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 [901] and Evanson have a solvent virtue. [902] 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 significant 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 (1774), gave up his post as a dissenting preacher, and, in conjunction with Franklin and other freethinkers, opened a short-lived deistic chapel in Margaret Street, London (1776), where there was used a "Liturgy on the Universal Principles of Religion and Morality." [903] § 15 On the other hand, apart from the revival of popular religion under Whitefield and Wesley, which won multitudes of the people 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 commerce which mark the second half of the eighteenth century in England. On this state of things supervened the massive performance of the greatest historical writer England had yet produced. Gibbon, 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 treatment 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 essentially 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 Middleton, and from Bolingbroke; though his acknowledgments are mostly paid to respectable Protestants and Catholics, as Basnage, Beausobre, Lardner, Mosheim, and Tillemont; and the sheer solidity of the work has sustained it against a hundred years of hostile comment. [904] While Gibbon was thus earning for his country a new literary distinction, the orthodox interest was concerned 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 Gibbon [905] and Voltaire, [906] there was a peculiar absurdity in Burke's famous question (1790) as to "Who now reads Bolingbroke" and the rest of the older deists. [907] The fashionable public was actually reading Bolingbroke even then; [908] and the work of the older deists was being done with new incisiveness and thoroughness by their successors. [909] 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." [910] Beside Burke in Parliament, all the while, was the Prime Minister, William Pitt 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 the Works of Bishop Butler, ed. 1896, pp. 30-33) has sought to discredit the recorded testimony of Wilberforce (Life of Wilberforce, 1838, i, 98) that Pitt told him "Bishop Butler's work raised in his mind more doubts than it had answered." Gladstone points to another passage in Wilberforce'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 me 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, 1846, 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, 1840, 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 was 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, [911] 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 [912]--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. [913] In England the impulse seems to have come from the writings of the Abbé Langlet du Fresnoy, De Maillet, and Mirabaud, challenging the Biblical 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. [914] 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." [915] 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 æra 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 Helvétius in France, and Lords Kames and Monboddo in Scotland. The idea of a Natura naturans 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 shines forth more brilliantly when we compare it with the vacillating and confused attempts of Buffon, Linnæus, and Goethe. It is the idea of a power working from within the organisms to improve their natural position" [916]--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 Wollstonecraft, ill-starred but noble, whose Letters on Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) show her to have been a freethinking deist of remarkable original faculty, [917] 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 poems [918] 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; [919] and the allusions to Jesus in his letters, even when writing to Mrs. Maclehose, who desired to bring him to confession, exclude orthodox belief, [920] 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"; [921] 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." [922] 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 offended [923] exhibit a sufficiently commonplace conception of Omnipotence; and 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," he yet from the first conquered the devotion of the mass of his countrymen; though he 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 characteristic of Burke, however, that he does not name Shaftesbury, a Whig nobleman of the sacred period. [924] 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 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 impermanency, though it was to arrest English intellectual progress for over a generation. The French Revolution had re-introduced freethought 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 (1794). Cp. Essays on the Evidence and Influence of Christianity, Bath, 1790, pref.; Andrew Fuller, The Gospel its own Witness, 1799, pref. and concluding address to deists; Watson's sermon of 1795, in Two Apologies, ed. 1806, p. 399; Priestley's Memoirs (written in 1795), 1806, pp. 127-28; Wilberforce's Practical View, 1797, passim (e.g., pp. 366-69, 8th ed. 1841); Rev. D. Simpson, A Plea for Religion ... addressed to the Disciples of Thomas Paine,