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

of to-day from that of older civilizations, or from that of previous centuries of the modern era, it is the diffusion of rationalistic views among the "common people." In no other era is to be found the 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 fled from England in time; and the sale of all his books was furiously prohibited and ferociously punished. Yet they circulated everywhere, even in Protestant Ireland, [1674] 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. [1675] All the while, direct propaganda was carried on by translations and reprints as well as by fresh English tractates. Diderot's Thoughts on Religion, and Fréret's Letter from Thrasybulus to 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 Esquisse had been promptly translated in 1795; the translation of d'Holbach's System of Nature reached a third edition in 1817; [1676] that of Raynal's History had been reprinted in 1804; and that of Helvétius On the Mind in 1810; while an English abridgment of Bayle in four volumes, on freethinking lines, appeared in 1826.