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

reaction was confronted with unbelief in lyric form. His immature 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 life, 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 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 orthodoxy [1840] 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 been 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 has 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 reaction, to which it was æsthetically though hardly emotionally akin. Yet George Eliot could say in later life that it was the influence of Scott that first unsettled her orthodoxy; [1841] 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 orthodoxy was in fact nearly on all fours with his Jacobitism--a matter of temperamental loyalty to a tradition. [1842] 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, [1843] 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; [1844] and it was widely appropriated for freethinkers' 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 propaganda by freethinking publishers. Keats, again, though he melodiously declaimed, in a boyish mood, against the scientific analysis of the rainbow, and though he never assented to Shelley's impeachments of Christianity, was in no active sense a believer in it, and after his long sickness met death gladly without the "consolations" ascribed to creed. [1845]