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

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 by Carlyle's posthumous Reminiscences 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: "Did God Almighty come down and make wheel-barrows in a shop?" [1847] Of his college life he 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." [1848] Goethe, he claimed, led him to peace; but philosophic peace he 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." [1849] To all freethinking work, scholarly or other, he was hostile with the hostility of a man consciously in a false position. Strauss's Leben Jesu he pronounced, quite late in life, "a revolutionary 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." [1850] He 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. [1851] Even Mill did so only partially in his lifetime, as in his address to the St. Andrews students (1867), when, "in the reception given to the Address, he was most struck by the vociferous applause of the divinity students at the freethought passage." [1852] In the first half of the century such displays of courage were rare indeed. Only after the death of Romilly was it tacitly avowed, by the publication of a deistic prayer found among his papers, that he had had no belief in revelation. [1853] 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 susceptible 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 was 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." [1854] 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 Christians 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. Froude 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. [1855]