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

extremely virulent; but Steele's run them hard. [721] Analyst, Queries 60 and 62: Defence of Freethinking in Mathematics, §§ 5, 6, 50. Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 141-42. [722] Letter in De Morgan's Newton: his Friend: and his Niece, 1885, p. 69. [723] The essays in the Characteristics (excepting the Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit, which was published by Toland, without permission, in 1699) appeared between 1708 and 1711, being collected in the latter year. Shaftesbury died in 1713, in which year appeared his paper on The Judgment of Hercules. [724] A Project for the Advancement of Religion. Bohn ed. of Works, iii, 44. In this paper Swift reveals his 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." [725] 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. But a doctrine of conditional immortality had been explicitly put by Locke in his Reasonableness of Christianity, 1695, p. 13. Cp. Prof. Fraser's Locke, 1890, pp. 259-60, and Fox Bourne's Life of Locke, ii, 287. The difference was that Dodwell elaborately gave his reasons, which, as Dr. Clarke put it, made "all good men sorry, and all profane men rejoice." [726] History of his Own Time, ed. 1838, p. 887. [727] Compare his ironical Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, 1708. [728] He had, however, hailed the anonymous Letter Concerning Enthusiasm as "very well writ," believing it to be by a friend of his own--(Robert Hunter, to whom, accordingly, it has since been mistakenly attributed by various bibliographers, including Barbier). "Enthusiasm," as meaning "popular fanaticism," was of course as repellent to a Churchman as to the deists. [729] Printed in folio 1711. Rep. in vol. xi of the Harleian Miscellany, p. 168 sq. (2nd ed. p. 163 sq.). [730] Dr. E. Synge, of Dublin (afterwards Archbishop of Tuam), in his Religion Tryed by the Test of Sober 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." [731] Leslie affirms 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 lacks his amenity, and is evidently not by him. [732] An English translation of the Dictionary, in 5 vols. folio, with "many passages restored," appeared in 1734. [733] A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke, 1720, p. 271. [734] E.g. Mark Pattison, who calls Collins's book of 178 pages a "small tract." [735] "Ignorance," Collins writes, "is the foundation of Atheism, and Freethinking the cure of it" (Discourse of Freethinking, p. 105). Like Newton, he contemplated only an impossible atheism, never formulated by any writer. The Philosophical Principles of Religion, Natural and Reveal'd, of Dr. George Cheyne (1705, 2nd ed. 1715), similarly declares (pref. end) that "if the modern [i.e. Newtonian] philosophy demonstrates nothing else, yet it infallibly proves Atheism to be the most gross ignorance." Thus the vindicator of "religion" was writing in the key of the deist. [736] 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. R. P. A. 1910, p. 38) is also astray. [737] Second ed. 1717. Another writer, William Lyons, was on the same track, publishing The Infallibility of Human Judgment, its Dignity and Excellence (2nd ed. 1720), and A Discourse of the Necessity of Human Actions (1730). [738] Work cited, p. 13. [739] As to whose positions see a paper in the writer's Pioneer Humanists, 1907. [740] There were six separate Discourses. Voltaire speaks of "three editions coup sur coup of ten thousand each" (Lettre sur les auteurs Anglais--in OEuvres, ed. 1792. lxviii, 359). This seems extremely unlikely as to any one Discourse; and even 5,000 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 case, Woolston's Discourses are now seldomer met with than Collins's Discourse of Freethinking. Alberti (Briefe betreffend den Zustand der Religion in Gross-Brittannien) wrote in 1752 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. [741] Tyerman's Life of Wesley, ed. 1871, i, 65-66. [742] The Infidel Convicted, 1731, pp. 33, 62. [743] Tindal (1653-1733) was the son of a clergyman, and in 1678 was elected a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford. From 1685 to 1688 he was a Roman Catholic. Under William III he 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. [744] Middleton's Works, 2nd ed. 1755, iii, 50-56. [745] Tindal (Voltaire tells) regarded Pope as devoid of genius and imagination, and so trebly earned his place in the Dunciad. [746] A Layman's Faith.... "By a Freethinker and a Christian," 1732. [747] Title-page of Rev. Elisha Smith's Cure of Deism, 1st ed. 1736; 3rd ed. 1740. [748] Le Moine, Dissertation historique sur les écrits de Woolston, sa condemnation, etc. pp. 29-31, cited by Salchi, Lettres sur le Déisme, 1759, p. 67 sq. [749] Lettre sur les auteurs Anglais, as cited. Voltaire tells that, when a she-bigot one day spat in Woolston's face, he calmly remarked: "It was so that the Jews treated your God." Another story reads like a carefully-improved version of the foregoing. A woman is said to have accosted him as a scoundrel, and asked him why he was not yet hanged. On his asking her grounds for such an accost, she replied: "You have writ against my Saviour. What 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 am." Life of Mr. Woolston, prefixed to a reprint of his collected Discourses, 1733, p. 27. Cp. Salchi, p. 78. [750] Life cited, pp. 22, 26, 29. [751] An Historical Defence of the Trustees of Lady Hewley's Foundations, by the Rev. Joseph Hunter, 1834, pp. 17, 35; The History, Opinions, and present legal position of the English Presbyterians, 1834, pp. 18, 29; Skeats, History of the Free Churches of England, ed. Miall, p. 240. [752] Hunter, as cited, p. 17; History of the Presbyterians, as cited, p. 19; Fletcher, History of Independency, 1862, iv, 266-67. [753] Hunter, pp. 37, 39. [754] Skeats, as cited, p. 226. [755] Hunter, pp. 24-25. [756] 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. [757] History, cited, p. 22; Hunter, pp. 44-45; Skeats, pp. 243-44. [758] Skeats, pp. 240-43, 245 sq. [759] Skeats, p. 248. [760] Hunter, p. 50. [761] As Sir Leslie Stephen has observed (English Thought, i, 164), Chubb "deserves the praise of Malthusians." Having a sufficiency of means for himself, but not more, he "lived a single life, judging it greatly improper to introduce a family into the world without a prospect of maintaining them." The proverb as to mouths and meat, he drily observes, had not been verified in his experience. (The Author's Account of Himself, pref. to Posthumous Works, 1748, i, p. iv.) [762] One of the then numerous tribe of eccentrics. He held by Judaic Sabbatarianism, and affected a Rabinnical costume. He made a competence, however, as an ironmonger. [763] Essay Towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain. [764] Discourse to Magistrates. [765] Guardian, Nos. 3, 55, 88. [766] The Analyst, Queries, 55-67. [767] See above, pp. 126-28. [768] Discourse of Passive Obedience, § 26. [769] Works, ed. 1837, p. 352. [770] See the whole context, which palpitates with excitement. [771] Mr. Walter Sichel (Bolingbroke 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. [772] E.g. Dunciad, ii, 399; iii, 212; iv, 492. [773] Voltaire commented pointedly on Pope's omission to make any reference to Shaftesbury, while vending his doctrine. (Lettres Philosophiques, xxii.) As a matter of fact Pope does in the Dunciad (iv, 488) refer maliciously to the Theocles of Shaftesbury'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 Characteristics, ed. 1900 (rep. in Pioneer Humanists); and cp. W. R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson, 1900, p. 101. [774] Texte, Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature, Eng. tr. pp. 117-18. [775] Chesterfield in his Characters (app. to the Letters) testifies that Pope "was a deist believing in a future state; this he has often owned himself to me." (Bradshaw's ed. of Letters, iii, 1410.) Chesterfield makes a similar statement concerning Queen Caroline:--"After puzzling herself in all the whimsies and fantastical speculations of different sects, she fixed herself ultimately in Deism, believing in a future state." (Id. p. 1406.) [776] Dict. Philos. art. Athée, § 2. [777] Wise, in his adaptation of Cudworth, A Confutation of the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism (1706), writes (i, 5) that "the philosophical atheists are but few in number," and their objections so weak "as that they deserve not a hearing but rather neglect"; but confusedly goes on to admit that "one or two broachers of 'em maybe thought able to infect a whole nation, as ... sad experience tells us." [778] 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 the Gospels of Christ." Natural Religion Insufficient (Edinburgh), 1714, p. 25. Cp. pp. 23, 26-27, 59, etc. Bishop 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. 1838, pp. 907-910.) [779] The Moralists deals rather with strict skepticism than with substantive atheism. [780] The Grand Essay: or, a Vindication of Reason and Religion against Impostures of Philosophy. The book was, on March 18, 1704, condemned by the House of Commons to be burned in Palace Yard, along with its author's Second Thoughts Concerning the Human Soul (1702). A second ed. of the latter appeared soon after. [781] Above, p. 153. [782] Mr. Herbert Paul, in his essay on Swift (Men and Letters, 1901, p. 267), 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 (Table 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. [783] Work cited, p. 324. The book is now rare. [784] Cp. Cheyne, Founders of Old Testament Criticism, 1893, p. 2. [785] Dr. Cheyne expresses surprise that a "theological writer" who got no far should not have been "prompted by his good genius to follow up his advantage." It is, however, rather remarkable that Parvish, who was a bookseller at Guildford (Alberti, Briefe, p. 426), should have achieved what he did. It was through not being a theological writer that he went so far, no theologian of his day following him. [786] See the author's introduction to ed. of the Characteristics, 1900, rep. in Pioneer Humanists. [787] The question remains obscure. Cp. the Letter cited, reprinted at end of Carver's 1830 ed. of Paine's Works (New York); F. Thackeray's Life of Chatham, ii, 405; and Chatham's "scalping-knife" speech. [788] A Vindication of the Moral Philosopher appeared in 1741. [789] Cp. Lechler, pp. 371, 386. [790] Cp. Cairns, Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century, 1881, p. 101. [791] Ed. 1741, p. 30 sq. [792] View of the Deistical Writers, Letter XI (X in 1st ed.). [793] Sir Leslie Stephen, English Thought, i, 169. [794] Act 9th, Geo. II (1736), ch. 5. [795] A Tour in Ireland, ed. 1892, ii, 59-72. [796] Young at this period was entirely secular in his thinking. Telling 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). [797] Really an abler man than half the others in the list, but himself a good deal of a heretic. So far from attempting to make "victims," he pleaded for a more candid treatment of deistic objections. [798] Doddridge himself was not theologically orthodox, but was an evangelical Christian. Dr. Stoughton, Religion in England under Queen Anne and the Georges, 1878, i, 344-46. [799] Whose doctrine Sir Leslie Stephen elsewhere (p. 258) calls a "brutal theology which gloried in trampling on the best instincts of its opponents," and a "most unlovely product of eighteenth-century speculation." [800] Of Warburton Sir Leslie writes elsewhere (p. 353) that "this colossus was built up of rubbish." See p. 352 for samples. Again he speaks (p. 368) of the bishop's pretensions as "colossal impudence." It should be noted, further, that Warburton's teaching in the Divine Legation was a gross heresy in the eyes of William Law, who in his Short but Sufficient Confutation pronounced its main thesis a "most horrible doctrine." Ed. 1768, as cited, i, 217. [801] As to whose "senile incompetence" see same vol. p. 234. [802] History of Protestant Theology, Eng. tr. ii, 77. For the influence of deism on Germany, see Tholuck (Vermischte Schriften, Bd. ii) and Lechler (Gesch. des englischen Deismus).--Note by Dr. Cheyne. [803] An Essay towards a Natural History of the Earth, 3rd ed. 1723, pref. and pp. 16 sq., 77 sq. Cp. White, Warfare of Science with Theology, i. 227. [804] End of pref. [805] Work cited, p. 85. [806] Playfair, in the Edinburgh Review, January, 1808, cited by Brewster, Memoirs of Newton, 1855. i, 347. [807] Brewster, as last cited. [808] Grant, History of Physical Astronomy, 1852, p. 108. [809] Baden Powell, Hist. of Nat. Philos. 1834, p. 363. [810] Brewster, More Worlds than One, 1854, p. 111. [811] Sir James Stephen, Horæ Sabbaticæ, ii, 281; Lechler, p. 451. [812] See details in Dynamics of Religion, ch. viii. [813] Essay on "Tendencies of Religious Thought in England: 1688-1750," in Essays and Reviews, 9th ed. p. 304. [814] In criticizing whom Sir Leslie Stephen barely notices his scientific work, but dwells much on his religious fallacies--a course which would make short work of the fame of Newton. [815] In his Case of Reason; or, Natural Religion Fully and Fairly Stated, in answer to Tindal (1732). See the argument set forth by Sir Leslie Stephen, i, 158-63. It is noteworthy, however, that in his Spirit of Prayer (1750), pt. ii, dial. i, Law expressly argues that "No other religion can be right but that which has its foundation in Nature. For the God of Nature can require nothing of his creatures but what the state of their nature calls them to." Like Baxter, Berkeley, Butler, and so many other orthodox polemists, Law uses the argument from ignorance when it suits him, and ignores or rejects it when used by others. [816] 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 be a verbatim reprint. [817] Even before his death he was suspected of that view. When his coffin was being carried from his house for interment, one of "the refuse of the rabble" is said to have remarked, "Ah, he was an atheist." "No matter," replied another, "he was an honest man" (Curious Particulars, etc., respecting Chesterfield and Hume, 1788, p. 15). [818] See Burton, Hist. of Scotland, viii, 549-50, as to the case of Pitcairne. [819] Howell's State Trials, xiii (1812), coll. 917-38. [820] Macaulay, History, ch. xxii; student's ed. ii, 620-21; Burton, History of Scotland, viii, 76-77. 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 boy's arguments on the bases of ethics, set forth in his "dying speech," as cited by Halyburton, Natural Religion Insufficient, 1714, pp. 119-23, 131, and the version in the State Trials, xiii, 930-34. [821] Macaulay ascribes the savagery of the prosecution to the Lord Advocate, Sir James Stewart, "as cruel as he was base"; but a letter printed in the State Trials, from a member of the Privy Council, says the sentence would have been commuted if "the ministers would intercede." They, however, "spoke and preached for cutting him off." Trials, xiii, 930; Burton, viii, 77. [822] Letter to Sir Francis Masham, printed in the State Trials, xiii, 928-29--evidently written by Locke, who seems to have preserved all the papers printed by Howell. [823] Macaulay, as cited. In 1681 one Francis Borthwick, who had gone abroad at the age of fourteen and turned Jew, was accused of blaspheming Jesus, and had to fly for his life, being outlawed. State Trials, as cited, col. 939. [824] A Full Account of the Several Ends and Uses of Confessions of Faith, first published in 1719 as a preface to a Collection of Confessions of Faith, by Prof. W. Dunbar, of Edinburgh University, 3rd ed. 1775, p. 1. [825] Work cited, p. 48. [826] Id. p. 198. [827] Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century. From the MSS. of John Ramsay, of Ochtertyre, 1888, i, 277. Ramsay describes Johnston as a "joyous, manly, honourable man," of whom Kames "was exceedingly fond" (p. 278). [828] W. R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson, 1900, pp. 15, 20-21. [829] Id. p. 52. [830] Cp. Alberti, Briefe betreffende den Zustand der Religion in Gross-Brittannien, 1752, pp. 430-31. [831] See Dr. McCosh's Scottish Philosophy, 1875, pp. 111-13. Dr. McCosh notes that at some points Dudgeon anticipated Hume. [832] Dr. McCosh, however, admits that the absence of the printer's name on the 1765 edition of Dudgeon's works shows that there was then no thorough freedom of thought in Scotland. [833] Rae, Life of Adam Smith, 1895, p. 13. Prof. Fowler shows no knowledge of this prosecution in his monograph on Hutcheson (Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, 1882); and Mr. W. R. Scott, in his, seems to rely for the wording of the indictment solely on Mr. Rae, who gives no references, drawing apparently on unpublished MSS. [834] Rae, as cited, pp. 11-15. [835] Scott, as cited, p. 87. [836] Dr. James Orr, David Hume and his Influence, etc.,