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

BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY § 1 The propagandist literature of deism begins with an English diplomatist, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the friend of Bacon, who stood in the full stream of the current freethought of England and France [309] in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. English deism, as literature, is thus at its very outset affiliated with French; all of its elements, critical and ethical, are germinal in Bodin, Montaigne, and Charron, each and all of whom had a direct influence on English thought; and we shall find later French thought, as in the cases of Gassendi, Bayle, Simon, St. Evremond, and Voltaire, alternately influenced by and reacting on English. But, apart from the undeveloped rationalism of the Elizabethan period, which never found literary expression, the French ferment seems to have given the first effective impulse; though it is to be remembered that about the same time the wars of religion in Germany, following on an age of theological uproar, had developed a common temper of indifferentism which would react on the thinking of men of affairs in France. We have seen the state of upper-class and middle-class opinion in France about 1624. It was in Paris in that year that Herbert published his De Veritate, after acting for five years as the English ambassador at the French court--an office from which he was recalled in the same year. [310] By his own account the book had been "begun by me in England, and formed there in all its principal parts," [311] but finished at Paris. He had, however, gone to France in 1608, and had served in various continental wars in the years following; and it was presumably in these years, not in his youth in England, that he had formed the remarkable opinions set forth in his epoch-making book. Hitherto deism had been represented by unpublished arguments disingenuously dealt with in published answers; henceforth there slowly grows up a deistic literature. Herbert was a powerful and audacious nobleman, with a weak king; and he could venture on a publication which would have cost an ordinary man dear. Yet even he saw fit to publish in Latin; and he avowed hesitations. [312] The most puzzling thing about it is his declaration that Grotius and the German theologian Tielenus, having read the book in MS., exhorted him "earnestly to print and publish it." It is difficult to believe that they had gathered its substance. Herbert's work has two aspects, a philosophical and a political, and in both it is remarkable. [313] Like the Discours de la Méthode of Descartes, which was to appear thirteen years later, it is inspired by an original determination to get at the rational grounds of conviction; and in Herbert's case the overweening self-esteem which disfigures his Autobiography seems to have been motive force for the production of a book signally recalcitrant to authority. Where Bacon attacks Aristotelianism and the habits of mind it had engendered, Herbert counters the whole conception of revelation in religion. Rejecting tacitly the theological basis of current philosophy, he divides the human mind into four faculties--Natural Instinct, Internal Sense, External Sense, and the Discursive faculty--through one or other of which all our knowledge emerges. Of course, like Descartes, he makes the first the verification of his idea of God, pronouncing that to be primary, independent, and universally entertained, and therefore not lawfully to be disputed (already a contradiction in terms); but, inasmuch as scriptural revelation has no place in the process, the position is conspicuously more advanced than that of Bacon in the De Augmentis, published the year before, and even than that of Locke, sixty years later. On the question of concrete religion Herbert is still more aggressive. His argument [314] is, in brief, that no professed revelation can have a decisive claim to rational acceptance; that none escapes sectarian dispute in its own field; that, as each one misses most of the human race, none seems to be divine; and that human reason can do for morals all that any one of them does. The negative generalities of Montaigne here pass into a positive anti-Christian argument; for Herbert goes on to pronounce the doctrine of forgiveness for faith immoral. Like all pioneers, Herbert falls into some inconsistencies on his own part; the most flagrant being his claim to have had a sign from heaven--that is, a private and special revelation--encouraging him to publish his book. [315] But his criticism is nonetheless telling and persuasive so far as it goes, and remains valid to this day. Nor do his later and posthumous works [316] add to it in essentials, though they do much to construct the deistic case on historical lines. The De religione gentilium in particular is a noteworthy study of pre-Christian religions, apparently motived by doubt or challenge as to his theorem of the universality of the God-idea. It proves only racial universality without agreement; but it is so far a scholarly beginning of rational hierology. The English Dialogue between a Teacher and his Pupil, which seems to have been the first form of the Religio Gentilium, [317] is a characteristic expression of his whole way of thought, and was doubtless left unpublished for the prudential reasons which led him to put all his published works in Latin. But the fact that the Latin quotations are translated shows that the book had been planned for publication--a risk which he did wisely to shun. The remarkable thing is that his Latin books were so little debated, the De Veritate being nowhere discussed before Culverwel. [318] Baxter in 1672 could say that Herbert, "never having been answered, might be thought unanswerable"; [319] and his own "answer" is merely theological. The next great freethinking figure in England is Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the most important thinker of his age, after Descartes, and hardly less influential. But the purpose of Hobbes being always substantially political and regulative, his unfaith in the current religion is only incidentally revealed in the writings in which he seeks to show the need for keeping it under monarchic control. [320] Hobbes is in fact the anti-Presbyterian or anti-Puritan philosopher; and to discredit anarchic religion in the eyes of the majority he is obliged to speak as a judicial Churchman. Yet nothing is more certain than that he was no orthodox Christian; and even his professed theism resolves itself somewhat easily into virtual agnosticism on logical pressure. No thought of prudence could withhold him from showing, in a discussion on words, that he held the doctrine of the Logos to be meaningless. [321] Of atheism he was repeatedly accused by both royalists and rebels; and his answer was forensic rather than fervent, alike as to his scripturalism, his Christianity, and his impersonal conception of Deity. [322] Reviving as he did the ancient rationalistic doctrine of the eternity of the world, [323] he gave a clear footing for atheism as against the Judæo-Christian view. In affirming "one God eternal" of whom men "cannot have any idea in their mind, answerable to his nature," he was negating all creeds. He expressly contends, it is true, for the principle of a Providence; but it is hard to believe that he laid any store by prayer, public or private; and it would appear that whatever thoughtful atheism there was in England in the latter part of the century looked to him as its philosopher, insofar as it did not derive from Spinoza. [324] Nor could the Naturalist school of that day desire a better, terser, or more drastic scientific definition of religion than Hobbes gave them: "Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind or imagined from tales publicly allowed, Religion; not allowed, Superstition." [325] As the Churchmen readily saw, his insistence on identifying the religion of a country with its law plainly implied that no religion is any more "revealed" than another. With him too begins (1651) the public criticism of the Bible on literary or documentary grounds; [326] though, as we have seen, this had already gone far in private; [327] and he gave a new lead, partly as against Descartes, to a materialistic philosophy. [328] His replies to the theistic and spiritistic reasonings of Descartes's Méditations are, like those of Gassendi, unrefuted and irrefutable; and they are fundamentally materialistic in their drift. [329] He was, in fact, in a special and peculiar degree for his age, a freethinker; and so deep was his intellectual hostility to the clergy of all species that he could not forego enraging those of his own political side by his sarcasms. [330] Here he is in marked contrast with Descartes, who dissembled his opinion about Copernicus and Galileo for peace' sake, [331] and was the close friend of the apologist Mersenne down to his death. [332] With the partial exception of the more refined and graceful Pecock, Hobbes has of all English thinkers down to his period the clearest and hardest head for all purposes of reasoning, save in the single field of mathematics, where he meddled without mastery; and against the theologians of his time his argumentation is as a two-edged sword. That such a man should have been resolutely on the side of the king in the Civil War is one of the proofs of the essential fanaticism and arbitrariness of the orthodox Puritans, who plotted more harm to the heresies they disliked than was ever wreaked on themselves. Hobbes came near enough being clerically ostracized among the royalists; but among the earlier Puritans, or under an Independent Puritan Parliament at any time, he would have stood a fair chance of execution. It was doubtless largely due to the anti-persecuting influence of Cromwell, as well as to his having ostensibly deserted the royalists, that Hobbes was allowed to settle quietly in England after making his submission to the Rump Parliament in 1651. In 1666 his Leviathan and De Cive were together condemned by the Restoration Parliament in its grotesque panic of piety after the Great Fire of London; and it was actually proposed to revive against him the writ de heretico comburendo; [333] but Charles II protected and pensioned him, though he was forbidden to publish anything further on burning questions, and Leviathan was not permitted in his lifetime to be republished in English. [334] He was thus for his generation the typical "infidel," the royalist clergy being perhaps his bitterest enemies. His spontaneous hostility to fanaticism shaped his literary career, which began in 1628 with a translation of Thucydides, undertaken by way of showing the dangers of democracy. Next came the De Cive (Paris, 1642), written when he was already an elderly man; and thenceforth the Civil War tinges his whole temper. It is in fact by way of a revolt against all theological ethic, as demonstrably a source of civil anarchy, that Hobbes formulates a strictly civic or legalist ethic, denying the supremacy of an abstract or à priori natural moral law (though he founded on natural law), as well as rejecting all supernatural illumination of the conscience. [335] In the Church of Rome itself there had inevitably arisen the practice of Casuistry, in which to a certain extent ethics had to be rationally studied; and early Protestant Casuistry, repudiating the authority of the priest, had to rely still more on reason. Compare Whewell, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. 1862, pp. 25-38, where it is affirmed that, after the Reformation, "Since the assertions of the teacher had no inherent authority, he was obliged to give his proofs as well as his results," and "the determination of cases was replaced by the discipline of conscience" (p. 29). There is an interesting progression in English Protestant casuistry from W. Perkins (1558-1602) and W. Ames (pub. 1630), through Bishops Hall and Sanderson, to Jeremy Taylor. Mosheim (17 Cent. sec. ii, pt. ii, § 9) pronounces Ames "the first among the Reformed who attempted to elucidate and arrange the science of morals as distinct from that of dogmatics." See biog. notes on Perkins and Ames in Whewell, pp. 27-29, and Reid's Mosheim, p. 681. But Hobbes passed in two strides to the position that natural morality is a set of demonstrable inferences as to what adjustments promote general well-being; and further that there is no practical code of right and wrong apart from positive social law. [336] He thus practically introduced once for all into modern Christendom the fundamental dilemma of rationalistic ethics, not only positing the problem for his age, [337] but anticipating it as handled in later times. [338] How far his rationalism was ahead of that of his age may be realized by comparing his positions with those of John Selden, the most learned and, outside of philosophy, one of the shrewdest of the men of that generation. Selden was sometimes spoken of by the Hobbists as a freethinker; and his Table Talk contains some sallies which would startle the orthodox if publicly delivered; [339] but not only is there explicit testimony by his associates as to his orthodoxy: [340] his own treatise, De Jure Naturali et Gentium juxta disciplinam Ebræorum, maintains the ground that the "Law of Nature" which underlies the variants of the Laws of Nations is limited to the precepts and traditions set forth in the Talmud as delivered by Noah to his posterity. [341] Le Clerc said of the work, justly enough, that in it "Selden only copies the Rabbins, and scarcely ever reasons." It is likely enough that the furious outcry against Selden for his strictly historical investigation of tithes, and the humiliation of apology forced upon him in that connection in 1618, [342] made him specially chary ever afterwards of any semblance of a denial of the plenary truth of theological tradition; but there is no reason to think that he had ever really transcended the Biblical view of the world's order. He illustrates, in fact, the extent to which a scholar could in that day be anti-clerical without being rationalistic. Like the bulk of the Parliamentarians, though without their fanaticism, he was thoroughly opposed to the political pretensions of the Church, [343] desiring however to leave episcopacy alone, as a matter outside of legislation, when the House of Commons abolished it. Yet he spoke of the name of Puritan as one which he "trusted he was not either mad enough or foolish enough to deserve." [344] There were thus in the Parliamentary party men of very different shades of opinion. The largest party, perhaps, was that of the fanatics who, as Mrs. Hutchinson--herself fanatical enough--tells concerning her husband, "would not allow him to be religious because his hair was not in their cut." [345] Next in strength were the more or less orthodox but anti-clerical and less pious Scripturalists, of whom Selden was the most illustrious. By far the smallest group of all were the freethinkers, men of their type being as often repelled by the zealotry of the Puritans as by the sacerdotalism of the State clergy. The Rebellion, in short, though it evoked rationalism, was not evoked by it. Like all religious strifes--like the vaster Thirty Years' War in contemporary Germany--it generated both doubt and indifferentism in men who would otherwise have remained undisturbed in orthodoxy. § 2 When, however, we turn from the higher literary propaganda to the verbal and other transitory debates of the period of the Rebellion, we realize how much partial rationalism had hitherto subsisted without notice. In that immense ferment some very advanced opinions, such as quasi-Anarchism in politics [346] and anti-Scripturalism in religion, were more or less directly professed. In January, 1646 (N.S.), the authorities of the City of London, alarmed at the unheard-of amount of discussion, petitioned Parliament to put down all private meetings; [347] and on February 6, 1646 (N.S.), a solemn fast, or "day of publique humiliation," was proclaimed on the score of the increase of "errors, heresies, and blasphemies." On the same grounds, the Presbyterian party in Parliament pressed an "Ordinance for the suppression of Blasphemies and Heresies," which, long held back by Vane and Cromwell, was carried in their despite in 1648, by large majorities, when the royalists renewed hostilities. It enacted the death penalty against all who should deny the doctrine of the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the inspiration of the Bible, a day of judgment, or a future state; and prescribed imprisonment for Arminianism, rejection of infant baptism, anti-Sabbatarianism, anti-Presbyterianism, or defence of the doctrine of Purgatory or the use of images. [348] And of aggressive heresy there are some noteworthy traces. In a pamphlet entitled "Hell Broke Loose: a Catalogue of the many spreading Errors, Heresies, and Blasphemies of these Times, for which we are to be humbled" (March 9, 1646, N.S.), the first entry--and in the similar Catalogue in Edwards's Gangræna, the second entry--is a citation of the notable thesis, "That the Scripture, whether a true manuscript or no, whether Hebrew, Greek, or English, is but humane, and not able to discover a divine God." [349] This is cited from "The Pilgrimage of the Saints, by Lawrence Clarkson," presumably the Lawrence Clarkson who for his book The Single Eye was sentenced by resolution of Parliament on September 27, 1650, to be imprisoned, the book being burned by the common hangman. [350] He is further cited as teaching that even unbaptized persons may preach and baptize. Of the other heresies cited the principal is the old denial of a future life, and especially of a physical and future hell. In general the heresy is pietistic or antinomian; but we have also the declaration "that right Reason is the rule of Faith, and that we are to believe the Scriptures and the doctrine of the Trinity, Incarnation, Resurrection, so far as we see them to be agreeable to reason and no further." Concerning Jesus there are various heresies, from simple Unitarianism to contemptuous disparagement, with the stipulation for a "Christ formed in us." But though there are cases of unquotable or ribald blasphemy there is little trace of scholarly criticism of the Bible, of reasoning against miracles or the inconsistencies of Scripture, as apart from the doctrine of deity. Nonetheless, it is very credible that "multitudes, unsettled ... have changed their faith, either to Scepticisme, to doubt of everything, or Atheisme, to believe nothing." [351] Against the furious intolerance of the Puritan legislature some pleaded with new zeal for tolerance all round; arguing that certainty on articles of faith and points of religion was impossible--a doctrine promptly classed as a bad heresy. [352] The plea that toleration would mean concord was met by the confident and not unfounded retort that the "sectaries" would themselves persecute if they could. [353] But this could hardly have been true of all. Notable among the new parties were the Levellers, who insisted that the State should leave religion entirely alone, tolerating all creeds, including even atheism; and who put forward a new and striking ethic, grounding on "universal reason" the right of all men to the soil. [354] In the strictly theological field the most striking innovation, apart from simple Unitarianism, is the denial of the eternity or even the existence of future torments--a position first taken up, as we have seen, either by the continental Socinians or by the unnamed English heretics of the Tudor period, who passed on their heresy to the time of Marlowe. [355] In this connection the learned booklet [356] entitled Of the Torments of Hell: the foundations and pillars thereof discover'd, search'd, shaken, and removed (1658) was rightly thought worth translating into French by d'Holbach over a century later. [357] It is an argument on scriptural lines, denying that the conception of a place of eternal torment is either scriptural or credible; and pointing out that many had explained it in a "spiritual" sense. Humane feeling of this kind counted for much in the ferment; but a contrary hate was no less abundant. The Presbyterian Thomas Edwards, who in a vociferous passion of fear and zeal set himself to catalogue the host of heresies that threatened to overwhelm the times, speaks of "monsters" unheard-of theretofore, "now common among us--as denying the Scriptures, pleading for a toleration of all religions and worships, yea, for blasphemy, and denying there is a God." [358] "A Toleration," he declares, "is the grand design of the Devil, his masterpiece and chief engine"; "every day now brings forth books for a Toleration." [359] Among the 180 sects named by him [360] there were "Libertines," "Antiscripturists," "Skeptics and Questionists," [361] who held nothing save the doctrine of free speech and liberty of conscience; [362] as well as Socinians, Arians, and Anti-trinitarians; and he speaks of serious men who had not only abandoned their religious beliefs, but sought to persuade others to do the same. [363] Under the rule of Cromwell, tolerant as he was of Christian sectarianism, and even of Unitarianism as represented by Biddle, the more advanced heresies would get small liberty; though that of Thomas Muggleton and John Reeve, which took shape about 1651 as the Muggletonian sect, does not seem to have been molested. Muggleton, a mystic, could teach that there was no devil or evil spirit, save in "man's spirit of unclean reason and cursed imagination"; [364] but it was only privately that such men as Henry Marten and Thomas Chaloner, the regicides, could avow themselves to be of "the natural religion." The statement of Bishop Burnet, following Clarendon, that "many of the republicans began to profess deism," cannot be taken literally, though it is broadly intelligible that "almost all of them were for destroying all clergymen ... and for leaving religion free, as they called it, without either encouragement or restraint." See Burnet's History of His Own Time, bk. i, ed. 1838, p. 43. The phrase, "They were for pulling down the churches," again, cannot be taken literally. Of those who "pretended to little or no religion and acted only upon the principles of civil liberty," Burnet goes on to name Sidney, Henry Nevill, Marten, Wildman, and Harrington. The last was certainly of Hobbes's way of thinking in philosophy (Croom Robertson, Hobbes, p. 223, note); but Wildman was one of the signers of the Anabaptist petition to Charles II in 1658 (Clarendon, Hist. of the Rebellion, bk. xv, ed. 1843, p. 855). As to Marten and Chaloner, see Carlyle's Cromwell, iii, 194; and articles in Nat. Dict. of Biog. Vaughan (Hist. of England, 1840, ii, 477, note) speaks of Walwyn and Overton as "among the freethinkers of the times of the Commonwealth." They were, however, Biblicists, not unbelievers. Prof. Gardiner (Hist. of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii, 253, citing a News-letter in the Clarendon MSS.) finds record in 1653 of "a man [who] preached flat atheism in Westminster Hall, uninterrupted by the soldiers of the guard"; but this obviously counts for little. Between the advance in speculation forced on by the disputes themselves, and the usual revolt against the theological spirit after a long and ferocious display of it, there spread even under the Commonwealth a new temper of secularity. On the one hand, the temperamental distaste for theology, antinomian or other, took form in the private associations for scientific research which were the antecedents of the Royal Society. On the other hand, the spirit of religious doubt spread widely in the middle and upper classes; and between the dislike of the Roundheads for the established clergy and the anger of the Cavaliers against all Puritanism there was fostered that "contempt of the clergy" which had become a clerical scandal at the Restoration and was to remain so for about a century. [365] Their social status was in general low, and their financial position bad; and these circumstances, possible only in a time of weakened religious belief, necessarily tended to further the process of mental change. Within the sphere of orthodoxy, it operated openly. It is noteworthy that the term "rationalist" emerges as the label of a sect of Independents or Presbyterians who declare that "What their reason dictates to them in church or State stands for good, until they be convinced with better." [366] The "rationalism," so-called, of that generation remained ostensibly scriptural; but on other lines thought went further. Of atheism there are at this stage only dubious biographical and controversial traces, such as Mrs. Hutchinson's characterization of a Nottingham physician, possibly a deist, as a "horrible atheist," [367] and the Rev. John Dove's Confutation of Atheism (1640), which does not bear out its title. Ephraim Pagitt, in his Heresiography (1644), speaks loosely of an "atheistical sect who affirm that men's soules sleep with them until the day of judgment"; and tells of some alleged atheist merely that he "mocked and jeared at Christ's Incarnation." [368] Similarly a work, entitled Dispute betwixt an Atheist and a Christian (1646), shows the existence not of atheists but of deists, and the deist in the dialogue is a Fleming. More trustworthy is the allusion in Nathaniel Culverwel's Discourse of the Light of Nature (written in 1646, published posthumously in 1652) to "those lumps and dunghills of all sects ... that young and upstart generation of gross anti-scripturalists, that have a powder-plot against the Gospel, that would very compendiously behead all Christian religion at one blow, a device which old and ordinary heretics were never acquainted withal." [369] The reference is presumably to the followers of Lawrence Clarkson. Yet even here we have no mention of atheism, which is treated as something almost impossible. Indeed, the very course of arguing in favour of a "Light of Nature" seems to have brought suspicion on Culverwel himself, who shows a noticeable liking for Herbert of Cherbury. [370] He is, however, as may be inferred from his angry tone towards anti-scripturalists, substantially orthodox, and not very important. It is contended for Culverwel by modern admirers (ed. cited, p. xxi) that he deserves the praise given by Hallam to the later Bishop Cumberland as "the first Christian writer who sought to establish systematically the principle of moral right independent of revelation." [See above, p. 74, the similar tribute of Mosheim to Ames.] But Culverwel does not really make this attempt. His proposition is that reason, "the candle of the Lord," discovers "that all the moral law is founded in natural and common light, in the light of reason, and that there is nothing in the mysteries of the Gospel contrary to the light of reason" (Introd. end); yet he contends not only that faith transcends reason, but that Abraham's attempt to slay his son was a dutiful obeying of "the God of nature" (pp. 225-26). He does not achieve the simple step of noting that the recognition of revelation as such must be performed by reason, and thus makes no advance on the position of Bacon, much less on those of Pecock and Hooker. His object, indeed, was not to justify orthodoxy by reason against rationalistic unbelief, but to make a case for reason in theology against the Lutherans and others who, "because Socinus has burnt his wings at this candle of the Lord," scouted all use of it (Introd.). Culverwel, however, was one of the learned group in Emanuel College, Cambridge, whose tradition developed in the next generation into Latitudinarianism; and he may be taken as a learned type of a number of the clergy who were led by the abundant discussion all around them into professing and encouraging a ratiocinative habit of mind. Thus we find Dean Stuart, Clerk of the Closet to Charles I, devoting one of his short homilies to Jerome's text, Tentemus animas quæ deficiunt a fide naturalibus rationibus adjurare. "It is not enough," he writes, "for you to rest in an imaginary faith, and easiness in beleeving, except yee know also what and why and how you come to that beleef. Implicite beleevers, ignorant beleevers, the adversary may swallow, but the understanding beleever hee must chaw, and pick bones before hee come to assimilate him, and make him like himself. The implicite beleever stands in an open field, and the enemy will ride over him easily: the understanding beleever is in a fenced town." (Catholique Divinity, 1657, pp. 133-34--a work written many years earlier.) The discourse on Atheism, again, in the posthumous works of John Smith of Cambridge (d. 1652), is entirely retrospective; but soon another note is sounded. As early as 1652, the year after the issue of Hobbes's Leviathan, the prolific Walter Charleton, who had been physician to the king, published a book entitled The Darkness of Atheism Expelled by the Light of Nature, wherein he asserted that England "hath of late produced and doth ... foster more swarms of atheistical monsters ... than any age, than any Nation hath been infested withal." In the following year Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, published his Antidote against Atheism. The flamboyant dedication to Viscountess Conway affirms that the existence of God is "as clearly demonstrable as any theorem in mathematicks"; but, the reverend author adds, "considering the state of things as they are, I cannot but pronounce that there is more necessity of this my Antidote than I could wish there were." At the close of the preface he pleasantly explains that he will use no Biblical arguments, but talk to the atheist as a "mere Naturalist"; inasmuch as "he that converses with a barbarian must discourse to him in his own language," and "he that would gain upon the more weak and sunk minds of sensual mortals is to accommodate himself to their capacity, who, like the bat and owl, can see nowhere so well as in the shady glimmerings of their twilight." Then, after some elementary play with the design argument, the entire Third Book of forty-six folio pages is devoted to a parade of old wives' tales of witches and witchcraft, witches' sabbaths, apparitions, commotions by devils, ghosts, incubi, polter-geists--the whole vulgar medley of the peasant superstitions of Europe. It is not that the Platonist does violence to his own philosophic tastes by way of influencing the "bats and owls" of atheism. This mass of superstition is his own special pabulum. In the preface he has announced that, while he may abstain from the use of the Scriptures, nothing shall restrain him from telling what he knows of spirits. "I am so cautious and circumspect," he claims, "that I make use of no narrations that either the avarice of the priest or the credulity and fancifulness of the melancholist may render suspected." As for the unbelievers, "their confident ignorance shall never dash me out of confidence with my well-grounded knowledge; for I have been no careless inquirer into these things." It is after a polter-geist tale of the crassest description that he announces that it was strictly investigated and attested by "that excellently-learned and noble gentleman, Mr. E. Boyle," who avowed "that all his settled indisposedness to believe strange things was overcome by this special conviction." [371] And the section ends with the proposition: "Assuredly that saying is not more true in politick, No Bishop, no King, than this in metaphysicks, No Spirit, no God." Such was the mentality of some of the most eminent and scholarly Christian apologists of the time. It seems safe to conclude that the Platonist made few converts. More avowed that he wrote without having read previous apologists; and others were similarly spontaneous in the defence of the faith. In 1654 there is noted [372] a treatise called Atheismus Vapulans, by William Towers, whose message can in part be inferred from his title; [373] and in 1657 Charleton issued his Immortality of the Human Soul demonstrated by the Light of Nature, wherein the argument, which says nothing of revelation, is so singularly unconfident, and so much broken in upon by excursus, as to leave it doubtful whether the author was more lacking in dialectic skill or in conviction. And still the traces of unbelief multiply. Baxter and Howe were agreed, in 1658, that there were both "infidels and papists" at work around them; and in 1659 Howe writes: "I know some leading men are not Christians." [374] "Seekers, Vanists, and Behmenists" are specified as groups to which both infidels and papists attach themselves. And Howe, recognizing how religious strifes promote unbelief, bears witness "What a cloudy, wavering, uncertain, lank, spiritless thing is the faith of Christians in this age become!... Most content themselves to profess it only as the religion of their country." [375] Alongside of all this vindication of Christianity there was going on constant and cruel persecution of heretic Christians. The Unitarian John Biddle, master of the Gloucester Grammar School, was dismissed for his denial of the Trinity; and in 1647 he was imprisoned, and his book burned by the hangman. In 1654 he was again imprisoned; and in 1655 he was banished to the Scilly Islands. Returning to London after the Restoration, he was again arrested, and died in gaol in