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

atheists," [645] and in 1681, at Amsterdam, of an attack in French on Spinoza's Scriptural criticism, [646] points to a movement outside of the clerical and scholarly class. All along, indeed, the atmosphere of the Arminian or "Remonstrant" School in Holland must have been fairly liberal. [647] Already in 1685 Locke's friend Le Clerc had taken up the position of Hobbes and Spinoza and Simon on the Pentateuch in his Sentimens de quelques théologiens de Hollande (translated into English and published in 1690 as "Five Letters Concerning the Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures"). [648] And although Le Clerc always remained something of a Scripturalist, and refused to go the way of Spinoza, he had courage enough to revive an ancient heresy by urging, in his commentary on the fourth Gospel (1701), that "the Logos" should be rendered "Reason"--an idea which he probably derived from the Unitarian Zwicker without realizing how far it could take him. His ultimate recantation, on the subject of the authorship of the Pentateuch, served only to weaken his credit with freethinkers, and came too late to arrest the intellectual movement which he had forwarded. A rationalizing spirit had now begun to spread widely in Holland; and within twenty years of Spinoza's death there had arisen a Dutch sect, led by Pontiaan van Hattem, a pastor at Philipsland, which blended Spinozism with evangelicalism in such a way as to incur the anathema of the Church. [649] In the time of the English Civil War the fear of the opponents of the new multitude of sects was that England should become "another Amsterdam." [650] This very multiplicity tended to promote doubt; and in 1713 we find Anthony Collins [651] pointing to Holland as a country where freedom to think has undermined superstition to a remarkable degree. During his stay, in the previous generation, Locke had found a measure of liberal theology, in harmony with his own; but in those days downright heresy was still dangerous. Deurhoff (d. 1717), who translated Descartes and was accused of Spinozism, though he strongly attacked it, [652] had at one time to fly Holland, though by his writings he founded a pantheistic sect known as Deurhovians; and Balthasar Bekker, a Cartesian, persecuted first for Socinianism, incurred so much odium by publishing in 1691 a treatise denying the reality of witchcraft that he had to give up his office as a preacher. Cp. art. in Biographie Universelle, and Mosheim, 17 Cent. pt. ii, ch. ii, § 35, and notes in Reid's ed. Bekker was not the first to combat demonology on scriptural grounds; Arnold Geulincx, of Leyden, and the French Protestant refugee Daillon having less confidently put the view before him, the latter in his Daimonologia, 1687 (trans. in English, 1723), and the former in his system of ethics. Gassendi, as we saw, had notably discredited witchcraft a generation earlier; Reginald Scot had impugned its actuality in 1584; and Wier, still earlier, in 1563. And even before the Reformation the learned King Christian II of Denmark (deposed 1523) had vetoed witch-burning in his dominions. (Allen, Hist. de Danemark, French tr. 1878, i, 281.) As Scot's Discoverie had been translated into Dutch in 1609, Bekker probably had a lead from him. Glanvill's Blow at Modern Sadducism (1688), reproduced in Sadducismus Triumphatus, undertakes to answer some objections of the kind later urged by Bekker; and the discussion was practically international. Bekker's treatise, entitled De Betooverte Wereld, was translated into English--first in 1695, from the French, under the title The World Bewitched (only 1 vol. published), and again in 1700 as The World turned upside down. In the French translation, Le Monde Enchanté (4 tom. 1694), it had a great vogue. A refutation was published in English in An Historical Treatise of Spirits, by J. Beaumont, in 1705. It is noteworthy that Bekker was included as one of "four modern sages (vier neuer Welt-Weisen)" with Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza, in a German folio tractate (hostile) of 1702.