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utilitarianism and the idea of causation; but his book, Essays on Morality
and Natural Religion (published anonymously, 1751), handled the thorny
question of free-will in such fashion as to give no less offence than Hume
had done; and the orthodox bracketed him with the subject of his criticism.
His doctrine was indeed singular, its purport being that there can be no free-
will, but that the deity has for wise purposes implanted in men the feeling
that their wills are free. The fact of his having been made a judge of the
Court of Session since writing his book had probably something to do with
the rejection of the whole subject by the General Assembly, and afterwards
by the Edinburgh Presbytery; but there had evidently arisen a certain
diffidence in the Church, which would be assiduously promoted by
“moderates” such as Principal Robertson, the historian. It is noteworthy
that, while Home and Hume thus escaped, the other Home, John, who wrote
the then admired tragedy of Douglas, was soon after forced to resign his
position as a minister of the Church for that authorship, deism having
apparently more friends in the fold than drama.160 While the theatre was
thus being treated as a place of sin, many of the churches in Scotland were
the scenes of repeated Sunday riots. A new manner of psalm-singing had
been introduced, and it frequently happened that the congregations divided
into two parties, each singing in its own way, till they came to blows.
According to one of Hume’s biographers, unbelievers were at this period
wont to go to church to see the fun.161 Naturally orthodoxy did not gain
ground.

In the case of Adam Smith we have one of the leading instances of the
divorce between culture and creed in the Scotland of that age. His
intellectual tendencies, primed by Hutcheson, were already revealing
themselves when, seeking for something worth study in the unstudious
Oxford of his day, he was found by some suspicious supervisor reading
Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. The book was seized and the student
scolded.162 When, in 1751, he became Professor of Moral Philosophy in
Glasgow University, he aroused orthodox comment by abandoning the
Sunday class on Christian Evidences set up by Hutcheson, and still further,
it is said, by petitioning the Senatus to be allowed to be relieved of the duty
of opening his class with prayer.163 The permission was not given; and the
compulsory prayers were “thought to savour strongly of natural religion”;
while the lectures on Natural Theology, which were part of the work of the
chair, were said to lead “presumptuous striplings” to hold that “the great
truths of theology, together with the duties which man owes to God and his
neighbours, may be discovered by the light of nature without any special
revelation.”164 Smith was thus well founded in rationalism before he
became personally acquainted with Voltaire and the other French
freethinkers; and the pious contemporary who deplores his associations
avows that neither before nor after his French tour was his religious creed
ever “properly ascertained.”165 It is clear, however, that it steadily
developed in a rationalistic direction. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759) the prevailing vein of theistic optimism is sufficiently uncritical; but
even there there emerges an apparent doubt on the doctrine of a future state,
and positive hostility to certain ecclesiastical forms of it.166 In the sixth
edition, which he prepared for the press in 1790, he deleted the passage
which pronounced the doctrine of the Atonement to be in harmony with
natural ethics.167 But most noteworthy of all is his handling of the question
of religious establishments in the Wealth of Nations.168 It is so completely
naturalistic that only the habit of taking the Christian religion for granted
could make men miss seeing that its account of the conditions of the rise of
new cults applied to that in its origin no less than to the rise of any of its
sects. As a whole, the argument might form part of Gibbon’s fifteenth
chapter. And even allowing for the slowness of the average believer to see
the application of a general sociological law to his own system, there must
be inferred a great change in the intellectual climate of Scottish life before
we can account for Smith’s general popularity at home as well as abroad
after his handling of “enthusiasm and superstition” in the Wealth of Nations.
The fact stands out that the two most eminent thinkers in Scotland in the
latter half of the eighteenth century were non-Christians,169 and that their
most intellectual associates were in general sympathy with them.

§ 11
In Ireland, at least in Dublin, during the earlier part of the century, there
occurred, on a smaller scale, a similar movement of rationalism, also largely
associated with Shaftesbury. In Dublin towards the close of the seventeenth
century we have seen Molyneux, the friend and correspondent of Locke,
interested in “freethought,” albeit much scared by the imprudence of
Toland. At the same period there germinated a growth of Unitarianism,
which was even more fiercely persecuted than that of Toland’s deism. The
Rev. Thomas Emlyn, an Englishman, co-pastor of the Protestant Dissenting
Congregation of Wood Street (now Strand Street), Dublin, was found by a
Presbyterian and a Baptist to be heretical on the subject of the Trinity, and
was indicted in 1702 for blasphemy. He was sentenced to two years’
imprisonment and a fine of £1,000, which was partly commuted on his
release. He protested that South and Sherlock and other writers on the
Trinitarian controversy might have been as justly prosecuted as he; but Irish
Protestant orthodoxy was of a keener scent than English, and Emlyn was
fain, when released, to return to his native land.170 His colleague Boyse,
like many other Churchmen, wished that the unhappy trinitarian
controversy “were buried in silence,” but was careful to conform
doctrinally. More advanced thinkers had double reason to be reticent. As
usual, however, persecution provoked the growth it sought to stifle; and
after the passing of the Irish Toleration Act of 1719, a more liberal measure
than the English, there developed in Ulster, and even in Dublin, a Unitarian
movement akin to that proceeding in England.171 In the next generation we
find in the same city a coterie of Shaftesburyans, centring around Lord
Molesworth, the friend of Hutcheson, a man of affairs devoted to
intellectual interests. It was within a few years of his meeting Molesworth
that Hutcheson produced his Inquiry, championing Shaftesbury’s ideas;172
and other literary men were similarly influenced. It is even suggested that
Hutcheson’s clerical friend Synge, whom we have seen173 in 1713
attempting a ratiocinative answer to the unbelief he declared to be abundant
around him, was not only influenced by Shaftesbury through Molesworth,
but latterly “avoided publication lest his opinions should prejudice his
career in the Church.”174 After the death of Molesworth, in 1725, the
movement he set up seems to have languished;175 but, as we have seen,
there were among the Irish bishops men given to philosophic controversy,
and the influence of Berkeley cannot have been wholly obscurantist. When
in 1756 we read of the Arian Bishop Clayton176 proposing in the Irish
House of Lords to drop the Nicene and Athanasian creeds, we realize that in
Ireland thought was far from stagnant. The heretic bishop, however, died
(February, 1758) just as he was about to be prosecuted for the anti-
Athanasian heresies of his last book; and thenceforth Ireland plays no
noticeable part in the development of rationalism, political interests soon
taking the place of religious, with the result that orthodoxy recovered
ground.

It cannot be doubted that the spectacle of religious wickedness presented by

the operation of the odious penal laws against Catholics, and the temper of
the Protestant Ascendancy party in religious matters, had bred rational
skepticism in Ireland in the usual way. Molesworth stands out in Irish
history as a founder of a new and saner patriotism; and his doctrines would
specially appeal to men of a secular and critical way of thinking. Heretical
bishops imply heretical laymen. But the environment was unpropitious to
dispassionate thinking. The very relaxation of the Penal Code favoured a
reversion to “moderate” orthodoxy; and the new political strifes of the last
quarter of the century, destined as they were to be reopened in the next,
determined the course of Irish culture in another way.

§ 12

In England, meanwhile, there was beginning the redistribution of energies

which can be seen to have prepared for the intellectual and political reaction
of the end of the century. There had been no such victory of faith as is
supposed to have been wrought by the forensic theorem of Butler. An
orthodox German observer, making a close inquest about 1750, cites the
British Magazine as stating in 1749 that half the educated people were then
deists; and he, after full inquiry, agrees.177 In the same year, Richardson
speaks tragically in the Postscriptum to Clarissa of seeing “skepticism and
infidelity openly avowed, and even endeavoured to be propagated from the
press; the great doctrines of the gospel brought into question”; and he
describes himself as “seeking to steal in with a disguised plea for religion.”
Instead of being destroyed by the clerical defence, the deistic movement
had really penetrated the Church, which was become as rationalistic in its
methods as its function would permit, and the educated classes, which had
arrived at a state of compromise. Pope, the chief poet of the preceding
generation, had been visibly deistic in his thinking; as Dryden had inferribly
been before him; and to such literary prestige was added the prestige of
scholarship. The academic Conyers Middleton, whose Letter from Rome
had told so heavily against Christianity in exposing the pagan derivations of
much of Catholicism, and who had further damaged the doctrine of
inspiration in his anonymous Letter to Dr. Waterland (1731), while
professing to refute Tindal, had carried to yet further lengths his service to
the critical spirit. In his famous Free Inquiry into the miracles of post-
apostolic Christianity (1749), again professing to strike at Rome, he had
laid the foundations of a new structure of comparative criticism, and had
given permanent grounds for rejecting the miracles of the sacred books.

Middleton’s book appeared a year after Hume’s essay Of Miracles, and it

made out no such philosophic case as Hume’s against the concept of
miracle; but it created at once, by its literary brilliance and its cogent
argument, a sensation such as had thus far been made neither by Hume’s
philosophic argument nor by Francklin’s anticipation of that.178 Middleton
had duly safeguarded himself by positing the certainty of the gospel
miracles and of those wrought by the Apostles, on the old principle179 that
prodigies were divinely arranged so far forth as was necessary to establish
Christianity, but no further. “The history of the gospel,” he writes, “I hope
may be true, though the history of the Church be fabulous.”180 But his
argument against post-Apostolic miracles is so strictly naturalistic that no
vigilant reader could fail to realize its fuller bearing upon all miracles
whatsoever. With Hume and Francklin, he insisted that facts incredible in
themselves could not be established by any amount or kind of testimony;
and he suggested no measure of comparative credibility as between the two
orders of miracle. With the deists in general, he argued that knowledge
“either of the ways or will of the Creator” was to be had only through study
of “that revelation which he made of himself from the beginning in the
beautiful fabric of this visible world.”181 An antagonist accordingly wrote
that his theses were: “First, that there were no miracles wrought in the
primitive Church; Secondly, that all the primitive fathers were fools or
knaves, and most of them both one and the other. And it is easy to observe,
the whole tenor of your argument tends to prove, Thirdly, that no miracles
were wrought by Christ or his apostles; and Fourthly, that these too were
fools or knaves, or both.”182 A more temperate opponent pressed the same
point in less explosive language. Citing Middleton’s demand for an
inductive method, this critic asks with much point: “What does he mean by
‘deserting the path of Nature and experience,’ but giving in to the belief of
any miracles, and acknowledging the reality of events contrary to the
known effects of the established Laws of Nature?”183

No other answer was seriously possible. In the very act of ostentatiously

terming Tindal an “infidel,” Middleton describes an answer made to him by
the apologist Chapman as a sample of a kind of writing which did “more
hurt and discredit” to Christianity “than all the attacks of its open
adversaries.”184 In support of the miracles of the gospel and the apostolic
history he offers merely conventional pleas: against the miracles related by
the Fathers he brings to bear an incessant battery of destructive criticism.
We may sum up that by the middle of the eighteenth century the essentials
of the Christian creed, openly challenged for a generation by avowed deists,
were abandoned by not a few scholars within the pale of the Church, of
whom Middleton was merely the least reticent. After his death was
published his Vindication of the Inquiry (1751); and in his collected works
(1752) was included his Reflections on the Variations or Inconsistencies
which are found among the Four Evangelists, wherein it is demonstrated
that “the belief of the inspiration and absolute infallibility of the evangelists
seems to be more absurd than even that of transubstantiation itself.”185 The
main grounds of orthodoxy were thus put in doubt in the name of a critical
orthodoxy. In short, the deistic movement had done what it lay in it to do.
The old evangelical or pietistic view of life was discredited among
instructed people, and in this sense it was Christianity that had “decayed.”
Its later recovery was economic, not intellectual.

Thus Skelton writes in 1751 that “our modern apologists for Christianity often
defend it on deistical principles” (Deism Revealed, pref. p. xii. Cp. vol. ii, pp. 234,
237). See also Sir Leslie Stephen as cited above, p. 149, note; and Gostwick,
German Culture and Christianity, 1882, pp. 33–36.

An interesting instance of liberalizing orthodoxy is furnished by the Rev. Arthur

Ashley Sykes, who contributed many volumes to the general deistic discussion,
some of them anonymously. In the preface to his Essay on the Truth of the
Christian Religion (1732; 2nd ed. enlarged, 1755) Sykes remarks that “since ...
systematical opinions have been received and embraced in such a manner that it
has not been safe to contradict them, the burden of vindicating Christianity has
been very much increased. Its friends have been much embarrassed through fear
of speaking against local truths; and its adversaries have so successfully attacked
those weaknesses that Christianity itself has been deemed indefensible, when in
reality the follies of Christians alone have been so.” Were Christians left to the
simple doctrines of Christ and the Apostles, he contends, Infidelity could make no
converts. And at the close of the book he writes: “Would to God that Christians
would be content with the plainness and simplicity of the gospel.... That they
would not vend under the name of evangelical truth the absurd and contradictory
schemes of ignorant or wicked men! That they would part with that load of
rubbish which makes thinking men almost sink under the weight, and gives too
great a handle for Infidelity!” Such writing could not give satisfaction to the
ecclesiastical authorities; and as little could Sykes’s remarkable admission (The
Principles and Connection of Natural and Revealed Religion, 1740, p. 242):
“When the advantages of revelation are to be specified, I cannot conceive that it
should be maintained as necessary to fix a rule of morality. For what one principle
of morality is there which the heathen moralists had not asserted or maintained?
Before ever any revelation is offered to mankind they are supposed to be so well
acquainted with moral truths as from them to judge of the truth of the revelation
itself.” Again he writes:—

“Nor can revelation be necessary to ascertain religion. For religion consisting in

nothing but doing our duties from a sense of the being of God, revelation is not
necessary to this end, unless it be said that we cannot know that there is a God,
and what our duties are, without it. Reason will teach us that there is a God ... that
we are to be just and charitable to our neighbours; that we are to be temperate and
sober in ourselves” (id. p. 244).

This is simple Shaftesburyan deism, and all that the apologist goes on to contend
for is that revelation “contains motives and reasons for the practice of what is
 right, more and different from what natural reason without this help can suggest.”
He seems, however, to have believed in miracles, though an anonymous Essay on
the Nature, Design, and Origin of Sacrifices (1748) which is ascribed to him
quietly undermines the whole evangelical doctrine. Throughout, he is remarkable
for the amenity of his tone towards “infidels.”

Balguy, a man of less ability, is notably latitudinarian in his theology. In the very
act of criticizing the deists, he complains of Locke’s arbitrariness in deriving
morality from the will of God. Religion, he argues, is so derived, but morality is
inherent in the whole nature of things, and is the same for God and men. This
position, common to the school of Clarke, is at bottom that of Shaftesbury and the
Naturalists. All that Balguy says for religion is that a doctrine of rewards and
punishments is necessary to stimulate the average moral sense; and that the
Christian story of the condescension of Omnipotence in coming to earth and
suffering misery for man’s sake ought to overwhelm the imagination! (See A
Letter to a Deist, 2nd ed. 1730, pp. 5, 14, 15, 31; Foundation of Moral Goodness,
pt. ii, 1729, p. 41 sq.)

The next intellectual step in natural course would have been a revision of
the deistic assumptions, insofar, that is, as certain positive assumptions
were common to the deists. But, as we have seen, certain fresh issues were
raised as among the deists themselves. In addition to those above noted,
there was the profoundly important one as to ethics. Shaftesbury, who
rejected the religious basis, held a creed of optimism; and this optimism
was assailed by Mandeville, who in consequence was opposed as warmly
by the deist Hutcheson and others as by Law and Berkeley. To grapple with
this problem, and with the underlying cosmic problem, there was needed at
least as much general mental activity as went to the antecedent discussion;
and the main activity of the nation was now being otherwise directed. The
negative process, the impeachment of Christian supernaturalism, had been
accomplished so far as the current arguments went. Toland and Collins had
fought the battle of free discussion, forcing ratiocination on the Church;
Collins had shaken the creed of prophecy; Shaftesbury had impugned the
religious conception of morals; and Mandeville had done so more
profoundly, laying the foundations of scientific utilitarianism.186 So
effective had been the utilitarian propaganda in general that the orthodox
Brown (author of the once famous Estimate of the life of his countrymen),
in his criticism of Shaftesbury (1751), wrote as a pure utilitarian against an
inconsistent one, and defended Christianity on strictly utilitarian lines.
Woolston, following up Collins, had shaken the faith in New Testament
miracles; Middleton had done it afresh with all the decorum that Woolston
lacked; and Hume had laid down with masterly clearness the philosophic
principle which rebuts all attempts to prove miracles as such.187 Tindal had
clinched the case for “natural” theism as against revelationism; and the later
deists, notably Morgan, had to some extent combined these results.188 This
literature was generally distributed; and so far the case had been thrashed
out.

§ 13

To carry intellectual progress much further there was needed a general

movement of scientific study and a reform in education. The translation of
La Mettrie’s Man a Machine (1749)189 found a public no better prepared
for the problems he raised than that addressed by Strutt eighteen years
before; and the reply of Luzac, Man More than a Machine, in the preface to
which the translator (1752) declared that “irreligion and infidelity
overspread the land,” probably satisfied what appetite there was for such a
discussion. There had begun a change in the prevailing mental life, a
diversion of interest from ideas as such to political and mercantile interests.
The middle and latter part of the eighteenth century is the period of the rise
of (1) the new machine industries, and (2) the new imperialistic policy of
Chatham.190 Both alike withdrew men from problems of mere belief,
whether theological or scientific.191 That the reaction was not one of mere
fatigue over deism we have already seen. It was a general diversion of
energy, analogous to what had previously taken place in France in the reign
of Louis XIV. As the poet Gray, himself orthodox, put the case in 1754, “the
mode of freethinking has given place to the mode of not thinking at all.”192
In Hume’s opinion the general pitch of national intelligence south of the
Tweed was lowered.193 This state of things of course was favourable to
religious revival; but what took place was rather a new growth of emotional
pietism in the new industrial masses (the population being now on a rapid
increase), under the ministry of the Wesleys and Whitefield, and a further
growth of similar religion in the new provincial middle-class that grew up
on the industrial basis. The universities all the while were at the lowest ebb
of culture, but officially rabid against philosophic freethinking.194

It would be a great mistake, however, to suppose that all this meant a dying
out of deism among the educated classes. The statement of Goldsmith,
about 1760, that deists in general “have been driven into a confession of the
necessity of revelation, or an open avowal of atheism,”195 is not to be taken
seriously. Goldsmith, whose own orthodoxy is very doubtful, had a
whimsical theory that skepticism, though it might not injure morals, has a
“manifest tendency to subvert the literary merits” of any country;196 and
argued accordingly. Deism, remaining fashionable, did but fall partly into
the background of living interests, the more concrete issues of politics and
the new imaginative literature occupying the foreground. It was early in the
reign of George III that Sir William Blackstone, having had the curiosity to
listen in succession to the preaching of every clergyman in London, “did
not hear a single discourse which had more Christianity in it than the
writings of Cicero,” and declared that it would have been impossible for
him to discover from what he heard whether the preacher were a follower of
Confucius, of Mahomet, or of Christ.197 When the Church was thus deistic,
the educated laity can have been no less so. The literary status of deism
after 1750 was really higher than ever. It was now represented by Hume; by
Adam Smith (Moral Sentiments, 1759); by the scholarship of Conyers
Middleton; and by the posthumous works (1752–54) of Lord Bolingbroke,
who, albeit more of a debater than a thinker, debated often with masterly
skill, in a style unmatched for harmony and energetic grace, which had
already won him a great literary prestige, though the visible insincerity of
his character, and the habit of browbeating, always countervailed his charm.
His influence, commonly belittled, was much greater than writers like
Johnson would admit; and it went deep. Voltaire, who had been his
intimate, tells198 that he had known some young pupils of Bolingbroke who
altogether denied the historic actuality of the Gospel Jesus—a stretch of
criticism beyond the assimilative power of that age.

His motive to write for posthumous publication, however, seems rather to

have been the venting of his tumultuous feelings than any philosophic
purpose. An overweening deist, he is yet at much pains to disparage the à
priori argument for deism, bestowing some of his most violent epithets on
Dr. Samuel Clarke, who seems to have exasperated him in politics. But his
castigation of “divines” is tolerably impartial on that side; and he is largely
concerned to deprive them of grounds for their functions, though he finally
insists that churches are necessary for purposes of public moral teaching.
His own teachings represent an effort to rationalize deism. The God whom
he affirms is to be conceived or described only as omnipotent and
omniscient (or all-wise), not as good or benevolent any more than as
vindictive. Thus he had assimilated part of the Spinozistic and the atheistic
case against anthropomorphism, while still using anthropomorphic
language on the score that “we must speak of God after the manner of
men.” Beyond this point he compromises to the extent of denying special
while admitting collective or social providences; though he is positive in his
denial of the actuality or the moral need of a future state. As to morals he
takes the ordinary deistic line, putting the innate “law of nature” as the
sufficient and only revelation by the deity to his creatures. On the basis of
that inner testimony he rejects the Old Testament as utterly unworthy of
deity, but endorses the universal morality found in the gospels, while
rejecting their theology. It was very much the deism of Voltaire, save that it
made more concessions to anti-theistic logic.

The weak side of Bolingbroke’s polemic was its inconsistency—a flaw

deriving from his character. In the spirit of a partisan debater he threw out at
any point any criticism that appeared for the moment plausible; and, having
no scientific basis or saving rectitude, would elsewhere take up another and
a contradictory position. Careful antagonists could thus discredit him by
mere collation of his own utterances.199 But, the enemy being no more
consistent than he, his influence was not seriously affected in the world of
ordinary readers; and much of his attack on “divines,” on dogmas, and on
Old Testament morality must have appealed to many, thus carrying on the
discredit of orthodoxy in general. Leland devoted to him an entire volume
of his View of the Principal Deistical Writers, and in all bestows more space
upon him than on all the others together—a sufficient indication of his
vogue.

In his lifetime, however, Bolingbroke had been extremely careful to avoid

compromising himself. Mr. Arthur Hassall, in his generally excellent monograph
on Bolingbroke (Statesmen Series, 1889, p. 226), writes, in answer to the attack
of Johnson, that “Bolingbroke, during his lifetime, had never scrupled to publish
criticisms, remarkable for their freedom, on religious subjects.” I cannot gather to
what he refers; and Mr. Walter Sichel, in his copious biography (2 vols. 1901–
1902), indicates no such publications. The Letters on the Study and Use of
History, which contain (Lett. iii, sect. 2) a skeptical discussion of the Pentateuch
as history, though written in 1735–36, were only posthumously published, in
1752. The Examen Important de Milord Bolingbroke, produced by Voltaire in
1767, but dated 1736, is Voltaire’s own work, based on Bolingbroke. In his letter
to Swift of September 12, 1724 (Swift’s Works, Scott’s ed. 1824, xvi, 448–49),
Bolingbroke angrily repudiates the title of esprit fort, declaring, in the very
temper in which pious posterity has aspersed himself, that “such are the pests of
society, because they endeavour to loosen the bands of it.... I therefore not only
disown, but I detest, this character.” In this letter he even affects to believe in “the
truth of the divine revelation of Christianity.” He began to write his essays, it is
true, before his withdrawal to France in 1735, but with no intention of speedily
publishing them. In his Letter to Mr. Pope (published with the Letter to Wyndham,
1753), p. 481, he writes: “I have been a martyr of faction in politics, and have no
vocation to be so in philosophy.” Cp. pp. 485–86. It is thus a complete blunder on
the part of Bagehot to say (Literary Studies, Hutton’s ed. iii, 137) that Butler’s
Analogy, published in 1736, was “designed as a confutation of Shaftesbury and
Bolingbroke.” It is even said (Warton, Essay on Pope, 4th ed. ii, 294–95) that
Pope did not know Bolingbroke’s real opinions; but Pope’s untruthfulness was
such as to discredit such a statement. Cp. Bolingbroke’s Letter as cited, p. 521,
and his Philosophical Works, 8vo-ed. 1754, ii, 405. It is noteworthy that a volume
of controversial sermons entitled A Preservative against unsettled notions and
Want of Principles in Religion, so entirely stupid in its apologetics as to be at
times positively entertaining, was published in 1715 by Joseph Trapp, M.A.,
“Chaplain to the Right Honble. The Lord Viscount Bolingbroke.”

In seeking to estimate Bolingbroke’s posthumous influence we have to remember

that after the publication of his works the orthodox members of his own party,
who otherwise would have forgiven him all his vices and insincerities, have held
him up to hatred. Scott, for instance, founding on Bolingbroke’s own dishonest
denunciation of freethinkers as men seeking to loosen the bands of society,
 pronounced his arrangement for the posthumous issue of his works “an act of
wickedness more purely diabolical than any hitherto upon record in the history of
any age or nation” (Note to Bolingbroke’s letter above cited in Swift’s Works, xvi,
450). It would be an error, on the other hand, to class him among either the great
sociologists or the great philosophers. Mr. Sichel undertakes to show (vol. ii, ch.
x) that Bolingbroke had stimulated Gibbon to a considerable extent in his
treatment of early Christianity. This is in itself quite probable, and some of the
parallels cited are noteworthy; but Mr. Sichel, who always writes as a panegyrist,
makes no attempt to trace the common French sources for both. He does show
that Voltaire manipulated Bolingbroke’s opinions in reproducing them. But he
does not critically recognize the incoherence of Bolingbroke’s eloquent treatises.
Mr. Hassall’s summary is nearer the truth; but that in turn does not note how well
fitted was Bolingbroke’s swift and graceful declamation to do its work with the
general public, which (if it accepted him at all) would make small account of self-
contradiction.

§ 14

In view of such a reinforcement of its propaganda, deism could not be

regarded as in the least degree written down. In 1765, in fact, we find
Diderot recounting, on the authority of d’Holbach, who had just returned
from a visit to this country, that “the Christian religion is nearly extinct in
England. The deists are innumerable; there are almost no atheists; those
who are so conceal it. An atheist and a scoundrel are almost synonymous
terms for them.”200 Nor did the output of deistic literature end with the
posthumous works of Bolingbroke. These were followed by translations of
the new writings of Voltaire,201 who had assimilated the whole
propaganda of English deism, and gave it out anew with a wit and brilliancy
hitherto unknown in argumentative and critical literature. The freethinking
of the third quarter of the century, though kept secondary to more pressing
questions, was thus at least as deeply rooted and as convinced as that of the
first quarter; and it was probably not much less common among educated
men, though new social influences caused it to be more decried.
The hapless Chatterton, fatally precocious, a boy in years and experience of
life, a man in understanding at seventeen, incurred posthumous obloquy
more for his “infidelity” than for the harmless literary forgeries which
reveal his poetic affinity to a less prosaic age. It is a memorable fact that
this first recovery of the lost note of imaginative poetry in that “age of prose
and reason” is the exploit of a boy whose mind was as independently
“freethinking” on current religion as it was original even in its imitative
reversion to the poetics of the past. Turning away from the impossible
mythicism and mysticism of the Tudor and Stuart literatures, as from the
fanaticism of the Puritans, the changing English world after the Restoration
had let fall the artistic possession of imaginative feeling and style which
was the true glory of the time of Renascence. The ill-strung genius of
Chatterton seems to have been the first to reunite the sense of romantic
beauty with the spirit of critical reason. He was a convinced deist, avowing
in his verse, in his pathetic will (1770), in a late letter, and at times in his
talk, that he was “no Christian,” and contemning the ethic of Scripture
history and the absurdity of literal inspiration.202 Many there must have
been who went as far, with less courage of avowal.

What was lacking to the age, once more, was a social foundation on which
it could not only endure but develop. In a nation of which the majority had
no intellectual culture, such a foundation could not exist. Green
exaggerates203 when he writes that “schools there were none, save the
grammar schools of Edward and Elizabeth”;204 but by another account only
twelve public schools were founded in the long reign of George III;205 and,
as a result of the indifference of two generations, masses of the people
“were ignorant and brutal to a degree which it is hard to conceive.”206 A
great increase of population had followed on the growth of towns and the
development of commerce and manufactures even between 1700 and
1760;207 and thereafter the multiplication was still more rapid. There was
thus a positive fall in the culture standards of the majority of the people.
According to Massey, “hardly any tradesman in 1760 had more instruction
than qualified him to add up a bill”; and “a labourer, mechanic, or domestic
servant who could read or write possessed a rare accomplishment.”208 As
for the Charity Schools established between 1700 and 1750, their express
object was to rear humble tradesmen and domestics, not to educate in the
proper sense of the term.

In the view of life which accepted this state of things the educated deists
seem to have shared; at least, there is no record of any agitation by them for
betterment. The state of political thought was typified in the struggle over
“Wilkes and Liberty,” from which cool temperaments like Hume’s turned
away in contempt; and it is significant that poor men were persecuted for
freethinking while the better-placed went free. Jacob Ilive, for denying in a
pamphlet (1753) the truth of revelation, was pilloried thrice, and sent to
hard labour for three years. In 1754 the Grand Jury of Middlesex
“presented” the editor and publisher of Bolingbroke’s posthumous works209
—a distinction that in the previous generation had been bestowed on
Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees; and in 1761, as before noted, Peter Annet,
aged seventy, was pilloried twice and sent to prison for discrediting the
Pentateuch; as if that were a more serious offence than his former attacks on
the gospels and on St. Paul. The personal influence of George III, further,
told everywhere against freethinking; and the revival of penalties would
have checked publishing even if there had been no withdrawal of interest to
politics.

Yet more or less freethinking treatises did appear at intervals in addition to the
works of the better-known writers, such as Bolingbroke and Hume, after the
period commonly marked as that of the “decline of deism.” In the list may be
included a few by Unitarians, who at this stage were doing critical work. Like a
number of the earlier works above mentioned, the following (save Evanson) are
overlooked in Sir Leslie Stephen’s survey:—
1746. Essay on Natural Religion. Falsely attributed to Dryden.
1746. Deism fairly stated and fully vindicated, etc. Anon.
,,
1749. J. G. Cooper, Life of Socrates.
1750. John Dove, A Creed founded on Truth and Common Sense.
1750. The British Oracle. (Two numbers only.)
,,
1752. The Pillars of Priestcraft and Orthodoxy Shaken. Four vols. of
freethinking pamphlets, collected (and some written) by Thomas Gordon,
formerly secretary to Trenchard. Edited by R. Barron. (Rep. 1768.)
 1765. W. Dudgeon, Philosophical Works (reprints of those of 1732, –4, –7, –9,
above mentioned). Privately printed—at Glasgow?
1772. E. Evanson, The Doctrines of a Trinity and the Incarnation, etc.
1773. —— Three Discourses (1. Upon the Man after God’s own Heart; 2. Upon
the Faith of Abraham; 3. Upon the Seal of the Foundation of God).
1777. —— Letter to Bishop Hurd.
1781. W. Nicholson, The Doubts of the Infidels. (Rep. by R. Carlile.)
1782. W. Turner, Answer to Dr. Priestley’s Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever.
1785. Dr. G. Hoggart Toulmin, The Antiquity and Duration of the World.
1789. —— The Eternity of the Universe.210 (Rep. 1825.)
1789. Dr. T. Cooper, Tracts, Ethical, Theological, and Political.
,,
1792. E. Evanson, The Dissonance of the Four Evangelists. (Rep. 1805.)
1795. Dr. J. A. O’Keefe, On the Progress of the Human Understanding.
1797. John C. Davies, The Scripturian’s Creed. Prosecuted and imprisoned.
(Book rep. 1822 and 1839.)

Of the work here noted a considerable amount was done by Unitarians,

Evanson being of that persuasion, though at the time of writing his earlier
Unitarian works he was an Anglican vicar.211 During the first half of the
eighteenth century, despite the movement at the end of the seventeenth,
specific anti-Trinitarianism was not much in evidence, the deistic
controversy holding the foreground. But gradually Unitarianism made fresh
headway. One dissenting clergyman, Martin Tomkyns, who had been
dismissed by his congregation at Stoke Newington for his “Arian or
Unitarian opinions,” published in 1722 A Sober Appeal to a Turk or an
Indian, concerning the plain sense of the Trinity, in reply to the treatise of
Dr. Isaac Watts on The Christian Doctrine of the Trinity. A second edition
of Tomkyns’s book appeared in 1748, with a further reply to Watts’s
Dissertations of 1724. The result seems to have been an unsettlement of the
orthodoxy of the hymn-writer. There is express testimony from Dr. Lardner,
a very trustworthy witness, that Watts in his latter years, “before he was
seized with an imbecility of his faculties,” was substantially a Unitarian.
His special papers on the subject were suppressed by his executors; but the
full text of his Solemn Address to the Great and Blessed God goes far to
bear out Lardner’s express assertion.212 Other prominent religionists were
more outspoken. The most distinguished names associated with the position
were those of Lardner and Priestley, of whom the former, trained as a
simple “dissenter,” avowedly reached his conclusions without much
reference to Socinian literature;213 and the second, who was similarly
educated, no less independently gave up the doctrines of the Atonement and
the Trinity, passing later from the Arian to the Socinian position after
reading Lardner’s Letter on the Logos.214 As Priestley derived his
determinism from Collins,215 it would appear that the deistical movement
had set up a general habit of reasoning which thus wrought even on
Christians who, like Lardner and Priestley, undertook to rebut the
objections of unbelievers to their faith. A generally rationalistic influence is
to be noted in the works of the Unitarian Antipædobaptist Dr. Joshua
Toulmin, author of lives of Socinus (1777) and Biddle (1789), and many
other solid works, including a sermon on “The Injustice of classing
Unitarians with Deists and Infidels” (1797). In his case the “classing” was
certainly inconvenient. In 1791 the effigy of Paine was burned before his
door, and his windows broken. His house was saved by being closely
guarded; but his businesses of schoolkeeping and bookselling had to be
given up. It thus becomes intelligible how, after a period in which Dissent,
contemned by the State Church, learned to criticize that Church’s creed,
there emerged in England towards the close of the eighteenth century a
fresh movement of specific Unitarianism.

Evanson and Toulmin were scholarly writers, though without the large
learning of Lardner and the propagandist energy and reputation of Priestley;
and the Unitarian movement, in a quiet fashion, made a numerical progress
out of all proportion to that of orthodoxy. It owed much of its immunity at
this stage, doubtless, to the large element of tacit deism in the Church; and
apart from the scholarly work of Lardner both Priestley and Evanson did
something for New Testament criticism, as well as towards the clearing-up
of Christian origins. Evanson was actually prosecuted in 1773, on local
initiative, for a sermon of Unitarian character delivered by him in the parish
church of Tewkesbury on Easter-Day of 1771; and, what is much more
remarkable, members of his congregation, at a single defence-meeting in an
inn, collected £150 to meet his costs.216 Five years later he had given up the
belief in eternal punishment, though continuing to believe in “long
protracted” misery for sinners.217 Still later, after producing his
Dissonance, he became uncommonly drastic in his handling of the Canon.
He lived well into the nineteenth century, and published in 1805 a vigorous
tractate, Second Thoughts on the Trinity, recommended to the Right
Reverend the Lord Bishop of Gloucester. In that he treats the First Gospel as
a forgery of the second century. The method is indiscriminating, and the
author lays much uncritical stress upon prophecy. On the whole, the
Unitarian contribution to rational thought, then as later, was secondary or
ancillary, though on the side of historical investigation it was important.
Lardner’s candour is as uncommon as his learning; and Priestley218 and
Evanson have a solvent virtue.219 In all three the limitation lies in the fixed
adherence to the concept of revelation, which withheld them from radical
rationalism even as it did from Arianism. Evanson’s ultra-orthodox
acceptance of the Apocalypse is significant of his limitations; and
Priestley’s calibre is indicated by his life-long refusal to accept the true
scientific inference from his own discovery of oxygen. A more pronounced
evolution was that of the Welsh deist David Williams, who, after publishing
two volumes of Sermons on Religious Hypocrisy (1774), gave up his post as
a dissenting preacher, and, in conjunction with Franklin and other
freethinkers, opened a short-lived deistic chapel in Margaret Street, London
(1776), where there was used a “Liturgy on the Universal Principles of
Religion and Morality.”220

§ 15

On the other hand, apart from the revival of popular religion under
Whitefield and Wesley, which won multitudes of the people whom no
higher culture could reach, there was no recovery of educated belief upon
intellectual lines; though there was a steady detachment of energy to the
new activities of conquest and commerce which mark the second half of the
eighteenth century in England. On this state of things supervened the
massive performance of the greatest historical writer England had yet
produced. Gibbon, educated not by Oxford but by the recent scholarly
literature of France, had as a mere boy seen, on reading Bossuet, the
theoretic weakness of Protestantism, and had straightway professed
Romanism. Shaken as to that by a skilled Swiss Protestant, he speedily
became a rationalist pure and simple, with as little of the dregs of deism in
him as any writer of his age; and his great work begins, or rather signalizes
(since Hume and Robertson preceded him), a new era of historical writing,
not merely by its sociological treatment of the rise of Christianity, but by its
absolutely anti-theological handling of all things.

The importance of the new approach may be at once measured by the zeal
of the opposition. In no case, perhaps, has the essentially passional
character of religious resistance to new thought been more vividly shown
than in that of the contemporary attacks upon Gibbon’s History. There is
not to be found in controversial literature such another annihilating
rejoinder as was made by Gibbon to the clerical zealots who undertook to
confound him on points of scholarship, history, and ratiocination. The
contrast between the mostly spiteful incompetence of the attack and the
finished mastery of the reply put the faith at a disadvantage from which it
never intellectually recovered, though other forces reinstated it socially. By
the admission of Macaulay, who thought Gibbon “most unfair” to religion,
the whole troup of his assailants are now “utterly forgotten”; and those
orthodox commentators who later sought to improve on their criticism have
in turn, with a notable uniformity, been rebutted by their successors; till
Gibbon’s critical section ranks as the first systematically scientific handling
of the problem of the rise of Christianity. He can be seen to have profited by
all the relevant deistic work done before him, learning alike from Toland,
from Middleton, and from Bolingbroke; though his acknowledgments are
mostly paid to respectable Protestants and Catholics, as Basnage,
Beausobre, Lardner, Mosheim, and Tillemont; and the sheer solidity of the
work has sustained it against a hundred years of hostile comment.221 While
Gibbon was thus earning for his country a new literary distinction, the
orthodox interest was concerned above all things to convict him of
ignorance, incompetence, and dishonesty; and Davis, the one of his
assailants who most fully manifested all of these qualities, and who will
long be remembered solely from Gibbon’s deadly exposure, was rewarded
with a royal pension. Another, Apthorp, received an archiepiscopal living;
while Chelsum, the one who almost alone wrote against him like a
gentleman, got nothing. But no cabal could avail to prevent the instant
recognition, at home and abroad, of the advent of a new master in history;
and in the worst times of reaction which followed, the History of the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire impassively defied the claims of the
ruling creed.

In a literary world which was eagerly reading Gibbon222 and Voltaire,223

there was a peculiar absurdity in Burke’s famous question (1790) as to
“Who now reads Bolingbroke” and the rest of the older deists.224 The
fashionable public was actually reading Bolingbroke even then;225 and the
work of the older deists was being done with new incisiveness and
thoroughness by their successors.226 In the unstudious world of politics, if
the readers were few the indifferentists were many. Evanson could
truthfully write to Bishop Hurd in 1777 that “That general unbelief of
revealed religion among the higher orders of our countrymen, which,
however your Lordship and I might differ in our manner of accounting for
it, is too notorious for either of us to doubt of, hath, by a necessary
consequence, produced in the majority of our present legislators an absolute
indifference towards religious questions of every kind.”227 Beside Burke in
Parliament, all the while, was the Prime Minister, William Pitt the
younger, an agnostic deist.

Whether or not the elder Pitt was a deist, the younger gave very plain signs of
being at least no more. Gladstone (Studies subsidiary to the Works of Bishop
Butler, ed. 1896, pp. 30–33) has sought to discredit the recorded testimony of
Wilberforce (Life of Wilberforce, 1838, i, 98) that Pitt told him “Bishop Butler’s
work raised in his mind more doubts than it had answered.” Gladstone points to
another passage in Wilberforce’s diary which states that Pitt “commended Butler’s
Analogy” (Life, i, 90). But the context shows that Pitt had commended the book
for the express purpose of turning Wilberforce’s mind from its evangelical bias.
Wilberforce was never a deist, and the purpose accordingly could not have been
to make him orthodox. The two testimonies are thus perfectly consistent;
especially when we note the further statement credibly reported to have been
made by Wilberforce (Life, i, 95), that Pitt later “tried to reason me out of my
 convictions.” We have yet further the emphatic declaration of Pitt’s niece, Lady
Hester Stanhope, that he “never went to church in his life ... never even talked
about religion” (Memoirs of Lady Hester Stanhope, 1845, iii, 166–67). This was
said in emphatic denial of the genuineness of the unctuous death-bed speech put
in Pitt’s mouth by Gifford. Lady Hester’s high veracity is accredited by her
physician (Travels of Lady Hester Stanhope, 1846, i, pref. p. 11). No such
character can be given to the conventional English biography of the period.

We have further to note the circumstantial account by Wilberforce in his letter to

the Rev. S. Gisborne immediately after Pitt’s death (Correspondence, 1840, ii,
69–70), giving the details he had had in confidence from the Bishop of Lincoln.
They are to the effect that, after some demur on Pitt’s part (“that he was not
worthy to offer up any prayer, or was too weak,”) the Bishop prayed with him
once. Wilberforce adds his “fear” that “no further religious intercourse took place
before or after, and I own I thought what was inserted in the papers impossible to
be true.”

There is clear testimony that Charles James Fox, Pitt’s illustrious rival, was
no more of a believer than he,228 though equally careful to make no
profession of unbelief. And it was Fox who, above all the English statesmen
of his day, fought the battle of religious toleration229—a service which
finally puts him above Burke, and atones for many levities of political
action.

Among thinking men too the nascent science of geology was setting up a
new criticism of “revelation”—this twenty years before the issue of the
epoch-making works of Hutton.230 In England the impulse seems to have
come from the writings of the Abbé Langlet du Fresnoy, De Maillet, and
Mirabaud, challenging the Biblical account of the antiquity of the earth. The
new phase of “infidelity” was of course furiously denounced, one of the
most angry and most absurd of its opponents being the poet Cowper.231
Still rationalism persisted. Paley, writing in 1786, protests that “Infidelity is
now served up in every shape that is likely to allure, surprise, or beguile the
imagination, in a fable, a tale, a novel, or a poem, in interspersed or broken
hints, remote and oblique surmises, in books of travel, of philosophy, of
natural history—in a word, in any form rather than that of a professed and
regular disquisition.”232 The orthodox Dr. J. Ogilvie, in the introduction to
his Inquiry into the Causes of the Infidelity and Skepticism of the Times
(1783), begins: “That the opinions of the deists and skeptics have spread
more universally during a part of the last century and in the present than at
any former æra since the resurrection of letters, is a truth to which the
friends and the enemies of religion will give their suffrage without
hesitation.” In short, until the general reversal of all progress which
followed on the French Revolution, there had been no such change of
opinion as Burke alleged.

One of the most popular poets and writers of the day was the celebrated
Erasmus Darwin, a deist, whose Zoonomia (1794) brought on him the
charge of atheism, as it well might. However he might poetize about the
Creator, Dr. Darwin in his verse and prose alike laid the foundations of the
doctrines of the transmutation of species and the aqueous origin of simple
forms of life which evolved into higher forms; though the idea of the
descent of man from a simian species had been broached before him by
Buffon and Helvétius in France, and Lords Kames and Monboddo in
Scotland. The idea of a Natura naturans was indeed ancient; but it has been
authoritatively said of Erasmus Darwin that “he was the first who proposed
and consistently carried out a well-rounded theory with regard to the
development of the living world—a merit which shines forth more
brilliantly when we compare it with the vacillating and confused attempts of
Buffon, Linnæus, and Goethe. It is the idea of a power working from within
the organisms to improve their natural position”233—the idea which,
developed by Lamarck, was modified by the great Darwin of the nineteenth
century into the doctrine of natural selection.

And in the closing years of the century there arose a new promise of higher
life in the apparition of Mary Wollstonecraft, ill-starred but noble,
whose Letters on Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) show her to have
been a freethinking deist of remarkable original faculty,234 and whose
Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was the first great plea for the
emancipation of her sex.
§ 16

Even in rural Scotland, the vogue of the poetry of Burns told of germinal
doubt. To say nothing of his mordant satires on pietistic types—notably
Holy Willie’s Prayer, his masterpiece in that line—Burns even in his
avowed poems235 shows small regard for orthodox beliefs; and his letters
reveal him as substantially a deist, shading into a Unitarian. Such pieces as
A Prayer in the prospect of Death, and A Prayer under the pressure of
Violent Anguish, are plainly unevangelical;236 and the allusions to Jesus in
his letters, even when writing to Mrs. Maclehose, who desired to bring him
to confession, exclude orthodox belief,237 though they suggest
Unitarianism. He frequently refers to religion in his letters, yet so constantly
restricts himself to the affirmation of a belief in a benevolent God and in a
future state that he cannot be supposed to have held the further beliefs
which his orthodox correspondents would wish him to express. A
rationalistic habit is shown even in his professions of belief, as here: “Still I
am a very sincere believer in the Bible; but I am drawn by the conviction of
a man, not the halter of an ass”;238 and in the passage: “Though I have no
objection to what the Christian system tells us of another world, yet I own I
am partial to those proofs and ideas of it which we have wrought out of our
own heads and hearts.”239 Withal, Burns always claimed to be “religious,”
and was so even in a somewhat conventional sense. The lines:

An atheist-laugh’s a poor exchange

For Deity offended240

exhibit a sufficiently commonplace conception of Omnipotence; and there

is no sign that the poet ever did any hard thinking on the problem. But,
emotionalist of genius as he was, his influence as a satirist and mitigator of
the crudities and barbarities of Scots religion has been incalculably great,
and underlies all popular culture progress in Scotland since his time.
Constantly aspersed in his own day and world as an “infidel,” he yet from
the first conquered the devotion of the mass of his countrymen; though he
would have been more potent for intellectual liberation if he had been by
them more intelligently read. Few of them now, probably, realize that their
adored poet was either a deist or a Unitarian—presumably the former.

§ 17

With the infelicity in prediction which is so much commoner with him than
the “prescience” for which he is praised, Burke had announced that the
whole deist school “repose in lasting oblivion.” The proposition would be
much more true of 999 out of every thousand writers on behalf of
Christianity. It is characteristic of Burke, however, that he does not name
Shaftesbury, a Whig nobleman of the sacred period.241 A seeming justice
was given to Burke’s phrase by the undoubted reaction which took place
immediately afterwards. In the vast panic which followed on the French
Revolution, the multitude of mediocre minds in the middle and upper
classes, formerly deistic or indifferent, took fright at unbelief as something
now visibly connected with democracy and regicide; new money
endowments were rapidly bestowed on the Church; and orthodoxy became
fashionable on political grounds just as skepticism had become fashionable
at the Restoration. Class interest and political prejudice wrought much in
both cases; only in opposite directions. Democracy was no longer
Bibliolatrous, therefore aristocracy was fain to became so, or at least to
grow respectful towards the Church as a means of social control. Gibbon, in
his closing years, went with the stream. And as religious wars have always
tended to discredit religion, so a war partly associated with the freethinking
of the French revolutionists tended to discredit freethought. The brutish
wrecking of Priestley’s house and library and chapel by a mob at
Birmingham in 1791 was but an extreme manifestation of a reaction which
affected every form of mental life. But while Priestley went to die in the
United States, another English exile, temporarily returned thence to his
native land, was opening a new era of popular rationalism. Even in the
height of the revolutionary tumult, and while Burke was blustering about
the disappearance of unbelief, Thomas Paine was laying deep and wide the
English foundations of a new democratic freethought; and the upper-class
reaction in the nature of the case was doomed to impermanency, though it
was to arrest English intellectual progress for over a generation. The French
Revolution had re-introduced freethought as a vital issue, even in causing it
to be banned as a danger.

That freethought at the end of the century was rather driven inwards and
downwards than expelled is made clear by the multitude of fresh treatises on
Christian evidences. Growing numerous after 1790, they positively swarm for a
generation after Paley (1794). Cp. Essays on the Evidence and Influence of
Christianity, Bath, 1790, pref.; Andrew Fuller, The Gospel its own Witness, 1799,
pref. and concluding address to deists; Watson’s sermon of 1795, in Two
Apologies, ed. 1806, p. 399; Priestley’s Memoirs (written in 1795), 1806, pp. 127–
28; Wilberforce’s Practical View, 1797, passim (e.g., pp. 366–69, 8th ed. 1841);
Rev. D. Simpson, A Plea for Religion ... addressed to the Disciples of Thomas
Paine, 1797. The latter writer states (2nd ed. p. 126) that “infidelity is at this
moment running like wildfire among the common people”; and Fuller (2nd ed. p.
128) speaks of the Monthly Magazine as “pretty evidently devoted to the cause of
infidelity.” A pamphlet on The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in this
Metropolis (London, 1800), by W. Hamilton Reid, describes the period as the first
“in which the doctrines of infidelity have been extensively circulated among the
lower orders”; and a Summary of Christian Evidences, by Bishop Porteous (1800;
16th ed. 1826), affirms, in agreement with the 1799 Report of the Lords’
Committee on Treasonable Societies, that “new compendiums of infidelity, and
new libels on Christianity, are dispersed continually, with indefatigable industry,
through every part of the kingdom, and every class of the community.”
Freethought, in short, was becoming democratized.

As regards England, Paine is the great popular factor; and it is the bare truth
to say that he brought into the old debate a new earnestness and a new
moral impetus. The first part of the Age of Reason, hastily put together in
expectation of speedy death in 1793, and including some astronomic matter
that apparently antedates 1781,242 is a swift outline of the position of the
rationalizing deist, newly conscious of firm standing-ground in astronomic
science. That is the special note of Paine’s gospel. He was no scholar; and
the champions of the “religion of Galilee” have always been prompt to
disparage any unlearned person who meddles with religion as an antagonist;
but in the second part of his book Paine put hard criticism enough to keep a
world of popular readers interested for well over a hundred years. The many
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