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.
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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." [883] 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, [884]
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. [885] 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 exaggerates [886] when he writes that "schools there
were none, save the grammar schools of Edward and Elizabeth"; [887]
but by another account only twelve public schools were founded in the
long reign of George III; [888] 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." [889] A great increase of
population had followed on the growth of towns and the development
of commerce and manufactures even between 1700 and 1760; [890]
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." [891] 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 works [892]--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:--