FREETHOUGHT IN THE REMAINING EUROPEAN STATES
§ 1. Holland
Holland, so notable for relative hospitality to freethinking in the
seventeenth century, continued to exhibit it in the eighteenth, though
without putting forth much native response. After her desperate wars
with Louis XIV, the Dutch State, now monarchically ruled, turned on
the intellectual side rather to imitative belles lettres than to the
problems which had begun to exercise so much of English thought. It
was an age of "retrogression and weakness." [1493] Elizabeth Wolff,
née Bekker, one of the most famous of the numerous Dutch women-writers
of the century (1738-1804), is notable for her religious as well
as for her political liberalism; [1494] but her main activity was
in novel-writing; and there are few other signs of freethinking
tendencies in popular Dutch culture. It was impossible, however,
that the influences at work in the neighbouring lands should be shut
out; and if Holland did not produce innovating books she printed many
throughout the century.
In 1708 there was published at Amsterdam a work under the pseudonym of
"Juan di Posos," wherein, by way of a relation of imaginary travels,
something like atheism was said to be taught; but the pastor Leenhof
had in 1703 been accused of atheism for his treatise, Heaven on
Earth, which was at most Spinozistic. [1495] Even as late as 1714
a Spinozist shoemaker, Booms, was banished for his writings; but
henceforth liberal influences, largely traceable to the works of Bayle,
begin to predominate. Welcomed by students everywhere, Bayle must have
made powerfully for tolerance and rationalism in his adopted country,
which after his time became a centre of culture for the States of
northern Europe rather than a source of original works. Holland in
the eighteenth century was receptive alike of French and English
thought and literature, especially the former; [1496] and, besides
reprinting many of the French deists' works and translating some of
the English, the Dutch cities harboured such heretics as the Italian
Alberto Radicati, Count Passerano, who, dying at Rotterdam in 1736,
left a collection of deistic treatises of a strongly freethinking
cast to be posthumously published.
The German traveller Alberti, [1497] citing the London Magazine,
1732, states that Passerano visited England and published works
in English through a translator, Joseph Morgan, and that both were
sentenced to imprisonment. This presumably refers to his anonymous
Philosophical Dissertation upon Death, "by a friend to truth,"
published in English in 1732. [1498] It is a remarkable treatise,
being a hardy justification of suicide, "composed for the consolation
of the unhappy," from a practically atheistic standpoint. Two years
earlier he had published in English, also anonymously, a tract
entitled Christianity set in a True Light, by a Pagan Philosopher
newly converted; and it may be that the startling nature of the second
pamphlet elicited a prosecution which included both. The pamphlet of
1730, however, is a eulogy of the ethic of Jesus, who is deistically
treated as a simple man, but with all the amenity which the deists
usually brought to bear on that theme. Passerano's Recueil des pièces
curieuses sur les matières les plus interessants, published with his
name at Rotterdam in 1736, [1499] includes a translation of Swift's
ironical Project concerning babies, and an Histoire abregée de la
profession sacerdotale, which was published in a separate English
translation. [1500] Passerano is noticeable chiefly for the relative
thoroughness of his rationalism. [1501] In the Recueil he speaks of
deists and atheists as being the same, those called atheists having
always admitted a first cause under the names God, Nature, Eternal
Germs, movement, or universal soul. [1502]
In 1737 was published in French a small mystification consisting
of a Sermon prêché dans la grande Assemblée des Quakers de
Londres, par le fameux Frère E. E., and another little tract,
La Religion Muhamedane comparée à la païenne de l'Indostan,
par Ali-Ebn-Omar. "E. E." stood for Edward Elwall, a well-known
Unitarian of the time, who, as we saw, was tried at Stafford
Assizes in 1726 for publishing a Unitarian treatise, and who in
1742 published another, entitled The Supernatural Incarnation of
Jesus Christ proved to be false ... and that our Lord Jesus Christ
was the real son of Joseph and Mary. The two tracts are both by
Passerano, and are on deistic lines, the text of the Sermon being
(in English) "The Religion of the Gospel is the true Original
Religion of Reason and Nature." The proposition is of course
purely ethical in its bearing.
The currency given in Holland to such literature tells of growing
liberality of thought as well as of political freedom. But the
conditions were not favourable to such general literary activity as
prevailed in the larger States, though good work was done in medicine
and the natural sciences. Not till the nineteenth century did Dutch
scholars again give a lead to Europe in religious thought.
§ 2. The Scandinavian States