freethinker who had a position to lose, must be kept in mind in
estimating the English evolution of that time. A professed man of
science could write in 1838 that "the new mode of interpreting the
Scriptures which has sprung up in Germany is the darkest cloud which
lowers upon the horizon of that country.... The Germans have been
conducted by some of their teachers to the borders of a precipice,
one leap from which will plunge them into deism." He added that in
various parts of Europe "the heaviest calamity impending over the
whole fabric of society in our time is the lengthening stride of bold
skepticism in some parts, and the more stealthy onwards-creeping
step of critical cavil in others." [1856] Such declamation could
terrorize the timid and constrain the prudent in such a society as
that of early Victorian England. The prevailing note is struck in
Macaulay's description of Charles Blount as "an infidel, and the head
of a small school of infidels who were troubled with a morbid desire to
make converts." [1857] All the while, Macaulay was himself privately
"infidel"; [1858] but he cleared his conscience by thus denouncing
those who had the courage of their opinions. In this simple fashion
some of the sanest writers in history were complacently put below
the level of the commonplace dissemblers who aspersed them; and the
average educated man saw no baseness in the procedure.
The opinion deliberately expressed in this connection by the late
Professor Bain is worth noting:--
"It can at last be clearly seen what was the motive of Carlyle's
perplexing style of composition. We now know what his opinions
were when he began to write, and that to express them would have
been fatal to his success; yet he was not a man to indulge in
rank hypocrisy. He accordingly adopted a studied and ambiguous
phraseology, which for long imposed upon the religious public,
who put their own interpretation upon his mystical utterances, and
gave him the benefit of any doubt. In the Life of Sterling he threw
off the mask, but still was not taken at his word. Had there been a
perfect tolerance of all opinions, he would have begun as he ended;
and his strain of composition, while still mystical and high-flown,
would never have been identified with our national orthodoxy.
"I have grave doubts as to whether we possess Macaulay's real
opinions on religion. His way of dealing with the subject is
so like the hedging of an unbeliever that, without some good
assurance to the contrary, I must include him also among the
imitators of Aristotle's 'caution.'...
"When Sir Charles Lyell brought out his Antiquity of Man, he too
was cautious. Knowing the dangers of his footing, he abstained
from giving an estimate of the extension of time required by the
evidences of human remains. Society in London, however, would
not put up with this reticence, and he had to disclose at dinner
parties what he had withheld from the public--namely, that in his
opinion the duration of man could not be less than 50,000 years"
(Practical Essays, p. 274.)