XXI. FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (part 1 of 2)

XXI. FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (part 1 of 2)

The Reaction

All over the civilized world, as we have seen, the terrors of the French Revolution evoked an intellectual no less than a political reaction, its stress being most apparent and most destructive in those countries in which there had been previously the largest measure of liberty. Nowhere was it more intense or more disastrous than in England. In countries such as Denmark and Spain, only lately and superficially liberalized, there was no great progress to undo: in England, though liberty was never left without an indomitable witness, there was a violent reversal of general movement, not to be wholly rectified in half a century. Joined in a new activity with the civil power for the suppression of all innovating thought, the Church rapidly attained to an influence it had not possessed since the days of Sacheverel and a degree of wealth it had not before reached since the Reformation. The wealth of the upper class was at its disposal to an unheard-of extent, there being apparently no better way of fighting the new danger of democracy; and dissent joined hands with the establishment to promote orthodoxy.

The average tone in England in the first quarter of the century may be gathered from the language held by a man so enlightened, comparatively speaking, as Sydney Smith, wit, humourist, Whig, and clergyman. In 1801 we find him, in a preface never reprinted, prescribing various measures of religious strategy in addition "to the just, necessary, and innumerable invectives which have been levelled against Rousseau, Voltaire, D'Alembert, and the whole pandemonium of those martyrs to atheism, who toiled with such laborious malice, and suffered odium with such inflexible profligacy, for the wretchedness and despair of their fellow creatures." [1663] That this was not jesting may be gathered from his daughter's account of his indignation when a publisher sent him "a work of irreligious tendency," and when Jeffrey admitted "irreligious opinions" to the Edinburgh Review. To the former he writes that every principle of suspicion and fear would be excited in me by a man who professed himself an infidel"; and to Jeffrey: "Do you mean to take care that the Review shall not profess infidel principles? Unless this is the case I must absolutely give up all connection with it." [1664] All the while any semblance of "infidelity" in any article in the Review must have been of the most cautious kind.

In the Catholic countries, naturally, the reaction was no less violent. In Italy, as we saw, it began in Tuscany almost at once. The rule of Napoleon, it is true, secured complete freedom of the Press as regarded translation of freethinking books, an entire liberty of conscience in religious matters, and a sharp repression of clericalism, the latter policy going to the length of expelling all the religious orders and confiscating their property. [1665] All this counted for change; but the Napoleonic rule all the while choked one of the springs of vital thought--to wit, the spirit of political liberty; and in 1814-15 the clerical system returned in full force, as it did all over Italy. Everywhere freethought was banned. All criticism of Catholicism was a penal offence; and in the kingdom of Naples alone, in 1825, there were 27,612 priests, 8,455 monks, 8,185 nuns, 20 archbishops, and 73 bishops, though in 1807 the French influence had caused the dissolution of some 250 convents. [1666] At Florence the Censure forbade, in 1817, the issue of a new edition of the translated work of Cabanis on Les Rapports du physique et du moral; and Mascagni, the physiologist, was invited to delete from his work a definition of man in which no notice was taken of the soul. [1667] It was even proclaimed that the works of Voltaire and Rousseau were not to be read in the public libraries without ecclesiastical permission; but this veto was not seriously treated. [1668] All native energy, however, was either cowed or cajoled into passivity. If, accordingly, the mind of Italy was to survive, it must be by the assimilation of the culture of freer States; and this culture, reinforced by the writings of Leopardi, generated a new intellectual life, which was a main factor in the ultimate achievement of Italian liberation from Austrian rule.

Spain, under Charles IV, became so thoroughly re-clericalized at the very outbreak of the Revolution that no more leeway seemed possible; but even in Spain, early in the nineteenth century, the government found means to retrogress yet further, and the minister Caballero sent an order to the universities forbidding the study of moral philosophy. The king, he justly declared, did not want philosophers, but good and obedient subjects. [1669]

In France, where the downfall of Napoleon meant the restoration of the monarchy, the intellectual reaction was really less powerful than in England. The new spirit had been too widely and continuously at work, from Voltaire onwards, to be politically expelled; and the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 gave the proof that even on the political side the old spirit was incapable of permanent recovery. In Germany, where freethinking was associated not with the beaten cause of the Revolution but in large measure with the national movement for liberation from the tyranny of Napoleon, [1670] the religious reaction was substantially emotional and unintellectual, though it had intellectual representatives, notably Schleiermacher. Apart from his culture-movement, the revival consisted mainly in a new Pietism, partly orthodox, partly mystical; [1671] and on those lines it ran later to the grossest excesses. But among the educated classes of Germany there was the minimum of arrest, because there the intellectual life was least directly associated with the political, and the ecclesiastical life relatively the least organized. The very separateness of the German States, then and later so often deplored by German patriots, was really a condition of relative security for freedom of thought and research; and the resulting multiplicity of universities meant a variety of intellectual effort not then paralleled in any other country. [1672] What may be ranked as the most important effect of the reaction in Germany--the turning of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel in succession to the task of reconciling rational philosophy with religion in the interests of social order--was in itself a rationalistic process as compared with the attitude of orthodoxy in other lands. German scholarship, led by the re-organized university of Berlin, was in fact one of the most progressive intellectual forces in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century; and only its comparative isolation, its confinement to a cultured class, prevented it from affecting popular thought as widely as deism had done in the preceding century. Even in the countries in which popular and university culture were less sharply divided, the German influence was held at bay like others.

But in time the spirit of progress regained strength, the most decisive form of recovery being the new development of the struggle for political liberty from about 1830 onwards. In England the advance thenceforward was to be broadly continuous on the political side. On the Continent it culminated for the time in the explosions of 1848, which were followed in the Germanic world by another political reaction, in which freethought suffered; and in France, after a few years, by the Second Empire, in which clericalism was again fostered. But these checks have proved impermanent.

The Forces of Renascence

As with the cause of democracy, so with the cause of rationalism, the forward movement grew only the deeper and more powerful through the check; and the nineteenth century closed on a record of freethinking progress which may be said to outbulk that of all the previous centuries of the modern era together. So great was the activity of the century in point of mere quantity that it is impossible, within the scheme of a "Short History," to treat it on even such a reduced scale of narrative as has been applied to the past. A detailed history on national lines from the French Revolution onwards would mean another book as large as the present. On however large a scale it might be written, further, it would involve a recognition of international influences such as had never before been evolved, save when on a much smaller scale the educated world all round read and wrote Latin. Since Goethe, the international aspect of culture upon which he laid stress has become ever more apparent; and scientific and philosophical thought, in particular, are world-wide in their scope and bearing. It must here suffice, therefore, to take a series of broad and general views of the past century's work, leaving adequate critical and narrative treatment for separate undertakings. [1673] The most helpful method seems to be that of a conspectus (1) of the main movements and forces that during the century affected in varying degrees the thought of the civilized world, and (2) of the main advances made and the point reached in the culture of the nations, separately considered. At the same time, the forces of rationalism may be discriminated into Particular and General. We may then roughly represent the lines of movement, in non-chronological order, as follows:--

I.--Forces of criticism and corrective thought bearing expressly on religious beliefs.

1. In Great Britain and America, the new movements of popular freethought begun by Paine, and lasting continuously to the present day.

2. In France and elsewhere, the reverberation of the attack of Voltaire, d'Holbach, Dupuis, and Volney, carried on most persistently in Catholic countries by the Freemasons, as against official orthodoxy after 1815.

3. German "rationalism," proceeding from English deism, moving towards naturalist as against supernaturalist conceptions, dissolving the notion of the miraculous in both Old and New Testament history, analysing the literary structure of the sacred books, and all along affecting studious thought in other countries.

4. The literary compromise of Lessing, claiming for all religions a place in a scheme of "divine education."

5. In England, the neo-Christianity of the school of Coleridge, a disintegrating force, promoting the "Broad Church" tendency, which in Dean Milman was so pronounced as to bring on him charges of rationalism.

6. The utilitarianism of the school of Bentham, carried into moral and social science.

7. Comtism, making little direct impression on the "constructive" lines laid by the founder, but affecting critical thought in many directions.

8. German philosophy, Kantian and post-Kantian, in particular the Hegelian, turned to anti-Christian and anti-supernaturalist account by Strauss, Vatke, Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, and Marx.

9. German atheism and scientific "materialism"--represented by Feuerbach and Büchner (who, however, rejected the term "materialism" as inappropriate).

10. Revived English deism, involving destructive criticism of Christianity, as in Hennell, F. W. Newman, R. W. Mackay, W. R. Greg, Theodore Parker, and Thomas Scott, partly in co-operation with Unitarianism.

11. American transcendentalism or pantheism--the school of Emerson.

12. Colenso's preliminary attack on the narrative of the Pentateuch, a systematized return to Voltairean common-sense, rectifying the unscientific course of the earlier "higher criticism" on the historical issue.

13. The later or scientific "higher criticism" of the Old Testament--represented by Kuenen, Wellhausen, and their successors.

14. New historical criticism of Christian origins, in particular the work of Strauss and Baur in Germany, Renan and Havet in France, and their successors.

15. Exhibition of rationalism within the churches, as in Germany, Holland, and Switzerland generally; in England in the Essays and Reviews; later in multitudes of essays and books, and in the ethical criticism of the Old Testament; in America in popular theology.

16. Association of rationalistic doctrine with the Socialist movements, new and old, from Owen to Bebel.

17. Communication of doubt and moral questioning through poetry and belles-lettres--as in Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Clough, Tennyson, Carlyle, Arnold, Browning, Swinburne, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Victor Hugo, Leconte de Lisle, Leopardi, and certain French and English novelists.

II.--Modern Science, physical, mental, and moral, sapping the bases of all supernaturalist systems.

1. Astronomy, newly directed by Laplace.

2. Geology, gradually connected (as in Britain by Chambers) with

3. Biology, made definitely non-deistic by Darwin.

4. The comprehension of all science in the Evolution Theory, as by Spencer, advancing on Comte.

5. Psychology, as regards localization of brain functions.

6. Comparative mythology, as yet imperfectly applied to Christism.

7. Sociology, as outlined by Comte, Buckle, Spencer, Winwood Reade, Lester Ward, Giddings, Tarde, Durkheim, and others, on strictly naturalistic lines.

8. Comparative Hierology; the methodical application of principles insisted on by all the deists, and formulated in the interests of deism by Lessing, but latterly freed of his implications.

9. Above all, the later development of Anthropology (in the wide English sense of the term), which, beginning to take shape in the eighteenth century, came to new life in the latter part of the nineteenth; and is now one of the most widely cultivated of all the sciences--especially on the side of religious creed and psychology.

On the other hand, we may group somewhat as follows the general forces of retardation of freethought operating throughout the century:--

1. Penal laws, still operative in Britain and Germany against popular freethought propaganda, and till recently in Britain against any endowment of freethought.

2. Class interests, involving in the first half of the century a social conspiracy against rationalism in England.

3. Commercial pressure thus set up, and always involved in the influence of churches.

4. In England, identification of orthodox Dissent with political Liberalism--a sedative.

5. Concessions by the clergy, especially in England and the United States--to many, another sedative.

6. Above all, the production of new masses of popular ignorance in the industrial nations, and continued lack of education in the others.

7. On this basis, business-like and in large part secular-minded organization of the endowed churches, as against a freethought propaganda hampered by the previously named causes, and in England by laws which veto all direct endowment of anti-Christian heresy.

It remains to make, with forced brevity, the surveys thus outlined.

Section 1.--Popular Propaganda and Culture

1. If any one circumstance more than another differentiates the life of to-day from that of older civilizations, or from that of previous centuries of the modern era, it is the diffusion of rationalistic views among the "common people." In no other era is to be found the phenomenon of widespread critical skepticism among the labouring masses: in all previous ages, though chronic complaint is made of some unbelief among the uneducated, the constant and abject ignorance of the mass of the people has been the sure foothold of superstitious systems. Within the last century the area of the recognizably civilized world has grown far vaster; and in the immense populations that have thus arisen there is a relative degree of enlightenment, coupled with a degree of political power never before attained. Merely to survey, then, the broad movement of popular culture in the period in question will yield a useful notion of the dynamic change in the balance of thought in modern times, and will make more intelligible the special aspects of the culture process.

This vital change in the distribution of knowledge is largely to be attributed to the written and spoken teaching of a line of men who made popular enlightenment their great aim. Their leading type among the English-speaking races is Thomas Paine, whom we have seen combining a gospel of democracy with a gospel of critical reason in the midst of the French Revolution. Never before had rationalism been made widely popular. The English and French deists had written for the middle and upper classes. Peter Annet was practically the first who sought to reach the multitude; and his punishment expressed the special resentment aroused in the governing classes by such a policy. Of all the English freethinkers of the earlier deistical period he alone was selected for reprinting by the propagandists of the Paine period. Paine was to Annet, however, as a cannon to a musket, and through the democratic ferment of his day he won an audience a hundredfold wider than Annet could have dreamt of reaching. The anger of the governing classes, in a time of anti-democratic panic, was proportional. Paine would have been at least imprisoned for his Rights of Man had he not fled from England in time; and the sale of all his books was furiously prohibited and ferociously punished. Yet they circulated everywhere, even in Protestant Ireland, [1674] hitherto affected only under the surface of upper-class life by deism. The circulation of Bishop Watson's Apology in reply only served to spread the contagion, as it brought the issues before multitudes who would not otherwise have heard of them. [1675] All the while, direct propaganda was carried on by translations and reprints as well as by fresh English tractates. Diderot's Thoughts on Religion, and Fréret's Letter from Thrasybulus to Leucippus, seem to have been great favourites among the Painites, as was Elihu Palmer's Principles of Nature; and Volney's Ruins of Empires had a large vogue. Condorcet's Esquisse had been promptly translated in 1795; the translation of d'Holbach's System of Nature reached a third edition in 1817; [1676] that of Raynal's History had been reprinted in 1804; and that of Helvétius On the Mind in 1810; while an English abridgment of Bayle in four volumes, on freethinking lines, appeared in 1826.

2. Meantime, new writers arose to carry into fuller detail the attacks of Paine, sharpening their weapons on those of the more scholarly French deists. A Life of Jesus, including his Apocryphal History, [1677] was published in 1818, with such astute avoidance of all comment that it escaped prosecution. Others, taking a more daring course, fared accordingly. George Houston translated the Ecce Homo of d'Holbach, first publishing it at Edinburgh in 1799, and reprinting it in London in 1813. For the second issue he was prosecuted, fined £200, and imprisoned for two years in Newgate. Robert Wedderburn, a mulatto calling himself "the Rev.," in reality a superannuated journeyman tailor who officiated in Hopkins Street Unitarian Chapel, London, was in 1820 sentenced to two years' imprisonment in Dorchester Jail for a "blasphemous libel" contained in one of his pulpit discourses. His Letters to the Rev. Solomon Herschell (the Jewish Chief Rabbi) and to the Archbishop of Canterbury show a happy vein of orderly irony and not a little learning, despite his profession of apostolic ignorance; and at the trial the judge admitted his defence to be "exceedingly well drawn up." His publications naturally received a new impetus, and passed to a more drastic order of mockery.

3. As the years went on, the persecution in England grew still fiercer; but it was met with a stubborn hardihood which wore out even the bitter malice of piety. One of the worst features of the religious crusade was that it affected to attack not unbelief but "vice," such being the plea on which Wilberforce and others prosecuted, during a period of more than twenty years, the publishers and booksellers who issued the works of Paine. [1678] But even that dissembling device did not ultimately avail. A name not to be forgotten by those who value obscure service to human freedom is that of Richard Carlile, who between 1819 and 1835 underwent nine years' imprisonment in his unyielding struggle for the freedom of the Press, of thought, and of speech. [1679] John Clarke, an ex-Methodist, became one of Carlile's shopmen, was tried in 1824 for selling one of his publications, and "after a spirited defence, in which he read many of the worst passages of the Bible," was sentenced to three years' imprisonment, and to find securities for good behaviour during life. The latter disability he effectively anticipated by writing, while in prison, A Critical Review of the Life, Character, and Miracles of Jesus, wherein Christian feelings were treated as Christians had treated the feelings of freethinkers, with a much more destructive result. Published first, strangely enough, in the Newgate Magazine, it was republished in 1825 and 1839, with impunity. Thus did a brutal bigotry bring upon itself ever a deadlier retaliation, till it sickened of the contest. Those who threw up the struggle on the orthodox side declaimed as before about the tone of the unbeliever's attack, failing to read the plain lesson that, while noisy fanaticism, doing its own worst and vilest, deterred from utterance all the gentler and more sympathetic spirits on the side of reason, the work of reason could be done only by the harder natures, which gave back blow for blow and insult for insult, rejoicing in the encounter. Thus championed, freethought could not be crushed. The propagandist and publishing work done by Carlile was carried on diversely by such free lances as Robert Taylor (ex-clergyman, author of the Diegesis, 1829, and The Devil's Pulpit, 1830), Charles Southwell (1814-1860), and William Hone, [1680] who ultimately became an independent preacher. Southwell, a disciple of Robert Owen, who edited The Oracle of Reason, was imprisoned for a year in 1840 for publishing in that journal an article entitled "The Jew Book"; and was succeeded in the editorship by George Jacob Holyoake (1817-1906), another Owenite missionary, who met a similar sentence; whereafter George Adams and his wife, who continued to publish the journal, were imprisoned in turn. Matilda Roalfe and Mrs. Emma Martin about the same period underwent imprisonment for like causes. [1681] In this fashion, by the steady courage of a much-enduring band of men and women, was set on foot a systematic Secularist propaganda--the name having relation to the term "Secularism," coined by Holyoake.

4. In this evolution political activities played an important part. Henry Hetherington (1792-1849), the strenuous democrat who in 1830 began the trade union movement, and so became the founder of Chartism, fought for the right of publication in matters of freethought as in politics. After undergoing two imprisonments of six months each (1832), and carrying on for three and a half years the struggle for an untaxed Press, which ended in his victory (1834), he was in 1840 indicted for publishing Haslam's Letters to the Clergy of all Denominations, a freethinking criticism of Old Testament morality. He defended himself so ably that Lord Denman, the judge, confessed to have "listened with feelings of great interest and sentiments of respect too"; and Justice Talfourd later spoke of the defence as marked by "great propriety and talent." Nevertheless, he was punished by four months' imprisonment. [1682] In the following year, on the advice of Francis Place, he brought a test prosecution for blasphemy against Moxon, the poet-publisher, for issuing Shelley's complete works, including Queen Mab. Talfourd, then Serjeant, defended Moxon, and pleaded that there "must be some alteration of the law, or some restriction of the right to put it in action"; but the jury were impartial enough to find the publisher guilty, though he received no punishment. [1683] Among other works published by Hetherington was one entitled A Hunt after the Devil, "by Dr. P. Y." (really by Lieutenant Lecount), in which the story of Noah's ark was subjected to a destructive criticism. [1684]

5. Holyoake had been a missionary and martyr in the movement of Socialism set up by Robert Owen, whose teaching, essentially scientific on its psychological or philosophical side, was the first effort to give systematic effect to democratic ideals by organizing industry. It was in the discussions of the "Association of all Classes of all Nations," formed by Owen in 1835, that the word "Socialism" first became current. [1685] Owen was a freethinker in all things; [1686] and his whole movement was so penetrated by an anti-theological spirit that the clergy as a rule became its bitter enemies, though such publicists as Macaulay and John Mill also combined with them in scouting it on political and economic grounds. [1687] Up till the middle of 1817 he had on his side a large body of "respectable" and highly-placed philanthropists, his notable success in his own social and commercial undertakings being his main recommendation. His early Essays on the Formation of Character, indeed, were sufficient to reveal his heterodoxy; but not until, at his memorable public meeting on August 21, 1817, he began to expatiate on "the gross errors that have been combined with the fundamental notions of every religion that has hitherto been taught to men" [1688] did he rank as an aggressive freethinker. It was in his own view the turning-point of his life. He was not prosecuted; though Brougham declared that if any politician had said half as much he would have been "burned alive"; but the alienation of "moderate" opinion at once began; and Owen, always more fervid than prudent, never recovered his influence among the upper classes. Nonetheless, "his secularistic teaching gained such influence among the working classes as to give occasion for the statement in the Westminster Review (1839) that his principles were the actual creed of a great portion of them." [1689]

Owen's polemic method--if it could properly be so called--was not so much a criticism of dogma as a calm impeachment of religion in a spirit of philanthropy. No reformer was ever more entirely free from the spirit of wrath: on this side Owen towers above comparison. "There is no place found in him for scorn or indignation. He cannot bring himself to speak or think evil of any man. He carried out in his daily life his own teaching that man is not the proper object of praise or blame. Throughout his numerous works there is hardly a sentence of indignation--of personal denunciation never. He loves the sinner, and can hardly bring himself to hate the sin." [1690] He had come by his rationalism through the influence rather of Rousseau than of Voltaire; and he had assimilated the philosophic doctrine of determinism--of all ideals the most difficult to realize in conduct--with a thoroughness of which the flawed Rousseau was incapable. There was thus presented to the world the curious case of a man who on the side of character carried rationalism to the perfection of ideal "saintliness," while in the general application of rational thought to concrete problems he was virtually unteachable. For an absolute and immovable conviction in his own practical rightness was in Owen as essential a constituent as his absolute benevolence. [1691] These were the two poles of his personality. He was, in short, a fair embodiment of the ideal formed by many people--doctrine and dogma apart--of the Gospel Jesus. And most Christians accordingly shunned and feared or hated him.

Such a personality was evidently a formidable force as against the reinforced English orthodoxy of the first generation of the nineteenth century. The nature of Owen's propaganda as against religion may be best sampled from his lecture, "The New Religion: or, Religion founded on the Immutable Laws of the Universe, contrasted with all Religions founded on Human Testimony," delivered at the London Tavern on October 20, 1830: [1692]--

"Under the arrangements which have hitherto existed for educating and governing man, four general characters have been produced among the human race. These four characters appear to be formed, under the past and present arrangements of society, from four different original organizations at birth....

"No. 1. May be termed the conscientious religious in all countries.

No. 2. Unbelievers in the truth of any religion, but who strenuously support the religion of their country, under the conviction that, although religion is not necessary to insure their own good conduct, it is eminently required to compel others to act right.

No. 3. Unbelievers who openly avow their disbelief in the truth of any religion, such as Deists, Atheists, Skeptics, etc., etc., but who do not perceive the laws of nature relative to man as an individual, or when united in a social state.

No. 4. Disbelievers in all past and present religions, but believers in the eternal unchanging laws of the universe, as developed by facts derived from all past experience; and who, by a careful study of these facts, deduce from them the religion of nature.

Class No. 1 is formed, under certain circumstances, from those original organizations which possess at birth strong moral and weak intellectual faculties.... Class No. 2 is composed of those individuals who by nature possess a smaller quantity of moral and a larger quantity of intellectual faculty.... Class No. 3 is composed of men of strong moral and moderate intellectual faculty.... Class No. 4 comprises those who, by nature, possess a high degree of intellectual and moral faculty...."

Thus all forms of opinion were shown to proceed either from intellectual or moral defect, save the opinions of Owen. Such propositions, tranquilly elaborated, were probably as effective in producing irritation as any frontal attack upon any dogmas, narratives, or polities. But, though not even consistent (inasmuch as the fundamental thesis that "character is formed by circumstances" is undermined by the datum of four varieties of organization), they were potent to influence serious men otherwise broadly instructed as to the nature of religious history and the irrationality of dogma; and Owen for a generation, despite the inevitable failure and frustration of his social schemes, exercised by his movement a very wide influence on popular life. To a considerable extent it was furthered by the popular deistic philosophy of George and Andrew Combe--a kind of deistic positivism--which then had a great vogue; [1693] and by the implications of phrenology, then also in its most scientific and progressive stage. When, for various reasons, Owen's movement dissolved, the freethinking element seems to have been absorbed in the secular party, while the others appear to have gone in large part to build up the movement of Co-operation. On the whole, the movement of popular freethought in England could be described as poor, struggling, and persecuted, only the most hardy and zealous venturing to associate themselves with it. The imprisonment of Holyoake (1842) for six months, on a trifling charge of blasphemy, is an illustration of the brutal spirit of public orthodoxy at the time. [1694] Where bigotry could thus only injure and oppress without suppressing heresy, it stimulated resistance; and the result of the stimulus was a revival of popular propaganda which led to the founding of a Secular Society in 1852.

6. This date broadly coincides with the maximum domination of conventional orthodoxy in English life. From about the middle of the century the balance gradually changes. In 1852 we find the publisher Henry Bohn reissuing the worthless apologetic works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, with a "publisher's preface" in which they are said to "maintain an acknowledged pre-eminence," though written "at a period of our national history when the writings of Volney and Gibbon, and especially of Thomas Paine, fostered by the political effects of the French Revolution, had deteriorated the morals of the people, and infused the poison of infidelity into the disaffected portion of the public." We have here still the note of early-nineteenth-century Anglican respectability, not easily to be matched in human history for hollowness and blatancy. Fuller is at once one of the most rabid and one of the most futile of the thousand and one defenders of the faith. A sample of his mind and method is the verdict that "If the light that is gone abroad on earth would permit the rearing of temples to Venus, or Bacchus, or any of the rabble of heathen deities, there is little doubt but that modern unbelievers would in great numbers become their devotees; but, seeing they cannot have a God whose worship shall accord with their inclinations, they seem determined not to worship at all." [1695] In the very next year the same publisher began the issue of a reprint of Gibbon, with variorum notes, edited by "An English Churchman," who for the most part defended Gibbon against his orthodox critics. This enterprise in turn brought upon the pious publisher a fair share of odium. But the second half of the century, albeit soon darkened by new wars in Europe, Asia, and America, was to be for England one of Liberalism alike in politics and in thought, free trade, and relatively free publication, with progress in enlightenment for both the populace and the "educated" classes.

7. In 1858 there was elected to the presidency of the London Secular Society the young Charles Bradlaugh, one of the greatest orators of his age, and one of the most powerful personalities ever associated with a progressive movement. Early experience of clerical persecution, which even drove the boy from his father's roof, helped to make him a fighter, but never infirmed his humanity. In the main self-taught, he acquired a large measure of culture in French and English, and his rare natural gift for debate was sharpened by a legal training. A personal admirer of Owen, he never accepted his social polity, but was at all times the most zealous of democratic reformers. Thenceforward the working masses in England were in large part kept in touch with a freethought which drew on the results of the scientific and scholarly research of the time, and wielded a dialectic of which trained opponents confessed the power. [1696] In the place of the bland dogmatism of Owen, and the calm assumption that all mankind could and should be schoolmastered into happiness and order, there came the alert recognition of the absoluteness of individualism as regards conviction, and its present pre-potency as regards social arrangements. Every thesis was brought to the test of argument and evidence; and in due course many who had complained that Owen would not argue, complained that the new school argued everything. The essential thing was that the people were receiving vitally needed instruction; and were being taught with a new power to think for themselves. Incidentally they were freed from an old burden by Bradlaugh's successful resistance to the demand of suretyship from newspapers, and by his no less successful battle for the right of non-theistic witnesses to make affirmation instead of taking the oath in the law courts. [1697]

The inspiration and the instruction of the popular movement thus maintained were at once literary, scientific, ethical, historical, scholarly, and philosophic. Shelley was its poet; Voltaire its first story-teller; and Gibbon its favourite historian. In philosophy, Bradlaugh learned less from Hume than from Spinoza; in Biblical criticism--himself possessing a working knowledge of Hebrew--he collated the work of English and French specialists, down to and including Colenso, applying all the while to the consecrated record the merciless tests of a consistent ethic. At the same time, the whole battery of argument from the natural sciences was turned against traditionalism and supernaturalism, alike in the lectures of Bradlaugh and the other speakers of his party, and in the pages of his journal, The National Reformer. The general outcome was an unprecedented diffusion of critical thought among the English masses, and a proportionate antagonism to those who had wrought such a result. When, therefore, Bradlaugh, as deeply concerned for political as for intellectual righteousness, set himself to the task of entering Parliament, he commenced a struggle which shortened his life, though it promoted his main objects. Not till after a series of electoral contests extending over twelve years was he elected for Northampton in 1880; and the House of Commons in a manner enacted afresh the long resistance made to him in that city. [1698] When, however, on his election in 1880, the Conservative Opposition began the historic proceedings over the Oath question, they probably did even more to deepen and diffuse the popular freethought movement than Bradlaugh himself had done in the whole of his previous career. The process was furthered by the policy of prosecuting and imprisoning (1883) Mr. G. W. Foote, editor of the Freethinker, under the Blasphemy Laws--a course not directly ventured on as against Bradlaugh, though it was sought to connect him with the publication of Mr. Foote's journal.

To this day it is common to give a false account of the origin of the episode, representing Bradlaugh as having "forced" his opinions on the attention of the House. Rather he strove unduly to avoid wounding religious feeling. Wont to make affirmation by law in the courts of justice, he held that the same law applied to the "oath of allegiance," and felt that it would be unseemly on his part to use the words of adjuration if he could legally affirm. On this point he expressly consulted the law officers of the Crown, and they gave the opinion that he had the legal right, which was his own belief as a lawyer. The faction called the "fourth party," however, saw an opportunity to embarrass the Gladstone Government by challenging the act of affirmation, and thus arose the protracted struggle. Only when a committee of the House decided that he could not properly affirm did Bradlaugh propose to take the oath, in order to take his seat.

The pretence of zeal for religion, made by the politicians who had raised the issue, was known by all men to be the merest hypocrisy. Lord Randolph Churchill, who distinguished himself by insisting on the moral necessity for a belief in "some divinity or other," is recorded to have professed a special esteem for Mr. (now Lord) Morley, the most distinguished Positivist of his time. [1699] The whole procedure, in Parliament and out, was so visibly that of the lowest political malice, exploiting the crudest religious intolerance, that it turned into active freethinkers many who had before been only passive doubters, and raised the secularist party to an intensity of zeal never before seen. At no period in modern British history had there been so constant and so keen a platform propaganda of unbelief; so unsparing an indictment of Christian doctrine, history, and practice; such contemptuous rebuttal of every Christian pretension; such asperity of spirit against the creed which was once more being championed by chicanery, calumny, and injustice. In those five years of indignant warfare were sown the seeds of a more abundant growth of rationalism than had ever before been known in the British Islands. With invincible determination Bradlaugh fought his case through Parliament and the law courts, incurring debts which forced upon him further toils that clearly shortened his life, but never yielding for an instant in his battle with the bigotry of half the nation. Liberalism was shamed by many defections; Conservatism, with the assent of Mr. Balfour, was solid for injustice; [1700] and in the entire Church of England less than a dozen priests stood for tolerance. But the cause at stake was indestructible. When Bradlaugh at length took the oath and his seat in 1886, under a ruling of the new Speaker (Peel) which stultified the whole action of the Speaker and majorities of the previous Parliament, and no less that of the law courts, straightforward freethought stood three-fold stronger in England than in any previous generation. Apart from their educative work, the struggles and sufferings of the secularist leaders won for Great Britain the abolition within one generation of the old burden of suretyship on newspapers, and of the disabilities of non-theistic witnesses; the freedom of public meeting in the London parks; the right of avowed atheists to sit in Parliament (Bradlaugh having secured in 1888 their title to make affirmation instead of oath); and the virtual discredit of the Blasphemy Laws as such. It is probable also that the treatment meted out to Mrs. Besant--then associated with Bradlaugh in freethought propaganda--marked the end of another form of tyrannous outrage, already made historic in the case of Shelley. Secured the custody of her children under a marital deed of separation, she was deprived of it at law (1879) on her avowal of atheistic opinions, with the result that her influence as a propagandist was immensely increased.

8. The special energy of the English secularist movement in the ninth decade was partly due to the fact that by that time there had appeared a remarkable amount of modern freethinking literature of high literary and intellectual quality, and good "social" status. Down to 1870 the new literary names committed to the rejection of Christianity, apart from the men of science who kept to their own work, were the theists Hennell, F. W. Newman, W. E. Greg, R. W. Mackay, Buckle, and W. E. H. Lecky, all of them influential, but none of them at once recognized as a first-rate force. But with the appearance of Lecky's History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (1865), lacking though it was in clearness of thought, a new tone began to prevail; and his History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869), equally readable and not more uncompromising, was soon followed by a series of powerful pronouncements of a more explicit kind. One of the first of the literary class to come forward with an express impeachment of Christianity was Moncure Daniel Conway, whose Earthward Pilgrimage (1870) was the artistic record of a gifted preacher's progress from Wesleyan Methodism, through Unitarianism, to a theism which was soon to pass into agnosticism. In 1871 appeared the remarkable work of Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man, wherein a rapid survey of ancient and medieval history, and of the growth of religion from savage beginnings, leads up to a definitely anti-theistic presentment of the future of human life with the claim to have shown "that the destruction of Christianity is essential to the interests of civilization." [1701] Some eighteen editions tell of the acceptance won by the book. Less vogue, but some startled notice, was won by the Duke of Somerset's Christian Theology and Modern Scepticism (1872), a work of moderate rationalism, but by a peer. In 1873 appeared Herbert Spencer's Introduction to the Study of Sociology, wherein the implicit anti-supernaturalism of that philosopher's First Principles was advanced upon, in the chapter on "The Theological Bias," by a mordant attack on that Christian creed.

That attack had been preceded by Matthew Arnold's Literature and Dogma (1872), wherein the publicist who had censured Colenso for not writing in Latin described the Christian doctrine of the Trinity as "the fairy-tale of three Lord Shaftesburys." Much pleading for the recognition by unbelievers of the value of the Bible failed to convince Christians of the value of such a thinker's Christianity. A more important sensation was provided in 1873 by the posthumous publication of Mill's Autobiography, and, in the following year, by his Three Essays on Religion, which exhibited its esteemed author as not only not a Christian but as never having been one, although he formulated a species of limited liability theism, as unsatisfactory to the rationalists as to the orthodox. Still the fresh manifestations of freethinking multiplied. On the one hand the massive treatise entitled Supernatural Religion (1874), and on the other the freethinking essays of Prof. W. K. Clifford in the Fortnightly Review, the most vigorously outspoken ever yet written by an English academic, showed that the whole field of debate was being reopened with a new power and confidence. The History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, by Leslie Stephen (1876), set up the same impression from another side; yet another social sensation was created by the appearance of Viscount Amberley's Analysis of Religious Belief (1877); and all the while the "Higher Criticism" proceeded within the pale of the Church.

The literary situation was now so changed that, whereas from 1850 to 1880 the "sensations" in the religious world were those made by rationalistic attacks, thereafter they were those made by new defences. H. Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883), Mr. Balfour's Defence of Philosophic Doubt (1879) and Foundations of Belief (1895), and Mr. Kidd's Social Evolution (1894), were successively welcomed as being declared to render such a service. It is doubtful whether they are to-day valued upon that score in any quarter.

9. In the first half of the century popular forms of freethought propaganda were hardly possible in other European countries. France had been too long used to regulation alike under the monarchy and under the empire to permit of open promotion of unbelief in the early years of the Restoration. Yet as early as 1828 we find the Protestant Coquerel avowing that in his day the Bourbonism of the Catholic clergy had revived the old anti-clericalism, and that it was common to find the most high-minded patriots unbelievers and materialists. [1702] But still more remarkable was the persistence of deep freethinking currents in the Catholic world throughout the century. About 1830 rationalism had become normal among the younger students at Paris; [1703] and the revolution of that year elicited a charter putting all religions on an equality. [1704] Soon the throne and the chambers were on a footing of practical hostility to the Church. [1705] Under Louis Philippe men dared to teach in the Collège de France that "the Christian dispensation is but one link in the chain of divine revelations to man." [1706] Even during the first period of reaction after the restoration numerous editions of Volney's Ruines and of the Abrégé [1707] of Dupuis's Origine de tous les Cultes served to maintain among the more intelligent of the proletariat an almost scientific rationalism, which can hardly be said to have been improved on by such historiography as that of Renan's Vie de Jésus. And there were other forces, over and above freemasonry, which in France and other Latin countries has since the Revolution been steadily anti-clerical. The would-be social reconstructor Charles Fourier (1772-1837) was an independent and non-Christian though not an anti-clerical theist, and his system may have counted for something as organizing the secular spirit among the workers in the period of the monarchic and Catholic reaction. Fourier approximated to Christianity inasmuch as he believed in a divine Providence; but like Owen he had an unbounded and heterodox faith in human goodness and perfectibility; and he claimed to have discovered the "plan of God" for men. But Fourier was never, like Owen, a popular force; and popular rationalism went on other lines. At no time was the proletariat of Paris otherwise than largely Voltairean after the Revolution, of which one of the great services (carried on by Napoleon) was an improvement in popular education. The rival non-Christian systems of Saint-Simon (1760-1823) and Auguste Comte (1798-1857) also never took any practical hold among them; but throughout the century they have been fully the most freethinking working-class population in the world.

As to Fourier see the OEuvres Choisies de Fourier, ed. Ch. Gide, pp. 1-3, 9. Cp. Solidarité: Vue Synthétique sur la doctrine de Ch. Fourier, par Hippolyte Renaud, 3e édit. 1846, ch. i: "Pour ramener l'homme à la foi" [en Dieu], writes Renaud, "il faut lui offrir aujourd'hui une foi complète et composée, une foi solidement assise sur le témoignage de la raison. Pour cela il faut que la flambeau de la science dissipe toutes les obscurités" (p. 9). This is not propitious to dogma; but Fourier planned and promised to leave priests and ministers undisturbed in his new world, and even declared religions to be "much superior to uncertain sciences." Gide, introd. to OEuvres Choisies, pp. xxii-xxiii, citing Manuscrits, vol. de 1853-1856, p. 293. Cp. Dr. Ch. Pellarin, Fourier, sa vie et sa théorie, 5e édit. p. 143.

Saint-Simon, who proposed a "new Christianity," expressly guarded against direct appeals to the people. See Weil, Saint-Simon et son OEuvre, 1894, p. 193. As to the Saint-Simonian sect, see an interesting testimony by Renan, Les Apôtres, p. 148.

The generation after the fall of Napoleon was pre-eminently the period of new schemes of society; and it is noteworthy that they were all non-Christian, though all, including even Owen's, claimed to provide a "religion," and the French may seem all to have been convinced by Napoleon's practice that some kind of cult must be provided for the peoples. Owen alone rejected alike supernaturalism and cultus; and his movement left the most definite rationalistic traces. All seem to have been generated by the double influence of (1) the social failure of the French Revolution, which left so many anxious for another and better effort at reconstruction, and (2) of the spectacle of the rule of Napoleon, which seems to have elicited new ideals of beneficent autocracy. Owen, Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Comte were all alike would-be founders of a new society or social religion. It seems probable that this proclivity to systematic reconstruction, in a world which still carried a panic-memory of one great social overturn, helped to lengthen the rule of orthodoxy. Considerably more progress was made when freethought became detached from special plans of polity, and grew up anew by way of sheer truth-seeking on all the lines of inquiry.

In France, however, the freethinking tradition from the eighteenth century never passed away, at least as regards the life of the great towns. And while Napoleon III made it his business to conciliate the Church, which in the person of the somewhat latitudinarian Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, had endorsed his coup d'état of 1851, [1708] even under his rule the irreversible movement of freethought revealed itself among his own ministers. Victor Duruy, the eminent historian, his energetic Minister of Education, was a freethinker, non-aggressive towards the Church, but perfectly determined not to permit aggression by it. [1709] And when the Church, in its immemorial way, declaimed against all forms of rationalistic teaching in the colleges, and insisted on controlling the instruction in all the schools, [1710] his firm resistance made him one of its most hated antagonists. Even in the Senate, then the asylum of all forms of antiquated thought and prejudice, Duruy was able to carry his point against the prelates, Sainte-Beuve strongly and skilfully supporting him. [1711] Thus in the France of the Third Empire, on the open field of the educational battle-ground between faith and reason, the rationalistic advance was apparent in administration no less than in the teaching of the professed men of science and the polemic of the professed critics of religion.

10. In other Catholic countries the course of popular culture in the first half of the century was not greatly dissimilar to that seen in France, though less rapid and expansive. Thus we find the Spanish Inquisitor-General in 1815 declaring that "all the world sees with horror the rapid progress of unbelief," and denouncing "the errors and the new and dangerous doctrines" which have passed from other countries to Spain. [1712] This evolution was to some extent checked; but in the latter half of the century, especially in the last thirty years, all the Catholic countries of Europe were more or less permeated with demotic freethought, usually going hand in hand with republican or socialistic propaganda in politics. It is indeed a significant fact that freethought propaganda is often most active in countries where the Catholic Church is most powerful. Thus in Belgium there are at least three separate federations, standing for hundreds of freethinking "groups"; in Spain, a few years ago, there were freethought societies in all the large towns, and at least half-a-dozen freethought journals; in Portugal there have been a number of societies--a weekly journal, O Secolo, of Lisbon, and a monthly review, O Livre Exame. In France and Italy, where educated society is in large measure rationalistic, the Masonic lodges do most of the personal and social propaganda; but there are federations of freethought societies in both countries. In Switzerland freethought is more aggressive in the Catholic than in the Protestant cantons. [1713] In the South American republics, again, as in Italy and France, the Masonic lodges are predominantly freethinking; and in Peru there was, a few years ago, a Freethought League, with a weekly organ. As long ago as 1856 the American diplomatist and archæologist, Squier, wrote that, "Although the people of Honduras, in common with those of Central America in general, are nominally Catholics, yet, among those capable of reflection or possessed of education, there are more who are destitute of any fixed creed--Rationalists or, as they are sometimes called, Freethinkers, than adherents of any form of religion." [1714] That the movement is also active in the other republics of the southern continent may be inferred from the facts that a Positivist organization has long subsisted in Brazil; that its members were active in the peaceful revolution which there substituted a republic for a monarchy; and that at the Freethought Congresses of Rome and Paris in 1904 and 1905 there was an energetic demand for a Congress at Buenos Aires, which was finally agreed to for 1906.

While popular propaganda is hardly possible save on political lines, freethinking journalism has counted for much in the most Catholic parts of Southern Europe. The influence of such journals is to be measured not by their circulation, which is never great, but by their keeping up a habit of more or less instructed freethinking among readers, to many of whom the instruction is not otherwise easily accessible. Probably the least ambitious of them is an intellectual force of a higher order than the highest grade of popular religious journalism; while some of the stronger, as De Dageraad of Amsterdam, have ranked as high-class serious reviews. In the more free and progressive countries, however, freethought affects all periodical literature; and in France it partly permeates the ordinary newspapers. In England, where a series of monthly or weekly publications of an emphatically freethinking sort has been nearly continuous from about 1840, [1715] new ones rising in place of those which succumbed to the commercial difficulties, such periodicals suffer an economic pinch in that they cannot hope for much income from advertisements, which are the chief sustenance of popular journals and magazines. The same law holds elsewhere; but in England and America the high-priced reviews have been gradually opened to rationalistic articles, the way being led by the English Westminster Review [1716] and Fortnightly Review, both founded with an eye to freer discussion.

Among the earlier freethinking periodicals may be noted The Republican, 1819-26 (edited by Carlile); The Deist's Magazine, 1820; The Lion, 1828 (Carlile); The Prompter, 1830 (Carlile); The Gauntlet, 1833 (Carlile); The Atheist and Republican, 1841-42; The Blasphemer, 1842; The Oracle of Reason (founded by Southwell), 1842, etc.; The Reasoner and Herald of Progress (largely conducted by Holyoake), 1846-1861; Cooper's Journal; or, unfettered Thinker, etc., 1850, etc.; The Movement, 1843; The Freethinker's Information for the People (undated: after 1840); Freethinker's Magazine, 1850, etc.; London Investigator, 1854, etc. Bradlaugh's National Reformer, begun in 1860, lasted till 1893. Mr. Foote's Freethinker, begun in 1881, still subsists. Various freethinking monthlies have risen and fallen since 1880--e.g., Our Corner, edited by Mrs. Besant, 1883-88; The Liberal and Progress, edited by Mr. Foote, 1879-87; the Free Review, transformed into the University Magazine, 1893-1898. The Reformer, a monthly, edited by Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner, subsisted from 1897 to 1904. The Literary Guide, which began as a small sheet in 1885, flourishes. Since 1900, a popular Socialist journal, The Clarion, has declared for rationalism through the pen of its editor, Mr. R. Blatchford ("Nunquam"), whose polemic has caused much controversy. For a generation back, further, rationalistic essays have appeared from time to time not only in the Fortnightly Review (founded by G. H. Lewes, and long edited by Mr. John (now Lord) Morley, much of whose writing on the French philosophes appeared in its pages), but in the Nineteenth Century, wherein was carried on, for instance, the famous controversy between Mr. Gladstone and Prof. Huxley. In the early 'seventies, the Cornhill Magazine, under the editorship of Leslie Stephen, issued serially Matthew Arnold's Literature and Dogma and St. Paul and Protestantism. In the latter years of the century quite a number of reviews, some of them short-lived, gave space to advanced opinions. But propaganda has latterly become more and more a matter of all-pervading literary influence, the immense circulation of the sixpenny reprints of the R. P. A. having put the advanced literature of the last generation within the reach of all.

11. In Germany, as we have seen, the relative selectness of culture, the comparative aloofness of the "enlightened" from the mass of the people, made possible after the War of Independence a certain pietistic reaction, in the absence of any popular propagandist machinery or purpose on the side of the rationalists. In the opinion of an evangelical authority, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, "through modern enlightenment (Aufklärung) the people had become indifferent to the Church; the Bible was regarded as a merely human book, the Saviour merely as a person who had lived and taught long ago, not as one whose almighty presence is with his people still." [1717] According to the same authority, "before the war, the indifference to the word of God which prevailed among the upper classes had penetrated to the lower; but after it, a desire for the Scriptures was everywhere felt." [1718] This involves an admission that the "religion of the heart" propounded by Schleiermacher in his addresses On Religion "to the educated among its despisers" [1719] (1799) was not really a Christian revival at all. Schleiermacher himself in 1803 declared that in Prussia there was almost no attendance on public worship, and the clergy had fallen into profound discredit. [1720] A pietistic movement had, however, begun during the period of the French ascendancy; [1721] and seeing that the freethinking of the previous generation had been in part associated with French opinion, it was natural that on this side anti-French feeling should promote a reversion to older and more "national" forms of feeling. Thus after the fall of Napoleon the tone of the students who had fought in the war seems to have been more religious than that of previous years. [1722] Inasmuch, however, as the "enlightenment" of the scholarly class was maintained, and applied anew to critical problems, the religious revival did not turn back the course of progress. "When the third centenary commemoration, in 1817, of the Reformation approached, the Prussian people were in a state of stolid indifference, apparently, on religious matters." [1723] Alongside of the pietistic reaction of the Liberation period there went on an open ecclesiastical strife, dating from an anti-rationalist declaration by the Court preacher Reinhard at Dresden in 1811, [1724] between the rationalists or "Friends of Light" and the Scripturalists of the old school; and the effect was a general disintegration of orthodoxy, despite, or it may be largely in virtue of, the governmental policy of rewarding the Pietists and discouraging their opponents in the way of official appointments. [1725] The Prussian measure (1817) of forcibly uniting the Lutheran and Calvinistic Churches, with a neutral sacramental ritual in which the eucharist was treated as a historical commemoration, tended to the same consequences, though it also revived old Lutheran zeal; [1726] and when the new revolutionary movement broke out in 1848, popular feeling was substantially non-religious. "In the south of Germany especially the conflict of political opinions and revolutionary tendencies produced, in the first instance, an entire prostration of religious sentiment." The bulk of society showed entire indifference to worship, the churches being everywhere deserted; and "atheism was openly avowed, and Christianity ridiculed as the invention of priestcraft." [1727] One result was a desperate effort of the clergy to "effect a union among all who retained any measure of Christian belief, in order to raise up their national religion and faith from the lowest state into which it has ever fallen since the French Revolution."

But the clerical effort evoked a counter effort. Already, in 1846, official interference with freedom of utterance led to the formation of a "free religious" society by Dr. Rupp, of Königsberg, one of the "Friends of Light" in the State Church; and he was followed by Wislicenus of Halle, a Hegelian, and by Uhlich of Magdeburg. [1728] As a result of the determined pressure, social and official, which ensued on the collapse of the revolution of 1848, these societies failed to develop on the scale of their beginnings; and that of Magdeburg, which at the outset had 7,000 members, has latterly only 500; though that of Berlin has nearly 4,000. [1729] There is further a Freidenker Bund, with branches in many towns; and the two organizations, with their total membership of some fifty thousand, may be held to represent the militant side of popular freethought in Germany. This, however, constitutes only a fraction of the total amount of passive rationalism. There is a large measure of enlightenment in both the working and the middle classes; and the ostensible force of orthodoxy among the official and conformist middle class is in many respects illusory. The German police laws put a rigid check on all manner of platform and press propaganda which could be indicted as hurting the feelings of religious people; so that a jest at the Holy Coat of Trèves could even in recent years send a journalist to jail, and the platform work of the militant societies is closely trammelled. Yet there are, or have been, over a dozen journals which so far as may be take the freethought side; [1730] and the whole stress of Bismarckian reaction and of official orthodoxy under the present Kaiser has never availed to make the tone of popular thought pietistic. Karl Marx, the prophet of the German Socialist movement (1818-1883), laid it down as part of its mission "to free consciousness from the religious spectre"; and his two most influential followers in Germany, Bebel and Liebknecht, were avowed atheists, the former even going so far as to avow officially in the Reichstag that "the aim of our party is on the political plane the republican form of State; on the economic, Socialism; and on the plane which we term the religious, atheism"; [1731] though the party attempts no propaganda of the latter order. "Christianity and Social-Democracy," said Bebel again, "are opposed as fire and water." [1732]

Some index to the amount of popular freethought that normally exists under the surface in Germany is furnished, further, by the strength of the German freethought movement in the United States, where, despite the tendency to the adoption of the common speech, there grew up in the last quarter of the nineteenth century many German freethinking societies, a German federation of atheists, and a vigorous popular organ, Der Freidenker.

Thus, under the sounder moral and economic conditions of the life of the proletariate in Germany, straightforward rationalism, as apart from propaganda, is becoming among them more and more the rule. The bureaucratic control of education forces religious teaching in the common schools; and there is no "conscience clause" for unbelieving parents. [1733] A Protestant pastor at the end of the century made an investigation into the state of religious opinion among the working Socialists of some provincial towns and rural districts, and found everywhere a determined attitude of rationalism. The formula of the Social Democrats, "Religion is a private matter," he bitterly perceives to carry the implication "a private matter for the fools"; and while he holds that the belief in a speedy collapse of the Christian religion is latterly less common than formerly among the upper and middle classes, he complains that the Socialists are not similarly enlightened. [1734] Bebel's drastic teaching as to the economic and social conditions of the rise of Christianity, [1735] and the materialistic theory of history set forth by Marx and Engels, he finds generally accepted. Not only do most of the party leaders declare themselves to be without religion, but those who do not so declare themselves are so no less. [1736] Nor is the unbelief a mere sequel to the Socialism: often the development is the other way. [1737] The opinion is almost universal, further, that the clergy in general do not believe what they teach. [1738] Atheists are numerous among the peasantry; more numerous among the workers in the provincial towns; and still more numerous in the large towns; [1739] and while many take a sympathetic view of Jesus as a man and teacher, not a few deny his historic existence [1740]--a view set forth in non-Socialist circles also. [1741]

12. Under the widely-different political conditions in Russia and the Scandinavian States it is the more significant that in all alike rationalism is latterly common among the educated classes. In Norway the latter perhaps include a larger proportion of working people than can be so classed even in Germany; and rationalism is relatively hopeful, though social freedom is still far from perfect. It is the old story of toleration for a dangerously well-placed freethought, and intolerance for that which reaches the common people. In Russia rationalism has before it the task of transmuting a system of autocracy into one of self-government. In no European country, perhaps, is rationalism more general among the educated classes; and in none is there a greater mass of popular ignorance. [1742] The popular icon-worship in Moscow can hardly be paralleled outside of Asia. On the other hand, the aristocracy became Voltairean in the eighteenth century, and has remained more or less incredulous since, though it now joins hands with the Church; while the democratic movement, in its various phases of socialism, constitutionalism, and Nihilism, has been markedly anti-religious since the second quarter of the century. [1743] Subsidiary revivals of mysticism, such as are chronicled in other countries, are of course to be seen in Russia; but the instructed class, the intelliguentia, is essentially naturalistic in its cast of thought. This state of things subsists despite the readiness of the government to suppress the slightest sign of official heterodoxy in the universities. [1744] The struggle is thus substantially between the spirit of freedom and that of arbitrary rule; and the fortunes of freethought go with the former.

13. "Free-religious" societies, such as have been noted in Germany, may be rated as forms of moderate freethought propaganda, and are to be found in all Protestant countries, with all shades of development. A movement of the kind has existed for a number of years back in America, in the New England States and elsewhere, and may be held to represent a theistic or agnostic thought too advanced to adhere even to the Unitarianism which during the two middle quarters of the century was perhaps the predominant creed in New England. The Theistic Church conducted by the Rev. Charles Voysey after his expulsion from the Church of England in 1871 to his death in 1912, and since then by the Rev. Dr. Walter Walsh, is an example. Another type of such a gradual and peaceful evolution is the South Place Institute (formerly "Chapel") of London, where, under the famous orator W. J. Fox, nominally a Unitarian, there was preached between 1824 and 1852 a theism tending to pantheism, perhaps traceable to elements in the doctrine of Priestley, and passed on by Mr. Fox to Robert Browning. [1745] In 1864 the charge passed to Moncure D. Conway, under whom the congregation quietly advanced during twenty years from Unitarianism to a non-scriptural rationalism, embracing the shades of philosophic theism, agnosticism, and anti-theism. In Conway's Lessons for the Day will be found a series of peculiarly vivid mementos of that period, a kind of itinerary, more intimate than any retrospective record. The latter part of his life, partly preserved in one of the most interesting autobiographies of the century, was spent between England and the United States and in travel. After his first withdrawal to the States in 1884 the Institute became an open platform for rationalist and non-theological ethics and social and historical teaching, and it now stands as an "Ethical Society" in touch with the numerous groups so named which have come into existence in England in the last dozen years on lines originally laid down by Dr. Felix Adler in New York. At the time of the present writing the English societies of this kind number between twenty and thirty, the majority being in London and its environs. Their open adherents, who are some thousands strong, are in most cases non-theistic rationalists, and include many former members of the Secularist movement, of which the organization has latterly dwindled. On partly similar lines there were developed in provincial towns about the end of the century a small number of "Labour Churches," in which the tendency was to substitute a rationalist humanitarian ethic for supernaturalism; and the same lecturers frequently spoke from their platforms and from those of Ethical and Secularist societies. Of late, however, the Labour Churches have tended to disappear. All this means no resumption of church-going, but, by the confession of the Churches, a completer secularization of the Sunday.

14. Alongside of the lines of movement before sketched, there has subsisted in England during the greater part of the nineteenth century a considerable organization of Unitarianism. In the early years of the nineteenth century it was strong enough to obtain the repeal (1813) of the penal laws against anti-Trinitarianism, whereafter the use of the name "Unitarian" became more common, and a sect so called was founded formally in 1825. When the heretical preachers of the Presbyterian sect began openly to declare themselves as Unitarians, there naturally arose a protest from the orthodox, and an attempt was made in 1833 to save from its new destination the property owned by the heretical congregations. [1746] This was frustrated by the Dissenters' Chapels Act of 1844, which gave to each group singly the power to interpret its trust in its own fashion. Thenceforward the sect prospered considerably, albeit not so greatly as in the United States. During the century English Unitarianism has been associated with scholarship through such names as John Kenrick and Samuel Sharpe, the historians of Egypt, and J. J. Tayler; and, less directly, with philosophy in the person of Dr. James Martineau, who, however, was rather a coadjutor than a champion of the sect. In the United States the movement, greatly aided to popularity by the eloquent humanism of the two Channings, lost the prestige of the name of Emerson, who had been one of its ministers, by the inability of his congregation to go the whole way with him in his opinions. In 1853 Emerson told the young Moncure Conway that "the Unitarian Churches were stated to be no longer producing ministers equal to their forerunners, but were more and more finding their best men in those coming from orthodox Churches," who "would, of course, have some enthusiasm for their new faith." [1747] Latterly Unitarians have been entitled to say that the Trinitarian Churches are approximating to their position. [1748] Such an approach, however, involves rather a weakening than a strengthening of the smaller body; though some of its teachers are to the full as bigoted and embittered in their propaganda as the bulk of the traditionally orthodox. Others adhere to their ritual practices in the spirit of use and wont, as Emerson found when he sought to rationalize in his own Church the usage of the eucharist. [1749] On the other hand, numbers have passed from Unitarianism to thoroughgoing rationalism; and some whole congregations, following more or less the example of that of South Place Chapel, have latterly reached a position scarcely distinguishable from that of the Ethical Societies.

15. A partly similar evolution has taken place among the Protestant Churches of France, Switzerland, Hungary, and Holland. French Protestantism could not but be intellectually moved by the intense ferment of the Revolution; and, when finally secured against active oppression from the Catholic side, could not but develop an intellectual opposition to the Catholic Reaction after 1815. In Switzerland, always in intellectual touch with France and Germany, the tendencies which had been stamped as Socinian in the days of Voltaire soon reasserted themselves so strongly as to provoke fanatical reaction. [1750] The nomination of Strauss to a chair of theology at Zürich by a Radical Government in 1839 actually gave rise to a violent revolt, inflamed and led by Protestant clergymen. The Executive Council were expelled, and a number of persons killed in the strife. [1751] In the canton of Aargau in 1841, again, the cry of "religion in danger" sufficed to bring about a Catholic insurrection against a Liberal Council; and yet again in 1844 it led, among the Catholics of the Valais canton, to the bloodiest insurrection of all. Since these disgraceful outbreaks the progress of Rationalism in Switzerland has been steady. In 1847 a chair was given at Berne to the rationalistic scholar Zeller, without any such resistance as was made to Strauss at Zürich. In 1892, out of a total number of 3,151 students in the five universities of Switzerland and in the academies of Fribourg and Neuchâtel, the number of theological students was only 374, positively less than that of the teaching staff, which was 431. Leaving out the academies named, which had no medical faculty, the number of theological students stood at 275 out of 2,917. The Church in Switzerland has thus undergone the relative restriction in power and prestige seen in the other European countries of long-established culture. The evolution, however, remains negative rather than positive. Though a number of pastors latterly call themselves libres penseurs or penseurs libres, and a movement of ethical culture (morale sociale) has made progress, the forces of positive freethought are not numerically strong. An economic basis still supports the Churches, and the lack of it leaves rationalism non-aggressive. [1752]

A somewhat similar state of things exists in Holland, where the "higher criticism" of both the Old and New Testaments made notable progress in the middle decades of the century. There then resulted not only an extensive decay of orthodoxy within the Protestant Church, but a movement of aggressive popular freethought, which was for a number of years well represented in journalism. To-day, orthodoxy and freethought are alike less demonstrative; the broad explanation being that the Dutch people in the mass has ceased to be pietistic, and has secularized its life. Even in the Bible-loving Boer Republic of South Africa (Transvaal), in its time one of the most orthodox of the civilized communities of the world, there was seen in the past generation the phenomenon of an agnostic ex-clergyman's election to the post of president, in the person of T. F. Burgers, who succeeded Pretorius in 1871. His election was of course on political and not on religious grounds; and panic fear on the score of his heresy, besides driving some fanatics to emigrate, is said to have disorganized a Boer expedition under his command; [1753] but his views were known when he was elected. In the years 1899-1902 the terrible experience of the last Boer War, in South Africa as in Britain, perhaps did more to turn critical minds against supernaturalism than was accomplished by almost any other agency in the same period. In Britain the overturn was by way of the revolt of many ethically-minded Christians against the attitude of the orthodox churches, which were so generally and so unscrupulously belligerent as to astonish many even of their freethinking opponents. [1754] As regards the Boers and the Cape Dutch the resultant unbelief was among the younger men, who harassed their elders with challenges as to the justice or the activity of a God who permitted the liberties of his most devoted worshippers to be wantonly destroyed. Among the more educated burghers in the Orange Free State commandos unbelief asserted itself with increasing force and frequency. [1755] An ethical rationalism thus motived is not likely to be displaced; and the Christian churches of Britain have thus the sobering knowledge that the war which they so vociferously glorified [1756] has wrought to the discredit of their creed alike in their own country and among the vanquished.

16. The history of popular freethought in Sweden yields a good illustration, in a compact form, [1757] of the normal play of forces and counter-forces. Since the day of Christina, as we saw, though there have been many evidences of passive unbelief, active rationalism has been little known in her kingdom down till modern times, Sweden as a whole having been little touched by the great ferment of the eighteenth century. The French Revolution, however, stirred the waters there as elsewhere. Tegnér, the poet-bishop, author of the once-famous Frithiof's Saga, was notable in his day for a determined rejection of the evangelical doctrine of salvation; and his letters contain much criticism of the ruling system. But the first recognizable champion of freethought in Sweden is the thinker and historian E. G. Geijer (d. 1847), whose history of his native land is one of the best European performances of his generation. In 1820 he was prosecuted for his attack upon the dogmas of the Trinity and redemption--long the special themes of discussion in Sweden--in his book Thorild; but was acquitted by the jury. Thenceforth Sweden follows the general development of Europe. In 1841 Strauss's Leben Jesu was translated in Swedish, and wrought its usual effect. On the popular side the poet Wilhelm von Braun carried on an anti-Biblical warfare; and a blacksmith in a provincial town contrived to print in 1850 a translation of Paine's Age of Reason. Once more the spirit of persecution blazed forth, and he was prosecuted and imprisoned. H. B. Palmaer (d. 1854) was likewise prosecuted for his satire, The Last Judgment in Cocaigne (Kräkwinkel), with the result that his defence extended his influence. In the same period the Stockholm curate Nils Ignell (d. 1864) produced a whole series of critical pamphlets and a naturalistic History of the Development of Man, besides supplying a preface to the Swedish translation of Renan's Vie de Jésus. Meantime translations of the works of Theodore Parker, by V. Pfeiff and A. F. Akerberg, had a large circulation and a wide influence; and the courage of the gymnasium rector N. J. Cramer (d. 1893), author of The Farewell to the Church, gave an edge to the movement. The partly rationalistic doctrine of Victor Rydberg (d. 1895) was in comparison uncritical, and was proportionally popular.

On another line the books of Dr. Nils Lilja (d. 1870), written for working people, created a current of rationalism among the masses; and in the next generation G. J. Leufstedt maintained it by popular lectures and by the issue of translations of Colenso, Ingersoll, Büchner, and Renan. Hjalmar Stromer (d. 1886) did similar platform work. Meantime the followers of Parker and Rydberg founded in 1877 a monthly review, The Truthseeker, which lasted till 1894, and an association of "Believers in Reason," closely resembling the British Ethical Societies of our own day. Among its leading adherents has been K. P. Arnoldson, the well-known peace advocate. Liberal clerics were now fairly numerous; Positivism, represented by Dr. Anton Nyström's General History of Civilization, played its part; and the more radical freethinking movement, nourished by new translations, became specially active, with the usual effect on orthodox feeling. August Strindberg, author and lecturer, was prosecuted in 1884 on a charge of ridiculing the eucharist, but was declared not guilty. The strenuous Victor Lennstrand, lecturer and journalist, prosecuted in 1888 and later for his anti-Christian propaganda, was twice fined and imprisoned, with the result of extending his influence and discrediting his opponents. "Utilitarian Associations," created by his activity, were set up in many parts of the country; and his movement survives his death.

17. Only in the United States has the public lecture platform been made a means of propaganda to anything like the extent seen in Britain; and the greatest part of the work in the States has thus far been done by the late Colonel Ingersoll, the leading American orator of the last generation, and the most widely influential platform propagandist of the last century. No other single freethinker, it is believed, has reached such an audience by public speech; and between his propaganda and that of the freethought journals there has been maintained for a generation back a large body of vigorous freethinking opinion in all parts of the States. Before the Civil War this could hardly be said. In the middle decades of the century the conditions had been so little changed that after the death of President Lincoln, who was certainly a non-Christian deist, and an agnostic deist at that, [1758] it was sought to be established that he was latterly orthodox. In his presidential campaign of 1860 he escaped attack on his opinions simply because his opponent, Stephen A. Douglas, was likewise an unbeliever. [1759] The great negro orator, Frederick Douglas, was as heterodox as Lincoln. [1760] It is even alleged that President Grant [1761] was of the same cast of opinion. Such is the general drift of intelligent thought in the United States, from Washington onwards; and still the social conditions impose on public men the burden of concealment, while popular history is garbled for the same reasons. Despite the great propagandist power of the late Colonel Ingersoll, therefore, American freethought remains dependent largely on struggling organizations and journals, [1762] and its special literature is rather of the popularizing than of the scholarly order. Nowhere else has every new advance of rationalistic science been more angrily opposed by the priesthood; because nowhere is the ordinary prejudice of the priest more voluble or better-bottomed in self-complacency. As late as 1891 the Methodist Bishop Keener delivered a ridiculous attack on the evolution theory before the OEcumenical Council of Methodism at Washington, declaring that it had been utterly refuted by a certain "wonderful deposit of the Ashley beds." [1763] Various professors in ecclesiastical colleges have been driven from their posts for accepting in turn the discoveries of geology, biology, and the "higher criticism"--for instance, Woodrow of Columbia, South Carolina; Toy of Louisville; Winchell of Vanderbilt University; and more than one professor in the American college at Beyrout. [1764] In every one of the three former cases, it is true, the denounced professor has been called to a better chair; and latterly some of the more liberal clergy have even commercially exploited the higher criticism by producing the "Rainbow Bible." Generally speaking, however, in the United States sheer preoccupation with business, and lack of leisure, counteract in a measure the relative advantage of social freedom; and while culture is more widely diffused than in England, it remains on the whole less radical in the "educated" classes so-called. So far as it is possible to make a quantitative estimate, it may be said that in the more densely populated parts of the States there is latterly less of studious freethinking because there is less leisure than in England; but that in the Western States there is a relative superiority, class for class, because of the special freedom of the conditions and the independent character of many of the immigrants who constitute the new populations. [1765]

Section 2.--Biblical Criticism

It is within the last generation that the critical analysis of the Jewish and Christian sacred books has been most generally carried on; but the process has never been suspended since the German Aufklärung arose on the stimuli of English and French deism.

1. At the beginning of the century, educated men in general believed in the Semitic myths of creation, as given in Genesis: long before the end of it they had more or less explicitly rectified their beliefs in the light of new natural science and new archæology. The change became rapid after 1860; but it had been led up to even in the period of reaction. While in France, under the restored monarchy, rationalistic activity was mainly headed into historical, philosophical, and sociological study, and in England orthodoxy predominated in theological discussion, the German rationalistic movement went on among the specialists, despite the liberal religious reaction of Schleiermacher, [1766] who himself gave forth such an uncertain sound. His case and that of his father, an army chaplain, tell signally of the power of the mere clerical occupation to develop a species of emotional belief in one who has even attained rationalism. When the son, trained for the church, avowed to his father (1787) that he had lost faith in the supernatural Jesus, the father professed to mourn bitterly, but three years later avowed that he in his own youth had preached Christianity for twelve years while similarly disbelieving its fundamental tenet. [1767] He professionally counselled compromise, which the son duly practised, with such success that, whereas he originally addressed his Discourses on Religion (1799) to "the educated among its despisers," he was able to say in the preface to the third edition, twenty years later (1821), that the need now was to reason with the pietists and literalists, the ignorant and bigoted, the credulous and superstitious. [1768] In short, he and others had been able to set up a fashion of poetic religion among deists, but not to lighten the darkness of orthodox belief.

The ostensible religious revival associated with Schleiermacher's name was in fact a reaction of temperament, akin to the romantic movement in literature, of which Chateaubriand in France was the exponent as regarded religious feeling. The German "rationalism" of the latter part of the eighteenth century, with its stolid translation of the miraculous into the historical, and its official accommodation of the result to the purposes of the pulpit, had not reached any firm scientific foundation; and Schleiermacher on the other side, protesting that religion was a matter not of knowledge but of feeling, attracted alike the religious emotionalists, the seekers of compromise, and the romantics. His personal and literary charm, and his tolerance of mundane morals, gave him a German vogue not unlike that of Chateaubriand in France. His intellectual cast and ultimate philosophic bias, however, together with his freedom of private life, [1769] ultimately alienated him from the orthodox, and thus it was that he died (1834) in the odour of heresy. Heresy, in fact, he had preached from the outset; and it was only in a highly emancipated society that his teaching could have been fashionable. The statement that by his Discourses "with one stroke he overthrew the card-castle of rationalism and the old fortress of orthodoxy" [1770] is literally quite false, for the old compromising pseudo-rationalism survived a long while, and orthodoxy still longer; and it is quite misleading inasmuch as it suggests a resurgence of faith. The same historian proceeds to record that some saw in the work "only a slightly disguised return to superstition, and others a brilliant confession of unbelief." "The general public saw in the Discourses a new assault of romanticism upon religion. The clergy in particular were painfully aroused, and did not dissemble their irritation. Spalding himself could not restrain his anger." Schleiermacher's friend Sach, who had passed the Discourses in manuscript, woke up to denounce them as unchristian, pantheistic, and denuded of the ideas of God, immortality, and morality. [1771]

In England the work would have been so denounced on all sides; and the bulk of Schleiermacher's teaching would there have been reckoned revolutionary and "godless." He was a lover of both political and social freedom; and in his Two Memoranda on the Church Question in regard to Prussia (1803) he made "a veritable declaration of war on the clerical spirit." [1772] Recognizing that ecclesiastical discipline had reached a low ebb, he even proposed that civil marriage should precede religious marriage, and be alone obligatory; besides planning a drastic subjection of the Prussian Church to State regulation. [1773] In his pamphlet on The So-called Epistle to Timothy, of which he denied the authenticity, he played the part of a "destructive" critic. [1774] He "saw with pain the approach of the rising tide of confessionalism"--that is, the movement for an exact statement of creed. [1775] Nor can it be said that, despite his attempts in later life to reach a more definite theology, Schleiermacher really held firmly any Christian or even theistic dogma. He seems to have been at bottom a pantheist; [1776] and the secret of his attraction for so many German preachers and theologians then and since is that he offered them in eloquent and moving diction a kind of profession of faith which avoided alike the fatal undertaking of the old religious rationalism to reduce the sacred narratives to terms of reason, and the dogged refusal of orthodoxy to admit that there was anything to explain away. Philosophically and critically speaking, his teaching has no lasting intellectual substance, being first a negation of intellectual tests and then a belated attempt to apply them. It is not even original, being a development from Rousseau and Lessing. But it had undoubtedly a freeing and civilizing influence for many years; and it did little harm save insofar as it fostered the German proclivity to the nebulous in thought and language, and partly encouraged the normal resistance to the critical spirit. All irrationalism, to be sure, in some sort spells self-will and lawlessness; but the orthodox negation of reason was far more primitive than Schleiermacher's. From that side, accordingly, he never had any sympathy. When, soon after his funeral, in which his coffin was borne and followed by troops of students, his church was closed to the friends who wished there to commemorate him, it was fairly clear that his own popularity lay mainly with the progressive spirits, and not among the orthodox; and in the end his influence tended to merge in that of the critical movement. [1777]

2. Gradually that had developed a greater precision of method, though there were to be witnessed repetitions of the intellectual anomalies of the past, so-called rationalists losing the way while supernaturalists occasionally found it. It has been remarked by Reuss that Paulus, a clerical "rationalist," fought for the Pauline authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the very year in which Tholuck, a reconverted evangelical, gave up the Pauline authorship as hopeless; that when Schleiermacher, ostensibly a believer in inspiration, denied the authenticity of the Epistle to Timothy, the [theological] rationalist Wegscheider opposed him; and that the rationalistic Eichhorn maintained the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch long after the supernaturalist Vater had disproved it. [1778] Still the general movement was inevitably and irrevocably rationalistic. Beginning with the Old Testament, criticism gradually saw more and more of mere myth where of old men had seen miracle, and where the first rationalists saw natural events misconceived. Soon the process reached the New Testament, every successive step being resisted in the old fashion; and much laborious work, now mostly forgotten, was done by a whole company of scholars, among whom Paulus, Eichhorn, De Wette, G. L. Bauer, Wegscheider, Bretschneider, and Gabler were prominent. [1779] The train as it were exploded on the world in the great Life of Jesus by Strauss (1835), a year after the death of Schleiermacher.

This was in some respects the high-water mark of rational critical science for the century, inasmuch as it represented the fullest use of free judgment. The powerful and orderly mind of Strauss, working systematically on a large body of previous unsystematic criticism, produced something more massive and coherent than any previous writer had achieved. It was not that he applied any new principle. Criticism had long been slowly disengaging itself from the primary fallacy of taking all scriptural records as standing for facts, and explaining away the supernatural side. Step by step it was recognized that not misinterpretation of events but mythology underlay much of the sacred history. Already in 1799 an anonymous and almost unnoticed writer [1780] had argued that the entire gospel story was a pre-existent conception in the Jewish mind. In 1802 G. L. Bauer had produced a treatise on Hebrew Mythology, [1781] in which not only was the actuality of myth in Bible narrative insisted on, but the general principle of animism in savage thought was clearly formulated. Semler had seen that the stories of Samson and Esther were myths. Even Eichhorn--who reduced all the Old Testament stories to natural events misunderstood, accepted Noah and the patriarchs as historical personages, and followed Bahrdt in making Moses light a fire on Mount Sinai--changed his method on coming to the New Testament, and pointed out that only indemonstrable hypotheses could be reached by turning supernatural events into natural where there was no outside historical evidence. Other writers--as Krug, Gabler, Kaiser, Wegscheider, and Horst--ably pressed the mythical principle, some of them preceding Bauer. The so-called "natural" theory--which was not at all that of the "naturalists" but the specialty of the compromising "rationalists"--was thus effectively shaken by a whole series of critics.

But the power of intellectual habit and environment was still strikingly illustrated in the inability of all of the critics to shake off completely the old fallacy. Bauer explained the divine promise to Abraham as standing for the patriarch's own prophetic anticipation, set up by a contemplation of the starry heavens. Another gave up the supernatural promise of the birth of the Baptist, but held to the dumbness of Zechariah. Krug similarly accepted the item of the childless marriage, and claimed to be applying the mythical principle in taking the Magi without the star, and calling them oriental merchants. Kaiser took the story of the fish with a coin in its mouth as fact, while complaining of other less absurd reductions of miracle to natural occurrences. The method of Paulus, [1782] the "Christian Evêmeros"--who loyally rejected all miracles, but got rid of them on the plan of explaining, e.g., that when Jesus was supposed to be walking on the water he was really walking on the bank--was still popular, a generation after Schleiermacher's Reden. The mythical theory as a whole went on hesitating among definitions and genera--saga and legend, historical myth, mythical history, philosophical myth, poetic myth--and the differences of the mythological school over method arrested the acceptance of their fundamental principle.

3. No less remarkable was the check to the few attempts which had been made at clearing the ground by removing the Fourth Gospel from the historical field. Lessing had taken this gospel as peculiarly historical, as did Fichte and Schleiermacher and the main body of critics after him. Only in England (by Evanson) had the case been more radically handled. In 1820 Bretschneider, following up a few tentative German utterances, put forth, by way of hypothesis, a general argument [1783] to the effect that the whole presentment of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel is irreconcilable with that of the Synoptics, that it could not be taken as historical, and that it could not therefore be the work of the Apostle John. [1784] The result was a general discussion and a general rejection. The innovation in theory was too sudden for assimilation: and Bretschneider, finding no support, later declared that he had been "relieved of his doubts" by the discussion, and had thus attained his object. Strauss himself, in his first Leben Jesu, failed to realize the case; and it was not till the second (1863) that he developed it, profiting by the intermediate work of F. C. Baur.

4. But as regards the gospel history in general, the first Leben Jesu is a great "advance in force" as compared with all preceding work. Himself holding undoubtingly to the vital assumption of the rationalizing school that the central story of Jesus and the disciples and the crucifixion was history, he yet applied the mythical principle systematically to nearly all the episodes, handling the case with the calmness of a great judge and the skill of a great critic. Even Strauss, indeed, paid the penalty which seems so generally to attach to the academic discipline--the lack of ultimate hold on life. After showing that much of the gospel narrative was mere myth, and leaving utterly problematical all the rest, he saw fit to begin and end with the announcement that nothing really mattered--that the ideal Jesus was unaffected by historic analysis, and that it was the ideal that counted. [1785] In a world in which nine honest believers out of ten held that the facts mattered everything, there could be no speedy or practical triumph for a demonstration which thus announced its own inutility. Strauss had achieved for New Testament criticism what Kant and Fichte and Hegel had compassed for rational philosophy in general, ostensibly proffering together bane and antidote. As in their case, however, so in his, the truly critical work had an effect in despite of the theoretic surrender. Among instructed men, historical belief in the gospels has never been the same since Strauss wrote; and he lived to figure for his countrymen as one of the most thoroughgoing freethinkers of his age.

5. For a time there was undoubtedly "reaction," engineered with the full power of the Prussian State in particular. The pious Frederick William IV, already furious against Swiss Radicalism in 1847, was moved by the revolutionary outbreaks of 1848 to a fierce repression of everything liberal in theological teaching. "This dismal period of Prussian history was the bloom-period of the Hengsterbergan theology" [1786]--the school of rabid orthodoxy. In 1854, Eduard Zeller, bringing out in book form his work on the Acts of the Apostles (originally produced in the Tübingen Theological Journal, 1848-51), writes that "The exertions of our ecclesiastics, assisted by political reaction, have been so effectual that the majority of our theologians not only look with suspicion or indifference on this or that scientific opinion, but regard scientific knowledge in general with the same feelings"; and he leaves it an open question "whether time will bring a change, or whether German Protestantism will stagnate in the Byzantine conditions towards which it is now hastening with all sail on." [1787] For his own part, Zeller abandoned the field of theology for that of philosophy, producing a history of Greek philosophy, and one of German philosophy since Leibnitz.

6. Another expert of Baur's school, Albrecht Schwegler, author of works on Montanism, the Post-Apostolic Age, and other problems of early Christian history, and of a Handbook of the History of Philosophy which for half a century had an immense circulation, was similarly driven out of theological research by the virulence of the reaction, [1788] and turned to the task of Roman history, in which he distinguished himself as he did in every other he essayed. The brains were being expelled from the chairs of theology. But this very fact tended to discredit the reaction itself; and outside of the Prussian sphere of influence German criticism went actively on. Gustav Volkmar, turning his back on Germany in 1854, settled in Switzerland, and in 1863 became professor at Zürich, where he added to his early Religion Jesu (1857) and other powerful works his treatises on the Origin of the Gospels (1866), The Gospels (1869), Commentary on the Apocalypse (1860-65), and Jesus Nazarenus (1881)--all stringent critical performances, irreconcilable with orthodoxy. Elsewhere too there was a general resumption of progress.

To this a certain contribution was made by Bruno Bauer (1809-1882), who, after setting out as an orthodox Hegelian, outwent Strauss in the opposite direction. In 1838, as a licentiate at Bonn, he produced two volumes on The Religion of the Old Testament, in which the only critical element is the notion of a "historical evolution of revelation." Soon he had got beyond belief in revelation. In 1840 appeared his Critique of the Gospel History of John, and in 1841 his much more disturbing Critique of the Gospel History of the Synoptics, wherein there is substituted for Strauss's formula of the "community-mind" working on tradition, that of individual literary construction. Weisse and Wilcke had convinced him that Mark was the first gospel, and Wilcke in particular that it was no mere copy of an oral tradition but an artistic construction. As he claimed, this was a much more "positive" conception than Strauss's, which was fundamentally "mysterious." [1789] Unfortunately, though he saw that the new position involved the non-historicity of the Gospel Jesus, he left his own historic conception "mysterious," giving no reason why the "Urevangelist" framed his romance. Bauer was non-anthropological, and left his theory as it began, one of an arbitrary construction by gospel-makers. Immediately after his book appeared that of Ghillany on Human Sacrifice among the ancient Hebrews (1842), which might have given him clues; but they seem to have had for him no significance.

As it was, his book on the Synoptics raised a great storm; and when the official request for the views of the university faculties as to the continuance of his licence evoked varying answers, Bauer settled the matter by a violent attack on professional theologians in general, and was duly expelled. [1790] For the rest of his long life he was a freelance, doing some relatively valid work on the Pauline problem, but pouring out his turbid spirit in a variety of political writings, figuring by turns as an anti-Semite (1843), a culture-historian, [1791] and a pre-Bismarckian imperialist, despairing of German unity, but looking hopefully to German absorption in a vast empire of Russia. [1792] Naturally he found political happiness in 1870, [1793] living on, a spent force, to do fresh books on Christian origins, [1794] on German culture-history, and on the glories of imperialism.

7. In 1864, after an abstention of twenty years from discussion of the problem, Strauss restated his case in a Life of Jesus, adapted for the German People. Here, accepting the contention of F. C. Baur that the proper line of inquiry was to settle the order of composition of the synoptic gospels, and agreeing in Baur's view that Matthew came first, he undertook to offer more of positive result than was reached in his earlier research, which simply dealt scientifically with the abundant elements of dubiety in the records. The new procedure was really much less valid than the old. Baur had quite unwarrantably decided that the Sermon on the Mount was one of the most certainly genuine of the discourses ascribed to Jesus; [1795] and Strauss, while exhibiting a reserve of doubt [1796] as to all "such speeches," nonetheless committed himself to the "certain" genuineness alike of the Sermon and of the seven parables in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew. [1797] Many scholars who continue to hold by the historicity of Jesus have since recognized that the Sermon is no real discourse, but a compilation of gnomic sayings or maxims previously current in Jewish literature. [1798] Thus the certainties of Baur and Strauss pass into the category of the cruder certainties which Strauss impugned; and the latter left the life of Jesus an unsolved enigma after all his analysis.

As he himself noted, the German New Testament criticism of the previous twenty years had "run to seed" [1799] in a multitude of treatises on the sources, aims, composition, and mutual relations of the Synoptics, as if these were the final issues. They had settled nothing; and after a lapse of fifty years the same problems are being endlessly discussed. The scientific course for Strauss would have been to develop more radically the method of his first Life: failing to do this, he made no new contribution to the problem, though he deftly enough indicated how little difference there was, save in formula, between Baur's negations and his own.

Something of the explanation is to be detected in the sub-title, "Adapted for the German People." From his first entrance into the arena he had met with endless odium theologicum; being at once deprived of his post as a philosophical lecturer at Tübingen, and virulently denounced on all hands. His proposed appointment to a chair at Zürich in 1839, as we have seen, led there to something approaching a revolution. Later, he found that acquaintance with him was made a ground of damage to his friends; and though he had actually been elected to the Wirtemberg Diet in 1848 by his fellow citizens of Ludwigsburg town, after being defeated in his candidature for the new parliament at Frankfort through the hostility of the rural voters, he had abundant cause to regard himself as a banned person in Germany. A craving for the goodwill of the people as against the hatred of the priests was thus very naturally and justifiably operative in the conception of his second work; and this none the less because his fundamental political conservatism had soon cut short his representation of radical Ludwigsburg. As he justly said, the question of the true history of Christianity was not one for theologians alone. But the emotional aim affected the intellectual process. As previously in his Life of Ulrich von Hutten, he strove to establish the proposition that the new Reformation he desired was akin to the old; and that the Germans, as the "people of the Reformation," would show themselves true to their past by casting out the religion of dogma and supernaturalism. Such an attempt to identify the spirit of freethought with the old spirit of Bibliolatry was in itself fantastic, and could not create a genuine movement, though the book had a wide audience. The Glaubenslehre, in which he made good his maxim that "the true criticism of dogma is its history," is a sounder performance. Strauss's avowed desire to write a book as suitable to Germans as was Renan's Vie de Jésus to Frenchmen was something less than scientific. The right book would be written for all nations.

Like most other Germans, Strauss exulted immensely over the war of 1870. In what is now recognized as the national manner, he wrote two boastful open-letters to Renan explaining that whatsoever Germany did was right, and whatsoever France did was wrong, and that the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine was altogether just. These letters form an important contribution to the vast cairn of self-praise raised by latter-day German culture. But Strauss's literary life ended on a nobler note and in a higher warfare. After all his efforts at popularity, and all his fraternization with his people on the ground of racial animosity (not visible in his volume of lectures on Voltaire, written and delivered at the request of the Princess Alice), his fundamental sincerity moved him to produce a final "Confession," under the title of The Old and the New Faith (1872). It asked the questions: "Are we still Christians?"; "Have we still religion?"; "How do we conceive the world?"; "How do we order our life?"; and it answered them all in a calmly and uncompromisingly naturalistic sense, dismissing all that men commonly call religious belief. The book as a whole is heterogeneous in respect of its two final chapters, "Of our Great Poets" and "Of our Great Musicians," which seem to have been appended by way of keeping up the attitude of national fraternity evoked by the war. But they could not and did not avail to conciliate the theologians, who opened fire on the book with all their old animosity, and with an unconcealed delight in the definite committal of the great negative critic to an attitude of practical atheism. The book ran through six editions in as many months, and crystallized much of the indefinite freethinking of Germany into something clearer and firmer. All the more was it a new engine of strife and disintegration; and the aging author, shocked but steadied by the unexpected outburst of hostility, penned a quatrain to himself, ending: "In storm hast thou begun; in storm shalt thou end."

On the last day of the year he wrote an "afterword" summing up his work and his position. He had not written, he declared, by way of contending with opponents; he had sought rather to commune with those of his own way of thinking; and to them, he felt, he had the right to appeal to live up to their convictions, not compromising with other opinions, and not adhering to any Church. For his "Confession" he anticipated the thanks of a more enlightened future generation. "The time of agreement," he concluded, "will come, as it came for the Leben Jesu; only this time I shall not live to see it." [1800] A little more than a year later (1874) he passed away.

It is noteworthy that he should have held that agreement had come as to the first Leben Jesu. He was in fact convinced that all educated men--at least in Germany--had ceased to believe in miracles and the supernatural, however they might affect to conform to orthodoxy. And, broadly speaking, this was true: all New Testament criticism of any standing had come round to the naturalistic point of view. But, as we have seen, the second Leben Jesu was far enough from reaching a solid historical footing; and the generation which followed made only a piecemeal and unsystematic advance to a scientific solution.

8. And it was long before even Strauss's early method of scientific criticism was applied to the initial problems of Old Testament history. The investigation lagged strangely. Starting from the clues given by Hobbes, Spinoza, and Simon, and above all by the suggestion of Astruc (1753) as to the twofold element implied in the God-names Jehovah and Elohim, it had proceeded, for sheer lack of radical skepticism, on the assumption that the Pentateuchal history was true. On this basis, modern Old Testament criticism of a professional kind may be said to have been founded by Eichhorn, who hoped by a quasi-rationalistic method to bring back unbelievers to belief. [1801] Of his successors, some, like Ilgen, were ahead of their time; some, like De Wette, failed to make progress in their criticism; some, like Ewald, remained always arbitrary; and some of the ablest and most original, as Vatke, failed to coördinate fully their critical methods and results. [1802] Thus, despite all the German activity, little sure progress had been made, apart from discrimination of sources, between the issue of the Critical Remarks on the Hebrew Scriptures of the Scotch Catholic priest, Dr. Geddes, in 1800, and the publication of the first part of the work of Bishop Colenso on The Pentateuch (1862). This, by the admission of Kuenen, who had begun as a rather narrow believer, [1803] corrected the initial error of the German specialists by applying to the narrative the common-sense tests suggested long before by Voltaire. [1804] That academic scholarship thus wasted two generations in its determination to adhere to the "reverent" method, and in its aversion to the "irreverence" which proceeded on the simple power to see facts, is a sufficient comment on the Kantian doctrine that it was the business of scholars to adapt the sacred books to popular needs. Tampering with the judgment of their flocks, the German theologians injured their own.

As of old, part of the explanation lay in the malignant resistance of orthodoxy to every new advance. We have seen how Strauss's appointment to a chair at Zürich was met by Swiss pietism. The same spirit sought to revert, even in "intellectually free" Germany, to its old methods of repression. The authorities of Berlin discussed with Neander the propriety of suppressing Strauss's Leben Jesu; [1805] and after a time those who shared his views were excluded even from philosophical chairs. [1806] Later, the brochure in which Edgar Bauer defended his brother Bruno against his opponents (1842) was seized by the police; and in the following year, for publishing The Strife of Criticism with Church and State, the same writer was sentenced to four years' imprisonment. In private life, persecution was carried on in the usual ways; and the virulence of the theological resistance recalled the palmy days of Lutheran polemics. In the sense that the mass of orthodoxy held its ground for the time being, the attack failed. Naturally the most advanced and uncompromisingly scientific positions were least discussed, the stress of dispute going on around the criticism which modified without annihilating the main elements in the current creed, or that which did the work of annihilation on a popular level of thought. Only in our day is German "expert" criticism beginning openly to reckon with propositions fairly and fully made out by German writers of three or more generations back. Thus in 1781 Corodi in his Geschichte des Chiliasmus dwelt on the pre-Hebraic origins of the belief in angels, in immortality, and heaven and hell, and on the Persian derivation of the Jewish seven archangels; Wegscheider in 1819 in his Institutes of Theology indicated further connections of the same order, and cited pagan parallels to the virgin-birth; J. A. L. Richter in the same year pointed to Indian and Persian precedents for the Logos and many other Christian doctrines; and several other writers, Strauss included, pointed to both Persian and Babylonian influences on Jewish theology and myth. [1807] The mythologist and Hebraist F. Korn (who wrote as "F. Nork"), in a series of learned and vigorous but rather loosely speculative works, [1808] indicated many of the mythological elements in Christianity, and endorsed many of the astronomical arguments of Dupuis, while holding to the historicity of Jesus. [1809]

When even these theses were in the main ignored, more mordant doctrine was necessarily burked. Such subversive criticism of religious history as Ghillany's Die Menschenopfer der alten Hebräer (1842), insisting that human sacrifice had been habitual in early Jewry, and that ritual cannibalism underlay the paschal eucharist, found even fewer students prepared to appreciate it than did the searching ethico-philosophical criticism passed on the Christian creed by Feuerbach. F. Daumer, [1810] who in 1842 published a treatise on the same lines as Ghillany's (Der Feuer und Molochdienst), and followed it up in 1847 with another on the Christian mysteries, nearly as drastic, wavered later in his rationalism and avowed his conversion to a species of faith. Hence a certain setback for his school. In France the genial German revolutionist and exile Ewerbeck published, under the titles of Qu'est ce que la Religion? and Qu'est ce que la Bible? (1850), two volumes of very freely edited translations from Feuerbach, Daumer, Ghillany, Lützelberger (on the simple humanity of Jesus), and Bruno Bauer, avowing that after vainly seeking a publisher for years he had produced the books at his own expense. He had, however, so mutilated the originals as to make the work ineffectual for scholars, without making it attractive to the general public; and there is nothing to show that his formidable-looking arsenal of explosives had much effect on contemporary French thought, which developed on other lines.

Old Testament criticism, nevertheless, has in the last generation been much developed, after having long missed some of the first lines of advance. After Colenso's rectification of the fundamental error as to the historicity of the narrative of the Pentateuch, so long and so obstinately persisted in by the German specialists in contempt of Voltaire, the "higher criticism" proceeded with such substantial certainty on the scientific lines of Kuenen and Wellhausen that, whereas Professor Robertson Smith had to leave the Free Church of Scotland in 1881 [1811] for propagating Kuenen's views, before the century was out Canons of the English Church were doing the work with the acquiescence of perhaps six clergymen out of ten; and American preachers were found promoting an edition of the Bible which exhibited some of the critical results to the general reader. Heresy on this score had "become merchandise." Nevertheless, the professional tendency to compromise (a result of economic and other pressures) keeps most of the ecclesiastical critics far short of the outspoken utterances of M. M. Kalisch, who in his Commentary on Leviticus (1867-72) repudiates every vestige of the doctrine of inspiration. [1812] Later clerical critics, notably Canon Driver, use language on that subject which cannot be read with critical respect. [1813] But among students at the end of the century the orthodox view was practically extinct. Whereas the defenders of the faith even a generation before habitually stood to the "argument from prophecy," the conception of prophecy as prediction has now become meaningless as regards the so-called Mosaic books; and the constant disclosure of interpolations and adaptations in the others has discredited it as regards the "prophets" themselves. For the rest, much of the secular history still accepted is tentatively reduced to myth in the Geschichte Israels of Hugo Winckler (1895-1900). The peculiar theory of Dr. Cheyne is no less "destructive."

9. In New Testament criticism, though the strict critical method of Strauss's first book was not faithfully followed, critical research went on continuously; and the school of F. C. Baur of Tübingen in particular imposed a measure of rational criticism on theologians in general. Apart from Strauss, Baur was probably the ablest Christian scholar of his day. Always lamed by his professionalism, he yet toiled endlessly to bring scientific method into Christian research. His Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi, 1845; Kritische Untersuchungen über die Kanonischen Evangelien, 1847; and Das Christenthum und die christliche Kirche der drei ersten Jahrhunderte, 1853, were epoch-marking works, which recast so radically, in the name of orthodoxy, the historical conception of Christian origins, that he figured as the most unsettling critic of his time after Strauss. With his earlier researches in the history of the first Christian sects and his history of the Church, they constitute a memorable mass of studious and original work. In the case of the Tübingen school as of every other there was "reaction," with the usual pretence by professional orthodoxy that the innovating criticism had been disposed of; but no real refutation has ever taken place. Where Baur reduced the genuine Pauline epistles to four, the last years of the century witnessed the advent of Van Manen, who, following up earlier suggestions, wrought out the thesis that the epistles are all alike supposititious. This may or may not hold good; but there has been no restoration of traditionary faith among the mass of open-minded inquirers. Such work as Zeller's Contents and Origin of the Acts of the Apostles (1854), produced in Baur's circle, has substantially held its ground; and such a comparatively "safe" book of the next generation as Weizsäcker's Apostolic Age (Eng. tr. of 2nd ed. 1893) leaves no doubt as to the untrustworthiness of the Acts. Thus at the close of the century the current professional treatises indicated a "Christianity" stripped not only of all supernaturalism, and therefore of the main religious content of the historic creed, but even of credibility as regards large parts of the non-supernaturalist narratives of its sacred books. The minute analysis and collocation of texts which has occupied so much of critical industry has but made clearer the extreme precariousness of every item in the records. The amount of credit for historicity that continues to be given to them is demonstrably unjustifiable on scientific grounds; and the stand for a "Christianity without dogma" is more and more clearly seen to be an economic adjustment, not an outcome of faithful criticism.

10. The movement of Biblical and other criticism in Germany has had a significant effect on the supply of students for the theological profession. The numbers of Protestant and Catholic theological students in all Germany have varied as follows:--Protestant: 1831, 4,147; 1851, 1,631; 1860, 2,520; 1876, 1,539; 1882-83, 3,168. Catholic: 1831, 1,801; 1840, 866; 1850, 1,393; 1860, 1,209; 1880, 619. [1814] Thus, under the reign of reaction which set in after 1848 there was a prolonged recovery; and again since 1876 the figures rise for Protestantism through financial stimulus. When, however, we take population into account, the main movement is clear. In an increasing proportion, the theological students come from the rural districts (69·4 in 1861-70), the towns furnishing ever fewer; [1815] so that the conservative measures do but outwardly and formally affect the course of thought; the clergy themselves showing less and less inclination to make clergymen of their sons. [1816] Even among the Catholic population, though that has increased from ten millions in 1830 to sixteen millions in 1880, the number of theological students has fallen from eleven to four per 100,000 inhabitants. [1817] Thus, after many "reactions" and much Bismarckism, the Zeit-Geist in Germany was still pronouncedly skeptical in all classes in 1881, [1818] when the church accommodation in Berlin provided only two per cent. of the population, and even that provision outwent the demand. [1819] And though there have been yet other alleged reactions since, and the imperial influence is zealously used for orthodoxy, a large proportion of the intelligent workers in the towns remain socialistic and freethinking; and the mass of the educated classes remain unorthodox in the teeth of the socialist menace. Reactionary professors can make an academic fashion: the majority of instructed men remain tacitly naturalistic.

Alongside of the inveterate rationalism of modern Germany, however, a no less inveterate bureaucratism preserves a certain official conformity to religion. University freedom does not extend to open and direct criticism of the orthodox creed. On the other hand, the applause won by Virchow in 1877 on his declaration against the doctrine of evolution, and the tactic resorted to by him in putting upon that doctrine the responsibility of Socialist violence, are instances of the normal operation of the lower motives against freedom in scientific teaching. [1820] The pressure operates in other spheres in Germany, especially under such a regimen as the present. Men who never go to church save on official occasions, and who have absolutely no belief in the Church's doctrine, nevertheless remain nominally its adherents; [1821] and the Press laws make it peculiarly difficult to reach the common people with freethinking literature, save through Socialist channels. Thus the Catholic Church is perhaps nowhere--save in Ireland and the United States--more practically influential than in nominally "Protestant" Germany, where it wields a compact vote of a hundred or more in the Reichstag, and can generally count on well-filled churches as beside the half-empty temples of Protestantism.

Another circumstance partly favourable to reaction is the simple maintenance of all the old theological chairs in the universities. As the field of scientific work widens, and increasing commerce raises the social standard of comfort, men of original intellectual power grow less apt to devote themselves to theological pursuits even under the comparatively free conditions which so long kept German Biblical scholarship far above that of other countries. It can hardly be said that men of the mental calibre of Strauss, Baur, Volkmar, and Wellhausen continue to arise among the specialists in their studies. Harnack, the most prominent German Biblical scholar of our day, despite his great learning, creates no such impression of originality and insight, and, though latterly forced forward by more independent minds, exhibits often a very uncritical orthodoxy. Thus it is à priori possible enough that the orthodox reactions so often claimed have actually occurred, in the sense that the experts have reverted to a prior type. A scientifically-minded "theologian" in Germany has now little official scope for his faculty save in the analysis of the Hebrew Sacred Books and the New Testament documents as such; and this has been on the whole very well done, short of the point of express impeachment of the historic delusion; but there is a limit to the attraction of such studies for minds of a modern cast. Thus there is always a chance that chairs will be filled by men of another type.

11. On a less extensive scale than in Germany, critical study of the sacred books made some progress in England, France, and America in the first half of the century; though for a time the attention even of the educated world was centred much more upon the Oxford "tractarian" religious reaction than upon the movement of rationalism. The reaction, associated mainly with the name of John Henry Newman, was rather against the political Erastianism and æsthetic apathy of the Whig type of Christian than against German or other criticism, of which Newman knew little. But against the attitude of those moderate Anglicans who were disposed to disestablish the Church in Ireland and to modernize the liturgy somewhat, the language of the "Tracts for the Times" is as authoritarian and anti-rationalistic as that of Catholics denouncing freethought. Such expressions as "the filth of heretical novelty" [1822] are meant to apply to anything in the nature of innovation; the causes at stake are ritual and precedent, the apostolic succession and the status of the priest, not the truth of revelation or the credibility of the scriptures. The third Tract appeals to the clergy to "resist the alteration of even one jot or tittle" of the liturgy; and concerning the burial service the line of argument is: "Do you pretend you can discriminate the wheat from the tares? Of course not." All attempts even to modify the ritual are an "abuse of reason"; and the true believer is adjured to stand fast in the ancient ways. [1823] At a pinch he is to "consider what Reason says; which surely, as well as Scripture, was given us for religious ends"; [1824] but the only "reason" thus recognized is one which accepts the whole apparatus of revelation. Previous to and alongside of this single-minded reversion to the ideals of the Dark Ages--a phenomenon not unconnected with the revival of romanticism by Scott and Chateaubriand--there was going on a movement of modernism, of which one of the overt traces is Milman's History of the Jews (1829), a work to-day regarded as harmless even by the orthodox, but sufficient in its time to let Newman see whither religious "Liberalism" was heading.

Other and later researches dug much deeper into the problems of religious historiography. The Unitarian C. C. Hennell produced an Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838), so important for its time as to be thought worth translating into German by Strauss; and this found a considerable response from the educated English public of its day. In the preface to his second edition (1841) Hennell spoke very plainly of "the large and probably increasing amount of unbelief in all classes around us"; and made the then remarkably courageous declarations that in his experience "neither deism, pantheism, nor even atheism indicates modes of thought incompatible with uprightness and benevolence"; and that "the real or affected horror which it is still a prevailing custom to exhibit towards their names would be better reserved for those of the selfish, the cruel, the bigot, and other tormentors of mankind." It was in the circle of Hennell that Marian Evans, later to become famous as George Eliot, grew into a rationalist in despite of her religious temperament; and it was she who, when Hennell's bride gave up the task, undertook the toil of translating Strauss's Leben Jesu--though at many points she "thought him wrong." [1825] In the churches he had of course no overt acceptance. At this stage, English orthodoxy was of such a cast that the pious Tregelles, himself fiercely opposed to all forms of rationalism, had to complain that the most incontrovertible corrections of the current text of the New Testament were angrily denounced. [1826]

In the next generation Theodore Parker in the United States, developing his critical faculty chiefly by study of the Germans, at the cost of much obloquy forced some knowledge of critical results and a measure of theistic or pantheistic rationalism on the attention of the orthodox world; promoting at the same time a semi-philosophic, semi-ethical reaction against the Calvinistic theology of Jonathan Edwards, theretofore prevalent among the orthodox of New England. In the old country a number of writers developed new movements of criticism from theistic points of view. F. W. Newman, the scholarly brother of John Henry, [1827] produced a book entitled The Soul (1849), and another, Phases of Faith (1853), which had much influence in promoting rationalism of a rather rigidly theistic cast. R. W. Mackay in the same period published two learned treatises, A Sketch of the Rise and Progress of Christianity (1854), notably scientific in method for its time; and The Progress of the Intellect as Exemplified in the Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews (1850), which won the admiration of Buckle; "George Eliot" translated Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity (1854) under her own name, Marian Evans; and W. R. Greg, one of the leading publicists of his day, put forth a rationalist study of The Creed of Christendom: Its Foundations Contrasted with its Superstructure (1850), which has gone through many editions and is still reprinted. In 1864 appeared The Prophet of Nazareth, by Evan Powell Meredith, who had been a Baptist minister in Wales. The book is a bulky prize essay on the theme of New Testament eschatology, which develops into a deistic attack on the central Christian dogma and on gospel ethics. Another zealous theist, Thomas Scott, whose pamphlet-propaganda on deistic lines had so wide an influence during many years, produced an English Life of Jesus (1871), which, though less important than the works of Strauss and less popular than those of Renan, played a considerable part in the disintegration of the traditional faith among English churchmen. Still the primacy in critical research on scholarly lines lay with the Germans; and it was the results of their work that were co-ordinated, from a theistic standpoint, [1828] in the anonymous work, Supernatural Religion (1874-77), a massive and decisive performance, too powerful to be disposed of by the episcopal and other attacks made upon it. [1829] Since its assimilation the orthodox or inspirationist view of the gospels has lost credit among competent scholars even within the churches. The battleground is now removed to the problem of the historicity of the ostensible origins of the cult; and scholarly orthodoxy takes for granted many positions which fifty years ago were typical of "German rationalism."

12. In France systematic criticism of the sacred books recommenced in the second half of the century with such writings as those of P. Larroque (Examen Critique des doctrines de la religion chrétienne, 1860); Gustave d'Eichthal (Les Évangiles, ptie. i, 1863); and Alphonse Peyrat (Histoire élémentaire et critique de Jésus, 1864); whereafter the rationalistic view was applied with singular literary charm, if with imperfect consistency, by Renan in his series of seven volumes on the origins of Christianity, and with more scientific breadth of view by Ernest Havet in his Christianisme et ses Origines (1872, etc.). Renan's Vie de Jésus (1863) especially has been read throughout the civilized world. It has been quite justly pronounced, by German and other critics, a romance; but no other "life" properly so called has been anything else, Strauss's first Life being an analysis rather than a construction; and the epithet was but an unwitting avowal that to accept the gospels, barring miracles, as biography--which is what Renan did--is to be committed to the unhistorical. He began by accepting the fourth as equipollent with the synoptics; and upon this Strauss in his second Life confidently called for a recantation, which came in due course. But Renan, in his fitful way, had critical glimpses which were denied to Strauss--for instance, as to the material of the Sermon on the Mount. The whole series of the Origines, which wound up with Marc Aurèle (1882), has a similar fluctuating value, showing on the whole a progressive critical sense. The Saint Paul, for example, at the close suddenly discards the traditional view previously accepted in Les Apôtres, and recognizes that the ministry of Paul can have been no more than a propaganda of small conventicles, whose total membership throughout the Empire could not have been above a thousand. But Renan's total service consisted rather in a highly artistic and winning application of rational historical methods to early Christian history, with the effect of displacing the traditionist method, than in any lasting or comprehensive solution of the problem of the origins. Havet's survey is both corrective and complementary to his. Renan's influence on opinion throughout the world, however, was enormous, were it only because he was one of the most finished literary artists of his time.

Section 3.--Poetry and General Literature

1. The whole imaginative literature of Europe, in the generation after the French Revolution, reveals directly or indirectly the transmutation that the eighteenth century had worked in religious thought. Either it reacts against or it develops the rationalistic movement. In France the literary reaction is one of the first factors in the orthodox revival. Its leader and type was Chateaubriand, in whose typical work, the Génie du Christianisme (1802), lies the proof that, whatever might be the "shallowness" of Voltairism, it was profundity beside the philosophy of the majority who repelled it. On one who now reads it with the slightest scientific preparation, the book makes an impression in parts of something like fatuity. The handling of the scientific question at the threshold of the inquiry is that of a man incapable of a scientific idea. All the accumulating evidence of geology and palæontology is disposed of by the grotesque theorem that God made the world out of nothing with all the marks of antiquity upon it--the oaks at the start bearing "last year's nests"--on the ground that, "if the world were not at once young and old, the great, the serious, the moral would disappear from nature, for these sentiments by their essence attach to antique things." [1830] In the same fashion the fable of the serpent is with perfect gravity homologated as a literal truth, on the strength of an anecdote about the charming of a rattlesnake with music. [1831] It is humiliating, but instructive, to realize that only a century ago a "Christian reaction," in a civilized country, was inspired by such an order of ideas; and that in the nation of Laplace, with his theory in view, it was the fashion thus to prattle in the taste of the Dark Ages. [1832] The book is merely the eloquent expression of a nervous recoil from everything savouring of cool reason and clear thought, a recoil partly initiated by the sheer stress of excitement of the near past; partly fostered by the vague belief that freethinking in religion had caused the Revolution; partly enhanced by the tendency of every warlike period to develop emotional rather than reflective life. What was really masterly in Chateaubriand was the style; and sentimental pietism had now the prestige of fine writing, so long the specialty of the other side. Yet a generation of monarchism served to wear out the ill-based credit of the literary reaction; and belles lettres began to be rationalistic as soon as politics began again to be radical. Thus the prestige of the neo-Christian school was already spent before the revolution of 1848; [1833] and the inordinate vanity of Chateaubriand, who died in that year, had undone his special influence still earlier. He had created merely a literary mode and sentiment.

2. The literary history of France since his death decides the question, so far as it can be thus decided. From 1848 till our own day it has been predominantly naturalistic and non-religious. After Guizot and the Thierrys, the nearest approach to Christianity by an influential French historian is perhaps in the case of the very heterodox Edgar Quinet. Michelet was a mere heretic in the eyes of the faithful, Saisset describing his book Du Prêtre, de la Femme, et de la Famille (1845), as a "renaissance of Voltaireanism." [1834] His whole brilliant History, indeed, is from beginning to end rationalistic, challenging as it does all the decorous traditions, exposing the failure of the faith to civilize, pronouncing that "the monastic Middle Age is an age of idiots" and the scholastic world which followed it an age of artificially formed fools, [1835] flouting dogma and discrediting creed over each of their miscarriages. [1836] And he was popular, withal, not only because of his vividness and unfailing freshness, but because his convictions were those of the best intelligence around him. In poetry and fiction the predominance of one or other shade of freethinking is signal. Balzac, who grew up in the age of reaction, makes essentially for rationalism by his intense analysis; and after him the difficulty is to find a great French novelist who is not frankly rationalistic. George Sand will probably not be claimed by orthodoxy; and Beyle, Constant, Flaubert, Mérimée, Zola, Daudet, Maupassant, and the De Goncourts make a list against which can be set only the names of M. Bourget, an artist of the second order, and of the distinguished décadent Huysmans, who became a Trappist after a life marked by a philosophy and practice of an extremely different complexion.

3. In French poetry the case is hardly otherwise. Béranger, who passed for a Voltairean, did indeed claim to have "saved from the wreck an indestructible belief"; [1837] and Lamartine goes to the side of Christianity; but de Musset, the most inspired of décadents, was no more Christian than Heine, save for what a critic has called "la banale religiosité de l'Espoir en Dieu", [1838] and the pessimist Baudelaire had not even that to show. De Musset's absurd attack on Voltaire in his Byronic poem, Rolla, well deserves the same epithets. It is a mere product of hysteria, representing neither knowledge nor reflection. The grandiose theism of Victor Hugo, again, is stamped only with his own image and superscription; and in his great contemporary Leconte de Lisle we have one of the most convinced and aggressive freethinkers of the century, a fine scholar and a self-controlled pessimist, who felt it well worth his while to write a little Popular History of Christianity (1871) which would have delighted d'Holbach. It is significant, on the other hand, that the exquisite religious verse of Verlaine was the product of an incurable neuropath, like the later work of Huysmans, and stands for decadence pure and simple. While French belles lettres thus in general made for rationalism, criticism was naturally not behindhand. Sainte-Beuve, the most widely appreciative though not the most scientific or just of critics, had only a literary sympathy with the religious types over whom he spent so much effusive research; [1839] Edmond Scherer was an unbeliever almost against his will; Taine, though reactionary on political grounds in his latter years, was the typical French rationalist of his time; and though M. Brunetière, whose preferences were all for Bossuet, made "the bankruptcy of science" the text of his very facile philosophy, the most scientific and philosophic head in the whole line of French critics, the late Émile Hennequin, was wholly a rationalist; and even the rather reactionary Jules Lemaître did not maintain his early attitude of austerity towards Renan.

4. In England it was due above all to Shelley that the very age of reaction was confronted with unbelief in lyric form. His immature Queen Mab was vital enough with conviction to serve as an inspiration to a whole host of unlettered freethinkers not only in its own generation but in the next. Its notes preserved, and greatly expanded, the tract entitled The Necessity of Atheism, for which he was expelled from Oxford; and against his will it became a people's book, the law refusing him copyright in his own work, on the memorable principle that there could be no "protection" for a book setting forth pernicious opinions. Whether he might not in later life, had he survived, have passed to a species of mystic Christianity, reacting like Coleridge, but with a necessary difference, is a question raised by parts of the Hellas. Gladstone seems to have thought that he had in him such a potentiality. But Shelley's work, as done, sufficed to keep for radicalism and rationalism the crown of song as against the final Tory orthodoxy [1840] of the elderly Wordsworth and of Southey; and Coleridge's zeal for (amended) dogma came upon him after his hour of poetic transfiguration was past.

And even Coleridge, who held the heresies of a modal Trinity and the non-expiatory character of the death of Christ, was widely distrusted by the pious, and expressed himself privately in terms which would have outraged them. Miracles, he declared, "are supererogatory. The law of God and the great principles of the Christian religion would have been the same had Christ never assumed humanity. It is for these things, and for such as these, for telling unwelcome truths, that I have been termed an atheist. It is for these opinions that William Smith assured the Archbishop of Canterbury that I was (what half the clergy are in their lives) an atheist. Little do these men know what atheism is. Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an atheist. I repeat it. Not one man in ten thousand has goodness of heart or strength of mind to be an atheist." Allsopp's Letters, etc., as cited, p. 47. But at other times Coleridge was a defender of the faith, while contemning the methods of the evidential school. Id. pp. 13-14, 31.

On the other side, Scott's honest but unintellectual romanticism, as we know from Newman, certainly favoured the Tractarian reaction, to which it was æsthetically though hardly emotionally akin. Yet George Eliot could say in later life that it was the influence of Scott that first unsettled her orthodoxy; [1841] meaning, doubtless, that the prevailing secularity of his view of life and his objective handling of sects and faiths excluded even a theistic solution. Scott's orthodoxy was in fact nearly on all fours with his Jacobitism--a matter of temperamental loyalty to a tradition. [1842] But the far more potent influence of Byron, too wayward to hold a firm philosophy, but too intensely alive to realities to be capable of Scott's feudal orthodoxy, must have counted much for heresy even in England, and was one of the literary forces of revolutionary revival for the whole of Europe. Though he never came to a clear atheistical decision as did Shelley, [1843] and often in private gave himself out for a Calvinist, he so handled theological problems in his Cain that he, like Shelley, was refused copyright in his work; [1844] and it was widely appropriated for freethinkers' purposes. The orthodox Southey was on the same grounds denied the right to suppress his early revolutionary drama, Wat Tyler, which accordingly was made to do duty in Radical propaganda by freethinking publishers. Keats, again, though he melodiously declaimed, in a boyish mood, against the scientific analysis of the rainbow, and though he never assented to Shelley's impeachments of Christianity, was in no active sense a believer in it, and after his long sickness met death gladly without the "consolations" ascribed to creed. [1845]

5. One of the best-beloved names in English literature, Charles Lamb, is on several counts to be numbered with those of the freethinkers of his day--who included Godwin and Hazlitt--though he had no part in any direct propaganda. Himself at most a Unitarian, but not at all given to argument on points of faith, he did his work for reason partly by way of the subtle and winning humanism of such an essay as New Year's Eve, which seems to have been what brought upon him the pedantically pious censure of Southey, apparently for its lack of allusion to a future state; partly by his delicately-entitled letter, The Tombs in the Abbey, in which he replied to Southey's stricture. "A book which wants only a sounder religious feeling to be as delightful as it is original" had been Southey's pompous criticism, in a paper on Infidelity. [1846] In his reply, Lamb commented on Southey's life-long habit of scoffing at the Church of Rome, and gravely repudiated the test of orthodoxy for human character.

Lamb's words are not generally known, and are worth remembering. "I own," he wrote, "I never could think so considerably of myself as to decline the society of an agreeable or worthy man upon difference of opinion only. The impediments and the facilitations to a sound belief are various and inscrutable as the heart of man. Some believe upon weak principles; others cannot feel the efficacy of the strongest. One of the most candid, most upright, and single-meaning men I ever knew was the late Thomas Holcroft. I believe he never said one thing and meant another in his life; and, as near as I can guess, he never acted otherwise than with the most scrupulous attention to conscience. Ought we to wish the character false for the sake of a hollow compliment to Christianity?" Of the freethinking and unpopular Hazlitt, who had soured towards Lamb in his perverse way, the essayist spoke still more generously. Of Leigh Hunt he speaks more critically, but with the same resolution to stand by a man known as a heretic. But the severest flout to Southey and his Church is in the next paragraph, where, after the avowal that "the last sect with which you can remember me to have made common profession were the Unitarians," he tells how, on the previous Easter Sunday, he had attended the service in Westminster Abbey, and when he would have lingered afterwards among the tombs to meditate, was "turned, like a dog or some profane person, out into the common street, with feelings which I could not help, but not very congenial to the day or the discourse. I do not know," he adds, "that I shall ever venture myself again into one of your churches."

These words were published in the London Magazine in 1825; but in the posthumous collected edition of the Essays of Elia all the portions above cited were dropped, and the paragraph last quoted from was modified, leaving out the last words. The essay does not seem to have been reprinted in full till it appeared in R. H. Shepherd's edition of 1878. But the original issue in the London Magazine created a tradition among the lovers of Lamb, and his name has always been associated with some repute for freethinking. There is further very important testimony as to Lamb's opinions in one of Allsopp's records of the conversation of Coleridge:--

"No, no; Lamb's skepticism has not come lightly, nor is he a skeptic [sic: Query, scoffer?]. The harsh reproof to Godwin for his contemptuous allusion to Christ before a well-trained child proves that he is not a skeptic [? scoffer]. His mind, never prone to analysis, seems to have been disgusted with the hollow pretences, the false reasonings and absurdities of the rogues and fools with whom all establishments, and all creeds seeking to become established, abound. I look upon Lamb as one hovering between earth and heaven; neither hoping much nor fearing anything. It is curious that he should retain many usages which he learnt or adopted in the fervour of his early religious feelings, now that his faith is in a state of suspended animation. Believe me, who know him well, that Lamb, say what he will, has more of the essentials of Christianity than ninety-nine out of a hundred professing Christians. He has all that would still have been Christian had Christ never lived or been made manifest upon earth." (Allsopp's Letters, etc., as cited, p. 46.) In connection with the frequently cited anecdote as to Lamb's religious feeling given in Leigh Hunt's Autobiography (rep. p. 253), also by Hazlitt (Winterslow, essay ii, ed. 1902, p. 39), may be noted the following, given by Allsopp: "After a visit to Coleridge, during which the conversation had taken a religious turn, Leigh Hunt ... expressed his surprise that such a man as Coleridge should, when speaking of Christ, always call him Our Saviour. Lamb, who had been exhilarated by one glass of that gooseberry or raisin cordial which he has so often anathematized, stammered out: 'Ne-ne-never mind what Coleridge says; he is full of fun.'"

6. While a semi-Bohemian like Lamb could thus dare to challenge the reigning bigotry, the graver English writers of the first half of the century who had abandoned or never accepted orthodoxy felt themselves for the most part compelled to silence or ostensible compliance. It was made clear by Carlyle's posthumous Reminiscences that he had early turned away from Christian dogma, having in fact given up a clerical career because of unbelief. Later evidence abounds. At the age of fifteen, by his own account, he had horrified his mother with the question: "Did God Almighty come down and make wheel-barrows in a shop?" [1847] Of his college life he told: "I studied the evidences of Christianity for several years, with the greatest desire to be convinced, but in vain. I read Gibbon, and then first clearly saw that Christianity was not true. Then came the most trying time of my life." [1848] Goethe, he claimed, led him to peace; but philosophic peace he never attained. "He was contemptuous to those who held to Christian dogmas; he was angry with those who gave them up; he was furious with those who attacked them. If equanimity be the mark of a Philosopher, he was of all great-minded men the least of a Philosopher." [1849] To all freethinking work, scholarly or other, he was hostile with the hostility of a man consciously in a false position. Strauss's Leben Jesu he pronounced, quite late in life, "a revolutionary and ill-advised enterprise, setting forth in words what all wise men had in their minds for fifty years past, and thought it fittest to hold their peace about." [1850] He was, in fact, so false to his own doctrine of veracity as to disparage all who spoke out; while privately agreeing with Mill as to the need for speaking out. [1851] Even Mill did so only partially in his lifetime, as in his address to the St. Andrews students (1867), when, "in the reception given to the Address, he was most struck by the vociferous applause of the divinity students at the freethought passage." [1852] In the first half of the century such displays of courage were rare indeed. Only after the death of Romilly was it tacitly avowed, by the publication of a deistic prayer found among his papers, that he had had no belief in revelation. [1853] Much later in the century, Harriet Martineau, for openly avowing her unbelief, incurred the angry public censure of her own brother.

Despite his anxious caution, Carlyle's writing conveyed to susceptible readers a non-Christian view of things. We know from a posthumous writing of Mr. Froude's that, when that writer had gone through the university and taken holy orders without ever having had a single doubt as to his creed, Carlyle's books "taught him that the religion in which he had been reared was but one of many dresses in which spiritual truth had arrayed itself, and that the creed was not literally true so far as it was a narrative of facts." [1854] It was presumably from the Sartor Resartus and some of the Essays, such as that on Voltaire--perhaps, also, negatively from the general absence of Christian sentiment in Carlyle's works--that such lessons were learned; and though it is certain that many non-zealous Christians saw no harm in Carlyle, there is reason to believe that for multitudes of readers he had the same awakening virtue. It need hardly be said that his friend Emerson exercised it in no less degree. Mr. Froude was remarkable in his youth for his surrender of the clerical profession, in the teeth of a bitter opposition from his family, and further for his publication of a freethinking romance, The Nemesis of Faith (1849); but he went far to conciliate Anglican orthodoxy by his History. The romance had a temporary vogue rather above its artistic merits as a result of being publicly burned by the authorities of Exeter College, Oxford, of which he was a Fellow. [1855]

7. This attitude of orthodoxy, threatening ostracism to any avowed 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.)

8. Thus for a whole generation honest and narrow-minded believers were trained to suppose that their views were triumphant over all attacks, [1859] and to see in "infidelity" a disease of an ill-informed past; and as the Church had really gained in conventional culture as well as in wealth and prestige in the period of reaction, the power of mere convention to override ideas was still enormous. But through the whole stress of reaction and conservatism, even apart from the positive criticism of creed which from time to time forced its head up, there is a visible play of a new spirit in the most notable of the serious writing of the time. Carlyle undermined orthodoxy even in his asseveration of unreasoned theism; Emerson disturbs it alike when he acclaims mystics and welcomes evolutionary science; and the whole inspiration of Mill's Logic no less than of his Liberty is something alien to the principle of authority. Of Ruskin, again, the same may be asserted in respect of his many searching thrusts at clerical and lay practice, his defence of Colenso, and the obvious disappearance from his later books of the evangelical orthodoxy of the earlier. [1860] Thus the most celebrated writers of serious English prose in the latter half of the century were in a measure associated with the spirit of critical thought on matters religious. In a much stronger degree the same thing may be predicated finally of the writer who in the field of English belles lettres, apart from fiction, came nearest them in fame and influence. Matthew Arnold, passing insensibly from the English attitude of academic orthodoxy to that of the humanist for whom Christ is but an admirable teacher and God a "Something not ourselves which makes for righteousness," became for the England of his later years the favourite pilot across the bar between supernaturalism and naturalism. Only in England, perhaps, could his curious gospel of church-going and Bible-reading atheism have prospered, but there it prospered exceedingly. Alike as poet and as essayist, even when essaying to disparage Colenso or to confute the Germans where they jostled his predilection for the Fourth Gospel, he was a disintegrator of tradition, and, in his dogmatic way, a dissolver of dogmatism. When, therefore, beside the four names just mentioned the British public placed those of the philosophers Spencer, Lewes, and Mill, and the scientists Darwin, Huxley, Clifford, and Tyndall, they could not but recognize that the mind of the age was divorced from the nominal faith of the Church.

9. In English fiction, the beginning of the end of genuine faith was apparent to the prophetic eyes of Wilberforce and Robert Hall, of whom the former lamented the total absence of Christian sentiment from nearly all the successful fiction even of his day; [1861] and the latter avowed the pain with which he noted that Miss Edgeworth, whom he admired for her style and art, put absolutely no religion in her books, [1862] while Hannah More, whose principles were so excellent, had such a vicious style. With Thackeray and Dickens, indeed, serious fiction might seem to be on the side of faith, both being liberally orthodox, though neither ventured on religious romance; but with George Eliot the balance began to lean the other way, her sympathetic treatment of religious types counting for little as against her known rationalism. At the end of the century almost all of the leading writers of the higher fiction were known to be either rationalists or simple theists; and against the heavy metal of Mr. Meredith, Mr. Conrad, Mr. Hardy, Mr. Bennett, Mr. Moore (whose sympathetic handling of religious motives suggests the influence of Huysmans), and the didactic-deistic Mrs. Humphry-Ward, orthodoxy can but claim artists of the third or lower grades. The championship of some of the latter may be regarded as the last humiliation of faith.

In 1905 there was current a vulgar novel entitled When it was Dark, wherein was said to be drawn a blood-curdling picture of what would happen in the event of a general surrender of Christian faith. Despite some episcopal approbation, the book excited much disgust among the more enlightened clergy. The preface to Miss Marie Corelli's Mighty Atom may serve to convey to the many readers who cannot peruse the works of that lady an idea of the temper in which she vindicates her faith. Another popular novelist of a low artistic grade, the late Mr. Seton-Merriman, has avowed his religious soundness in a romance with a Russian plot, entitled The Sowers. Referring to the impressions produced by great scenes of Nature, he writes: "These places and these times are good for convalescent atheists and such as pose as unbelievers--the cheapest form of notoriety" (p. 168). The novelist's own Christian ethic is thus indicated: "He had Jewish blood in his veins, which ... carried with it the usual tendency to cringe. It is in the blood; it is part of that which the people who stood without Pilate's palace took upon themselves and their children" (p. 59). But the enormous mass of modern novels includes some tolerable pleas for faith, as well as many manifestoes of agnosticism. One of the works of the late "Edna Lyall," We Two, was notable as the expression of the sympathy of a devout, generous, and amiable Christian lady with the personality and career of Mr. Bradlaugh.

10. Among the most artistically gifted of the English story-writers and essayists of the last generation of the century was Richard Jefferies (d. 1887), who in The Story of My Heart (1883) has told how "the last traces and relics of superstitions acquired compulsorily in childhood" finally passed away from his mind, leaving him a Naturalist in every sense of the word. In the Eulogy of Richard Jefferies published by Sir Walter Besant in 1888 it is asserted that on his deathbed Jefferies returned to his faith, and "died listening with faith and love to the words contained in the Old Book." A popular account of this "conversion" accordingly became current, and was employed to the usual purpose. As has been shown by a careful student, and as was admitted on inquiry by Sir Walter Besant, there had been no conversion whatever, Jefferies having simply listened to his wife's reading without hinting at any change in his convictions. [1863] Despite his biographer's express admission of his error, Christian journals, such as the Spectator, have burked the facts; one, the Christian, has piously charged dishonesty on the writer who brought them to light; and a third, the Salvationist War Cry, has pronounced his action "the basest form of chicanery and falsehood." [1864] The episode is worth noting as indicating the qualities which still attach to orthodox propaganda.

11. Though Shelley was anathema to English Christians in his own clay, his fame and standing steadily rose in the generations after his death. Nor has the balance of English poetry ever reverted to the side of faith. Even Tennyson, who more than once struck at rationalism below the belt, is in his own despite the poet of doubt as much as of credence, however he might wilfully attune himself to the key of faith; and the unparalleled optimism of Browning evolved a form of Christianity sufficiently alien to the historic creed. [1865] In Clough and Matthew Arnold, again, we have the positive record of surrendered faith. Alongside of Arnold, Swinburne put into his verse the freethinking temper that Leconte de Lisle reserved for prose; and the ill-starred but finely gifted James Thomson ("B.V.") was no less definitely though despairingly an unbeliever. Among our later poets, finally, the balance is pretty much the same. Mr. Watson has declared in worthily noble diction for a high agnosticism, and the late John Davidson defied orthodox ethics in the name of his very antinomian theology; [1866] while on the side of the regulation religion--since Mr. Yeats is but a stray Druid--can be cited at best the regimental psalmody of Mr. Kipling, lyrist of trumpet and drum; the stained-glass Mariolatries of the late Francis Thompson; the declamatory orthodoxy of Mr. Noyes; and the Godism of W. E. Henley, whereat the prosaic godly look askance.

12. Of the imaginative literature of the United States, as of that of England, the same generalization broadly holds good. The incomparable Hawthorne, whatever his psychological sympathy with the Puritan past, wrought inevitably by his art for the loosening of its intellectual hold; Poe, though he did not venture till his days of downfall to write his Eureka, thereby proves himself an entirely non-Christian theist; and Emerson's poetry, no less than his prose, constantly expresses his pantheism; while his gifted disciple Thoreau, in some ways a more stringent thinker than his master, was either a pantheist or a Lucretian theist, standing aloof from all churches. [1867] The economic conditions of American life have till recently been unfavourable to the higher literature, as apart from fiction; but the unique figure of Walt Whitman stands for a thoroughly naturalistic view of life; [1868] Mr. Howells appears to be at most a theist; Mr. Henry James has not even exhibited the bias of his gifted brother to the theism of their no less gifted father; and some of the most esteemed men of letters since the Civil War, as Dr. Wendell Holmes and Colonel Wentworth Higginson, have been avowedly on the side of rationalism, or, as the term goes in the States, "liberalism." Though the tone of ordinary conversation is more often reminiscent of religion in the United States than in England, the novel and the newspaper have been perhaps more thoroughly secularized there than here; and in the public honour done to so thorough a rationalist as the late Dr. Moncure Conway at the hands of his alma mater, the Dickinson College, West Virginia, may be seen the proof that the official orthodoxy of his youth has disappeared from the region of his birth.

13. Of the vast modern output of belles lettres in continental Europe, finally, a similar account is to be given. The supreme poet of modern Italy, Leopardi, is one of the most definitely rationalistic as well as one of the greatest philosophic poets in literature; Carducci, the greatest of his successors, was explicitly anti-Christian; and despite all the claims of the Catholic socialists, there is little modern Catholic literature in Italy of any European value. One of the most distinguished of modern Italian scholars, Professor A. de Gubernatis, has in his Letture sopra la mitologia vedica (1874) explicitly treated the Christian legend as a myth. In Germany we have seen Goethe and Schiller distinctly counting for naturalism; and of Jean Paul Richter (1763-1825) an orthodox historian declares that his "religion was a chaotic fermenting of the mind, out of which now deism, then Christianity, then a new religion, seems to come forth." [1869] The naturalistic line is found to be continued in Heinrich von Kleist, the unhappy but masterly dramatist of Der Zerbrochene Krug, one of the truest geniuses of his time; and above all in Heine, whose characteristic profession of reconciling himself on his deathbed with the deity he imaged as "the Aristophanes of heaven" [1870] serves so scantily to console the orthodox lovers of his matchless song. His criticism of Kant and Fichte is a sufficient clue to his serious convictions; and that "God is all that there is" [1871] is the sufficient expression of his pantheism. The whole purport of his brilliant sketch of the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (1834; 2nd ed. 1852) is a propaganda of the very spirit of freethinking, which constitutes for Germany at once a literary classic and a manifesto of rationalism. As he himself said of the return of the aged Schelling to Catholicism, we may say of Heine, that a deathbed reversion to early beliefs is a pathological phenomenon.

The use latterly made of Heine's deathbed re-conversion by orthodoxy in England is characteristic. The late letters and conversations in which he said edifying things of God and the Bible are cited for readers who know nothing of the context, and almost as little of the speaker. He had similarly praised the Bible in 1830 (Letter of July, in B. iii of his volume on Börne--Werke, vii, 160). To the reader of the whole it is clear that, while Heine's verbal renunciation of his former pantheism, and his characterization of the pantheistic position as a "timid atheism," might have been made independently of his physical prostration, his profession of the theism at which he had formerly scoffed is only momentarily serious, even at a time when such a reversion would have been in no way surprising. His return to and praise of the Bible, the book of his childhood, during years of extreme suffering and utter helplessness, was in the ordinary way of physiological reaction. But inasmuch as his thinking faculty was never extinguished by his tortures, he chronically indicated that his religious talk was a half-conscious indulgence of the overstrained emotional nature, and substantially an exercise of his poetic feeling--always as large a part of his psychosis as his reasoning faculty. Even in deathbed profession he was neither a Jew nor a Christian, his language being that of a deism "scarcely distinguishable in any essential element from that of Voltaire or Diderot" (Strodtmann, Heine's Leben und Werke, 2te Aufl. ii, 386). "My religious convictions and views," he writes in the preface to the late Romancero, "remain free of all churchism.... I have abjured nothing, not even my old heathen Gods, from whom I have parted in love and friendship." In his will he peremptorily forbade any clerical procedure at his funeral; and his feeling on that side is revealed in his sad jests to his friend Meissner in 1850. "If I could only go out on crutches!" he exclaimed; adding: "Do you know where I should go? Straight to church." On his friends expressing disbelief, he went on: "Certainly, to church! Where should a man go on crutches? Naturally, if I could walk without crutches, I should go to the laughing boulevards or the Jardin Mabille." The story is told in England without the conclusion, as a piece of "Christian Evidence."

But even as to his theism Heine was never more than wilfully and poetically a believer. In 1849 we find him jesting about "God" and "the Gods," declaring he will not offend the lieber Gott, whose vultures he knows and respects. "Opium is also a religion," he writes in 1850. "Christianity is useless for the healthy ... for the sick it is a very good religion." "If the German people in their need accept the King of Prussia, why should not I accept the personal God?" And in speaking of the postscript to the Romancero he writes in 1851: "Alas, I had neither time nor mood to say there what I wanted--namely, that I die as a Poet, who needs neither religion nor philosophy, and has nothing to do with either. The Poet understands very well the symbolic idiom of Religion, and the abstract jargon of Philosophy; but neither the religious gentry nor those of philosophy will ever understand the Poet." A few weeks before his death he signs a New Year letter, "Nebuchadnezzar II, formerly Prussian Atheist, now Lotosflower-adorer." At this time he was taking immense doses of morphia to make his tortures bearable. A few hours before his death a querying pietist got from him the answer: "God will pardon me; it is his business." The Geständnisse, written in 1854, ends in absolute irony; and his alleged grounds for giving up atheism, sometimes quoted seriously, are purely humorous (Werke, iv, 33). If it be in any sense true, as he tells in the preface to the Romancero, that "the high clerisy of atheism pronounced its anathema" over him--that is to say, that former friends denounced him as a weak turncoat--it needed only the publication of his Life and Letters to enable freethinkers to take an entirely sympathetic view of his case, which may serve as a supreme example of "the martyrdom of man." On the whole question see Strodtmann, as cited, ii, 372 sq., and the Geständnisse, which should be compared with the earlier written fragments of Briefe über Deutschland (Werke, iii, 110), where there are some significant variations in statements of fact.

Since Heine, German belles lettres has not been a first-rate influence in Europe; but some of the leading novelists, as Auerbach and Heyse, are well known to have shared in the rational philosophy of their age; and the Christianity of Wagner, whose precarious support to the cause of faith has been welcomed chiefly by its heteroclite adherents, counts for nothing in the critical scale. [1872]

14. But perhaps the most considerable evidence, in belles lettres, of the predominance of rationalism in modern Europe is to be found in the literary history of the Scandinavian States and Russia. The Russian development indeed had gone far ere the modern Scandinavian literatures had well begun. Already in the first quarter of the century the poet Poushkine was an avowed heretic; and Gogol even let his art suffer from his preoccupations with the new humanitarian ideas; while the critic Biélinsky, classed by Tourguénief as the Lessing of Russia, [1873] was pronouncedly rationalistic, [1874] as was his contemporary the critic Granovsky, [1875] reputed the finest Russian stylist of his day. At this period belles lettres stood for every form of intellectual influence in Russia, [1876] and all educated thought was moulded by it. The most perfect artistic result is the fiction of the freethinker Tourguénief, [1877] the Sophocles of the modern novel. His two great contemporaries, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, count indeed for supernaturalism; but the truly wonderful genius of the former was something apart from his philosophy, which was merely childlike; and the latter, the least masterly if the most strenuous artist of the three, made his religious converts in Russia chiefly among the uneducated, and was in any case sharply antagonistic to orthodox Christianity. It does not appear that the younger writer, Potapenko, a fine artist, is orthodox, despite his extremely sympathetic presentment of a superior priest; and the still younger Gorky is an absolute Naturalist.

15. In the Scandinavian States, again, there are hardly any exceptions to the freethinking tendency among the leading living men of letters. In the person of the abnormal religionist Sören Kierkegaard (1813-1855) a new force of criticism began to stir in Denmark. Setting out as a theologian, Kierkegaard gradually developed, always on quasi-religious lines, into a vehement assailant of conventional Christianity, somewhat in the spirit of Pascal, somewhat in that of Feuerbach, again in that of Ruskin; and in a temper recalling now a Berserker and now a Hebrew prophet. The general effect of his teaching may be gathered from the mass of the work of Henrik Ibsen, who was his disciple, and in particular from Ibsen's Brand, of which the hero is partly modelled on Kierkegaard. [1878] Ibsen, though his Brand was counted to him for righteousness by the Churches, showed himself a thorough-going naturalist in all his later work; Björnson was an active freethinker; the eminent Danish critic, Georg Brandes, early avowed himself to the same effect; and his brother, the dramatist, Edward Brandes, was elected to the Danish Parliament in 1871 despite his declaration that he believed in neither the Christian nor the Jewish God. Most of the younger littérateurs of Norway and Sweden seem to be of the same cast of thought.

Section 4.--The Natural Sciences

1. The power of intellectual habit and tradition had preserved among the majority of educated men, to the end of the eighteenth century, a notion of deity either slightly removed from that of the ancient Hebrews or ethically purified without being philosophically transformed, though the astronomy of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton had immensely modified the Hebraic conception of the physical universe. We have seen that Newton did not really hold by the Christian scheme--he wrote, at times, in fact, as a pantheist--but some later astronomers seem to have done so. When, however, the great Laplace developed the nebular hypothesis, previously guessed at by Bruno and outlined by Kant, orthodox psychological habit was rudely shaken as regards the Biblical account of creation; and like every other previous advance in physical science this was denounced as atheistic [1879]--which, as we know, it was, Laplace having declared in reply to Napoleon that he had no need of the God hypothesis. Confirmed in essentials by all subsequent science, Laplace's system widens immensely the gulf between modern cosmology and the historic theism of the Christian era; and the subsequent concrete developments of astronomy, giving as they do such an insistent and overwhelming impression of physical infinity, have made the "Christian hypothesis" [1880] fantastic save for minds capable of enduring any strain on the sense of consistency. Paine had brought the difficulty vividly home to the common intelligence; and though the history of orthodoxy is a history of the success of institutions and majorities in imposing incongruous conformities, the perception of the incongruity on this side must have been a force of disintegration. The freethinking of the French astronomers of the Revolution period marks a decisive change; and as early as 1826 we find in a work on Jewish antiquities by a Scotch clergyman a very plain indication [1881] of disbelief in the Hebrew story of the stopping of the sun and moon, or (alternatively) of the rotation of the earth. It is typical of the tenacity of religious delusion that a quarter of a century later this among other irrational credences was contended for by the Swiss theologian Gaussen, [1882] and by the orthodox majority elsewhere, when for all scientifically trained men they had become untenable. And that the general growth of scientific thought was disintegrating among scientific men the old belief in miracles may be gathered from an article, remarkable in its day, which appeared in the Edinburgh Review of January, 1814 (No. 46), and was "universally attributed to Prof. Leslie," [1883] the distinguished physicist. Reviewing the argument of Laplace's essay, Sur les probabilités, it substantially endorsed the thesis of Hume that miracles cannot be proved by any testimony.

Leslie's own case is one of the milestones marking the slow recovery of progress in Britain after the Revolution. His appointment to the chair of Mathematics, after Playfair, at Edinburgh University in 1805 was bitterly resisted by the orthodox on the score that he was a disbeliever in miracles and an "infidel" of the school of Hume, who had been his personal friend. Nevertheless he again succeeded Playfair in the chair of Physics in 1819, and was knighted in 1832. The invention of the hygrometer and the discovery of the relations of light and heat had begun to count for more in science than the profession of orthodoxy.

2. From France came likewise the impulse to a naturalistic handling of biology, long before the day of Darwin. The protagonist in this case was the physician P.-J.-G. Cabanis (1737-1808), the colleague of Laplace in the School of Sciences. Growing up in the generation of the Revolution, Cabanis had met, in the salon of Madame Helvétius, d'Holbach, Diderot, D'Alembert, Condorcet, Laplace, Condillac, Volney, Franklin, and Jefferson, and became the physician of Mirabeau. His treatise on the Rapports du physique et du morale de l'homme (1796-1802) [1884] might be described as the systematic application to psychology of that "positive" method to which all the keenest thought of the eighteenth century had been tending, yet with much of the literary or rhetorical tone by which the French writers of that age had nearly all been characterized. For Cabanis, the psychology of Helvétius and Condillac had been hampered by their ignorance of physiology; [1885] and he easily put aside the primary errors, such as the "equality of minds" and the entity of "the soul," which they took over from previous thinkers. His own work is on the whole the most searching and original handling of the main problems of psycho-physiology that had yet been achieved; and to this day its suggestiveness has not been exhausted.

But Cabanis, in his turn, made the mistake of Helvétius and Condillac. Not content with presenting the results of his study in the province in which he was relatively master, he undertook to reach ultimate truth in those of ethics and philosophy, in which he was not so. In the preface to the Rapports he lays down an emphatically agnostic conviction as to final causes: "ignorance the most invincible," he declares, is all that is possible to man on that issue. [1886] But not only does he in his main work freely and loosely generalize on the phenomena of history and overleap the ethical problem: he penned shortly before his death a Lettre sur les causes premières, addressed to Fauriel, [1887] in which the aging intelligence is seen reverting to à priori processes, and concluding in favour of a "sort of stoic pantheism" [1888] with a balance towards normal theism and a belief in immortality. The final doctrine did not in the least affect the argument of the earlier, which was simply one of positive science; but the clerical world, which had in the usual fashion denounced the scientific doctrine, not on the score of any attack by Cabanis upon religion, but because of its incompatibility with the notion of the soul, naturally made much of the mystical, [1889] and accorded its framer authority from that moment.

As for the conception of "vitalism" put forward in the Letter to Fauriel by way of explanation of the phenomena of life, it is but a reversion to the earlier doctrine of Stahl, of which Cabanis had been a partisan in his youth. [1890] The fact remains that he gave an enduring impulse to positive science, [1891] his own final vacillation failing to arrest the employment of the method he had inherited and improved. Most people know him solely through one misquotation, the famous phrase that "the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile." This is not only an imperfect statement of his doctrine: it suppresses precisely the idea by which Cabanis differentiates from pure "sensationalism." What he taught was that "impressions, reaching the brain, set it in activity, as aliments reaching the stomach excite it to a more abundant secretion of gastric juice.... The function proper to the first is to perceive particular impressions, to attach to them signs, to combine different impressions, to separate them, to draw from them judgments and determinations, as the function of the second is to act on nutritive substances," etc. [1892] It is after this statement of the known processus, and after pointing out that there is as much of pure inference in the one case as in the other, that he concludes: "The brain in a manner digests impressions, and makes organically the secretion of thought" and this conclusion, he points out, disposes of the difficulty of those who "cannot conceive how judging, reasoning, imagining, can ever be anything else than feeling. The difficulty ceases when one recognizes, in these different operations, the action of the brain upon the impressions which are passed on to it." The doctrine is, in short, an elementary truth of psychological science, as distinguished from the pseudo-science of the Ego considered as an entity. To that pseudo-science Cabanis gave a vital wound; and his derided formula is for true science to-day almost a truism. The attacks made upon his doctrine in the next generation only served to emphasize anew the eternal dilemma of theism. On the one hand his final "vitalism" was repugnant to those who, on traditional lines, insisted upon a distinction between "soul" and "vital force"; on the other hand, those who sought to make a philosophic case for theism against him made the usual plunge into pantheism, and were reproached accordingly by the orthodox. [1893] All that remained was the indisputable "positive" gain.

3. In England the influence of the French stimulus in physiology was seen even more clearly than that of the great generalization of Laplace. Professor William Lawrence (1783-1867), the physiologist, published in 1816 an Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and Physiology, containing some remarks on the nature of life, which elicited from the then famous Dr. Abernethy a foul attack in his Physiological Lectures delivered before the College of Surgeons. Lawrence was charged with belonging to the party of French physiological skeptics whose aim was to "loosen those restraints on which the welfare of mankind depends." [1894] In the introductory lecture of his course of 1817 before the College of Physicians, Lawrence severely retaliated, repudiating the general charge, but reasserting that the dependence of life on organization is as clear as the derivation of daylight from the sun. The war was adroitly carried at once into the enemy's territory in the declaration that "The profound, the virtuous, and fervently pious Pascal acknowledged, what all sound theologians maintain, that the immortality of the soul, the great truths of religion, and the fundamental principles of morals cannot be demonstrably proved by mere reason; and that revelation alone is capable of dissipating the uncertainties which perplex those who inquire too curiously into the sources of these important principles. All will acknowledge that, as no other remedy can be so perfect and satisfactory as this, no other can be necessary, if we resort to this with firm faith." [1895] The value of this pronouncement is indicated later in the same volume by subacid allusions to "those who regard the Hebrew Scriptures as writings composed with the assistance of divine inspiration," and who receive Genesis "as a narrative of actual events." Indicating various "grounds of doubt respecting inspiration," the lecturer adds that the stories of the naming of the animals and their collection in the ark, "if we are to understand them as applied to the living inhabitants of the whole world, are zoologically impossible." [1896] On the principle then governing such matters Lawrence was in 1822, on the score of his heresies, refused copyright in his lectures, which were accordingly reprinted many times in a cheap stereotyped edition, and thus widely diffused. [1897]

This hardy attack was reinforced in 1819 by the publication of Sir T. C. Morgan's Sketches of the Philosophy of Life, wherein the physiological materialism of Cabanis is quietly but firmly developed, and a typical sentence of his figures as a motto on the title-page. The method is strictly naturalistic, alike on the medical and on the philosophic side; and "vitalism" is argued down as explicitly as is anthropomorphism. [1898] As a whole the book tells notably of the stimulus of recent French thought upon English.

4. A more general effect, however, was probably wrought by the science of geology, which in a stable and tested form belongs to the nineteenth century. Of its theoretic founders in the eighteenth century, Werner and Dr. James Hutton (1726-1797), the latter and more important [1899] is known from his Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge (1794) to have been consciously a freethinker on more grounds than that of his naturalistic science; and his Theory of the World (1795) was duly denounced as atheistic. [1900] Whereas the physical infinity of the universe almost forced the orthodox to concede a vast cosmic process of some kind as preceding the shaping of the earth and solar system, the formation of these within six days was one of the plainest assertions in the sacred books; and every system of geology excluded such a conception. As the evidence accumulated, in the hands of men mostly content to deprecate religious opposition, [1901] there was duly evolved the quaint compromise of the doctrine that the Biblical six "days" meant six ages--a fantasy still cherished in the pulpit. On the ground of that absurdity, nevertheless, there gradually grew up a new conception of the antiquity of the earth. Thus a popular work on geology such as The Ancient World, by Prof. Ansted (1847), could begin with the proposition that "long before the human race had been introduced on the earth this world of ours existed as the habitation of living things different from those now inhabiting its surface." Even the thesis of "six ages," and others of the same order, drew upon their supporters angry charges of "infidelity." Hugh Miller, whose natural gifts for geological research were chronically turned to confusion by his orthodox bias, was repeatedly so assailed, when in point of fact he was perpetually tampering with the facts to salve the Scriptures. [1902] Of all the inductive sciences geology had been most retarded by the Christian canonization of error. [1903] Even the plain fact that what is dry land had once been sea was obstinately distorted through centuries, though Ovid [1904] had put the observations of Pythagoras in the way of all scholars; and though Leonardo da Vinci had insisted on the visible evidence; nay, deistic habit could keep even Voltaire, as we saw, preposterously incredulous on the subject. When the scientific truth began to force its way in the teeth of such authorities as Cuvier, who stood for the "Mosaic" doctrine, the effect was proportionately marked; and whether or not the suicide of Miller (1856) was in any way due to despair on perception of the collapse of his reconciliation of geology with Genesis, [1905] the scientific demonstration made an end of revelationism for many. What helped most to save orthodoxy from humiliation on the scientific side was the attitude of men like Professor Baden Powell, whose scientific knowledge and habit of mind moved him to attack the Judaism of the Bibliolaters in the name of Christianity, and in the name of truth to declare that "nothing in geology bears the smallest semblance to any part of the Mosaic cosmogony, torture the interpretation to what extent we may." [1906] In 1857 this was very bold language.

5. Still more rousing, finally, was the effect of the science of zoology, as placed upon a broad scientific foundation by Charles Darwin. Here again steps had been taken in previous generations on the right path, without any general movement on the part of scientific and educated men. Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had in his Zoonomia (1794) anticipated many of the positions of the French Lamarck, who in 1801 began developing the views he fully elaborated in 1815, as to the descendance of all existing species from earlier forms. [1907] As early as 1795 Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire had begun to suspect that all species are variants on a primordial form of life; and at the same time (1794-95) Goethe in Germany had reached similar convictions. [1908] That views thus reached almost simultaneously in Germany, England, and France, at the time of the French Revolution, should have to wait for two generations before even meeting the full stress of battle, must be put down as one of the results of the general reaction. Saint-Hilaire, publishing his views in 1828, was officially overborne by the Cuvier school in France. In England, indeed, so late as 1855, we find Sir David Brewster denouncing the Nebular Hypothesis: "that dull and dangerous heresy of the age.... An omnipotent arm was required to give the planets their position and motion in space, and a presiding intelligence to assign to them the different functions they had to perform." [1909] And Murchison the geologist was no less emphatic against Darwinism, which he rejected till his dying day (1871).

6. Other anticipations of Darwin's doctrine in England and elsewhere came practically to nothing, [1910] as regarded the general opinion, until Robert Chambers in 1844 published anonymously his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a work which found a wide audience, incurring bitter hostility not only from the clergy but from some specialists who, like Huxley, were later to take the evolutionist view on Darwin's persuasion. Chambers it was that brought the issue within general knowledge; and he improved his position in successive editions. A hostile clerical reader, Whewell, admitted of him, in a letter to a less hostile member of his profession, that, "as to the degree of resemblance between the author and the French physiological atheists, he uses reverent phrases: theirs would not be tolerated in England"; adding: "You would be surprised to hear the contempt and abhorrence with which Owen and Sedgwick speak of the Vestiges." [1911] Hugh Miller, himself accused of "infidelity" for his measure of inductive candour, held a similar tone towards men of greater intellectual rectitude, calling the liberalizing religionists of his day "vermin" and "reptiles," [1912] and classifying as "degraded and lost" [1913] all who should accept the new doctrine of evolution, which, as put by Chambers, was then coming forward to evict his own delusions from the field of science. The young Max Müller, with the certitude born of an entire ignorance of physical science, declared in 1856 that the doctrine of a human evolution from lower types "can never be maintained again," and pronounced it an "unhallowed imputation." [1914]

7. "Contempt and abhorrence" had in fact at all times constituted the common Christian temper towards every form of critical dissent from the body of received opinion; and only since the contempt, doubled with criticism, began to be in a large degree retorted on the bigots by instructed men has a better spirit prevailed. Such a reaction was greatly promoted by the establishment of the Darwinian theory. It was after the above-noted preparation, popular and academic, and after the theory of transmutation of species had been definitely pronounced erroneous by the omniscient Whewell, [1915] that Darwin produced (1859) his irresistible arsenal of arguments and facts, the Origin of Species, expounding systematically the principle of Natural Selection, suggested to him by the economic philosophy of Malthus, and independently and contemporaneously arrived at by Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace. The outcry was enormous; and the Church, as always, arrayed itself violently against the new truth. Bishop Wilberforce pointed out in the Quarterly Review that "the principle of natural selection is absolutely incompatible with the word of God," [1916] which was perfectly true; and at a famous meeting of the British Association in 1860 he so travestied the doctrine as to goad Huxley into a fierce declaration that he would rather be a descendant of an ape than of a man who (like the Bishop) plunged into questions with which he had no real acquaintance, only to obscure them and distract his hearers by appeals to religious prejudice. [1917] The mass of the clergy kept up the warfare of ignorance; but the battle was practically won within twenty years. In France, Germany, and the United States leading theologians had made the same suicidal declarations, entitling all men to say that, if evolution proved to be true, Christianity was false. Professor Luthardt, of Leipzig, took up the same position as Bishop Wilberforce, declaring that "the whole superstructure of personal religion is built upon the doctrine of creation"; [1918] leading American theologians pronounced the new doctrine atheistic; and everywhere gross vituperation eked out the theological argument. [1919]

8. Thus the idea of a specific creation of all forms of life by an originating deity--the conception which virtually united the deists and Christians of the eighteenth century against the atheists--was at length scientifically exploded. The principle of personal divine rule or providential intervention had now been philosophically excluded successively (1) from astronomy by the system of Newton; (2) from the science of earth-formation by the system of Laplace and the new geology; (3) from the science of living organisms by the new zoology. It only needed that the deistic conception should be further excluded from the human sciences--from anthropology, from the philosophy of history, and from ethics--to complete, at least in outline, the rationalization of modern thought. Not that the process was complete in detail even as regarded zoology. Despite the plain implications of the Origin of Species, the doctrine of the Descent of Man (1871) came on many as a shocking surprise and evoked a new fury of protest. The lacunæ in Darwin, further, had to be supplemented; and much speculative power has been spent on the task by Haeckel, without thus far establishing complete agreement. But the desperate stand so long made on the score of the "missing link" seems to have been finally discredited in 1894; and the Judæo-Christian doctrine of special creation and providential design appears, even in the imperfectly educated society of our day, to be already a lost cause.

As we have seen, however, it was not merely the clerical class that resisted the new truth: the men of science themselves were often disgracefully hostile; and that "class" continued to give a sufficiency of support to clericalism. If the study of the physical sciences be no guarantee for recognition of new truth in those sciences, still less is it a sure preparation for right judgment in matters of sociology, or, indeed, for a courageous attitude towards conventions. Spencer in his earlier works used the language of deism [1920] at a time when Comte had discarded it. It takes a rare combination of intellectual power, moral courage, and official freedom to permit of such a directly rationalistic propaganda as was carried on by Professor Clifford, or even such as has been accomplished by President Andrew White in America under the comparatively popular profession of deism. It was only in his leisured latter years that Huxley carried on a general conflict with orthodoxy. In middle age he frequently covered himself by attacks on professed freethinkers; and he did more than any other man of his time in England to conserve the Bible as a school manual by his politic panegyric of it in that aspect at a time when bolder rationalists were striving to get it excluded from the State schools. [1921] Other men of science have furnished an abundance of support to orthodoxy by more or less vaguely religious pronouncements on the problem of the universe; so that Catholic and other obscurantist agencies are able to cite from them many quasi-scientific phrases [1922]--taking care not to ask what bearing their language has on the dogmas of the Churches. Physicists who attempt to be more precise are rarely found to be orthodox; and the moral and social science of such writers is too often a species of charlatanism. But the whole tendency of natural science, which as such is necessarily alien to supernaturalism, makes for a rejection of the religious tradition; and the real leaders of science are found more and more openly alienated from the creed of faith. We know that Darwin, though the son and grandson of freethinkers, was brought up in ordinary orthodoxy by his mother, and "gave up common religious belief almost independently from his own reflections." [1923] All over the world that has since been an increasingly common experience among scientific men.

Section 5.--The Sociological Sciences

1. A rationalistic treatment of human history had been explicit or implicit in the whole literature of Deism; and had been attempted with various degrees of success by Bodin, Vico, Montesquieu, Mandeville, Hume, Smith, Voltaire, Volney, and Condorcet, as well as by lesser men. [1924] So clear had been the classic lead to naturalistic views of social growth in the Politics of Aristotle, and so strong the influence of the new naturalistic spirit, that it is seen even in the work of Goguet (1769), who sets out as biblically as Bossuet; while in Germany Herder and Kant framed really luminous generalizations; and a whole group of sociological writers rose up in the Scotland of the middle and latter parts of the century. [1925] Here again there was reaction; but in France the orthodox Guizot did much to promote broader views than his own; Eusèbe Salverte in his essay De la Civilisation (1813) made a highly intelligent effort towards a general view; and Charles Comte in his Traité de Législation (1826) made a marked scientific advance on the suggestive work of Herder. As we have seen, the eclectic Jouffroy put human affairs in the sphere of natural law equally with cosmic phenomena. At length, in the great work of Auguste Comte, scientific method was applied so effectively and concretely to the general problem that, despite his serious fallacies, social science again took rank as a solid study.

2. In England the anti-revolution reaction was visible in this as in other fields of thought. Hume and Gibbon had set the example of a strictly naturalistic treatment of history; and the clerical Robertson was faithful to their method; but Hallam makes a stand for supernaturalism even in applying a generally scientific critical standard. The majority of historical events he is content to let pass as natural, even as the average man sees the hand of the doctor in his escape from rheumatism, but the hand of God in his escape from a railway accident. Discussing the defeat of Barbarossa at Legnano, Hallam pronounces that it is not "material to allege ... that the accidental destruction of Frederic's army by disease enabled the cities of Lombardy to succeed in their resistance.... Providence reserves to itself various means by which the bonds of the oppressor may be broken; and it is not for human sagacity to anticipate whether the army of a conqueror shall moulder in the unwholesome marshes of Rome or stiffen with frost in a Russian winter." [1926]

But Hallam was nearly the last historian of distinction to vend such nugatory oracles as either a philosophy or a religion of history. Even the oracular Carlyle did not clearly stipulate for "special providences" in his histories, though he leant to that conception; and though Ranke also uses mystifying language, he writes as a Naturalist; while Michelet is openly anti-clerical. Grote was wholly a rationalist; the historic method of his friend and competitor, Bishop Thirlwall, was as non-theological as his; Macaulay, whatever might be his conformities or his bias, wrote in his most secular spirit when exhibiting theological evolution; and George Long indicated his rationalism again and again. [1927] It is only in the writings of the most primitively prejudiced of those German historians who eliminate ethics from historiography that the "God" factor is latterly emphasized in ostensibly expert historiography.

3. All study of economics and of political history fostered such views, and at length, in England and America, by the works of Draper and Buckle, in the sixth and later decades of the century, the conception of law in human history was widely if slowly popularized, to the due indignation of the supernaturalists, who saw the last great field of natural phenomena passing like others into the realm of science. Draper's avowed theism partly protected him from attack; but Buckle's straightforward attacks on creeds and on Churches brought upon him a peculiarly fierce hostility, which was unmollified by his incidental avowal of belief in a future life and his erratic attacks upon unbelievers. For long this hostility told against his sociological teaching. Spencer's Principles of Sociology nevertheless clinched the scientific claim by taking sociological law for granted; and the new science has continually progressed in acceptance. In the hands of all its leading modern exponents in all countries--Lester Ward, Giddings, Guyau, Letourneau, Tarde, Ferri, Durkheim, De Greef, Gumplowicz, Lilienfeld, Schäffle--it has been entirely naturalistic, though some Catholic professors continue to inject into it theological assumptions. It cannot be said, however, that a general doctrine of social evolution is even yet fully established. The problem is complicated by the profoundly contentious issues of practical politics; and in the resulting diffidence of official teachers there arises a notable opening for obscurantism, which has been duly forthcoming. In the first half of the century such an eminent Churchman as Dean Milman incurred at the hands of J. H. Newman and others the charge of writing the history of the Jews and of early Christianity in a rationalistic spirit, presenting religion as a "human" phenomenon. [1928] Later Churchmen, with all their preparation, have rarely gone further.

4. Two lines of scientific study, it would appear, must be thoroughly followed up before the ground can be pronounced clear for authoritative conclusions--those of anthropological archæology (including comparative mythology and comparative hierology) and economic analysis. On both lines, however, great progress has been made; and on the former in particular the result is profoundly disintegrating to traditional belief. The lessons of anthropology had been long available to the modern world before they began to be scientifically applied to the "science of religion." The issues raised by Fontenelle and De Brosses in the eighteenth century were in practice put aside in favour of direct debate over Christian history, dogma, and ethic; though many of the deists dwelt on the analogies of "heathen" and "revealed" religion. As early as 1824 Benjamin Constant made a vigorous attempt to bring the whole phenomena under a general evolutionary conception in his work De la Religion. [1929] But it was not till the treasure of modern anthropology had been scientifically massed by such students as Theodor Waitz (Anthropologie der Naturvölker, 6 Bde. 1859-71) and Adolf Bastian (Der Mensch in der Geschichte, 3 Bde. 1860), and above all by Sir Edward Tylor, who first lucidly elaborated the science of it all, that the arbitrary religious conception of the psychic evolution of humanity began to be decisively superseded.

In 1871 Tylor could still say that "to many educated minds there seems something presumptuous and repulsive in the view that the history of mankind is part and parcel of the history of nature; that our thoughts, wills, and actions accord with laws as definite as those which govern the motion of waves, the combination of acids and bases, and the growth of plants and animals." [1930] But the old repulsion had already been profoundly impaired by biological and social science; and Tylor's book met with hardly any of the odium that had been lavished on Darwin and Buckle. "It will make me for the future look on religion--a belief in the soul, etc.--from a different point of view," wrote Darwin [1931] to Tylor on its appearance. So thoroughly did the book press home the fact of the evolution of religious thought from savagery that thenceforward the science of mythology, which had never yet risen in professional hands to the height of vision of Fontenelle, began to be decisively adapted to the anthropological standpoint.

In the hands of Spencer [1932] all the phenomena of primitive mental life--beliefs, practices, institutions--are considered as purely natural data, no other point of view being recognized; and the anthropological treatises of Lord Avebury (Sir John Lubbock) are at the same standpoint. When at length the mass of savage usages which lie around the beginnings of historic religion began to be closely scanned and classified, notably in the great latter-day compilations of Sir J. G. Frazer, what had appeared to be sacred peculiarities of the Christian cult were seen to be but variants of universal primitive practice. Thenceforth the problem for serious inquirers was not whether Christianity was a supernatural revelation--the supernatural is no longer a ground of serious discussion--but whether the central narrative is historical in any degree whatever. The defence is latterly conducted from a standpoint indistinguishable from the Unitarian. But an enormous amount of anthropological research is being carried on without any reference to such issues, the total effect being to exclude the supernaturalist premiss from the study of religion as completely as from that of astronomy.

Section 6.--Philosophy and Ethics

1. The philosophy of Kant, while giving the theological class a new apparatus of defence as against common-sense freethinking, forced none the less on theistic philosophy a great advance from the orthodox positions. Thus his immediate successors, Fichte and Schelling, produced systems of which one was loudly denounced as atheistic, and the other as pantheistic, [1933] despite its dualism. Neither seems to have had much influence on concrete religious opinion outside the universities; [1934] and when Schelling in old age turned Catholic obscurantist, the gain to clericalism was not great. Hegel in turn loosely wrought out a system of which the great merit is to substitute the conception of existence as relation for the nihilistic idealism of Fichte and the unsolved dualism of Schelling. This system he latterly adapted to practical exigencies [1935] by formulating, as Kant had recently done, a philosophic Trinity and hardily defining Christianity as "Absolute Religion" in comparison with the various forms of "Natural Religion." Nevertheless, he counted in a great degree as a disintegrating influence, and was in a very practical way anti-Christian. More explicitly than Kant, he admitted that the Aufklärung, the freethinking movement of the past generation, had made good its case so far as it went; and though, by the admission of admirers, he took for granted without justification that it had carried its point with the world at large, [1936] he was chronically at strife with the theologians as such, charging them on the one hand with deserting the dogmas which he re-stated, [1937] and on the other declaring that the common run of them "know as little of God as a blind man sees of a painting, even though he handles the frame." [1938] Of the belief in miracles he was simply contemptuous. "Whether at the marriage of Cana the guests got a little more wine or a little less is a matter of absolutely no importance; nor is it any more essential to demand whether the man with the withered hand was healed; for millions of men go about with withered and crippled limbs, whose limbs no man heals." On the story of the marks made for the information of the angel on the Hebrew houses at the Passover he asks: "Would the angel not have known them without these marks?", adding: "This faith has no real interest for Spirit." [1939] Such writing, from the orthodox point of view, was not compensated for by a philosophy of Christianity which denaturalized its dogmas, and a presentment of the God-idea and of moral law which made religion alternately a phase of philosophy and a form of political utilitarianism.

As to the impression made by Hegel on most Christians, compare Hagenbach, German Rationalism (Eng. tr. of Kirchengeschichte), pp. 364-69; Renan, Études d'histoire religieuse, 5e édit. p. 406; J. D. Morell, Histor. and Crit. View of the Spec. Philos. of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. 1847, ii, 189-91; Robins, A Defence of the Faith, 1862, pt. i, pp. 135-41, 176; Eschenmenger, Die Hegel'sche Religions-philosophie, 1834; quoted in Beard's Voices of the Church, p. 8; Leo, Die Hegelingen, 1838; and Reinhard, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie, 2nd ed. 1839, pp. 753-54--also cited by Beard, pp. 9-12.

The gist of Hegel's rehabilitation of Christianity is well set forth by Prof. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison in his essay on The Philosophy of Religion in Kant and Hegel (rep. in The Philos. Radicals and other Essays, 1907), ch. iii. Considered in connection with his demonstration that in politics the Prussian State was the ideal government, it is seen to be even more of an arbitrary and unveridical accommodation to the social environment than Kant's Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft. It approximates intellectually to the process by which the neo-Platonists and other eclectics of the classic decadence found a semblance of allegorical or symbolical justification for every item in the old theology. Nothing could be more false to the spirit of Hegel's general philosophy than the representing of Christianity as a culmination or "ultimate" of all religion; and nothing, in fact, was more readily seen by his contemporaries.

We who look back, however, may take a more lenient view of Hegel's process of adaptation than was taken in the next generation by Haym, who, in his Hegel und seine Zeit (1857), presented him as always following the prevailing fashion in thought, and lending himself as the tool of reactionary government. Hegel's officialism was in the main probably wholehearted. Even as Kant felt driven to do something for social conservation at the outbreak of the French Revolution, and Fichte to shape for his country the sinister ideal of The Closed Industrial State, so Hegel, after seeing Prussia shaken to its foundations at the battle of Jena and being turned out of his own house by the looting French soldiers, was very naturally impelled to support the existing State by quasi-philosophico-religious considerations. It was an abandonment of the true function of philosophy; but it may have been done in all good faith. An intense political conservatism was equally marked in Strauss, who dreaded "demagogy," and in Schopenhauer, who left his fortune to the fund for the widows and families of soldiers killed or injured in the revolutionary strifes of 1848. It came in their case from the same source--an alarmed memory of social convulsion. The fact remains that Hegel had no real part in the State religion which he crowned with formulas.

Not only does Hegel's conception of the Absolute make deity simply the eternal process of the universe, and the divine consciousness indistinguishable from the total consciousness of mankind, [1940] but his abstractions lend themselves equally to all creeds; [1941] and some of the most revolutionary of the succeeding movements of German thought--as those of Vatke, Strauss, [1942] Feuerbach, and Marx--professedly founded on him. It is certainly a striking testimony to the influence of Hegel that five such powerful innovators as Vatke [1943] in Old-Testament, Bruno Bauer and Strauss in New-Testament criticism, Feuerbach in the philosophy of religion, and Marx in social philosophy, should at first fly the Hegelian flag. It can hardly have been that Hegel's formulas sufficed to generate the criticism they all brought to bear upon their subject matter; rather we must suppose that their naturally powerful minds were attracted by the critical and reconstructive aspects of his doctrine; but the philosophy which stimulated them must have had great affinities for revolution, as well as for all forms of the idea of evolution.

2. In respect of his formal championship of Christianity Hegel's method, arbitrary even for him, appealed neither to the orthodox nor, with a few exceptions, [1944] to his own disciples, some of whom, as Ruge, at length definitely renounced Christianity. [1945] In 1854 Heine told his French readers that there were in Germany "fanatical monks of atheism" who would willingly burn Voltaire as a besotted deist; [1946] and Heine himself, in his last years of suffering and of revived poetic religiosity, could see in Hegel's system only atheism. Bruno Bauer at first opposed Strauss, and afterwards went even further than he, professing Hegelianism all the while. [1947] Schopenhauer and Hartmann in turn being even less sustaining to orthodoxy, and later orthodox systems failing to impress, there came in due course the cry of "Back to Kant," where at least orthodoxy had some formal semblance of sanction.

Hartmann's work on The Self-Decomposition of Christianity [1948] is a stringent exposure of the unreality of what passed for "liberal Christianity" in Germany a generation ago, and an appeal for a "new concrete religion" of monism or pantheism as a bulwark against Ultramontanism. On this monism, however, Hartmann insisted on grounding his pessimism; and with this pessimistic pantheism he hoped to outbid Catholicism against the "irreligious" Strauss and the liberal Christians--in his view no less irreligious. It does not seem to have had much acceptance. On the whole, the effect of all German philosophy has probably been to make for the general discredit of theistic thinking, the surviving forms of Hegelianism being little propitious to current religion. And though Schopenhauer and Nietzsche can hardly be said to carry on the task of philosophy either in spirit or in effect, yet the rapid intensification of hostility to current religion which their writings in particular manifest [1949] must be admitted to stand for a deep revolt against the Kantian compromise. And this revolt was bound to come about. The truth-shunning tactic of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel--aiming at the final discrediting of the Aufklärung as a force that had done its work, and could find no more to do, however it be explained and excused--was a mere expression of their own final lack of scientific instinct. It is hard to believe that thinkers who had perceived and asserted the fact of progression in religion could suppose that true philosophy consisted in putting a stop on à priori grounds to the historical analysis, and setting up an "ultimate" of philosophic theory. The straightforward investigators, seeking simply for truth, have passed on to posterity a spirit which, correcting their inevitable errors, reaches a far deeper and wider comprehension of religious evolution and psychosis than could be reached by the verbalizing methods of the self-satisfied and self-sufficing metaphysicians. These, so far as they prevailed, did but delay the advance of real knowledge. Their work, in fact, was fatally shaped by the general reaction against the Revolution, which in their case took a quasi-philosophic form, while in France and England it worked out as a crude return to clerical and political authoritarianism. [1950]

3. From the collisions of philosophic systems in Germany there emerged two great practical freethinking forces, the teachings of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-76), who was obliged to give up his lecturing at Erlangen in 1830 after the issue of his Thoughts upon Death and Immortality, and Ludwig Büchner, who was deprived of his chair of clinic at Tübingen in 1855 for his Force and Matter. The former, originally a Hegelian, expressly broke away from his master, declaring that, whereas Hegel belonged to the "Old Testament" of modern philosophy, he himself would set forth the New, wherein Hegel's fundamentally incoherent treatment of deity (as the total process of things on the one hand, and an objective personality on the other) should be cured. [1951] Feuerbach accordingly, in his Essence of Christianity (1841) and Essence of Religion (1851), supplied one of the first adequate modern statements of the positively rationalistic position as against Christianity and theism, in terms of philosophic as well as historical insight--a statement to which there is no characteristically modern answer save in terms of the refined sentimentalism of the youthful Renan, [1952] fundamentally averse alike to scientific precision and to intellectual consistency.

Feuerbach's special service consists in the rebuttal of the metaphysic in which religion had chronically taken refuge from the straightforward criticism of freethinkers, in itself admittedly unanswerable. They had shown many times over its historic falsity, its moral perversity, and its philosophic self-contradiction; and the more astute official defenders, leaving to the less competent the task of re-vindicating miracles and prophecy and defending the indefensible, proceeded to shroud the particular defeat in a pseudo-philosophic process which claimed for all religion alike an indestructible inner truth, in the light of which the instinctive believer could again make shift to affirm his discredited credences. It was this process which Feuerbach exploded, for all who cared to read him. He had gone through it. Intensely religious in his youth, he had found in the teaching of Hegel an attractive philosophic garb for his intuitional thought. But a wider concern than Hegel's for actual knowledge, and for the knowledge of the actual, moved him to say to his teacher, on leaving: "Two years have I attached myself to you; two years have I completely devoted to your philosophy. Now I feel the necessity of starting in the directly opposite way: I am going to study anatomy." [1953] It may have been that what saved him from the Hegelian fate of turning to the end the squirrel-cage of conformist philosophy was the personal experience which put him in fixed antagonism to the governmental forces that Hegel was moved to serve. The hostility evoked by his Thoughts on Death and Immortality completed his alienation from the official side of things, and left him to the life of a devoted truth-seeker--a career as rare in Germany as elsewhere. The upshot was that Feuerbach, in the words of Strauss, "broke the double yoke in which, under Hegel, philosophy and theology still went." [1954]

For the task he undertook he had consummately equipped himself. In a series of four volumes (History of Modern Philosophy from Bacon to Spinoza, 1833; Exposition and Criticism of the Leibnitzian Philosophy, 1837; Pierre Bayle, 1838; On Philosophy and Christianity, 1839) he explored the field of philosophy, and re-studied theology in the light of moral and historical criticism, before he produced his masterpiece, Das Wesen des Christenthums. Here the tactic of Hegel is turned irresistibly on the Hegelian defence; and religion, defiantly declared by Hegel to be an affair of self-consciousness, [1955] is shown to be in very truth nothing else. "Such as are a man's thoughts and dispositions, such is his God; so much worth as a man has, so much and no more has his God. Consciousness of God is self-consciousness; knowledge of God is self-knowledge." [1956] This of course is openly what Hegelian theism is in effect--philosophic atheism; and though Feuerbach at times disclaimed the term, he declares in his preface that "atheism, at least in the sense of this work, is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself ... in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature." In the preliminary section on The Essence of Religion he makes his position clear once for all: "A God who has abstract predicates has also an abstract existence.... Not the attribute of the divinity, but the divineness or deity of the attribute, is the first true Divine Being. Thus what theology and philosophy have held to be God, the Absolute, the Infinite, is not God; but that which they have held not to be God, is God--namely the attribute, the quality, whatever has reality. Hence, he alone is the true atheist to whom the predicates of the Divine Being--for example, love, wisdom, justice--are nothing; not he to whom merely the subject of these predicates is nothing.... These have an intrinsic, independent reality; they force their recognition upon man by their very nature; they are self-evident truths to him; they approve, they attest themselves.... The idea of God is dependent on the idea of justice, of benevolence...."

This is obviously the answer to Baur, who, after paying tribute to the personality of Feuerbach, and presenting a tolerably fair summary of his critical philosophy, can find no answer to it save the inept protest that it is one-sided in respect of its reduction of religion to the subjective (the very course insisted on by a hundred defenders!), that it favours the communistic and other extreme tendencies of the time, and that it brings everything "under the rude rule of egoism." [1957] Here a philosophic and an aspersive meaning are furtively combined in one word. The scientific subjectivism of Feuerbach's analysis of religion is no more a vindication or acceptance of "rude egoism" than is the Christian formula of "God's will" a condonation of murder. The restraint of egoism by altruism lies in human character and polity alike for the rationalist and for the irrationalist, as Baur must have known well enough after his long survey of Church history. His really contemptible escape from Feuerbach's criticism, under cover of alternate cries of "Communism" and "egoism"--a self-stultification which needs no comment--is simply one more illustration of the fashion in which, since the time of Kant, philosophy in Germany as elsewhere has been chronically demoralized by resort to non-philosophical tests. "Max Stirner" (pen-name of Johann Caspar Schmidt, 1806-1856) carried the philosophic "egoism" of Feuerbach about as far in words as might be; but his work on the Ego (Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, 1845) remains an ethical curiosity rather than a force. [1958]

4. Arnold Ruge (1802-1880), who was of the same philosophical school, [1959] gave his life to a disinterested propaganda of democracy and light; and if in 1870 he capitulated to the new Empire, and thereby won a small pension for the two last years of his life, he was but going the way of many another veteran, dazzled in his old age by very old fires. His Addresses on Religion, its Rise and Fall: to the educated among its Reverers [1960] (1869) is a lucid and powerful performance, proceeding from a mythological analysis of religion to a cordial plea for rationalism in all things. The charge of "materialism" was for him no bugbear. "Truly," he writes, "we are not without the earth and the solar system, not without the plants and the animals, not without head. But whoever has head enough to understand science and its conquests in the field of nature and of mind (Geist) knows also that the material world rests in the immaterial, moves in it, and is by it animated, freed, and ensouled; that soul and idea are incarnate in Nature, but that also logic, idea, spirit, and science free themselves out of Nature, become abstracted and as immaterial Power erect their own realm, the realm of spirit in State, science, and art." [1961]

5. On Feuerbach's Essence of Religion followed the resounding explosion of Büchner's Force and Matter (1855), which in large measure, but with much greater mastery of scientific detail, does for the plain man of his century what d'Holbach in his chief work sought to do for his day. Constantly vilified, even in the name of philosophy, in the exact tone and spirit of animal irritation which marks the religious vituperation of all forms of rationalism in previous ages; and constantly misrepresented as professing to explain an infinite universe when it does but show the hollowness of all supernaturalist explanations, [1962] the book steadily holds its ground as a manual of anti-mysticism. [1963] Between them, Feuerbach and Büchner may be said to have framed for their age an atheistic "System of Nature," concrete and abstract, without falling into the old error of substituting one apriorism for another. Whosoever endorses Baur's protest against the "one-sidedness" of Feuerbach, who treats of religion on its chosen ground of self-consciousness, has but to turn to Büchner's study of the objective world and see whether his cause fares any better.

6. In France the course of thought had been hardly less revolutionary. Philosophy, like everything else, had been affected by the legitimist restoration; and between Victor Cousin and the other "classic philosophers" of the first third of the century orthodoxy was nominally reinstated. Yet even among these there was no firm coherence. Maine de Biran, one of the shrinking spirits who passed gradually into an intolerant authoritarianism from fear of the perpetual pressures of reason, latterly declared (1821) that a philosophy which ascribed to deity only infinite thought or supreme intelligence, eliminating volition and love, was pure atheism; and this pronouncement struck at the philosophy of Cousin. Nor was this species of orthodoxy any more successful than the furious irrationalism of Joseph De Maistre in setting up a philosophic form of faith, as distinct from the cult of rhetoric and sentiment founded by Chateaubriand. Cousin was deeply distrusted by those who knew him, and at the height of his popularity he was contemned by the more competent minds around him, such as Sainte-Beuve, Comte, and Edgar Quinet. [1964] The latter thinker himself counted for a measure of rationalism, though he argued for theism, and undertook to make good the historicity of Jesus against those who challenged it. For the rest, even among the ostensibly conservative and official philosophers, Théodore Jouffroy, an eclectic, who held the chair of moral philosophy in the Faculté des Lettres at Paris, was at heart an unbeliever from his youth up, [1965] and even in his guarded writings was far from satisfying the orthodox. "God," he wrote, [1966] "interposes as little in the regular development of humanity as in the course of the solar system." He added a fatalistic theorem of divine predetermination, which he verbally salved in the usual way by saying that predetermination presupposed individual liberty. Eclecticism thus fell, as usual, between two stools; but it was not orthodoxy that would gain. On another line Jouffroy openly bantered the authoritarians on their appeal to a popular judgment which they declared to be incapable of pronouncing on religious questions. [1967]

7. On retrospect, the whole official French philosophy of the period, however conservative in profession, is found to have been at bottom rationalistic, and only superficially friendly to faith. The Abbé Felice de Lamennais declaimed warmly against L'indifférence en matière de religion (4 vols. 1818-24), resorting to the old Catholic device, first employed by Montaigne, of turning Pyrrhonism against unbelief. Having ostensibly discredited the authority of the senses and the reason (by which he was to be read and understood), he proceeded in the customary way to set up the ancient standard of the consensus universalis, the authority of the majority, the least reflective and the most fallacious. This he sought to elevate into a kind of corporate wisdom, superior to all individual judgment; and he marched straight into the countersense of claiming the pagan consensus as a confirmation of religion in general, while arguing for a religion which claimed to put aside paganism as error. The final logical content of the thesis was the inanity that the majority for the time being must be right.

Damiron, writing his Essai sur l'histoire de la philosophie en France au XIXe Siècle in 1828, replies in a fashion more amiable than reassuring, commenting on the "strange skepticism" of Lamennais as to the human reason. [1968] For himself, he takes up the parable of Lessing, and declares that where Lessing spoke doubtfully, men had now reached conviction. It was no longer a question of whether, but of when, religion was to be recast in terms of fuller intelligence. "In this religious regeneration we shall be to the Christians what the Christians were to the Jews, and the Jews to the patriarchs: we shall be Christians and something more." The theologian of the future will be half-physicist, half-philosopher. "We shall study God through nature and through men; and a new Messiah will not be necessary to teach us miraculously what we can learn of ourselves and by our natural lights." Christianity has been a useful discipline; but "our education is so advanced that henceforth we can be our own teachers; and, having no need of an extraneous inspiration, we draw faith from science." [1969] "Prayer is good, doubtless," but it "has only a mysterious, uncertain, remote action on our environment." [1970] All this under Louis Philippe, from a professor at the École Normale. Not to this day has official academic philosophy in Britain ventured to go so far. In France the brains were never out, even under the Restoration. Lamennais himself gave the proof. His employment of skepticism as an aid to faith had been, like Montaigne's, the expression of a temperament slow to reach rational positions, but surely driven thither. As a boy of twelve, when a priest sought to prepare him for communion, he had shown such abnormal incredulity that the priest gave him up; and later he read omnivorously among the deists of the eighteenth century, Rousseau attracting him in particular. Later he passed through a religious crisis, slowly covering ground which others traverse early. He did not become a communicant till he was twenty-two; he entered the seminary only at twenty-seven; and he was ordained only when he was nearly thirty-two.

Yet he had experienced much. Already in 1808 his Réflexions sur l'état de l'église had been suppressed by Napoleon's police; in 1814 he had written, along with his brother, in whose seminary he taught mathematics, a treatise maintaining the papal claims; and in the Hundred Days of 1815 he took flight to London. His mind was always at work. His Essay on Indifference expressed his need of a conviction; with unbelief he could reckon and sympathize; with indifference he could not; but when the indifference was by his own account the result of reflective unbelief he treated it in the same fashion as the spontaneous form. At bottom, his quarrel was with reason. Yet the very element in his mind which prompted his anti-rational polemic was ratiocinative; and as he slowly reached clearness of thought he came more and more into conflict with Catholicism. It was all very well to flout the individual reason in the name of the universal; but to give mankind a total infallibility was not the way to satisfy a pope or a Church which claimed a monopoly of the gift. In 1824 he was well received by the pope; but when in 1830 he began to write Liberal articles in the journal L'Avenir, in which he collaborated with Lacordaire, the Comte de Montalembert, and other neo-Catholics, offence was quickly taken, and the journal was soon suspended. Lamennais and his disciples Lacordaire and Montalembert went to Rome to plead their cause, but were coldly received; and on their way home in 1832 received at Munich a missive of severe reprimand.

Rendering formal obedience, Lamennais retired, disillusioned, with his friends to his and his brother's estate in Brittany, and began his process of intellectual severance. In January, 1833, he performed mass, and at this stage he held by his artificial distinction between the spheres of faith and reason. In May of that year he declared his determination to place himself "as a writer outside of the Church and Catholicism," declaring that "outside of Catholicism, outside faith, there is reason; outside of the Church there is humanity; I place myself (je me renferme) in this sphere." [1971] Still he claimed to be simple fidèle en religion, and to combine "fidelity in obedience with liberty in science." [1972] In January of 1834, however, he had ceased to perform any clerical function; and his Paroles d'un Croyant, published in that year, stand for a faith which the Church reckoned as infidelity.

Lacordaire, separating from his insubordinate colleague, published an Examen de la philosophie de M. de Lamennais, in which the true papal standpoint was duly taken. Thenceforth Lamennais was an Ishmaelite. Feeling as strongly in politics as in everything else, he was infuriated by the brutal suppression of the Polish rising in 1831-32; and the government of Louis Philippe pleased him as little as that of Charles X had done. In 1841 he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment for his brochure Le pays et le gouvernement (1840). Shortly before his death in 1854 he claimed that he had never changed: "I have gone on, that is all." But he had in effect changed from a Catholic to a pantheist; [1973] and in 1848, as a member of the National Assembly, he more than once startled his colleagues by "an affectation of impiety." [1974] On his deathbed he refused to receive the curé of the parish, and by his own wish he was buried without any religious ceremony, in the fosse commune of the poor and with no cross on his grave.

Such a type does not very clearly belong to rationalism; and Lamennais never enrolled himself save negatively under that flag. Always emotional and impulsive, he had in his period of aggressive fervour as a Churchman played a rather sinister part in the matter of the temporary insanity of Auguste Comte, lending himself to the unscrupulous tactics of the philosopher's mother, who did not stick at libelling her son's wife in order to get him put under clerical control. [1975] It was perhaps well for him that he was forced out of the Church; for his love of liberty was too subjective to have qualified him for a wise use of power. But the spectacle of such a temperament forced into antagonism with the Church on moral and social grounds could not but stimulate anti-clericalism in France, whatever his philosophy may have done to promote rational thinking.

8. The most energetic and characteristic philosophy produced in the new France was that of Auguste Comte, which as set forth in the Cours de Philosophie Positive (1830-42) practically reaffirmed while it recast and supplemented the essentials of the anti-theological rationalism of the previous age, and in that sense rebuilt French positivism, giving that new name to the naturalistic principle. Though Comte's direct following was never large, it is significant that soon after the completion of his Cours we find Saisset lamenting that the war between the clergy and the philosophers, "suspended by the great political commotion of 1830," had been "revived with a new energy." [1976] The later effort of Comte to frame a politico-ecclesiastical system never succeeded beyond the formation of a politically powerless sect; and the attempt to prove its consistency with his philosophic system by claiming that from the first he had harboured a plan of social regulation [1977] is beside the case. A man's way of thinking may involve intellectual contradictions all through his life; and Comte's did. Positivism in the scientific sense cannot be committed to any one man's scheme for regulating society and conserving "cultus"; and Comte's was merely one of the many evoked in France by the memory of an age of revolutions. It belongs, indeed, to the unscientific and unphilosophic side of his mind, the craving for authority and the temper of ascendency, which connect with his admiration of the medieval Church. Himself philosophically an atheist, he condemned atheists because they mostly contemned his passion for regimentation. By reason of this idiosyncrasy and of the habitually dictatorial tone of his doctrine, he has made his converts latterly more from the religious than from the freethinking ranks. But both in France and in England his philosophy tinged all the new thought of his time, his leading English adherents in particular being among the most esteemed publicists of the day. Above all, he introduced the conception of a "science of society" where hitherto there had ruled the haziest forms of "providentialism." In France the general effect of the rationalistic movement had been such that when Taine, under the Third Empire, assailed the whole "classic" school in his Philosophes classiques (1857), his success was at once generally recognized, and a non-Comtist positivism was thenceforth the ruling philosophy. The same thing has happened in Italy, where quite a number of university professors are explicitly positivist in their philosophic teaching. [1978]

9. In Britain, where abstract philosophy after Berkeley had been mainly left to Hume and the Scotch thinkers who opposed him, metaphysics was for a generation practically overriden by the moral and social sciences; Hartley's Christian Materialism making small headway as formulated by him, though it was followed up by the Unitarian Priestley. The reaction against the Revolution, indeed, seems to have evicted everything in the nature of active philosophic thought from the universities in the first decade of the nineteenth century; at Oxford it was taught in a merely traditionary fashion, in lamentable contrast to what was going on in Germany; [1979] and in Scotland in the 'thirties things had fallen to a similar level. [1980] It was over practical issues that new thought germinated in England. The proof of the change wrought in the direction of native thought is seen in the personalities of the men who, in the teeth of the reaction, applied rationalistic method to ethics and psychology. Bentham and James Mill were in their kindred fields among the most convinced and active freethinkers of their day, the former attacking both clericalism and orthodoxy; [1981] while the latter, no less pronounced in his private opinions, more cautiously built up a rigorously naturalistic psychology in his Analysis of the Human Mind (1829). Bentham's utilitarianism was so essentially anti-Christian that he could hardly have been more disliked by discerning theists if he had avowed his share in the authorship of the atheistic Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion, which, elaborated from his manuscript by no less a thinker than George Grote, was published in 1822. [1982] Pseudonymous as that essay is, it seeks to guard against the risk of prosecution by the elaborate stipulation that what it discusses is always the influence of natural religion on life, revealed religion being another matter. But this is of course the merest stratagem, the whole drift of the book being a criticism of the effects of the current religion on contemporary society. It greatly influenced J. S. Mill, whose essay on The Utility of Religion echoes its beginning; and if it had been a little less drab in style it might have influenced many more.

But Bentham's ostensible restriction of his logic to practical problems of law and morals secured him a wider influence than was wielded by any of the higher publicists of his day. The whole tendency of his school was intensely rationalistic; and it indirectly affected all thought by its treatment of economics, which from Hume and Smith onwards had been practically divorced from theology. Even clerical economists, such as Malthus and Chalmers, alike orthodox in religion, furthered naturalism in philosophy in spite of themselves by their insistence on the law of population, which is the negation of divine benevolence as popularly conceived. A not unnatural result was a religious fear of all reasoning whatever, and a disparagement of the very faculty of reason. This, however, was sharply resisted by the more cultured champions of orthodoxy, [1983] to the great advantage of critical discussion.

10. When English metaphysical philosophy revived with Sir William Hamilton, [1984] it was on the lines of a dialectical resistance to the pantheism of Germany, in the interests of faith; though Hamilton's dogmatic views were always doubtful. [1985] Admirably learned, and adroit in metaphysical fence, he always grounded his theism on the alleged "needs of our moral nature"--a declaration of philosophical bankruptcy. The vital issue was brought to the front after his death in the Bampton Lectures (1858) of his supporter Dean Mansel; and between them they gave the decisive proof that the orthodox cause had been philosophically lost while being socially won, since their theism emphasized in the strongest way the negative criticism of Kant, leaving deity void of all philosophically cognizable qualities. Hamilton and Mansel alike have received severe treatment at the hands of Mill and others for the calculated irrationalism and the consequent immoralism of their doctrine, which insisted on attributing moral bias to an admittedly Unknowable Absolute, and on standing for Christian mysteries on the skeptical ground that reason is an imperfect instrument, and that our moral faculties and feelings "demand" the traditional beliefs. But they did exactly what was needed to force rationalism upon open and able minds. It is indeed astonishing to find so constantly repeated by trained reasoners the old religious blunder of reasoning from the inadequacy of reason to the need for faith. The disputant says in effect: "Our reason is not to be trusted; let us then on that score rationally decide to believe what is handed down to us": for if the argument is not a process of reasoning it is nothing; and if it is to stand, it is an assertion of the validity it denies. Evidently the number of minds capable of such self-stultification is great; but among minds at once honest and competent the number capable of detecting the absurdity must be considerable; and the invariable result of its use down to our own time is to multiply unbelievers in the creed so absurdly defended.

It is difficult to free Mansel from the charge of seeking to confuse and bewilder; but mere contact with the processes of reasoning in his Bampton Lectures is almost refreshing after much acquaintance with the see-saw of vituperation and platitude which up to that time mostly passed muster for defence of religion in nineteenth-century England. He made for a revival of intellectual life. And he suffered enough at the hands of his co-religionists, including F. D. Maurice, to set up something like compassion in the mind of the retrospective rationalist. Accused of having adopted "the absolute and infinite, as defined after the leaders of German metaphysics," as a "synonym for the true and living God," he protested that he had done "exactly the reverse. I assert that the absolute and infinite, as defined in the German metaphysics, and in all other metaphysics with which I am acquainted, is a notion which destroys itself by its own contradictions. I believe also that God is, in some manner incomprehensible by me, both absolute and infinite; and that those attributes exist in Him without any repugnance or contradiction at all. Hence I maintain throughout that the infinite of philosophy is not the true infinite." [1986] Charged further with borrowing without acknowledgment from Newman, the Dean was reduced to crediting Newman with "transcendent gifts" while claiming to have read almost nothing by him, [1987] and winding up with a quotation from Newman inviting men to seek solace from the sense of nescience in blind belief.

It was said of Hamilton that, "having scratched his eyes out in the bush of reason, he scratched them in again in the bush of faith"; and when that could obviously be said also of his reverend pupil, the philosophic tide was clearly on the turn. Within two years of the delivery of Mansel's lectures his and Hamilton's philosophic positions were being confidently employed as an open and avowed basis for the naturalistic First Principles (1860-62) of Herbert Spencer, wherein, with an unfortunate laxity of metaphysic on the author's own part, and a no less unfortunate lack of consistency as regards the criticism of religious and anti-religious positions, [1988] the new cosmic conceptions are unified in a masterly conception of evolution as a universal law. This service, the rendering of which was quite beyond the capacity of the multitude of Spencer's metaphysical critics, marks him as one of the great influences of his age. Strictly, the book is a "System of Nature" rather than a philosophy in the sense of a study of the grounds and limitations of knowledge; that is to say, it is on the former ground alone that it is coherent and original. But its very imperfections on the other side have probably promoted its reception among minds already shaken in theology by the progress of concrete science; while at the same time such imperfections give a hostile foothold to the revived forms of theism. In any case, the "agnostic" foundation supplied by the despairing dialectic of Hamilton and Mansel has always constituted the most effective part of the Spencerian case.

11. The effect of the ethical pressure of the deistic attack on the intelligence of educated Christians was fully seen even within the Anglican Church before the middle of the century. The unstable Coleridge, who had gone round the whole compass of opinion [1989] when he began to wield an influence over the more sensitive of the younger Churchmen, was strenuous in a formal affirmation of the doctrine of the Trinity, but no less anxious to modify the doctrine of Atonement on which the conception of the Trinity was historically founded. In the hands of Maurice the doctrine of sacrifice became one of example to the end of subjective regeneration of the sinner. This view, which was developed by John the Scot--perhaps from hints in Origen [1990]--and again by Bernardino Ochino, [1991] is specially associated with the teaching of Coleridge; but it was quite independently held in England before him by the Anglican Dr. Parr (1747-1825), who appears to have been heterodox upon most points in the orthodox creed, [1992] and who, like Servetus and Coleridge and Hegel, held by a modal as against a "personal" Trinity. The advance in ethical sensitiveness which had latterly marked English thought, and which may perhaps be traced in equal degrees to the influence of Shelley and to that of Bentham, counted for much in this shifting of Christian ground. The doctrine of salvation by faith was by many felt to be morally indefensible. Such Unitarian accommodations presumably reconciled to Christianity and the Church many who would otherwise have abandoned them; and the only orthodox rebuttal seems to have been the old and dangerous resort to the Butlerian argument, to the effect that the God of Nature shows no such benign fatherliness as the anti-sacrificial school ascribe to him. [1993] This could only serve to emphasize the moral bankruptcy of Butler's philosophy, to which Mansel, in an astonishing passage of his Bampton Lectures, [1994] had shown himself incredibly blind.

The same pressure of moral argument was doubtless potent in the development of "Socinian" or other rationalistic views in the Protestant Churches of Germany, Holland, Hungary, Switzerland, and France in the first half of the century. Such development had gone so far that by the middle of the century the Churches in question were, to the eye of an English evangelical champion, predominantly rationalistic, and in that sense "infidel." [1995] Reactions have been claimed before and since; but in our own age there is little to show for them. In the United States, again, the ethical element probably predominated in the recoil of Emerson from Christian orthodoxy even of the Unitarian stamp, as well as in the heresy of Theodore Parker, whose aversion to the theistic ethic of Jonathan Edwards was so strong as to make him blind to the reasoning power of that stringent Calvinist.

12. A powerful and wholesome stimulus was given to English thought throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century by the many-sided influence of John Stuart Mill, who, beginning by a brilliant System of Logic (1843), which he followed up with a less durable exposition of the Principles of Political Economy (1848), became through his shorter works On Liberty and on various political problems one of the most popular of the serious writers of his age. It was not till the posthumous issue of his Autobiography and his Three Essays on Religion (1874) that many of his readers realized how complete was his alienation from the current religion, from his childhood up. In his Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865), indeed, he had indignantly repudiated the worship of an unintelligibly good God; but he had there seemed to take for granted the God-idea; and save in inconclusive passages in the Liberty (1859) he had indicated no rejection of Christianity. But though the Liberty was praised by Kingsley and contemned by Carlyle, it made for freethinking no less than for tolerance; and his whole life's work made for reason. "The saint of rationalism" was Gladstone's [1996] account of him as a parliamentarian. His posthumous presentment to the world of the strange conception of a limited-liability God, the victim of circumstances--a theorem which meets neither the demand for a theistic explanation of the universe nor the worshipper's craving for support--sets up some wonder as to his philosophy; but was probably as disintegrative of orthodoxy as a more philosophical performance would have been.

Section 7.--Modern Jewry

In the culture-life of the dispersed Jews, in the modern period, there is probably as much variety of credence in regard to religion as occurs in the life of Christendom so called. Such names as those of Spinoza, Jacobi, Moses Mendelssohn, Heine, and Karl Marx tell sufficiently of Jewish service to freethought; and each one of these must have had many disciples of his own race. Deism among the educated Jews of Germany in the eighteenth century was probably common. [1997] The famous Rabbi Elijah of Wilna (d. 1797), entitled the Gaon, "the great one," set up a movement of relatively rationalistic pietism that led to the establishment in 1803 of a Rabbinical college at Walosin, which has flourished ever since, and had in 1888 no fewer than 400 students, among whose successors there goes on a certain amount of independent study. [1998] In the freer world outside critical thought has asserted itself within the pale of orthodox Judaism; witness such a writer as Nachman Krochmal (1785-1840), whose posthumous Guide to the Perplexed of the Time [1999] (1851), though not a scientific work, is ethically and philosophically in advance of the orthodox Judaism of its age. Of Krochmal it has been said that he "was inspired in his work by the study of Hegel, just as Maimonides had been by the study of Aristotle." [2000] The result is only a liberalizing of Jewish orthodoxy in the light of historic study, [2001] such as went on among Christians in the same period; but it is thus a stepping-stone to further science.

To-day educated Jewry is divided in somewhat the same proportions as Christendom into absolute rationalists and liberal and fanatical believers; and representatives of all three types, of different social grades, may be found among the Zionists, whose movement for the acquisition of a new racial home has attracted so much attention and sympathy in recent years. Whether or not that movement attains to any decisive political success, Judaism clearly cannot escape the solvent influences which affect all European opinion. As in the case of the Christian Church, the synagogue in the centres of culture keeps the formal adherence of some who no longer think on its plane; but while attempts are made from time to time to set up more rationalistic institutions for Jews with the modern bias, the general tendency is to a division between devotees of the old forms and those who have decided to live by reason.

Section 8.--The Oriental Civilizations

We have already seen, in discussing the culture histories of India, China, and Moslem Persia, how ancient elements of rationalism continue to germinate more or less obscurely in the unpropitious soils of Asiatic life. Ignorance is in most oriental countries too immensely preponderant to permit of any other species of survival. But sociology, while recognizing the vast obstacles to the higher life presented by conditions which with a fatal facility multiply the lower, can set no limit to the possibilities of upward evolution. The case of Japan is a sufficient rebuke to the thoughtless iterators of the formula of the "unprogressiveness of the East." While a cheerfully superstitious religion is there still normal among the mass, the transformation of the political ideals and practice of the nation under the influence of European example is so great as to be unparalleled in human history; and it has inevitably involved the substitution of rationalism for supernaturalism among the great majority of the educated younger generation. The late Yukichi Fukuzawa, who did more than any other man to prepare the Japanese mind for the great transformation effected in his time, was spontaneously a freethinker from his childhood; [2002] and through a long life of devoted teaching he trained thousands to a naturalist way of thought. That they should revert to Christian or native orthodoxy seems as impossible as such an evolution is seen to be in educated Hindostan, where the higher orders of intelligence are probably not relatively more common than among the Japanese. The final question, there as everywhere, is one of social reconstruction and organization; and in the enormous population of China the problem, though very different in degree of imminence, is the same in kind. Perhaps the most hopeful consideration of all is that of the ever-increasing inter-communication which makes European and American progress tend in every succeeding generation to tell more and more on Asiatic life.

As to Japan, Professor B. H. Chamberlain pronounced twenty years ago that the Japanese "now bow down before the shrine of Herbert Spencer" (Things Japanese, 3rd ed. 1898, p. 321. Cp. Religious Systems of the World, 3rd ed. p. 103), proceeding in another connection (p. 352) to describe them as essentially an undevotional people. Such a judgment would be hard to sustain. The Japanese people in the past have exhibited the amount of superstition normal in their culture stage (cp. the Voyages de C. P. Thunberg au Japon, French tr. 1796, iii, 206); and in our own day they differ from Western peoples on this side merely in respect of their greater general serenity of temperament. There were in Japan in 1894 no fewer than 71,831 Buddhist temples, and 190,803 Shinto temples and shrines; and the largest temple of all, costing "several million dollars," was built in the last dozen years of the nineteenth century. To the larger shrines there are habitual pilgrimages, the numbers annually visiting one leading Buddhist shrine reaching from 200,000 to 250,000, while at the Shintô shrine of Kompira the pilgrims are said to number about 900,000 each year. (See The Evolution of the Japanese, 1903, by L. Gulick, an American missionary organizer.)

Professor Chamberlain appears to have construed "devotional" in the light of a special conception of true devotion. Yet a Christian observer testifies, of the revivalist sect of Nichirenites, "the Ranters of Buddhism," that "the wildest excesses that seek the mantle of religion in other lands are by them equalled if not excelled" (Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, 1876, p. 163); and Professor Chamberlain admits that "the religion of the family binds them [the Japanese in general, including the 'most materialistic'] down in truly sacred bonds"; while another writer, who thinks Christianity desirable for Japan, though he apparently ranks Japanese morals above Christian, declares that in his travels he was much reassured by the superstition of the innkeepers, feeling thankful that his hosts were "not Agnostics or Secularists," but devout believers in future punishments (Tracy, Rambles through Japan without a Guide, 1892, pp. 131, 276, etc.).

A third authority with Japanese experience, Professor W. G. Dixon, while noting a generation ago that "among certain classes in Japan not only religious earnestness but fanaticism and superstition still prevail," decides that "at the same time it remains true that the Japanese are not in the main a very religious people, and that at the present day religion is in lower repute than probably it has ever been in the country's history. Religious indifference is one of the prominent features of new Japan" (The Land of the Morning, 1882, p. 517). The reconciliation of these estimates lies in the recognition of the fact that the Japanese populace is religious in very much the same way as those of Italy and England, while the more educated classes are rationalistic, not because of any "essential" incapacity for "devotion," but because of enlightenment and lack of countervailing social pressure. To the eye of the devotional Protestant the Catholics of Italy, with their regard to externals, seem "essentially" irreligious; and vice versâ. Such formulas miss science. Two hundred years ago Charron, following previous schematists, made a classification in which northerners figured as strong, active, stupid, warlike, and little given to religion; the southerners as slight, abstinent, obstinate, unwarlike, and superstitious; and the "middle" peoples as between the two. La Sagesse, liv. i, ch. 42. The cognate formulas of to-day are hardly more trustworthy. Buddhism triumphed over Shintôism in Japan both in ancient and modern times precisely because its lore and ritual make so much more appeal to the devotional sense. (Cp. Chamberlain, pp. 358-62; Dixon, ch. x; Religious Systems of the World, pp. 103, 111; Griffis, p. 166.) But the æsthetically charming cult of the family, with its poetic recognition of ancestral spirits (as to which see Lafcadio Hearn, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, 1904), seems to hold its ground as well as any.

So universal is sociological like other law that we find in Japan, among some freethinkers, the same disposition as among some in Europe to decide that religion is necessary for the people. Professor Chamberlain (p. 352) cites Fukuzawa, "Japan's most representative thinker and educationist," as openly declaring that "It goes without saying that the maintenance of peace and security in society requires a religion. For this purpose any religion will do. I lack a religious nature, and have never believed in any religion. I am thus open to the charge that I am advising others to be religious while I am not so. Yet my conscience does not permit me to clothe myself with religion when I have it not at heart.... Of religions there are several kinds--Buddhism, Christianity, and what not. From my standpoint there is no more difference between those than between green tea and black.... See that the stock is well selected and the prices cheap...." (Japan Herald, September 9, 1897). To this view, however, Fukuzawa did not finally adhere. The Rev. Isaac Dooman, a missionary in Japan who knew him well, testifies to a change that was taking place in his views in later life regarding the value of religion. In an unpublished letter to Mr. Robert Young, of Kobe, Mr. Dooman says that on one occasion, when conversing on the subject of Christianity, Fukuzawa remarked: "There was a time when I advocated its adoption as a means to elevate our lower classes; but, after finding out that all Christian countries have their own lower classes just as bad, if not worse than ours, I changed my mind." Further reflection, marked by equal candour, may lead the pupils of Fukuzawa to see that nations cannot be led to adore any form of "tea" by the mere assurance of its indispensableness from leaders who confess they never take any. His view is doubtless shared by those priests concerning whom "it may be questioned whether in their fundamental beliefs the more scholarly of the Shinshiû priests differ very widely from the materialistic agnostics of Europe" (Dixon, p. 516). In this state of things the Christian thinks he sees his special opportunity. Professor Dixon writes (p. 518), in the manner of the missionary, that "decaying shrines and broken gods are to be seen everywhere. Not only is there indifference, but there is a rapidly-growing skepticism.... The masses too are becoming affected by it.... Shintôism and ... Buddhism are doomed. What is to take their place?... It must be either Christianity or Atheism. We have the brightest hopes that the former will triumph in the near future...."

The American missionary before cited, Mr. Gulick, argues alternately that the educated Japanese are religious and that they are not, meaning that they have "religious instincts," while rejecting current creeds. The so-called religious instinct is in fact simply the spirit of moral and intellectual seriousness. Mr. Gulick's summing-up, as distinct from his theory and forecast, is as follows: "For about three hundred years the intelligence of the nation has been dominated by Confucian thought, which rejects active belief in supra-human beings.... The tendency of all persons trained in Confucian classics was towards thoroughgoing skepticism as to divine beings and their relation to this world. For this reason, beyond doubt, has Western agnosticism found so easy an entrance into Japan.... Complete indifference to religion is characteristic of the educated classes of to-day. Japanese and foreigners, Christians and non-Christians alike, unite in this opinion. The impression usually conveyed by this statement, however, is that agnosticism is a new thing in Japan. In point of fact, the old agnosticism is merely reinforced by ... the agnosticism of the West" (The Evolution of the Japanese, pp. 286-87). This may be taken as broadly accurate. Cp. the author's paper on "Freethought in Japan" in the Agnostic Annual for 1906. Professor E. H. Parker notes (China and Religion, 1905, p. 263) that "the Japanese in translating Western books are beginning, to the dismay of our missionaries, to leave out all the Christianity that is in them."

But a very grave danger to the intellectual and moral life of Japan has been of late set up by a new application of Shintôism, on the lines of the emperor-worship of ancient Rome. A recent pamphlet by Professor Chamberlain, entitled The Invention of a New Religion (R. P. A.; 1912), incidentally shows that the Japanese temperament is so far from being "essentially" devoid of devotion as to be capable of building up a fresh cultus to order. It appears that since the so-called Restoration of 1868, when the Imperial House, after more than two centuries of seclusion in Kyoto, was brought from its retirement and the Emperor publicly installed as ruler by right of his divine origin, the sentiment of religious devotion to the Imperial House has been steadily inculcated, reaching its height during the Russo-Japanese War, when the messages of victorious generals and admirals piously ascribed their successes over the enemy to the "virtues of the Imperial Ancestors." In every school throughout the Empire there hangs a portrait of the emperor, which is regarded and treated as is a sacred image in Russia and in Catholic countries. The curators of schools have been known on occasion of fire and earthquake to save the imperial portrait before wife or child; and their action has elicited popular acclamation. On the imperial birthday teachers and pupils assemble, and passing singly before the portrait, bow in solemn adoration. The divine origin of the Imperial House and the grossly mythical history of the early emperors are taught as articles of faith in Japanese schools precisely as the cosmogony of Genesis has been taught for ages in the schools of Christendom. Some years ago a professor who exposed the absurdity of the chronology upon which the religion is based was removed from his post, and a teacher who declined to bow before a casket containing an imperial rescript was dismissed. His life was, in fact, for some time in danger from the fury of the populace. So dominant has Mikado-worship become that some Japanese Christian pastors have endeavoured to reconcile it with Christianity, and to be Mikado-worshippers and Christ-worshippers at the same time. [2003] All creeds are nominally tolerated in Japan, but avowed heresy as to the divine origin of the Imperial House is a bar to public employment, and exposes the heretic to suspicion of treason. The new religion, which is merely old Shintôism revised, has been invented as a political expedient, and may possibly not long survive the decease of Mutsu Hito, the late emperor, who continued throughout his reign to live in comparative seclusion, and has been succeeded by a young prince educated on European lines. But the cult has obtained a strong hold upon the people; and by reason of social pressure receives the conventional support of educated men exactly as Christianity does in England, America, Germany, and Russia.

Thus there is not "plain sailing" for freethought in Japan. In such a political atmosphere neither moral nor scientific thought has a good prognosis; and if it be not changed for the better much of the Japanese advance may be lost. Rationalism on any large scale is always a product of culture; and culture for the mass of the people of Japan has only recently begun. Down till the middle of the nineteenth century nothing more than sporadic freethought existed. [2004] Some famous captains were irreverent as to the omens; and in a seventeenth-century manual of the principles of government, ascribed to the great founder of modern feudalism, Iyéyasu, the sacrifices of vassals at the graves of their lords are denounced, and Confucius is even cited as ridiculing the burial of effigies in substitution. [2005] But, as elsewhere under similar conditions, such displays of originality were confined to the ruling caste. [2006] I have seen, indeed, a delightful popular satire, apparently a product of mother-wit, on the methods of popular Buddhist shrine-making; but, supposing it to be genuine and vernacular, it can stand only for that measure of freethought which is never absent from any society not pithed by a long process of religious tyranny. Old Japan, with its intense feudal discipline and its indurated etiquette, exhibited the social order, the grace, the moral charm, and the intellectual vacuity of a hive of bees. The higher mental life was hardly in evidence; and the ethical literature of native inspiration is of no importance. [2007] To this day the educated Chinese, though lacking in Japanese "efficiency" and devotion to drill of all kinds, are the more freely intellectual in their habits of mind. The Japanese feudal system, indeed, was so immitigably ironbound, so incomparably destructive of individuality in word, thought, and deed, that only in the uncodified life of art and handicraft was any free play of faculty possible. What has happened of late is the rapid and docile assimilation of western science. Another and a necessarily longer step is the independent development of the speculative and critical intelligence; and in the East, as in the West, this is subject to economic conditions.

A similar generalization holds good as to the other Oriental civilizations. Analogous developments to those seen in the latter-day Mohammedan world, and equally marked by fluctuation, have been noted in the mental life alike of the non-Mohammedan and the Mohammedan peoples of India; and at the present day the thought of the relatively small educated class is undoubtedly much affected by the changes going on in that of Europe, and especially of England. The vast Indian masses, however, are far from anything in the nature of critical culture; and though some system of education for them is probably on the way to establishment, [2008] their life must long remain quasi-primitive, mentally as well as physically. Buddhism is theoretically more capable of adaptation to a rationalist view of life than is Christianity; but its intellectual activities at present seem to tend more towards an "esoteric" credulity than towards a rational or scientific adjustment to life.

Of the nature of the influence of Buddhism in Burmah, where it has prospered, a vivid and thoughtful account is given in the work of H. Fielding, The Soul of a People, 1898. At its best the cult there deifies the Buddha; elsewhere, it is interwoven with aboriginal polytheism and superstition (Davids, Buddhism, pp. 207-211; Max Müller, Anthro. Rel., P. 132).

Within Brahmanism, again, there have been at different times attempts to set up partly naturalistic reforms in religious thought--e.g. that of Chaitanya in the sixteenth century; but these have never been pronouncedly freethinking, and Chaitanya preached a "surrender of all to Krishna," very much in the manner of evangelical Christianity. Finally he has been deified by his followers. (Müller, Nat. Rel. p. 100; Phys. Rel. p. 356.)

More definitely freethinking was the monotheistic cult set up among the Sikhs in the fifteenth century, as the history runs, by Nanak, who had been influenced both by Parsees and by Mohammedans, and whose ethical system repudiated caste. But though Nanak objected to any adoration of himself, he and all his descendants have been virtually deified by his devotees, despite their profession of a theoretically pantheistic creed. (Cp. De la Saussaye, Manual of the Science of Religion, Eng. tr. pp. 659-62; Müller, Phys. Rel. p. 355.) Trumpp (Die Religion der Sikhs, 1881, p. 123) tells of other Sikh sects, including one of a markedly atheistic character belonging to the nineteenth century; but all alike seem to gravitate towards Hinduism.

Similarly among the Jainas, who compare with the Buddhists in their nominal atheism as in their tenderness to animals and in some other respects, there has been decline and compromise; and their numbers appear steadily to dwindle, though in India they survived while Buddhism disappeared. Cp. De la Saussaye, Manual, pp. 557-63; Rev. J. Robson, Hinduism, 1874, pp. 80-86; Tiele, Outlines, p. 141. Finally, the Brahmo-Somaj movement of the nineteenth century appears to have come to little in the way of rationalism (Mitchell, Hinduism, pp. 224-46; De la Saussaye, pp. 669-71; Tiele, p. 160).

The principle of the interdependence of the external and the internal life, finally, applies even in the case of Turkey. The notion that Turkish civilization in Europe is unimprovable, though partly countenanced by despondent thinkers even among the enlightened Turks, [2009] had no justification in social science, though bad politics may ruin the Turkish, like other Moslem States; and although Turkish freethinking has not in general passed the theistic stage, [2010] and its spread is grievously hindered by the national religiosity, [2011] which the age-long hostility of the Christian States so much tends to intensify, a gradual improvement in the educational and political conditions would suffice to evolve it, according to the observed laws of all civilization. It may be that a result of the rationalistic evolution in the other European States will be to make them intelligently friendly to such a process, where at present they are either piously malevolent towards the rival creed or merely self-seeking as against each other's influence on Turkish destinies.

In any case, it cannot seriously be pretended that the mental life of Christian Greece in modern times has yielded, apart from services to simple scholarship, a much better result to the world at large than has that of Turkey. The usual reactions in individual cases of course take place. An American traveller writing in 1856 notes how illiterate Greek priests glory in their ignorance, "asserting that a more liberal education has the effect of making atheists of the youth." He adds that he has "known several deacons and others in the University [of Athens] that were skeptics even as to the truth of religion," and would gladly have become laymen if they could have secured a livelihood. [2012] But there was then and later in the century no measurable movement of a rationalistic kind. At the time of the emancipation the Greek priesthood was "in general at once the most ignorant and the most vicious portion of the community"; [2013] and it remained socially predominant and reactionary. "Whatever progress has been made in Greece has received but little assistance from them." [2014] Liberal-minded professors in the theological school were mutinied against by bigoted students, [2015] a type still much in evidence at Athens; and the liberal thinker Theophilus Kaïres, charged with teaching "atheistic doctrines," and found guilty with three of his followers, died of jail fever while his appeal to the Areopagus was pending. [2016]

Thus far Christian bigotry seems to have held its own in what once was Hellas. On the surface, Greece shows little trace of instructed freethought; while in Bulgaria, by Greek testimony, school teachers openly proclaim their rationalism, and call for the exclusion of religious teaching from the schools. [2017] Despite the political freedom of the Christian State, there has thus far occurred there no such general fertilization by the culture of the rest of Europe as is needed to produce a new intellectual evolution of any importance. The mere geographical isolation of modern Greece from the main currents of European thought and commerce is probably the most retardative of her conditions; and it is hard to see how it can be countervailed. Italy, in comparison, is pulsating with original life, industrial and intellectual. But, given either a renascence of Mohammedan civilization or a great political reconstruction such as is latterly on foot, the whole life of the nearer East may take a new departure; and in such an evolution Greece would be likely to share.

CONCLUSION

Any fuller survey of the intellectual history of the nineteenth century will but reveal more fully the signal and ever-widening growth of rational thought among all classes of the more advanced nations, and among the more instructed of the less advanced. The retrospect of the whole past tells of a continuous evolution, which in the twentieth century proceeds more extensively than ever before. There has emerged the curious fact that in our own country a measure of rational doubt has been almost constantly at work in the sphere in which it could perhaps least confidently be expected--to wit, that of poetry. From Chaucer onwards it is hard to find a great orthodox poet. Even Spenser was as much Platonist as Christian; and Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Burns, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson, Arnold, and Browning (to name no others) in their various ways baffle the demand of faith. Latterly, the sex which has always been reckoned the more given to religion has shown many signs of adaptation to the higher law. In Britain, as in France, women began to appear in the ranks of reason in the eighteenth century. [2018] In the nineteenth the number has increased at a significant rate. Already in the fierce battles fought in the time of reaction after the French Revolution women took their place on the side of freedom; and Frances Wright (Madame d'Arusmont) played a notable part as a freethinking publicist and philanthropist. [2019] Since her day the names of Harriet Martineau and George Eliot tell of the continual gain of knowledge; and women rationalists are now to be counted by thousands in all the more civilized countries.

The same law holds of public life in general. Gladstone eagerly maintained in his latter years that politicians, in virtue of their practical hold of life, were little given to skepticism; but the facts were and are increasingly against him. The balance of the evidence is against the ascription of orthodoxy to either of the Pitts, or to Fox; and we have seen that the statesmen of the American Revolution, as of the French, were in general deists. Garibaldi [2020] in Italy, and Gambetta in France, were freethinkers; Lincoln and his opponent, Douglas, were deists; towards the close of the century, in New Zealand, Sir Robert Stout and the late Mr. John Ballance, avowed rationalists, were among the foremost politicians of their generation; and in the English Cabinet rationalism began to be represented in the person of Lord Morley.

While such developments have been possible in the fierce light of political strife, the process of disintegration and decomposition has proceeded in society at large till unbelief can hardly be reckoned a singularity. Within the pale of all the Christian Churches dogmatic belief has greatly dwindled, and goes on dwindling: and "Christianity" is made to figure more and more as an ethical doctrine which has abandoned its historical foundations, while preserving formulas and rituals which have no part in rational ethics. The mythical cosmogony out of which the whole originally grew is no longer believed in by any educated person, though it is habitually presented to the young as divine truth. Thousands of clergymen, economically gripped to a false position, would gladly rectify their professed creeds, but cannot; because the political and economic bases involve the consent of the majority, and changes cannot be made without angry resistance and uproar among the less instructed multitude of all classes. The Protestant Churches collectively dread to figure as repudiating the historic creed; while the Roman Catholic Church, conscious of the situation, maintains a semblance of rigid discipline and a minimum standard of instruction for its adherents, counting on holding its ground while the faculty of uncritical faith subsists. Only by the silent alienation of the more thoughtful and sincere minds from the priesthood can the show of orthodoxy be maintained even within the Catholic pale.

In all orders alike, nevertheless, the "practice" of religion decays with the theory. The Churches are constantly challenged to justify their existence by social reforms and philanthropic works: no other plea passes as generally valid; and it is only by reason of a general transference of interest from religious to social problems that the decay of belief is disguised. "Piety," in the old sense, counts relatively for little; and while orthodoxy is still a means of advantage in political life, religion counts for nothing in international relations. In the war of 1899-1902, "Bible-loving" England forced a quarrel on the most Bible-loving race in the world; and at the time of the penning of these lines six nations are waging the greatest war of all time irrespectively of racial and religious ties alike, though all alike officially claim the support of Omnipotence. In Berlin a popular preacher edifies great audiences by proclaiming that "God is not neutral"; and his Emperor habitually parades the same faith, with the support of all the theologians of Germany--the State supremely guilty of the whole embroilment, and the deliberate perpetrator of the grossest aggression in modern history. On the side of the Allies "Christianity" is less systematically but still frequently invoked. On both sides the forms of prayer are officially practised by the non-combatants, very much as the Romans in their wars maintained the practice of augury from the entrails of sacrificed victims; and "family prayer" is said to be reviving.

Everywhere, nevertheless, the more rational, remembering how in the "ages of faith" deadly wars were waged for whole generations in the very name of religion, recognize that Christianity furnishes neither control for the present nor solution for the future; and that the hope of civilization lies in the resort of the nations to human standards of sanity and reciprocity. The ties which hold are those of fellow-citizenship.

There can be no doubt among rationalists that if modern civilization escapes the ruin which militarism brought upon those of all previous eras, the principle of reason will continually widen its control, latterly seen to be everywhere strengthening apart from the dangerous persistence of militarist ideals and impulses. When it controls international relations, it will be dominant in the life of thought. In the words of a great fighter for freethought, "No man ever saw a religion die"; and there are abundant survivals of pre-Christian paganism in Europe after two thousand years of Christianity; but it seems likely that when the history of the twentieth century is written it will be recognized that what has historically figured as religion belongs in all its forms to the past.

The question is sometimes raised whether the age of decline will be marked by movements of active and persecuting fanaticism. Here, again, the answer must be that everything depends upon the general fortunes of civilization. It is significant that a number of clerical voices proclaim a revival of religion as a product of war, while others complain that the state of struggle has a sterilizing effect upon religious life. While organized religions subsist, there will always be adherents with the will to persecute; and from time to time acts of public persecution occur, in addition to many of a private character. But in Britain public persecution is latterly restricted to cases in which the technical offence of "blasphemy" is associated with acts which come under ordinary police jurisdiction. After the unquestionable blasphemies of Arnold and Swinburne had to be officially ignored, it became impossible, in the present stage of civilization, that any serious and decent literary indictment of the prevailing creeds should be made a subject of persecution; and before long, probably, such indictments will be abandoned in the cases of offenders against police regulations.

The main danger appears to lie in Catholic countries, and from the action of the Catholic hierarchy. The common people everywhere, save in the most backward countries, are increasingly disinclined to persecution. In Ireland there is much less of that spirit among the Catholic population than among that of Protestant Ulster. But the infamous execution of Francisco Ferrer in Spain, in 1909, which aroused passionate reprobation in every civilized country, was defended in England and elsewhere with extravagant baseness by Catholic littérateurs, who, with their reactionary priests, are the last to learn the lesson of tolerance. The indignation everywhere excited by the judicial murder [2021] of Ferrer, however, gives promise that even the most zealous fanatics of the Catholic Church will hesitate again to rouse the wrath of the nations by such a reversion to the methods of the eras of religious rule.

NOTES

[1] Stow's Annals, ed. 1615, pp. 570, 575.

[2] Burnet, Hist. of the Reformation, ed. Nares, ii, 179; iii, 289; Strype, Memorials of Cranmer, ed. 1848-54, ii, 100.

[3] The Marian persecutions undoubtedly did much to stimulate Protestantism. It is not generally realized that many of the burnings of heretics under Mary were quasi-sacrifices on her behalf. On each occasion of her hopes of pregnancy being disappointed, some victims were sent to the stake. See Strype, ed. cited, iii, 196, and Peter Martyr, there cited; Froude, ed. 1870, v, 521 sq., 539 sq. The influence of Spanish ecclesiastics may be inferred. The expulsions of the Jews and the Moriscoes from Spain were by way of averting the wrath of God. Still, a Spanish priest at Court preached in favour of mercy. Lingard, ed. 1855, v, 231.

[4] The number slain was certainly not small. It amounted to at least 190, perhaps to 204. Soames, Elizabethan Religious History, 1839, p. 596-98. Under Mary there perished some 288. Durham Dunlop, The Church under the Tudors, 1869, p. 104 and refs.

[5] Soames, as cited, pp. 213-18, and refs.

[6] Froude, Hist. of England, ed. 1870, x, 545 (ed. 1875, xi, 199), citing MSS. Ireland.

[7] Gloss to February in the Shepherd's Calendar, Globe ed. pp. 451-52.

[8] Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, Arber's reprint, pp. 140, 153. That the reference was mainly to Oxford is to be inferred from the address "To my verie good friends the Gentlemen Schollers of Oxford," prefixed to the ed. of 1581. Id. p. 207.

[9] Id. p. 158.

[10] Id. pp. 161, 166.

[11] Essay Of Atheism.

[12] Lecky, Rationalism, i, 103-104. Scot's book (now made accessible by a reprint, 1886) had practically no influence in his own day; and King James, who wrote against it, caused it to be burned by the hangman in the next. Scot inserts the "infidelitie of atheists" in the list of intellectual evils on his title-page; but save for an allusion to "the abhomination of idolatrie" all the others indicted are aspects of the black art.

[13] "No woman ever lived who was so totally destitute of the sentiment of religion" (Green, Short History, ch. vii, § 3, p. 369).

[14] Cp. Soames, Elizabethan Religious History, 1839, p. 225. Yet when Morris, the attorney of the Duchy of Lancaster, introduced in Parliament a Bill to restrain the power of the ecclesiastical courts, she had him dismissed and imprisoned for life, being determined that the control should remain, through those courts, in her own hands. Heylyn, Hist. of the Reformation, ed. 1849, pref. vol. i, pp. xiv-xv.

[15] See above, vol. i, pp. 435, 446, 459.

[16] Collier's Reprint, p. 190.

[17] Camden, Annals of Elizabeth, sub. ann. 1580; 3rd ed. 1635, p. 218. Cp. Soames, p. 214.

[18] Hooker, Pref. to Ecclesiastical Polity, ch. iii, § 9, ed. 1850. Camden (p. 219) states that the Dutch teacher Henry Nichalai, whose works were translated for the sect, "gave out that he did partake of God, and God of his humanity."

[19] See above, i, 458, as to a much more pronounced heresy in 1549, which also seems to have escaped punishment. Camden tells that the books of the "Family of Love" were burnt in 1580, but mentions no other penalties. Stow records that on October 9, 1580, "proclamation was published at London for the apprehension and severe punishing of all persons suspected to be of the family of love." Ed. 1615, p. 687. Five of them had been frightened into a public recantation in 1575. Id. p. 679.

[20] May 13, 1579. The burning was on the 20th.

[21] Stow's Annals, ed. 1580, pp. 1, 194-95. Ed. 1615, p. 695.

[22] Stow, ed. 1615, p. 697; David's Evidence, by William Burton, Preacher of Reading, 1592 (?), p. 125.

[23] Stow, ed. 1615, p. 696.

[24] Burton, as cited. See below, pp. 7, 12, as to Kett's writings.

[25] Art. Matthew Hamond, in Dict. of Nat. Biog.

[26] Art. Francis Kett, in Dict. of Nat. Biog.

[27] Prof. Storojenko, Life of Greene, Eng. tr. in Grosart's "Huth Library" ed. of Greene's Works, i, 42-50. It is quite clear that Malone and the critics who have followed him were wrong in supposing the unnamed instructor to be Francis Kett, who was a devout Unitarian. Prof. Storojenko speaks of Kett as having been made an Arian at Norwich, after his return there in 1585, by the influence of Lewes and Haworth. Query Hamond?

[28] In Pierce's Supererogation, Collier's ed. p. 85.

[29] Rep. of Nashe's Works in Grosart's "Huth Library" ed. vol. iv, pp. 172, 173, 178, 182, 183. etc. Ed. McKerrow. 1904, ii, 114-129.

[30] MS. Harl. 6853, fol. 320. It is given in full in the appendix to the first issue of the selected plays of Marlowe in the Mermaid Series, edited by Mr. Havelock Ellis: and, with omissions, in the editions of Cunningham, Dyce, and Bullen.

[31] Act II, sc. i.

[32] Grosart's ed. in "Temple Dramatists" series, 11. 246-371. There is plenty of "irreligion" in the passage, but not atheism, though there is a denial of a future state (365-70). The lines in question strongly suggest Marlowe's influence or authorship, which indeed is claimed by Mr. C. Crawford for the whole play. But all the external evidence ascribes the play to Greene.

[33] Tamburlaine, Part II, Act II, sc. ii, iii; V, sc. i.

[34] Writing as Andrew Philopater. See Dict. of Nat. Biog., art. Robert Parsons, and Storojenko, as cited, i, 36, and note.

[35] Translated into Latin by Henri Estienne in 1562.

[36] Remains of Sir Walter Raleigh, ed. 1657, p. 123.

[37] Bk. i, ch. i, sec. 11.

[38] Bk. ii, ch. i, sec. 7.

[39] Essay on the Prometheus.

[40] Art. Raleigh, in Dict. of Nat. Biog., xlvii, 192.

[41] Id. pp. 200-201.

[42] Report in 1736 ed. of History of the World, p. ccxlix. "Harpool" seems an error for Harriott. Cp. Edwards, Life of Sir Walter Raleigh, 1868, i, 432, 436. It is after naming "Harpool" that the judge says: "Let not any devil persuade you to think there is no eternity in heaven."

[43] Ed. cited, p. xxviii.

[44] Id. p. xxiv.

[45] Id. p. xxii.

[46] Id. p. xvi.

[47] Cp. Gardiner, History of England, 1603-1642, 10-vol. ed. i, 132-35; iii, 150, 152.

[48] Ed. cited, p. xxii.

[49] Title of verses appended to trans. of Achilles Shield, 1598. Chapman spells the name Harriots.

[50] Pref. to complete trans. of Iliad.

[51] Bk. v, ch. ii, §§ 1-4. Works, ed. 1850, i, 432-36.

[52] Exposition upon Nehemiah (1585) in Parker Soc. ed. of Works, 1812, p. 401.

[53] Work cited, pp. 8-11, 22.

[54] Works, i, 432; ii, 762-63.

[55] Eccles. Pol. bk. i, ch. vii; bk. ii, ch. i, vii; bk. iii, ch. viii, § 16; bk. v, ch. viii; bk. vii, ch. xi; bk. viii, § 6 (Works, i, 165, 231, 300, 446; ii, 388, 537). See the citations in Buckle, 3-vol. ed. iii, 341-42; 1-vol. ed. pp. 193-94.

[56] Supplication of Travers, in Hooker's Works, ed. 1850, ii, 662.

[57] Answer to Travers, id. p. 693.

[58] Some typical attempts of the kind are discussed in the author's two lectures on The Religion of Shakespeare, 1887 (South Place Institute).

[59] Shakespeare Commentaries, Eng. tr. 1863, ii, 618-19.

[60] Id. ii, 586.

[61] In the last edition I had written to that effect; but I have modified the opinion.

[62] The allusion to "popish ceremonies" in Titus Andronicus is probably from his hand. See the author's work, Did Shakespeare Write "Titus Andronicus"?, where it is argued that the play in question is substantially Peele's and Greene's.

[63] Shakespeare Soc. rep. 1853, pp. 14, 16-17, 18, 24, 28, etc.

[64] This has been shown to be his by Fleay and Mr. Crawford.

[65] See his Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance.

[66] Compare the Jane Shore portions of his Edward IV with the close of A Woman Killed with Kindness. Note also the conclusion of The English Traveller.

[67] See the poem England's Elizabeth, 1631.

[68] Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, i, fol. 96.

[69] E.g., the lines,

The best of men That e'er wore earth about him, was a sufferer, A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit, The first true gentleman that ever breathed,

at the close of Part I of The Honest Whore; and the phrase, "Heaven's great arithmetician," at the close of Old Fortunatus.

[70] Green, Short Hist. ch. vii, § 7 end. Cp. Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, Lect. iii, § 115.

[71] The old work of W. J. Birch, M.A., An Inquiry into the Philosophy and Religion of Shakspere (1848), is an unjudicial ex parte statement of the case for Shakespeare's unbelief; but it is worth study.

[72] The town paid for his bread and wine, no doubt by way of compliment.

[73] Cp. the author's Montaigne and Shakespeare, 2nd ed. sec. viii.

[74] A Woorke concerning the trewnesse of the Christian Religion, 1587. Reprinted in 1592, 1604, and 1617.

[75] As to the expert analysis of this play, which shows it to be in large part Fletcher's, see Furnivall, as cited, pp. xciii-xcvi.

[76] Cp. Seccombe and Allen, The Age of Shakspere, 1903, ii, 189.

[77] Alberti, Briefe betreffende den Zustand der Religion in Gross-Britannien, Hanover, 1752, ii, 429. Alberti reads "God" at the end of the passage; I follow Grosart's edition.

[78] Hallam, Lit. Europe, ii, 371, 376; Pattison, Isaac Casaubon, 2nd ed. p. 286 sq.

[79] Pattison, as cited, p. 290; G. W. Johnson, Memoirs of John Selden, 1835, pp. 56-70.

[80] Memoirs cited, pp. 60-61. On the whole question see the Review appended by Selden to his History after a few copies had been distributed.

[81] Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Grosart, 1876, i, 82, 83.

[82] Essaies Politicke and Morall, by D. T. Gent, 1608, fol. 9.

[83] Act iv, sc. 1.

[84] Act i, sc. 1. Jonson himself could have been so indicted on the strength of certain verses.

[85] He had been offered professorships of divinity at Saumur and Marburg.

[86] Gardiner, History of England, 1603-1642, 4th ed. ii, 128. Cp. Bayle, art. Vorstius, Note N. By his theological opponents and by James, Vorstius was of course called an atheist. He was in reality not a Socinian, but a "strict Arian, who believed that the Son of God was at first created by the Father, and then delegated to create the universe--a sort of inferior deity, who was nevertheless entitled to religious homage" (James Nichols, note to App. P. on Brandt's Life of Arminius in Works of Arminius, 1825, i, 218). Nichols gives a full survey of the subject, pp. 202-237. Fuller (Ch. Hist. B. x, cent. 17, sec. iv, §§ 1-5) tells the story, and pronounces the opinions of Vorstius "fitter to be remanded to hell than committed to writing."

[87] Bayle (art. cited, Note F) says both Universities, as does Fuller. At the Synod of Dort, however, the British representatives read only, it seems, a decree (dated Sept. 21, 1611) of the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, ordering the burning of the book there. (Nichols, Account of the Synod of Dort, in Works of Arminius, i, 497).

[88] Gardiner, pp. 129-30. Fuller (as last cited, §§ 6-14) gives a list of Legate's "damnable tenets." See it in Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner's Penalties upon Opinion, pp. 12-14.

[89] Gardiner, as cited. Fuller is cheerfully acquiescent, though he notes the private demurs, which he denounces. "God," he says, "may seem well pleased with this seasonable severity."

[90] In 1580 Stow records how one Randall was put on trial for "conjuring to know where treasure was hid in the earth and goods feloniously taken were become"; and four others were tried "for being present." Four were found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. Randall was executed, and the others reprieved. (Ed. 1615, p. 688.)

[91] Fuller actually alleges that "there was none ever after that openly avowed these heretical doctrines"--an unintelligible figment.

[92] All reprinted in 1816 for the Hanserd Knollys Society, with histor. introd. by E. B. Underhill, in the vol. Tracts on Liberty of Conscience and Persecution, 1614-1661. They do not speak of Legate or Wightman.

[93] Atheomastix, 1622, pref. Sig. B. 3, verso. The work was posthumous and incomplete.

[94] Bk. i, ch. i, p. 5.

[95] In the Advancement of Learning, bk. i (Routledge ed. p. 54), he himself notes how, long before his time, the new learning had in part discredited the schoolmen.

[96] Filum Labyrinthi--an English version of the Cogitata et Visa--§ 7.

[97] Cp. Huarte, cited above, p. 471.

[98] Nov. Org. bk. i. Aph. 62 (Works, Routledge ed. p. 271).

[99] Id. Aph. 65.

[100] Id. ib. Cp. the Advancement of Learning, bk. ii, and the De Augmentis, bk. ix, near end. (Ed. cited, pp. 173, 634.)

[101] Nov. Org. Aph. 89. Cp. Aph. 46, 49, 96; the Valerius Terminus, ch. xxv; the English Filum Labyrinthi, § 7; and the De Principiis atque Originibus (ed. cited, p. 650).

[102] Valerius Terminus, cap. i. (Ed. cited, p. 188.)

[103] Id. p. 187; Filum Labyrinthi, p. 209.

[104] Bk. ix, ch. i. (Ed. cited, p. 631.) Compare Valerius Terminus, ch. i (p. 186), and De Aug. bk. iii, ch. ii (p. 456), as to the impossibility of knowing the will and character of God from Nature, though (De Aug. last cit.) it reveals his power and glory.

[105] Advancement, bk. i (ed. cited, p. 45). Cp. Valerius Terminus, ch. i (p. 187).

[106] Advancement, bk. ii; De Augmentis, bk. iii, chs. iv and v; Valerius Terminus, ch. xxv; Novum Organum, bk. i, Aph. 48; bk. ii, Aph. 2. (Ed. cited, pp. 96, 205, 266, 302, 471, 473.)

[107] De Principiis atque Originibus. (Ed. cited, pp. 649-50.) Elsewhere (De Aug. bk. iii, ch. iv, p. 471) he expressly puts it that the system of Democritus, which "removed God and mind from the structure of things," was more favourable to true science than the teleology and theology of Plato and Aristotle.

[108] Id. pp. 651, 657.

[109] Id. p. 648.

[110] De Augmentis, bk. iii, ch. ii; bk. iv, ch. ii. (Ed. cited, pp. 456, 482.)

[111] Id. bk. ii, ch. i. (Ed. cited, p. 428.)

[112] De Augmentis, ed. cited, p. 73.

[113] No. xviii, Diomedes. Ed. cited, p. 841.

[114] De Principiis atque Originibus, p. 664.

[115] Nov. Org. i. 89; Filum Labyrinthi, § 7; Essay 16.

[116] Francis Osborn, pref. to his "Miscellany," in Works, 7th ed. 1673.

[117] Cp. Valerius Terminus, ch. i.

[118] This is noted by Glassford in his tr. of the Novum Organum (1844, p. 26); and by Ellis in his and Spedding's edition of the Works. (Routledge ed. pp. 32, 473, note.)

[119] De Augmentis, bk. iii, ch. iv, end.

[120] Essay 57, Of Anger.

[121] Valerius Terminus, ch. xxv.

[122] De Principiis, ed. cited, pp. 648-49. Cp. pp. 612-43.

[123] Id. p. 648.

[124] Valerius Terminus, ch. ii; De Augmentis, bk. v, ch. iv. Ed. cited, pp. 199, 517.

[125] Cp. Brewster, Life of Newton, 1855, ii, 400-404; Draper, Intel. Devel. of Europe, ed. 1875, ii, 258-60; Dean Church, Bacon, pp. 180-201; Fowler, Bacon, ch. vi; Lodge, Pioneers of Science, pp. 145-51; Lange, Gesch. d. Materialismus, i, 197 sq. (Eng. tr. i, 236-37), and cit. from Liebig--as to whom, however, see Fowler, pp. 133, 157.

[126] Novum Organum, ii, 46 and 48, § 17; De Aug. iii, 4; Thema Coeli. Ed. cited, pp. 364, 375, 461, 705, 709. Whewell (Hist. of Induct. Sciences, 3rd ed. i, 296, 298) ignores the second and third of these passages in denying Hume's assertion that Bacon rejected the Copernican theory with "disdain." It is true, however, that Bacon had vacillated. The facts are fairly faced by Prof. Fowler in his Bacon, 1881, pp. 151-52, and his ed. of Novum Organum, Introd. pp. 30-36. See also the summing-up of Ellis in notes to passages above cited, and at p. 675.

[127] Aubrey, Lives of Eminent Persons, ed. 1813, vol. ii, pt. ii, p. 383.

[128] See notes in ed. cited, pp. 50, 53, 61, 63, 68, 75, 76, 84, 110.

[129] Fowler, ed. of Nov. Org. § 14, pp. 101-104.

[130] Id. § 14, p. 108; Ellis in ed. cited, p. 643.

[131] Rawley's Life, in ed. cited, p. 9; Osborn, as above cited; Fowler, ed. of Nov. Org. Introd. § 14; T. Martin, Character of Bacon, 1835, pp. 216, 227, 222-23.

[132] Cp. Fowler, Bacon, pp. 139-41; Mill, Logic, bk. vi, ch. v, § 5; Jevons, Princ. of Science, 1-vol. ed. p. 576; Tyndall, Scientific Use of the Imagination, 3rd ed. pp. 4, 8-9, 42-43; T. Martin, as cited, pp. 210-38; Bagehot, Postulates of Eng. Polit. Econ. ed. 1885, pp. 18-19; Ellis and Spedding, in ed. cited, pp. x, xii, 22, 389. The notion of a dialectic method which should mechanically enable any man to make discoveries is an irredeemable fallacy, and must be abandoned. Bacon's own remarkable anticipation of modern scientific thought in the formula that heat is a mode of motion (Nov. Org. ii, 20) is not mechanically yielded by his own process, noteworthy and suggestive though that is.

[133] Pref. Epistle.

[134] Works, ed. Dublin. 1766, p. 159; ed. 1910, p. 344.

[135] Kohlrausch, Hist. of Germany, Eng. tr. p. 385.

[136] Moritz Ritter, Geschichte der deutschen Union, 1867-73, ii, 55.

[137] Menzel, Geschichte der Deutschen, 3te Aufl. Cap. 416.

[138] Cp. Gardiner, Thirty Years' War, pp. 12-13; Kohlrausch, p. 438; Pusey, Histor. Enq. into Ger. Rationalism, pp. 9-25; Henderson, Short Hist. of Germany, i, ch. xvi.

[139] Kohlrausch, p. 439. A specially strong reaction set in about 1573. Ritter, Geschichte der deutschen Union, i, 19. Cp. Menzel, Cap. 433.

[140] Cp. Gardiner, Thirty Years' War, pp. 16, 18, 21; Kohlrausch, p. 370.

[141] As to this see Moritz Ritter, as cited, i, 9, 27; ii, 122 sq.; Dunham, Hist. of the Germanic Empire, iii, 186; Henderson, i, 411 sq.

[142] Freytag, Bilder aus d. deutschen Vergangenheit, Bd. ii, 1883, p. 381; Bd. iii, ad init.

[143] Cp. Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, i, 53-83.

[144] Freytag, Bilder, Bd. ii, Abth. ii, p. 378.

[145] The Pope and the Council, Eng. tr. p. 260; French tr. p. 285.

[146] De Praestigiis Daemonum, 1563. See it described by Lecky, Rationalism, i, 85-87; Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ii, 76.

[147] By Dutch historians Wier is claimed as a Dutchman. He was born at Grave, in North Brabant, but studied medicine at Paris and Orleans, and after practising physic at Arnheim in the Netherlands was called to Düsseldorf as physician to the Duke of Jülich, to whom he dedicated his treatise. His ideas are probably traceable to his studies in France.

[148] His collected works (1632) amount to nearly 7,000 folio pages. J. Ten Brink, Kleine Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Letteren, 1882, p. 91.

[149] Ten Brink, p. 86. Jonckbloet (Beknopte Geschiedenis der Nederl. Letterkunde, ed. 1880, p. 148) is less specific.

[150] Ten Brink, pp. 89-90.

[151] Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ii, 83.

[152] Ten Brink, p. 87.

[153] Jonckbloet, Beknopte Geschiedenis, p. 149; Ten Brink, p. 91; Bayle, Dictionnaire, art. Koornhert; Pünjer, Hist. of the Chr. Philos. of Religion, Eng. tr. p. 269; Dr. E. Gosse, art. on Dutch Literature in Encyc. Brit. 9th ed. xii, 93.

[154] Ten Brink, p. 91.

[155] Flint, Vico, p. 142.

[156] De Jure Belli et Pacis, proleg. §§ 11, 16.

[157] Bayle, art. Voelkel.

[158] Schlegel's note on Mosheim, Reid's ed. p. 862.

[159] Nelson, Life of Bishop Bull, 2nd ed. 1714, p. 392.

[160] Nicéron, Mémoires pour servir, etc., xiv (1731), 340 sq. One of the replies is the Justa Detestatio sceleratissimi libelli Adriani Beverlandi De Peccato Originali, by Leonard Ryssen, 1680. A very free version of Beverland's book appeared in French in 1714 under the title Etat de l'Homme dans le Peché Originel. It reached a sixth edition in 1741.

[161] Nelson, Life of Bishop Bull, as cited, p. 280.

[162] Krasinski, Ref. in Poland, 1840, ii, 363; Mosheim, 16 Cent. sec. iii, pt. ii, ch. iv, § 22. Budny translated the Bible, with rationalistic notes.

[163] Krasinski, p. 361.

[164] Mosheim, last cit. § 23, note 4.

[165] Krasinski, p. 367; Wallace, Antitrin. Biog. 1850, ii, 320.

[166] Bayle, art. Fauste Socin. Krasinski, p. 374.

[167] Krasinski, pp. 361-62. Fausto Sozzini also could apparently forgive everybody save those who believed less than he did.

[168] Cp. the inquiry as to Locke's Socinianism in J. Milner's Account of Mr. Lock's Religion out of his own Writings, 1706, and Lessing's Zur Geschichte und Literatur, i, as to Leibnitz's criticism of Sonerus.

[169] Enfield's History of Philosophy (an abstract of Brucker), ed. 1840, p. 537.

[170] In the dominions of Philip II there are said to have been 58 archbishops, 684 bishops, 11,400 abbeys, 23,000 religious fraternities, 46,000 monasteries, 13,500 nunneries, 312,000 secular priests, 400,000 monks, 200,000 friars and other ecclesiastics. H. E. Watts, Miguel de Cervantes, 1895, pp. 67-68. Spain alone had 9,088 monasteries.

[171] Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 484; 1-vol. ed. p. 564, and refs.

[172] Cp. Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 497-99; 1-vol. ed. pp. 572-73; La Rigaudière, Hist. des Perséc. Relig. en Espagne, 1860, pp. 220-26.

[173] Cp. Lewes, Spanish Drama, passim.

[174] "He inspires me only with horror for the faith which he professes. No one ever so far disfigured Christianity; no one ever assigned to it passions so ferocious, or morals so corrupt" (Sismondi, Lit. of South of Europe, Bohn tr. ii, 379).

[175] Ticknor, Hist. of Spanish Lit. 6th ed. ii, 501; Don Quixote, pt. ii, ch. liv; Ormsby, tr. of Don Quixote, 1885, introd. i, 58.

[176] Lafuente, Historia de España, 1856, xvii, 340. It is not quite certain that Lafuente expressed his sincere opinion.

[177] Llorente, ii. 433.

[178] Id. p. 420.

[179] Bouterwek, Hist. of Spanish and Portuguese Literature, Eng. tr. 1823, i, 331.

[180] Id. p. 151.

[181] Part II, ch. xxxvi.

[182] Bouterwek, whose sociology, though meritorious, is ill-clarified, argues that the Inquisition was in a manner congenital to Spain because before its establishment the suspicion of heresy was already "more degrading in Spain than the most odious crimes in other countries." But the same might have been said of the other countries also. As to earlier Spanish heresy see above, vol. i, p. 337 sq.

[183] Despite the many fallacies retained by Copernicus from the current astronomy, he must be pronounced an exceptionally scientific spirit. Trained as a mathematician, astronomer, and physician, he showed a keen and competent interest in the practical problem of currency; and one of the two treatises which alone he published of his own accord was a sound scheme for the rectification of that of his own government. Though a canon of Frauenburg, he never took orders; but did manifold and unselfish secular service.

[184] It was shielded by thirteen popes--from Paul III to Paul V.

[185] Galileo, Dialogi dei due massimi sistemi del mondo, ii (Opere, ed. 1811, xi, 303-304).

[186] A good study of Bruno is supplied by Owen in his Skeptics of the Italian Renaissance. He has, however, omitted to embody the later discoveries of Dufour and Berti, and has some wrong dates. The Life of Giordano Bruno, by I. Frith (Mrs. Oppenheim), 1887, gives all the data, but is inadequate on the philosophic side. A competent estimate is given in the late Prof. Adamson's lectures on The Development of Modern Philosophy, etc., 1903, ii, 23 sq.; also in his art. in Encyc. Brit. For a hostile view see Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ii, 105-111. The biography of Bartholmèss, Jordano Bruno, 1846, is extremely full and sympathetic, but was unavoidably loose as to dates. Much new matter has since been collected, for which see the Vita di Giordano Bruno of Domenico Berti, rev. and enlarged ed. 1889; Prof. J. L. McIntyre, Giordano Bruno, 1903; Dufour, Giordano Bruno à Génève: Documents Inédits, 1884; David Levi, Giordano Bruno, o la religione del pensiero: l'uomo, l'apostolo e il martire, 1887; Dr. H. Brunnhofer's Giordano Bruno's Weltanschauung und Verhängniss, 1882; and the doctoral treatise of C. Sigwart, Die Lebensgeschichte Giordano Brunos, Tübingen, 1880. For other authorities see Owen's and I. Frith's lists, and the final Literaturnachweis in Gustav Louis's Giordano Bruno, seine Weltanschauung und Lebensverfassung, Berlin, 1900. The study of Bruno has been carried further in Germany than in England; but Mr. Whittaker (Essays and Notices, 1895) and Prof. McIntyre make up much leeway.

[187] Cp. Bartholmèss, i, 49-53; Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, i, 191-94 (Eng. tr. i, 232); Gustav Louis, as cited, pp. 11, 88.

[188] Berti, Vita di Giordano Bruno, 1889, pp. 40-41, 420. Bruno gives the facts in his own narrative before the Inquisitors at Venice.

[189] Berti, pp. 42-43, 47; Owen, p. 265.

[190] Not to Genoa, as Berti stated in his first ed. See ed. 1889, pp. 54, 392.

[191] Berti, p. 65. Owen has the uncorrected date, 1576.

[192] Dufour, Giordano Bruno à Génève: Documents Inédits, 1884; Berti, pp. 95-97; Gustav Louis, Giordano Bruno, pp. 73-75. Owen (p. 269) has overlooked these facts, set forth by Dufour in 1884. The documents are given in full in Frith, Life, 1887, p. 60 sq.

[193] The dates are in doubt. Cp. Berti, p. 115, and Frith, p. 65.

[194] See his own narrative before the Inquisitors in 1592. Berti, p. 394.

[195] McIntyre, Giordano Bruno, 1907, pp. 21-22.

[196] Frith, Life, p. 121, and refs.; Owen, p. 275; Bartholmèss, Jordano Bruno, i, 136-38.

[197] Cp. Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ii, 111, note. As to Bruno's supposed influence on Bacon and Shakespeare, cp. Bartholmèss, i, 134-35; Frith, Life, pp. 104-48; and the author's Montaigne and Shakspere, pp. 132-38. Here there is no case; but there is much to be said for Mr. Whittaker's view (Essays and Notices, p. 94) that Spenser's late Cantos on Mutability were suggested by Bruno's Spaccio. Prof. McIntyre supports.

[198] His praise of Luther, and his compliments to the Lutherans, are in notable contrast to his verdict on Calvinism. What happened was that at Wittemberg he was on his best behaviour, and was well treated accordingly.

[199] As to the traitor's motives cp. McIntyre, p. 66 sq.; Berti, p. 262 sq.

[200] Noroff, as cited in Frith, p. 345.

[201] De l'Infinito, ed. Wagner, ii, 27; Cena de la Ceneri, ed. Wagner, i, 173; Acrotismus, ed. Gfrörer, p. 12.

[202] Cp. Berti, pp. 187-88; Whittaker, Essays and Notices, 1895, p. 89; and Louis's section, Stellung zu Christenthum und Kirche.

[203] Berti, pp. 297-98. It takes much searching in the two poems to find any of the ideas in question, and Berti has attempted no collation; but, allowing for distortions, the Inquisition has sufficient ground for outcry.

[204] Sigillus Sigillorum: De duodecima contractionis speciae. Cp. F. J. Clemens, Giordano Bruno und Nicolaus von Cusa, 1847, pp. 176, 183; and H. Brunnhofer, Giordano Bruno's Weltanschauung und Verhängniss, 1882, pp. 227, 237.

[205] In the treatise De Lampade combinatoria Lulliana (1587). According to Berti (p. 220) he is the first to employ this phrase, which becomes the watchword of Spinoza (libertas philosophandi) a century later.

[206] Berti, cap. iv; Owen, p. 249; Ueberweg, ii, 27; Pünjer, p. 93 sq.; Whittaker, Essays and Notices, p. 66. As to Bruno's debt to Nicolaus of Cusa cp. Gustav Louis, as cited, p. 11; Pünjer, as cited; Carriere, Die philosophische Weltanschauung der Reformationszeit, p. 25; and Whittaker, p. 68. The argument of Carriere's second edition is analysed and rebutted by Mr. Whittaker, p. 253 sq.

[207] De Immenso, vii, c. 18, cited by Whittaker, Essays and Notices, p. 70.

[208] As to Bruno's own claim in the Eroici Furori, cp. Whittaker, Essays, p. 90.

[209] Documents in Berti, pp. 407-18; McIntyre, p. 75 sq.

[210] See the document in Berti, p. 398 sq.; Frith, pp. 270-81.

[211] Berti, p. 400 sq.

[212] See Berti, p. 396; Owen, pp. 285-86; Frith, pp. 282-83.

[213] The controversy as to whether Galileo was tortured leaves it clear that torture was common. See Dr. Parchappe, Galilée, sa vie, etc., 1866, Ptie. ii, ch. 7.

[214] Spaccio della bestia trionfante, ed. Wagner, ii, 120.

[215] Prof. Carriere has contended that a transition from pantheism to theism marks the growth of his thought; but, as is shown by Mr. Whittaker, he is markedly pantheistic in his latest work of all, though his pantheism is not merely naturalistic. Essays and Notices, pp. 72, 253-58.

[216] Italian versions differ verbally. Cp. Levi, p. 379; Berti, p. 386. That inscribed on the Bruno statue at Rome is a close rendering of the Latin: Majori forsan cum timore sententiam in me fertis quam ego accipiam, preserved by Scioppius.

[217] Avviso, in Berti, p. 329; in Levi, p. 386.

[218] Levi, pp. 384-92. Levi relates (p. 390) that Bruno at the stake was heard to utter the words: "O Eterno, io fo uno sforzo supremo per attrarre in me quanto vi tra di più divino nell'universo." He cites no authority. An Avviso reports that Bruno said his soul would rise with the smoke to Paradise (p. 386; Berti, p. 330), but does not state that this was said at the stake. And Levi accepts the other report that Bruno was gagged.

[219] Notably his comedy Il Candelaio.

[220] Owen, Skeptics of the Italian Renaissance, p. 357. A full narrative, from the documents, is given in R. C. Christie's essay, "Vanini in England," in the English Historical Review of April, 1895, reprinted in his Selected Essays and Papers, 1902.

[221] See it analysed by Owen, pp. 361-68, and by Carriere, Weltanschauung, pp. 496-504.

[222] Amphitheatrum, 1615, Exercit. xix, pp. 117-18.

[223] Amphitheatrum, Exercit. xxvii, p. 161.

[224] Id. pp. 72, 73, 78, 113, etc.

[225] P. 35. Machiavelli is elsewhere attacked. Pp. 36, 50.

[226] Julii Cæsaris Vanini Neapolitani, Theologi, Philosophi, et juris utriusque Doctoris, de Admirandis Naturæ Reginæque Deæque Mortalium Arcanis, libri quatuor. Lutetiæ, 1616.

[227] Mr. Owen makes a serious misstatement on this point, by which I was formerly misled. He writes (p. 369) that from the publisher's preface we "learn that the Dialogues were not written by Vanini, but by his disciples. They are a collection of discursive conversations embodying their master's opinions." This is not what the preface says. It tells, after a high-pitched eulogy of Vanini, that "nos publicæ utilitatis solliciti, alia eius monumenta, quæ avarius retinebat, per idoneos ex scriptores nancisci curavimus." In ascribing the matter of the dialogues to Vanini's young days, Mr. Owen forgets the references to the Amphitheatrum.

[228] "Alex. Sed in qua nam Religione verè et piè Deum coli vetusti Philosophi existimarunt? Vanini. In unica Naturæ lege, quam ipsa Natura, quæ Deus est (est enim principium motus)...." De Arcanis, as cited, p. 366. Lib. iv, Dial. 50. See Rousselot's French tr. 1842, p. 227. This passage is cited by Hallam (Lit. Hist. ii, 461) as avowing "disbelief of all religion except such as Nature ... has planted in the minds of men"--a heedless perversion.

[229] De Arcanis, pp. 354-60, 420-22 (Dial. 50, 56); Rousselot, pp. 219-23, 271-73.

[230] The special reference (lib. iv, dial. 56, p. 428) is to a story of an infant prophesying when only twenty-four hours old. (Amphitheatrum, Ex. vi, p. 38; cp. Owen, p. 368, note.) On this and on other points Cousin (cited by Owen, pp. 368, 371, 377) and Hallam (Lit. Hist. ii, 461) make highly prejudiced statements. Quoting the final pages on which the dialoguist passes from serious debate to a profession of levity, and ends by calling for the play-table, the English historian dismisses him as "the wretched man."

[231] Cp. Carriere's analysis of the Dialogues, pp. 505-59; and the Apologia pro Jul. Cæsare Vanino (by Arpe), 1712.

[232] See Owen's vindication, pp. 371-74. Renan's criticism (Averroès, pp. 420-23) is not quite judicial. See many others cited by Carriere, p. 516.

[233] It is difficult to understand how the censor could let pass the description of Nature in the title; but this may have been added after the authorization. The book is dedicated by Vanini to Marshal Bassompierre, and the epistle dedicatory makes mention of the Serenissima Regina aeterni nominis Maria Medicæa, which would disarm suspicion. In any case the permit was revoked, and the book condemned to be burned.

[234] Owen, p. 395.

[235] Mercure Français, 1619, tom. v, p. 64.

[236] Gramond (Barthélemi de Grammont), Historia Galliæ ab excessu Henrici IV, 1643, p. 209. Carriere translates the passage in full, pp. 500-12, 515; as does David Durand in his hostile Vie et Sentimens de Lucilio Vanini, 1717. As to Gramond see the Lettres de Gui Patin, who (Lett. 428, ed. Reveillé-Parise) calls him âme foible et bigote, and guilty of falsehood and flattery.

[237] Gramond, p. 210. Of Vanini, as of Bruno, it is recorded that at the stake he repelled the proffered crucifix. Owen and other writers, who justly remark that he well might, overlook the once received belief that it was the official practice, with obstinate heretics, to proffer a red-hot crucifix, so that the victim should be sure to spurn it with open anger.

[238] Stephen Phillips, Marpessa.

[239] Cp. Owen, pp. 389, 391, and Carriere, pp. 512-13, as to the worst calumnies. It is significant that Vanini was tried solely for blasphemy and atheism. What is proved against him is that he and an associate practised a rather gross fraud on the English ecclesiastical authorities, having apparently no higher motive than gain and a free life. Mr. Christie notes, however, that Vanini in his writings always speaks very kindly of England and the English, and so did not add ingratitude to his act of imposture.

[240] De Arcanis, p. 205. Lib. iii, dial. 30.

[241] Amphitheatrum, p. 17.

[242] De Arcanis, lib. iv, dial. 52, p. 379; dial. 51, p. 373. Cp. Amphitheatrum, p. 36; and De Arcanis, p. 20.

[243] De Arcanis, dial. 50 and 56. In the Amphitheatrum he adduces an equally skilful German atheist (p. 73).

[244] Dial. li, p. 371.

[245] Dial. liv, p. 407.

[246] Cp. Rousselot, notice, p. xi.

[247] Durand compiles a list of ten or eleven works of Vanini from the allusions in the Amphitheatrum and the De Arcanis.

[248] Reported by Gramond, as cited.

[249] Owen, pp. 393-94.

[250] Garasse, Doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits, 1623.

[251] De Arcanis, dial. vii, p. 36.

[252] Dial. iv, p. 21.

[253] Doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits de ce temps, 1623, p. 848.

[254] Karl von Gebler, Galileo Galilei and the Roman Curia, Eng. tr. 1879, pp. 36-37.

[255] This appears from the letters of Sagredo to Galileo. Gebler, p. 37. Cp. Gui Patin, Lett. 816, ed. Reveillé-Parise, 1846, iii, 758; Bayle, art. Cremonin, notes C and D; and Renan, Averroès, 3e édit. pp. 408-13. Patin writes that his friend Naudé "avoit été intime ami de Cremonin, qui n'étoit point meilleur Chrétien que Pomponace, que Machiavel, que Cardan et telles autres ... dont le pays abonde."

[256] Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, i, 183 (Eng. tr. i, 220); Gebler, p. 25. Libri actually made the refusal; but all that is proved as to Cremonini is that he opposed Galileo's discoveries à priori. As to the attitude of such opponents see Galileo's letter to Kepler. J. J. Fahie, Galileo: his Life and Work, 1903. pp. 101-102.

[257] Fahie, Galileo, p. 100.

[258] Id. p. 127.

[259] Gebler, pp. 54, 129, and passim; The Private Life of Galileo (by Mrs. Olney), Boston, 1870, pp. 67-72.

[260] Galileo's letter to Kepler, cited by Gebler, p. 26.

[261] The Jesuits were expelled from Venice in 1616, in retaliation for a papal interdict.

[262] See it summarized by Gebler, pp. 46-60, and quoted in the Private Life, pp. 83-85.

[263] The measure of reverence with which the orthodox handled the matter may be inferred from the fact that the Dominican Caccini, who preached against Galileo in Florence, took as one of his texts the verse in Acts i: "Viri Galilaei, quid statis aspicientes in coelum," making a pun on the Scripture.

[264] See this summarized by Gebler, pp. 64-70.

[265] See The Private Life of Galileo, pp. 86-87, 91, 99; Gebler, p. 44; Fahie, pp. 169-70; Berti, Il Processo Originale de Galileo Galilei, 1878, p. 53.

[266] Gebler (p. 101) solemnly comments on this letter as a lapse into "servility" on Galileo's part.

[267] Gebler, pp. 112-13.

[268] Private Life, pp. 216-18; Gebler, pp. 157-62.

[269] Berti, pp. 61-64; Private Life, pp. 212-13; Gebler, p. 162.

[270] Gebler, p. 239; Private Life, p. 256.

[271] Gebler, pp. 249-63; Private Life, pp. 255-56; Marini, pp. 55-57. The "e pur si muove" story is first heard of in 1774. As to the torture, it is to be remembered that Galileo recanted under threat of it. See Berti, pp. 93-101; Marini, p. 59; Sir O. Lodge, Pioneers of Science, 1893, pp. 128-31. Berti argues that only the special humanity of the Commissary-General, Macolano, saved him from the torture. Cp. Gebler, p. 259, note.

[272] Gebler, p. 281.

[273] Private Life, pp. 265-60, 268; Gebler, p. 252.

[274] Berti, Il Processo di Galileo, pp. 111-12.

[275] Letter of Hobbes to Newcastle, in Report of the Hist. Mss. Comm. on the Duke of Portland's Papers, 1892, ii. Hobbes explains that few copies were brought over, "and they that buy such books are not such men as to part with them again." "I doubt not," he adds, "but the translation of it will here be publicly embraced."

[276] Gebler, pp. 312-15; Putnam, Censorship of the Church of Rome, i, 313-14.

[277] See Ueberweg, ii, 12, as to the conflicting types. In addition to Cremonini, several leading Aristotelians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were accused of atheism (Hallam, Lit. Hist. ii, 101-102), the old charge against the Peripatetic school. Hallam (p. 102) complains that Cesalpini of Pisa "substitutes the barren unity of pantheism for religion." Cp. Ueberweg, ii, 14; Renan, Averroès, 3e édit. p. 417. An Averroïst on some points, he believed in separate immortality.

[278] Gebler, pp. 37, 45. Gebler appears to surmise that Cremonini may have escaped the attack upon himself by turning suspicion upon Galileo, but as to this there is no evidence.

[279] Ueberweg, ii, 17.

[280] Epist. 36.

[281] See above, p. 45.

[282] Bartholmèss, Jordano Bruno, i, 49.

[283] Lange, Gesch. des Mater. i, 189-90 (Eng. tr. i, 228). Born in Valencia and trained at Paris, Vives became a humanist teacher at Louvain, and was called to England (1523) to be tutor to the Princess Mary. During his stay he taught at Oxford. Being opposed to the divorce of Henry VIII, he was imprisoned for a time, afterwards living at Bruges.

[284] See the monograph, Ramus, sa vie, ses écrits, et ses opinions, par Ch. Waddington, 1855. Owen has a good account of Ramus in his French Skeptics.

[285] Scholæ math. l. iii, p. 78, cited by Waddington, p. 343.

[286] "In many respects Galileo deserves to be ranked with Descartes as inaugurating modern philosophy." Prof. Adamson, Development of Mod. Philos. 1903, i, 5. "We may compare his [Hobbes's] thought with Descartes's, but the impulse came to him from the physical reasonings of Galileo." Prof. Croom Robertson, Hobbes, 1886, p. 42.

[287] Buckle, 1-vol. ed. pp. 327-36; 3-vol. ed. ii, 77-85. Cp. Lange, i, 425 (Eng. tr. i, 248, note); Adamson, Philosophy of Kant, 1879, p. 194.

[288] Cp. Lange, i, 425 (Eng. tr. i, 248-49, note); Bouillier, Hist. de la philos. cartésienne, 1854, i, 40-47, 185-86; Bartholmèss, Jordano Bruno, i, 354-55; Memoir in Garnier ed. of OEuvres Choisies, p. v, also pp. 6, 17, 19, 21. Bossuet pronounced the precautions of Descartes excessive. But cp. Dr. Land's notes in Spinoza: Four Essays, 1882, p. 55.

[289] Coll. of Philos. Writings, ed. 1712, pref. p. xi.

[290] Discours de la Méthode, pties. i, ii, iii, iv (OEuvres Choisies, pp. 8, 10, 11, 22, 24); Meditation I (id. pp. 73-74).

[291] Full details in Kuno Fischer's Descartes and his School, Eng. tr. 1890, bk. i, ch. vi; Bouillier, i, chs. xii, xiii.

[292] Buckle, 1-vol. ed. pp. 337-39; 3-vol. ed. ii, 94, 97.

[293] Buckle, pp. 327-30; ii, 81.

[294] Id. p. 330; ii, 82. The process is traced hereinafter.

[295] Kuno Fischer, Francis Bacon, Eng. tr. 1857, p. 74.

[296] For an exact summary and criticism of Gassendi's positions see the masterly monograph of Prof. Brett of Lahore, The Philosophy of Gassendi, 1908--a real contribution to the history of philosophy.

[297] Cp. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. v, ch. i (McCulloch's ed. 1839, pp. 364-65). It is told of him, with doubtful authority, that when dying he said: "I know not who brought me into the world, neither do I know what was to do there, nor why I go out of it." Reflections on the Death of Freethinkers, by Deslandes (Eng. tr. of the Réflexions sur les grands hommes qui sont morts en plaisantant), 1713, p. 105.

[298] For a good account of Gassendi and his group (founded on Lange, § iii, ch. i) see Soury, Bréviaire de l'hist. de matérialisme, ptie. iii, ch. ii.

[299] Voltaire, Éléments de philos. de Newton, ch. ii; Lange, i, 232 (Eng. tr. i, 267) and 269.

[300] Bayle, art. Pomponace, Notes F. and G. The complaint was made by Arnauld, who with the rest of the Jansenists was substantially a Cartesian.

[301] See it in Garnier's ed. of Descartes's OEuvres Choisies, p. 145.

[302] Id. pp. 158-64.

[303] Apparently just because the Jansenists adopted Descartes and opposed Gassendi. But Gassendi is extremely guarded in all his statements, save, indeed, in his objections to the Méditations of Descartes.

[304] See Soury, pp. 397-98, as to a water-drinking "debauch" of Gassendi and his friends.

[305] Rambaud, as cited, p. 154.

[306] Id. p. 155.

[307] Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV, ed. Didot, p. 366. "On ne l'eût pas osé sous Henri IV et sous Louis XIII," adds Voltaire. Cp. Michelet, La Sorcière, éd. Séailles, 1903, p. 302.

[308] Tr. into English in 1659, under the title The Vanity of Judiciary Astrology.

[309] Jenkin Thomasius in his Historia Atheismi (1692) joins Herbert with Bodin as having five points in common with him (ed. 1709, ch. ix, § 2, pp. 76-77).

[310] It might have been supposed that he was recalled on account of his book; but it was not so. He was recalled by letter in April, returned home in July, and seems to have sent his book thence to Paris to be printed.

[311] Autobiography, Sir S. Lee's 2nd ed. p. 132.

[312] The book was reprinted at London in Latin in 1633; again at Paris in 1636; and again at London in 1645. It was translated and published in French in 1639, but never in English.

[313] Compare the verdict of Hamilton in his ed. of Reid, note A, § 6, 35 (p. 781).

[314] For a good analysis see Pünjer, Hist. of the Christ. Philos. of Religion, Eng. trans. 1887, pp. 292-99; also Noack, Die Freidenker in der Religion, Bern, 1853, i, 17-40; and Lechler, Geschichte des englischen Deismus, pp. 36-54.

[315] See his Autobiography, as cited, pp. 133-34.

[316] De causis errorum, una cum tractate de religione laici et appendice ad sacerdotes (1645); De religione gentilium (1663). The latter was translated into English in 1705. The former are short appendices to the De Veritate. In 1768 was published for the first time from a manuscript, A Dialogue between a Tutor and his Pupil, which, despite the doubts of Lechler, may confidently be pronounced Herbert's from internal evidence. See the "Advertisement" by the editor of the volume, and cp. Lee, p. xxx, and notes there referred to. The "five points," in particular, occur not only in the Religio Gentilium, but in the De Veritate. The style is clearly of the seventeenth century.

[317] Sir Sidney Lee can hardly be right in taking the Dialogue to be the "little treatise" which Herbert proposed to write on behaviour (Autobiography, Lee's 2nd ed. p. 43). It does not answer to that description, being rather an elaborate discussion of the themes of Herbert's main treatises, running to 272 quarto pages.

[318] See below, p. 80.

[319] More Reasons for the Christian Religion, 1672, p. 79.

[320] It is to be remembered that the doctrine of the supremacy of the civil power in religious matters (Erastianism) was maintained by some of the ablest men on the Parliamentary side, in particular Selden.

[321] Leviathan, ch. iv, H. Morley's ed. p. 26.

[322] Cp. his letter to an opponent, Considerations upon the Reputation, etc., of Thomas Hobbes, 1680, with chs. xi and xii of Leviathan, and De Corpore Politico, pt. ii, c. 6. One of his most explicit declarations for theism is in the De Homine, c. 1, where he employs the design argument, declaring that he who will not see that the bodily organs are a mente aliqua conditas ordinatasque ad sua quasque officia must be himself without mind. This ascription of "mind," however, he tacitly negates in Leviathan, ch. xi, and De Corpore Politico, pt. ii, c. 6.

[323] De Corpore, pt. ii, c. 8, § 20.

[324] Cp. Bentley's letter to Bernard, 1692, cited in Dynamics of Religion, pp. 82-83.

[325] Leviathan, pt. i, ch. vi. Morley's ed. p. 34.

[326] Leviathan, pt. iii, ch. xxxiii.

[327] Above, p. 24.

[328] On this see Lange, Hist. of Materialism, sec. iii, ch. ii.

[329] Molyneux, an anti-Hobbesian, in translating Hobbes's objections along with the Meditations (1680) claims that the slightness of Descartes's replies was due to his unacquaintance with Hobbes's works and philosophy in general (trans. cited, p. 114). This is an obviously lame defence. Descartes does parry some of the thrusts of Hobbes; others he simply cannot meet.

[330] E.g., Leviathan, pt. iv, ch. xlvii.

[331] Kuno Fischer, Descartes and his School, pp. 232-35. Cp. Bentley, Sermons on Atheism (i.e., his Boyle Lectures), ed. 1724, p. 8.

[332] Hobbes also was of Mersenne's acquaintance, but only as a man of science. When, in 1647, Hobbes was believed to be dying, Mersenne for the first time sought to discuss theology with him; but the sick man instantly changed the subject. In 1648 Mersenne died. He thus did not live to meet the strain of Leviathan (1651), which enraged the French no less than the English clergy. (Croom Robertson's Hobbes, pp. 63-65.)

[333] Hobbes lived to see this law abolished (1677). There was left, however, the jurisdiction of the bishops and ecclesiastical courts over cases of atheism, blasphemy, heresy, and schism, short of the death penalty.

[334] Croom Robertson, Hobbes, p. 196; Pepys's Diary, Sept. 3, 1668.

[335] Leviathan, ch. ii; Morley's ed. p. 19; chs. xiv, xv, pp. 66, 71, 72, 78; ch. xxix, pp. 148, 149.

[336] Leviathan, chs. xv, xvii, xviii. Morley's ed. pp. 72, 82, 83, 85.

[337] "For two generations the effort to construct morality on a philosophical basis takes more or less the form of answers to Hobbes" (Sidgwick, Outlines of the History of Ethics, 3rd ed. p. 169).

[338] As when he presents the law of Nature as "dictating peace, for a means of the conservation of men in multitudes" (Leviathan, ch. xv. Morley's ed. p. 77).

[339] See the headings, Council, Religion, etc.

[340] G. W. Johnson, Memoirs of John Selden, 1835, pp. 348, 362.

[341] G. W. Johnson, p. 264.

[342] Above, p. 20.

[343] G. W. Johnson, pp. 258, 302.

[344] Id. p. 302. Cp. in the Table Talk, art. Trinity, his view of the Roundheads.

[345] Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. 1810, i, 181. Cp. i, 292; ii, 44.

[346] Cp. Overton's pamphlet, An Arrow against all Tyrants and Tyranny (1646), cited in the History of Passive Obedience since the Reformation, 1689, i, 59; pt. ii of Thomas Edwards's Gangræna: or a Catalogue and Discovery of many of the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies, and pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of this time, etc., 2nd ed. 1646, pp. 33-34 (Nos. 151-53).

[347] Lords Journals, January 16, 1645-1646; Gangræna, as cited, p. 150; cp. Gardiner, Hist. of the Civil War, ed. 1893, iii, 11.

[348] Green, Short Hist. ch. viii, § 8, pp. 551-52; Gardiner, Hist. of the Civil War, iv, 22.

[349] Gangræna, p. 18.

[350] In 1644 he had been imprisoned at Bury St. Edmunds for "dipping" adults, and after six months' durance had been released on a recantation and promise of amendment. Gangræna, as cited, pp. 104-105.

[351] Rev. James Cranford, Hæreseo-Machia, a Sermon, 1646, p. 10.

[352] No. 100 in Gangræna.

[353] Cranford, as cited, p. 11 sq.

[354] See G. P. Gooch's Hist. of Democ. Ideas in England in the 17th Century, 1898, ch. vi.

[355] Above, pp. 4 and 8.

[356] In the British Museum copy the name Richardson is penned, not in a contemporary hand, at the end of the preface; and in the preface to vol. ii of the Phenix, 1708, in which the treatise is reprinted, the same name is given, but with uncertainty. The Richardson pointed at was the author of The Necessity of Toleration in Matters of Religion (1647). E. B. Underhill, in his collection of that and other Tracts on Liberty of Conscience for the Hanserd Knollys Society, 1846, remains doubtful (p. 247) as to the authorship of the tract on hell.

[357] The fourth English edition appeared in 1754.

[358] Gangræna, ep. ded. (p. 5). Cp. pp. 47, 151, 178-79; and Bailie's Letters, ed. 1841, ii, 234-37; iii, 393. The most sweeping plea for toleration seems to have been the book entitled Toleration Justified, 1646. (Gangræna, p. 151.) The Hanserd Knollys collection, above mentioned, does not contain one of that title.

[359] Gangræna, pp. 152-53.

[360] Pp. 18-36.

[361] Id. p. 15. As to other sects mentioned by him cp. Tayler, p. 194.

[362] On the intense aversion of most of the Presbyterians to toleration see Tayler, Retrospect of Relig. Life of Eng. p. 136. They insisted, rightly enough, that the principle was never recognized in the Bible.

[363] See the citations in Buckle, 3-vol. ed. i, 347; 1-vol. ed. p. 196.

[364] Alex. Ross, Pansebeia, 4th ed. 1672, p. 379.

[365] Cp. the present writer's Buckle and his Critics, 1895, ch. viii, § 2.

[366] See above, vol. i, p. 5.

[367] Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, 3rd ed. i, 200.

[368] Heresiography: The Heretics and Sectaries of these Times, 1614. Epist. Ded.

[369] Discourse, ed. 1857, p. 226.

[370] Dr. J. Brown's pref. to ed. of 1857, p. xxii.

[371] More, Collection of Philosophical Writings, 4th ed. 1692, p. 95.

[372] Fabricius, Delectus Argumentorum et Syllabus Scriptorum, 1725, p. 341.

[373] No copy in British Museum.

[374] Urwick, Life of John Howe, with 1846 ed. of Howe's Select Works, pp. xiii, xix. Urwick, a learned evangelical, fully admits the presence of "infidels" on both sides in the politics of the time.

[375] Discourse Concerning Union Among Protestants, ed. cited, pp. 146, 156, 158. In the preface to his treatise, The Redeemer's Tears Wept over Lost Souls, Howe complains of "the atheism of some, the avowed mere theism of others," and of a fashionable habit of ridiculing religion. This sermon, however, appears to have been first published in 1684; and the date of its application is uncertain.

[376] Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography, Art. 285.

[377] The preface begins: "It is neither to satisfie the importunity of friends, nor to prevent false copies (which and such like excuses I know are expected in usual prefaces), that I have adventured abroad this following treatise: but it is out of a just resentment of the affronts and indignities which have been cast on religion, by such who account it a matter of judgment to disbelieve the Scriptures, and a piece of wit to dispute themselves out of the possibility of being happy in another world."

[378] See bk. ii, ch. x. Page 338, 3rd ed. 1666.

[379] Cp. Glanvill, pref. Address to his Scepsis Scientifica, Owen's ed. 1885, pp. lv-lvii; and Henry More's Divine Dialogues, Dial. i, ch. xxxii.

[380] Cp. Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, i. 109.

[381] The Reformed Pastor, abr. ed. 1826, pp. 236, 239.

[382] Work cited, ed. 1667, p. 136. The proposition is reiterated.

[383] Id. p. 388.

[384] Reasons of the Christian Religion, pp. 388-89.

[385] Religio Stoici, Edinburgh, 1663. p. 19. The essay was reprinted in 1665, and in London in 1693 under the title of The Religious Stoic.

[386] Id. p. 18.

[387] Id. p. 124.

[388] Id. p. 76.

[389] Id. p. 69.

[390] Religio Stoici, p. 116.

[391] Id. p. 122.

[392] This last is interesting as a probable echo of opinions he had heard from some of his older contemporaries: "Opinion kept within its proper bounds is an [ = the Scottish "ane"] pure act of the mind; and so it would appear that to punish the body for that which is a guilt of the soul is as unjust as to punish one relation for another" (pref. pp. 10-11). He adds that "the Almighty hath left no warrand upon holy record for persecuting such as dissent from us."

[393] Reason: an Essay, ed. 1690, p. 21. Cp. p. 152.

[394] Id. p. 82. It is noteworthy that Mackenzie puts in a protest against "implicit Faith and Infallibility, those great tyrants over Reason" (p. 88). But the essay as a whole is ill-planned and unimpressive.

[395] Work cited, 2nd ed. pt. ii, pp. 106-15.

[396] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 86-87, 89-90. This explanation is also given by Bishop Wilkins in his treatise on Natural Religion, 7th ed. p. 354.

[397] Replying to Herbert's De Veritate, which he seems not to have read before.

[398] Pref. to Obs. upon the United Prov. of the Netherlands, in Works, ed. 1814, i, 36.

[399] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 87, 94-98, 111, 112.

[400] As to the religious immoralism see Mosheim, 17 Cent. sec. ii, pt. ii, ch. ii, § 23, and Murdock's notes.

[401] Compare the picture of average Protestant deportment given by Benjamin Bennet in his Discourses against Popery, 1714, p. 377.

[402] More, Coll. of Philos. Writings, 4th ed. 1712, gen. pref. p. 7.

[403] Compare some of the extracts in Thomas Bennet's Defence of the Discourse of Schism, etc., 2nd ed. 1704, from the sermons of R. Gouge (1688). The description of men as "mortal crumbling bits of dependency, yesterday's start-ups, that come out of the abyss of nothing, hastening to the bosom of their mother earth" (work cited, p. 93) is a reminder that the resonant and cadenced rhetoric of the Brownes and Taylors and Cudworths was an art of the age, at the command of different orders of propaganda.

[404] Cited by Bonnet, A Defence of the Discourse of Schism, etc., as cited, p. 41.

[405] Thus Henry More's biographer, the Rev. Richard Ward, says "the late Mr. Chiswel told a friend of mine that for twenty years together after the return of King Charles the Second the Mystery of Godliness, and Dr. More's other works, ruled all the booksellers in London" (Life of More, 1710, pp. 162-63). We have seen the nature of some of More's "other works."

[406] The Reasonableness of Scripture Belief, 1672, Epist. Ded.

[407] Rep. 1675; 2nd ed. 1691; rep. in the Phoenix, vol. ii, 1708; 3rd ed. 1736.

[408] A very hostile account of him is given in Dict. of Nat. Biog. He was, however, the friend of Cowley, and the "M. Clifford" to whom Sprat addressed his sketch of Cowley's Life. He was also a foe of Dryden--the "malicious Matt Clifford" of Dryden's Sessions of the Poets; and he attacked the poet in Notes on Dryden's Poems (published 1687), and is supposed to have had a hand in the Rehearsal. He was befriended by Shaftesbury.

[409] Tract. Theol. Polit. c. 15.

[410] Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses, ii, 381-82; Granger, Biog. Hist. of England, 5th ed. v, 293.

[411] Johnson's Life of Dr. Watts, 1785, App. i.

[412] Toulmin, Hist. of the Prot. Dissenters, 1814, citing Johnson's Life of Dr. Watts.

[413] It has been suggested that this was really written by Clifford, for posthumous publication. The humorous sketch of "His Character" at the close, suggesting that his vices seem to the writer to have outweighed his virtues, hints of ironical mystification.

[414] Work cited, pp. 10, 14, 30, 55.

[415] Dr. Urwick, Life of Howe, as cited, p. xxxii.

[416] A Demonstration of the Divine Authority of the Law of Nature and of the Christian Religion, by Samuel Parker, D.D., 1681, pref. The first part of this treatise is avowedly a popularization of the argument of Cumberland's Disquisitio de Legibus Naturæ, 1672. Parker had previously published in Latin a Disiputatio de Deo et Providentia Divina, in which he raised the question, An Philosophorum ulli, et quinam Athei fuerunt (1678).

[417] Work cited, 2nd ed. 1682, pp. 32, 38-40, 45-48.

[418] Id. pp. 54-55.

[419] Id. p. 52.

[420] Twelve Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions, 1692, pp. 438-39.

[421] This has been ascribed, without any good ground, to Charles Blount. It does not seem to me to be in his style.

[422] Premonition to the Candid Reader.

[423] Hist. Nat. vii, 1.

[424] Pamphlet cited, pp. 20, 21.

[425] Id. p. 23.

[426] Concerning whom see Macaulay's History, ch. xix, ed. 1877, ii, 411-12--a very prejudiced account. Blount is there spoken of as "one of the most unscrupulous plagiaries that ever lived," and as having "stolen" from Milton, because he issued a pamphlet "By Philopatris," largely made up from the Areopagitica. Compare Macaulay's treatment of Locke, who adopted Dudley North's currency scheme (ch. xxi, vol. ii, p. 547).

[427] Bayle (art. Apollonius, note), who is followed by the French translator of Philostratus with Blount's notes in 1779 (J. F. Salvemini de Castillon), says the notes were drawn from the papers of Lord Herbert of Cherbury; but of this Blount says nothing.

[428] As to these see the Dict. of Nat. Biog. The statements of Anthony Wood as to the writings of Blount's father, relied on in the author's Dynamics of Religion, appear to be erroneous. Sir Thomas Pope Blount, Charles's eldest brother, shows a skeptical turn of mind in his Essays (3rd ed. 1697, Essay 7). Himself a learned man, he disparages learning as checking thought; and, professing belief in the longevity of the patriarchs (p. 187), pronounces popery and pagan religion to be mere works of priestcraft (Essay 1). He detested theological controversy and intolerance, and seems to have been a Lockian.

[429] All that is known of this tragedy is that Blount loved his deceased wife's sister and wished to marry her; but she held it unlawful, and he was in despair. According to Pope, a sufficiently untrustworthy authority, he "gave himself a stab in the arm, as pretending to kill himself, of the consequence of which he really died" (note to Epilogue to the Satires, i, 123). An overstrung nervous system may be diagnosed from his writing.

[430] Boyle Lectures on Atheism, ed. 1724, p. 4.

[431] Reflexions upon the Books of the Holy Scriptures to establish the Truth of the Christian Religion, by Peter Allix, D.D., 1688, i, 6-7.

[432] As cited by Leslie, Truth of Christianity Demonstrated, 1711, pp. 17-21.

[433] Characteristics, ii, 263 (Moralists, pt. ii, § 3). One of the most dangerous positions from the orthodox point of view would be the thesis that while religion could do either great good or great harm to morals, atheism could do neither. (Bk. I, pt. iii, § 1.) Cp. Bacon's Essay, Of Atheism.

[434] Blount, after assailing in anonymous pamphlets Bohun the licenser, induced him to license a work entitled King William and Queen Mary Conquerors, which infuriated the nation. Macaulay calls the device "a base and wicked scheme." It was almost innocent in comparison with Blount's promotion of the "Popish plot" mania. See Who Killed Sir Edmund Godfrey Berry? by Alfred Marks. 1905, pp. 133-35, 150.

[435] See the text in Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner's Penalties upon Opinion, pp. 19-21. Macaulay does not mention this measure.

[436] The Act had been preceded by a proclamation of the king, dated Feb. 24. 1697.

[437] As to an earlier monopoly of the London booksellers, see George Herbert's letters to the Archbishop of Canterbury and to Bacon, Jan. 29, 1620. In Works of George Herbert, ed. 1841, i. 217-18.

[438] See Locke's notes on the Licensing Act in Lord King's Life of Locke, 1829, pp. 203-206; Fox Bourne's Life of Locke, ii. 313-14; Macaulay's History, ii, 504.

[439] Trinius, Freydenker-Lexicon, 1759, p. 120; Pünjer, i, 291, 300-301. Browne was even called an atheist. Arpe, Apologia pro Vanino, 1712, p. 27, citing Welschius. Mr. A. H. Bullen, in his introduction to his ed. of Marlowe (1885, vol. i, p. lviii), remarks that Browne, who "kept the road" in divinity, "exposed the vulnerable points in the Scriptural narratives with more acumen and gusto than the whole army of freethinkers, from Anthony Collins downwards." This is of course an extravagance, but, as Mr. Bullen remarks in the Dict. of Nat. Biog. vii, 66, Browne discusses "with evident relish" the "seeming absurdities in the Scriptural narrative."

[440] Browne's Annotator points to the derivation of his skepticism from "that excellent French writer Monsieur Mountaign, in whom I often trace him" (Sayle's ed. 1904, i, p. xviii).

[441] Religio Medici, i, 6.

[442] Id. i, 9.

[443] Id. i, 18.

[444] Religio Medici, i, 20.

[445] Bk. I, ch. x.

[446] Here we have a theorem independently reached later (with the substitution of Nature for God) by Mary Wollstonecraft and Tennyson in turn. Browne cites yet another: "that he looks not below the moon, but hath resigned the regiment of sublunary affairs unto inferior deputations"--a thesis adopted in effect by Cudworth.

[447] By an error of the press, Browne is made in Mr. Sayle's excellent reprint (i, 108) to begin a sentence in the middle of a clause, with an odd result:--"I do confess I am an Atheist. I cannot persuade myself to honour that the world adores." The passage should obviously read: "to that subterraneous Idol (avarice) and God of the Earth I do confess I am an Atheist," etc.

[448] Hutchinson, Histor. Essay Conc. Witchcraft, 1718, p. 118; 2nd ed. 1720, p. 151.

[449] Cp. Whewell, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. 1862, p. 33.

[450] Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, 1889, pref. p. vi; Rev. Dr. Duff, Hist. of Old Test. Criticism, R. P. A. 1910, p. 113.

[451] This appears again, much curtailed and "so altered as to be in a manner new," in its author's collected Essays on Several Important Subjects in Religion and Philosophy (1676), under the title Against Confidence in Philosophy.

[452] See the Humane Nature (1640), ch. iv, §§ 7-9.

[453] Scepsis Scientifica, ch. 23, § 1.

[454] See the passages compared by Lewes, History of Philosophy, 4th ed. ii, 338.

[455] In his Blow at Modern Sadducism (4th ed. 1668), Sadducismus Triumphatus (1681; 3rd ed. 1689), and A Whip to the Droll, Fidler to the Atheist (1688--a letter to Henry More, who was zealous on the same lines). These works seem to have been much more widely circulated than the Scepsis Scientifica.

[456] Scepsis, ch. 20, § 3.

[457] See Glanvill's reply in a letter to a friend (1665), re-written as Essay II, Of Scepticism and Certainty: in A short Reply to the learned Mr. Thomas White in his collected Essays on Several Important Subjects, 1676.

[458] See the reply in Plus Ultra: or, the Progress and Advancement of Knowledge since the days of Aristotle, 1668, Epist. Ded. Pref. ch. xviii, and Conclusion. [The re-written treatise, in the collected Essays, eliminates the controversial matter.]

[459] First printed with Glanvill's Philosophia Pia in 1671. Rep. as an essay in the collected Essays.

[460] Owen, pref. to Scepsis, pp. xx-xxii.

[461] Owen, pref. to ed. of Scepsis Scientifica, p. ix.

[462] Of whom, however, a high medical authority declares that, "as a physiologist, he was sunk in realism" (that is, metaphysical apriorism). Prof. T. Clifford Allbutt, Harveian Oration on Science and Medieval Thought, 1901, p. 44.

[463] Cp. Whewell, as last cited, pp. 75-83; Hallam, Literature of Europe, iv, 159-71.

[464] Reid, Intellectual Powers, Essay I, ch. i; Hamilton's ed. of Works, p. 226. Glanvill calls Gassendi "that noble wit." (Scepsis Scientifica, Owen's ed. p. 151.)

[465] Poet. Works of Milton, 1874, Introd. i, 92 sq.

[466] Scepsis Scientifica, Owen's ed. p. 66. In the condensed version of the treatise in Glanvill's collected Essays (1676, p. 20), the language is to the same effect.

[467] J. J. Tayler, Retrospect of the Religious Life of England, Martineau's ed. p. 204; Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography, iii, 152-53.

[468] Cp. Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 347-51; 1-vol. ed. pp. 196-99.

[469] Tayler, Retrospect, pp. 204-205; Wallace, iii, 154-56.

[470] Gangræna, pt. i, p. 38.

[471] Tayler, p. 221. As to Biddle, the chief propagandist of the sect, see pp. 221-24, and Wallace, Art. 285.

[472] Macaulay, Essay on Milton. Cp. Brown's ed. (Clarendon Press) of the poems of Milton, ii, 30.

[473] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, ch. v.

[474] Of Education, § 136.

[475] Essay, bk. iv, ch. xix. § 4.

[476] Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, c. 15.

[477] Third Letter to the Bishop of Worcester.

[478] Some Familiar Letters between Mr. Locke and Several of his Friends, 1708, pp. 302-304.

[479] Fox Bourne, Life of Locke, 1876, ii, 34.

[480] The first Letter, written while he was hiding in Holland in 1685, was in Latin, but was translated into French, Dutch, and English.

[481] Mr. Fox Bourne, in his biography (ii, 41), apologizes for the lapse, so alien to his own ideals, by the remark that "the atheism then in vogue was of a very violent and rampant sort." It is to be feared that this palliation will not hold good--at least, the present writer has been unable to trace the atheism in question. For "atheism" we had better read "religion."

[482] Second Vindication of "The Reasonableness of Christianity," 1697, pref.

[483] Fox Bourne, Life of Locke, ii, 181.

[484] Son of the Presbyterian author of the famous Gangræna.

[485] Said by Carrol, Dissertation on Mr. Lock's Essay, 1706, cited by Anthony Collins, Essay Concerning the Use of Reason, 1709, p. 30.

[486] Cited by Fox Bourne, Life of Locke, ii, 438.

[487] Whose calibre may be gathered from his egregious doctoral thesis, Concio ad clerum de dæmonum malorum existentia et natura (1700). After a list of the deniers of evil spirits, from the Sadducees and Sallustius to Bekker and Van Dale, he addresses to his "dilectissimi in Christo fratres" the exordium: "En, Academici, veteres ac hodiernos Sadducæos! quibuscum tota Atheorum cohors amicissimè congruit; nam qui divinum numen, iidem ipsi infernales spiritus acriter negant."

[488] Confutation of Warburton (1757) in Extracts from Law's Works, 1768, i, 208-209.

[489] Cp. the Essay, bk. i, ch. iii, § 6, with Law's Case of Reason, in Extracts, as cited, p. 36.

[490] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, p. 122.

[491] Fox Bourne, ii, 404-405.

[492] An ostensibly orthodox Professor of our own day has written that Locke's doctrine as to religion and ethics "shows at once the sincerity of his religious convictions and the inadequate conception he had formed to himself of the grounds and nature of moral philosophy" (Fowler, Locke, 1880, p. 76).

[493] Burnet, History of his Own Time, ed. 1838, p. 251. Burnet adds that Temple "was a corrupter of all that came near him." The 1838 editor protests against the whole attack as the "most unfair and exaggerated" of Burnet's portraits; and a writer in The Present State of the Republick of Letters, Jan., 1736, p. 26, carries the defence to claiming orthodoxy for Temple. But the whole cast of his thought is deistic. Cp. the Essay upon the Origin and Nature of Government, and ch. v of the Observations upon the United Provinces (Works, ed. 1770, i, 29, 36, 170-74).

[494] Cp. Macaulay, History, ch. ii. Student's ed. i, 120.

[495] Compare his Advice to a Daughter, § 1 (in Miscellanies, 1700), and his Political Thoughts and Reflections: Religion.

[496] See Macaulay, ch. xx. Student's ed. ii, 459.

[497] De Morgan, as cited, p. 107.

[498] See Brewster, ii, 318, 321-22, 323, 331 sq., 342 sq.

[499] Id. p. 327 sq.

[500] Id. p. 115.

[501] Cp. De Morgan, pp. 133-45.

[502] Four Letters from Sir Isaac Newton to Dr. Bentley, ed. 1756, p. 25. Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 97-102.

[503] Brewster, ii, 314.

[504] Id. pp. 315-16.

[505] Id. pp. 342-46.

[506] Brewster, p. 349. See the remaining articles, and App. XXX, p. 532.

[507] Id. p. 388.

[508] Discourse on Tillotson and Burnet, pp. 38, 40, 74, cited by Collins, Discourse of Freethinking, 1713, pp. 171-72.

[509] The Brief Notes on the Creed of St. Athanasius (author unknown), printed by Thomas Firmin. Late in 1693 appeared another antitrinitarian tract, by William Freke, who was prosecuted, fined £500, and ordered to make a recantation in the Four Courts of Westminster Hall. The book was burnt by the hangman. Wallace, Art. 354. There had also been "two quarto volumes of tracts in support of Unitarianism," published in 1691 (Dr. W. H. Drummond, An Explanation and Defence of the Principles of Protestant Dissent, 1842, p. 17).

[510] "Locke's ribald schoolfellow of nearly fifty years ago" (Fox Bourne, ii, 405).

[511] Id. ib.

[512] Tayler, Retrospect, p. 226; Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography, i, 160-69.

[513] Fox Bourne, ii, 405; Wallace, art. 353.

[514] Above, pp. 35-36.

[515] Nelson's Life of Bishop Bull, 2nd ed. 1714, p. 398.

[516] "Perhaps at no period was the Unitarian controversy so actively carried on in England as between 1690 and 1720." History, Opinions, etc., of the English Presbyterians, 1834, p. 22.

[517] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 113-15--Tayler, Retrospect, p. 227.

[518] As to whom see Tayler, Retrospect, ch. v. § 4. They are spoken of as "the new sect of Latitude-Men" in 1662; and in 1708 are said to be "at this day Low Churchmen." See A Brief Account of the New Sect of Latitude-Men, by "S. P." of Cambridge, 1662, reprinted in The Phenix, vol. ii, 1708. and pref. to that vol. From "S. P.'s" account it is clear that they connected with the new scientific movement, and leant to Cartesianism. As above noted, they included such prelates as Wilkins and Tillotson. The work of E. A. George, Seventeenth Century Men of Latitude (1908), deals with Hales, Chillingworth, Whichcote, H. More, Taylor, Browne, and Baxter.

[519] Toulmin, Histor. View of the Prot. Dissenters, 1814, p. 270. A main ground of the offence taken was a somewhat trivial dialogue in Burnet's book between Eve and the serpent, indicating the "popular" character of the tale. This was omitted from a Dutch edition at the author's request, and from the 3rd ed. 1733 (Toulmin, as cited). It is given in the partial translation in Blount's Oracles of Reason.

[520] See Brewster's Memoirs of Newton, 1855, ii, 315-16, for a letter indicating Craig's religious attitude. He contributed to Dr. George Cheyne's Philosophical Principles of Religion, Natural and Revealed, 1705. (Pref. to pt. i, ed. 1725.)

[521] See the note of Pope and Warburton on the Dunciad, iv, 462.

[522] See arts. in Dict. of Nat. Biog.

[523] Reprinted at Amsterdam, 1712.

[524] Essays as cited, p. 84.

[525] Id. p. 30.

[526] See Christianity not Founded on Argument (by Henry Dodwell, jr.), 1741, pp. 11, 34. Waterland, as cited by Bishop Hurst, treats the terms Reasonist and Rationalist as labels or nicknames of those who untruly profess to reason more scrupulously than other people. The former term may, however, have been set up as a result of Le Clerc's rendering of "the Logos," in John i, 1, by "Reason"--an argument to which Waterland repeatedly refers.

[527] Prof. Strowski, who is concerned to prove that the freethinkers of the period were mostly men-about-town, claims Patin as a Frondeur (De Montaigne à Pascal, p. 215). But Patin's attitude in this matter was determined by his detestation of Mazarin, whom he regarded as an arch-scoundrel. Naudé's defence of the Massacre is forensic.

[528] Lettres de Gui Patin, No. 188, édit. Reveillé-Parise, 1846, i, 364.

[529] Cp. Reveillé-Parise, as cited, Notice sur Gui Patin, pp. xxiii-xxvii, and Bayle, art. Patin.

[530] See the notices of him in Owen's Skeptics of the French Renaissance; and in Sainte-Beuve. Port Royal, iii, 180, etc.

[531] De la Vertu des Payens, in t. v. of the 12mo ed. of OEuvres, 1669.

[532] Hanotaux, Hist. du Cardinal de Richelieu, 1893, i, pref. p. 7.

[533] Cp. Buckle, ch. viii, 1-vol. ed. pp. 305-10, 325-28.

[534] See the good criticism of M. Hanotaux in Perrens, Les Libertins en France au xvii. siècle, p. 95 sq.

[535] OEuvres, ed. 1669, v, 4 sq. Bellarmin, as Le Vayer shows, had similarly explained away Augustine. But the doctrine that heathen virtue was not true virtue had remained orthodox.

[536] Ed. cited, iv, 125.

[537] Id. pp. 123-24.

[538] Tom. iii, 251.

[539] He wrote very many, the final collection filling three volumes folio, and fifteen in duodecimo. The Cincq Dialogues faits à l'imitation des Anciens were pseudonymous, and are not included in the collected works.

[540] "On le régarde comme le Plutarque de notre siècle" (Perrault, Les Hommes Illustres du XVIIe Siècle, éd. 1701, ii. 131).

[541] Perrault, ii, 132.

[542] Bayle, Dict. art. La Mothe le Vayer. Cp. introd. to L'Esprit de la Mothe le Vayer, par M. de M. C. D. S. P. D. L. (i.e. De Montlinot, chanoine de Saint Pierre de Lille), 1763, pp. xviii, xxi, xxvi.

[543] M. Perrens, who endorses this criticism, does not note that some passages he quotes from the Dialogues, as to atheism being less disturbing to States than superstition, are borrowed from Bacon's essay Of Atheism, of which Le Vayer would read the Latin version.

[544] Perrens, p. 132.

[545] In French, 1631; in Latin, 1656, amended.

[546] Translated into English in 1688, and into French, under the title Traité du Pyrrhonisme de l'église romaine, by N. Chalaire, Amsterdam, 1721.

[547] Bouillier, Hist. de la Philos. cartésienne, 1854, i, 410 sq., 420 sq.; Lanson, Hist. de la litt. française, 5e édit. p. 396; Brunetière, Études Critiques, 3e série, p. 2; Buckle, 1-vol. ed. p. 338. Bouillier notes (i, 426) that the femmes savantes ridiculed by Molière are Cartesians.

[548] Bouillier, i, 456; Lanson, p. 397.

[549] Bouillier, i, 411 sq.

[550] Id. p. 431 sq.

[551] Id. p. 437 sq.

[552] Id. pp. 449-50.

[553] "Il disait très souvent," said Pascal's niece:--"Je ne puis pardonner à Descartes: il aurait bien voulu, dans toute sa philosophie, pouvoir se passer de Dieu; mais il n'a pu s'empêcher de lui accorder une chiquenade, pour mettre le monde en mouvement; après cela il n'a plus que faire de Dieu." Récit de Marguerite Perier ("De ce que j'ai ouï dire par M. Pascal, mon oncle"), rep. with Pensées, ed. 1853. pp. 38-39.

[554] Bouillier, p. 453.

[555] Id. p. 455 sq.

[556] See Bouillier, i, 460 sq.; ii, 373 sq.; and introd. to OEuvres philos. du Père Buffier, 1846, p. 4; and cp. Rambaud, Hist. de la civilisation française, 6e édit. ii, 336.

[557] Bouillier, i, 465.

[558] Perrens, pp. 84-85.

[559] Cp. Perrens, pp. 68-69, and refs.

[560] Cp. Strowski, De Montaigne à Pascal, p. 141.

[561] See Duvernet, Vie de Voltaire, ch. i, and note 1; and Perrens, pp. 74-80.

[562] For all that is known of Petit see the Avertissement to Bibliophile Jacob's edition of Paris ridicule et burlesque au 17ième siècle, and refs. in Perrens, p. 153. After Petit's death, his friend Du Pelletier defended him as being a deist; but he seems in his youthful writings to have blasphemed at large, and he had been guilty of assassinating a young monk. He was burned, however, for blaspheming the Virgin.

[563] Guizot, Corneille et son temps, ed. 1880, p. 200. The circle of the Hôtel Rambouillet were especially hostile. Cp. Palissot's note to Polyeucte, end. On the other hand, Corneille found it prudent to cancel four skeptical lines which he had originally put in the mouth of the pagan Severus, the sage of the piece. Perrens, Les Libertins, p. 140.

[564] Under whom he studied in his youth with a number of other notably independent spirits, among them Cyrano de Bergerac. See Sainte-Beuve's essay on Molière, prefixed to the Hachette edition. Molière held by Gassendi as against Descartes. Bouillier, i, 542 sq.

[565] Constant Coquelin, art. "Don Juan" in the International Review, September, 1903, p. 61--an acute and scholarly study.

[566] "Molière is a freethinker to the marrow of his bones" (Perrens, p. 280). Cp. Lanson, p. 520; Fournier, Études sur Molière, 1885, pp. 122-23; Soury, Brêv. de l'hist. du matér. p. 384. "Ginguené," writes Sainte-Beuve, "a publié une brochure pour montrer Rabelais précurseur de la révolution française: c'étoit inutile à prouver sur Molière" (essay cited).

[567] Act II, sc. iv. in OEuvres Comiques, etc., ed. Jacob, rep. by Garnier, pp. 426-27.

[568] See Jacob's note in loc., ed. cited, p. 455.

[569] E.g. his Lettre contre un Pédant (No. 13 of the Lettres Satiriques in ed. cited, p. 181), which, however, appears to have been mutilated in some editions; as one of the deistic sentences cited by M. Perrens, p. 247, does not appear in the reprint of Bibliophile Jacob.

[570] E.g. the Histoire des Oiseaux in the Histoire Comique des états et empires du Soleil, ed. Jacob (Garnier), p. 278; and the Fragment de Physique (same vol.).

[571] See the careful criticism of Perrens, pp. 248-50.

[572] Bibliophile Jacob, pref. to ed. cited, pp. i-ii.

[573] Perrens, p. 302. Compare Bossuet's earlier sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent, 1665, cited by Perrens, pp. 253-54, where he speaks with something like fury of the free discussion around him.

[574] Cousin plausibly argues that Pascal began writing Pensées under the influence of a practice set up in her circle by Madame de Sablé. Mme. de Sablé, 5e édit. p. 124 sq.

[575] It is to be remembered that the work as published contained matter not Pascal's. Cp. Brunetière, Études, iii, 46-47; and the editions of the Pensées by Faugère and Havet.

[576] As to some of these see Perrens, pp. 158-69. They included the great Condé and some of the women in his circle; all of them unserious in their skepticism, and all "converted" when the physique gave the required cue.

[577] Pensées, ed. Faugère, ii, 168-69. The "abêtira" comes from Montaigne.

[578] Thus Mr. Owen treats Pascal as a skeptic, which philosophically he was, insofar as he really philosophized and did not merely catch at pleas for his emotional beliefs. "Les Pensées de Pascal," writes Prof. Le Dantec, "sont à mon avis le livre le plus capable de renforcer l'athéisme chez un athée" (L'Athéisme, 1906, pp. 24-25). They have in fact always had that effect.

[579] De la Delicatesse, 1671, dial. v, p. 329, etc.

[580] Vinet, Études sur Blaise Pascal, 3e édit. p. 267 sq.

[581] Cp. the Éloge de Pascal by Bordas Demoulin in Didot ed. of the Lettres, 1854, pp. xxii-xxiii, and cit. from Saint-Beuve. Mark Pattison, it seems, held that the Jesuits had the best of the argument. See the Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone, 1904, p. 207. As regards the effect of Jansenism on belief, we find De Tocqueville pronouncing that "Le Jansenisme ouvrit ... la brêche par laquelle la philosophie du 18e siècle devait faire irruption" (Hist. philos. du règne de Louis XV, 1849, i, 2). This could truly be said of Pascal.

[582] Cp. Voltaire's letter of 1768, cited by Morley, Voltaire, 4th ed. p. 159.

[583] Cp. Owen, French Skeptics, pp. 762-63, 767.

[584] This was expressly urged against Huet by Arnauld. See the Notice in Jourdain's ed. of the Logique de Port Royal, 1854, p. xi; Perrens, Les Libertins, p. 301; and Bouillier Hist. de la philos. cartésienne, 1854, i, 595-96, where are cited the letters of Arnauld (Nos. 830, 834, and 837 in OEuvres Compl. iii, 396, 404, 424) denouncing Huet's Pyrrhonism as "impious" and perfectly adapted to the purposes of the freethinkers.

[585] Cp. Alexandre Westphal, Les Sources du Pentateuque, i (1888), pp. 64-68.

[586] Huet himself incurred a charge of temerity in his handling of textual questions. Id. p. 66.

[587] Pattison, Essays, 1889, i. 303-304.

[588] Pattison, as cited.

[589] "After all, a book [the Bible] cannot make a stand against the wild, living intellect of man." Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua, 1st ed. p. 382; ed. 1875, p. 245. The same is said by Newman of religion in general (p. 243).

[590] Pattison disparages it as colourless, a fault he charges on Jesuit Latin in general. But by most moderns the Latin style of Huet will be found pure and pleasant.

[591] Pattison, Essays, i, 299. Cp. Bouillier, i, 595.

[592] Fontenelle, Éloge sur Régis; Bouillier, Philos. cartés., i, 507.

[593] Réponse to Huet's Censura philosophiæ cartes., 1691; Bouillier, i, 515.

[594] Usage de la raison et de la foi, 1704, liv. i, ptie. i, ch. vii; Bouillier, p. 511.

[595] Bouillier, i, 521-25.

[596] Lettre de 10 août, 1677, No. 591, éd. Nodier.

[597] Bouillier, ii, 10.

[598] Méditations chrétiennes, ix, § 13.

[599] Entretiens métaphysiques, viii.

[600] Id. viii, ix.

[601] Bouillier, ii, 33. So Kuno Fischer: "In brief, Malebranche's doctrine, rightly understood, is Spinoza's" (Descartes and his School, Eng. tr. 1890, p. 589. Cp. p. 542).

[602] The work of Arnauld was reprinted in 1724 with a remarkable Approbation by Clavel, in which he eulogizes the style and the dialectic of Arnauld, and expresses the hope that the book may "guérir, s'il se peut, d'une étrange préoccupation et d'une excessive confiance, ceux qui enseignent ou soutiennent comme evident ce qu'il y a de plus dangereux dans la nouvelle philosophie non-obstant les défenses faites par le feu Roi Louis XIV à l'Université d'Angers en l'année 1675 et à l'Université de Paris aux années 1691 et 1704 de le laisser enseigner ou soutenir."

[603] Des vrayes et des fausses idées, ch. xxviii.

[604] Recherche de la Vérité, liv. vi, ptie. ii, ch. iii.

[605] This was the main theme of the finished Éloge of Fontenelle, and was acknowledged by Bayle, Daguesseau, Arnauld, Bossuet, Voltaire, and Diderot, none of whom agreed with him. Bouillier, ii, 19. Fontenelle opposed Malebranche's philosophy in his Doutes sur le système physique des causes occasionelles. Id. p. 575.

[606] Cp. Bouillier, ii, 260-61.

[607] He is not mentioned by Ueberweg, Lange, or Lewes. His importance in æsthetics, however, is recognized by some moderns, though he is not named in Mr. Bosanquet's History of Æsthetic.

[608] Traité des premières vérités, 1724, §§ 521-31.

[609] Bouillier, introd. to Buffier's OEuvres philosophiques, 1846, p. xiii.

[610] Remarques sur les principes de la metaphysique de Locke, passages cited by Bouillier.

[611] OEuvres, éd. Bouillier, p. 329.

[612] Cp. Bouillier, Hist. de la philos. cartés., ii, 391.

[613] Malebranche, Traité de Morale, liv. ii, ch. 10. Cp. Bouillier, i, 582, 588-90; ii, 23.

[614] Cp. Westphal, Les Sources du Pentateuque, 1888, i, 67 sq.

[615] Præadamitæ, sive Exercitatio super versibus 12, 13, 14 cap. 5, Epist. D. Pauli ad Romanos, Quibus inducuntur Primi Homines ante Adamum conditi. The notion of a pre-Adamite human race, as we saw, had been held by Bruno. (Above, p. 46.)

[616] My copies of the Præadamitæ and Systema bear no place-imprint, but simply "Anno Salutis MDCLV." Both books seem to have been at once reprinted in 12mo.

[617] Bayle, Dictionnaire, art. Peyrere. A correspondent of Bayle's concludes his account of "le Préadamite" thus: "Le Pereire étoit le meilleur homme du monde, le plus doux, et qui tranquillement croyoit fort peu de chose." There is a satirical account of him in the Lettres de Gui Patin, April 5,1658 (No. 454, ed. Reveillé-Parise, 1846, iii, 83), cited by Bayle.

[618] See the account of his book by Mr. Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, i, 295-97. Rejecting as he did the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, he ranks with Hobbes and Spinoza among the pioneers of true criticism. Indeed, as his book seems to have been in MS. in 1645, he may precede Hobbes. Patin had heard of Peyrère's Præadamitæ as ready for printing in 1643. Let. 169, ed. cited, i, 297.

[619] Kuno Fischer, Descartes and his School, pp. 254-68.

[620] Colerus (i.e., Köhler), Vie de Spinoza, in Gfrörer's ed. of the Opera, pp. xlv-xlvii.

[621] Cited by George Sinclar in pref. to Satan's Invisible World Discovered, 1685,rep. 1871. I have been unable to meet with a copy of Mastricht's book.

[622] "Novitates Cartesianæ multis parasangas superunt Arminianas."

[623] Nichols, Works of Arminius, 1824, i, 257 b (paging partly duplicated).

[624] Cp. Bouillier, i, 293-94.

[625] Colerus, Vie de Spinoza, in Gfrörer's ed. of Opera, p. xxv; Martineau, Study of Spinoza, 1882, pp. 20-22; Pollock, Spinoza, 2nd ed. 1899, pp. 10-14.

[626] As set forth by Joel, Beiträge zur Gesch. der Philos., Breslau, 1876. See citations in Land's note to his lecture in Spinoza: Four Essays, 1882, pp. 51-53.

[627] Land, "In Memory of Spinoza," in Spinoza: Four Essays, pp. 57-58; Sigwart, as there cited; Pollock, Spinoza, p. 12. Cp. however, Martineau, p. 101, note.

[628] Renati Des Cartes Princip. Philos. more geometrico demonstratæ, 1663.

[629] Cp. Martineau, pp. 46, 57.

[630] Reprinted in 1674, without place-name, and with the imprint of an imaginary Hamburg publisher.

[631] Tractatus, c. 15.

[632] Ep. xxiv, to Oldenburg.

[633] Epp. lviii, lx, to Boxel.

[634] Ep. xxiii, to Oldenburg.

[635] Ep. xxiv.

[636] Ep. xxxiv, to W. van Bleyenberg.

[637] Ep. xlvii, to Jellis, Feb. 1671.

[638] Ep. xix, 1675, to Oldenburg.

[639] "Spinozism is atheistic, and has no valid ground for retaining the word 'God'" (Martineau, p. 349). This estimate is systematically made good by Prof. E. E. Powell of Miami University in his Spinoza and Religion (1906). See in particular ch. v. The summing-up is that "the right name for Spinoza's philosophy is Atheistic Monism" (pp. 339-40).

[640] Ethica, pt. i, App.; pt. ii, end; pt. v, prop. 41, schol. Cp. the Letters, passim.

[641] The solution is, of course, that the attitude of the will in the forming of opinion may or may not be passionally perverse, in the sense of being inconsistent. To show that it is inconsistent may be a means of enlightening it; and an aspersion to that effect may be medicinal. Spinoza might truly have said that passional perversity was at least as common on the orthodox side as on the other. In any case, he quashes his own criticism of Bacon. Cp. the author's essay on Spinoza in Pioneer Humanists.

[642] Pt. iv, prop. 68, schol.

[643] Ep. 1; 2 June, 1674.

[644] Colerus, as cited, p. liv. Cuper appears to have been genuinely anti-Spinozist, while his opponent, Breitburg, or Bredenburg, of Rotterdam, was a Spinozist. Both were members of the society of "Collegiants," a body of non-dogmatic Christians, which for a time was broken up through their dissensions. Mosheim, 17 Cent. sec. ii, pt. ii, ch. vii, § 2, and note.

[645] Theologisch, Philosophisch, en Historisch process voor God, tegen allerley Atheisten. By Francis Ridder, Rotterdam, 1678.

[646] L'Impiétié Convaincu, "par Pierre Yvon," Amsterdam, 1681. Really by the Sieur Noël Aubert de Versé. This appears to have been reprinted in 1685 under the title L'Impie convaincu, ou Dissertation contre Spinosa, ou l'on réfute les fondemens de son athéisme.

[647] See Fox Bourne's Life of Locke, ii, 282-83, as to Locke's friendly relations with the Remonstrants in 1683-89.

[648] See the summary of his argument by Alexandre Westphal, Les Sources du Pentateuque, 1888, i, 78 sq.

[649] Mosheim, Reid's ed. p. 836; Martineau, pp. 327-28. The first MS. of the treatise of Spinoza, De Deo et Homine, found and published in the nineteenth century, bore a note which showed it to have been used by a sect of Christian Spinozists. See Janet's ed. 1878, p. 3. They altered the text, putting "faith" for "opinion." Id. p. 53, notes.

[650] Edwards, Gangræna, as before cited.

[651] Discourse of Freethinking, p. 28.

[652] Colerus, as cited, p. lviii.

[653] First ed. Rotterdam, 2 vols. folio, 1696.

[654] Albert Cazes, Pierre Bayle, sa vie, ses idées, son influence, son oeuvre, 1905, pp. 6, 7.

[655] A movement of skepticism had probably been first set up in the young Bayle by Montaigne, who was one of his favourite authors before his conversion (Cazes, p. 5). Montaigne, it will be remembered, had been a fanatic in his youth. Thus three typical skeptics of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries had known what it was to be Catholic believers.

[656] Cp. the essay on The Skepticism of Bayle in Sir J. F. Stephen's Horæ Sabbaticæ, vol. iii, and the remarks of Perrens, Les Libertins, pp. 331-37.

[657] Éloge de M. le Cardinal Polignac prefixed to Bougainville's translation, L'Anti-Lucrèce, 1767, i, 141. Bayle's quoted words are: "Oui, monsieur, je suis bon Protestant, et dans toute la force du mot; car au fond de mon âme je proteste contre tout ce qui se dit et tout ce qui se fait."

[658] Cp. the testimony of Bonet-Maury, Histoire de la liberté de conscience en France, 1900, p. 55. Besides the writings above cited, note, in the Dictionnaire, art. Mahomet, § ix; art. Conecte; art. Simonide, notes H and G; art. Sponde, note C.

[659] Commentaire philosophique sur la parabole: Contrains-les d'entrer, 2e ptie, vi. Cp. the Critique générale de l'histoire du Calvinisme du Père Maimbourg, passim.

[660] See pref. to Eng. tr. of Hotman's Franco-Gallia, 1711.

[661] Rep. at Amsterdam, 1788, under the title, Voeux d'un Patriote. Jurieu's authorship is not certain. Cp. Ch. Nodier, Mélanges tirés d'une petite bibliothèque, 1829, p. 357. But it is more likely than the alternative ascription to Le Vassor. The book made such a sensation that the police of Louis XIV destroyed every copy they could find; and in 1772 the Chancelier Maupeou was said to have paid 500 livres for a copy at auction over the Duc d'Orléans.

[662] Ed. 1766, p. 7.

[663] The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus had been translated into French in 1678 by Saint-Glain, a Protestant, who gave it no fewer than three other titles in succession to evade prosecution. (Note to Colerus in Gfrörer's ed. of Spinoza, p. xlix.) In addition to the work of Aubert de Versé, above mentioned, replies were published by Simon, De la Motte (minister of the Savoy Chapel, London), Lami, a Benedictine, and others. Their spirit may be divined from Lami's title, Nouvel athéisme renversé, 1706.

[664] Tom. I. § ii, ch. ix (ed. 1864, i, 134. 177).

[665] The destruction of Protestant liberties was not the work of the single Act of Revocation. It had begun in detail as early as 1663. From the withholding of court favour it proceeded to subsidies for conversions, and thence to a graduated series of invasions of Protestant rights, so that the formal Revocation was only the violent consummation of a process. See the recital in Bonet-Maury, Histoire de la liberté de conscience en France, 1900, pp. 46-52.

[666] As to the loss to French industry see Bonet-Maury, as cited, p. 59, and refs.

[667] See Duruy, Hist. de la France, ii, 253; Bonet-Maury, as cited, pp. 53-66.

[668] As to whose attitude at this crisis see O. Douen, L'Intolérance de Fénelon, 1880.

[669] Lanson, Hist. de la litt. française, p. 627.

[670] Id ib. Cp. Demogeot, p. 468.

[671] Not printed till 1743, in the Nouvelles libertés de penser; and still read in MS. by Grimm in 1754. Fontenelle was also credited with a heretical letter on the resurrection, and an essay on the Infinite, pointing to disbelief. It should be noted, however, that he stands for deism in his essay, De l'existence de Dieu, which is a guarded application of the design argument against what was then assumed to be the only alternative--the "fortuitous concourse of atoms."

[672] But Voltaire and he were not at one. He is the "nain de Saturne" in Micromégas.

[673] B. 1613; d. 1703. A man who lived to ninety can have been no great debauchee.

[674] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, p. 172.

[675] Cp. Gidel, Étude prefixed to OEuvres Choisies de Saint-Evremond, ed. Garnier, pp. 64-69.

[676] Caractères (1687), ch. xvi: Les Esprits Forts.

[677] "Is embarrassed" in the first edition.

[678] Des ouvrages de l'esprit, near end. § 65 in ed. Walckenaer, p. 176.

[679] M. Le Vassor, De la véritable religion, 1688, préf. Le Vassor speaks in the same preface of "this multitude of libertins and of unbelievers which now terrifies us." His book seeks to vindicate the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, inspiration, prophecies, and miracles, against Spinoza, Le Clerc, and others.

[680] Cp. Huet, Huetiana, § 1.

[681] The question is discussed in the author's Buckle and his Critics, pp. 324-42, and ed. of Buckle's Introduction. Buckle's view, however, was held by Huet, Huetiana, § 73.

[682] Cp. Perrens, pp. 310-14.

[683] Letter of the Duchesse d'Orléans, cited by Rocquain, L'Esprit révolutionnaire avant la révolution, 1878, p. 3, note.

[684] As Voltaire noted, Toland was persecuted in Ireland for his circumspect and cautious first book, and left unmolested in England when he grew much more aggressive.

[685] First ed. anonymous. Second ed., of same year, gives author's name. Another ed. in 1702.

[686] See Dynamics of Religion, p. 129.

[687] Pref. to 2nd ed. pp. vi, viii, xxiv, xxvi.

[688] As late as 1701 a vote for its prosecution was passed in the Lower House of Convocation. Farrar, Crit. Hist. of Freethought, p. 180.

[689] Molyneux, in Familiar Letters of Locke, etc. p. 228.

[690] No credit for this is given in Sir Leslie Stephen's notice of Toland in English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, i, 101-12. Compare the estimate of Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, i, 272-76 (Eng. tr. i, 324-30). Lange perhaps idealizes his subject somewhat.

[691] In two letters published along with the Letters to Serena, 1704.

[692] Letters to Serena, etc. 1704, pref.

[693] De Principiis atque Originibus (Routledge's 1-vol. ed. pp. 651, 667).

[694] Letters to Serena, pp. 19, 67.

[695] Sir Henry Craik (cited by Temple Scott, Bohn ed. of Swift's Works, iii, 9) speaks of Toland as "a man of utterly worthless character." This is mere malignant abuse. Toland is described by Pope in a note to the Dunciad (ii, 399) as a spy to Lord Oxford. There could hardly be a worse authority for such a charge.

[696] Gostwick, German Culture and Christianity, 1882, p. 26.

[697] Cp. Stephen, as cited, p. 115.

[698] "The Christianity of many writers consisted simply in expressing deist opinions in the old-fashioned phraseology" (Stephen, i, 91).

[699] Cp. Pünjer, Christ. Philos. of Religion, i, 289-90; and Dynamics of Religion, pp. 94-98. Lord Morley's reference to "the godless deism of the English school" (Voltaire, 4th ed. p. 69) is puzzling. Cp. Rosenkranz (Diderot's Leben und Werke, 1866, ii, 421) on "den ungöttlichen Gott der Jesuiten and Jansenisten, dies monströse Zerrbild des alten Jehovah, diesen apotheosirten Tyrannen, diesen Moloch." The latter application of the term seems the more plausible.

[700] Macaulay's description of Blount as an atheist is therefore doubly unwarranted.

[701] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 94-98.

[702] Continuation des Pensées Diverses ... à l'occasion de la Comète ... de 1680, Amsterdam, 1705, i, 91.

[703] Warburton, Divine Legation, vol. ii, preface.

[704] Stephen, English Thought, i, 114-18.

[705] This, according to John Craig, was Newton's opinion. "The reason of his [Newton's] showing the errors of Cartes's philosophy was because he thought it made on purpose to be the foundation of infidelity." Letter to Conduitt, April 7, 1727, in Brewster's Memoirs of Newton, ii, 315. Clarke, in his Answer to Butler's Fifth Letter, expresses a similar view.

[706] "Three Discourses of Happiness, Virtue, and Liberty, Collected from the Works of the Learn'd Gassendi by Monsieur Bernier. Translated out of the French, 1699."

[707] Cp. W. Sichel, Bolingbroke and His Times, 1901, i, 175.

[708] Sir Leslie Stephen (i, 33) makes the surprising statement that a "dogmatic assertion of free-will became a mark of the whole deist and semi-deist school." On the contrary, Hobbes and Anthony Collins, not to speak of Locke, wrote with uncommon power against the conception of free-will, and had many disciples on that head.

[709] Letter to the Princess of Wales, November, 1715, in Brewster, ii, 284-85.

[710] Second Letter to Clarke, par. 1.

[711] Abstract from the Works of John Hutchinson, 1755, pp. 149-63.

[712] Clarke's Answer to Leibnitz's First Letter, end.

[713] Berkeley, Defence of Freethinking in Mathematics, par. vii; and Stock's Memoir of Berkeley. Cp. Brewster, Memoirs of Newton, ii, 408.

[714] In the Philosophical Transactions, 1718, No. 355, i, v, vi.

[715] Brewster, More Worlds than One, 1854, p. 110.

[716] Lecky, Hist. of England in the Eighteenth Cent. ed. 1892, iii, 22-24.

[717] The tradition of Saunderson's unbelief is constant. In the memoir prefixed to his Elements of Algebra (1740) no word is said of his creed, though at death he received the sacrament.

[718] See The State of the Process depending against Mr. John Simson, Edinburgh, 1728. Simson always expressed himself piously, but had thrown out such expressions as Ratio est principium et fundamentum theologiæ, which "contravened the Act of Assembly, 1717" (vol. cited, p. 316). The "process" against him began in 1714, and dragged on for nearly twenty years, with the result of his resigning his professorship of theology at Glasgow in 1729, and seceding from the Associate Presbytery in 1733. Burton, History of Scotland, viii, 399-400.

[719] Cp. the pamphlet by "A Presbyter of the Church of England," attributed to Bishop Hare, cited in Dynamics of Religion, pp. 177-78, and by Lecky, iii, 25.

[720] Tatler, Nos. 12, 111, 135; Spectator, Nos. 231, 381, 389, 599; Guardian, Nos. 3, 9, 27, 35, 39, 55, 62, 70, 77, 83, 88, 120, 130, 169. Most of the Guardian papers cited are by Berkeley. They are extremely virulent; but Steele's run them hard.

[721] Analyst, Queries 60 and 62: Defence of Freethinking in Mathematics, §§ 5, 6, 50. Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 141-42.

[722] Letter in De Morgan's Newton: his Friend: and his Niece, 1885, p. 69.

[723] The essays in the Characteristics (excepting the Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit, which was published by Toland, without permission, in 1699) appeared between 1708 and 1711, being collected in the latter year. Shaftesbury died in 1713, in which year appeared his paper on The Judgment of Hercules.

[724] A Project for the Advancement of Religion. Bohn ed. of Works, iii, 44. In this paper Swift reveals his moral standards by the avowal (p. 40) that "hypocrisy is much more eligible than open infidelity and vice: it wears the livery of religion ... and is cautious of giving scandal."

[725] Sir Leslie Stephen (English Thought, i, 283) speaks of Dodwell's thesis as deserving only "pity or contempt." Cp. Macaulay, Student's ed. ii, 107-108. But a doctrine of conditional immortality had been explicitly put by Locke in his Reasonableness of Christianity, 1695, p. 13. Cp. Prof. Fraser's Locke, 1890, pp. 259-60, and Fox Bourne's Life of Locke, ii, 287. The difference was that Dodwell elaborately gave his reasons, which, as Dr. Clarke put it, made "all good men sorry, and all profane men rejoice."

[726] History of his Own Time, ed. 1838, p. 887.

[727] Compare his ironical Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, 1708.

[728] He had, however, hailed the anonymous Letter Concerning Enthusiasm as "very well writ," believing it to be by a friend of his own--(Robert Hunter, to whom, accordingly, it has since been mistakenly attributed by various bibliographers, including Barbier). "Enthusiasm," as meaning "popular fanaticism," was of course as repellent to a Churchman as to the deists.

[729] Printed in folio 1711. Rep. in vol. xi of the Harleian Miscellany, p. 168 sq. (2nd ed. p. 163 sq.).

[730] Dr. E. Synge, of Dublin (afterwards Archbishop of Tuam), in his Religion Tryed by the Test of Sober and Impartial Reason, published in 1713, seems to be writing before the issue of Collins's book when he says (Dedication, p. 11) that the spread of the "disease not only of Heterodoxy but of Infidelity" is "too plain to be either denied or dissembled."

[731] Leslie affirms in his Truth of Christianity Demonstrated (1711, p. 14) that the satirical Detection of his Short Method with the Deists, to which the Truth is a reply, was by the author of Priestcraft in Perfection; but, while the Detection has some of Collins's humour, it lacks his amenity, and is evidently not by him.

[732] An English translation of the Dictionary, in 5 vols. folio, with "many passages restored," appeared in 1734.

[733] A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke, 1720, p. 271.

[734] E.g. Mark Pattison, who calls Collins's book of 178 pages a "small tract."

[735] "Ignorance," Collins writes, "is the foundation of Atheism, and Freethinking the cure of it" (Discourse of Freethinking, p. 105). Like Newton, he contemplated only an impossible atheism, never formulated by any writer. The Philosophical Principles of Religion, Natural and Reveal'd, of Dr. George Cheyne (1705, 2nd ed. 1715), similarly declares (pref. end) that "if the modern [i.e. Newtonian] philosophy demonstrates nothing else, yet it infallibly proves Atheism to be the most gross ignorance." Thus the vindicator of "religion" was writing in the key of the deist.

[736] Mr. Temple Scott, in his Bohn ed. of Swift's Works (iii, 166), asserts that Swift's satire "frightened Collins into Holland." For this statement there is no evidence whatever, and as it stands it is unintelligible. The assertion that Collins had had to fly to Holland in 1711 (Dr. Conybeare, Hist. of N. T. Crit. R. P. A. 1910, p. 38) is also astray.

[737] Second ed. 1717. Another writer, William Lyons, was on the same track, publishing The Infallibility of Human Judgment, its Dignity and Excellence (2nd ed. 1720), and A Discourse of the Necessity of Human Actions (1730).

[738] Work cited, p. 13.

[739] As to whose positions see a paper in the writer's Pioneer Humanists, 1907.

[740] There were six separate Discourses. Voltaire speaks of "three editions coup sur coup of ten thousand each" (Lettre sur les auteurs Anglais--in OEuvres, ed. 1792. lxviii, 359). This seems extremely unlikely as to any one Discourse; and even 5,000 copies of each Discourse is a hardly credible sale, though the writer of the sketch of his life (1733) says that "the sale of Mr. Woolston's works was very great." In any case, Woolston's Discourses are now seldomer met with than Collins's Discourse of Freethinking. Alberti (Briefe betreffend den Zustand der Religion in Gross-Brittannien) wrote in 1752 that the Discourses were even in that day somewhat rare, and seldom found together. Many copies were probably destroyed by the orthodox, and many would doubtless be thrown away, as tracts so often are.

[741] Tyerman's Life of Wesley, ed. 1871, i, 65-66.

[742] The Infidel Convicted, 1731, pp. 33, 62.

[743] Tindal (1653-1733) was the son of a clergyman, and in 1678 was elected a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford. From 1685 to 1688 he was a Roman Catholic. Under William III he wrote three works on points of political freedom--one, 1698, on The Liberty of the Press. His Rights of the Christian Church, anonymously published in 1706, a defence of Erastianism, made a great sensation, and was prosecuted--only to be reprinted. His later Defence of the Rights of the Christian Church was in 1710, by order of the House of Commons, burned by the common hangman.

[744] Middleton's Works, 2nd ed. 1755, iii, 50-56.

[745] Tindal (Voltaire tells) regarded Pope as devoid of genius and imagination, and so trebly earned his place in the Dunciad.

[746] A Layman's Faith.... "By a Freethinker and a Christian," 1732.

[747] Title-page of Rev. Elisha Smith's Cure of Deism, 1st ed. 1736; 3rd ed. 1740.

[748] Le Moine, Dissertation historique sur les écrits de Woolston, sa condemnation, etc. pp. 29-31, cited by Salchi, Lettres sur le Déisme, 1759, p. 67 sq.

[749] Lettre sur les auteurs Anglais, as cited. Voltaire tells that, when a she-bigot one day spat in Woolston's face, he calmly remarked: "It was so that the Jews treated your God." Another story reads like a carefully-improved version of the foregoing. A woman is said to have accosted him as a scoundrel, and asked him why he was not yet hanged. On his asking her grounds for such an accost, she replied: "You have writ against my Saviour. What would become of my poor sinful soul if it was not for my dear Saviour--my Saviour who died for such wicked sinners as I am." Life of Mr. Woolston, prefixed to a reprint of his collected Discourses, 1733, p. 27. Cp. Salchi, p. 78.

[750] Life cited, pp. 22, 26, 29.

[751] An Historical Defence of the Trustees of Lady Hewley's Foundations, by the Rev. Joseph Hunter, 1834, pp. 17, 35; The History, Opinions, and present legal position of the English Presbyterians, 1834, pp. 18, 29; Skeats, History of the Free Churches of England, ed. Miall, p. 240.

[752] Hunter, as cited, p. 17; History of the Presbyterians, as cited, p. 19; Fletcher, History of Independency, 1862, iv, 266-67.

[753] Hunter, pp. 37, 39.

[754] Skeats, as cited, p. 226.

[755] Hunter, pp. 24-25.

[756] Skeats (pp.239-40) sums up that while the Baptists had probably "never been entirely free from the taint" of Unitarianism, the Particular Baptists and the Congregationalists were saved from it by their lack of men of "eminently speculative mind"; while the Presbyterians "were men, for the most part, of larger reading than other Nonconformists, and the writings of Whiston and Clarke had found their way among them." But the tendency existed before Whiston and Clarke.

[757] History, cited, p. 22; Hunter, pp. 44-45; Skeats, pp. 243-44.

[758] Skeats, pp. 240-43, 245 sq.

[759] Skeats, p. 248.

[760] Hunter, p. 50.

[761] As Sir Leslie Stephen has observed (English Thought, i, 164), Chubb "deserves the praise of Malthusians." Having a sufficiency of means for himself, but not more, he "lived a single life, judging it greatly improper to introduce a family into the world without a prospect of maintaining them." The proverb as to mouths and meat, he drily observes, had not been verified in his experience. (The Author's Account of Himself, pref. to Posthumous Works, 1748, i, p. iv.)

[762] One of the then numerous tribe of eccentrics. He held by Judaic Sabbatarianism, and affected a Rabinnical costume. He made a competence, however, as an ironmonger.

[763] Essay Towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain.

[764] Discourse to Magistrates.

[765] Guardian, Nos. 3, 55, 88.

[766] The Analyst, Queries, 55-67.

[767] See above, pp. 126-28.

[768] Discourse of Passive Obedience, § 26.

[769] Works, ed. 1837, p. 352.

[770] See the whole context, which palpitates with excitement.

[771] Mr. Walter Sichel (Bolingbroke and his Times, 1901, i, 175) thinks fit to dispose of her attitude as "her aversion to the Church and to everything that transcended her own faculties." So far as the evidence goes, her faculties were much superior to those of most of her orthodox contemporaries. For her tone see her letters.

[772] E.g. Dunciad, ii, 399; iii, 212; iv, 492.

[773] Voltaire commented pointedly on Pope's omission to make any reference to Shaftesbury, while vending his doctrine. (Lettres Philosophiques, xxii.) As a matter of fact Pope does in the Dunciad (iv, 488) refer maliciously to the Theocles of Shaftesbury's Moralists as maintaining a Lucretian theism or virtual atheism. The explanation is that Shaftesbury had sharply criticized the political course of Bolingbroke, who in turn ignored him as a thinker. See the present writer's introd. to Shaftesbury's Characteristics, ed. 1900 (rep. in Pioneer Humanists); and cp. W. R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson, 1900, p. 101.

[774] Texte, Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature, Eng. tr. pp. 117-18.

[775] Chesterfield in his Characters (app. to the Letters) testifies that Pope "was a deist believing in a future state; this he has often owned himself to me." (Bradshaw's ed. of Letters, iii, 1410.) Chesterfield makes a similar statement concerning Queen Caroline:--"After puzzling herself in all the whimsies and fantastical speculations of different sects, she fixed herself ultimately in Deism, believing in a future state." (Id. p. 1406.)

[776] Dict. Philos. art. Athée, § 2.

[777] Wise, in his adaptation of Cudworth, A Confutation of the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism (1706), writes (i, 5) that "the philosophical atheists are but few in number," and their objections so weak "as that they deserve not a hearing but rather neglect"; but confusedly goes on to admit that "one or two broachers of 'em maybe thought able to infect a whole nation, as ... sad experience tells us."

[778] Complaint to this effect was made by orthodox writers. The Scotch Professor Halyburton, for instance, complains that in many sermons in his day "Heathen Morality has been substituted in the room of Gospel Holiness. And Ethicks by some have been preached instead of the Gospels of Christ." Natural Religion Insufficient (Edinburgh), 1714, p. 25. Cp. pp. 23, 26-27, 59, etc. Bishop Burnet, in the Conclusion to his History of his Own Time, declares, "I must own that the main body of our clergy has always seemed dead and lifeless to me," and ascribes much more zeal to Catholics and dissenters. (Ed. 1838, pp. 907-910.)

[779] The Moralists deals rather with strict skepticism than with substantive atheism.

[780] The Grand Essay: or, a Vindication of Reason and Religion against Impostures of Philosophy. The book was, on March 18, 1704, condemned by the House of Commons to be burned in Palace Yard, along with its author's Second Thoughts Concerning the Human Soul (1702). A second ed. of the latter appeared soon after.

[781] Above, p. 153.

[782] Mr. Herbert Paul, in his essay on Swift (Men and Letters, 1901, p. 267), lumps as deists the four writers named by Swift in his Argument. Not having read them, he thinks fit to asperse all four as bad writers. Asgill, as was noted by Coleridge (Table Talk, July 30, 1831; April 30, 1832), was one of the best writers of his time. He was, in fact, a master of the staccato style, practised by Mr. Paul with less success.

[783] Work cited, p. 324. The book is now rare.

[784] Cp. Cheyne, Founders of Old Testament Criticism, 1893, p. 2.

[785] Dr. Cheyne expresses surprise that a "theological writer" who got no far should not have been "prompted by his good genius to follow up his advantage." It is, however, rather remarkable that Parvish, who was a bookseller at Guildford (Alberti, Briefe, p. 426), should have achieved what he did. It was through not being a theological writer that he went so far, no theologian of his day following him.

[786] See the author's introduction to ed. of the Characteristics, 1900, rep. in Pioneer Humanists.

[787] The question remains obscure. Cp. the Letter cited, reprinted at end of Carver's 1830 ed. of Paine's Works (New York); F. Thackeray's Life of Chatham, ii, 405; and Chatham's "scalping-knife" speech.

[788] A Vindication of the Moral Philosopher appeared in 1741.

[789] Cp. Lechler, pp. 371, 386.

[790] Cp. Cairns, Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century, 1881, p. 101.

[791] Ed. 1741, p. 30 sq.

[792] View of the Deistical Writers, Letter XI (X in 1st ed.).

[793] Sir Leslie Stephen, English Thought, i, 169.

[794] Act 9th, Geo. II (1736), ch. 5.

[795] A Tour in Ireland, ed. 1892, ii, 59-72.

[796] Young at this period was entirely secular in his thinking. Telling of his recovery from a fever in 1790, he writes: "I fear that not one thought of God ever occurred to me at that time" (Autobiography, 1898, p. 188). Afterwards he fell into religious melancholia (Introd. note of editor).

[797] Really an abler man than half the others in the list, but himself a good deal of a heretic. So far from attempting to make "victims," he pleaded for a more candid treatment of deistic objections.

[798] Doddridge himself was not theologically orthodox, but was an evangelical Christian. Dr. Stoughton, Religion in England under Queen Anne and the Georges, 1878, i, 344-46.

[799] Whose doctrine Sir Leslie Stephen elsewhere (p. 258) calls a "brutal theology which gloried in trampling on the best instincts of its opponents," and a "most unlovely product of eighteenth-century speculation."

[800] Of Warburton Sir Leslie writes elsewhere (p. 353) that "this colossus was built up of rubbish." See p. 352 for samples. Again he speaks (p. 368) of the bishop's pretensions as "colossal impudence." It should be noted, further, that Warburton's teaching in the Divine Legation was a gross heresy in the eyes of William Law, who in his Short but Sufficient Confutation pronounced its main thesis a "most horrible doctrine." Ed. 1768, as cited, i, 217.

[801] As to whose "senile incompetence" see same vol. p. 234.

[802] History of Protestant Theology, Eng. tr. ii, 77. For the influence of deism on Germany, see Tholuck (Vermischte Schriften, Bd. ii) and Lechler (Gesch. des englischen Deismus).--Note by Dr. Cheyne.

[803] An Essay towards a Natural History of the Earth, 3rd ed. 1723, pref. and pp. 16 sq., 77 sq. Cp. White, Warfare of Science with Theology, i. 227.

[804] End of pref.

[805] Work cited, p. 85.

[806] Playfair, in the Edinburgh Review, January, 1808, cited by Brewster, Memoirs of Newton, 1855. i, 347.

[807] Brewster, as last cited.

[808] Grant, History of Physical Astronomy, 1852, p. 108.

[809] Baden Powell, Hist. of Nat. Philos. 1834, p. 363.

[810] Brewster, More Worlds than One, 1854, p. 111.

[811] Sir James Stephen, Horæ Sabbaticæ, ii, 281; Lechler, p. 451.

[812] See details in Dynamics of Religion, ch. viii.

[813] Essay on "Tendencies of Religious Thought in England: 1688-1750," in Essays and Reviews, 9th ed. p. 304.

[814] In criticizing whom Sir Leslie Stephen barely notices his scientific work, but dwells much on his religious fallacies--a course which would make short work of the fame of Newton.

[815] In his Case of Reason; or, Natural Religion Fully and Fairly Stated, in answer to Tindal (1732). See the argument set forth by Sir Leslie Stephen, i, 158-63. It is noteworthy, however, that in his Spirit of Prayer (1750), pt. ii, dial. i, Law expressly argues that "No other religion can be right but that which has its foundation in Nature. For the God of Nature can require nothing of his creatures but what the state of their nature calls them to." Like Baxter, Berkeley, Butler, and so many other orthodox polemists, Law uses the argument from ignorance when it suits him, and ignores or rejects it when used by others.

[816] The general reader should take note that in A. Murray's issue of Hume's Essays (afterwards published by Ward, Lock, and Co.), which omits altogether the essays on Miracles and a Future State, the Natural History of Religion is much mutilated, though the book professes to be a verbatim reprint.

[817] Even before his death he was suspected of that view. When his coffin was being carried from his house for interment, one of "the refuse of the rabble" is said to have remarked, "Ah, he was an atheist." "No matter," replied another, "he was an honest man" (Curious Particulars, etc., respecting Chesterfield and Hume, 1788, p. 15).

[818] See Burton, Hist. of Scotland, viii, 549-50, as to the case of Pitcairne.

[819] Howell's State Trials, xiii (1812), coll. 917-38.

[820] Macaulay, History, ch. xxii; student's ed. ii, 620-21; Burton, History of Scotland, viii, 76-77. Aikenhead seems to have been a boy of unusual if unbalanced capacity, even by the bullying account of Macaulay, who missed no opportunity to cover himself by stoning heretics. See the boy's arguments on the bases of ethics, set forth in his "dying speech," as cited by Halyburton, Natural Religion Insufficient, 1714, pp. 119-23, 131, and the version in the State Trials, xiii, 930-34.

[821] Macaulay ascribes the savagery of the prosecution to the Lord Advocate, Sir James Stewart, "as cruel as he was base"; but a letter printed in the State Trials, from a member of the Privy Council, says the sentence would have been commuted if "the ministers would intercede." They, however, "spoke and preached for cutting him off." Trials, xiii, 930; Burton, viii, 77.

[822] Letter to Sir Francis Masham, printed in the State Trials, xiii, 928-29--evidently written by Locke, who seems to have preserved all the papers printed by Howell.

[823] Macaulay, as cited. In 1681 one Francis Borthwick, who had gone abroad at the age of fourteen and turned Jew, was accused of blaspheming Jesus, and had to fly for his life, being outlawed. State Trials, as cited, col. 939.

[824] A Full Account of the Several Ends and Uses of Confessions of Faith, first published in 1719 as a preface to a Collection of Confessions of Faith, by Prof. W. Dunbar, of Edinburgh University, 3rd ed. 1775, p. 1.

[825] Work cited, p. 48.

[826] Id. p. 198.

[827] Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century. From the MSS. of John Ramsay, of Ochtertyre, 1888, i, 277. Ramsay describes Johnston as a "joyous, manly, honourable man," of whom Kames "was exceedingly fond" (p. 278).

[828] W. R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson, 1900, pp. 15, 20-21.

[829] Id. p. 52.

[830] Cp. Alberti, Briefe betreffende den Zustand der Religion in Gross-Brittannien, 1752, pp. 430-31.

[831] See Dr. McCosh's Scottish Philosophy, 1875, pp. 111-13. Dr. McCosh notes that at some points Dudgeon anticipated Hume.

[832] Dr. McCosh, however, admits that the absence of the printer's name on the 1765 edition of Dudgeon's works shows that there was then no thorough freedom of thought in Scotland.

[833] Rae, Life of Adam Smith, 1895, p. 13. Prof. Fowler shows no knowledge of this prosecution in his monograph on Hutcheson (Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, 1882); and Mr. W. R. Scott, in his, seems to rely for the wording of the indictment solely on Mr. Rae, who gives no references, drawing apparently on unpublished MSS.

[834] Rae, as cited, pp. 11-15.

[835] Scott, as cited, p. 87.

[836] Dr. James Orr, David Hume and his Influence, etc., 1903. pp. 36-37.

[837] Also for a time a theological professor in Edinburgh University.

[838] The Thoughts Concerning Religion, Natural and Revealed, appeared in 1735; the Letter to a Bishop in 1732; and the Reflections on the Sources of Incredulity (left unfinished) posthumously about 1750. Forbes in his youth had been famed as one of the hardest drinkers of his day.

[839] Reflections on Incredulity, in Works, undated, ii, 141-42. Yet the works of Forbes were translated for orthodox purposes into German, and later into French by Père Houbigant (1769), who preserves the passage on freethinkers' morals, though curtailing the Reflections as a whole.

[840] As to which see A Sober Enquiry into the Grounds of the Present Differences in the Church of Scotland, 1723.

[841] Cockburn's Life of Jeffrey, ed. 1872, p. 10.

[842] See the Autobiography of the Rev. Dr. A. Carlyle, 1860, pp. 492-93. Millar's Historical View of the English Government (censured by Hallam) was once much esteemed; and his Origin of Ranks is still worth the attention of sociologists.

[843] Ritchie's Life of Hume, 1807, pp. 52-81; Tytler's Life of Lord Kames, 2nd ed. 1814, i, ch. v; Burton's Life of Hume, i, 425-30.

[844] Ritchie, as cited, p. 57.

[845] McCulloch, Life of Smith prefixed to ed. of Wealth of Nations, ed. 1839, p. ii.

[846] Ramsay of Ochtertyre, Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, 1888, i, 462-63. Mr. Rae doubts the story, Life of Adam Smith, 1895, p. 60.

[847] Ramsay, as last cited.

[848] Ramsay, passage cited.

[849] Theory of Moral Sentiments, pt. iii, ch. ii, end.

[850] Cp. Rae, pp. 427-30. Mr. Rae thinks the deletion stood for no change of opinion, and cites Smith's own private explanation (Sinclair's Life of Sir John Sinclair, i, 40) that he thought the passage "unnecessary and misplaced." But this expression must be read in the light of Smith's general reticence concerning established dogmas. Certainly he adhered to his argument--which does not claim to be a demonstration--for the doctrine of a future state.

[851] Bk. v, ch. i, pt. iii, art. 3.

[852] Smith's admiration for Voltaire might alone indicate his mental attitude. As to that see F. W. Hirst, Adam Smith (Eng. Men of Letters ser.), pp. 127-28. But the assertion of Skarzinski, that Smith, after being an Idealist under the influence of Hume, "returned a materialist" from his intercourse with Voltaire and other French freethinkers, is an exhibition of learned ignorance. See Hirst, p. 181.

[853] An Explanation and Defence of the Principles of Protestant Dissent, by the Rev. Dr. W. Hamilton Drummond, 1842, pp. 5-6. 47; Skeats, Hist. of the Free Churches of England, ed. Miall, pp. 238-39; Wallace, Anti-Trinitarian Biography, iii, art. 360.

[854] Cp. Drummond, as cited, pp. 29-30; History, Opinions, etc., of the English Presbyterians, 1834, p. 29.

[855] W. R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson, p. 31.

[856] Above, p. 154, note.

[857] Scott, pp. 28-29, 35-36. The suggestion is not quite convincing. Synge, after becoming Archbishop of Tuam, continued to publish his propagandist tracts, among them An Essay towards making the Knowledge of Religion Easy to the Meanest Capacity (6th ed. 1734), which is quite orthodox, and which argues (p. 3) that the doctrine of the Trinity is to be believed, and not pried into, "because it is above our understanding to comprehend." All the while there was being sold also his early treatise, "A Gentleman's Religion: in Three Parts ... with an Appendix, wherein it is proved that nothing contrary to our Reason can possibly be the object of our belief, but that it is no just exception against some of the doctrines of Christianity that they are above our reason."

[858] Scott, p. 36.

[859] All that is told of this prelate by Lecky (Hist. of Ireland in the 18th Cent. 1892. i, 207) is that at Killala he patronized horse-races. He was industrious on more episcopal lines. He wrote an Introduction to the History of the Jews; a Vindication of Biblical Chronology; two treatises on prophecy; an anti-Athanasian Essay on Spirit (1751), which aroused much controversy; A Vindication of the Histories of the Old and New Testament, in answer to Bolingbroke (2 vols. 1752-1754; 2nd ed. 1757; rep. with the Essay on Spirit, Dublin, 1759), which led to his being prosecuted; and other works. The offence given by the Vindication lay in his denunciation of the Athanasian creed, and of the bigotry of those who supported it. See pt. iii, letters i and ii. The Essay on Spirit is no less heterodox. In other respects, however, Clayton is ultra-orthodox.

[860] Dr. G. W. Alberti, Briefe betreffende den Zustand der Religion in Gross-Brittannien, Hannover, 1752, p. 440.

[861] Above, p. 180.

[862] Put by Huarte in 1575. Above, i, 472.

[863] Inquiry, p. 162.

[864] Inquiry, pref. pp. x, xxii.

[865] A Letter to the Rev. Dr. Conyers Middleton, occasioned by his late "Free Inquiry," 1749, pp. 3-4.

[866] A Free Answer to Dr. Middleton's "Free Inquiry," by William Dodwell [son of the elder and brother of the younger Henry], Rector of Shottesbrook, 1749, pp. 14-15.

[867] Inquiry, p. 162.

[868] Works, 2nd ed. 1755, ii, 348.

[869] Cp. essay on Mandeville, in the author's Pioneer Humanists, 1907.

[870] As against the objections of Mr. Lang, see the author's paper in Studies in Religious Fallacy.

[871] Cp. the summary of Farrar, Crit. Hist. of Freethought, pp. 177-78, which is founded on that of Pusey's early Historical Enquiry concerning German Rationalism, pp. 124-26.

[872] Rep. same year at Dublin: 2nd ed. 1750. The first ed. was ascribed to D'Argens--an error caused though not justified by the publisher's notice.

[873] The point is further discussed in Dynamics of Religion, pp. 175-76.

[874] Cp. G. B. Hertz, The Old Colonial System, 1905, pp. 4, 22, 93, 157.

[875] Letter xxxi, in Mason's Memoir.

[876] Hill Burton's Life of Hume, ii, 433, 434, 484-85, 487.

[877] Compare the verdicts of Gibbon in his Autobiography, and of Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. v, ch. i, art. 2; and see the memoir of Smith in 1831 ed. and McCulloch's ed., and Rae's Life of Adam Smith, p. 24. It appears that about 1764 many English people sent their sons to Edinburgh University on account of the better education there. Letter of Blair, in Burton's Life of Hume, ii, 229.

[878] Essays, iv, end.

[879] Present State of Polite Learning, 1765, ch. vi. His story of how the father of St. Foix cured the youth of the desire to rationalize his creed is not suggestive of conviction. The father pointed to a crucifix, saying, "Behold the fate of a reformer." The story has been often plagiarized since--e.g., in Galt's Annals of the Parish.

[880] Abbey and Overton, The English Church in the Eighteenth Century, 1878, ii, 37.

[881] Dieu et les Hommes, ch. xxxix.

[882] Cp. Bishop Law, Considerations on the Theory of Religion, 6th ed. 1774, p. 65, note, and the Analysis of Bolingbroke's writings (1755) there cited. Mr. Sichel's reply to Sir L. Stephen's criticism may or may not be successful; but he does not deal with Bishop Law's.

[883] Mémoires de Diderot, ed. 1841, ii, 25.

[884] These had begun as early as 1753 (Micromégas).

[885] Works, ed. 1842, i, pp. cix, 445; ii, 628, 728. Cp. the poem Kew Gardens, left in MS.

[886] I here take a few sentences from my paper, The Church and Education, 1903.

[887] Short History, p. 717. The Concise Description of the Endowed Grammar Schools, by Nicholas Carlisle, 1818, shows that schools were founded in all parts of the country by private bequest or public action during the eighteenth century.

[888] Collis, in Transactions of the Social Science Association, 1857, p. 126. According to Collis, 48 had been founded by James I, 28 under Charles I, 16 under the Commonwealth, 36 under Charles II, 4 under James II, 7 under William and Mary, 11 under Anne, 17 under George I, and 7 under George II. He does not indicate their size.

[889] Green, as last cited.

[890] Gibbins, Industrial History of England, 1894, p. 151.

[891] Hist. of England under George III, ed. 1865, ii, 83.

[892] The document is given in Ritchie's Life of Hume, 1807, pp. 53-55.

[893] A reply, The World proved to be not eternal nor mechanical, appeared in 1790.

[894] The Doctrines of a Trinity and the Incarnation of God was published anonymously.

[895] See the Biographical Introduction to the Unitarian reprint of Watts's Solemn Address, 1840, which gives the letters of Lardner. And cp. Skeats, Hist. of the English Free Churches, ed. Miall, p. 240.

[896] Life of Lardner, by Dr. Kippis, prefixed to Works, ed. 1835, i, p. xxxii.

[897] Memoirs of Priestley, 1806, pp. 30-32, 35, 37. The Letter on the Logos was addressed by Lardner to the first Lord Barrington, and was first published anonymously, in 1759.

[898] Memoirs of Priestley, p. 19.

[899] Pamphlet of 1778, printing the sermon, with reply to a local attack.

[900] MS. alteration in print. See also p. 1 of Epistle Dedicatory.

[901] In criticizing whom Sir Leslie Stephen barely notices his scientific work, but dwells much on his religious fallacies--a course which would make short work of the fame of Newton.

[902] A Church dignitary has described Evanson's Dissonance as "the commencement of the destructive criticism of the Fourth Gospel" (Archdeacon Watkins's Bampton Lectures, 1890, p. 174).

[903] Williams (d. 1816), who published 3 vols. of "Lectures on Education" and other works, has a longer claim on remembrance as the founder of the "Literary Fund."

[904] The subject is discussed at length in the essay on Gibbon in the author's Pioneer Humanists.

[905] Cp. Bishop Watson's Apology for Christianity (1776) as to the vogue of unbelief at that date. (Two Apologies, ed. 1806, p. 121. Cp. pp. 179, 399.)

[906] The panegyric on Voltaire delivered at his death by Frederick the Great (Nov. 26, 1778) was promptly translated into English (1779).

[907] Reflections on the French Revolution, 1790, p. 131.

[908] See Hannah More's letter of April, 1777, in her Life, abridged 16mo-ed. p. 36. An edition of Shaftesbury, apparently, appeared in 1773, and another in 1790.

[909] The essays of Hume, including the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779), were now circulated in repeated editions. Mr. Rae, in his valuable Life of Adam Smith, p. 311, cites a German observer, Wendeborn, as writing in 1785 that the Dialogues, though a good deal discussed in Germany, had made no sensation in England, and were at that date entirely forgotten. But a second edition had been called for in 1779, and they were added to a fresh edition of the essays in 1788. Any "forgetting" is to be set down to preoccupation with other interests.

[910] Letter to the Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, 1777, p. 3.

[911] Dr. Parr, Characters of C. J. Fox, i, 220; cited in Charles James Fox, a Commentary, by W. S. Landor, ed. by S. Wheeler, 1907, p. 147. Fox's secretary and biographer, Trotter, while anxious to discredit the statement of Parr, gives such a qualified account (Memoirs of the Latter Years of C. J. Fox, 1811, pp. 470-71) of Fox's views on immortality as to throw much doubt on the stronger testimony of B. C. Walpole (Recollections of C. J. Fox, 1806, p. 242).

[912] See J. L. Le B. Hammond, Charles James Fox, 1903, ch. xiii.

[913] See a letter in Bishop Watson's Life, i, 402; and cp. Buckle, ch. vii, note 218.

[914] See his Task, bk. iii, 150-90 (1783-1784), for the prevailing religious tone.

[915] Princ. of Moral Philos. bk. v, ch. ix. The chapter tells of widespread freethinking.

[916] Ernest Krause, Erasmus Darwin, Eng. tr. 1879, p. 211. Cp. pp. 193, 194.

[917] Letters vii, viii, ix, xix, xxii.

[918] E.g., The Ordination, the Address to the Deil, A Dedication to Gavin Hamilton, The Kirk's Alarm, etc.

[919] See also the pieces printed between these in the Globe edition, pp. 66-68.

[920] The benevolent Supreme Being, he writes, "has put the immediate administration of all this into the hands of Jesus Christ--a great personage, whose relation to Him we cannot fathom, but whose relation to us is [that of] a guide and Saviour." Letter 86 in Globe ed. Letters 189 and 197, to Mrs. Dunlop, similarly fail to meet the requirements of the orthodox correspondent. The poem Look up and See, latterly printed several times apart from Burns's works, and extremely likely to be his, is a quite Voltairean criticism of David. If the poem be ungenuine, it is certainly by far the ablest of the unacknowledged pieces ascribed to him, alike in diction and in purport.

[921] Letter to Mrs. Dunlop, Jan. 1, 1789, in Robert Burns and Mrs. Dunlop, ed. by W. Wallace, 1898, p. 129. The passage is omitted from Letter 168 in the Globe ed., and presumably from other reprints.

[922] Letter to Mrs. Dunlop, July 9, 1790. Published for the first time in vol. cited, p. 266.

[923] Epistle to a Young Friend.

[924] Lecky, writing in 1865, and advancing on Burke, has said of the whole school, including Shaftesbury, that "the shadow of the tomb rests on all: a deep, unbroken silence, the chill of death, surrounds them. They have long ceased to wake any interest" (Rationalism in Europe, i, 116). As a matter of fact, they had been discussed by Taylor in 1853; by Pattison in 1860; and by Farrar in 1862; and they have since been discussed at length by Dr. Hunt, by Dr. Cairns, by Lange, by Gyzicki, by M. Sayous, by Sir Leslie Stephen, by Prof. Höffding, and by many others.

[925] Conway, introd. to Age of Reason, in his ed. of Paine's Works, iv, 3.

[926] Lemontey, Hist. de la régence et de la minorité de Louis XV, 1835, ii, 358, note. In 1731 there was published under the name of Boulainvilliers (d. 1722) a so-called Réfutation de Spinoza, which was "really a popular exposition." Pollock, Spinoza, 2nd ed. p. 363. Sir F. Pollock assents to Voltaire's remark that Boulainvilliers "gave the poison and forgot to give the antidote."

[927] For a brief view of the facts, usually misconceived, see Lanson, pp. 610-11. Fénelon seems to have been uncandid, while Bossuet, by common consent, was malevolent. There is probably truth, however, in the view of Shaftesbury (Characteristics, ed. 1900, ii, 214), that the real grievance of Fénelon's ecclesiastical opponents was the tendency of his mysticism to withdraw devotees from ceremonial duties.

[928] Now remembered chiefly through the account of his intercourse with Fénelon (repr. in Didot ed. of Fénelon's misc. works), and Hume's long extract from his Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion in the concluding note to the Essays. Cp. M. Matter, Le Mysticisme en France au temps de Fénelon, 1865, pp. 352-54.

[929] Tyssot de Patot was Professor of Mathematics at Deventer. In his Lettres choisies, published in 1726, there is an avowal that "he might be charged with having different notions from those of the vulgar in point of religion" (New Memoirs of Literature, iv (1726), 267); and his accounts of pietists and unbelieving and other priests sufficiently convey that impression (id. pp. 268-84).

[930] Towards the close of his "poem" Polignac speaks of a defence of Christianity as a future task. He died without even completing the Anti-Lucretius, begun half a century before. Of him are related two classic anecdotes. Sent at the age of twenty-seven to discuss Church questions with the Pope, he earned from His Holiness the compliment: "You seem always to be of my opinion; and in the end it is yours that prevails." Louis XIV gave him a long audience, after which the King said: "I have had an interview with a young man who has constantly contradicted me without my being able to be angry for a moment." (Éloge prefixed to Bougainville's trans., L'Anti-Lucrèce, 1767, i. 131.)

[931] Cp. Duvernet, Vie de Voltaire, ch. i. Rivarol (Lettres à Necker, in OEuvres, ed. 1852, p. 138) wrote that under Louis XV there began a "general insurrection" of discussion, and that everybody then talked "only of religion and philosophy during half a century." But this exaggerates the beginnings, of which Rivarol could have no exact knowledge.

[932] La verité de la religion chrétienne prouvée par les faits: précédée d'un discours historique et critique sur la méthode des principaux auteurs qui ont écrit pour et contre le christianisme depuis son origine, 1722. Rep. 1741, 3 vols. 4to., 4 vols. 12mo.

[933] Nouveau Dictionnaire historique portatif, 1771, art. Houteville, tom. ii.

[934] Whose Considérations sur les Moeurs (1751) does not seem to contain a single religious sentiment. Historiographer of France, he had not escaped the suppression of his Histoire de Louis XI, 1745.

[935] See above, p. 130. Buffier seems to have begun an attempt at spelling reform (by dropping doubled letters), followed in 1725 by Huard and later by Prémontval.

[936] 7 vols. 4to., 10 vols. 12mo. Rep. with corrections 1733. Seconde partie, 1753, 8 vols. 12mo.

[937] A reprint in 1735 bears the imprint of London, with the note "Aux dépens de la Compagnie."

[938] Lanson, p. 702. The Persian Letters, like the Provincial Letters of Pascal, had to be printed at Rouen and published at Amsterdam. Their freethinking expressions put considerable difficulties in the way of his election (1727) to the Academy. See E. Edwards, Chapters of the Biog. Hist. of the French Academy, 1864, pp. 34-35, and D. M. Robertson, Hist. of the French Academy, 1910, p. 92, as to the mystification about the alleged reprint without the obnoxious passages.

[939] Lettre 86.

[940] "Au point de vue religieux, Montesquieu tirait poliment son coup de chapeau au christianisme" (Lanson, p. 714). E.g. in the Esprit des Lois, liv. xxiv, chs. i, ii, iii, iv, vi, and the footnote to ch. x of liv. xxv. Montesquieu's letter to Warburton (16 mai, 1754), in acknowledgment of that prelate's attack on the posthumous works of Bolingbroke, is a sample of his social make-believe. But no religious reader could suppose it to come from a religious man.

[941] Also of E. Edwards, as cited above.

[942] See the notes cited on pp. 405, 407 of Garnier's variorum ed. of the Esprit des Lois, 1871. La Harpe and Villemain seem blind to irony.

[943] The flings at Bayle (liv. xxiv, chs. ii, vi) are part of a subtly ironical vindication of ideal as against ecclesiastical Christianity, and they have no note of faith.

[944] Paul Mesnard, Hist. de l'académie française, 1857, pp. 61-63.

[945] Pensées Diverses: De la religion.

[946] Lanson, p. 714, note.

[947] Tr. in English, 1753. It is noteworthy that Cataneo formally accepts Montesquieu's professions of orthodoxy.

[948] Correspondance littéraire de Grimm et Diderot, ed. 1829-31, i, 273. See the footnote for an account of the indecent efforts of the Jesuits to get at the dying philosopher. The curé of the parish who was allowed entry began his exhortation with: "Vous savez, M. le Président, combien Dieu est grand." "Oui, monsieur," returned Montesquieu, "et combien les hommes sont petits."

[949] Mesnard, Hist. de l'académie française, p. 63.

[950] A full analysis is given by Strauss in the second Appendix to his Voltaire: Sechs Vorträge, 2te Aufl. 1870.

[951] The details are dubious. See the memoir compiled by "Rudolf Charles" (R. C. D'Ablaing van Giessenburg), the editor of the Testament, Amsterdam, 3 tom. 1861-64. It draws chiefly on the Mémoires secrets de Bachaumont, under date Sept. 30, 1764.

[952] Testament, as cited, i, 25.

[953] iii, 396.

[954] First published in 1762 [or 1764? See Bachaumont, Oct. 30], with the date 1742; and reprinted in the Évangile de la Raison, 1764. It was no fewer than four times ordered to be destroyed in the Restoration period.

[955] Probably Diderot did the most of the adaptation. "Il y a plus que du bon sens dans ce livre," writes Voltaire to D'Alembert; "il est terrible. S'il sort de la boutique du Système de la Nature, l'auteur s'est bien perfectionné" (Lettre de 27 Juillet, 1775).

[956] "Il leur faut un Être à ces messieurs; pour moi, je m'en passe." Grimm, Correspondance Littéraire, ed. 1829-31, iv, 186.

[957] Grimm, as cited, i, 235. Grimm tells a delightful story of his reception of the confessor.

[958] "Cet ouvrage, dont les vers sont grands et bien tournés, est une satire des plus licencieuses contre les moeurs de nos évêques." Bachaumont, Mémoires Secrets, Juin 15, 1762.

[959] Bonet-Maury, Hist. de la lib. de conscience en France, 1900, p. 68.

[960] Nouveau dictionnaire historique-portatif ... par une Société de Gens de Lettres, ed. 1771, i, 314.

[961] Marmontel does not relate this in his Mémoires, where he insists on the decorum of the talk, even at d'Holbach's table.

[962] Chamfort, Caractères et Anecdotes.

[963] Nouveau dictionnaire, above cited, i, 315.

[964] Name assumed for literary purposes, and probably composed by anagram from the real name Arouet, with "le jeune" (junior) added, thus: A. R. O. V. E. T. L(e). I(eune).

[965] Not to be confounded with the greater and later Jean Jacques Rousseau. J. B. Rousseau became Voltaire's bitter enemy--on the score, it is said, of the young man's epigram on the elder poet's "Ode to Posterity," which, he said, would not reach its address. Himself a rather ribald freethinker, Rousseau professed to be outraged by the irreligion of Voltaire.

[966] See the poem in note 4 to ch. ii of Duvernet's Vie de Voltaire. Duvernet calls it "one of the first attacks on which philosophy in France had ventured against superstition" (Vie de Voltaire, ed. 1797, p. 19).

[967] Duvernet, ch. ii. The free-hearted Ninon de l'Enclos, brightest of old ladies, is to be numbered among the pre-Voltairean freethinkers, and to be remembered as leaving young Voltaire a legacy to buy books. She refused to "sell her soul" by turning dévote on the invitation of her old friend Madame de Maintenon. Madame D'Épinay, Voltaire's "belle philosophe et aimable Habacuc," Madame du Deffand, and Madame Geoffrin were among the later freethinking grandes dames of the Voltairean period; and so, presumably, was the Madame de Créquí, quoted by Rivarol, who remarked that "Providence" is "the baptismal name of Chance." As to Madame Geoffrin see the OEuvres Posthumes de D'Alembert, 1799, i, 240, 271; and the Mémoires de Marmontel, 1804, ii, 102 sq. If Marmontel is accurate, she went secretly at times to mass (p. 104).

[968] Deslandes wrote some new chapters of his Réflexions in London, for the English translation. Eng. tr. 1713, p. 99.

[969] Pour et Contre, ou Épitre à Uranie. It was of course not printed till long afterwards. Diderot, writing his Promenade du Sceptique in 1747, says: "C'est, je crois, dans l'allée des fleurs [of his allegory] entre le champagne et le tokay, que l'épitre à Uranie prit naissance." (L'Allée des Marronniers, ad init.) This seems unjust.

[970] He has been alternately represented as owing everything and owing very little to England. Cp. Texte, Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit, Eng. tr. p. 58. Neither view is just.

[971] In his Essay upon the Civil Wars of France, and ... upon Epick Poetry (2nd ed. 1728, "corrected by himself"), written and published in English, he begins his "Advertisement" with the remark: "It has the appearance of too great a presumption in a traveller who hath been but eighteen months in England, to attempt to write in a language which he cannot pronounce at all, and which he hardly understands in conversation." As the book is remarkably well written, he must have read much English.

[972] Lord Morley (Voltaire, 4th ed. p. 40) speaks of the English people as having then won "a full liberty of thought and speech and person." This, as we have seen, somewhat overstates the case. But discussion was much more nearly free than in France.

[973] Probably as much on political as on religious grounds. The 8th letter, Sur le Parlement, must have been very offensive to the French Government; and in 1739, moved by angry criticisms, Voltaire saw fit to modify its language. See Lanson's ed. of the Lettres, 1909, i, 92, 110.

[974] Condorcet, Vie de Voltaire, ed. 1792, p. 92. In reprints the poem was entitled Sur la religion naturelle, and was so commonly cited.

[975] Condorcet, p. 99.

[976] See above, pp. 213-14, as to the works of Boulainvilliers, Tyssot de Patot, Deslandes, and others who wrote between 1700 and 1715.

[977] Cited by Schlosser, Hist. of the Eighteenth Century, Eng. tr. i, 146-7.

[978] Traité de la verité de la religion chrétienne, tiré en partie du latin de M. J. Alphonse Turrettin, professeur ... en l'académie de Génève, par M. J. Vernet, professeur de belles-lettres en la même Académie. Revue et corrigé par un Théologien Catholique. 1e éd. Génève, 1730. Rep. in 2 tom. 1753. Ecclesiastical approbation given 15 janv. 1749; privilège, juillet, 1751.

[979] Dom Remi Desmonts, according to Barbier.

[980] "Par Panage" (=Toussaint?). Rep. 1755 and 1767 (Berlin).

[981] Work cited, ed. 1755, p. 252.

[982] A glimpse of old Paris before or about 1750 is afforded by Fontenelle's remark that the prevailing diseases might be known from the affiches. At every street corner were to be seen two, of which one advertised a Traité sur l'incrédulité. (Grimm, Corr. litt. iii, 373.)

[983] Thus Duruy had said in his Histoire de France (1st ed. 1852) that in the work of the Jansenists of Port Royal "l'esprit d'opposition politique se cacha sous l'opposition religieuse" (ed. 1880, ii, 298).

[984] The case has been thus correctly put by M. Rocquain, who, however, decides that "de religieuse qu'elle était, l'opposition devient politique" as early as about 1724-1733. L'Esprit révolutionnaire avant la révolution, 1878; table des matières, liv. 2e. Duruy (last note) puts the tendency still earlier.

[985] "Cette hardiesse étonna Voltaire, et excita son émulation" (ed. cited, p. 118).

[986] Avertissement des éditeurs, in Basle ed. of 1792, vol. xlv, p. 92.

[987] It has been counted that he used no fewer than a hundred and thirty different pseudonyms; and the perpetual prosecution and confiscation of his books explains the procedure. As we have seen, the Lettres philosophiques (otherwise the Lettres anglaises) were burned on their appearance, in 1734, and the bookseller put in the Bastille; the Recueil des pièces fugitives was suppressed in 1739; the Voix du Sage et du Peuple was officially and clerically condemned in 1751; the poem on Natural Law was burned at Paris in 1758; Candide at Geneva in 1759; the Dictionnaire philosophique at Geneva in 1764, and at Paris in 1765; and many of his minor pseudonymous performances had the same advertisement. But even the Henriade, the Charles XII, and the first chapters of the Siècle de Louis XIV were prohibited; and in 1785 the thirty volumes published of the 1784 edition of his works were condemned en masse.

[988] Diderot, critique of Le philosophe ignorant in Grimm's Corr. Litt. 1 juin 1766; Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Stück 10-12, 15; Gibbon, ch. i, note near end; ch. li, note on siege of Damascus. Rousseau was as hostile as any (see Morley's Rousseau, ch. ix, § 1). But Rousseau's verdict is the least important, and the least judicial. He had himself earned the detestation of Voltaire, as of many other men. In a moment of pique, Diderot wrote of Voltaire: "Cet homme n'est que le second dans tous les genres" (Lettre 71 à Mdlle. Voland, 12 août, 1762). He forgot wit and humour!

[989] Prof. Jowett, of Balliol College. See L. A. Tollemache, Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, 4th ed. pp. 27-28.

[990] See details in Lord Morley's Voltaire, 4th ed. pp. 165-70, 257-58. The erection by the French freethinkers of a monument to La Barre in 1905, opposite the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Montmartre, Paris, is an expression at once of the old feud with the Church and the French appreciation of high personal courage. La Barre was in truth something of a scapegrace, but his execution was an infamy, and he went to his death as to a bridal. The erection of the monument has been the occasion of a futile pretence on the clerical side that for La Barre's death the Church had no responsibility, the movers in the case being laymen. Nothing, apparently, can teach Catholic Churchmen that the Church's past sins ought to be confessed like those of individuals. It is quite true that it was a Parlement that condemned La Barre. But what a religious training was it that turned laymen into murderous fanatics!

[991] M. Lanson seems to overlook it when he writes (p. 747) that "the affirmation of God, the denial of Providence and miracles, is the whole metaphysic of Voltaire."

[992] Lord Morley writes (p. 209): "We do not know how far he ever seriously approached the question ... whether a society can exist without a religion." This overlooks both the Homélie sur l'Athéisme and the article Athéisme in the Dictionnaire Philosophique, where the question is discussed seriously and explicitly.

[993] Horace Walpole, Letter to Gray, Nov. 19, 1765. Compare the mordant criticism of Grimm (Corr. litt. vii, 54 sq.) on his tract Dieu in reply to d'Holbach. "Il raisonne là-dessus comme un enfant," writes Grimm, "mais comme un joli enfant qu'il est."

[994] Browning, The Two Poets of Croisic, st. cvii.

[995] Cp. Ständlin, Gesch. des Rationalismus und Supernaturalismus, 1826, pp. 287-90. Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, 2te Aufl. 1848, i, 218-20.

[996] Zimmerman, De causis magis magisque invalescentis incredulitatis, et medela huic malo adhibenda, Tiguri, 1739, 4to. Prof. Breitinger of Zurich wrote a criticism afterwards tr. (1741) as Examen des Lettres sur la religion essentielle. De Roches, pastor at Geneva, published in letter-form 2 vols. entitled Défense du Christianisme, as "préservatif contre" the Lettres of Mdlle. Huber (1740); and Bouillier of Amsterdam also 2 vols. of Lettres (1741).

[997] Cp. Bouillier, Hist. de la philos. cartés, ii, 624-25; D'Argenson, Mémoires, ed. Jannet, iv. 63.

[998] See the thesis (Jerusalem Coelesti) as printed in the Apologie de M. l'Abbé De Prades, "Amsterdam," 1752, pp. 4, 6.

[999] Id. p. 10.

[1000] Mémoires sur la vie et les ouvrages de Diderot, 1821, p. 160.

[1001] Cp. Bachaumont, Mémoires secrets, 4 fév. 1762; 22 avril, 1768. Tn the latter entry, Yvon is described as "poursuivi comme infidèle, quoique le plus croyant de France." In 1768, after the Bélisaire scandal, he was refused permission to proceed with the publication of his Histoire ecclésiastique.

[1002] This was de Prades's own view of the matter (Apologie, as cited, p. v); and D'Argenson repeatedly says as much. Mémoires, iv, 57, 65, 66, 74, 77.

[1003] Rocquain, L'esprit revolutionnaire avant la révolution, 1878, pp. 149-51; Morley, Diderot, ch. v; D'Argenson, iv, 78. The decree of suppression was dated 13 fév. 1752.

[1004] Mémoires, iv, 64, 74.

[1005] Id. iv, 129, 140.

[1006] Id. iv, 92-93.

[1007] Maury, Hist. de l'ancienne Académie des Inscriptions, 1864, pp. 312-13.

[1008] Journal historique de Barbier, 1847-56, iv, 304.

[1009] Astruc, we learn from D'Alembert, connected their decline with the influence of the new opinions. "Ce ne sont pas les jansenistes qui tuent les jésuites, c'est l'Encyclopédie." "Le maroufle Astruc," adds D'Alembert, "est comme Pasquin, il parle quelquefois d'assez bon sens." Lettre à Voltaire. 4 mai, 1762.

[1010] Cp. pref. (La Vie de Salvien) to French tr. of Salvian, 1734, p. lxix. I have seen MS. translations of Toland and Woolston.

[1011] MS. statement, in eighteenth-century hand, on flyleaf of a copy of 1755 ed. of the Grands hommes, in the writer's possession.

[1012] Lettre à D'Alembert, 16 Octobre, 1765.

[1013] Of the works noted below, the majority appear or profess to have been printed at Amsterdam, though many bore the imprint Londres. All the freethinking books and translations ascribed to d'Holbach bore it. The Arétin of Abbé Dulaurens bore the imprint: "Rome, aux dépens de la Congrégation de l'Index." Mystifications concerning authorship have been as far as possible cleared up in the present edition.

[1014] Given by Brunet, who is followed by Wheeler, as appearing in 1732, and as translated into English, under the title Dying Merrily, in 1745. But I possess an English translation of 1713 (pref. dated March 25), entitled A Philological Essay: or, Reflections on the Death of Freethinkers.... By Monsieur D----, of the Royal Academy of Sciences in France, and author of the Poetae Rusticantis Literatum Otium. Translated from the French by Mr. B----, with additions by the author, now in London, and the translator. [A note in a contemporary hand makes "B" Boyer.] Barbier gives 1712 for the first edition, 1732 for the second. Rep. 1755 and 1776.

[1015] There is no sign of any such excitement in France over the translation as was aroused in England by the original; but an Examen du traité de la liberté de penser, by De Crousaz, was published at Amsterdam in 1718.

[1016] This was probably meant to point to the Abbé de Marsy, who died in 1763.

[1017] The Abbé Sepher ascribed this book to one Dupuis, a Royal Guardsman.

[1018] This "prose poem" was not an intentional burlesque, as the ecclesiastical authorities alleged; but it did not stand for orthodoxy. See Grimm's Correspondance, i, 113.

[1019] "A eu les honneurs de la brûlure, et toutes les censures cumulées des Facultés de Théologie, de la Sorbonne et des évêques." Bachaumont, déc. 23, 1763. Marsy, who was expelled from the Order of Jesuits, was of bad character, and was hotly denounced by Voltaire.

[1020] See Grimm, Corr. v. 15.

[1021] A second edition appeared within the year. "Quoique proscrit presque partout, et même en Hollande, c'est de là qu'il nous arrive." Bachaumont, déc. 27, 1764.

[1022] Bachaumont, mai 7, 1767.

[1023] "Se repand à Paris avec la permission de la police." Bachaumont, 13 fév. 1766.

[1024] "Il est facile de se convaincre que les parties les plus importantes et les plus solides de cet ouvrage sont empruntées aux travaux de Burigny." L.-F. Alfred Maury, L'ancienne Académie des Incriptions et bellet-lettres, 1864, p. 316. Maury leaves it open question whether the compilation was made by Burigny or by Naigeon. The Abbé Bergier accepted it without hesitation as the work of Fréret, who was known to hold some heretical views. (Maury, p. 317.) Barbier confidently ascribes the work to Burigny.

[1025] The mystification in regard to this work is elaborate. It purports to be translated from an English version, declared in turn by its translator to be made "from the Greek." It is now commonly ascribed to Naigeon. (Maury, as cited, p. 317.) Its machinery, and its definite atheism, mark it as of the school of d'Holbach, though it is alleged to have been written by Fréret as early as 1722. It is however reprinted, with the Examen critique des Apologistes, in the 1796 edition of Fréret's works without comment; and Barbier was satisfied that it was the one genuine "philosophic" work ascribed to Fréret, but that it was redacted by Naigeon from imperfect MSS.

[1026] Notice sur Henri Meister, pref. to Lettres inédites de Madame de Staël à Henri Meister, 1903, p. 17.

[1027] "Deux nouveaux livres infernaux ... connus comme manuscrits depuis longtemps et gardés dans l'obscurité des portefeuilles...." Bachaumont, 22 mars, 1769.

[1028] Bachaumont, Mémoires Secrets, déc. 20, 1767.

[1029] Id. Jan. 18, 1768.

[1030] So Pidansat de Mairobert in his preface to the first ed. (1777) of the Mémoires Secrets of Bachaumont, continued by him. See pref. to the abridged ed. by Bibliophile Jacob.

[1031] As to the authorship see above, p. 241.

[1032] La Certitude des preuves du Christianisme (1767). 2e édit. 1768, Avertissement.

[1033] In the short essay Le Philosophe, which appeared in the Nouvelles Libertés de Penser, 1743 and 1750, and in the Recueil Philosophique, 1770. In the 1793 rep. of the Essai sur les préjugés (again rep. in 1822) it is unhesitatingly affirmed, on the strength of its title-page and the prefixed letter of Dumarsais, dated 1750, that that book is an expansion of the essay Le Philosophe, and that this was published in 1760. But Le Philosophe is an entirely different production, which to a certain extent criticizes les philosophes so-called. The Essai sur les préjugés published in 1770 is not the work of Dumarsais; it is a new work by d'Holbach. This was apparently known to Frederick, who in his rather angry criticism of the book writes that, whereas Dumarsais had always respected constituted authorities, others had "put out in his name, two years after he was dead and buried, a libel of which the veritable author could only be a schoolboy as new to the world as he was puzzle-headed." (Mélanges en vers et en prose de Frederic II, 1792, ii, 215). Dumarsais died in 1754, but I can find no good evidence that the Essai sur les préjugés was ever printed before 1770. As to d'Holbach's authorship see the OEuvres de Diderot, ed. 1821, xii, 115 sq.--passage copied in the 1829-31 ed. of the Correspondance littéraire of Grimm and Diderot, xiv, 293 sq. In a letter to D'Alembert dated Mars 27, 1773, Voltaire writes that in a newly-printed collection of treatises containing his own Lois de Minos is included "le philosophe de Dumarsais, qui n'a jamais été imprimé jusqu'à present." This seems to be a complete mistake.

[1034] Grimm (iv, 86) has some good stories of him. He announced one day that he had ound twenty-five fatal flaws in the story of the resurrection of Lazarus, the first being that the dead do not rise. His scholarly friend Nicolas Boindin (see above, p. 222) said: "Dumarsais is a Jansenist atheist; as for me, I am a Molinist atheist."

[1035] On two successive pages the title Messiah is declared to mean "simply one sent" and simply "anointed."

[1036] Like Buffier and Huard, however, he strives for a reform in spelling, dropping many doubled letters, and writing home, bone, acuse, fole, apelle, honête, afreux, etc.

[1037] Abriss einer Geschichte der Umwälzung welche seit 1750 auf dem Gebiete der Theologie in Deutschland statt gefunden, in Tholuck's Vermischte Schriften, 1839, ii, 5. The proposition is repeated pp. 24, 33.

[1038] The exceptions were books published outside of France.

[1039] Madame de Sévigné, for instance, declared that she would not let pass a year of her life without re-reading the second volume of Abbadie.

[1040] Le Déisme refuté par lui-même (largely a reply to Rousseau), 1765; 1770, Apologie de la religion chrétienne; 1773, La certitude des preuves du christianisme. In 1759 had appeared the Lettres sur le Déisme of the younger Salchi, professor at Lausanne. It deals chiefly with the English deists, and with D'Argens. As before noted, the Abbé Gauchat began in 1751 his Lettres Critiques, which in time ran to 15 volumes (1751-61). There were also two journals, Jesuit and Jansenist, which fought the philosophes (Lanson, p. 721); and sometimes even a manuscript was answered--e.g. the Réfutation du Celse moderne of the Abbé Gautier (1752), a reply to Mirabaud's unpublished Examen critique.

[1041] Alison, History of Europe, ed. 1849, i, 180-81.

[1042] The Jesuits were expelled from Portugal in 1759; from Bohemia and Denmark in 1766; from the whole dominions of Spain in 1767; from Genoa and Venice in the same year; and from Naples, Malta, and Parma in 1768. Officially suppressed in France in 1764, they were expelled thence in 1767. Pope Clement XIII strove to defend them; but in 1773 the Society was suppressed by papal bull by Clement XIV; whereafter they took refuge in Prussia and Russia, ruled by the freethinking Frederick and Catherine.

[1043] See the Correspondance de Grimm, ed. 1829-31, vii, 51 sq.

[1044] This apologetic work, after having been praised by the censor and registered with privilège du roi in November, 1772, was officially suppressed on Jan. 17, 1773, and, it would appear, reissued in that year.

[1045] Liv. i. ch. viii.

[1046] Bachaumont, juin 22; juillet 9, 20, 27; novembre 14, 1762.

[1047] Grimm notices Astruc's Dissertations sur l'immortalité, l'immaterialité, et la liberté de l'âme, published in 1755 (Corr. i, 438), but not his Conjectures. At his death (1766) he pronounces him "un des hommes les plus decriés de Paris," "Il passait pour fripon, fourbe, méchant, en un mot pour un très-malhonnête homme." "Il était violent et emporté, et d'une avarice sordide." Finally, he died "sans sacremens" after having "fait le dévot" and attached himself to the Jesuits in their day of power. Corr. v, 98. But Grimm was a man of many hates, and not the best of historians.

[1048] Cp. Maury, L'ancienne Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 1864, pp. 55-56.

[1049] Voltaire's various stratagems to secure election are not to his credit. See Paul Mesnard, Histoire de l'académie française, 1857, pp. 68-74. But even Montesquieu is said to have resorted to some questionable devices for the same end. Id. p. 62.

[1050] Maury, L'ancienne Académie des inscriptions, pp. 54-55, 94, 308.

[1051] Id. p. 93.

[1052] Id. pp. 116-20.

[1053] Where he was lieutenant-général, and died in 1750.

[1054] Maury, pp. 53, 86-87.

[1055] Mémoires, ed. Jannet, iv, 181.

[1056] Cp. Mesnard, as cited, pp. 79-80.

[1057] Maury, p. 315.

[1058] Id. pp. 82-84. It is noteworthy that the orthodox Thomas, and not any of the philosophes, was the first to impeach the Government in academic discourses. Mesnard, pp. 82-84, 100 sq.

[1059] "L'excellent Pompignan," M. Lanson calls him, p. 723.

[1060] "Les provisions de sa charge pendant six mois en 1736." Voltaire, Lettre à Mme. D'Épinay, 13 juin, 1760. "Je le servis dans cette affaire," adds Voltaire.

[1061] Mesnard, pp. 67, 71, 73, 89.

[1062] Le Pauvre Diable, ouvrage en vers aisés de feu M. Vadé, mis en lumière par Catherine Vadé, sa cousine (falsely dated 1758); La Vanité; and Le Russe à Paris.

[1063] Mesnard, pp. 86-92.

[1064] Id. pp. 93-94.

[1065] Id. pp. 95-96.

[1066] Lanson, Hist. de la litt. française, p. 725.

[1067] The formal approval of a Sorbonnist was necessary. One refused it; another gave it. Marmontel, Mémoires, 1804, iii, 35-36.

[1068] Marmontel mentions that while he was still discussing a compromise with the syndic of the Sorbonne, 40,000 copies had been sold throughout Europe. Mémoires, iii, 39.

[1069] This satire was taken by the German freethinker Eberhard, in his New Apology for Socrates, as the actual publication of the Sorbonne. Barbier, Dict. des Ouvr. anon et Pseud., 2e édit., i, 468.

[1070] Published pseudonymously as a translation from the English: Histoire naturelle de l'âme, traduite de l'Anglais de M. Charp, par feu M. H----, de l'Académie des Sciences. À La Haye, 1745. Republished under the title Traité de l'Âme.

[1071] By Elie Luzac, to whom is ascribed the reply entitled L'Homme plus que Machine (1748 also). This is printed in the OEuvres philosophiques of La Mettrie as if it were his: and Lange (i, 420) seems to think it was. But the bibliographers ascribe it to Luzac, who was a man of culture and ability.

[1072] L'Homme Machine, ed. Assézat, 1865, p. 97; OEuv. philos. ed. 1774, iii, 51.

[1073] Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, i, 362 sq. (Eng. tr. ii, 78-80); Soury, Bréviare de l'hist. du matérialisme, pp. 663, 666-68; Voltaire, Homélie sur l'athéisme, end. Frederick the Great, who gave La Mettrie harbourage, support, and friendship, and who was not a bad judge of men, wrote and read in the Berlin Academy the funeral éloge of La Mettrie, and pronounced him "une âme pure et un coeur serviable." By "pure" he meant sincere.

[1074] Salchi, Lettres sur le Déisme, 1759, pp. 177, 197, 239, 283 sq.

[1075] Huxley, essay on Darwin on the Origin of Species; R. P. A. ed. of Twelve Lectures and Essays, p. 94.

[1076] See the parallel passages in the Lettres Critiques of the Abbé Gauchat, vol. xv (1761), p. 192 sq.

[1077] See his essay Des Singularités de la Nature, ch. xii, and his Dissertation sur les changements arrivés dans notre globe.

[1078] Eng. tr. 1750.

[1079] Essay cited, p. 96. The criticism ignores the greater comprehensiveness of Robinet's survey of nature.

[1080] George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, 1707-1788.

[1081] Lyell, Principles of Geology, 12th ed. 1875, i, 57-58.

[1082] Suite de l'Apologie de M. l'Abbé De Prades, 1752, p. 37 sq.

[1083] Dissertatio inauguralis metaphysica de universali naturæ systemate, published at Göttingen as the doctoral thesis of an imaginary Dr. Baumann, 1751. In French, 1753.

[1084] Soury, p. 579. The later speculations of Maupertuis by their extravagance discredited the earlier.

[1085] "Scheinbar bekämpft er Maupertuis desswegen, aber im geheimen stimmt er ihm bei"(Rosenkranz, i, 144).

[1086] It should be noted that by Condillac's avowal he was much aided by his friend Mdlle. Ferrand.

[1087] Cp. Réthoré, Condillac, ou l'empirisme et le rationalisme, 1864, ch. i.

[1088] Lange, ii, 27, 29; Soury, pp. 603-44.

[1089] Soury, pp. 596-600; Lange, ii, 27.

[1090] Oddly enough he became ultimately press censor! He lived till 1820, dying at Rennes at the age of 85.

[1091] This may best be translated Treatise on the Mind. The English translation of 1759 (rep. 1807) is entitled De l'Esprit: or, Essays on the Mind, etc.

[1092] Correspondance, ii, 262.

[1093] Id. p. 263.

[1094] Id. p. 293.

[1095] At the time the pietists declared that Diderot had collaborated in De l'Esprit. This was denied by Grimm, who affirmed that Diderot and Helvétius were little acquainted, and rarely met; but his Secretary, Meister, wrote in 1786 that the finest pages in the book were Diderot's. Id. p. 294, note. In his sketch À la mémoire de Diderot (1786, app. to Naigeon's Mémoires, 1821, p. 425, note), Meister speaks of a number of "belles pages," but does not particularize.

[1096] De l'Esprit, Disc, iii, ch. 30.

[1097] Cp. Morley's criticism. Diderot, ed. 1884, pp. 331-32.

[1098] Beccaria's Letter to Morellet, cited in ch. i of J. A. Farrer's ed. of the Crimes and Punishments, p. 6. It is noteworthy that the partial reform effected earlier in England by Oglethorpe, on behalf of imprisoned debtors (1730-32), belongs to the time of propagandist deism there.

[1099] Morley, Diderot, p. 329.

[1100] Lettre à d'Alembert, 9 janvier, 1773.

[1101] Cp. Rosenkranz, Vorbericht, p. vi.

[1102] Cp. Morley, Diderot, ed. 1834, p. 32.

[1103] E.g. § 21.

[1104] A police agent seized the MS. in Diderot's library, and Diderot could not get it back. Malesherbes, the censor, kept it safe for him!

[1105] According to Naigeon (Mémoires, 1821, p. 131), three months and ten days.

[1106] The Lettre purports, like so many other books of that and the next generation, to be published "A Londres."

[1107] Diderot's daughter, in her memoir of him, speaks of his imprisonment in the Bastille as brought about through the resentment of a lady of whom he had spoken slightingly; and her husband left a statement in MS. to the same effect (printed at the end of the Mémoires by Naigeon). The lady is named as Madame Dupré de Saint-Maur, a mistress of the King, and the offence is said to have been committed in the story entitled Le Pigeon blanc. Howsoever this may have been, the prosecution was quite in the spirit of the period, and the earlier Pensées were made part of the case against him. See Delort, Hist. de la détention des philosophes, 1829, ii, 208-16. M. de Vandeul-Diderot testifies that the Marquis Du Chatelet, Governor of Vincennes, treated his prisoner very kindly. Buckle (1-vol. ed. p. 425) does not seem to have fully read the Lettre, which he describes as merely discussing the differentiation of thought and sensation among the blind.

[1108] His friend Meister (À la mémoire de Diderot, 1786, app. to Naigeon's Mémoires de Diderot, 1821, p. 424) writes as if Diderot had written the whole Apologie "in a few days." The third part, a reply to the pastoral of the Bishop of Auxerre, appeared separately as a Suite to the others.

[1109] Apologie, as cited, 2e partie, p. 87 sq.

[1110] Observations sur l'instruction pastorale de Mons. l'Évêque d'Auxerre, Berlin, 1752, p. 17.

[1111] Id. p. 102 sq.

[1112] Cp. Morley, Diderot, pp. 98-99.

[1113] Carlyle, Frederick, bk. xviii, ch. ix, end.

[1114] D'Argenson, Mémoires, iv, 188.

[1115] Carlyle, as cited.

[1116] "Quelle abominable homme!" he writes to Mdlle. Voland (15 juillet, 1759); and Lord Morley pronounces de Prades a rascal (Diderot, p. 98). Carlyle is inarticulate with disgust--but as much against the original heresy as against the treason to Frederick. As to that, Thiébault was convinced that de Prades was innocent and calumniated. Everybody at court, he declares, held the same view. Mes Souvenirs de vingt ans de séjour à Berlin, 2e édit. 1805, v, 402-404.

[1117] It is not clear how these are to be distinguished from the mutilations of the later volumes by his treacherous publisher Le Breton. Of this treachery the details are given by Grimm, Corr. litt. ed. 1829. vii, 144 sq.

[1118] Buckle's account of him (1-vol. ed. p. 426) as "burning with hatred against his persecutors" after his imprisonment is overdrawn. He was a poor hater.

[1119] Madame Diderot, says her daughter, was very upright as well as very religious, but her temper, "éternellement grondeur, faisait de notre intérieur un enfer, dont mon père était l'ange consolateur" (Letter to Meister, in Notice pref. to Lettres Inédites de Mme. de Staël à Henri Meister, 1903, p. 62).

[1120] "Hélas! disait mon excellent grand-père, j'ai deux fils: l'un sera sûrement un saint, et je crains bien que l'autre ne soit damné; mais je ne puis vivre avec le saint, et je suis très heureux du temps que je passe avec le damné" (Letter of Mme. de Vandeul, last cited). Freethinker as he was, his fellow-townsmen officially requested in 1780 to be allowed to pay for a portrait of him for public exhibition, and the bronze bust he sent them was placed in the hôtel de ville (MS. of M. de Vandeul-Diderot, as cited).

[1121] Madame de Vandeul states that this story was motived by the case of Diderot's sister, who died mad at the age of 27 or 28 (Letter above cited; Rosenkranz, i, 9).

[1122] Lettre de Voltaire à D'Alembert, 27 août, 1774.

[1123] Lettre de 2 décembre, 1757.

[1124] OEuvres posthumes de D'Alembert, 1799, i, 240.

[1125] D'Holbach was the original of the character of Wolmar in Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse, of whom Julie says that he "does good without recompense." "I never saw a man more simply simple" was the verdict of Madame Geoffrin. Corr. litt. de Grimm (notice probably by Meister), ed. 1829-31, xiv, 291.

[1126] Marmontel says of him that he "avoit tout lu et n'avoit jamais rien oublié d'interessant." Mémoires, 1804, ii, 312.

[1127] See a full list of his works (compiled by Julian Hibbert after the list given in the 1821 ed. of Diderot's Works, xii, 115, and rep. in the 1829-31 ed. of Grimm and Diderot's Correspondance, xiv, 293), prefixed to Watson's ed. (1834 and later) of the English translation of the System of Nature.

[1128] Morley, Diderot, p. 341. The chapter gives a good account of the book. Cp. Lange, i, 364 sq. (Eng. trans, ii, 26 sq.) as to its materialism. The best pages were said to be by Diderot (Corr. de Grimm, as cited, p. 289; the statement of Meister, who makes it also in his Éloge). Naigeon denied that Diderot had any part in the Système, but in 1820 there was published an edition with "notes and corrections" by Diderot.

[1129] It is to be noted that the English translation (3 vols. 3rd ed. 1817; 4th ed. 1820) deliberately tampers with the language of the original to the extent of making it deistic. This perversion has been by oversight preserved in all the reprints.

[1130] Mirabeau spoke of the Essai as "le livre le moins connu, et celui qui mérite le plus l'être." Even the reprint of 1793 had become "extremely rare" in 1822. The book seems to have been specially disquieting to orthodoxy, and was hunted down accordingly.

[1131] So Morley, p. 347. It does not occur to Lord Morley, and to the Comtists who take a similar tone, that in thus disparaging past thinkers they are really doing the thing they blame.

[1132] Lettres de Memmius à Cicéron (1771); Histoire de Jenni (1775). In the earlier article, Athée, in the Dictionnaire Philosophique, he speaks of having met in France very good physicists who were atheists. In his letter of September 26, 1770, to Madame Necker, he writes concerning the Système de la Nature: "Il est un peu honteux à notre nation que tant de gens aient embrassé si vite une opinion si ridicule." And yet Prof. W. M. Sloane, of Columbia University, still writes of Voltaire, in the manner of English bishops, as "atheistical" (The French Revolution and Religious Reform, 1901, p. 26).

[1133] Though in 1797 we have Maréchal's Code d'une Société d'hommes sans Dieu, and in 1798 his Pensées libres sur les prêtres.

[1134] Thus Dr. Cairns (Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century, p. 165) gravely argues that the French Revolution proves the inefficacy of theism without a Trinity to control conduct. He has omitted to compare the theistic bloodshed of the Revolution with the Trinitarian bloodshed of the Crusades, the papal suppression of the Albigenses, the Hussite wars, and other orthodox undertakings.

[1135] The book was accorded the Monthyon prize by the French Academy. In translation (1788) it found a welcome in England among Churchmen by reason of its pro-Christian tone and its general vindication of religious institutions. The translation was the work of Mary Wollstonecraft. See Kegan Paul's William Godwin, 1876, i, 193. Mrs. Dunlop, the friend of Burns, recommending its perusal to the poet, paid it a curious compliment: "He does not write like a sectary, hardly like a Christian, but yet while I read him, I like better my God, my neighbour, Monsieur Necker, and myself." Robert Burns and Mrs. Dunlop, ed. by W. Wallace, 1898, p. 258.

[1136] See Voltaire's letters to Madame Necker, Corr. de Grimm, ed. 1829, vii, 23, 118. Of the lady, Grimm writes (p. 118): "Hypathie Necker passe sa vie avec des systématiques, mais elle est devote à sa manière. Elle voudrait être sincèrement hugenote, ou socinienne, ou déistique, ou plutôt, pour être quelque chose, elle prend le parti de ne se rendre compte sur rien." "Hypathie" was Voltaire's complimentary name for her.

[1137] Cp. Aulard, Le Culte de la Raison et le Culte de l'Être Suprême, 1892, pp. 17-19. M. Gazier (Études sur l'histoire religieuse de la révolution française, 1877, pp. 48, 173, 189 sq.) speaks somewhat loosely of a prevailing anti-Christian feeling when actually citing only isolated instances, and giving proofs of a general orthodoxy. Yet he points out the complete misconception of Thiers on the subject (p. 202).

[1138] Cp. Prof. W. M. Sloane, The French Revolution and Religious Reform, p. 43.

[1139] Gazier, as cited, pp. 2, 4, 12, 19-21, 71, etc.

[1140] Les Assemblées Provinciales sous Louis XVI, 1864, pref. pp. viii-ix.

[1141] Gazier, L. ii, ch. i.

[1142] Id. p. 67.

[1143] Id. p. 69.

[1144] Léonce de Lavergne, as cited.

[1145] The authority of Turgot himself could be cited for the demand that the State clergy should accept the constitution of the State. Cp. Aulard, Le Culte de la Raison, p. 12; Tissot, Étude sur Turgot, 1878, p. 160.

[1146] Gazier, p. 113.

[1147] Aulard, Culte, pp. 19-20.

[1148] Michelet, Hist. de la révolution française, ed. 8vo 1868 and later, i, 16. Cp. Proudhon's De la justice, 1858.

[1149] "Tout jugement religieux ou politique est une contradiction flagrante dans une religion uniquement fondée sur un dogme étranger à la justice." Ed. cited, introd. p. 60.

[1150] The grave misstatement of Michelet on this head is exposed by Aulard, Culte, p. 60.

[1151] Yet it is customary among Christians to speak of this lady in the most opprobrious terms. The royalist (but malcontent) Marquis de Villeneuve, who had seen the Revolution in his youth, claimed in his old age to have afterwards "conversed with the Goddess Reason of Paris and with the Goddess Reason of Bourges" (where he became governor); but, though he twice alludes to those women, he says nothing whatever against their characters (De l'Agonie de la France, 1835, i, 3, 19). Prof. W. M. Sloane, with all his religious prejudice, is satisfied that the women chosen as Goddesses of Reason outside of Paris were "noted for their spotless character." Work cited, p. 198.

[1152] Mémoires, ed. 1841, ii, 166.

[1153] Père F.-J.-F. Fortin, Souvenirs, Auxerre, 1867, ii, 41.

[1154] See the speech in Aulard, Culte, p. 240; and cp. pp. 79-85.

[1155] "Le peuple aura des fêtes dans lesquelles il offrira de l'encens à l'Être Suprême, au maître de la nature, car nous n'avons pas voulu anéantir la superstition pour établir le règne de l'athéisme." Speech of Nov. 26, 1793, in the Moniteur. (Discours de Danton, ed. André Fribourg, 1910, p. 599.)

[1156] Aulard, Culte, pp. 81-82.

[1157] Concerning whom see Aulard, Culte, pp. 86-96.

[1158] The Source, the Strength, and the True Spirit of Laws, Eng. tr. 1753, p. 6.

[1159] E.g., in the Arrêt du Parlement of 9 juin, 1762, denouncing Rousseau's Émile as tending to make the royal authority odious and to destroy the principle of obedience; and in the Examen du Béllisaire de M. Marmontel, by Coger (Nouv. éd. augm. 1767, p. 45 sq. Cp. Marmontel's Mémoires, 1804, iii, 46, as to his being called ennemi du trône et de l'autel). This kind of invective was kept up against the philosophes to the moment of the Revolution. See for instance Le vrai religieux, Discours dédié à Madame Louise de France, par le R. P. C. A. 1787, p. 4: "Une philosophie orgueilleuse a renversé les limites sacrées que la main du Très-Haut avoit elle-même élevées. La raison de l'homme a osé sonder les décrets de Dieu.... Dans les accès de son ivresse, n'a-t-elle pas sapé les fondemens du trône et des lois," etc.

[1160] Cp. the admissions of Curnier (Rivarol, sa vie et ses oeuvres, 1858, p. 149) in deprecation of Burke's wild likening of Rivarol's journalism to the Annals of Tacitus.

[1161] OEuvres, ed. cited, pp. 136-40, 147-55.

[1162] Cp. the critique of Sainte-Beuve, prefixed to ed. cited, pp. 14-17, and that of Arsène Houssaye, id. pp. 31-33. Mr. Saintsbury, though biassed to the side of the royalist, admits that "Rivarol hardly knows what sincerity is" (Miscellaneous Essays, 1892, p. 67).

[1163] Charles Comte is thus partly inaccurate in saying (Traité de Législation, 1835, i, 72) that the charge against the philosophers began "on the day on which there was set up a government in France that sought to re-establish the abuses of which they had sought the destruction." What is true is that the charge, framed at once by the backers of the Old Régime, has always since done duty for reaction.

[1164] Mémoires, ed. Jannet, iii, 313; iv, 70; v, 346, 348.

[1165] Id. iii, 346-47.

[1166] D'Argenson, noting in his old age how "on n'a jamais autant parlé de nation et d'État qu'aujourd'hui," how no such talk had been heard under Louis XIV, and how he himself had developed on the subject, adds, "cela vient du parlement et des Anglois." He goes on to speak of a reissue of the translation of Locke on Civil Government, originally made by the Jansenists (Mémoires, iv, 189-90).

[1167] Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ed. 1872, iii, 160-63.

[1168] OEuvres diverses de Pierre Bayle, La Haye, 4 vols. fol. 1737, ii, 564 sq.

[1169] This Critique appears in the very volume to which Coger refers for the Avis aux Réfugiéz. See Lett. viii, xiii, xvii, etc., vol. and ed. cited, pp. 36, 54, 71, etc.

[1170] Cp. the survey of Aulard, Hist. polit. de la rév. française, 2e édit. 1903, pp. 2-23.

[1171] Probably the work of a Jansenist.

[1172] On the whole question of the growth of abstract revolutionary doctrine in politics cp. W. S. McKechnie on the De Jure Regni apud Scotos in the "George Buchanan" vol. of Glasgow Quatercentenary Studies, 1906, pp. 256-76; Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, Maitland's tr. 1900, p. 37 sq.

[1173] Mallet actually reproaches the philosophes in the mass--while admitting the hostility of many of them to the Revolution--with "having accelerated French degeneration and depravation ... by rendering the conscience argumentative (raisonneuse), by substituting for duties inculcated by sentiment, tradition, and habit, the uncertain rules of the human reason and sophisms adapted to passions," etc., etc. (B. Mallet, as cited, p. 360). With all his natural vigour of mind, Mallet du Pan thus came to talk the language of the ordinary irrationalist of the Reaction. Certainly, if the stimulation of the habit of reasoning be a destructive course, the philosophes stand condemned. But as Christians had been reasoning as best they could, in an eternal series of vain disputes, for a millennium and a-half before the Revolution, with habitual appeal to the passions, the argument only proves how vacuous a Christian champion's reasoning can be.

[1174] Art. in Mercure Britannique, No. 13, Feb. 21, 1799; cited by B. Mallet in Mallet du Pan and the French Revolution, 1902, App. p. 357.

[1175] Id. p. 359.

[1176] Tableau littéraire du dix-huitième siècle, 8e édit. pp. 112, 113.

[1177] Id. p. 72.

[1178] Work cited, p. 358.

[1179] Id. p. 359.

[1180] Cp. Morley, Diderot, p. 407. Lord Morley points to the phrase in another form in a letter of Voltaire's in 1761. It really derives from Jean Meslier, who quotes it from an unlettered man (Testament, i. 19).

[1181] Rosenkranz, Diderot's Leben und Werke, 1866, ii, 380-81.

[1182] As Lord Morley points out, Henri Martin absolutely reverses the purport of a passage in order to convict Diderot of justifying regicide.

[1183] Mémoires, ed. Jannet, iv, 44, 51, 68, 69, 74, 91, 93, 101, 103.

[1184] Mallet du Pan says he saw the MS., and knew Diderot to have received 10,000 livres tournois for his additions. This statement is incredible. But Meister is explicit, in his éloge, as to Diderot having written for the book much that he thought nobody would sign, whereas Raynal was ready to sign anything.

[1185] Memoirs of Sir Samuel Romilly, 3rd ed. 1841, i, 46.

[1186] When D'Argenson writes in 1752 (Mémoires, éd. Jannet, iv, 103) that he hears "only philosophes say, as if convinced, that even anarchy would be better" than the existing misgovernment, he makes no suggestion that they teach this. And he declares for his own part that everything is drifting to ruin: "nulle réformation ... nulle amélioration.... Tout tombe, par lambeaux."

[1187] Aulard, Hist. polit. de la révol. p. 24.

[1188] This is the sufficient comment on a perplexing page of Lord Morley's second monograph on Burke (pp. 110-11), which I have never been able to reconcile with the rest of his writing.

[1189] Lecky, Hist. of England in the Eighteenth Century, small ed. vi, 263.

[1190] D'Argenson notes this repeatedly, though in one passage he praises the Parlement as having alone made head against absolutism (déc. 1752; ed. cited, iv, 116).

[1191] Maximes et Pensées, ed. 1856, p. 72.

[1192] Id. pp. 73-74.

[1193] Chamfort in another passage maintains against Soulavie that the Academy did much to develop the spirit of freedom in thought and politics. Id. p. 107. And this too is arguable, as we have seen.

[1194] On this complicated issue, which cannot be here handled at any further length, see Prof. P. A. Wadia's essay The Philosophers and the French Revolution (Social Science Series, 1904), which, however, needs revision; and compare the argument of Nourrisson, J.-J. Rousseau et le Rousseauisme, 1903, ch. xx.

[1195] Correspondance de Grimm, ed. cited, xiv, 5-6. Lettre de janv. 1788.

[1196] Lettre de Voltaire à D'Alembert, 27 août, 1774.

[1197] Histoire du mariage des prêtres en France, par M. Grégoire, ancien évêque de Blois, 1826, p. v. Compare the details in the Appendice to the Etudes of M. Gazier, before cited. That writer's account is the more decisive seeing that his bias is clerical, and that, writing before M. Aulard, he had to a considerable extent retained the old illusion as to the "decreeing of atheism" by the Convention (p. 313). See pp. 230-260 as to the readjustment effected by Grégoire, while the conservative clergy were still striving to undo the Revolution.

[1198] Heroes and Hero-Worship: Napoleon.

[1199] See the Sentiments de Napoléon sur le Christianisme: conversations recueillies à Sainte-Hélène par le Comte de Montholon, 1841. Many of the utterances here set forth are irreconcilable with Napoleon's general tone.

[1200] O'Meara, Napoléon en Exil, ed. Lacroix, 1897, ii, 39.

[1201] Ph. Gonnard, Les origines de la légende Napoléonienne, 1906, p. 258.

[1202] Id. p. 260.

[1203] Pasquier, cited by Rose, Life of Napoleon, ed. 1913, i, 282. The Concordat was bitterly resented by the freethinkers in the army. Id. p. 281.

[1204] See Jules Barni's Napoléon Ier. ed. 1870, p. 83, as to the amazing Catechism imposed by Napoleon on France in 1811. For the history of its preparation and imposition see De Labone, Paris sous Napoléon: La Religion, 1907, p. 100 sq.

[1205] As to the Napoleonic censorship of literature, cp. Madame de Staël, Considérations sur la révolution française, ptie. iv, ch. 16; Dix Années d'Exil, préf.; Welschinger, La Censure sous le premier Empire, 1882.

[1206] Las Cases, Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, 19 août, 1816.

[1207] Mignet, Hist. de la révolution française, 4e édit. ii, 340.

[1208] Cp. Pusey, Histor. Enquiry into the Probable Causes of the Rationalist Character ... of the Theology of Germany, 1828, p. 79.

[1209] Bishop Hurst, History of Rationalism, ed. 1867, p. 56.

[1210] Id. pp. 57-58 (last ed. pp. 74-76), citing Tholuck, Deutsche Universitäten, i, 145-48, and Dowding, Life of Calixtus, pp. 132-33.

[1211] Pusey, p. 113.

[1212] Hurst, p. 59.

[1213] Cp. Buckle, 1-vol. ed. pp. 303-309. "The result of the Thirty Years' War was indifference, not only to the Confession, but to religion in general. Ever since that period, secular interests decidedly occupy the foreground" (Kahnis, Internal History of German Protestantism, Eng. tr. 1856, p. 21).

[1214] Quoted by Bishop Hurst, ed. cited, p. 60 (78).

[1215] Preservatio wider die Pest der heutigen Atheisten.

[1216] Dated from Rome; but this was a mystification.

[1217] Kahnis, p. 125; La Croze, Entretiens, 1711, p. 401.

[1218] Even Knutzen seems to have been influenced by Spinoza. Pünjer, Hist. of the Christ. Philos. of Religion, Eng. tr. i, 437. Pünjer, however, seems to have exaggerated the connection.

[1219] Cp. Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, 3te Aufl. i, 318 (Eng. tr. ii, 35).

[1220] Epistolæ ad Spinozam et Responsiones, in Gfrörer, liii.

[1221] Colerus, Vie de Spinoza, in Gfrörer's ed. of the Opera, 1830, pp. lv, lvi.

[1222] Pünjer, as cited, i, 434-30: Lange, last cit. Lange notes that Genthe's Compendium de impostura religionum, which has been erroneously assigned to the sixteenth century, must belong to the period of Kortholt's work.

[1223] Pünjer, p. 439; Lange, last cit.; Tholuck, Kirch. Leben, 2 Abth. pp. 57-58.

[1224] It was nominally issued at Amsterdam, really at Berlin.

[1225] This writer gives (p. 12) a notable list of the forms of atheism: Atheismus directus, indirectus, formalis, virtualis, theoreticus, practicus, inchoatus, consummatus, subtilis, crassus, privativus, negativus, and so on, ad lib.

[1226] Cp. Buckle and his Critics, pp. 171-72; Pünjer, i, 515.

[1227] Letter cited by Dr. Latta. Leibniz, 1898, p. 2, note.

[1228] Philos. Schriften, ed. Gerhardt, i, 26; Martineau, Study of Spinoza, p. 77.

[1229] Letter to Thomas, December 23, 1670.

[1230] Quoted by Tholuck, as last cited, p. 61. Spener took the same tone.

[1231] Philos. Schriften, ed. Gerhardt, i, 34; ii, 563; Latta, p. 24; Martineau, p. 75. Cp. Refutation of Spinoza by Leibnitz, ed. by Foucher de Careil. Eng. tr. 1855.

[1232] His notable surmise as to gradation of species (see Latta, pp. 38-39) was taken up among the French materialists, but did not then modify current science.

[1233] The only lengthy treatise published by him in his lifetime.

[1234] M. A. Jacques, intr. to OEuvres de Leibniz, 1846, i, 54-57.

[1235] Cp. Tholuck, Das kirchliche Leben, as cited, 2 Abth. pp. 52-55. Kahnis, coinciding with Erdmann, pronounces that, although Leibnitz "acknowledges the God of the Christian faith, yet his system assigned to Him a very uncertain position only" (Int. Hist. of Ger. Protestantism, p. 26).

[1236] Cp. Pünjer, i, 509, as to his attitude on ritual.

[1237] Latta, as cited, p. 16; Vie de Leibnitz, par De Jaucourt, in ed. 1747 of the Essais de Théodicée, i, 235-39.

[1238] As to his virtual deism see Pünjer, i, 513-15. But he proposed to send Christian missionaries to the heathen. Tholuck, as last cited, p. 55.

[1239] Lettres entre Leibnitz et Clarke.

[1240] Discours de la conformité de la foi avec la raison, §§ 68-70; Essais sur la bonté de Dieu, etc., §§ 50, 61, 164, 180, 292-93.

[1241] The Nouveaux Essais sur l'Entendement humain, refuting Locke, appeared posthumously in 1765. Locke had treated his theistic critic with contempt. (Latta, p. 13.)

[1242] Amand Saintes, Hist. crit. du Rationalisme en Allemagne, 1841, ch. vi; Heinrich Schmid, Die Geschichte des Pietismus, 1863, ch. ii.

[1243] Saintes, p. 51; cp. Pusey, p. 105, as to "the want of resistance from the school of Pietists to the subsequent invasion of unbelief."

[1244] Hagenbach, German Rationalism, Eng. tr. 1865, p. 9.

[1245] Id. p. 39; Pusey, Histor. Enquiry into the Causes of German Rationalism, 1828, pp. 88, 97; Tholuck, Abriss einer Geschichte des Umwälzung ... seit 1750 auf dem Gebiete der Theologie in Deutschland, in Vermischte Schriften, 1839, ii, 5.

[1246] Pusey, pp. 86, 87, 98.

[1247] Cp. Pusey, pp. 37-38, 45, 48, 49, 53-54, 79, 101-109; Saintes, pp. 28, 79-80; Hagenbach, pp. 41, 72, 105.

[1248] Pusey, p. 110. Cp. Saintes, ch. vi.

[1249] Das kirchliche Leben, as cited, 2 Abth. p. 58.

[1250] Id. pp. 56-57.

[1251] Vol. i, p. 6.

[1252] H. Luden, Christian Thomasius nach seinen Schicksalen und Schriften dargestellt, 1805, p. 7.

[1253] Cp. Schmid, Geschichte des Pietismus, pp. 486-88.

[1254] Pufendorf's bulky treatise De Jure Naturæ et Gentium was published at Lund, where he was professor, in 1672. The shorter De Officio hominis et civis (also Lund, 1673) is a condensation and partly a vindication of the other, and this it was that convinced Thomasius. As to Pufendorf's part in the transition from theological to rational moral philosophy, see Hallam, Lit. of Europe, iv, 171-78. He is fairly to be bracketed with Cumberland; but Hallam hardly recognizes that it was the challenge of Hobbes that forced the change.

[1255] Freimüthige, lustige und ernsthafte, jedoch vernunft- und gesetzmässige Gedanken, oder Monatgespräche über allerhand, vornehmlich über neue Bücher. There had been an earlier Acta Eruditorum, in Latin, published at Leipzig, and a French Ephemerides savantes, Hamburg, 1686. Other German and French periodicals soon followed that of Thomasius. Luden, p. 162.

[1256] Schmid, pp. 488-92, gives a sketch of some of the contents.

[1257] Pusey, p. 86, note. It is surprising that Pusey does not make more account of Thomasius's naturalistic treatment of polygamy and suicide, which he showed to be not criminal in terms of natural law.

[1258] Compare Weber, Gesch. der deutschen Lit. § 81 (ed. 1880, pp. 90-91); Pusey, as cited, p. 114. note; Enfield's Hist. of Philos. (abst. of Brucker's Hist. crit. philos.), 1840. pp. 610-612; Ueberweg, ii, 115; and Schlegel's note in Reid's Mosheim, p. 790, with Karl Hillebrand, Six Lect. on the Hist. of German Thought, 1880, pp. 64-65. There is a modern monograph by A. Nicoladoni, Christian Thomasius; ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Aufklärung, 1888.

[1259] Baron de Bielfeld, Progrès des Allemands, 3e éd. 1767, i, 24. "Before Thomasius," writes Bielfeld, "an old woman could not have red eyes without running the risk of being accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake."

[1260] Schmid, pp. 493-97. Thomasius's principal writings on this theme were: Vom Recht evangelischen Fürsten in Mitteldingen (1692); Vom Recht evangelischen Fürsten in theologischen Streitigkeiten (1696); Vom Recht evangelischen Fürsten gegen Ketzer (1697).

[1261] Ec. Hist. 17 Cent. sect. ii, pt. ii, ch. i, §§ 11, 14. It is noteworthy that the Pietists at Halle did not scruple to ally themselves for a time with Thomasius, he being opposed to the orthodox party. Kahnis, Internal Hist. of Ger. Protestantism, p. 114.

[1262] Pusey, as cited, p. 121. Cp. p. 113.

[1263] Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte des 18. und 19. Jahrh., 2te Aufl. i, 164. (This matter is not in the abridged translation.)

[1264] See the furious account of him by Mosheim, 17 C. sec. ii, pt. ii, ch. i, § 33.

[1265] Hagenbach, last cit. p. 169.

[1266] Noack, Die Freidenker in der Religion, Th. iii, Kap. 1; Bruno Bauer, Einfluss des englischen Quäkerthums auf die deutsche Cultur und auf das englisch-russische Projekt einer Weltkirche, 1878, pp. 41-44.

[1267] Pref. to French tr. of the Meditationes, 1770, pp. xii-xvii. Lau died in 1740.

[1268] Tholuck, Abriss, as cited, p. 10.

[1269] Trans. in English, 1750.

[1270] Hagenbach, tr. pp. 35-36; Saintes, p. 61; Kahnis, as cited, p. 114.

[1271] Hagenbach, pp. 37-39. It is to be observed (Tholuck, Abriss, p. 23) that the Wolffian philosophy was reinstated in Prussia by royal mandate in 1739, a year before the accession of Frederick the Great. But we know that Frederick championed him.

[1272] Tholuck, Abriss, as cited, p. 5.

[1273] Tholuck, Abriss, as cited, p. 6.

[1274] Kahnis, p. 55.

[1275] Pünjer, i, 544. Cp. Tholuck, Abriss, pp. 19-22.

[1276] Tholuck, Abriss, p. 22. Schmid was for a time supposed to be the author of the Wolfenbüttel Fragments of Reimarus (below, p. 327).

[1277] Unpartheyische Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie, 1699-1700, 2 tom. fol.--fuller ed. 3 tom. fol. 1740. Compare Mosheim's angry account of it with Murdock's note in defence: Reid's ed. p. 804. Bruno Bauer describes it as epoch-making (Einfluss des englischen Quäkerthums, p. 42). This history had a great influence on Goethe in his teens, leading him, he says, to the conviction that he, like so many other men, should have a religion of his own, which he goes on to describe. It was a re-hash of Gnosticism. (Wahrheit und Dichtung, B. viii; Werke, ed. 1866, xi, 344 sq.)

[1278] Cp. Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte, i, 171: Pünjer, i, 279.

[1279] Die Göttlichkeit der Vernunft.

[1280] Noack, Th. iii, Kap. 2: Saintes, pp. 85-86; Pünjer, p. 442. It is interesting to find Edelmann supplying a formula latterly utilized by the so-called "New Theology" in England--the thesis that "the reality of everything which exists is God," and that there can therefore be no atheists, since he who recognizes the universe recognizes God.

[1281] Naigeon, by altering the words of Diderot, caused him to appear one of the exceptions; but he was not. See Rosenkranz, Diderot's Leben und Werke. Vorb. p. vii.

[1282] Kahnis, pp. 128-29. Edelmann's Life was written by Pratje. Historische Nachrichten von Edelmann's Leben, 1755. It gives a list of replies to his writings (p. 205 sq.). Apropos of the first issue of Strauss's Leben Jesu, a volume of Erinnerungen of Edelmann was published at Clausthal in 1839 by W. Elster; and Strauss in his Dogmatik avowed the pleasure with which he had made the acquaintance of so interesting a writer. A collection of extracts from Edelmann's works, entitled Der neu eröffnete Edelmann, was published at Bern in 1847; and the Unschuldige Wahrheiten was reprinted in 1846. His Autobiography, written in 1752, was published in 1849.

[1283] Betrachtungen über die vornehmsten Wahrheiten der Religion. Another apologetic work of the period marked by rational moderation and tolerance was the Vertheidigten Glauben der Christen of the Berlin court-preacher A. W. F. Sack (1754).

[1284] Art. by Wagenmann in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie.

[1285] Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte, i, 355.

[1286] Pünjer, i, 542.

[1287] Kurz, Hist. of the Christian Church from the Reformation, Eng. tr. ii, 274. A Jesuit, A. Merz, wrote four replies to Jerusalem. One was entitled Frag ob durch die biblische Simplicität allein ein Freydenker oder Deist bekehret ... werden könne ("Can a Freethinker or Deist be converted by Biblical Simplicity alone?"), 1775.

[1288] Cp. Hagenbach, i, 353; tr. p. 120. Jerusalem was the father of the gifted youth whose suicide (1775) moved Goethe to write The Sorrows of Werther, a false presentment of the real personality, which stirred Lessing (his affectionate friend) to publish a volume of the dead youth's essays, in vindication of his character. The father had considerable influence in purifying German style. Cp. Goethe, Wahrheit und Dichtung, Th. ii, B. vii; Werke, ed. 1866. xi, 272; and Hagenbach, i, 354.

[1289] Goethe, as last cited, pp. 268-69.

[1290] Lechler, Gesch. des englischen Deismus, pp. 447-52. The translations began with that of Tindal (1741), which made a great sensation.

[1291] Pusey, pp. 125, 127, citing Twesten; Gostwick, German Culture and Christianity, p. 36, citing Ernesti. Thorschmid's Freidenker Bibliothek, issued in 1765-67, collected both translations and refutations. Lechler, p. 451.

[1292] Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, i. 405 (Eng. tr. ii, 146-47).

[1293] Lange, i, 347, 399 (Eng. tr. ii, 76, 137).

[1294] Lange, i, 396-97 (ii, 134-35).

[1295] Goethe tells of having seen in his boyhood, at Frankfort, an irreligious French romance publicly burned, and of having his interest in the book thereby awakened. But this seems to have been during the French occupation. (Wahrheit und Dichtung, B. iv; Werke, xi, 146.)

[1296] Id. B. iv, end.

[1297] Translated into English 1780; 2nd ed. 1793. The translator claims for Haller great learning (2nd ed. p. xix). He seems in reality to have had very little, as he represents that Jesus in his day "was the only teacher who recommended chastity to men" (p. 82).

[1298] Rettung der Offenbarung gegen die Einwürfe der Freigeister. Haller wrote under a similar title, 1775-76.

[1299] Baur, Gesch. der christl. Kirche, iv, 599.

[1300] Gostwick, p. 15.

[1301] Wahrheit und Dichtung, B. viii; Werke, xi, 329.

[1302] Schlosser, Hist. of Eighteenth Cent., Eng. tr. 1843. i, 150; Hagenbach, tr. p. 66.

[1303] Hagenbach, tr. p. 63.

[1304] Id., Kirchengeschichte, i, 232.

[1305] Kahnis, p. 43; Tholuck, Abriss, p. 34.

[1306] See the extracts of Büchner, Zwei gekrönte Freidenker, 1890, pp. 45-47.

[1307] Thiébault, Mes Souvenirs de Vingt Ans de Séjour à Berlin, 2e édit. 1805, i, 126-28. See i, 355-56, ii, 78-82, as to the baselessness of the stories (e.g., Pusey, Histor. Inq. into Ger. Rationalism, p. 123) that Frederick changed his views in old age. Thiébault, a strict Catholic, is emphatic in his negation: "The persons who assert that [his principles] became more religious ... have either lied or been themselves mistaken." Carlyle naturally detests Thiébault. The rumour may have arisen out of the fact that in his Examen critique du Système de la Nature Frederick counter-argues d'Holbach's impeachment of Christianity. The attack on kings gave him a fellow-feeling with the Church.

[1308] Cp. the argument of Faure, Hist. de Saint Louis, 1866, i, 242-43; ii, 597.

[1309] Examen de l'Essai sur les préjugés, 1769. See the passage in Lévy-Bruhl, L'Allemagne depuis Leibniz, p. 89).

[1310] G. Weber, Gesch. der deutschen Literatur, 11te Aufl. p. 99.

[1311] Zur Gesch. der Relig. und Philos. in Deutschland--Werke, ed. 1876, iii, 63-64. Goethe's blame (W. und D., B. vii) is passed on purely literary grounds.

[1312] Hagenbach, tr. pp. 103-104; Cairns, p. 177.

[1313] This post he left to become secretary of the Academy of Painting.

[1314] Cited by Pünjer, i, 545-46.

[1315] Id. p. 546.

[1316] Hagenbach, tr. pp. 100-103; Saintes, pp. 91-92; Pünjer, p. 536; Noack, Th. iii, Kap. 7.

[1317] Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte, i, 298, 351.

[1318] Id. i, 294 sq.

[1319] The book is remembered in France by reason of Eberhard's amusing mistake of treating as a serious production of the Sorbonne the skit in which Turgot derided the Sorbonne's findings against Marmontel's Bélisaire.

[1320] Hagenbach, tr. p. 109.

[1321] Eberhard, however, is respectfully treated by Lessing in his discussion on Leibnitz's view as to eternal punishment.

[1322] Noack, Th. iii, Kap. 8.

[1323] Saintes, pp. 92-93.

[1324] Cp. Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte, i, 348, 363.

[1325] Id. i, 367; tr. pp. 124-25; Saintes, p. 94; Kahnis, p. 45. Pusey (150-51, note) speaks of Teller and Spalding as belonging, with Nicolai, Mendelssohn, and others, to a "secret institute, whose object was to remodel religion and alter the form of government." This seems to be a fantasy.

[1326] So Steffens, cited by Hagenbach, tr. p. 124.

[1327] P. Gastrow, Joh. Salomo Semler, 1905, p. 45. See Pusey, 140-41, note, for Semler's account of the rigid and unreasoning orthodoxy against which he reacted. (Citing Semler's Lebenschreibung, ii, 121-61.) Semler, however, records that Baumgarten, one of the theological professors at Halle, would in expansive moods defend theism and make light of theology (Lebenschreibung, i, 103 ). Cp. Tholuck, Abriss, as cited, pp. 12, 18. Pusey notes that "many of the principal innovators had been pupils of Baumgarten" (p. 132, citing Niemeyer).

[1328] Cp. Dr. G. Karo, Johann Salomo Semler, 1905, p. 25; Saintes, pp. 129-31.

[1329] Cp. Gostwick, p. 51; Pünjer, i, 561.

[1330] Karo, p. 44.

[1331] Cp. Saintes, p. 132 sq.

[1332] Cp. Karo, pp. 3, 8, 16, 28.

[1333] Over a hundred and seventy in all. Pünjer, i, 560; Gastrow, p. 637.

[1334] Karo, pp. 5-6.

[1335] Gastrow, p. 223.

[1336] Pusey, p. 142; A. S. Farrar, Crit. Hist. of Freethought, p. 313.

[1337] Cp. Karo, p. 5 sq.; Stäudlin, cited by Tholuck, Abriss, p. 39.

[1338] Kahnis. p. 116.

[1339] Wahre Gründe wanum Gott die Offenbarung nicht mit augenscheinlichen Beweisen versehen hat.

[1340] Die Göttliche Eingebung, 1771.

[1341] Beweis das Gott die Menschen bereits durch seine Offenbarung in der Natur zur Seligkeit fuhre.

[1342] Gostwick, p. 53; Pünjer, i, 546, note.

[1343] Cp. Kahnis, pp. 132-36, as to Bahrdt's early morals.

[1344] Geschichte seines Lebens, etc. 1700-91, iv, 119.

[1345] See below, p. 331.

[1346] Geschichte seines Lebens, Kap. 22; ii, 223 sq.

[1347] Baur, Gesch. der chr. Kirche, iv. 597.

[1348] Translated into English in 1789.

[1349] Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, Abschn. I--Werke, 1838 p. 239 (Eng. tr. 1838, pp. 50-51); Rousseau, Contrat Social, liv, iv, ch. viii, near end; Locke, as cited above, p. 117. Cp. Bartholmèss, Hist. crit. des doctr. relig. de la philos. moderne, 1855, i, 145; Baur, as last cited.

[1350] See his Werke, ed. 1866, v, 317--Aus dem Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend, 49ter Brief.

[1351] If Lessing's life were sketched in the spirit in which orthodoxy has handled that of Bahrdt, it could be made unedifying enough. Even Goethe remarks that Lessing "enjoyed himself in a disorderly tavern life" (Wahrheit und Dichtung, B. vii); and all that Hagenbach maliciously charges against Basedow in the way of irregularity of study is true of him. On that and other points, usually glossed over, see the sketch in Taylor's Historic Survey of German Poetry, 1830, i, 332-37. All the while, Lessing is an essentially sound-hearted and estimable personality; and he would probably have been the last man to echo the tone of the orthodox towards the personal life of the freethinkers who went further in unbelief than he.

[1352] E.g. his fable The Bull and the Calf (Fabeln, ii, 5), à propos of the clergy and Bayle.

[1353] Sime, Life of Lessing, 1877, i, 102.

[1354] E.g. his early notice of Diderot's Lettre sur les Aveugles. Sime, i, 94.

[1355] Dramaturgie, Stück 7.

[1356] Sime, i, 103-109.

[1357] Sime, i, 73, 107; ii, 253.

[1358] In his Gedanke über die Herrnhuter, written in 1750. See Adolf Stahr's Lessing, sein Leben und seine Werke, 7te Aufl. ii, 183 sq.

[1359] Julian Schmidt puts the case sympathetically: "He had learned in his father's house what value the pastoral function may have for the culture of the people. He was bibelfest, instructed in the history of his church, Protestant in spirit, full of genuine reverence for Luther, full of high respect for historical Christianity, though on reading the Fathers he could say hard things of the Church." Gesch. der deutschen Litteratur von Leibniz bis auf unsere Zeit, ii (1886), 326.

[1360] Taylor, as cited, p. 361.

[1361] Sime, i, 73.

[1362] See Lessing's rather crude comedy, Der Freigeist, and Sime's Life, i, 41-42, 72, 77.

[1363] Cp. his letters to his brother of which extracts are given by Sime, ii, 191-92.

[1364] Sime, ii, 188.

[1365] As to the authorship see Saintes, pp. 101-102; and Sime's Life of Lessing, i, 261-62, where the counter-claim is rejected.

[1366] Zur Geschichte und Literatur, aus dem 4ten Beitr.--Werke, vi. 142 sq. See also in his Theologische Streitschriften the Axiomata written against Pastor Goeze. Cp. Schwarz, Lessing als Theologe, 1854, pp. 146, 151; and Pusey, as cited, p. 51. note.

[1367] Compare the regrets of Pusey (pp. 51, 153), Cairns (p. 195), Hagenbach (pp. 89-97), and Saintes (p. 100).

[1368] Sämmtliche Schriften, ed. Lachmann, 1857, xi (2), 248. Sime (ii, 190) mistranslates this passage; and Schmidt (ii, 326) mutilates it by omissions. Fontanes (Le Christianisme moderne: Étude sur Lessing, 1867, p. 171) paraphrases it very loosely.

[1369] Sime, ii, 190.

[1370] Stahr, ii, 239; Sime, ii. 189.

[1371] See Sime, ii, 222, 233: Stahr, ii, 254. Hettner, an admirer, calls the early Christianity of Reason a piece of sophistical dialectic. Litteraturgeschichte des 18ten Jahrhunderts, ed. 1872, iii. 588-89.

[1372] Stahr, ii, 243. Lessing said the report to this effect was a lie; but this and other mystifications appear to have been by way of fulfilling his promise of secrecy to the Reimarus family. Cairns, pp. 203, 209. Cp. Farrar, Crit. Hist. of Freethought, note 29.

[1373] See it analysed by Bartholmèss, Hist. crit. des doctr. relig. de la philos. moderne, i, 147-67; and by Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historic Jesus (trans. of Von Reimarus zu Wrede), 1910.

[1374] Gostwick, p. 47; Bartholmèss, i, 166. His book was translated into English (The Principal Truths of Natural Religion Defended and Illustrated) in 1766; into Dutch in 1758; in part into French in 1768; and seven editions of the original had appeared by 1798.

[1375] Stahr, ii, 241-44.

[1376] Id. ii, 245.

[1377] The statement that, in Lessing's age, "in north Germany men were able to think and write freely" (Conybeare, Hist. of N. T. Crit., p. 80) is thus seen to be highly misleading.

[1378] Von dem Zwecke, Jesus und seiner Jünger, Braunschweig, 1778.

[1379] Taylor, Histor. Survey of German Poetry, i, 365.

[1380] Stahr, ii, 253-54.

[1381] Cp. Introd. to Willis's trans. of Nathan. The play is sometimes attacked as being grossly unfair to Christianity. (E.g. Crouslé, Lessing, 1863, p. 206.) The answer to this complaint is given by Sime, ii, 252 sq.

[1382] See Cairns, Appendix, Note I; Willis, Spinoza, pp. 149-62; Sime, ii, 299-303; and Stahr, ii, 219-30, giving the testimony of Jacobi. Cp. Pünjer, i, 564-85. But Heine laughingly adjures Moses Mendelssohn, who grieved so intensely over Lessing's Spinozism, to rest quiet in his grave: "Thy Lessing was indeed on the way to that terrible error ... but the Highest, the Father in Heaven, saved him in time by death. He died a good deist, like thee and Nicolai and Teller and the Universal German Library" (Zur Gesch. der Rel. und Philos. in Deutschland, B. ii, near end.--Werke, ed. 1876, iii. 69).

[1383] See in Stahr, ii, 184-85. the various characterizations of his indefinite philosophy. Stahr's own account of him as anticipating the moral philosophy of Kant is as overstrained as the others. Gastrow, an admirer, expresses wonder (Johann Salomo Semler, p. 188) at the indifference of Lessing to the critical philosophy in general.

[1384] Sime, ii, ch. xxix, gives a good survey.

[1385] Letter to his brother, Feb., 1778.

[1386] Strauss, Das Leben Jesu (the second) Einleitung, § 14.

[1387] Hurst, History of Rationalism, 3rd ed. p. 130. "It was a popular belief, as an organ of pious opinion announced to its readers, that at his death the devil came and carried him away like a second Faust." Sime, ii, 330.

[1388] Cited by Hurst, Hist. of Rationalism, 3rd ed. p. 125. Outside Berlin, however, matters went otherwise till late in the century. Kurz tells (Gesch. der deutschen Literatur, ii, 461 b) that "the indifference of the learned towards native literature was so great that even in the year 1761 Abbt could write that in Rinteln there was nobody who knew the names of Moses Mendelssohn and Lessing."

[1389] Karl Hillebrand, Lectures on the Hist. of German Thought, 1880, p. 109.

[1390] Deutsche Merkur, Jan. and March, 1788 (Werke, ed. 1797, xxix, 1-144; cited by Stäudlin, Gesch. der Rationalismus und Supernaturalismus, 1826, p. 233).

[1391] Kurtz, Hist. of the Chr. Church, Eng. tr. 1864, ii, 224.

[1392] T. C. Perthes, Das Deutsche Staatsleben vor der Revolution, 262 sq., cited by Kahnis pp. 58-59.

[1393] See above, pp. 321, 328.

[1394] Kant distinguishes explicitly between "rationalists," as thinkers who would not deny the possibility of a revelation, and "naturalists," who did. See the Religion innerhalb der grenzen der blossen Vernunft, Stück iv, Th. i. This was in fact the standing significance of the term in Germany for a generation.

[1395] Letter to his brother, February 2, 1774.

[1396] Known as Zopf-Schulz from his wearing a pigtail in the fashion then common among the laity. "An old insolent rationalist," Kurtz calls him (ii, 270).

[1397] Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte, i, 372; Gostwick, pp. 52, 54.

[1398] Philosophische Betrachtung über Theologie und Religion überhaupt, und über die Jüdische insonderheit, 1784.

[1399] Pünjer, i, 544-45.

[1400] Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ch. ix, Bohn ed. p. 71.

[1401] See the details in Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte, i, 368-72; Kahnis, p. 60.

[1402] Marokkanische Briefe. Aus dem Arabischen. Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1785. The Letters purport to be written by one of the Moroccan embassy at Vienna in 1783.

[1403] Briefe, xxi.

[1404] P. 49.

[1405] P. 232.

[1406] Das zum Theil einzige wahre System der christlichen Religion. It had been composed in its author's youth under the title False Reasonings of the Christian Religion; and the MS. was lost through the bankruptcy of a Dutch publisher.

[1407] Noack, Th. III, Kap. 9, p. 194.

[1408] Mauvillon further collaborated with Mirabeau, and became a great admirer of the French Revolution. He left freethinking writings among his remains. They are not described by Noack, and I have been unable to meet with them.

[1409] It was a test of the depth of the freethinking spirit in the men of the day. Semler justified the edict; Bahrdt vehemently denounced it. Hagenbach, i, 372.

[1410] Cp. Crabb Robinson's Diary, iii, 48; Martineau, Study of Spinoza, p. 328; Willis, Spinoza, pp. 162-68. Bishop Hurst laments (Hist. of Rationalism, 3rd ed. p. 145) that Herder's early views as to the mission of Christ "were, in common with many other evangelical views, doomed to an unhappy obscuration upon the advance of his later years by frequent intercourse with more skeptical minds."

[1411] On the clerical opposition to him at Weimar on this score see Düntzer, Life of Goethe, Eng. tr. 1883, i, 317.

[1412] Cp. Kronenberg, Herder's Philosophie nach ihrem Entwickelungsgang, 1889.

[1413] Kronenberg, p. 90.

[1414] Stuckenberg, Life of Immanuel Kant, 1882, pp. 381-87; Kronenberg, Herder's Philosophie, pp. 91, 103.

[1415] Kahnis, p. 78, and Erdmann, as there cited. Erdmann finds the pantheism of Herder to be, not Spinozistic as he supposed, but akin to that of Bruno and his Italian successors.

[1416] The chief sample passages in his works are the poem Das Göttliche and the speech of Faust in reply to Gretchen in the garden scene. It was the surmised pantheism of Goethe's poem Prometheus that, according to Jacobi, drew from Lessing his avowal of a pantheistic leaning. The poem has even an atheistic ring; but we have Goethe's own account of the influence of Spinoza on him from his youth onwards (Wahrheit und Dichtung, Th. III, B. xiv; Th. IV, B. xvi). See also his remarks on the "natural" religion of "conviction" or rational inference, and that of "faith" (Glaube) or revelationism, in B. iv (Werke, ed. 1866, xi, 134); also Kestner's account of his opinions at twenty-three, in Düntzer's Life, Eng. tr. i, 185; and again his letter to Jacobi, January 6, 1813, quoted by Düntzer, ii, 290.

[1417] See the Alt-Testamentliches Appendix to the West-Oestlicher Divan.

[1418] Heine, Zur Gesch. der Rel. u. Phil. in Deutschland (Werke, ed. 1876, iii, 92).

[1419] Wahrheit und Dichtung, Th. I, B. iv (Werke, ed. 1886, xi, 123).

[1420] Id. Th. III, B. xiv, par. 20 (Werke, xii, 159).

[1421] Id. pp. 165, 186.

[1422] Id. p. 184.

[1423] Cited by Baur, Gesch. der christl. Kirche, v, 50.

[1424] Compare, as to the hostility he aroused, Düntzer, i, 152, 317, 329-30, 451; ii, 291 note, 455, 461; Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, März 6, 1830; and Heine, last cit. p. 93.

[1425] Eckermann, März 11, 1832.

[1426] Id. Feb. 4, 1829.

[1427] Hurst, Hist. of Rationalism, 3rd ed. p. 150.

[1428] Wahrheit und Dichtung, Th. III, B. viii; Werke, xi, 334.

[1429] Cp., however, the estimate of Krause, above, p. 207. Virchow, Göthe als Naturforscher, 1861, goes into detail on the biological points, without reaching any general estimate.

[1430] Remarked by Hagenbach, tr. p. 238.

[1431] Letter to Goethe, August 17, 1795 (Briefwechsel, No. 87). The passage is given in Carlyle's essay on Schiller.

[1432] In Die Sendung Moses.

[1433] See the Philosophische Briefe.

[1434] Carlyle translates, "No Rights of Man," which was probably the idea.

[1435] Letter to Goethe, July 9, 1796 (Briefwechsel, No. 188). "It is evident that he was estranged not only from the church but from the fundamental truths of Christianity" (Rev. W. Baur, Religious Life of Germany, Eng. tr. 1872, p. 22). F. C. Baur has a curious page in which he seeks to show that, though Schiller and Goethe cannot be called Christian in a natural sense, the age was not made un-Christian by them to such an extent as is commonly supposed (Gesch. der christl. Kirche, v, 46).

[1436] Cp. Tieftrunk, as cited by Stuckenberg, Life of Immanuel Kant, p. 225.

[1437] Id. p. 376. In his early essay Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik (1766) this attitude is clear. It ends with an admiring quotation from Voltaire's Candide.

[1438] Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? in the Berliner Monatschrift, Dec. 1784, rep. in Kant's Vorzügliche kleine Schriften, 1833, Bd. i.

[1439] For an able argument vindicating the unity of Kant's system, however, see Prof. Adamson, The Philosophy of Kant, 1879, p. 21 sq., as against Lange. With the verdict in the text compare that of Heine, Zur Gesch. der Relig. u. Philos. in Deutschland, B. iii (Werke, as cited, iii, 81-82); that of Prof. G. Santayana, The Life of Reason, vol. i, 1905, p. 94 sq.; and that of Prof. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, The Philosophy of Religion in Kant and Hegel, rep. in vol. entitled The Philosophical Radicals and Other Essays, 1907, pp. 264, 266.

[1440] Stuckenberg, pp. 225, 332.

[1441] Cp. Haym, Herder nach seinem Leben ... dargestellt, 1877, i, 33, 48; Kronenberg, Herder's Philosophie, p. 10.

[1442] Cp. Hagenbach, Eng. tr. p. 223.

[1443] Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, Stück iii, Abth. i, § 5; Abth. ii (ed. 1793, pp. 145-46, 188-89).

[1444] Work cited, Stück ii, Abschn. ii, Allg. Anm. p. 108 sq.

[1445] E.g. Stück iv, Th. i, preamble (p. 221, ed. cited).

[1446] Id. Stück iii, Abth. ii, Allg. Anm.: "This belief," he avows frankly enough, "involves no mystery" (p. 199). In a note to the second edition he suggests that there must be a basis in reason for the idea of a Trinity, found as it is among so many ancient and primitive peoples. The speculation is in itself evasive, for he does not give the slightest reason for thinking the Goths capable of such metaphysic.

[1447] Stück iii, Abth. i, § 5; pp. 137, 139.

[1448] Stück iii, Abth. ii, p. 178.

[1449] Kant explicitly concurs in Warburton's thesis that the Jewish lawgiver purposely omitted all mention of a future state from the Pentateuch; since such belief must be supposed to have been current in Jewry. But he goes further, and pronounces that simple Judaism contains "absolutely no religious belief." To this complexion can philosophic compromise come.

[1450] Stuckenberg, Life of Immanuel Kant, p. 329.

[1451] Borowski, Darstellung des Lebens und Charakters Immanuel Kant's, 1804, cited by Stuckenberg, p. 357.

[1452] Stuckenberg, pp. 359-60.

[1453] Stuckenberg, p. 361.

[1454] Cp. F. C. Baur, Gesch. der christl. Kirche, v, 63-66.

[1455] The first, on "Radical Evils," appeared in a Berlin monthly in April, 1792, and was then reprinted separately.

[1456] Stuckenberg, p. 361.

[1457] Ueberweg, ii, 141; Stuckenberg, p. 363.

[1458] Stuckenberg, pp. 304-309.

[1459] Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, Stück iv, Th. 2.

[1460] Cp. Stuckenberg, p. 332; Seth Pringle-Pattison, as cited.

[1461] Stuckenberg, pp. 340, 346, 354, 468.

[1462] Letter of May 22, 1799, reproduced by Heine.

[1463] Zur Gesch. der Rel. u. Philos. in Deutschland. Werke, as cited, iii, 96, 98.

[1464] Stuckenberg, p. 311.

[1465] Id. p. 357.

[1466] Stuckenberg, p. 351. "It is only necessary," adds Stuckenberg (p. 468, note 142), "to develop Kant's hints in order to get the views of Strauss in his Leben Jesu."

[1467] Id. p. 375. Erhard stated that Pestalozzi shared his views on Christian ethics.

[1468] Stuckenberg, p. 358.

[1469] Cp. Weber, Gesch. der deutschen Literatur, 11te Aufl. p. 119; R. Unger, Hamann und die Aufklärung, 1911.

[1470] Bartholmèss, Hist. crit. des doctr. relig. de la philos. moderne, 1855, i, 136-40.

[1471] In demanding a "history of the human conscience" (Neue Anthropologie, 1790) Platner seems to have anticipated the modern scientific approach to religion.

[1472] Gespräche über den Atheismus, 1781.

[1473] Lehrbuch der Logik und Metaphysik, 1795.

[1474] W. Smith, Memoir of Fichte, 2nd ed. p. 10.

[1475] Id. pp. 12, 13, 20, 23, 25, etc.

[1476] Id. pp. 34-35.

[1477] Smith, p. 94.

[1478] Id. p. 34.

[1479] Adamson, Fichte, 1881, p. 32; Smith, as cited, pp. 64-65.

[1480] Letter to Kant, cited by Smith, p. 63.

[1481] Asserted by Stuckenberg, Life of Kant, p. 386.

[1482] Cp. Robins, A Defence of the Faith, 1862, pt. i, pp. 132-33; Adamson, Fichte, pp. 50-67; W. Smith, Memoir of Fichte, pp. 106-107.

[1483] Adamson, pp. 71, 73.

[1484] Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters, 16te Vorles. ed. 1806, pp. 509-510.

[1485] Compare the complaints of Hurst, Hist. of Rationalism, 3rd ed. pp. 136-37, and of Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Bohn ed. p. 72. Fichte's theory, says Coleridge (after praising him as the destroyer of Spinozism), "degenerated into a crude egoismus, a boastful and hyperstoic hostility to Nature, as lifeless, godless, and altogether unholy, while his religion consisted in the assumption of a mere ordo ordinans, which we were permitted exotericé to call God." Heine (as last cited, p. 75) insists that Fichte's Idealism is "more Godless than the crassest Materialism."

[1486] Grundzüge, as cited, p. 502.

[1487] Cp. Seth Pringle-Pattison, as cited, p. 280, note.

[1488] Kurtz, Hist. of the Chr. Church, Eng. tr. 1864, ii, 225. Jahn was well in advance of his age in his explanation of Joshua's cosmic miracle as the mistaken literalizing of a flight of poetic phrase. See the passage in his Introduction to the Book of Joshua, cited by Rowland Williams, The Hebrew Prophets, ii (1871), 31, note 33.

[1489] R. N. Bain, Gustavus Vasa and his Contemporaries, 1894, i. 265-68.

[1490] A. Sorel, L'Europe et la révolution française, i (1885), p. 458.

[1491] See articles on Beethoven by Macfarren in Dictionary of Universal Biography, and by Grove in the Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

[1492] Grove, art. cited, ed. 1904, i, 224.

[1493] Jonckbloet, Beknopte Geschiedenis der nederl. Letterkunde, ed. 1880, p. 282.

[1494] Id. pp. 315-16.

[1495] Cp. Trinius, Freydenker-Lexicon, pp. 336-37; Colerus, Vie de Spinoza, as cited, p. lviii.

[1496] See Texte, Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit, Eng. tr. p. 29.

[1497] Briefe, 1752, p. 451.

[1498] This is the basis of Pope's reference to "illustrious Passeran" in his Epilogue to the Satires, 1738, ii, 124. The Rev. J. Bramstone's satire, The Man of Taste (1733), spells the name "Pasaran," whence may be inferred the extent of the satirist's knowledge of his topic.

[1499] Reprinted, in French, at London in 1749, in a more complete and correct edition, published by J. Brindley.

[1500] The copy in the British Museum is dated 1737, and the title-page describes Passerano as "a Piemontæse exile now in Holland, a Christian Freethinker." It is presumably a re-issue.

[1501] Warburton in a note on Pope (Epilogue, as cited) characteristically alleges that Passerano had been banished from Piedmont "for his impieties, and lived in the utmost misery, yet feared to practise his own precepts; and at last died a penitent." The source of these allegations may serve as warrant for disbelieving them. Warburton, it will be observed, says nothing of an imprisonment in England.

[1502] London ed. 1749, pp. 24-25.

[1503] Koch, Histor. View of the European Nations, Eng. tr. 3rd ed. p. 103. Cp. Crichton and Wheaton, Scandinavia, 1837, i, 383-96; Otté, Scandinavian History, 1874, pp. 222-24; Villiers, Essay on the Reformation, Eng. tr. 1836, p. 105. But cp. Allen, Histoire de Danemark, Fr. tr. i, 298-300.

[1504] Otté, pp. 232-36; Crichton-Wheaton, i, 398-400; Geijer, Hist. of the Swedes, Eng. tr. i, 125.

[1505] Koch, p. 104; Geijer, i, 129.

[1506] Crichton-Wheaton, ii, 322.

[1507] Ludwig Holberg, Baron Holberg, born at Bergen, Norway, 1684. After a youth of poverty and struggle he settled at Copenhagen in 1718, as professor of metaphysics, and attained the chair of eloquence in 1720. Made Baron by King Frederick V of Denmark at his accession in 1747. D. 1754.

[1508] Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum novam telluris theoriam ac historiam quintæ monarchiæ ... exhibens, etc. Dr. Gosse, in art. Holberg, Encyc. Brit., makes the mistake of calling the book a poem. It is in Latin prose, with verse passages.

[1509] It was published thrice in Danish, ten times in German, thrice in Swedish, thrice in Dutch, thrice in English, twice in French, twice in Russian, and once in Hungarian.

[1510] Cap. vi, De religione gentis Potuanæ.

[1511] Cp. pp. 75-78, ed. 1754.

[1512] Cap. vi, p. 69; cp. cap. viii, De Academia, p. 101.

[1513] Id. p. 77.

[1514] He had visited England in his youth.

[1515] Crichton-Wheaton, ii, 322. On p. 159 a somewhat contrary statement is made, which obscures the facts. Cp. Schlosser, iv, 13, as to Christian's martinet methods.

[1516] Geijer, i, 324.

[1517] Id. p. 343; Otté, p. 292.

[1518] Geijer, i, 342. Cp. Ranke, Hist. of the Popes, Eng. tr. ed. 1908, ii, 399; iii, 345-46.

[1519] Crichton-Wheaton, ii, 88-89, and refs.

[1520] Cp. Ranke, as cited, ii, 407.

[1521] Work cited, pp. 288-89. This writer gives the only intelligible account of the private execution of Christina's secretary, Monaldeschi, by her orders. Monaldeschi had either passed over to other hands some of her letters to him, or kept them so carelessly as to let them be stolen. Id. p. 11. For her cruel act she shows no trace of religious or any other remorse. She was, in fact, a neurotic egoist. Cp. Ranke, ii, 394, 405.

[1522] Bouillier, Hist. de la philos. cartés., i, 449-50.

[1523] Geijer, i, 342.

[1524] See his treatise, Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion in Reference to Civil Society, Eng. tr. by Crull, 1698.

[1525] Heaven and Hell, 1758, §§ 353, 354, 464.

[1526] Translated as The Divine Providence.

[1527] §§ 235-264.

[1528] Work cited, § 241.

[1529] De cultu et amore Dei, 1745. tr. as The Worship and Love of God, ed. 1885, p. 18.

[1530] "When he was contradicted he kept silence." Documents concerning Swedenborg, ed. by Dr. Tafel, 1875-1877, ii, 564.

[1531] Cp. Swedenborg's letter to Beyer, in Documents, as cited, ii, 279.

[1532] For many years he seldom went to church, being unable to listen peacefully to the trinitarian doctrine he heard there. Documents, as cited, ii, 560.

[1533] W. White, Swedenborg: his Life and Writings, ed. 1867, i, 188.

[1534] Schweitzer, Geschichte der skandinavischen Literatur, ii, 175, 225; C.-F. Allen, Histoire de Danemark, Fr. tr. ii, 1900-1901; R. N. Bain, Gustavus Vasa and his Contemporaries, 1894, i, 226.

[1535] Correspondance de Grimm, ed. 1829-1831, vii, 229.

[1536] Crichton-Wheaton, ii, 206.

[1537] Writing to his mother on his first visit to Paris, he takes her, ostensibly as a libre esprit, into his confidence, disparaging Marmontel and Grimm as vain. Joseph II in turn pronounced Gustavus "a conceited fop, an impudent braggart" (Bain, as cited, i, 266). Both monarchs set up an impression of want of balance, and the mother of Gustavus, who forced him to break with her, does the same.

[1538] Bain, as cited, i, 224-31.

[1539] Id. ii, 208-12.

[1540] Id. i, 267-68.

[1541] Cp. Bain, ii, 272, 287, 293-96.

[1542] Crichton-Wheaton, ii, 335.

[1543] Crichton-Wheaton, ii, 322. Cp. pp. 161-63. Schlosser, iv, 15.

[1544] Crichton-Wheaton, ii, 190; Otté, p. 322; C.-F. Allen, as cited, ii, 194-201; Schlosser, iv, 319 sq.

[1545] Cp. Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, 1796, Let. xviii. One of the grounds on which the queen was charged with unchastity was, that she had established a hospital for foundlings.

[1546] Trans. from the German, 1774; 2nd ed. 1825. See it also in the work, Converts from Infidelity, by Andrew Crichton; vols. vi and vii of Constable's Miscellany, 1827. This singular compilation includes lives of Boyle, Bunyan, Haller, and others, who were never "infidels."

[1547] Crichton-Wheaton, ii, 190-91.

[1548] Work cited, Letter vii.

[1549] Id. Letter viii, near end.

[1550] Crichton-Wheaton, ii, 324.

[1551] He claimed that the remarks penned by him in an anti-atheistic work, challenging its argument, represented not unbelief but the demand for a better proof, which he undertook to produce. See Krasinski, Sketch of the Religious History of the Slavonic Nations, 1851, pp. 224-25. It is remarkable that the Pope, Innocent XI, bitterly censured the execution.

[1552] Fletcher, History of Poland, 1831, p. 141.

[1553] Fletcher, pp. 145-46.

[1554] Hardwick, Church History: Middle Age, 1853, pp. 386-87.

[1555] L. Sichler, Hist. de la litt. Russe, 1887, pp. 88-89, 139. Cp. Rambaud, Hist. de Russie, 2e édit. pp. 249, 259, etc. (Eng. tr. i, 309, 321, 328).

[1556] R. N. Bain, The First Romanovs, 1905, pp. 136-51; Rambaud, p. 333 (tr. i, 414-17). The struggle (1654) elicited old forms of heresy, going back to Manicheism and Gnosticism. In this furious schism Nikon destroyed irregular ikons or sacred images; and savage persecutions resulted from his insistence that the faithful should use three fingers instead of two in crossing themselves. Many resisted to the death.

[1557] Prince Serge Wolkonsky, Russian History and Literature, 1897, pp. 98-101.

[1558] Morfill, History of Russia, 1902, p. 14; Bain, p. 201.

[1559] Cp. Wolkonsky, p. 101.

[1560] C. E. Turner, Studies in Russian Literature, 1882, p. 2.

[1561] Id. pp. 16, 17, 25, 26, 40; Sichler, p. 148.

[1562] Sichler, p. 139. Peter's dislike of monks won him the repute of a freethinker. Morfill, p. 97. He was actually attacked as "Antichrist" in a printed pamphlet on the score of his innovations. Personally, he detested religious persecution, and was willing to tolerate anybody but Jews; but he had to let persecution take place; and even to consent to removing statues of pagan deities from his palace. Bain, pp. 304-309.

[1563] Cp. Bain, p. 392.

[1564] Turner, p. 22. Kantemir was the friend of Bolingbroke and Montesquieu in Paris.

[1565] Sichler, p. 147.

[1566] Turner, pp. 40-41.

[1567] See the passages cited by Rambaud, p. 482, from her letter to Voltaire.

[1568] Seume, Ueber das Leben ... der Kaiserin Catharina II: Werke, ed. 1839, v, 239-40; Rambaud, pp. 482-84.

[1569] See Bishop Burnet's Letters, iv, ed. Rotterdam, 1686, pp. 187-91.

[1570] Zeller, Histoire d'Italie, pp. 426-32, 450; Procter, Hist. of Italy, 2nd ed. pp. 240, 268.

[1571] Burnet, as cited, pp. 195-97.

[1572] Prof. Flint, who insists on the deep piety of Vico, notes that he "appears to have had strangely little interest in Christian systematic theology" (Vico, 1884, p. 70).

[1573] Siciliani, Sul Rinnovamento della filosofia positiva in Italia, 1871, pp. 37-41.

[1574] Siciliani, p. 36.

[1575] Introduction (by Mignet?) to the Princess Belgiojoso's tr. La Science Nouvelle, 1844, p. cxiii. Cp. Flint, Vico, 231.

[1576] Ganganelli, Papst Clemens XIV, seine Briefe und seine Zeit, vom Verfasser der Römischen Briefe (Von Reumont), 1847, pp. 35-36, and p. 155, note.

[1577] See the Storia della economia pubblica in Italia of G. Pecchio, 1829, p. 61 sq., as to the claim of Antonio Serra (Breve trattato, etc. 1613) to be the pioneer of modern political economy. Cp. Hallam, Lit. of Europe, iii, 164-66. Buckle (1-vol. ed. p. 122, note) has claimed the title for William Stafford, whose Compendious or briefe Examination of certain ordinary Complaints (otherwise called A Briefe Conceipt of English Policy) appeared in 1581. But cp. Ingram (Hist. of Pol. Econ. 1888, pp. 43-45) as to the prior claims of Bodin.

[1578] Briefe, as before cited, p. 408.

[1579] Correspondence littéraire, ed. 1829-31, vii, 331. Cp. Von Reumont, Ganganelli, p. 33.

[1580] The Dei delitti e delle pene was translated into 22 languages. Pecchio, p. 144.

[1581] See in the 6th ed. of the Dei delitti (Harlem, 1766) the appended Risposta ad uno scritto, etc., Parte prima, Accuse d'empietà.

[1582] See his letter to the Abbé Morellet, cited by Mr. Farrer in ch. i of his ed. of Crimes and Punishments, 1880, p. 5. It describes the Milanese as deeply sunk in prejudices.

[1583] Pecchio, p. 123.

[1584] Cp. McCulloch, Literature of Political Economy, 1845, p. 64; Blanqui, Hist. de l'economie politique, 2e édit. ii, 432.

[1585] As to the genuineness of the Ganganelli letters, originally much disputed, see Von Reumont's Ganganelli, Papst Clemens XIV; seine Briefe und seine Zeit, 1847, pp. 40-44.

[1586] Lett. lvi, Eng. tr. 1777, i, 141-42. No. lxxii in Von Reumont's Ganganelli, 1847.

[1587] Lett. xiii, 1749. Eng. tr. i, 44-46; No. cxiv in Von Reumont's translation.

[1588] Lett. vi and xiv; Nos. ix and xxii in Von Reumont.

[1589] Lett. xxx, p. 83; No. xxxiv in Von Reumont.

[1590] Lett. xci; No. xcii in Von Reumont.

[1591] Lett. cxlvi; No. xiii in Von Reumont.

[1592] Lett. lxxxii, 1753 or 1754; No. lxi in Von Reumont.

[1593] Lett. cxxiv, 1769. This letter is not in Von Reumont's collection, and appears to be regarded by him as spurious--or unduly indiscreet.

[1594] Lett. lxxxiii, 1754; No. lxxiii in Von Reumont.

[1595] Corr. Litt. as cited, vii, 104.

[1596] Zeller, p. 473.

[1597] Zeller, pp. 478-79.

[1598] Julien Luchaire, Essai sur l'evolution intellectuelle de l'Italie de 1815 à 1830, 1906, p. 3.

[1599] Parini wrote a reproving Ode on the subject. (Henri Hauvette, Littérature Italienne, 1906, p. 371.) He was one of those disillusioned by the course of the Revolution. (Id. p. 375.)

[1600] Hauvette, pp. 391-93.

[1601] Coxe, Memoirs of the Bourbon Kings of Spain, ed. 1815, iv, 408.

[1602] Villanueva, Vida Literaria, London, 1825.

[1603] Buckle, iii, 547-48 (1-vol. ed. 599-600). The last victim seems to have been a woman accused of witchcraft. Her nose was cut off before her execution. See the Marokkanische Briefe, 1785, p. 36; and Buckle's note 272.

[1604] Letter of D'Alembert to Voltaire, 13 mai, 1773.

[1605] Grimm, Corr. Litt. x, 393.

[1606] Llorente, ii, 534.

[1607] As to which see Buckle, p. 607.

[1608] Llorente, ii, 544.

[1609] Id. ii, 544-47.

[1610] Grimm is evidently in error in his statement (Correspondance, ed. 1829-31, x, 394) that one of the main grievances against Olavidès was his having caused to be made a Spanish translation of Raynal's book, which was never published. No such offence is mentioned by Llorente. The case of Almodobar had been connected in French rumour with that of Olavidès.

[1611] Llorente, ii, 532.

[1612] Id. ii, 534-35.

[1613] Id. pp. 547-48.

[1614] Llorente, ii. 549-50.

[1615] Id. ii, 472-73.

[1616] Id. pp. 436-40.

[1617] Id. ii, 440-42. Llorente mentions that Clavijo edited a journal named The Thinker, "at a time when hardly anyone was to be found who thought." A Frenchman, Langle having asserted, in his Voyage d'Espagne, that the Thinker was without merit, the historian comments that if Langle is right in the assertion, it will be the sole verity in his book, but that, in view of his errors on all other matters, it is probable that he is wrong there also.

[1618] Llorente, p. 449.

[1619] Id. ii, 450-51. The book was prohibited, but a printer at Bayonne reissued it with an additional volume of the tracts written for and against it.

[1620] Id. ii, 469-72.

[1621] Buckle, p. 618.

[1622] Id. p. 612.

[1623] Id. p. 613.

[1624] Carnota, The Marquis of Pombal, 2nd ed. 1871, p. 242.

[1625] Id. p. 240.

[1626] Id. pp. 261-62.

[1627] Id. p. 262.

[1628] Id. p. 375.

[1629] Cp. P. Godet, Hist. litt. de la suisse française, 1900.

[1630] E. de Budé, Vie de François Turrettini, 1871, pp. 12-18. B. Turrettini was commissioned to write a history of the Reformation at Geneva, which however remains in MS. He was further commissioned in 1621 to go to Holland to obtain financial help for the city, then seriously menaced by Savoy; and obtained 30,000 florins, besides smaller sums from Hamburg and Bremen.

[1631] Cp. Budé, as cited, pp. 24 (birth-date wrong), 294; and the Avis de l'Éditeur to the Traité de la Verité de la Religion Chrétienne of J. A. Turretin, Paris, 1753.

[1632] Work cited, i, 8, note.

[1633] Lettre à Damilaville, 6 décembre, 1763. The reserved youth may have been either Jean-Alphonse, grandson of the Socinian professor, who was born in 1735 and died childless, or some other member of the numerous Turrettini clan.

[1634] Voltaire to Damilaville, 12 juillet, 1763. "Il faut que vous sachiez," explains Voltaire "que Jean Jacques n'a été condamné que parce qu'on n'aime pas sa personne."

[1635] Voltaire to Damilaville, 21 auguste, 1763.

[1636] Cp. i, 2, 16, 56, 58, 65, 68, 70, 71, 73, 94; ii, 290, etc.

[1637] For instance: "Je me recommande contr'eux [les prêtres] à Dieu le père, car pour le fils, vous savez qu'il a aussi peu de crédit que sa mère à Genève" (Lettre à D'Alembert, 25 mars, 1758).... "Une république où tout le monde est ouvertement socinien, exceptés ceux qui font anabaptistes ou moraves. Figurez-vous, mon cher ami, qu'il n'y a pas actuellement un chrétien de Genève à Berne; cela fait frémir!" (To the same, 8 fév. 1776.)

[1638] On this see the correspondence of Voltaire and D'Alembert, under dates 8, 28, and 29 janvier, 1757.

[1639] Lettre à D'Alembert, 27 août, 1757.

[1640] Lettres sur le Déisme, 1759, p. 6. Cp. pp. 84, 94, 103, 105, 412.

[1641] John Wesley in his Journal, dating May, 1737, speaks of having everywhere met many more "converts to infidelity" than "converts to Popery," with apparent reference to Carolina.

[1642] Such is the wording of the passage in the Autobiography in the Edinburgh edition of 1803, p. 25, which follows the French translation of the original MS. In the edition of the Autobiography and Letters in the Minerva Library, edited by Mr. Bettany (1891, p. 11), which follows Mr. Bigelow's edition of 1879, it runs: "Being then, from reading Shaftesbury and Collins, become a real doubter in many points of our religious doctrine...."

[1643] Only in 1784, however, appeared the first anti-Christian work published in America, Ethan Allen's Reason the only Oracle of Man. As to its positions see Conway, Life of Paine, ii, 192-93.

[1644] Autobiography, Bettany's ed. pp. 56, 65, 74, 77, etc.

[1645] Letter of March 9, 1790. Id. p. 636.

[1646] Cp. J. T. Morse's Thomas Jefferson, pp. 339-40.

[1647] MS. cited by Dr. Conway, Life of Paine, ii, 310-11.

[1648] Memoirs of Jefferson, 1829, iv, 300-301. The date is 1817. These and other passages exhibiting Jefferson's deism are cited in Rayner's Sketches of the Life, etc., of Jefferson, 1832, pp. 513-17.

[1649] Memoirs of Jefferson, iv, 331.

[1650] Dr. Conway, Life of Paine, ii, 310.

[1651] Extract from Jefferson's Journal under date February 1, 1800, in the Memoirs, iv, 512. Gouverneur Morris, whom Jefferson further cites as to Washington's unbelief, is not a very good witness; but the main fact cited is significant.

[1652] Compare the testimony given by the Rev. Dr. Wilson, of Albany, in 1831, as cited by R. D. Owen in his Discussion on the Authenticity of the Bible with O. Bacheler (London, ed. 1840, p. 231), with the replies on the other side (pp. 233-34). Washington's death-bed attitude was that of a deist. See all the available data for his supposed orthodoxy in Sparks's Life of Washington, 1852, app. iv.

[1653] So far as is known, Paine was the first writer to use the expression "the religion of Humanity." See Conway's Life of Paine, ii, 206. To Paine's influence, too, appears to be due the founding of the first American Anti-Slavery Society. Id. i, 51-52, 60, 80, etc.

[1654] Cp. Conway's Life of Paine, ii, 205-207.

[1655] A letter of Franklin to someone who had shown him a freethinking manuscript, advising against its publication (Bettany's ed. p. 620), has been conjecturally connected with Paine, but was clearly not addressed to him. Franklin died in 1790, and Paine was out of America from 1787 onwards. But the letter is in every way inapplicable to the Age of Reason. The remark: "If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be without it?" could not be made to a devout deist like Paine.

[1656] Conway, Life of Paine, ii, 254-55.

[1657] See Dr. Conway's chapter, "The American Inquisition," vol. ii, ch. xvi; also pp. 361-62, 374, 379. The falsity of the ordinary charges against Paine's character is finally made clear by Dr. Conway, ch. xix, and pp. 371, 383, 419, 423. Cp. the author's pamphlet, Thomas Paine: An Investigation (Bonner). The chronically revived story of his death-bed remorse for his writings--long ago exposed (Conway, ii, 420)--is definitively discredited in the latest reiteration. That occurs in the Life and Letters of Dr. R. H. Thomas (1905), the mother of whose stepmother was the Mrs. Mary Hinsdale, née Roscoe, on whose testimony the legend rests. Dr. Thomas, a Quaker of the highest character, accepted the story without question, but incidentally tells of the old lady (p. 13) that "her wandering fancies had all the charm of a present fairy-tale to us." No further proof is needed, after the previous exposure, of the worthlessness of the testimony in question.

[1658] Conway, ii, 371.

[1659] See the details in Conway's Life, ii, 280-81, and note. He had also a scheme for a gunpowder motor (id. and i, 240), and various other remarkable plans.

[1660] Conway, ii, 362-71.

[1661] Testimonies quoted by R. D. Owen, as cited, pp. 231-32.

[1662] Conway, ii, 422.

[1663] Memoir of Sydney Smith, by his daughter, Lady Holland, ed. 1869, p. 49. Lady Holland remarks on the same page that her father's religion had in it "nothing intolerant."

[1664] Memoir of Sydney Smith, p. 142.

[1665] Julien Luchaire, Essai sur l'évolution intellectuelle de l'Italie, 1906, pp. 5-7.

[1666] Dr. Ramage, Nooks and Byeways of Italy, 1868, pp. 76, 105-13. Ramage describes the helplessness of the better minds before 1830.

[1667] Luchaire, pp. 35, 36.

[1668] Id. p. 30.

[1669] Doblado (Blanco White), Letters from Spain, 1822. p. 358.

[1670] Thus the traveller and belletrist J. G. Seume, a zealous deist and opponent of atheism, and a no less zealous patriot, penned many fiercely freethinking maxims, as: "Where were the most so-called positive religions, there was always the least morality"; "Grotius and the Bible are the best supports of despotism"; "Heaven has lost us the earth"; "The best apostles of despotism and slavery are the mystics." Apokryphen, 1806-1807, in Sämmtliche Werke, 1839, iv, 157, 173, 177, 219.

[1671] C. H. Cottrell, Religious Movements of Germany, 1849, p. 12 sq.

[1672] Cp. the author's Evolution of States, pp. 138-39.

[1673] When I thus planned the treatment of the nineteenth century in the first edition of this book, it was known to me that Mr. Alfred W. Benn had in hand a work on The History of English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century; and the knowledge made me the more resolved to keep my own record condensed. Duly published in 1906 (Longmans, 2 vols.), Mr. Benn's book amply fulfilled expectations; and to it I would refer every reader who seeks a fuller survey than the present. Its freshness of thought and vigour of execution will more than repay him. Even Mr. Benn's copious work, however--devoting as it does a large amount of space to a preliminary survey of the eighteenth century--leaves room for various English monographs on the nineteenth, to say nothing of the culture history of a dozen other countries.

[1674] Lecky, Hist. of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, ed. 1892, iii, 382.

[1675] Cp. Conway's Life of Paine, ii, 252-53.

[1676] This translation, issued by "Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, Paternoster Row, and all booksellers," purports to be "with additions." The translation, however, has altered d'Holbach's atheism to deism.

[1677] By W. Huttman. The book is "embellished with a head of Jesus"--a conventional religious picture. Huttman's opinions may be divined from the last sentence of his preface, alluding to "the high pretentions and inflated stile of the lives of Christ which issue periodically from the English press."

[1678] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 208-209.

[1679] See Harriet Martineau's History of the Peace, ed. 1877, ii, 87, and Mrs. Carlile Campbell's The Battle of the Press (Bonner, 1899), passim, as to the treatment of those who acted as Carlile's shopmen. Women were imprisoned as well as men--e.g. Susanna Wright, as to whom see Wheeler's Dictionary, and last ref. Carlile's wife and sister were likewise imprisoned with him; and over twenty volunteer shopmen in all went to jail.

[1680] Hone's most important service to popular culture was his issue of the Apocryphal New Testament, which, by co-ordinating work of the same kind, gave a fresh scientific basis to the popular criticism of the gospel history. As to his famous trial for blasphemy on the score of his having published certain parodies, political in intention, see bk. i, ch. x (by Knight) of Harriet Martineau's History of the Peace.

[1681] Holyoake, Sixty Years of an Agitator's Life, i, 109-10. See p. 111 as to other cases.

[1682] Art. by Holyoake in Dict. of Nat. Biog. Cp. Sixty Years, per index.

[1683] Articles in Dict. of Nat. Biog.

[1684] Holyoake, Sixty Years, i, 47.

[1685] Kirkup, History of Socialism, 1892, p. 64.

[1686] "From an early age he had lost all belief in the prevailing forms of religion" (Kirkup, p. 59).

[1687] Reformers of almost all schools, indeed, from the first regarded Owen with more or less genial incredulity, some criticizing him acutely without any ill-will. See Podmore's Robert Owen, 1906, i, 238-42. Southey was one of the first to detect his lack of religious belief. Id. p. 222, n.

[1688] Podmore, i, 246.

[1689] Kirkup, as cited, p. 64.

[1690] Podmore, ii, 640.

[1691] "Extraordinary self-complacency," "autocratic action," "arrogance," are among the expressions used of him by his ablest biographer. (Podmore, ii, 641.) Of him might be said, as of Emerson by himself, "the children of the Gods do not argue"--the faculty being absent.

[1692] Pamphlet sold at 1 1/2d., and "to be had of all the Booksellers."

[1693] Of George Combe's Constitution of Man (1828), a deistic work, over 50,000 copies were sold in Britain within twelve years, and 10,000 in America. Advt. to 4th ed. 1839. Combe avows that his impulse came from the phrenologist Spurzheim.

[1694] See the details in his Last Trial by Jury for Atheism in England.

[1695] The Gospel its Own Witness, 1799. rep. in Bohn's ed. of The Principal Works and Remains of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, 1852, pp. 136-37.

[1696] See Prof. Flint's tribute to the reasoning power of Bradlaugh and Holyoake in his Anti-Theistic Theories, 4th ed. pp. 518-19.

[1697] See Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner's Charles Bradlaugh, i, 149, 288-89.

[1698] For a full record see Part II of Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner's Charles Bradlaugh.

[1699] After Bradlaugh had secured his seat, the noble lord even sought his acquaintance.

[1700] Though young Conservative members, after 1886, privately professed sympathy.

[1701] Work cited, p. 524.

[1702] Coquerel, Essai sur l'histoire générale du christianisme, 1828, préf.

[1703] Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, Diary in France, 1845, pp. 75-77.

[1704] "The miserable and deistical principle of the equality of all religions" (id. p. 188). Cp. pp. 151, 153.

[1705] Id. pp. 15, 37, 45, 181, 185, 190.

[1706] Id. pp. 157-61. As to the general vogue of rationalism in France at that period, see pp. 35, 204: and compare Saisset, Essais sur la philosophie et la religion, 1845; The Progress of Religious Thought as illustrated in the Protestant Church of France, by Dr. J. R. Beard, 1861; and Wilson's article in Essays and Reviews. As to Switzerland and Holland, see Pearson, Infidelity, its Aspects, etc., 1853, pp. 560-64, 575-84.

[1707] Louis Philippe sought to suppress this book, of which many editions had appeared before 1830. See Blanco White's Life, 1845, ii. 168.

[1708] Prof. E. Lavisse, Un Ministre: Victor Duruy, 1895 (rep. of art. in Revue de Paris, Janv. 15 and Mars 1, 1895), p. 117.

[1709] Id. pp. 99-105.

[1710] Id. pp. 107-118.

[1711] Id. pp. 118-27.

[1712] Llorente, Hist. crit. de l'Inquisition de l'Espagne, 2e édit, iv, 153.

[1713] Rapport of Ch. Fulpius in the Almanach de Libre Pensée, 1906.

[1714] Squier, Notes on Central America, 1856, p. 227.

[1715] Before 1840 the popular freethought propaganda had been partly carried on under cover of Radicalism, as in Carlile's Republican, and Lion, and in various publications of William Hone. Cp. H. B. Wilson's article "The National Church," in Essays and Reviews, 9th ed. p. 152.

[1716] Described as "our chief atheistic organ" by the late F. W. Newman "because Dr. James Martineau declined to continue writing for it, because it interpolated atheistical articles between his theistic articles" (Contributions ... to the early history of the late Cardinal Newman, 1891, p. 103). The review was for a time edited by J. S. Mill, and for long after him by Dr. John Chapman. It lasted into the twentieth century, under the editorship of Dr. Chapman's widow, and kept a free platform to the end.

[1717] Pastor W. Baur, Hamburg, Religious Life in Germany during the Wars of Independence, Eng. tr. 1872, p. 41. H. J. Rose and Pusey, in their controversy as to the causes of German rationalism, were substantially at one on this point of fact. Rose, Letter to the Bishop of London, 1829, pp. 19, 150, 161.

[1718] Id. p. 481.

[1719] Ueber die Religion: Reden an die gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern. These are discussed hereinafter.

[1720] Lichtenberger, Hist. of Ger. Theol. in the Nineteenth Cent. Eng. tr. 1889, pp. 122-23.

[1721] See the same volume, passim.

[1722] Karl von Raumer, Contrib. to the Hist. of the German Universities, Eng. tr. 1859, p. 79. The intellectual tone of W. Baur and K. von Raumer certainly protects them from any charge of "enlightenment."

[1723] Laing, Notes of a Traveller, 1842, p. 181.

[1724] C. H. Cotterill, Relig. Movements of Germany in the Nineteenth Century, 1849, pp. 39-40.

[1725] Id. pp. 27-28, 41-42.

[1726] Cp. Laing, as cited, pp. 206-207, 211.

[1727] Cotterill, as cited, p. 84.

[1728] Cotterill. as cited, pp. 43-47.

[1729] Rapport de Ida Altmann, in Almanach de Libre Pensée, 1906, p. 20.

[1730] The principal have been: Das freie Wort and Frankfurter Zeitung, Frankfort-on-Main; Der Freidenker, Friedrichshagen, near Berlin; Das freireligiöse Sonntagsblatt, Breslau; Die freie Gemeinde, Magdeburg; Der Atheist, Nuremberg; Menschentum, Gotha; Vossische Zeitung, Berlin; Berliner Volkszeitung, Berlin; Vorwärts (Socialist), Berlin; Weser Zeitung, Bremen; Hartungsche Zeitung, Königsberg; Kölnische Zeitung, Cologne.

[1731] Studemund, Der moderne Unglaube in den unteren Ständen, 1901, p. 14.

[1732] Id. p. 22.

[1733] A. D. McLaren, An Australian in Germany, 1911, pp. 181, 184.

[1734] Studemund, Der moderne Unglaube in den unteren Ständen, 1901, pp. 17, 21.

[1735] Glossen zu Yves Guyot's und Sigismund Lacroix's "Die wahre Gestalt des Christentums."

[1736] Studemund, p. 22.

[1737] Id. p. 23.

[1738] Id. p. 27.

[1739] Id. pp. 37-38.

[1740] Id. pp. 40-42. Cp. p. 43. Pastor Studemund cites other inquirers, notably Rade, Gebhardt, Lorenz, and Dietzgen, all to the same effect.

[1741] E.g. Pastor A. Kalthoff's Was wissen wir von Jesus? 1901. Since that date the opinion has found new and powerful supporters in Germany.

[1742] "The people in the country do not read; in the towns they read little. The journals are little circulated. In Russia one never sees a cabman, an artisan, a labourer reading a newspaper" (Ivan Strannik, La pensée russe contemporaine, 1903, p. 5).

[1743] Cp. E. Lavigne, Introduction à l'histoire du nihilisme russe, 1880, pp. 149, 161, 224; Arnaudo, Le Nihilisme, French trans. pp. 37, 58, 61, 63, 77, 86, etc.; Tikhomirov, La Russie, p. 290.

[1744] Tikhomirov, La Russie, pp. 325-26, 338-39.

[1745] Cp. Priestley, Essay on the First Principles of Government, 2nd ed. 1771, pp. 257-61, and Conway's Centenary History of South Place, pp. 63, 77, 80.

[1746] See Rev. Joseph Hunter, An Historical Defence of the Trustees of Lady Henley's Foundations, 1834; The History, Opinions, and Present Legal Position of the English Presbyterians (official), 1834; An Examination and Defence of the Principles of Protestant Dissent, by the Rev. W. Hamilton Drummond, of Dublin, 1842.

[1747] Conway, Autobiography, 1905, i, 123.

[1748] So Prof. William James, The Will to Believe, etc., 1897, p. 133.

[1749] Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad, 1883, ch. vii.

[1750] Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, 1848, ii, 422. Rationalism seems to have spread soonest in the canton of Zürich. Id. ii, 427.

[1751] Grote, Seven Letters concerning the Politics of Switzerland, pp. 34-35. Hagenbach (Kirchengeschichte, ii, 427-28) shows no shame over the insurrection at Zürich. But cp. Beard, in Voices of the Church in Reply to Dr. Strauss, 1845, pp. 17-18.

[1752] Cp. the rapport of Ch. Fulpius in the Almanach de Libre Pensée, 1906.

[1753] G. M. Theal, South Africa ("Story of the Nations" series), pp. 340, 345. Mr. Theal's view of the mental processes of the Boers is somewhat à priori, and his explanation seems in part inconsistent with his own narrative.

[1754] An English acquaintance of my own at Cape Town, who before the war not only was an orthodox believer, but found his chief weekly pleasure in attending church, was so astounded by the general attitude of the clergy on the war that he severed his connection, once for all. Thousands did the same in England.

[1755] I write on the strength of personal testimonies spontaneously given to me in South Africa, some of them by clergymen of the Dutch Reformed Church.

[1756] See the evidence collected in the pamphlet The Churches and the War, by Alfred Marks. New Age Office, 1905.

[1757] For the survey here reduced to outline I am indebted to two Swedish friends.

[1758] Cp. Lamon's Life of Lincoln, and J. B. Remsburg's Abraham Lincoln: Was he a Christian? (New York, 1893.)

[1759] Remsburg, pp. 318-19.

[1760] Personal information.

[1761] Remsburg, p. 324.

[1762] Of these the New York Truthseeker has been the most energetic and successful.

[1763] White, Warfare, i, 81.

[1764] White, Warfare, i, 84, 86, 314, 317, 318.

[1765] This view is not inconsistent with the fact that popular forms of credulity are also found specially flourishing in the West. Cp. Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 3rd ed. ii, 832-33.

[1766] As to the absolute predominance of rationalistic unbelief (in the orthodox sense of the word) in educated Germany in the first third of the century, see the Memoirs of F. Perthes, Eng. tr. 2nd ed. ii, 240-45, 255, 266-75. Despite the various reactions claimed by Perthes and others, it is clear that the tables have never since been turned. Cp. Pearson, Infidelity, pp. 554-59, 569-74. Schleiermacher was charged on his own side with making fatal concessions. Kahnis, Internal Hist. of German Protestantism, Eng. tr. 1856, pp. 210-11; Robins, A Defence of the Faith, 1862, i, 181; and Quinet as there cited.

[1767] Aus Schleiermachers Leben: In Briefen, 1860, i, 42, 84. The father's letters, with their unctuous rhetoric, are a revelation of the power of declamatory habit to eliminate sincere thought.

[1768] Werke, 1843, i, 140.

[1769] See Kabnis, p. 214, and refs. as to his relations with Frau Grunow. "He belonged to the circle of Prince Louis, in which intellect and art, but not morality," reigned. Ib. Compare the sympathetic Lichtenberger, Hist. of Ger. Theol. in the Nineteenth Cent. Eng. tr. 1889, pp. 103-104. It was of course his clerical character that disadvantaged Schleiermacher in such matters.

[1770] Lichtenberger, as cited, p. 87.

[1771] Lichtenberger, as cited, p. 89.

[1772] Id. p. 109.

[1773] Id. pp. 123-24.

[1774] Id. p. 119.

[1775] Id. p. 129.

[1776] Strauss, Die Halben und die Ganzen, 1865, p. 18.

[1777] For estimates of his work cp. Baur, Kirchengeschichte des 19ten Jahrh., p. 45; Kahnis, as last cited; Pfleiderer, Development of Theology in Germany, 1893, bk. i, ch. iii; bk. ii, ch. ii; Lichtenberger, as cited; and art. by Rev. F. J. Smith in Theol. Review, July, 1869.

[1778] Reuss, History of the Canon, Eng. tr. 1890, p. 387. Cp. Strauss, Einleitung in Das Leben Jesu, § 10.

[1779] See a good account of the development in Strauss's Introductions to his two Lives of Jesus.

[1780] In a volume entitled Offenbarung und Mythologie.

[1781] Hebräische Mythologie des alten und neuen Testaments.

[1782] Evangeliencommentar, 1800-1804; Leben Jesu, 1828.

[1783] Probabilia de Evangelii et Epistolarum Joannis Apostoli indole et origine.

[1784] It is thus inaccurate--Strauss himself being the witness--to say, as does Dr. Conybeare (Hist. of N. T. Crit. p. 107), that Strauss was the first German writer to discern the unhistoricity of the Fourth Gospel.

[1785] Das Leben Jesu, pref. to first ed. end.

[1786] Hausrath, David Friedrich Strauss und die Theologie seiner Zeit, 1878, ii, 233-34.

[1787] Pref. to work cited. Eng. tr. 1875, i, 86, 89.

[1788] Lichtenberger, as cited, p. 391.

[1789] Kritik der evang. Gesch. der Synoptiker, ed. 1846, Vorrede, pp. v-xiii.

[1790] Baur, Kirchengesch. des 19ten Jahrh., pp. 388-89.

[1791] Gesch. der Politik, Kultur, und Aufklärung des 18ten Jahrh. 4 Bde. 1843-45; Gesch. der französ. Revolution, 3 Bde. 1847.

[1792] Russland und das Germanenthum, 1847.

[1793] Lichtenberger, p. 378.

[1794] Philo, Strauss, Renan, und das Urchristenthum, 1874; Christus und die Cäsaren, 1877.

[1795] Das Christenthum und die chr. Kirche, 1854, p. 34.

[1796] Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk bearbeitet, § 41, 3te Aufl. p. 254, 1st par.

[1797] Id. ib.

[1798] Cp. Christianity and Mythology, pt. iii, div. ii, § 6.

[1799] Pref. to second Leben Jesu, ed. cited, p. xv.

[1800] Zeller, David Friedrich Strauss, 2te Aufl. p. 113.