Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  Reason is natural revelation, whereby the eternal Father of light, and Fountain of all knowledge, communicates to mankind that portion of truth which he has laid within the reach of their natural faculties.34

  And His requirements were not beyond human capacities but could be met by sober conduct:

  the business of men is to be happy in this world by the enjoyment of the things of nature subservient to life, health, ease, and pleasure, and by the comfortable hopes of another life when this is ended.35

  Precisely what Locke thought cardinal to Christianity was set out in his The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695), published five years after the Essay concerning Human Understanding. Brushing off the scholastic encrustations, he restored the Gospel to its pristine purity. The key truth – that Jesus was the Messiah, proclaiming the coming of the Kingdom – admittedly needed clarification. The Jews had thought of a messiah as a prophet, priest and king; but ‘though these three offices,’ commented the anti-clerical philosopher,

  be in holy writ attributed to our Saviour, yet I do not remember that he anywhere assumes to himself the title of a priest, or mentions anything relating to his priesthood… but the Gospel, or the good news of the kingdom of the Messiah, is what he preaches everywhere, and makes it his great business to publish to the world.36

  Another problem: Christ had declared that none would be admitted to his Kingdom who did not accept him.37 What, then, of that hoary quandary, the fate of the millions who had not heard the Word? Locke's consoling answer – one showing the centrality of natural law to his thinking – referred to the parable of the talents: the Lord would not expect ten talents from him to whom He had given but one. Independently of revelation, man was governed by the law of reason, and he should make use of ‘this candle of the Lord, so far as to find what was his duty’.38 Even without Christ, reason pointed to the just life under natural law.

  What, then, was the point of Christ's coming? Since Locke did not believe the Messiah had been sent to bear the sins of the world, again his answer hinged on natural law. Reason had indeed revealed the Deity, but the truth had grown clouded, and the people had been fooled by crafty clerics peddling false gods: ‘vice and superstition held the world,’ he explained, ‘the priests everywhere, to secure their empire, having excluded reason from having any thing to do in religion’.39 Through such cheats, sight had been lost of the ‘Wise Architect’. While the discerning built on the rock of reason, that alone failed to persuade the herd. The Greeks had had their Socrates, but such philosophers made no impact on the rabble, and when St Paul had visited Athens, he had found its denizens sunk in superstition as if the sage had never existed, wallowing in ceremonies and sacrifices to the neglect of reason's ‘clear and convincing light’.40 ‘In this state of darkness and error… our Saviour found the world. But the clear revelation he brought with him dissipated this darkness’, and made the ‘one invisible true God’ known.41 Christ thus came not to reveal new truths but to ‘republish’ those obscured by evil and error.

  In Locke's plain man's guide to Christianity, no one accepting the Messiah need flounder in theological niceties. ‘Religious creeds I leave to others,’ he shrugged; ‘I only set down the Christian religion as I find our Saviour and his apostles preached it.’42 Like other enlightened thinkers, what concerned Locke was Christ's moral mission – faith was futile without works, religion was a school of virtue.

  Locke was a cautious radical. By casting Christ as a moral guide, and especially by his silence on the Trinity, he seemed to be slipping towards Arianism, the denial of Jesus's divinity. Yet, unlike later Deists, he had no qualms about Scripture: revelation and reason were not antagonists but allies. Even so, he had come far from his Calvinist youth and Oxford orthodoxy; dogmas had given way to the duty of inquiry. In all this he was not alone.43

  Small surprise, perhaps, that a philosophical physician like Locke held that the horrors of the age owed much to an over-mighty clergy, insisted that articles of faith submit to reason and urged toleration. It is more remarkable that a churchman who acceded to the see of Canterbury in 1689 should espouse comparable views: that is what Voltaire and others found so extraordinary about John Tillotson. ‘All the duties of Christian religion which respect God,’ he stressed, assuming a thoroughly Lockean air, ‘are no other but what natural light prompts men to, excepting the two sacraments, and praying to God in the name and by the mediation of Christ.’44 Like his friend Locke, Tillotson taught that Christianity was simple and squared with man's nature:

  Two things make any course of life easy; present pleasure, and the assurance of a future reward. Religion gives part of its reward in hand, the present comfort and satisfaction of having done our duty; and, for the rest, it offers us the best security that Heaven can give.45

  What made religion easy was that it was rational – the prelate might have pipped Locke to the catch phrase ‘the reasonableness of Christianity’. In Tillotson's appeal to common sense, the mysteries of faith, so attractive to earlier pious men like Sir Thomas Browne, were superseded. ‘The laws of God are reasonable, that is, suitable to our nature and advantageous to our interest,’ the Latitudinarian glossed the reassuring text, ‘His Commandments are not Grievous’, in what proved the most popular sermon of the century to come.46

  Tillotson thus fused Pelagianism and benevolence in a creed which, he trusted, all Englishmen would feel able to endorse. After all, was not Jesus a consummate gentleman? ‘The Virtues of his Life are pure, without any Mixture of Infirmity and Imperfection testimonial of good character’, began his character reference for the Messiah.

  He had Humility without Meanness of Spirit; Innocency without Weakness; Wisdom without Cunning; and Constancy and Resolution in that which was good, without Stiffness or Conceit, and Peremptoriness of Humour: In a word, his Virtues were shining without Vanity, Heroical without anything of Transport, and very extraordinary without being in the least extravagant.47

  Warning his flock not to be ‘righteous overmuch’ – far too dangerously ‘enthusiastic’! – Tillotson gallantly rescued Jesus from any aspersions of fanaticism.

  The Archbishop's middle-of-the-roadism struck a chord with enlightened élites in a controversy-weary age. But his rationalist distaste for Catholicism unwittingly gave a hostage to fortune, since his arguments against Papism could easily be used against Anglicanism itself. Tillotson rejected transubstantiation on the grounds that it contravened the testimony of the senses; half a century later David Hume effortlessly extended this very appeal to the senses to miracles at large.48

  While many enlisted reason in the cause of Christianity, the turn of the century divine who strove hardest to prove that Christianity was not merely reasonable but demonstrable by reasoning was Samuel Clarke. Cambridge-educated, he first attracted attention by defending the proposition that ‘no article of the Christian faith is opposed to reason’.49 Later, in his Boyle Lectures of 1704 (see chapter 6) Clarke sought to prove the existence, omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience, infinite wisdom and beneficence of the Creator, precisely as in a proof in Euclidian geometry. It was a contradiction in terms, for example, to suppose that there could have been an infinite succession of dependent beings going back through all eternity. There must, therefore, be an eternal Being, whose nonexistence would constitute a nonsense. Pace Spinoza, the universe could not be this necessary Being, for matter could be destroyed without contradiction.

  Man's duties were clear, Clarke insisted, thanks to the universality and immutability of the laws of nature. Like mathematics, moral laws were founded upon ‘the eternal and necessary differences of things’. To deny the compelling nature of such laws was as absurd as to say that ‘a square is not double to a triangle of equal base and height’.50 Proving God against atheists by such philosophical subtleties left him open, however, to Anthony Collins's gibe that no one doubted His existence until Clarke tried to prove it.51

  Furthermore, verifying Christianity by
logic alone failed to resolve doctrinal disputes. Having sifted no fewer than 1,251 New Testament texts, Clarke was forced to concede in his Scripture-doctrine of the Trinity (1712) that the Bible supported neither the Athanasian (Trinitarian) nor the Arian (Unitarian) position. The conclusion that the Trinity was a subject upon which a Christian might incline either way may have contented Clarke, but it raised suspicions of heterodoxy – and allegedly cost this doyen of learning a bishopric.52

  Clarke's confidence that Christianity was confirmed by cosmic order as revealed by the new philosophy became standard to the new natural theology dear to Latitudinarian hearts. In his Physico-Theology (1713), the Revd William Derham, himself a fellow of the Royal Society, thus concluded his survey of Creation: ‘the works of God are so visible to all the world… that they plainly argue the vileness and perverseness of the atheist’.53 He gloried in a designer universe presided over by a humane Creator, rather as in Joseph Addison's rhyming of Psalm XIX:

  The unwearied Sun from day to day

  Does his Creator's power display;

  And publishes to every land

  The work of an Almighty hand.54

  The terraqueous globe was made for man who, guided by the laws of God and Nature, was to lead a virtuous, industrious and happy life. Whereas dons and divines had previously sought out demons, ghosts and wonders as ammunition against atheism, Latitudinarians saluted universal order, explained by Newtonian laws, as the surer proof of the Almighty hand; Satan's evil empire and all such talk was reduced to a bugaboo. Rational religion discredited – indeed, voiced positive disgust for – the Calvinist Lord of Vengeance, baroque demonology and all its attendant theological wranglings (just how many of the damned would the bottomless pit house?). It began to dismiss fire and brimstone eschatology as the prattle of deluded Dissenters or mad Methodists, even if the zealots’ fixation with portents and prophesyings might serve as a salutary reminder of the grotesque pandemonium of the Interregnum.

  ‘Religious toleration is the greatest of all evils,’ judged Thomas Edwards in 1646; ‘it will bring in first scepticism in doctrine and looseness of life, then atheism.’55 Once so orthodox, such views seemed increasingly insupportable. The new temper carried a key implication. If religion was rational and basic truths plain, what justification could there be for compulsion?56 Pragmatic considerations were in any case pointing the other way. Persecution had actually bred heresy, and did not the multiplication of sects and the divisions of the Christians palpably discredit any confession's claim to be God's chosen?

  Locke became the high priest of toleration, his thinking feeding off his anti-innatist epistemology. In an essay of 1667, which spelt out the key principles expressed in his later Letters on Toleration, Locke denied the prince's right to enforce religious orthodoxy, reasoning that the ‘trust, power and authority’ of the civil magistrate were vested in him solely to secure ‘the good, preservation and peace of men in that society’. Hence princely powers extended solely to externals, not to faith, which was a matter of conscience. Any state intervention in faith was ‘meddling’.57

  To elucidate the limits of those civil powers, Locke divided religious opinions and actions into three. First, there were speculative views and modes of divine worship. These had ‘an absolute and universal right to toleration’, since they did not affect society, being either private or God's business alone. Second, there were those – beliefs about marriage and divorce, for instance – which impinged upon others and hence were of public concern. These ‘have a title also to toleration, but only so far as they do not tend to the disturbance of the State’. The magistrate might thus prohibit publication of such convictions if they would disturb the public good, but no one ought to be forced to forswear his opinion, for coercion bred hypocrisy. Third, there were actions good or bad in themselves. Respecting these, Locke held that civil rulers should have ‘nothing to do with the good of men's soul or their concernments in another life’ – it was for God to reward virtue and punish vice, and the magistrate's job simply to keep the peace. Applying such principles to contemporary realities, Locke advocated toleration, but with limits: Papists should not be tolerated, because their beliefs were ‘absolutely destructive of all governments except the Pope's’; nor should atheists, since any oaths they took would be in bad faith.

  As a radical Whig in political exile in the Dutch republic, Locke wrote the first Letter on Toleration, which was published, initially in Latin, in 1689. Echoing the 1667 arguments, this denied that Christianity could be furthered by force. Christ was the Prince of Peace; his gospel was love, his means persuasion; persecution could not save souls. Civil and ecclesiastical government had contrary ends; the magistrate's business lay in securing life, liberty and possessions, whereas faith was about the salvation of souls. A church should be a voluntary society, like a ‘club for claret’; it should be shorn of all sacerdotal pretensions. While Locke's views were contested – Bishop Stillingfleet, for example, deemed them a ‘Trojan Horse’58 – they nevertheless won favour in an age inclined, or resigned, to freedom of thought and expression in general.

  Like Locke, the so-called Toleration Act of 1689 had an eye first and foremost to practical politics, and did not grant full toleration. Officially an ‘Act for Exempting their Majesties' Protestant Subjects, Dissenting from the Church of England, from the Penalties of Certain Laws’, it stated that Trinitarian Protestant Nonconformists who swore the oaths of Supremacy and Allegiance and accepted thirty-six of the Thirty-nine Articles could obtain licences as ministers or teachers.59 Catholics and non-Christians did not enjoy rights of public worship under the Act – and non-Trinitarians were left subject to the old penal laws. Unitarians, indeed, were further singled out by the Blasphemy Act of 1697, which made it an offence to ‘deny any one of the persons in the holy Trinity to be God’. There was no official Toleration Act for them until 1813, and in Scotland the death penalty could still be imposed – as it was in 1697 – for denying the Trinity.60

  Scope for prosecution remained. Ecclesiastical courts still had the power of imprisoning for atheism, blasphemy and heresy (maximum term: six months). Occasional indictments continued under the common law, and Parliament could order books to be burned. Even so, patriots justly proclaimed that England was, alongside the United Provinces, the first nation to have embraced religious toleration – a fact that became a matter of national pride. ‘My island was now peopled, and I thought myself very rich in subjects; and it was a merry reflection which I frequently made, how like a king I looked,’ remarked Defoe's castaway hero, Robinson Crusoe; ‘we had but three subjects, and they were of different religions. My man Friday was a pagan and a cannibal, and the Spaniard was a Papist: however, I allowed liberty of conscience throughout my dominions.’61

  Two developments made toleration a fait accompli: the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, and the fact that England had already been sliced up into sects. It was, quipped Voltaire, a nation of many faiths but only one sauce, a recipe for confessional tranquillity if culinary tedium: ‘If there were only one religion in England, there would be danger of despotism, if there were only two they would cut each other's throats; but there are thirty, and they live in peace.’62 No longer could faith be expected to unify the kingdom. ‘The heretical sects in this country are so numerous,’ commented Robert Southey, ventriloquizing his visiting Spaniard,

  that an explanatory dictionary of their names has been published. They form a curious list! Arminians, Socinians, Baxterians, Presbyterians, New Americans, Sabellians, Lutherans, Moravians, Swedenborgians, Athanasians, Episcopalians, Arians, Sublapsarians, Supralapsarians, Antinomians, Hutchinsonians, Sandemanians, Muggletonians, Baptists, Anabaptists, Paedobaptists, Methodists, Papists, Universalists, Calvinists, Materialists, Destructionists, Brownists, Independants, Protestants, Huguenots, Nonjurors, Seceders, Hernhutters, Dunkers, Jumpers, Shakers, and Quakers, &c. &c. &c. A precious nomenclature!63

  Heterogeneity fostered a climate in which religion was up f
or questioning – a fact recognized with evident exasperation by one author writing in 1731: ‘I shall examine no further than is absolutely necessary whether God is Spirit or Matter, or Both, or Neither, or Whether the World is eternal or not.’64

  Among the many burning debates, a major one concerned the nature and destiny of the soul. For Locke, the reality of the spiritual was, pace Hobbes, plain: ‘For, whilst I know by seeing, or hearing, etc., that there is some corporeal being without me, the object of that sensation, I can more certainly know that there is some spiritual being within me that sees and hears.’65 Though its ‘substance’ was unknown, it was no harder to accept spirit than matter, for ‘the motion of body [itself] is cumbered with some difficulties, very hard and perhaps impossible to be explained or understood by us’.66 Locke thus validated the soul and reassured critics that ‘the resurrection of the dead’ was for him ‘an article of the Christian Faith’.67 The crux of his polemic on this matter with Edward Stillingfleet, bishop of Worcester, lay rather in his denial that what was requisite for a heavenly transition was the resurrection of the same body. Did not the flesh change over time?

  your lordship will easily see, that the body he had, when an embryo in the womb, when a child playing in coats, when a man marrying a wife, and when bed-rid, dying of a consumption, and at last, which he shall have after his resurrection; are each of them his body, though neither of them be the same body, the one with the other.68