by Roy Porter
44 Quoted in Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background, p. 3. Such positions, as will be shown below, were readily exploited by Deists, who drove their logic to the limits. Quoting this passage, Anthony Collins continued: ‘And even these he justly observes, are of less moment than any of those parts of religion which in their own nature tend to the Happiness of human Society’: Discourse of Freethinking (sn, 1713), p. 136.
45 John Tillotson, The Works of the Most Reverend Dr John Tillotson (1820), vol. i, p. 475.
46 Tillotson, The Works of the Most Reverend Dr John Tillotson, vol. i, p. 468. For analysis, see Norman Sykes, Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century (1934); see also Downey, The Eighteenth Century Pulpit, pp. 10, 15. See also John Tillotson, The Works of the Most Reverend Dr John Tillotson, vol. i, sermon 6, pp. 152–73.
47 ‘The Life of Jesus Christ Consider'd as Our Example’, Tillotson, The Works of the Most Reverend Dr John Tillotson, vol. i, sermon 6, p. 71. Tom Paine later styled Jesus ‘a virtuous and an amiable man’, a ‘virtuous reformer’.
48 David Hume, ‘Of Miracles’, in David Hume, Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals (1966 [1751]), pp. 109f.; W. M. Spellman, The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 1660–1700 (1993), p. 60; R. M. Burns, The Great Debate on Miracles (1981).
49 Quinlan, Samuel Johnson: A Layman's Religion, p. 28. The Deist Anthony Collins called him the man ‘whom all English freethinkers own as their head’: Discourse of Freethinking, p. 171.
50 Samuel Clarke, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1705), quoted in Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. i, pp. 100–4; J. P. Ferguson, An Eighteenth Century Heretic (1976), pp. 23f.; Peter Gay, The Enlightenment (1967), p. 326; Peter Searby, A History of the University of Cambridge (1997), vol. iii, p. 281, who brings out Clarke's friendship with the Arian William Whiston.
51 Quoted in David Brown, ‘Butler and Deism’ (1992), p. 9.
52 Samuel Clarke, The Scripture-doctrine of the Trinity (1712); John Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion (1976), ch. 7. Compare M. Greig, ‘The Reasonableness of Christianity?’ (1993). Isaac Watts too sweated over the Trinity for twenty years, until he had to admit that he had only ‘learned more of my own ignorance’, and he was finally driven to chide his Maker for leaving him in such a quandary: ‘Surely I ought to know the God whom I worship, whether he be one pure and simple or whether thou art a threefold deity’: Stromberg, Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-century England, p. 36.
53 William Derham, Physico-Theology (1713), p.467.
54 Addison and Steele, The Spectator, vol. iv, no. 465, pp. 141–5 (Saturday, 23 August 1712).
55 Quoted in Nigel Smith, ‘The Charge of Atheism and the Language of Radical Speculation, 1640–1660’ (1992), p. 131.
56 For a conspectus, see O. P. Grell and B. Scribner (eds.), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (1996); O. P. Grell, J. I. Israel and N. Tyacke (eds.), From Persecution to Toleration (1991); W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England (1965 [1932–40]); Elisabeth Labrousse, ‘Religious Toleration’ (1974); Henry Kamen, The Rise of Toleration (1967); John Christian Laursen and Cary J. Nederman (eds.), Beyond the Persecuting Society (1998); and O. P. Grell and Roy Porter (eds.), Toleration in the Enlightenment (2000).
57 See John Dunn, The Claim to Freedom of Conscience’ (1991); Henry Kamen, The Rise of Toleration (1967), pp. 231f.; Cranston, John Locke: A Biography, p. 100; John W. Yolton, Locke: An Introduction (1985), pp. 77f.; John Dunn, Locke (1984), p. 26.
58 Kamen, The Rise of Toleration, p. 204.
59 Ursula Henriques, Religious Toleration in England 1783–1833 (1961), pp. 11–12.
60 The Blasphemy Act made it an offence if any person educated in the Christian religion ‘shall by writing, printing, teaching, or advised speaking deny any one of the persons in the Holy Trinity to be God, or shall assert or maintain there are more gods than one, or shall deny the Christian religion to be true, or shall deny the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be of divine authority’. See Michael Hunter, ‘Aikenhead the Atheist’ (1992). Executions for religious offences long continued elsewhere: as late as 1782 a maid servant was executed as a witch in the Swiss canton of Glarus.
61 Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719), p. 240; Brean S. Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1740 (1997), p. 273. See J. B. Bury, A History of Freedom of Thought (nd), pp. 138–40. William Warburton sallied: ‘Orthodoxy is my doxy. Heterodoxy is the other man's doxy’: S. C. Carpenter, Eighteenth Century Church and People (1959), p. 146.
62 F. M. Voltaire, Letters concerning the English Nation (1926 [1733]), p. 34, quoted in Arthur Wilson, ‘The Enlightenment Came First to England’ (1983), p. 7; F. M. Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (1979 [1764]), p. 387. Everyone could go to Heaven the way they liked.
63 Southey, Letters from England by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, p. 159. For the proliferation of sects the world over, see William Hodgson, The Commonwealth of Reason (1795), pp. 31–4:
And as religion seems to be a subject on which men may perhaps never be perfectly agreed; since no one can, by any thing like demonstrative evidence, prove that the tenets of the particular sect to which he belongs, is more acceptable to the Supreme Being, than those of another sect, whether he be BAPTIST, JEW, GENTILE, MAHOMETAN, ARMENIAN, CHRISTIAN, ANTICHRISTIAN, ADAMITE, DUNKER, SWEDENBURGIAN, WORSHIPER OF THE SUN, WORSHIPER OF THE MOON, UNIVERSALIST, EUTYCHIAN, ADRAMMELECHIAN, PHILADELPHIAN, QUARTODECIMANIAN, PRE-DESTINARIAN, AGONYCLITE, BONASIAN, BASILIDIAN
–the list goes on and on –
it follows of course, that setting up one species of religion, in preference to others, or nationalizing it, by countenancing, protecting, and supporting in idleness and luxury such drones as MUFTIS, POPES, TA-HO-CHANGS, GREAT LAMAS, PARSONS, ARCHBISHOPS, DEACONESSES, RECTORS, HIGH-PRIESTS, DOCTORS OF DIVINITY, HO-CHANGS, NUNS, RABBIS, MONKS, ABBES, CARMELITES, JESUITS, CARTHUSIANS, DOMINICANS, FRANCISCANS, LADY ABBESSES, MASORITES, LAMAS, CARDINALS, EMIRS, VICARS, PROPHETS, PREBENDS, TALAPOINS, BONZES, BRAMINS, APOSTLES, SEERS, PRIMONTRES, BENEDICTINES, JACOBINES, FEUILLANS, BERNARDINES, FRERES DE L'ORDRE DE LA MERCY, CORDELIERS, CAPUCHINS, RECOLLECTS… and other such useless beings, or as they emphatically style each other IMPUDENT IMPOSTORS,who being too proud and lazy to work, have availed themselves of man's credulity, and the corruption of the executive power, to get laws enacted, enabling them to steal with impunity from the laborious and industrious citizens; and who not content with thus cheating mankind, have contrived to defraud each other in the division of the spoil, by giving to one, because he wears a cap of a particular form, and of his own invention, TEN OR TWELVE THOUSAND POUNDS A YEAR, whilst the poor devils who read all their tenets to the infatuated multitude are allowed by these meek, moderate, temperate, sober, honest, chaste, virtuous, modest, dignified, and superior interpreters of what, as they say of each other, each impiously chooses to call God's holy word, perhaps FIFTEEN OR TWENTY POUNDS A YEAR; but then their motto is patience, and perhaps I may be a cardinal, pope, mufti, Ta-ho-chang, Great Lama, or high-priest.
After listing such a gallimaufry of competing sectarians, Hodgson drew the inevitable enlightened conclusion:
it follows, I say, that these establishments, which produce such caterpillars, who pretend that an all just God has sent them to devour the good things of this world, without contributing to the labour of producing them, can be attended with no other consequence than that unhappy one of exciting the most rancorous animosities and implacable resentments betwixt those whose immediate interest consists in preserving the utmost cordiality, harmony, and fraternity, with each other, because they are at every instant endeavouring to gain superiority the one over the other, by engendering the most vicious hatred in their followers against all who happen to dissent from their particular doctrine; I therefore propose, as religion is a subject merely of opinion, and consequently ought to be fr
ee as the circumambient air, This premised, I think it proper and suitable to my subject, to set out with a declaration of rights, founded on the broad and permanent basis of LIBERTY, FRATERNITY AND EQUALITY, as I conceive it is on the imperishable foundation of these rights alone, that those laws and regulations can be built, which shall truly and faithfully have for object, what ought to be considered the most important of all human pursuits – THE HAPPINESS OF THE HUMAN RACE LIVING TOGETHER IN SOCIETY.
Quoted in Gregory Claeys (ed.), Utopias of the British Enlightenment (1994), p. 208.
64 [Anon.], Some Reflections on Prescience (1731), p. 2.
65 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, vol. ii, ch. 23, para. 15. Locke's raising the possibility of ‘thinking matter’ was less to advance materialism than to deny that it was not for man to circumscribe divine powers: John W. Yolton, Thinking Matter (1983).
66 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, vol. ii, ch. 23, para. 31.
67 John Locke, A Letter to… Edward [Stillingfleet], Ld Bishop of Worcester… (1697), p. 303; Yolton, Locke: An Introduction, p. 88; generally, see William Rounseville Alger, The Destiny of the Soul (1878).
68 Locke, A Letter to… Edward [Stillingfleet], Ld Bishop of Worcester…, p. 304.
69 See Yolton, Locke: An Introduction, p. 88.
70 Quoted in Sell, John Locke and the Eighteenth-century Divines, p. 197.
71 On his deathbed, Shaftesbury supposedly talked of the Socinian notions ‘imbibed from Mr Locke and his tenth chapter of “Human Understanding” ’: H. R. Fox Bourne, Life of John Locke (1876), vol. i, p. 469.
72 ‘It seems likely that Locke's chief impact in eighteenth-century England was not to import contractarianism into politics, but Arianism into religion': J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832 (1985), p. 47. At Cambridge, John Jebb's lectures ‘made so much noise’ because he ‘had been charged with propagating Socinianism and Fatalism ([to] which Mr Locke's chapter on power is thought to look)’: quoted in J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty 1660–1832 (1994), p. 314; see Stromberg, Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-century England, p. 98.
73 [Charles Leslie], The Charge of Socinianism against Dr Tillotson Considered (sn, 1695), p. 13.
74 Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion, p. 142.
75 John Dryden, Absolom and Achitophel (1681), in John Sargeaunt (ed.), The Poems of John Dryden (1959), p. 42, ll. 1–2.
76 Stephen H. Daniel, John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind (1984), p. 34; Mark Goldie, ‘Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism’ (1993), p. 219.
77 Ashcraft, ‘Anticlericalism and Authority in Lockean Political Thought’, p. 74. Locke's early writings express his opposition to the political embroilments of the clergy, blaming the Civil War on the ‘ambition… pride and hypocrisy' of those ‘malicious men’. People were ‘hoodwinked’ by the clergy, and ‘a veil is cast over their eyes’ (p. 82).
78 Richard Baron, The Pillars of Priestcraft and Orthodoxy Shaken (1768), vol. i, pp. iii, vi; Justin A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken (1992); Goldie, ‘Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism’, p. 214.
79 Peter Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (1990), p. 79.
80 Charles F. Bahmueller, The National Charity Company (1981), p. 98; James E. Crimmins, Secular Utilitarianism (1990). In 1818, Bentham published his Church of Englandism, and Its Catechism Examined (1818), in which he outlined the programme of a moral Christianity simplified in the extreme; and it was about the same time that he composed his Not Paul but Jesus (sn, 1823), in which he devoted himself to proving that Paul was an impostor and an ambitious man, that his doctrine was on almost all points different from the doctrine of Jesus, and that he was the true Antichrist.
81 Mary Thale (ed.), The Autobiography of Francis Place (1771–1854) (1972), p. xvii: ‘twaddler’ was a favourite expression of his for priest.
82 Journal for Tuesday, 7 September 1824: John Clare, ‘The Autobiography, 1793–1824’, in J. W. and A. Tibble (eds.), The Prose of John Clare (1970 [1951]), p. 103.
83 William Wollaston, The Religion of Nature Delineated (1724). Franklin singled out that book as the stimulus which launched his career: Douglas Anderson, The Radical Enlightenment of Benjamin Franklin (1997), p. 6.
84 Matthew Tindal, The Rights of the Christian Church Asserted (sn, 1706); see Christopher Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler's Moral and Religious Thought (1992), pp. 11f.
85 Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation; Or The Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature (1733), p. 7; Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment, p. 167.
86 Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation, pp. 7, 10.
87 Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation, p. 10.
88 Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation, p. 23.
89 For primitive monotheism, see Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian (1997), p. 80. Compare Pope's:
Nor think, in NATURE'S STATE they blindly trod;
The state of nature was the reign of God…
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1733–4) in John Butt (ed.), The Poems of Alexander Pope (1965), p. 530, ll. 247–8.
90 Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation, p. 92.
91 Bury, A History of Freedom of Thought, pp. 144–5.
92 L. S. Sutherland and L. G. Mitchell (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford (1986), vol. v, p. 455.
93 Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation (1733), p. 49; Ernest Mossner, Bishop Butler and the Age of Reason (1990), p. 76.
94 Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (1974), pp. 52f.
95 See William H. Trapnell, ‘Who Thomas Woolston Was’ (1988), ‘What Thomas Woolston Wrote’ (1991), and Thomas Woolston: Madman and Deist? (1994).
96 Thomas Woolston, Six Discourses on the Miracles of Our Saviour and Defences of His Discourses (1979 [1727–30]); Stock, The Holy and the Daemonic from Sir Thomas Browne to William Blake, p. 99; Trapnell, ‘What Thomas Woolston Wrote’, p. 17.
97 See, for instance, Thomas Sherlock, Trial of the Witnesses (1729). The pamphlet purports to be the report of a trial held at the Inns of Court, with the Apostles charged with giving false evidence in the case of the Resurrection. A ‘not guilty’ verdict is returned. Samuel Johnson deplored the ‘Old Bailey theology’, ‘in which the apostles are being tried once a week for the capital crime of forgery’.
98 For the following, see T. L. Bushell, The Sage of Salisbury (1968), p. 18.
99 Bushell, The Sage of Salisbury, p. 51.
100 Thomas Chubb, ‘Human Nature Vindicated’, in A Collection of Tracts (1730), p. 342, quoted in Bushell, The Sage of Salisbury, p. 88.
101 For Toland, see Daniel, John Toland: His Methods, Manners and Mind; R. E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy (1982); Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (1976), pp. 210–11.
102 John Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), p. 6, quoted in Simon Eliot and Beverley Stern (eds.), The Age of Enlightenment (1979), vol. i, p. 31; James O'Higgins, Anthony Collins: The Man and His Works (1970), p. 52.
103 Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious, preface, p. xxvii.
104 Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious, p. 6.
105 John C. Biddle, ‘Locke's Critique of Innate Principles and Toland's Deism’ (1990), p. 148.
106 John Toland, Tetradymus (1720), p. 45.
107 John Toland, Pantheisticon, Sive Formula Celebrandae Sodalitatis Socraticae (sn, 1720), quoted in Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (1967), p. 67. For Toland's pantheism, see Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment (1981), p. 49.
108 John Toland, Letters to Serena (1704).
109 John Toland, Letters to Serena, p. 71.
Natural Religion was easy first and plain,
Tales made it Mystery, Offrings made it Gain;
Sacrifices and Shows were at length prepar'd,
The
Priests ate Roast-meat, and the People star'd.
Daniel, John Toland: His Methods, Manners and Mind, p. 34.
110 See O'Higgins, Anthony Collins: The Man and His Works. David Berman infers that Collins was an atheist: Berman, A History of Atheism in Britain. There is, however, no evidence for this view. Gentlemen like Collins professed a Deity who upheld order; such a belief would square with their own interests as land and property owners.
111 Anthony Collins, A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (sn, 1724), p. vi.
112 Sell, John Locke and the Eighteenth-century Divines, p. 209; O'Higgins, Anthony Collins: The Man and His Works, pp. 6ff.
113 O'Higgins, Anthony Collins: The Man and His Works, p. 6. Much was made in Radical circles of Collins' connections with Locke, to insinuate that Locke was more radical than he was. Forged letters of Locke to Collins were published in the Gentleman's Magazine in 1753: Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment (1992), p. 61.
114 O'Higgins, Anthony Collins: The Man and His Works, p. 12. The Discourse went too far for circumspect Whigs who publicly disowned him (their private feelings are less clear): see O'Higgins, Anthony Collins: The Man and His Works, p. 89; Yolton, Thinking Matter, p. 42.