Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/44

literary activity of the deists, as well as of their voluminous opponents, falls within the same half century. The impulses that promoted a vein of thought cognate to deism were active both before and since the time of its greatest notoriety. But there are many reasons to show why, in the 17th century, men should have set themselves with a new zeal, in politics, law, and theology, to follow the light of nature alone, and to cast aside, to the utmost of their ability, the fetters of tradition and prescriptive right, of positive codes, and scholastic systems, and why in England especially there should, amongst numerous free-thinkers, have been not a few free writers. The significance of the Copernican system, as the total overthrow of the traditional conception of the universe, dawned on all educated men. In physics, Descartes had prepared the way for the final triumph of the mechanical explanation of the world in Newton s system. In England the new philosophy had broken with time- honoured beliefs more completely than it had done even in France ; Hobbes was more startling than Bacon. Locke s philosophy, as well as his theology, served as a school for the deists. Men had becomff weary of Protestant scholas ticism ; religious wars had made peaceful thinkers seek to take the edge off dogmatical rancour ; and the multiplicity of religious sects provoked distrust of the common basis on which all founded. There was a school of distinctively latitudinarian thought in the Church of England ; others not unnaturally thought it better to extend the realm of the adiaphora beyond the sphere of Protestant ritual or the details of systematic divinity. Arminianism had revived the rational side of theological method. Semi-Arians and Unitarians, though sufficiently distinguished from the free thinkers by reverence for the letter of Scripture, might be held to encourage departure from the ancient landmarks. The scholarly labours of Huet, Simon, Dupin, and Cleri- cus, of Lightfoot, Spencer, and Prideaux, of Mill and Fell, furnished new materials for controversy ; and the scope of Spinoza s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus had naturally been much more fully apprehended than ever his Ethica could be. The success of the English revolution permitted men to turn from the active side of political and theological controversy to speculation and theory ; and curiosity was more powerful than faith. Much new ferment was working. The toleration and the free press of England gave it scope. Deism was one of the results. A great part of the deistical teaching was the same from first to last ; but though deism cannot be said to have any marked logical development, it went through a sufficiently observable chronological growth. Long ere England was ripe to welcome deistic thought, Lord Herbert earned the name " Father of Deism " by laying down the main line of that religious philosophy which in various forms continued ever after to be the backbone of deistic systems. He based his theology on a comprehensive, if insufficient, survey of the nature, founda tion, limits, and tests of human knowledge. And amongst the divinely implanted, original, indefeasible notitice com munes of the human mind, he found as foremost his five articles : that there is one supreme God, that he is to be worshipped, that worship consists chiefly of virtue and piety, that we must repent of our sins and cease from them, and that there are rewards and punishments here and here after. These truths, though often clouded, are found in all religions and at all times, and are the essentials of any religion their universal prevalence being, along with their immediacy, an unmistakable mark of their verity. Thus Herbert sought to do for the religion of nature what his friend Grotius was doing for natural law, making a new application of tho standard of .Vincentius, Quod semper, qiiod ii/sique, quod ab onmibus. Herbert had hardly criticised the Christian revelation either as a whole or in its details. Blount, a man of a very different spirit, did both, and in so doing may be regarded as having inaugurated the second main line of deistic procedure, that of historico-critical examination of the Old and New Testaments. Blount adopted and expanded Hobbes s arguments against the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch ; and, mainly in the words of Burnet s Archeo- logia Philosophica, he asserts the total inconsistency of the Mosaic Hexaemeron with the Copernican theory of the heavens, dwelling with emphasis on the impossibility of admitting the view developed in Genesis, that the earth is the most important part of the universe. He assumes that the narrative was meant ethically, not physically, in order to eliminate false and polytheistic notions ; and he draws attention to that double narrative in Genesis which was elsewhere to be so fruitfully handled. The examin ation of the miracles of Apollonius of Tyana, professedly founded on papers of Lord Herbert s, is meant to suggest similar considerations with regard to the miracles of Christ. Naturalistic explanations of some of these are proposed, and a mythical theory is distinctly foreshadowed when Blount dwells on the inevitable tendency of men, especially long after the event, to discover miracles attendant on the birth and death of their heroes. Blount assaults the doctrine of a mediator as irreligious ; and much more pronouncedly than Herbert he dwells on the view, afterwards regarded as a special characteristic of all deists, that much or most error in religion has been invented or knowingly maintained by sagacious men for the easier main tenance of good government, or in the interests of themselves and their class. And when he heaps suspicion, not on Christian dogmas, but on beliefs of which the resemblance to Christian tenets is sufficiently patent, the real aim is so transparent that his method seems to partake rather of the nature of literary eccentricity than of polemical artifice ; yet by this disingenuous indirectness he gave his argu ment that savour of duplicity which ever after clung to the popular conception of deism. Shaftesbury, dealing with matters for the most part different from those usually handled by the deists, stands almost wholly out of their ranks. But he showed how loosely he held the views he did not go out of his way to attack, and made it plain how little weight the letter of Scripture had for himself ; and, writing with much greater power than any of the deists, he was held to have done more than any one of them to forward the cause for which they wrought. Founding ethics on the native and cultivable capacity in men to appreciate worth in men and actions, and associating the apprehension of morality with the appre hension of beauty, he makes morality wholly independent of scriptural enactment, and still more, of theological forecast ing of future bliss or agony. He yet insisted on religion as the crown of virtue ; and, arguing that religion is insepar able from a high and holy enthusiasm for the divine plan of the universe, he sought the root of religion in feeling, not in accurate beliefs or meritorious good works. The theology of those was of little account with him, he said, who in a system of dry and barren notions " pay handsome compliments to the Deity," " remove providence/ " explode devotion," and leave but " little of zeal, affection, or warmth in what they call rational religion." In the protest against the scheme of "judging truth by counting noses," Shaftesbury recognized the danger of the standard which seemed to satisfy many deists ; and in almost every respect he has more in common with those who afterwards, in Germany, annihilated the pretensions of complacent rationalism than with the rationalists themselves. Toland, writing at first professedly without hostility to any of the received elements of the Christian faith, insisted that Christianity was not mysterious, and that the value of