It remains to add my thanks to a number of friendly correspondents who have assisted me by pointing out shortcomings and errors. Further assistance of the same kind will be gratefully welcomed. It is still my hope that the book may help some more leisured student in the construction of a more massive record of the development of rational thought on the side of human life with which it deals. An apology is perhaps due to the purchasers of the second edition, which is now superseded by a fuller record. I can but plead that I have been unable otherwise to serve their need; and express a hope that the low price of the present edition will be a compensation. J. M. R. September, 1914. A SHORT HISTORY OF FREETHOUGHT CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY § 1. ORIGIN AND MEANING OF THE WORD The words "freethinking" and "freethinker" first appear in English literature about the end of the seventeenth century, and seem to have originated there and then, as we do not find them earlier in French or in Italian, [1] the only other modern literatures wherein the phenomena for which the words stand had previously arisen. The title of "atheist" had been from time immemorial applied to every shade of serious heresy by the orthodox, as when the early Christians were so described by the image-adoring polytheists around them; and in Latin Christendom the term infidelis, translating the apistos of the New Testament, which primarily applied to Jews and pagans, [2] was easily extensible, as in the writings of Augustine, to all who challenged or doubted articles of ordinary Christian belief, all alike being regarded as consigned to perdition. [3] It is by this line of descent that the term "infidelity," applied to doubt on such doctrines as that of the future state, comes up in England in the fifteenth century. [4] It implied no systematic or critical thinking. The label of "deist," presumably self-applied by the bearers, begins to come into use in French about the middle of the sixteenth century; [5] and that of "naturalist," also presumably chosen by those who bore it, came into currency about the same time. Lechler traces the latter term in the Latin form as far back as the MS. of the Heptaplomeres of Bodin, dated 1588; but it was common before that date, as De Mornay in the preface to his De la Vérité de la religion chrétienne (1581) declaims "against the false naturalists (that is to say, professors of the knowledge of nature and natural things)"; and Montaigne in one of his later essays (1588) has the phrase "nous autres naturalistes." [6] Apart from these terms, those commonly used in French in the seventeenth century were bel esprit (sometimes, though not necessarily, connoting unbelief), esprit fort and libertin, the latter being used in the sense of a religious doubter by Corneille, Molière, and Bayle. [7]