A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 1 of 2: Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumes — John Shaqi
A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 1 of 2: Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumesRobertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Religion
A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 1 of 2: Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumes
Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Free thought -- History
Before "deism" came into English vogue, the names for unbelief,
even deistic, were simply "infidelity" and "atheism"--e.g.,
Bishop Fotherby's Atheomastix (1622), Baxter's Unreasonableness
of Infidelity (1655) and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1667),
passim. Bishop Stillingfleet's Letter to a Deist (1677) appears to
be the first published attack on deism by name. His Origines Sacræ
(1662) deals chiefly with deistic views, but calls unbelievers
in general "atheists." Cudworth, in his True Intellectual System
of the Universe (written 1671, published 1678), does not speak
of deism, attacking only atheism, and was himself suspected of
Socinianism. W. Sherlock, in his Practical Discourse of Religious
Assemblies (2nd ed., 1682), attacks "atheists and infidels," but
says nothing of "deists." That term, first coined, as we have
seen, in French, seems first to have found common currency in
France--e.g., on the title-pages of the apologetic works of Marin
Mersenne, 1623 and 1624. The term "atheist" was often applied at
random at this period; but atheism did exist.
When the orthodox Boyle pushed criticism in physical science under
such a title as The Sceptical Chemist, the principle could not well be
withheld from application to religion; and it lay in the nature of the
case that the name "freethinker," like that of "skeptic," should come
to attach itself specially to those who doubted where doubt was most
resented and most resisted. At length the former term became specific.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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