A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2: Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumesRobertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Religion
A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2: Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumes
Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Free thought -- History
No less marked is the failure to develop the "higher criticism" from
the notable start made in 1739 in the very remarkable Inquiry into
the Jewish and Christian Revelations by Samuel Parvish, who made the
vital discovery that Deuteronomy is a product of the seventh century
B.C. [783] His book, which is in the form of a dialogue between a
Christian and a Japanese, went into a second edition (1746); but his
idea struck too deep for the critical faculty of that age, and not
till the nineteenth century was the clue found again by De Wette, in
Germany. [784] Parvish came at the end of the main deistic movement,
[785] and by that time the more open-minded men had come to a point of
view from which it did not greatly matter when Deuteronomy was written,
or precisely how a cultus was built up; while orthodoxy could not dream
of abandoning its view of inspiration. There was thus an arrest alike
of historical criticism and of the higher philosophic thought under
the stress of the concrete disputes over ethics, miracles, prophecy,
and politics; and a habit of taking deity for granted became normal,
with the result that when the weak point was pressed upon by Law and
Butler there was a sense of blankness on both sides. But among men
theistically inclined, the argument of Tindal against revelationism
was extremely telling, and it had more literary impressiveness
than any writing on the orthodox side before Butler. By this time
the philosophic influence of Spinoza--seen as early as 1699 in
Shaftesbury's Inquiry Concerning Virtue, [786] and avowed by Clarke
when he addressed his Demonstration (1705) "more particularly in
answer to Mr. Hobbs, Spinoza, and their followers"--had spread among
the studious class, greatly reinforcing the deistic movement; so that
in 1732 Berkeley, who ranked him among "weak and wicked writers,"
described him as "the great leader of our modern infidels."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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