"The wave of freethought that was spreading over Europe and permeating its literature had not failed to affect Ireland.... An atmosphere of skepticism was fatal to the Penal Code. What element of religious persecution there had been in it had long ceased to be operative" (R. Dunlop, in Camb. Mod. Hist. vi, 489). Macaulay's testimony on this head is noteworthy: "The philosophy of the eighteenth century had purified English Whiggism of the deep taint of intolerance which had been contracted during a long and close alliance with the Puritanism of the eighteenth century" (History, ch. xvii, end). The denunciations of the penal laws by Arthur Young in 1780 [795] are the outcome of two generations of deistic thinking; the spirit of religion has been ousted by judgment. [796] Could that spirit have had freer play, less hindrance from blind passion, later history would have been a happier record. But for reasons lying in the environment as well as in its own standpoint, deism was not destined to rise on continuous stepping-stones to social dominion. Currency has been given to a misconception of intellectual history by the authoritative statement that in the deistic controversy "all that was intellectually venerable in England" appeared "on the side of Christianity" (Sir Leslie Stephen, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, i, 86). The same thing, in effect, is said by Lecky: "It was to repel these [deistic] attacks ['upon the miracles'] that the evidential school arose, and the annals of religious controversy narrate few more complete victories than they achieved" (Rise and Influence of Rationalism, pop. ed. i, 175). The proposition seems to be an echo of orthodox historiography, as Buckle had before written in his note-book: "In England skepticism made no head. Such men as Toland and Tindal, Collins, Shaftesbury, Woolston, were no match for Clarke, Warburton, and Lardner. They could make no head till the time of Middleton" (Misc. Works, abridged ed. i, 321)--a strain of assertion which clearly proceeds on no close study of the period. In the first place, all the writing on the freethinking side was done under peril of Blasphemy Laws, and under menace of all the calumny and ostracism that in Christian society follow on advanced heresy; while the orthodox side could draw on the entire clerical profession, over ten thousand strong, and trained for and pledged to defence of the faith. Yet, when all is said, the ordinary list of deists amply suffices to disprove Sir L. Stephen's phrase. His "intellectually venerable" list runs: Bentley, Locke, Berkeley, Clarke, Butler, Waterland, Warburton, Sherlock, Gibson, Conybeare, Smalbroke, Leslie, Law, Leland, Lardner, Foster, Doddridge, Lyttelton, Barrington, Addison, Pope, Swift. He might have added Newton and Boyle. Sykes, [797] Balguy,