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
In the view of life which accepted this state of things the educated
deists seem to have shared; at least, there is no record of any
agitation by them for betterment. The state of political thought was
typified in the struggle over "Wilkes and Liberty," from which cool
temperaments like Hume's turned away in contempt; and it is significant
that poor men were persecuted for freethinking while the better-placed
went free. Jacob Ilive, for denying in a pamphlet (1753) the truth of
revelation, was pilloried thrice, and sent to hard labour for three
years. In 1754 the Grand Jury of Middlesex "presented" the editor and
publisher of Bolingbroke's posthumous works [892]--a distinction that
in the previous generation had been bestowed on Mandeville's Fable of
the Bees; and in 1761, as before noted, Peter Annet, aged seventy, was
pilloried twice and sent to prison for discrediting the Pentateuch;
as if that were a more serious offence than his former attacks on
the gospels and on St. Paul. The personal influence of George III,
further, told everywhere against freethinking; and the revival of
penalties would have checked publishing even if there had been no
withdrawal of interest to politics.
Yet more or less freethinking treatises did appear at intervals
in addition to the works of the better-known writers, such as
Bolingbroke and Hume, after the period commonly marked as that
of the "decline of deism." In the list may be included a few by
Unitarians, who at this stage were doing critical work. Like
a number of the earlier works above mentioned, the following
(save Evanson) are overlooked in Sir Leslie Stephen's survey:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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