O wearisome condition of humanity, Born under one law, to another bound; Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity; Created sick, commanded to be sound: If nature did not take delight in blood, She would have made more easy ways to good. It is natural to suspect that the author of such lines was less orthodox than his own day had reputed him; and yet the whole of his work shows him much pre-occupied with religion, though perhaps in a deistic spirit. But Brooke's introspective and undramatic poetry is an exception: the prevailing colour of the whole drama of the Shakespearean period is pre-Puritan and semi-pagan; and the theological spirit of the next generation, intensified by King James, was recognized by cultured foreigners as a change for the worse. [78] The spirit of free learning for the time was gone, expelled by theological rancours; and when Selden ventured in his History of Tythes (1618) to apply the method of dispassionate historical criticism to ecclesiastical matters he was compelled to make a formal retractation. [79] Early Protestants had attacked, as a papal superstition, the doctrine that tithes were levied jure divino: Protestants had now come to regard as atheistic the hint that tithes were levied otherwise. [80] Not that rationalism became extinct. The "Italianate" incredulity as to a future state, which Sir John Davies had sought to repel by his poem, Nosce Teipsum (1599), can hardly have been overthrown even by that remarkable production, which in the usual orthodox way pronounces all doubters to be "light and vicious persons," who, "though they would, cannot quite be beasts." [81] And there were other forms of doubt. In 1602 appeared The Unmasking of the Politique Atheist, by J. H. [John Hull], Batchelor of Divinitie, which, however, is in the main a mere attempt to retort upon Catholics the charge of atheism laid by them against Protestants. Soon after, in 1605, we find Dr. John Dove producing a Confutation of Atheisme in the manner of previous continental treatises, making the word "atheism" cover many shades of theism; and an essayist writing in 1608 asserts that, on account of the self-seeking and corruption so common among churchmen, "prophane Atheisme hath taken footing in the hearts of ignorant and simple men." [82] The orthodox Ben Jonson, in his Volpone (1607), puts in the mouth of a fool [83] the lines:-- And then, for your religion, profess none, But wonder at the diversity of all; And, for your part, protest, were there no other But simply the laws o' th' land, you would content you. Nic Machiavel and Monsieur Bodin both Were of this mind. But the testimony is not the less significant; as is the account in The Magnetick Lady (1632) of A young physician to the family That, letting God alone, ascribes to Nature More than her share; licentious in discourse, And in his life a profest voluptuary. [84]