See Burnet's History of His Own Time, bk. i, ed. 1838, p. 43. The phrase, "They were for pulling down the churches," again, cannot be taken literally. Of those who "pretended to little or no religion and acted only upon the principles of civil liberty," Burnet goes on to name Sidney, Henry Nevill, Marten, Wildman, and Harrington. The last was certainly of Hobbes's way of thinking in philosophy (Croom Robertson, Hobbes, p. 223, note); but Wildman was one of the signers of the Anabaptist petition to Charles II in 1658 (Clarendon, Hist. of the Rebellion, bk. xv, ed. 1843, p. 855). As to Marten and Chaloner, see Carlyle's Cromwell, iii, 194; and articles in Nat. Dict. of Biog. Vaughan (Hist. of England, 1840, ii, 477, note) speaks of Walwyn and Overton as "among the freethinkers of the times of the Commonwealth." They were, however, Biblicists, not unbelievers. Prof. Gardiner (Hist. of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii, 253, citing a News-letter in the Clarendon MSS.) finds record in 1653 of "a man [who] preached flat atheism in Westminster Hall, uninterrupted by the soldiers of the guard"; but this obviously counts for little. Between the advance in speculation forced on by the disputes themselves, and the usual revolt against the theological spirit after a long and ferocious display of it, there spread even under the Commonwealth a new temper of secularity. On the one hand, the temperamental distaste for theology, antinomian or other, took form in the private associations for scientific research which were the antecedents of the Royal Society. On the other hand, the spirit of religious doubt spread widely in the middle and upper classes; and between the dislike of the Roundheads for the established clergy and the anger of the Cavaliers against all Puritanism there was fostered that "contempt of the clergy" which had become a clerical scandal at the Restoration and was to remain so for about a century. [365] Their social status was in general low, and their financial position bad; and these circumstances, possible only in a time of weakened religious belief, necessarily tended to further the process of mental change. Within the sphere of orthodoxy, it operated openly. It is noteworthy that the term "rationalist" emerges as the label of a sect of Independents or Presbyterians who declare that "What their reason dictates to them in church or State stands for good, until they be convinced with better." [366] The "rationalism," so-called, of that generation remained ostensibly scriptural; but on other lines thought went further. Of atheism there are at this stage only dubious biographical and controversial traces, such as Mrs. Hutchinson's characterization of a Nottingham physician, possibly a deist, as a "horrible atheist," [367] and the Rev. John Dove's Confutation of Atheism (1640), which does not bear out its title. Ephraim Pagitt, in