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
All of these works explicitly avow the abundance of unbelief;
Tillotson, himself accused of it, pronounces the age "miserably overrun
with Skepticism and Infidelity"; and Wilkins, avowing that these
tendencies are common "not only among sensual men of the vulgar sort,
but even among those who pretend to a more than ordinary measure of
wit and learning," attempts to meet them by a purely deistic argument,
with a claim for Christianity appended, as if he were concerned chiefly
to rebut atheism, and held his own Christianity on a very rationalistic
tenure. The fact was that the orthodox clergy were as hard put to it
to repel religious antinomianism on the one hand as to repel atheism
on the other; and no small part of the deistic movement seems to have
been set up by the reaction against pious lawlessness. [400] Thus
we have Tillotson, writing as Dean of Canterbury, driven to plead
in his preface to the work of Wilkins that "it is a great mistake"
to think the obligation of moral duties "doth solely depend upon the
revelation of God's will made to us in the Holy Scriptures." It was
such reasoning that brought upon him the charge of freethinking.
If it be now possible to form any accurate picture of the state of
belief in the latter part of the seventeenth century, it may perhaps
be done by recognizing three categories of temperament or mental
proclivity. First we have to reckon with the great mass of people
held to religious observance by hebetude, [401] devoid of the deeper
mystical impulse or psychic bias which exhibited itself on the one
hand among the dissenters who partly preserved the "enthusiasms"
of the Commonwealth period, and on the other among the more cultured
pietists of the Church who, banning "enthusiasm" in its stronger forms,
cultivated a certain "enthusiasm" of their own. Religionists of the
latter type were ministered to by superstitious mystics like Henry
More, who, even when undertaking to "prove" the existence of God and
the separate existence of the soul by argument and by demonology,
taught them to cultivate a "warranted enthusiasm," and to "endeavour
after a certain principle more noble and inward than reason itself,
and without which reason will falter, or at least reach but to mean
and frivolous things" ... "something in me while I thus speak, which
I must confess is of so retruse a nature that I want a name for it,
unless I should adventure to term it divine sagacity, which is the
first rise of successful reason, especially in matters of great
comprehension and moment." [402] There was small psychic difference
between this dubiously draped affirmation of the "inner light" and
the more orotund proclamations of it by the dissenters who, for a
considerable section of the people, still carried on the tradition of
rapturous pietism; and the dissenters were not always at a disadvantage
in that faculty for rhetoric which has generally been a main factor
in doctrinal religion. [403]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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