Democracy, however, was not the sole or the worst enemy dreaded by the
author of _Leviathan_ as a competitor with his "mortal god." In the
frontispiece of that work the deified monarch who holds the sword erect
with his right hand grasps the crozier with his left, thus typifying the
union of the spiritual and temporal powers in the same person. The
publicists of the Italian Renaissance, with their classical ideals, had,
indeed, been as anti-papal as the Protestants; and the political disorders
fomented by the agents of the Catholic reaction during the last hundred
years had given Hobbes an additional reason for perpetuating their point of
view. Meanwhile another menace to {28} public order had presented itself
from an opposite quarter. Calvinism had created a new spiritual power based
on the free individual interpretation of Scripture, in close alliance with
the alleged rights of conscience and with the spirit of republican liberty.
Each creed in turn had attacked the Stuart monarchy, and the second had
just effected its overthrow. Therefore, to save the State it was necessary
that religious creeds, no less than codes of conduct, should be dictated by
the secular authority, enslaving men's minds as well as their bodies.
By the dialectic irony of the speculative movement, this attempt to fetter
opinion was turned into an instrument for its more complete emancipation.
In order to discredit the pretensions of the religious zealots, Hobbes made
a series of attacks on the foundations of their faith, mostly by way of
suggestion and innuendo--no more being possible under the conditions then
obtaining---but with such effect that, according to Macaulay, "for many
years the _Leviathan_ was the gospel of cold-blooded and hard-headed
unbelievers." That one who made religious belief a matter to be fixed by
legislation could be in any sense a Christian seems most unlikely. He
professed, with what sincerity we know not, to regard the existence of God
as something only a fool could deny. But his philosophy from beginning to
end forms a rigorously-thought-out system of materialism which any atheist,
if otherwise it satisfied him, might without inconsistency accept.
On the meeting of the Long Parliament, Hobbes again left England for the
Continent, where he remained for eleven years. But his principles were no
more to the taste of the exiled royalists than of {29} their opponents. He
therefore returned once more to England, made his submission to the
Parliament, and spent the rest of his days, practically unmolested by
either party, under the Commonwealth and the Restoration until his death in
1679 at the age of ninety-one.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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