A Short History of Freethought, Volume 2 19 – Robertson · Verses Across
Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 2 19Freethought in the Nineteenth Century (part 1)
18
Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 2 19
Freethought in the Nineteenth Century (part 1)
RobertsonEnglish
The Reaction
All over the civilized world, as we have seen, the terrors of the French Revolution evoked an intellectual no less than a political reaction, its stress being most apparent and most destructive in those countries in which there had been previously the largest measure of liberty. Nowhere was it more intense or more disastrous than in England. In countries such as Denmark and Spain, only lately and superficially liberalized, there was no great progress to undo: in England, though liberty was never left without an indomitable witness, there was a violent reversal of general movement, not to be wholly rectified in half a century. Joined in a new activity with the civil power for the suppression of all innovating thought, the Church rapidly attained to an influence it had not possessed since the days of Sacheverel and a degree of wealth it had not before reached since the Reformation. The wealth of the upper class was at its disposal to an unheard-of extent, there being apparently no better way of fighting the new danger of democracy; and dissent joined hands with the establishment to promote orthodoxy.
The average tone in England in the first quarter of the century may be gathered from the language held by a man so enlightened, comparatively speaking, as Sydney Smith, wit, humourist, Whig, and clergyman. In 1801 we find him, in a preface never reprinted, prescribing various measures of religious strategy in addition "to the just, necessary, and innumerable invectives which have been levelled against Rousseau, Voltaire, D'Alembert, and the whole pandemonium of those martyrs to atheism, who toiled with such laborious malice, and suffered odium with such inflexible profligacy, for the wretchedness and despair of their fellow creatures." That this was not jesting may be gathered from his daughter's account of his indignation when a publisher sent him "a work of irreligious tendency," and when Jeffrey admitted "irreligious opinions" to the Edinburgh Review. To the former he writes that every principle of suspicion and fear would be excited in me by a man who professed himself an infidel"; and to Jeffrey: "Do you mean to take care that the Review shall not profess infidel principles? Unless this is the case I must absolutely give up all connection with it." All the while any semblance of "infidelity" in any article in the Review must have been of the most cautious kind.
In the Catholic countries, naturally, the reaction was no less violent. In Italy, as we saw, it began in Tuscany almost at once. The rule of Napoleon, it is true, secured complete freedom of the Press as regarded translation of freethinking books, an entire liberty of conscience in religious matters, and a sharp repression of clericalism, the latter policy going to the length of expelling all the religious orders and confiscating their property. All this counted for change; but the Napoleonic rule all the while choked one of the springs of vital thought--to wit, the spirit of political liberty; and in 1814-15 the clerical system returned in full force, as it did all over Italy. Everywhere freethought was banned. All criticism of Catholicism was a penal offence; and in the kingdom of Naples alone, in 1825, there were 27,612 priests, 8,455 monks, 8,185 nuns, 20 archbishops, and 73 bishops, though in 1807 the French influence had caused the dissolution of some 250 convents. At Florence the Censure forbade, in 1817, the issue of a new edition of the translated work of Cabanis on Les Rapports du physique et du moral; and Mascagni, the physiologist, was invited to delete from his work a definition of man in which no notice was taken of the soul. It was even proclaimed that the works of Voltaire and Rousseau were not to be read in the public libraries without ecclesiastical permission; but this veto was not seriously treated. All native energy, however, was either cowed or cajoled into passivity. If, accordingly, the mind of Italy was to survive, it must be by the assimilation of the culture of freer States; and this culture, reinforced by the writings of Leopardi, generated a new intellectual life, which was a main factor in the ultimate achievement of Italian liberation from Austrian rule.
Spain, under Charles IV, became so thoroughly re-clericalized at the very outbreak of the Revolution that no more leeway seemed possible; but even in Spain, early in the nineteenth century, the government found means to retrogress yet further, and the minister Caballero sent an order to the universities forbidding the study of moral philosophy. The king, he justly declared, did not want philosophers, but good and obedient subjects.
In France, where the downfall of Napoleon meant the restoration of the monarchy, the intellectual reaction was really less powerful than in England. The new spirit had been too widely and continuously at work, from Voltaire onwards, to be politically expelled; and the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 gave the proof that even on the political side the old spirit was incapable of permanent recovery. In Germany, where freethinking was associated not with the beaten cause of the Revolution but in large measure with the national movement for liberation from the tyranny of Napoleon, the religious reaction was substantially emotional and unintellectual, though it had intellectual representatives, notably Schleiermacher. Apart from his culture-movement, the revival consisted mainly in a new Pietism, partly orthodox, partly mystical; and on those lines it ran later to the grossest excesses. But among the educated classes of Germany there was the minimum of arrest, because there the intellectual life was least directly associated with the political, and the ecclesiastical life relatively the least organized. The very separateness of the German States, then and later so often deplored by German patriots, was really a condition of relative security for freedom of thought and research; and the resulting multiplicity of universities meant a variety of intellectual effort not then paralleled in any other country. What may be ranked as the most important effect of the reaction in Germany--the turning of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel in succession to the task of reconciling rational philosophy with religion in the interests of social order--was in itself a rationalistic process as compared with the attitude of orthodoxy in other lands. German scholarship, led by the re-organized university of Berlin, was in fact one of the most progressive intellectual forces in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century; and only its comparative isolation, its confinement to a cultured class, prevented it from affecting popular thought as widely as deism had done in the preceding century. Even in the countries in which popular and university culture were less sharply divided, the German influence was held at bay like others.
But in time the spirit of progress regained strength, the most decisive form of recovery being the new development of the struggle for political liberty from about 1830 onwards. In England the advance thenceforward was to be broadly continuous on the political side. On the Continent it culminated for the time in the explosions of 1848, which were followed in the Germanic world by another political reaction, in which freethought suffered; and in France, after a few years, by the Second Empire, in which clericalism was again fostered. But these checks have proved impermanent.
The Forces of Renascence
As with the cause of democracy, so with the cause of rationalism, the forward movement grew only the deeper and more powerful through the check; and the nineteenth century closed on a record of freethinking progress which may be said to outbulk that of all the previous centuries of the modern era together. So great was the activity of the century in point of mere quantity that it is impossible, within the scheme of a "Short History," to treat it on even such a reduced scale of narrative as has been applied to the past. A detailed history on national lines from the French Revolution onwards would mean another book as large as the present. On however large a scale it might be written, further, it would involve a recognition of international influences such as had never before been evolved, save when on a much smaller scale the educated world all round read and wrote Latin. Since Goethe, the international aspect of culture upon which he laid stress has become ever more apparent; and scientific and philosophical thought, in particular, are world-wide in their scope and bearing. It must here suffice, therefore, to take a series of broad and general views of the past century's work, leaving adequate critical and narrative treatment for separate undertakings. The most helpful method seems to be that of a conspectus (1) of the main movements and forces that during the century affected in varying degrees the thought of the civilized world, and (2) of the main advances made and the point reached in the culture of the nations, separately considered. At the same time, the forces of rationalism may be discriminated into Particular and General. We may then roughly represent the lines of movement, in non-chronological order, as follows:--
I.--Forces of criticism and corrective thought bearing expressly on religious beliefs.
1. In Great Britain and America, the new movements of popular freethought begun by Paine, and lasting continuously to the present day.
2. In France and elsewhere, the reverberation of the attack of Voltaire, d'Holbach, Dupuis, and Volney, carried on most persistently in Catholic countries by the Freemasons, as against official orthodoxy after 1815.
3. German "rationalism," proceeding from English deism, moving towards naturalist as against supernaturalist conceptions, dissolving the notion of the miraculous in both Old and New Testament history, analysing the literary structure of the sacred books, and all along affecting studious thought in other countries.
4. The literary compromise of Lessing, claiming for all religions a place in a scheme of "divine education."
5. In England, the neo-Christianity of the school of Coleridge, a disintegrating force, promoting the "Broad Church" tendency, which in Dean Milman was so pronounced as to bring on him charges of rationalism.
6. The utilitarianism of the school of Bentham, carried into moral and social science.
7. Comtism, making little direct impression on the "constructive" lines laid by the founder, but affecting critical thought in many directions.
8. German philosophy, Kantian and post-Kantian, in particular the Hegelian, turned to anti-Christian and anti-supernaturalist account by Strauss, Vatke, Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, and Marx.
9. German atheism and scientific "materialism"--represented by Feuerbach and Büchner (who, however, rejected the term "materialism" as inappropriate).
10. Revived English deism, involving destructive criticism of Christianity, as in Hennell, F. W. Newman, R. W. Mackay, W. R. Greg, Theodore Parker, and Thomas Scott, partly in co-operation with Unitarianism.
11. American transcendentalism or pantheism--the school of Emerson.
12. Colenso's preliminary attack on the narrative of the Pentateuch, a systematized return to Voltairean common-sense, rectifying the unscientific course of the earlier "higher criticism" on the historical issue.
13. The later or scientific "higher criticism" of the Old Testament--represented by Kuenen, Wellhausen, and their successors.
14. New historical criticism of Christian origins, in particular the work of Strauss and Baur in Germany, Renan and Havet in France, and their successors.
15. Exhibition of rationalism within the churches, as in Germany, Holland, and Switzerland generally; in England in the Essays and Reviews; later in multitudes of essays and books, and in the ethical criticism of the Old Testament; in America in popular theology.
16. Association of rationalistic doctrine with the Socialist movements, new and old, from Owen to Bebel.
17. Communication of doubt and moral questioning through poetry and belles-lettres--as in Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Clough, Tennyson, Carlyle, Arnold, Browning, Swinburne, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Victor Hugo, Leconte de Lisle, Leopardi, and certain French and English novelists.
II.--Modern Science, physical, mental, and moral, sapping the bases of all supernaturalist systems.
1. Astronomy, newly directed by Laplace.
2. Geology, gradually connected (as in Britain by Chambers) with
3. Biology, made definitely non-deistic by Darwin.
4. The comprehension of all science in the Evolution Theory, as by Spencer, advancing on Comte.
5. Psychology, as regards localization of brain functions.
6. Comparative mythology, as yet imperfectly applied to Christism.
7. Sociology, as outlined by Comte, Buckle, Spencer, Winwood Reade, Lester Ward, Giddings, Tarde, Durkheim, and others, on strictly naturalistic lines.
8. Comparative Hierology; the methodical application of principles insisted on by all the deists, and formulated in the interests of deism by Lessing, but latterly freed of his implications.
9. Above all, the later development of Anthropology (in the wide English sense of the term), which, beginning to take shape in the eighteenth century, came to new life in the latter part of the nineteenth; and is now one of the most widely cultivated of all the sciences--especially on the side of religious creed and psychology.
On the other hand, we may group somewhat as follows the general forces of retardation of freethought operating throughout the century:--
1. Penal laws, still operative in Britain and Germany against popular freethought propaganda, and till recently in Britain against any endowment of freethought.
2. Class interests, involving in the first half of the century a social conspiracy against rationalism in England.
3. Commercial pressure thus set up, and always involved in the influence of churches.
4. In England, identification of orthodox Dissent with political Liberalism--a sedative.
5. Concessions by the clergy, especially in England and the United States--to many, another sedative.
6. Above all, the production of new masses of popular ignorance in the industrial nations, and continued lack of education in the others.
7. On this basis, business-like and in large part secular-minded organization of the endowed churches, as against a freethought propaganda hampered by the previously named causes, and in England by laws which veto all direct endowment of anti-Christian heresy.
It remains to make, with forced brevity, the surveys thus outlined.
Section 1.--Popular Propaganda and Culture
1. If any one circumstance more than another differentiates the life of to-day from that of older civilizations, or from that of previous centuries of the modern era, it is the diffusion of rationalistic views among the "common people." In no other era is to be found the phenomenon of widespread critical skepticism among the labouring masses: in all previous ages, though chronic complaint is made of some unbelief among the uneducated, the constant and abject ignorance of the mass of the people has been the sure foothold of superstitious systems. Within the last century the area of the recognizably civilized world has grown far vaster; and in the immense populations that have thus arisen there is a relative degree of enlightenment, coupled with a degree of political power never before attained. Merely to survey, then, the broad movement of popular culture in the period in question will yield a useful notion of the dynamic change in the balance of thought in modern times, and will make more intelligible the special aspects of the culture process.
This vital change in the distribution of knowledge is largely to be attributed to the written and spoken teaching of a line of men who made popular enlightenment their great aim. Their leading type among the English-speaking races is Thomas Paine, whom we have seen combining a gospel of democracy with a gospel of critical reason in the midst of the French Revolution. Never before had rationalism been made widely popular. The English and French deists had written for the middle and upper classes. Peter Annet was practically the first who sought to reach the multitude; and his punishment expressed the special resentment aroused in the governing classes by such a policy. Of all the English freethinkers of the earlier deistical period he alone was selected for reprinting by the propagandists of the Paine period. Paine was to Annet, however, as a cannon to a musket, and through the democratic ferment of his day he won an audience a hundredfold wider than Annet could have dreamt of reaching. The anger of the governing classes, in a time of anti-democratic panic, was proportional. Paine would have been at least imprisoned for his Rights of Man had he not fled from England in time; and the sale of all his books was furiously prohibited and ferociously punished. Yet they circulated everywhere, even in Protestant Ireland, hitherto affected only under the surface of upper-class life by deism. The circulation of Bishop Watson's Apology in reply only served to spread the contagion, as it brought the issues before multitudes who would not otherwise have heard of them. All the while, direct propaganda was carried on by translations and reprints as well as by fresh English tractates. Diderot's Thoughts on Religion, and Fréret's Letter from Thrasybulus to Leucippus, seem to have been great favourites among the Painites, as was Elihu Palmer's Principles of Nature; and Volney's Ruins of Empires had a large vogue. Condorcet's Esquisse had been promptly translated in 1795; the translation of d'Holbach's System of Nature reached a third edition in 1817; that of Raynal's History had been reprinted in 1804; and that of Helvétius On the Mind in 1810; while an English abridgment of Bayle in four volumes, on freethinking lines, appeared in 1826.
2. Meantime, new writers arose to carry into fuller detail the attacks of Paine, sharpening their weapons on those of the more scholarly French deists. A Life of Jesus, including his Apocryphal History, was published in 1818, with such astute avoidance of all comment that it escaped prosecution. Others, taking a more daring course, fared accordingly. George Houston translated the Ecce Homo of d'Holbach, first publishing it at Edinburgh in 1799, and reprinting it in London in 1813. For the second issue he was prosecuted, fined £200, and imprisoned for two years in Newgate. Robert Wedderburn, a mulatto calling himself "the Rev.," in reality a superannuated journeyman tailor who officiated in Hopkins Street Unitarian Chapel, London, was in 1820 sentenced to two years' imprisonment in Dorchester Jail for a "blasphemous libel" contained in one of his pulpit discourses. His Letters to the Rev. Solomon Herschell (the Jewish Chief Rabbi) and to the Archbishop of Canterbury show a happy vein of orderly irony and not a little learning, despite his profession of apostolic ignorance; and at the trial the judge admitted his defence to be "exceedingly well drawn up." His publications naturally received a new impetus, and passed to a more drastic order of mockery.
3. As the years went on, the persecution in England grew still fiercer; but it was met with a stubborn hardihood which wore out even the bitter malice of piety. One of the worst features of the religious crusade was that it affected to attack not unbelief but "vice," such being the plea on which Wilberforce and others prosecuted, during a period of more than twenty years, the publishers and booksellers who issued the works of Paine. But even that dissembling device did not ultimately avail. A name not to be forgotten by those who value obscure service to human freedom is that of Richard Carlile, who between 1819 and 1835 underwent nine years' imprisonment in his unyielding struggle for the freedom of the Press, of thought, and of speech. John Clarke, an ex-Methodist, became one of Carlile's shopmen, was tried in 1824 for selling one of his publications, and "after a spirited defence, in which he read many of the worst passages of the Bible," was sentenced to three years' imprisonment, and to find securities for good behaviour during life. The latter disability he effectively anticipated by writing, while in prison, A Critical Review of the Life, Character, and Miracles of Jesus, wherein Christian feelings were treated as Christians had treated the feelings of freethinkers, with a much more destructive result. Published first, strangely enough, in the Newgate Magazine, it was republished in 1825 and 1839, with impunity. Thus did a brutal bigotry bring upon itself ever a deadlier retaliation, till it sickened of the contest. Those who threw up the struggle on the orthodox side declaimed as before about the tone of the unbeliever's attack, failing to read the plain lesson that, while noisy fanaticism, doing its own worst and vilest, deterred from utterance all the gentler and more sympathetic spirits on the side of reason, the work of reason could be done only by the harder natures, which gave back blow for blow and insult for insult, rejoicing in the encounter. Thus championed, freethought could not be crushed. The propagandist and publishing work done by Carlile was carried on diversely by such free lances as Robert Taylor (ex-clergyman, author of the Diegesis, 1829, and The Devil's Pulpit, 1830), Charles Southwell (1814-1860), and William Hone, who ultimately became an independent preacher. Southwell, a disciple of Robert Owen, who edited The Oracle of Reason, was imprisoned for a year in 1840 for publishing in that journal an article entitled "The Jew Book"; and was succeeded in the editorship by George Jacob Holyoake (1817-1906), another Owenite missionary, who met a similar sentence; whereafter George Adams and his wife, who continued to publish the journal, were imprisoned in turn. Matilda Roalfe and Mrs. Emma Martin about the same period underwent imprisonment for like causes. In this fashion, by the steady courage of a much-enduring band of men and women, was set on foot a systematic Secularist propaganda--the name having relation to the term "Secularism," coined by Holyoake.
4. In this evolution political activities played an important part. Henry Hetherington (1792-1849), the strenuous democrat who in 1830 began the trade union movement, and so became the founder of Chartism, fought for the right of publication in matters of freethought as in politics. After undergoing two imprisonments of six months each (1832), and carrying on for three and a half years the struggle for an untaxed Press, which ended in his victory (1834), he was in 1840 indicted for publishing Haslam's Letters to the Clergy of all Denominations, a freethinking criticism of Old Testament morality. He defended himself so ably that Lord Denman, the judge, confessed to have "listened with feelings of great interest and sentiments of respect too"; and Justice Talfourd later spoke of the defence as marked by "great propriety and talent." Nevertheless, he was punished by four months' imprisonment. In the following year, on the advice of Francis Place, he brought a test prosecution for blasphemy against Moxon, the poet-publisher, for issuing Shelley's complete works, including Queen Mab. Talfourd, then Serjeant, defended Moxon, and pleaded that there "must be some alteration of the law, or some restriction of the right to put it in action"; but the jury were impartial enough to find the publisher guilty, though he received no punishment. Among other works published by Hetherington was one entitled A Hunt after the Devil, "by Dr. P. Y." (really by Lieutenant Lecount), in which the story of Noah's ark was subjected to a destructive criticism.
5. Holyoake had been a missionary and martyr in the movement of Socialism set up by Robert Owen, whose teaching, essentially scientific on its psychological or philosophical side, was the first effort to give systematic effect to democratic ideals by organizing industry. It was in the discussions of the "Association of all Classes of all Nations," formed by Owen in 1835, that the word "Socialism" first became current. Owen was a freethinker in all things; and his whole movement was so penetrated by an anti-theological spirit that the clergy as a rule became its bitter enemies, though such publicists as Macaulay and John Mill also combined with them in scouting it on political and economic grounds. Up till the middle of 1817 he had on his side a large body of "respectable" and highly-placed philanthropists, his notable success in his own social and commercial undertakings being his main recommendation. His early Essays on the Formation of Character, indeed, were sufficient to reveal his heterodoxy; but not until, at his memorable public meeting on August 21, 1817, he began to expatiate on "the gross errors that have been combined with the fundamental notions of every religion that has hitherto been taught to men" did he rank as an aggressive freethinker. It was in his own view the turning-point of his life. He was not prosecuted; though Brougham declared that if any politician had said half as much he would have been "burned alive"; but the alienation of "moderate" opinion at once began; and Owen, always more fervid than prudent, never recovered his influence among the upper classes. Nonetheless, "his secularistic teaching gained such influence among the working classes as to give occasion for the statement in the Westminster Review (1839) that his principles were the actual creed of a great portion of them."
Owen's polemic method--if it could properly be so called--was not so much a criticism of dogma as a calm impeachment of religion in a spirit of philanthropy. No reformer was ever more entirely free from the spirit of wrath: on this side Owen towers above comparison. "There is no place found in him for scorn or indignation. He cannot bring himself to speak or think evil of any man. He carried out in his daily life his own teaching that man is not the proper object of praise or blame. Throughout his numerous works there is hardly a sentence of indignation--of personal denunciation never. He loves the sinner, and can hardly bring himself to hate the sin." He had come by his rationalism through the influence rather of Rousseau than of Voltaire; and he had assimilated the philosophic doctrine of determinism--of all ideals the most difficult to realize in conduct--with a thoroughness of which the flawed Rousseau was incapable. There was thus presented to the world the curious case of a man who on the side of character carried rationalism to the perfection of ideal "saintliness," while in the general application of rational thought to concrete problems he was virtually unteachable. For an absolute and immovable conviction in his own practical rightness was in Owen as essential a constituent as his absolute benevolence. These were the two poles of his personality. He was, in short, a fair embodiment of the ideal formed by many people--doctrine and dogma apart--of the Gospel Jesus. And most Christians accordingly shunned and feared or hated him.
Such a personality was evidently a formidable force as against the reinforced English orthodoxy of the first generation of the nineteenth century. The nature of Owen's propaganda as against religion may be best sampled from his lecture, "The New Religion: or, Religion founded on the Immutable Laws of the Universe, contrasted with all Religions founded on Human Testimony," delivered at the London Tavern on October 20, 1830: --
"Under the arrangements which have hitherto existed for educating and governing man, four general characters have been produced among the human race. These four characters appear to be formed, under the past and present arrangements of society, from four different original organizations at birth....
"No. 1. May be termed the conscientious religious in all countries.
No. 2. Unbelievers in the truth of any religion, but who strenuously support the religion of their country, under the conviction that, although religion is not necessary to insure their own good conduct, it is eminently required to compel others to act right.
No. 3. Unbelievers who openly avow their disbelief in the truth of any religion, such as Deists, Atheists, Skeptics, etc., etc., but who do not perceive the laws of nature relative to man as an individual, or when united in a social state.
No. 4. Disbelievers in all past and present religions, but believers in the eternal unchanging laws of the universe, as developed by facts derived from all past experience; and who, by a careful study of these facts, deduce from them the religion of nature.
Class No. 1 is formed, under certain circumstances, from those original organizations which possess at birth strong moral and weak intellectual faculties.... Class No. 2 is composed of those individuals who by nature possess a smaller quantity of moral and a larger quantity of intellectual faculty.... Class No. 3 is composed of men of strong moral and moderate intellectual faculty.... Class No. 4 comprises those who, by nature, possess a high degree of intellectual and moral faculty...."
Thus all forms of opinion were shown to proceed either from intellectual or moral defect, save the opinions of Owen. Such propositions, tranquilly elaborated, were probably as effective in producing irritation as any frontal attack upon any dogmas, narratives, or polities. But, though not even consistent (inasmuch as the fundamental thesis that "character is formed by circumstances" is undermined by the datum of four varieties of organization), they were potent to influence serious men otherwise broadly instructed as to the nature of religious history and the irrationality of dogma; and Owen for a generation, despite the inevitable failure and frustration of his social schemes, exercised by his movement a very wide influence on popular life. To a considerable extent it was furthered by the popular deistic philosophy of George and Andrew Combe--a kind of deistic positivism--which then had a great vogue; and by the implications of phrenology, then also in its most scientific and progressive stage. When, for various reasons, Owen's movement dissolved, the freethinking element seems to have been absorbed in the secular party, while the others appear to have gone in large part to build up the movement of Co-operation. On the whole, the movement of popular freethought in England could be described as poor, struggling, and persecuted, only the most hardy and zealous venturing to associate themselves with it. The imprisonment of Holyoake (1842) for six months, on a trifling charge of blasphemy, is an illustration of the brutal spirit of public orthodoxy at the time. Where bigotry could thus only injure and oppress without suppressing heresy, it stimulated resistance; and the result of the stimulus was a revival of popular propaganda which led to the founding of a Secular Society in 1852.
6. This date broadly coincides with the maximum domination of conventional orthodoxy in English life. From about the middle of the century the balance gradually changes. In 1852 we find the publisher Henry Bohn reissuing the worthless apologetic works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, with a "publisher's preface" in which they are said to "maintain an acknowledged pre-eminence," though written "at a period of our national history when the writings of Volney and Gibbon, and especially of Thomas Paine, fostered by the political effects of the French Revolution, had deteriorated the morals of the people, and infused the poison of infidelity into the disaffected portion of the public." We have here still the note of early-nineteenth-century Anglican respectability, not easily to be matched in human history for hollowness and blatancy. Fuller is at once one of the most rabid and one of the most futile of the thousand and one defenders of the faith. A sample of his mind and method is the verdict that "If the light that is gone abroad on earth would permit the rearing of temples to Venus, or Bacchus, or any of the rabble of heathen deities, there is little doubt but that modern unbelievers would in great numbers become their devotees; but, seeing they cannot have a God whose worship shall accord with their inclinations, they seem determined not to worship at all." In the very next year the same publisher began the issue of a reprint of Gibbon, with variorum notes, edited by "An English Churchman," who for the most part defended Gibbon against his orthodox critics. This enterprise in turn brought upon the pious publisher a fair share of odium. But the second half of the century, albeit soon darkened by new wars in Europe, Asia, and America, was to be for England one of Liberalism alike in politics and in thought, free trade, and relatively free publication, with progress in enlightenment for both the populace and the "educated" classes.
7. In 1858 there was elected to the presidency of the London Secular Society the young Charles Bradlaugh, one of the greatest orators of his age, and one of the most powerful personalities ever associated with a progressive movement. Early experience of clerical persecution, which even drove the boy from his father's roof, helped to make him a fighter, but never infirmed his humanity. In the main self-taught, he acquired a large measure of culture in French and English, and his rare natural gift for debate was sharpened by a legal training. A personal admirer of Owen, he never accepted his social polity, but was at all times the most zealous of democratic reformers. Thenceforward the working masses in England were in large part kept in touch with a freethought which drew on the results of the scientific and scholarly research of the time, and wielded a dialectic of which trained opponents confessed the power. In the place of the bland dogmatism of Owen, and the calm assumption that all mankind could and should be schoolmastered into happiness and order, there came the alert recognition of the absoluteness of individualism as regards conviction, and its present pre-potency as regards social arrangements. Every thesis was brought to the test of argument and evidence; and in due course many who had complained that Owen would not argue, complained that the new school argued everything. The essential thing was that the people were receiving vitally needed instruction; and were being taught with a new power to think for themselves. Incidentally they were freed from an old burden by Bradlaugh's successful resistance to the demand of suretyship from newspapers, and by his no less successful battle for the right of non-theistic witnesses to make affirmation instead of taking the oath in the law courts.
The inspiration and the instruction of the popular movement thus maintained were at once literary, scientific, ethical, historical, scholarly, and philosophic. Shelley was its poet; Voltaire its first story-teller; and Gibbon its favourite historian. In philosophy, Bradlaugh learned less from Hume than from Spinoza; in Biblical criticism--himself possessing a working knowledge of Hebrew--he collated the work of English and French specialists, down to and including Colenso, applying all the while to the consecrated record the merciless tests of a consistent ethic. At the same time, the whole battery of argument from the natural sciences was turned against traditionalism and supernaturalism, alike in the lectures of Bradlaugh and the other speakers of his party, and in the pages of his journal, The National Reformer. The general outcome was an unprecedented diffusion of critical thought among the English masses, and a proportionate antagonism to those who had wrought such a result. When, therefore, Bradlaugh, as deeply concerned for political as for intellectual righteousness, set himself to the task of entering Parliament, he commenced a struggle which shortened his life, though it promoted his main objects. Not till after a series of electoral contests extending over twelve years was he elected for Northampton in 1880; and the House of Commons in a manner enacted afresh the long resistance made to him in that city. When, however, on his election in 1880, the Conservative Opposition began the historic proceedings over the Oath question, they probably did even more to deepen and diffuse the popular freethought movement than Bradlaugh himself had done in the whole of his previous career. The process was furthered by the policy of prosecuting and imprisoning (1883) Mr. G. W. Foote, editor of the Freethinker, under the Blasphemy Laws--a course not directly ventured on as against Bradlaugh, though it was sought to connect him with the publication of Mr. Foote's journal.
To this day it is common to give a false account of the origin of the episode, representing Bradlaugh as having "forced" his opinions on the attention of the House. Rather he strove unduly to avoid wounding religious feeling. Wont to make affirmation by law in the courts of justice, he held that the same law applied to the "oath of allegiance," and felt that it would be unseemly on his part to use the words of adjuration if he could legally affirm. On this point he expressly consulted the law officers of the Crown, and they gave the opinion that he had the legal right, which was his own belief as a lawyer. The faction called the "fourth party," however, saw an opportunity to embarrass the Gladstone Government by challenging the act of affirmation, and thus arose the protracted struggle. Only when a committee of the House decided that he could not properly affirm did Bradlaugh propose to take the oath, in order to take his seat.
The pretence of zeal for religion, made by the politicians who had raised the issue, was known by all men to be the merest hypocrisy. Lord Randolph Churchill, who distinguished himself by insisting on the moral necessity for a belief in "some divinity or other," is recorded to have professed a special esteem for Mr. (now Lord) Morley, the most distinguished Positivist of his time. The whole procedure, in Parliament and out, was so visibly that of the lowest political malice, exploiting the crudest religious intolerance, that it turned into active freethinkers many who had before been only passive doubters, and raised the secularist party to an intensity of zeal never before seen. At no period in modern British history had there been so constant and so keen a platform propaganda of unbelief; so unsparing an indictment of Christian doctrine, history, and practice; such contemptuous rebuttal of every Christian pretension; such asperity of spirit against the creed which was once more being championed by chicanery, calumny, and injustice. In those five years of indignant warfare were sown the seeds of a more abundant growth of rationalism than had ever before been known in the British Islands. With invincible determination Bradlaugh fought his case through Parliament and the law courts, incurring debts which forced upon him further toils that clearly shortened his life, but never yielding for an instant in his battle with the bigotry of half the nation. Liberalism was shamed by many defections; Conservatism, with the assent of Mr. Balfour, was solid for injustice; and in the entire Church of England less than a dozen priests stood for tolerance. But the cause at stake was indestructible. When Bradlaugh at length took the oath and his seat in 1886, under a ruling of the new Speaker (Peel) which stultified the whole action of the Speaker and majorities of the previous Parliament, and no less that of the law courts, straightforward freethought stood three-fold stronger in England than in any previous generation. Apart from their educative work, the struggles and sufferings of the secularist leaders won for Great Britain the abolition within one generation of the old burden of suretyship on newspapers, and of the disabilities of non-theistic witnesses; the freedom of public meeting in the London parks; the right of avowed atheists to sit in Parliament (Bradlaugh having secured in 1888 their title to make affirmation instead of oath); and the virtual discredit of the Blasphemy Laws as such. It is probable also that the treatment meted out to Mrs. Besant--then associated with Bradlaugh in freethought propaganda--marked the end of another form of tyrannous outrage, already made historic in the case of Shelley. Secured the custody of her children under a marital deed of separation, she was deprived of it at law (1879) on her avowal of atheistic opinions, with the result that her influence as a propagandist was immensely increased.
8. The special energy of the English secularist movement in the ninth decade was partly due to the fact that by that time there had appeared a remarkable amount of modern freethinking literature of high literary and intellectual quality, and good "social" status. Down to 1870 the new literary names committed to the rejection of Christianity, apart from the men of science who kept to their own work, were the theists Hennell, F. W. Newman, W. E. Greg, R. W. Mackay, Buckle, and W. E. H. Lecky, all of them influential, but none of them at once recognized as a first-rate force. But with the appearance of Lecky's History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (1865), lacking though it was in clearness of thought, a new tone began to prevail; and his History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869), equally readable and not more uncompromising, was soon followed by a series of powerful pronouncements of a more explicit kind. One of the first of the literary class to come forward with an express impeachment of Christianity was Moncure Daniel Conway, whose Earthward Pilgrimage (1870) was the artistic record of a gifted preacher's progress from Wesleyan Methodism, through Unitarianism, to a theism which was soon to pass into agnosticism. In 1871 appeared the remarkable work of Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man, wherein a rapid survey of ancient and medieval history, and of the growth of religion from savage beginnings, leads up to a definitely anti-theistic presentment of the future of human life with the claim to have shown "that the destruction of Christianity is essential to the interests of civilization." Some eighteen editions tell of the acceptance won by the book. Less vogue, but some startled notice, was won by the Duke of Somerset's Christian Theology and Modern Scepticism (1872), a work of moderate rationalism, but by a peer. In 1873 appeared Herbert Spencer's Introduction to the Study of Sociology, wherein the implicit anti-supernaturalism of that philosopher's First Principles was advanced upon, in the chapter on "The Theological Bias," by a mordant attack on that Christian creed.
That attack had been preceded by Matthew Arnold's Literature and Dogma (1872), wherein the publicist who had censured Colenso for not writing in Latin described the Christian doctrine of the Trinity as "the fairy-tale of three Lord Shaftesburys." Much pleading for the recognition by unbelievers of the value of the Bible failed to convince Christians of the value of such a thinker's Christianity. A more important sensation was provided in 1873 by the posthumous publication of Mill's Autobiography, and, in the following year, by his Three Essays on Religion, which exhibited its esteemed author as not only not a Christian but as never having been one, although he formulated a species of limited liability theism, as unsatisfactory to the rationalists as to the orthodox. Still the fresh manifestations of freethinking multiplied. On the one hand the massive treatise entitled Supernatural Religion (1874), and on the other the freethinking essays of Prof. W. K. Clifford in the Fortnightly Review, the most vigorously outspoken ever yet written by an English academic, showed that the whole field of debate was being reopened with a new power and confidence. The History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, by Leslie Stephen (1876), set up the same impression from another side; yet another social sensation was created by the appearance of Viscount Amberley's Analysis of Religious Belief (1877); and all the while the "Higher Criticism" proceeded within the pale of the Church.
The literary situation was now so changed that, whereas from 1850 to 1880 the "sensations" in the religious world were those made by rationalistic attacks, thereafter they were those made by new defences. H. Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883), Mr. Balfour's Defence of Philosophic Doubt (1879) and Foundations of Belief (1895), and Mr. Kidd's Social Evolution (1894), were successively welcomed as being declared to render such a service. It is doubtful whether they are to-day valued upon that score in any quarter.
9. In the first half of the century popular forms of freethought propaganda were hardly possible in other European countries. France had been too long used to regulation alike under the monarchy and under the empire to permit of open promotion of unbelief in the early years of the Restoration. Yet as early as 1828 we find the Protestant Coquerel avowing that in his day the Bourbonism of the Catholic clergy had revived the old anti-clericalism, and that it was common to find the most high-minded patriots unbelievers and materialists. But still more remarkable was the persistence of deep freethinking currents in the Catholic world throughout the century. About 1830 rationalism had become normal among the younger students at Paris; and the revolution of that year elicited a charter putting all religions on an equality. Soon the throne and the chambers were on a footing of practical hostility to the Church. Under Louis Philippe men dared to teach in the Collège de France that "the Christian dispensation is but one link in the chain of divine revelations to man." Even during the first period of reaction after the restoration numerous editions of Volney's Ruines and of the Abrégé of Dupuis's Origine de tous les Cultes served to maintain among the more intelligent of the proletariat an almost scientific rationalism, which can hardly be said to have been improved on by such historiography as that of Renan's Vie de Jésus. And there were other forces, over and above freemasonry, which in France and other Latin countries has since the Revolution been steadily anti-clerical. The would-be social reconstructor Charles Fourier (1772-1837) was an independent and non-Christian though not an anti-clerical theist, and his system may have counted for something as organizing the secular spirit among the workers in the period of the monarchic and Catholic reaction. Fourier approximated to Christianity inasmuch as he believed in a divine Providence; but like Owen he had an unbounded and heterodox faith in human goodness and perfectibility; and he claimed to have discovered the "plan of God" for men. But Fourier was never, like Owen, a popular force; and popular rationalism went on other lines. At no time was the proletariat of Paris otherwise than largely Voltairean after the Revolution, of which one of the great services (carried on by Napoleon) was an improvement in popular education. The rival non-Christian systems of Saint-Simon (1760-1823) and Auguste Comte (1798-1857) also never took any practical hold among them; but throughout the century they have been fully the most freethinking working-class population in the world.
As to Fourier see the OEuvres Choisies de Fourier, ed. Ch. Gide, pp. 1-3, 9. Cp. Solidarité: Vue Synthétique sur la doctrine de Ch. Fourier, par Hippolyte Renaud, 3e édit. 1846, ch. i: "Pour ramener l'homme à la foi" [en Dieu], writes Renaud, "il faut lui offrir aujourd'hui une foi complète et composée, une foi solidement assise sur le témoignage de la raison. Pour cela il faut que la flambeau de la science dissipe toutes les obscurités" (p. 9). This is not propitious to dogma; but Fourier planned and promised to leave priests and ministers undisturbed in his new world, and even declared religions to be "much superior to uncertain sciences." Gide, introd. to OEuvres Choisies, pp. xxii-xxiii, citing Manuscrits, vol. de 1853-1856, p. 293. Cp. Dr. Ch. Pellarin, Fourier, sa vie et sa théorie, 5e édit. p. 143.
Saint-Simon, who proposed a "new Christianity," expressly guarded against direct appeals to the people. See Weil, Saint-Simon et son OEuvre, 1894, p. 193. As to the Saint-Simonian sect, see an interesting testimony by Renan, Les Apôtres, p. 148.
The generation after the fall of Napoleon was pre-eminently the period of new schemes of society; and it is noteworthy that they were all non-Christian, though all, including even Owen's, claimed to provide a "religion," and the French may seem all to have been convinced by Napoleon's practice that some kind of cult must be provided for the peoples. Owen alone rejected alike supernaturalism and cultus; and his movement left the most definite rationalistic traces. All seem to have been generated by the double influence of (1) the social failure of the French Revolution, which left so many anxious for another and better effort at reconstruction, and (2) of the spectacle of the rule of Napoleon, which seems to have elicited new ideals of beneficent autocracy. Owen, Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Comte were all alike would-be founders of a new society or social religion. It seems probable that this proclivity to systematic reconstruction, in a world which still carried a panic-memory of one great social overturn, helped to lengthen the rule of orthodoxy. Considerably more progress was made when freethought became detached from special plans of polity, and grew up anew by way of sheer truth-seeking on all the lines of inquiry.
In France, however, the freethinking tradition from the eighteenth century never passed away, at least as regards the life of the great towns. And while Napoleon III made it his business to conciliate the Church, which in the person of the somewhat latitudinarian Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, had endorsed his coup d'état of 1851, even under his rule the irreversible movement of freethought revealed itself among his own ministers. Victor Duruy, the eminent historian, his energetic Minister of Education, was a freethinker, non-aggressive towards the Church, but perfectly determined not to permit aggression by it. And when the Church, in its immemorial way, declaimed against all forms of rationalistic teaching in the colleges, and insisted on controlling the instruction in all the schools, his firm resistance made him one of its most hated antagonists. Even in the Senate, then the asylum of all forms of antiquated thought and prejudice, Duruy was able to carry his point against the prelates, Sainte-Beuve strongly and skilfully supporting him. Thus in the France of the Third Empire, on the open field of the educational battle-ground between faith and reason, the rationalistic advance was apparent in administration no less than in the teaching of the professed men of science and the polemic of the professed critics of religion.
10. In other Catholic countries the course of popular culture in the first half of the century was not greatly dissimilar to that seen in France, though less rapid and expansive. Thus we find the Spanish Inquisitor-General in 1815 declaring that "all the world sees with horror the rapid progress of unbelief," and denouncing "the errors and the new and dangerous doctrines" which have passed from other countries to Spain. This evolution was to some extent checked; but in the latter half of the century, especially in the last thirty years, all the Catholic countries of Europe were more or less permeated with demotic freethought, usually going hand in hand with republican or socialistic propaganda in politics. It is indeed a significant fact that freethought propaganda is often most active in countries where the Catholic Church is most powerful. Thus in Belgium there are at least three separate federations, standing for hundreds of freethinking "groups"; in Spain, a few years ago, there were freethought societies in all the large towns, and at least half-a-dozen freethought journals; in Portugal there have been a number of societies--a weekly journal, O Secolo, of Lisbon, and a monthly review, O Livre Exame. In France and Italy, where educated society is in large measure rationalistic, the Masonic lodges do most of the personal and social propaganda; but there are federations of freethought societies in both countries. In Switzerland freethought is more aggressive in the Catholic than in the Protestant cantons. In the South American republics, again, as in Italy and France, the Masonic lodges are predominantly freethinking; and in Peru there was, a few years ago, a Freethought League, with a weekly organ. As long ago as 1856 the American diplomatist and archæologist, Squier, wrote that, "Although the people of Honduras, in common with those of Central America in general, are nominally Catholics, yet, among those capable of reflection or possessed of education, there are more who are destitute of any fixed creed--Rationalists or, as they are sometimes called, Freethinkers, than adherents of any form of religion." That the movement is also active in the other republics of the southern continent may be inferred from the facts that a Positivist organization has long subsisted in Brazil; that its members were active in the peaceful revolution which there substituted a republic for a monarchy; and that at the Freethought Congresses of Rome and Paris in 1904 and 1905 there was an energetic demand for a Congress at Buenos Aires, which was finally agreed to for 1906.
While popular propaganda is hardly possible save on political lines, freethinking journalism has counted for much in the most Catholic parts of Southern Europe. The influence of such journals is to be measured not by their circulation, which is never great, but by their keeping up a habit of more or less instructed freethinking among readers, to many of whom the instruction is not otherwise easily accessible. Probably the least ambitious of them is an intellectual force of a higher order than the highest grade of popular religious journalism; while some of the stronger, as De Dageraad of Amsterdam, have ranked as high-class serious reviews. In the more free and progressive countries, however, freethought affects all periodical literature; and in France it partly permeates the ordinary newspapers. In England, where a series of monthly or weekly publications of an emphatically freethinking sort has been nearly continuous from about 1840, new ones rising in place of those which succumbed to the commercial difficulties, such periodicals suffer an economic pinch in that they cannot hope for much income from advertisements, which are the chief sustenance of popular journals and magazines. The same law holds elsewhere; but in England and America the high-priced reviews have been gradually opened to rationalistic articles, the way being led by the English Westminster Review and Fortnightly Review, both founded with an eye to freer discussion.
Among the earlier freethinking periodicals may be noted The Republican, 1819-26 (edited by Carlile); The Deist's Magazine, 1820; The Lion, 1828 (Carlile); The Prompter, 1830 (Carlile); The Gauntlet, 1833 (Carlile); The Atheist and Republican, 1841-42; The Blasphemer, 1842; The Oracle of Reason (founded by Southwell), 1842, etc.; The Reasoner and Herald of Progress (largely conducted by Holyoake), 1846-1861; Cooper's Journal; or, unfettered Thinker, etc., 1850, etc.; The Movement, 1843; The Freethinker's Information for the People (undated: after 1840); Freethinker's Magazine, 1850, etc.; London Investigator, 1854, etc. Bradlaugh's National Reformer, begun in 1860, lasted till 1893. Mr. Foote's Freethinker, begun in 1881, still subsists. Various freethinking monthlies have risen and fallen since 1880--e.g., Our Corner, edited by Mrs. Besant, 1883-88; The Liberal and Progress, edited by Mr. Foote, 1879-87; the Free Review, transformed into the University Magazine, 1893-1898. The Reformer, a monthly, edited by Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner, subsisted from 1897 to 1904. The Literary Guide, which began as a small sheet in 1885, flourishes. Since 1900, a popular Socialist journal, The Clarion, has declared for rationalism through the pen of its editor, Mr. R. Blatchford ("Nunquam"), whose polemic has caused much controversy. For a generation back, further, rationalistic essays have appeared from time to time not only in the Fortnightly Review (founded by G. H. Lewes, and long edited by Mr. John (now Lord) Morley, much of whose writing on the French philosophes appeared in its pages), but in the Nineteenth Century, wherein was carried on, for instance, the famous controversy between Mr. Gladstone and Prof. Huxley. In the early 'seventies, the Cornhill Magazine, under the editorship of Leslie Stephen, issued serially Matthew Arnold's Literature and Dogma and St. Paul and Protestantism. In the latter years of the century quite a number of reviews, some of them short-lived, gave space to advanced opinions. But propaganda has latterly become more and more a matter of all-pervading literary influence, the immense circulation of the sixpenny reprints of the R. P. A. having put the advanced literature of the last generation within the reach of all.
