 | A sketch of old England |  |
LETTER XIV.
Thomas Paine, although his “Age of Reason” was answered
and refuted so completely in this country, is still,
though dead, an object against which the fears of this government
are strongly directed. To buy and read his book is considered
an overt act of disaffection, if not treason; and to sell
it, subjects a bookseller to a prosecution, although he may vend
the works of Tindal, Bolingbroke, Hume, Gibbon, Swift, Rabelais,
and Voltaire, in perfect security. This the most orthodox
booksellers do without scruple; and what is more, the
most orthodox of the clergy and nobility buy them with as
little. It is true, that Paine has treated the religion of our
fathers with indecent scurrility; whereas most of those who
previously attacked it, preserved an air of respect, which only
made their efforts the more dangerous. This is not, however,
the case with Tindal, Woolston, Swift, Rabelais, and Voltaire,
whose works, as I observed before, are still vended by the
trade, who, as there is no law to the contrary, settle the point
of conscience quietly among themselves.
Not long ago, I alarmed the shopman of a worthy bookseller,
by inquiring for a copy of Paine's works. This honest fellow
has lived so much among books, that he resembles an exceedingly
old edition of a man by Caxton or Wynkyn de Worde.
In reply to my question, he pursed up his mouth into an excruciating
vinegar expression, and assured me they never kept any
such vile trash in the store. I believe I have almost lost his
good opinion, for he eyes me ever since with a look of suspicion,
and I begin to believe takes me for a confirmed radical.
This worthy and well-meaning man, however, on my inquiring
for Voltaire and the rest, very courteously handed me
a quarto of Tindal, from which he brushed the dust with an
air of great devotion, being one of those excellent scholars
who actually worship a great book. What I mean to infer
from this toleration of other deistical works, and this inveterate
persecution of Paine, is simply, that a regard to the interests of
religion has nothing to do with the matter. I am no advocate
or defender of Paine's theological opinions. Though I look
upon him as one of the most clear and able advocates of human
rights, I certainly have no respect whatever for his religion or
morality. By his attacks on the Bible, he has not only meditated
a great injury to the welfare and happiness of mankind
here and hereafter, but he has likewise vitally injured the
interests of human freedom, by affording its enemies a pretext
to couple it with infidelity. Because the same writer
happened to advocate the rights of man, and question the
authority of the Scriptures, occasion has been taken to establish
a sort of affinity between the unbeliever and the republican,
which would probably never have been though of,
had it not been that the example of Paine afforded a pretext
for this preposterous association. For this reason, I am apt to
think him one of the worst enemies to liberty; and that, so far
as his influence extends, he has actually retarded the progress
of freedom more than all the efforts of the Holy Alliance.
But though the pretence set up by the ministry, the beneficed
clergy, and indeed all those orthodox people here, who enjoy
more than their share of the good things of this life, for persecuting
Paine and his opinions, is that of religion; yet nothing
is clearer to my mind, than that his political opinions are almost
exclusively the objects of their apprehension and hostility. If
he had only maintained the divine right of kings, I believe he
might have questioned any other divine right with impunity.
As it was, he afforded, by his religious, a pretext for prohibiting
the circulation of his political opinions; and although his
morals were quite equal, I am inclined to think, to most of the
which has deprived his opinions of a great portion of their
weight and authority. His Age of Reason has been triumphantly
refuted by men who were made bishops for their
good service: yet such are the apprehensions still entertained
by the good ministry and Church of England, that though his
book has been thus entirely subdued, they have actually outlawed
its disarmed heresies, and made it penal to print or to
read “this flippant, nonsensical, and dangerous blasphemy.”
Nothing, my dear brother, so strongly indicates the weakness
of a government as the fear of a book. It is a sign of a consumptive
habit in any system, religious or political, when it
shrinks from the battery of truth, much more when it is afraid
even of the sapping of falsehood. When a single volume, a single
newspaper, or a single individual becomes an object of royal,
ministerial, noble, or clerical apprehension, it would seem to
indicate, that the edifice which thus trembles at every blast, is
destitute of a proper basis of truth or utility, to sustain it
against reason, ridicule, or declamation.
In witnessing thus the whole force of the government applied
to the suppression of a single book, one might be tempted to
suppose, that Thomas Paine was the first English writer who
ventured to question the authority of the Bible, and the truth
of revealed religion; or, at all events, that the present king
was the only pious monarch, and the present ministers the only
pious ministers, this country has been blessed with since the
days of lord Herbert of Cherbury. He was one of the
bravest, most gallant, and accomplished persons of the seventeenth
century, a courtier and scholar combined. He has written
his own life with a degree of candour and openness, which
seems to prove him incapable of deceit or falsehood, and from
which it appears that he was somewhat spoiled by the admiration
of the ladies, with whom he was a great favourite, on
account of his wit, gallantry, and great personal beauty. Lord
Herbert was every where celebrated for his generosity and magnanimity;
nor can it be denied that he carried the point of
honour to a pitch that might almost be called fantastical. He
filled several offices about the court of England, and was ambassador
at the court of France for some time. Here he first
printed his work, “De Veritate prout distinguitur a Revelatione.”
This tract is a vindication of natural religion, which
he maintains to be in itself perfect without the aid of revelation.
That he might clearly understand whether his work was agreeable
to Heaven, he adopted the following method of consulting
its will previous to the publication. “I took,” he says, “my
book `De Veritate' in my hand, and kneeling on my knees,
light that now shines on me, and giver of all inward illumination!
I do beseech thee, of thy infinite goodness, to pardon
a greater request than I, a sinner, ought to make. I am not
satisfied enough whether I shall publish this book De Veritate;
if it be for thy glory, I beseech thee give me some sign from
Heaven; if not, I will suppress it.' I had no sooner spoke
these words, than a loud, though gentle noise came from
Heaven, (for it was like nothing on earth,) which did so comfort
and cheer me, that I took my petition as granted, and that
I had the sign demanded.”
Thomas Hobbes was one of the most learned and scientific
men of his age, and among the most acute reasoners, although
entirely worsted in a mathematical controversy with the famous
Dr. Wallis. He was a person of great purity and simplicity
of character, and held with Socrates, that a man was
bound to conform to the religion established by government.
Hobbes traces religion to a fear of invisible powers, and an
ignorance of second causes, which ascribes natural or accidental
appearances to supernatural power. Inspiration, he
affirms, is a sign of madness; the immortality of the soul, and
a belief in a future state, as hearsay; and the distinction between
soul and body, as a modern branch from the old root of
Grecian demonology; that the truth of the scriptures rests altogether
upon the decisions of councils and the will of magistrates,
who are the interpreters in authority, whose dicta must
be obeyed. He also maintained, that a subject might conscientiously
comply with the will of his sovereign, acting as
God's vicegerent, even to the denying of Christ in words,
while he cherished him in his heart. It was this courtly doctrine
of the king's supremacy, that probably procured him the
patronage of King Charles, who settled a pension upon him.
He also was all his lifetime patronised by the Earl of Devonshire,
at whose house he died in the year 1679. Unluckily,
however, he was not a democrat, and therefore affords no support
to the prevailing theory of the inflexible affinity between
freedom in politics and free opinions in religion.
Lord Shaftesbury was a cotemporary of Hobbes, but not,
like him, an advocate for the divine right of kings, being a
steady opposer of arbitrary power, although by no means a republican.
He wrote the famous “Characteristics,” and was
justly esteemed one of the most elegant scholars and well read
persons of the age. His style of writing, though condemned
by Blair, has been much admired by fine judges. Though
Lord Shaftesbury, in his dialogue of “the Moralists,” most
eloquently supports the doctrines of a Deity and superintending
the divinity of Christ. Hence he must be classed
with those, who, like Paine, have been the opponents of religion,
according to the opinions of orthodox writers, although
in other respects an advocate of virtue, and an enemy to arbitrary
power. For this last reason, while Hobbes was pensioned,
Shaftesbury lost his place of vice-admiral of Dorsetshire, and
continued out of favour with queen Anne.
Bolingbroke, the cotemporary of Pope and Swift, and one
of the finest English writers, imitated by Burke, and praised
by all the wits of his time, also wrote against revealed religion.
After the publication of his tracts, the grand jury of Westminster
presented them as calculated to subvert religion, morality,
and government. They have, however, continued to
be publicly vended in this country ever since; and have met
their antidote, as all such writings should do, not in the persecution
of their author, or the proscription of his book, but in
able and satisfactory refutations. Bolingbroke's opinions on
religious subjects were undoubtedly known during his life, for
he was not a man to keep them secret; yet he was secretary
of state to queen Anne, and owed his subsequent disgrace and
attainder, not to his religious, but his political opinions. His
favourite doctrine was, that atheists were much less dangerous
than divines. How came he to escape being burnt?
Matthew Tindal was another bold and bitter enemy to christianity,
cotemporary with Bolingbroke. He was the son of a
clergyman, and a doctor of laws at Oxford. He turned catholic
at the instance of some Roman missionaries, but afterwards
returned to the Church of England. He wrote a book
called “The rights of the Christian Church vindicated,” &c.
which waked up the high church clergy, who would go to
sleep at their fat stalls, if it were not for a blast of heterodoxy
to awaken them now and then. Tindal was furiously assailed
as a deist, and his publishers indicted. He afterwards published
a defence of this work, which was ordered by the house
of commons to be burnt by the common hangman, in the same
fire with Sacheverell's sermons. Like many other men, Tindal,
finding himself persecuted on suspicion of heterodoxy, was
spurred on by a sense of injury, and injustice perhaps, to direct
opposition. He accordingly wrote a book, called “Christianity
as old as the Creation;” in which he boldly and directly maintained
the broadest principles of natural religion, and denied
all external revelation. But his politics, as usual, atoned for
his heterodoxy; being a staunch advocate of the Hanoverian
succession, he enjoyed a persion of two hundred sterling a
year from George the First.
Toland, author of “Christianity not mysterious,” the “Pantheisticon,”
and other works, was a haughty, bold spirit, exasperated
by opposition into open and violent assaults on christianity.
Being prosecuted in Ireland for his first work, he
threw aside disguise, and afterwards came to England, where
he published the others, which contain the most undisguised
attacks. But though prosecuted in Ireland for the most moderate
of his productions, he remained unmolested in England
for the most violent of them all, and neither suffered in person
nor property, although heterodox in the extreme. He was
accused of dying with a blasphemous prayer in his mouth, beginning
with “Omnipotens et sempiterne Bacche,” &c. But
this is probably a calumny, as the prayer, according to Voltaire,
was composed two centuries before, for a society of
tipplers. He died with perfect composure, saying, “I am
going to sleep.”
Anthony Collins, author of “A Discourse on Free-thinking,”
“A Discourse of the grounds and reasons of the Christian Religion,”
and various other controversial works, was a man of
extraordinary ability, as well as great private and public virtues;
but he was one of the most dangerous enemies to orthodoxy
that ever lived, not excepting David Hume, whom he
resembled in many respects. Instead of being persecuted for
his opinions, he successively enjoyed the most honourable public
offices, such as deputy lord-lieutenant of Essex, and treasurer
of that county. On his death-bed he appealed to his
Maker for the purity of his intentions in all his writings. He
was a friend and correspondent of Mr. Locke, who had a great
regard for him, and his most bitter adversaries always treated
him with respect. They thought it better, perhaps, to take
the trouble of refuting him by their learning, than to resort to
the more easy and expeditious method of the modern Church
of England, clamour and persecution.
Thomas Woolston was a contemporary with Collins, and
mingled in the controversy with him and Dr. Clarke, who,
perhaps, of all the champions of orthodoxy, was the most able,
learned, and tolerant. He refuted Woolston, and interfered
for his release when imprisoned for a fine which he could not
pay, condemning every species of religious persecution. Woolston
was, in the latter part of his life, reputed mad by his opponents,
and yet, at the same time was prosecuted by the
attorney-general for his heresies; for it happened, unluckily
for him, that his opinions coincided with neither party, being
far more extravagant than those of lord Herbert, or any of
his successors. He belonged to no faction, and was persecuted
by one, without being protected by the other. His moral character
were, “This is a struggle which all men must go through,
and which I bear not only patiently but willingly;” certainly
neither the words of a madman nor unbeliever. Woolston was
offered his freedom from prison, if he would promise to refrain
from the further publication of his opinions. This he refused,
and it is said that he died in jail, although from the best authorities,
and the testimony of eye-witnesses, it appears that he
obtained his liberty, and died peaceably at his own house. He
maintained that the miracles of our Saviour were all allegorical,
and attempted to explain their mystical sense. Such was the
demand for his discourses against the miracles, that three editions,
of ten thousand copies each, were sold by himself at his
own house in a very short time.
Thomas Chubb was a person of extraordinary natural abilities,
which he managed greatly to improve by study, although
successively engaged as apprentice to a glover, and assistant
to a tallow-chandler. His first work was published in conjunction
with the celebrated Whiston, who, together with Pope
and many other persons, admired his talents greatly. He was
in truth, a philosopher of nature's forming. In his book, entitled
“The Supremacy of the Father asserted,” &c. his object
was to prove the Son a being of inferior order to the Father. It
engaged him, eventually, in a whole life of controversy,
though he escaped legal prosecution and clerical persecution.
Being charged with hostility to revealed religion, he proceeded
to justify himself; and, as often happens, in the zeal to defend
himself, advanced into the very errors with which he was
charged; he at length came to the point, and placed the Saviour
in the highest rank of teachers and moralists, such as Socrates
and Confucius. He was a man of great purity and simplicity
of character, and so disinterested, that he refused to
accept any addition to his income, which was already equal to
his wants. The famous Dr. Clarke, the two Hoadleys, the
bishop and Dr. Joh, although they rejected and opposed his
theory, bore testimony to his ability and virtues: but it must
be remembered, this was before it became orthodox to take
away a man's character for disagreeing in opinion. Chubb,
however, like many others of his class, is now known principally
through the writings of his adversaries, and has more reputation
than readers.
But of all those writers who attacked religion under many
masks, and in various ways, there is none who took such liberties,
and broke so many severe jests as Swift, a beneficed clergyman
of the Church of England. His “Tale of a Tub” is one of the
bitterest satires ever written; nor do I believe any works now
calculated to weaken our respect and reverence for the scriptures.
He possessed an admirable vein of humour, with an
invention that supplied him with all sorts of incidents in which
to display it; and having chosen the vehicle of a romance,
has had more readers than all the preceding catalogue of
writers put together. By placing the pulpit side by side with
the gallows and mountebank's stage, as theatres for the display
of eloquence, he did what would in preceding ages have cost
him his life. Yet he escaped persecution, and was rewarded
with a rich benefice. His only punishment was not obtaining
an English bishopric. The matter is easily explained; he was
the partisan of ministers, and the advocate of tory principles.
—This merit atoned for his having soused the christian religion
all over with ridicule. But I forget—he had another merit;
he made the catholic more ridiculous than any other, which
procured him toleration from the protestant divines.
It is not generally known, nor is it mentioned, that I recollect,
by any of his biographers, that Swift borrowed the
idea of his “Tale of a Tub” from an eastern story of considerable
antiquity, called “The Three Rings.” An old man,
having three sons, leaves each one at his death a ring: they fall
together by the ears about which is entitled to the handsomest.
After long debates and furious contentions, they make the discovery
that the three rings are all perfectly alike. The father
signifies Theism, and the three sons typify Judaism, Christianity,
and Mahommedanism. The three coats of Peter,
Martin, and Jack, and the three rings, suggest nearly the
same ideas, and the resemblance in the plans is certainly not
accidental.
During the eighteenth century, England appears to have
produced no other writers against orthodoxy of particular note,
except Hume, Gibbon, and Thomas Paine. The preceding
century had exhausted the subject in a great degree, or perhaps
few persons had the hardihood to resume a controversy,
which not only ensured a life of contention, but a bad name
after death. David Hume, however, the most cool and philosophical
of Scotsmen, published, during the last century, his
“Dialogues concerning Natural Religion,” and “Essays on
Suicide,” which last contains those principles that have called
forth the abuse and reproaches of thousands who have never
read them, and know not what they contain. He was certainly
a most sturdy heterodoxian; and though more temperate
as well as decorous in his style and manner, aimed greater
blows at religion and the immortality of the soul than Paine
himself. But his History of England made amends for his
right of kings. Hume became secretary to embassies and
charge des affaires; received a pension from the king; was
admired and respected by the first men of the age; and finally
died like Socrates, leaving behind him one of the best characters
on record.
Not long after the “Essays on Suicide,” appeared the celebrated
“History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,”
by Edward Gibbon. Gibbon had turned catholic when
young, and was sent to a calvinist minister at Lausanne by
his father, with a view of having him brought back to his
mother church. The experiment was successful, and Gibbon
abjured his errors. Two chapters of his great work gave offence
to the ruling church here. In relating the progress of the
christian religion, he ascribes much of its success to temporal
influence; in short, he maintains that secondary causes had
highly favoured the first establishment of the church. These
chapters of Gibbon were made the pretext perhaps, for avenging
the tales he has told of the profligacy of some of the
early patrons of the church—the ridicule he has cast upon
some of the most frivolous grounds of church divisions and
ecclesiastical persecutions—and above all, the light he has
thrown upon the creed of St. Athanasius. To these offences
may be added the terrible liberties he has taken with the
Reverend George of Cappadocia, tutelary saint of England.
This worthy he proves to have been one of the most corrupt,
unprincipled rogues of his time, by testimonials which are of
unquestionable authority. St. George is, however, the patron
of more orders of knighthood than any saint in the calendar,
and figures as the tutelary of the most noble order of the garter,
of which his excellent copyist, his present majesty, is
grand master. He was assailed by many writers of the established
church, and will descend to posterity as the enemy of
true religion. But his politics were right orthodox; as a
member of parliament, he voted with the ministry; as a political
writer, he supported the principles of Mr. Burke in his
“Reflections,” and professed himself an enemy to every species
of reform. Instead, therefore, of being fined, imprisoned,
or outlawed, he was made a lord of trade, a profitable sinecure,
and was a favourite of kings and their ministers all his
life.
But it was otherwise with Thomas Paine, who was neither
so profane as Tindal and Swift, nor so much of a sceptic as
Hume and Collins. His “Rights of Man” rendered his “Age of
Reason” unpardonable. Although the examples I have quoted,
and the fact that all the other heterodox books continue to be
his politics, and supported the divine right of kings,
with the same clearness and ability he did those of the people,
he might have enjoyed his unbelief unmolested either by church
or state. As I observed before, I have no great regard to the
memory of this person, although his early writings were serviceable
to our cause in the time of the revolutionary war.
All that he ever wrote in favour of freedom, is insufficient to
atone for the indecent and arrogant manner in which he questions
the authority of Holy Writ; nor can all the clearness of
his reasonings in support of human liberty, counterbalance the
injury he has inflicted upon it, by giving its enemies a plausible
pretext for connecting the progress of political freedom
with the spreading of religious indifference, if not absolute
unbelief.
In the present state of human intellect, the middling orders
of people here, who see the works of those writers I have just
enumerated publicly sold by the most orthodox booksellers,
and publicly bought by the most orthodox people (bishops and
all), naturally think they have a right to read these matters
in books adapted to their taste and capacity. Like the gravedigger
in Hamlet, they exclaim, “It is a shame, that great
folks shall have countenance to drown or hang themselves,
more than common christians.” Accordingly, they claim the
privilege of incurring the same risk as to the future, that their
superiors so beedlessly encounter. The higher orders, on the
contrary, seem to think that these books come under the class
of luxuries, to which the other classes have no right to aspire.
They are delicacies only calculated for the most refined palates,
and must not be prostituted to the uses of the vulgar. While they
do not hesitate to purchase and read the ribaldry of Rabelais
and Swift, as well as the dangerous heresies of Collins and
Hume, they prosecute the printers and purchasers of Paine,
and sentence Mr. and Mrs. Carlile, Miss Mary Ann Carlile,
and half-a-dozen more, to what, in fact, amounts to perpetual
imprisonment, for selling a twopenny pamphlet. Of those
guilty of these inconsistencies, what can we say, except that
they must be either the greatest hypocrites on earth, or the
most disinterested of human beings, since they heedlessly subject
themselves to a danger which they punish others for daring
to encounter? They had better be consistent, however, like
the great Mecænas of Germany, who honestly confesses his
motives, and has made abundance of regulations to prohibit
the introduction of Voltaire, Hume, Gibbon, and various others
whose works have ever since been not only more plenty, but
also more read, in the empire, than they were before. This
with the faculty of growing wise by experience.
As an abstract proposition, nobody ever denied that prosecution
had any other effect, than to render opinion more obstinate
in matters of religion.
Like to a mastiff dog;
Which, if tied up, so fierce he'll grow,
He'll bite his very clog.”
acted upon this universal experience. On the contrary, they
have ever proceeded upon the supposition, that they could do
what no other had ever done before, and cemented by oppression,
what, if let alone, would very probably have, in a few
years, crumbled to pieces.
| A sketch of old England | |