A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume...

77Religio Stoici, Edinburgh, 1663. p. 19. The essay was reprinted in 1665, and in London in 1693 under the title of The Religious Stoic. ↑

78Id. p. 18. ↑

79Id. p. 124. ↑

80Id. p. 76. ↑

81Id. p. 69. ↑

82Religio Stoici, p. 116. ↑

83Id. p. 122. ↑

84 This last is interesting as a probable echo of opinions he had heard from some of his older contemporaries: “Opinion kept within its proper bounds is an [ = the Scottish “ane”] pure act of the mind; and so it would appear that to punish the body for that which is a guilt of the soul is as unjust as to punish one relation for another” (pref. pp. 10–11). He adds that “the Almighty hath left no warrand upon holy record for persecuting such as dissent from us.” ↑

85Reason: an Essay, ed. 1690, p. 21. Cp. p. 152. ↑

86Id. p. 82. It is noteworthy that Mackenzie puts in a protest against “implicit Faith and Infallibility, those great tyrants over Reason” (p. 88). But the essay as a whole is ill-planned and unimpressive. ↑

87 Work cited, 2nd ed. pt. ii, pp. 106–15. ↑

88 Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 86–87, 89–90. This explanation is also given by Bishop Wilkins in his treatise on Natural Religion, 7th ed. p. 354. ↑

89 Replying to Herbert’s De Veritate, which he seems not to have read before. ↑

90 Pref. to Obs. upon the United Prov. of the Netherlands, in Works, ed. 1814, i, 36. ↑

91 Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 87, 94–98, 111, 112. ↑

92 As to the religious immoralism see Mosheim, 17 Cent. sec. ii, pt. ii, ch. ii, § 23, and Murdock’s notes. ↑

93 Compare the picture of average Protestant deportment given by Benjamin Bennet in his Discourses against Popery, 1714, p. 377. ↑

94 More, Coll. of Philos. Writings, 4th ed. 1712, gen. pref. p. 7. ↑

95 Compare some of the extracts in Thomas Bennet’s Defence of the Discourse of Schism, etc., 2nd ed. 1704, from the sermons of R. Gouge (1688). The description of men as “mortal crumbling bits of dependency, yesterday’s start-ups, that come out of the abyss of nothing, hastening to the bosom of their mother earth” (work cited, p. 93) is a reminder that the resonant and cadenced rhetoric of the Brownes and Taylors and Cudworths was an art of the age, at the command of different orders of propaganda. ↑

96 Cited by Bonnet, A Defence of the Discourse of Schism, etc., as cited, p. 41. ↑

97 Thus Henry More’s biographer, the Rev. Richard Ward, says “the late Mr. Chiswel told a friend of mine that for twenty years together after the return of King Charles the Second the Mystery of Godliness, and Dr. More’s other works, ruled all the booksellers in London” (Life of More, 1710, pp. 162–63). We have seen the nature of some of More’s “other works.” ↑

98The Reasonableness of Scripture Belief, 1672, Epist. Ded. ↑

99 Rep. 1675; 2nd ed. 1691; rep. in the Phœnix, vol. ii, 1708; 3rd ed. 1736. ↑

100 A very hostile account of him is given in Dict. of Nat. Biog. He was, however, the friend of Cowley, and the “M. Clifford” to whom Sprat addressed his sketch of Cowley’s Life. He was also a foe of Dryden—the “malicious Matt Clifford” of Dryden’s Sessions of the Poets; and he attacked the poet in Notes on Dryden’s Poems (published 1687), and is supposed to have had a hand in the Rehearsal. He was befriended by Shaftesbury. ↑

101Tract. Theol. Polit. c. 15. ↑

102 Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses, ii, 381–82; Granger, Biog. Hist. of England, 5th ed. v, 293. ↑

103 Johnson’s Life of Dr. Watts, 1785, App. i. ↑

104 Toulmin, Hist. of the Prot. Dissenters, 1814, citing Johnson’s Life of Dr. Watts. ↑

105 It has been suggested that this was really written by Clifford, for posthumous publication. The humorous sketch of “His Character” at the close, suggesting that his vices seem to the writer to have outweighed his virtues, hints of ironical mystification. ↑

106 Work cited, pp. 10, 14, 30, 55. ↑

107 Dr. Urwick, Life of Howe, as cited, p. xxxii. ↑

108A Demonstration of the Divine Authority of the Law of Nature and of the Christian Religion, by Samuel Parker, D.D., 1681, pref. The first part of this treatise is avowedly a popularization of the argument of Cumberland’s Disquisitio de Legibus Naturæ, 1672. Parker had previously published in Latin a Disiputatio de Deo et Providentia Divina, in which he raised the question, An Philosophorum ulli, et quinam Athei fuerunt (1678). ↑

109 Work cited, 2nd ed. 1682, pp. 32, 38–40, 45–48. ↑

110Id. pp. 54–55. ↑

111Id. p. 52. ↑

112Twelve Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions, 1692, pp. 438–39. ↑

113 This has been ascribed, without any good ground, to Charles Blount. It does not seem to me to be in his style. ↑

114 Premonition to the Candid Reader. ↑

115Hist. Nat. vii, 1. ↑

116 Pamphlet cited, pp. 20, 21. ↑