Historical Argument in the Writings of the English Deists GCB Roberts

271 Pages·2015·1.66 MB·English

Historical Argument in the Writings of the English Deists

G.C.B. Roberts
Abstract

‘Historical Argument in the Writings of the English Deists’
G.C.B. Roberts
Worcester College
DPhil in English
Submitted: Summer Vacation 2014
Word Count: 84,428

This study examines the role of history in the writings of the English deists, a group of
heterodox religious controversialists who were active from the last quarter of the
seventeenth century until the middle of the eighteenth century. Its main sources are the
published works of the deists and their opponents, but it also draws, where possible, on
manuscript sources. Not all of the deists were English (one was Irish and another was of
Welsh extraction), but the term ‘English Deists’ has been used on the grounds that the
majority of deists were English and that they published overwhelmingly in England and
in English. It shows that the deists not only disagreed with their orthodox opponents
about the content of sacred history, but also about the relationship between religious
truth and historical evidence.

Chapter 1 explains the entwining of theology and history in early Christianity, how the
connection between them was understood by early modern Christians, and how
developments in orthodox learning set the stage for the appearance of deism in the latter
decades of the seventeenth century. Each of the following three chapters is devoted to a
different line of argument which the deists employed against orthodox belief. Chapter 2
examines the argument that certain propositions were meaningless, and therefore neither
true nor false irrespective of any historical evidence which could be marshalled in their
support, as it was used by John Toland and Anthony Collins. Chapter 3 traces the
argument that the actions ascribed to God in sacred history might be unworthy of his
goodness, beginning with Samuel Clarke’s first set of Boyle Lectures and then
progressing through the writings of Thomas Chubb, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Morgan,
and William Warburton. Chapter 4 charts the decline of the category of certain
knowledge in the latter half of the seventeenth century, the rise of probability theory,
and the effect of these developments on the deists’ views about the reliability of
historical evidence. Chapter 5 is a case-study, which reads Anthony Collins’s Discourse
of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1724) in light of the findings of
the earlier chapters. Finally, a coda provides a conspectus of the state of the debate in
the middle decades of the eighteenth century, focusing on the work of four writers:
Peter Annet, David Hume, Conyers Middleton, and Edward Gibbon.
Acknowledgements
I have incurred debts in the writing of this thesis, which it is a pleasure to acknowledge
here. The first are to the librarians of the Bodleian Library, the British Library,
Cambridge University Library, Lambeth Palace Library, and the libraries of St John’s
College and Worcester College in Oxford. The second are to students and academics
who have helped me: Peter Auger, Alex Englander, Christine Gerrard, Mark Goldie,
Jonathan Gordon, Nick Hardy, Per Landgren, Rhodri Lewis, Jeffrey Miller, Kathryn
Murphy, David Norbrook, Emma Salgård-Cunha, Stefan Uhlig, Abigail Williams,
Kelsey Jackson Williams, Edmund White, and Philippa White. I am especially grateful
to David Womersley for his diligent and patient supervision.

I would also like to thank my parents and my brother Dunstan who have supported me
abidingly throughout.
Contents

Introduction 1

1. History and Christianity 22

I. The early Church 23
II. Textual criticism and Hebrew scholarship 31
III. Chronology and the creation 47
IV. Ecclesiastical history 57

2. History and Comprehensibility 74

I. Things contrary, above, and according to reason 76
II. The elimination of things above reason 85
III. The history of things above reason 90
IV. Negation and analogy 96
V. The comprehensibility of the God 99

3. History and the Moral Attributes of God 106

I. A priori and historical theology 107
II. The scriptures pruned 114
III. The scriptures felled 124
IV. The moral attributes of God and the ancient Jews 133
V. The ancient Jews defended 141

4. History, Certainty, and Doubt 147

I. Certainty, moral certainty, and opinion 148
II. The emergence of probability theory 157
II. Uncertainty and historical belief 163
IV. Christianity without history 172

5. Case Study: Anthony Collins’s Grounds and Reasons (1724) 178

I. The background to a debate 181
II. Intimations of ill-intent 186
III. Theology and historical change 195

Coda 205

Conclusion 218
Abbreviations

ESTC The English Short Title Catalogue
STC A Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and
Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475-1640, eds A.W.
Pollard and G.R. Redgrave, 2nd ed., revised W.A. Jackson, F.S.
Ferguson, and Katherine F. Pantzer, 3 vols (London: Bibliographical
Society, 1976-91)
Wing A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland,
Ireland, Wales, and British America and of the English Books Printed
in Other Countries, 1641-1700 (Index Society: New York, 1945–1951),
ed. Donald Wing
Conventions

Dates before the birth of Christ are marked BC. Dates afterwards are left unmarked.
Dates have been regularised to conform to the continental practice of having the year
begin on 1 January, rather than on 25 March as was the case in Britain until 1752. They
have otherwise been left unaltered. No attempt has been made to regularise the
discrepancy of 10 days which arose through the adoption from 1582 of the Gregorian
calendar in continental Europe.

There has, for general purposes, been an attempt to maintain gender-neutral language,
although male pronouns have been used when discussing anonymous sources. This is a
reflection of fact that third-person pronouns are difficult to avoid when talking about
individual human agency and that the anonymous sources discussed in this study were
very likely written by men. I am not, in applying this convention, asserting that any
given work was actually written by a man.

The names of writers which were habitually Latinised in the period (e.g. Hugo Grotius
rather than Huig de Groot) have been given in their Latinised form.

The titles of works have been changed so that they conform to modern standards of
capitalisation. Where the title is longer than can reasonably be included in a footnote, an
abbreviated form has been used and the full title given in the bibliography. Diphthongs
have been removed from titles and replaced with the appropriate vowels.

All works cited from before 1800 were printed in London unless otherwise stated.

Short title catalogue references have been given for quoted works which are not
uniquely identified by their title and date of publication: STC numbers cover works
from 1475-1640; Wing numbers cover works from 1641-1700; and ESTC numbers
cover works from 1701-1800.

In citing primary sources, every effort has been made to cite the first edition of a work
where this is appropriate. In the case of a small number of works with complicated
publication histories, a modern scholarly edition has been used.

In citing sources which were published anonymously, pseudonymously, or with initials,
and of which the author is now known, the author’s name is given first, followed by the
word ‘anonymous’, the pseudonym, or the initials in brackets. In citing pseudonymous
or initialled sources of whom the author remains unknown, the word ‘anonymous’ is
given first, followed by the pseudonym or initials in brackets.

Page signatures have been given for works which do not include page numbers or in
which the page numbers are unreliable.

The original italicisation and capitalisation have been retained in quotations from works
written before 1800 with the following exceptions for quotations in English:

- Fossil thorns have been rendered as ‘th’
- Long ‘s’s have been rendered as ‘s’
- ‘v’s given as ‘u’s have been rendered as ‘v’s
- ‘u’s given as ‘v’s have been rendered as ‘u’s’
- ‘w’s given as double ‘v’s or double ‘u’s have been rendered as ‘w’s
- Letters and numbers linking to footnotes have been omitted
- Where the first word of a paragraph, a proper name, or the words ‘God’ or ‘Christ’
are given entirely in capitals, the word has been rendered with only the first letter
capitalised
- Contractions have been expanded with the missing letters supplied in squared
brackets

All biblical quotations are taken from the Authorized or King James Version of the
Bible.
Introduction
After its Restoration in 1660, the Church of England underwent sustained attack, from
Catholics and Protestant dissenters and from a new kind of religious controversialist
who took issue with Christianity as a whole. Critics of this latter kind took many forms,
but were united in their efforts to shake the foundations of orthodox belief. The most
important group among them were the deists, who rose from relative obscurity in the
1670s to offer a serious threat to the Church of England in the 1720s and 30s, before
dissipating in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The aim of this study is to
explain the role of history in the arguments between the deists and their critics. It shows
how the deists combined arguments about the content of Christian history with
arguments about whether the truth of Christianity could depend on historical evidence.
Deism is not easily defined.1 The term was used to describe a variety of positions,
ranging from scepticism about the reliability of the Bible, through disbelief in miracles,
prophecy, providence, and revelation, to denials of the afterlife, the divinity of Jesus,
and even God’s creation of the world.2 The term retained a broad range of meanings

1 In Europe, ‘deistes’ was first used in Pierre Viret’s Exposition de la Doctrine de la Foy Chrestienne
(Geneva, 1564), sig. C5v. In England, ‘deist’ was first used in print in Joseph Hall’s A Sermon of
Publike Thanksgiving for the Wonderfull Mitigation of the Late Mortalitie (1626), sig. A7v and in
Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1628), sig. Kkkk1v; it was first defined (under the
heading ‘Anti-Trinitarians’) in Thomas Pope Blount’s Glossographia (1656), Wing B3334, sig. D2r;
and it was first used to designate a category of religious controversialist in Edward Stillingfleet’s A
Letter to a Deist (1677), title page and passim. ‘Deism’ was first used in John Dryden’s Religio Laici
(1682), Wing D2342, sig. a1v. ‘Theist’, meaning the same as ‘deist’, entered English a little later, was
interchangeable with it, fell out of use in the latter decades of the seventeenth century, and began to be
used to refer to those who believed in God, in contradistinction to atheists, in the early eighteenth
century. For the first use of ‘theist’ in its earlier sense, see Thomas Pierce, Autokatakrisis (1658), sig.
N1r and, for an example of its use in the latter sense, see William Warburton, The Divine Legation of
Moses Demonstrated on the Principles of a Religious Deist, 2 vols (1738-41), I, 46.
2 There has been some debate about whether the term should be used by modern scholars, either because
it was hopelessly vague or because the phenomenon which it referred to was exaggerated. There is some
truth in these allegations, but they underestimate the consistency of Anglican apologists in defining and
applying the term. It would be strange, moreover, if so many works had been written about deism
(perhaps 1,500, between 1675 and 1750) without referring to some concrete reality. See S.J. Barnett,
Idol Temples and Crafty Priests: The Origins of Enlightenment Anticlericalism (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1999), 129-51; S.J. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 11-37; and Robert E. Sullivan, John Toland and the
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even when the refutation of deism became a major objective for Anglican apologists.
The Boyle Lecturers, who included some of the Church of England’s most respected
defenders, distinguished various species of deism, which they sought to confute and
confound.3 But although ‘deism’ was a flexible and capacious term, it was most often
used to refer to disbelief in revelation.4 Likewise, though many works were written
against deism which omitted to identify any deists, and though many people were
accused of deism, a small number of names occurred repeatedly: John Toland, Anthony
Collins, and Matthew Tindal in the first three decades of the eighteenth century; and
Thomas Chubb and Thomas Morgan after 1730.5 These are the figures with whom this
study is principally concerned.
While there was consensus about what deism was and who the deists were, the deists
themselves were hostile or ambivalent towards the term. Some purported to be
defending Christianity from deism.6 Some used it to describe other people or defined

Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 205-35.
For details of how the term was defined, see the following three footnotes.
3 See Richard Bentley, The Folly of Atheism and (what is now Called) Deism, even with Respect to the
Present Life (1692), Wing B1932, 4-10 and Samuel Clarke, A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable
Obligations of Natural Religion and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation (1706), 19-45.
4 See Stillingfleet, Letter to a Deist, sig. A3r; William Stephens, An Account of the Growth of Deism in
England (1696), 4; Charles Leslie, A Short and Easie Method with the Deists (1698), 5-7; John
Edwards, A Free Discourse Concerning Truth and Error, Especially in Matters of Religion (1701), 87;
Francis Gastrell, The Principles of Deism (1708), 9-10; Joseph Smith, The Unreasonableness of Deism
(1720), xii; and John Reynolds, Three Letters to the Deist (1725), 2-3.
5 See Gastrell, The Principles of Deism, 47; Thomas Woolston, A Free Gift to the Clergy (1722), ESTC
T040177, 60; Thomas Sherlock, The Tryal of the Witnesses of the Resurrection of Jesus (1729), ESTC
T058115, 5; Warburton, The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, I, 416; William Whiston,
Historical Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Samuel Clarke (1730), ESTC T036320, 88; William Whiston,
Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. William Whiston, 2 vols (1753), I, 96; John Leland, A View of
the Principal Deistic Writers, 3 vols (1754-56), passim; anonymous, The Freethinker’s Catechism
(1755), passim; William Warburton, Remarks on Mr. David Hume's Essay on the Natural History of
Religion (1757), 76; Peter Annet, Tyranny and Persecution Enemies to Liberty and Truth; Displayed in
Prose and Verse, by a Lover of Truth and Righteousness (1763), xxxiv; and Edmund Burke, Reflections
on the Revolution in France, ed. L.G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 89. Edward
Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury, Baruch Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, Charles Blount, Anthony
Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Thomas Woolston, Peter Annet, Conyers Middleton, and Henry
St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, were also routinely identified as deists, but are absent from this
study, or feature in it only in passing, because they fall outside its chronological limits or because their
works did not exhibit the interplay of evidential and abstract arguments which is the focus of this study.
6 See John Toland (anonymous), Christianity not Mysterious (1696), Wing T1762, 176.
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themselves in opposition to it.7 And others used it to describe themselves, but only with
the ambiguous prefix ‘Christian’.8 Nor were they content with their opponents’
placement of them outside Christianity. Though they were habitually unclear about their
position on many matters of doctrine, they professed belief in God, upheld the need for
public worship, and presented themselves in general terms as Christians. They did not
attack Christianity directly, but exacerbated divisions within the Church of England by
defending marginal positions in debates which were internal to Christianity. Many of
the deists knew each other personally, but there was never an organised deist movement
or a set of beliefs to which they subscribed.
There were also important differences among them. Toland rose from humble origins in
Ireland to become an international figure, whose patrons included the Electress Sophia
of Hanover and Prince Eugene of Savoy.9 Toland’s writings encompassed theology and
philosophy, but he was active primarily as an ecclesiastical historian, scouring the
Bodleian Library and other collections, both in Britain and abroad, for incendiary
scholarly finds.10 Collins was a different figure. After studying under the philosopher

7 See Charles Blount et al., The Oracles of Reason (1693), Wing B3312, sigs E8v-E12vand Anthony
Collins (anonymous), A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1724), ESTC
T140491, xlviii.
8 ‘Christian deist’ was coined by Tindal and then used by Morgan to describe a speaker in a dialogue,
whose name he later adopted as a pseudonym. Chubb used the term to describe his own position. See
Matthew Tindal (anonymous), Christianity as Old as the Creation: or, the Gospel, a Republication of
the Religion of Nature (1730), ESTC T101186, 373-82; Thomas Morgan (anonymous), The Moral
Philosopher (1737), title page; Thomas Morgan (‘Philalethes’), The Moral Philosopher. Vol. II (1739),
title page; and Thomas Chubb, An Enquiry into the Ground and Foundation of Religion (1740), viii. On
Morgan’s pseudonymity, see Jan Van Den Berg, ‘Is Thomas Morgan Philalethes?’, Notes and Queries,
58:3 (2011), 400-01 and, for a summary of deists’ attitudes to ‘deist’ and ‘deism’, see Wayne Hudson,
The English Deists: Studies in Early Enlightenment (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), 2-3.
9 See Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696-
1722 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 1-22 and passim.
10 Ibid., 25-42. In particular, Toland was notable for publishing details of an Italian manuscript of the
Gospel of Barnabas, which he had seen in the library of Prince Eugene of Savoy. On this topic, see
Justin Champion, ‘Introduction’, in John Toland, Nazaenus, ed. Justin Champion (Oxford: Voltaire
Foundation, 1999), 1-106 and Justin Champion, ‘Apocrypha, Canon and Criticism from Samuel Fisher
to John Toland, 1650-1718’, in Allison P. Coudert, Sarah Hutton, Richard D. Popkin, and Gordon M.
Weiner (eds), Judaeo-Christian Intellectual Culture in the Seventeenth Century: A Celebration of the
Library of Narcissus Marsh (1638-1713) (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), 91-117.
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