by Will Durant
At Eton William protested against the discipline; he thought the fagging would break the spirit of the students; it did not break his. At Oxford he distinguished himself by suffering from gout at the age of eighteen. Hoping to shake off the ailment in a warmer climate, he left the university without a degree and traveled in France and Italy, but gout remained his cross through all his victories. Nevertheless he joined the army, served in it for four years, saw no battle, but came out with the conviction that war is the arbiter of history and the destiny of states. In 1735 his family, while keeping him relatively poor as a younger son, bought Old Sarum’s votes for him, and he began his career in Parliament.
He soon made himself heard there, for he was the most effective orator that that forensic cavern has ever known. All the force of his passionate character went into his speeches, all his resolve to rise to power, to unseat Walpole, to dominate Parliament and the King, finally to remake Europe to his heart’s desire. For those purposes he used logic, drama, imagination, enthusiasm, poetry, bombast, invective, sarcasm, satire, appeals to patriotism, to personal and national interest and glory. As the years progressed he developed his oratorical mastery until it embraced all the arts of a Demosthenes or a Cicero. He could lower his voice to a whisper, or raise it to an angry roar; he could sink an enemy with a phrase. He followed Demosthenes’ rule and made action the life of speech; every line had its gesture, every feeling molded his hawklike face and glowed in his deep-set eyes, until his whole body came into play as if the word had been made flesh. He was the greatest actor that ever shunned the stage.
He was no saint. Ambition was the mast of his character and the wind in his sails; but it redeemed itself by embracing all England, and consumed itself in dragging England, willy-nilly, out over imperial seas to world supremacy. Feeling himself to be the voice of the state, beyond any Hanoverian gutturals or Walpolian bribes, he appropriated the ethic of governments—that all is good that advantages the state; if he used deception, calumny, intimidation, intrigue, ingratitude, perjury, treachery, these were tools of the statesman’s trade, and were to be judged not by preachers but by kings. At nearly every step in his rise he turned his back upon a position that he had recently defended with all the sublimity of moral passion;80 he seldom stopped to explain or apologize; he mounted all intent toward his goal; and his success—which was England’s—sanctified his sins and haloed his head. Meanwhile there was something grand in his pride; he disdained to buy advancement with servility, he remained incorruptible amid corruption, and he attained his ends by the force of an uncompromising personality that would not be deterred.
He pursued Walpole as a peacemongering merchant too chicken-livered to risk war with Spain, and too subservient to a king who, said Pitt, showed an “absurd, ungrateful, and perfidious partiality for Hanover,” and “considered England only as a province to a despicable electorate.”81 The ardent orator pursued his martial policy with such intensity that the Duchess of Marlborough, dying in 1744, left Pitt a legacy of ten thousand pounds, for Sarah had inherited her dead Duke’s love of war. When Pelham came to office he asked the King to make Pitt secretary of war; George II, still burning with Pitt’s fire, refused. Pelham persisted; he described Pitt as “the most able and useful man we have amongst us, truly honorable and strictly honest.”82 The King yielded, and in 1746 Pitt entered the ministry, first as joint vice-treasurer for Ireland, then as paymaster of the forces. This position had become by custom a mine of personal wealth: the paymaster took for himself one half of one per cent of all subsidies voted by Parliament to foreign princes; and he invested at interest—which he kept for himself—the large floating balance left with him for the payment of troops. Pitt refused to take anything more than his official salary; when the King of Sardinia pressed him to accept a gift equal to the usual deduction from his subsidy he declined it. England, which had long accounted such perquisites as a normal accommodation to the nature of man, applauded Pitt’s anomalous integrity, and listened with eagerness to his pleas for a Britain that would bestride the world.
In June, 1755, without a declaration of war, hostilities between England and France broke out in America. In January, 1756, England signed a treaty with Prussia. In May France concluded a defensive alliance with Austria. In November Pitt, now secretary of state, became England’s voice and arm in that Seven Years’ War that would determine the map of Europe till the French Revolution.
* * *
I. Cf. Lord Birkenhead’s summary: “The Whigs went bathing, and Bolingbroke stole their clothes.”43
II. According to Horace Walpole, when Jenkins died he was found to have two perfectly sound ears. Burke spoke of “the fable of Jenkins’ ears.”47 Another version attributed the amputation to a pirate, who was punished therefor by the Spanish government.48
CHAPTER IV
Religion and Philosophy
I. THE RELIGIOUS SITUATION
THE story of the eighteenth century in Western Europe had a double theme: the collapse of the Christian religion that had given it spiritual and social support. State and faith were bound together in mutual aid, and the fall of one seemed to involve the other in volve the other in a common tragedy.
In both aspects of the great change England played the first act. On the political stage her Civil War of 1642–49 preceded by 147 years the French Revolution in deposing a feudal aristocracy and beheading a king. In the religious realm the deistic criticism of Christianity antedated by half a century the Voltairean campaign in France; the materialism of Hobbes preceded by a century the materialism of La Mettrie; Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739) and his essay “Of Miracles” (1748) antedated the attack of the French philosophes upon Christianity in the Encyclopédie (1751). Voltaire had learned his skepticism in France—partly from the English exile Bolingbroke—before coming to England; but his three years in England (1726–28) startled him with the sight of orthodoxy in decay, Catholicism humiliated, Protestantism breaking up into feeble sects, and deists challenging everything in Christianity except the belief in God-precisely the challenge that Voltaire would carry to France. “In France,” said Voltaire, “I am looked upon as having too little religion; in England as having too much.”1
Montesquieu, visiting England in 1731, reported, “There is no religion in England.”2 This was, of course, an exercise in striking hyperbole; at that very time John and Charles Wesley were founding the Methodist movement at Oxford. But Montesquieu, an aristocrat, moved mostly among lords and ladies of the peerage or the pen; and in these groups, he tells us, “if religion is spoken of, everybody laughs.”3 This too seems extreme; but hear Lord Hervey, who knew almost every man, woman, and deviate in the upper classes:
This fable of Christianity … was now [1728] so exploded in England that any man of fashion or condition would have been almost as much ashamed to own himself a Christian as formerly he would have been to profess himself none. Even the women who prided themselves at all on their understanding took care to let people know that Christian prejudices were what they despised being bound by.4
In those exalted ranks or minds religion meant either the somnolence of the Anglican communion or the “enthusiasm” of the Dissenting sects; and Dr. Johnson would soon define enthusiasm as “a vain belief of private revelation”—literally a “god within.” The Established Church had lost face and influence by supporting the Stuarts against the Hanoverians and the triumphant Whigs; now it submitted to the state, and its clergy became humble dependents of the ruling class. The country parson was the favorite butt of literary satire or vulgar ridicule; Fielding honored the exceptions in Parson Adams. Class distinctions prevailed in the churches; the rich had special pews near the pulpit, the tradesmen sat behind them, the common people sat or stood in the rear; and when the service was over, the commoners remained in their places while their superiors filed out in slow dignity.5 In some London churches, when too many of the poor came to worship, the periwigged members fled, locking their pews behind them,6 and seek
ing fresher air.
Some Anglican bishops, like Butler, Berkeley, and Warburton, were men of great learning, and two of these were of fine character; but most of the upper clergy, maneuvering for promotion, played politics with the skeptics and mistresses of the court, and consumed in luxury the revenues of many parishes. Bishop Chandler, we are told, paid £9,000 for advancement from Lichfield to Durham; Bishop Willis of Winchester, Archbishop Potter of Canterbury, Bishops Gibson and Sherlock of London died “shamefully rich,” some of them worth £100,00o.7 Thackeray had no stomach for them:
I read that Lady Yarmouth [mistress of George II] sold a bishopric to a clergyman for £5,000.… Was he the only prelate of his time led up by such hands for consecration? As I peep into George II’s St. James’s, I see crowds of cassocks rustling up the back stairs of the ladies of the court; stealthy clergy slipping purses into their laps; that godless old King yawning under his canopy in his Chapel Royal as the chaplain before him is discoursing, [or] chattering in German … so loud that the clergyman … burst out crying in his pulpit because the defender of the faith and dispenser of bishoprics would not listen to him!8
It was a sign of the times that the Established Church had become broadly tolerant of different theologies and rituals among its members. Pitt described it as “a Calvinist creed, a Popish liturgy, and an Arminian clergy”9—i.e., the official doctrine was predestinarian, the ritual was semi-Roman Catholic, but a Latitudinarian spirit allowed Anglican ministers to reject Calvin’s determinism and adopt the free-will teaching of the Dutch heretic Arminius. Toleration grew because faith declined. Heresies like Hume’s, which would have startled seventeenth-century England, made now but a slight ripple on the stream of British thought. Hume himself described England as “settled into the most cool indifference with regard to religious matters that is to be found in any nation in the world.”10
The letter of the law made the Anglican worship compulsory on all Englishmen. A man who absented himself from Sunday services was liable to a fine of a shilling for each truancy; and anyone who allowed such an absentee to live with him was subject to a fine of twenty pounds per month;11 these laws, however, were seldom enforced. Again in law rather than practice, Catholic services were outlawed. A Catholic priest who performed any sacerdotal function was subject to life imprisonment. A like penalty discouraged any Catholic from keeping a school; and no parent might send his child abroad for a Catholic education, under penalty of £100 fine. Only those citizens who took the oaths of allegiance and supremacy (acknowledging the king of England to be head of the Church), and declared against transubstantiation, were eligible to buy or inherit land. Any Catholic who refused to take these oaths was excluded from civil or military office, from the practice of law, from bringing any action at law, and from living within ten miles of London; moreover, such a Catholic might at any time be banished from England, and be sentenced to death if he returned. Actually, however, under Georges I and II, Catholics regularly transmitted their property and their creed to their children; they could hear Mass unhindered in their chapels and homes; and many of them took the required oaths with a mental reservation.12
Nearly all ardent English Protestants were now in the sects dissenting from the Established Church. Voltaire laughed and rejoiced at their multiplicity: Independents (Puritans), Presbyterians, Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers, Socinians (Unitarians). The Presbyterians, having lost political power, were becoming tolerant; they did not take predestination very seriously, and many of them were quietly content with a human Christ.13 In 1719 an assembly of Presbyterian clergymen voted 73 to 69 that subscription to the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity should no longer be required of candidates for the ministry.14 The Quakers were increasing not in number but in wealth; and as they rose in the social scale they became more reconciled to the ways and sins of men. A tendency to gloom infected nearly all Dissenters, even in prosperity; and while the upper classes made Sunday a day of frolic, the lower middle class—where Dissent was strongest—continued the “blue Sunday” of the Puritans. There, after morning prayers at home, the family went to the meetinghouse for a service that lasted two hours; back at home, the father read the Bible or pious books to his wife and children, who, as like as not, sat on cushions on the uncarpeted floor. Normally they went to services again in the afternoon and evening, prayed together, heard another sermon, and found some pleasure in singing sonorous hymns. No profane singing was allowed on that holy day, no card-playing, in general no amusement of any kind. Travel was to be avoided on the Sabbath, so allowing the highwaymen a day of rest.
Voltaire, reviewing the religious scene of England, found much in it to carry a lesson to a France where intolerance still ruled:
Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London.… There the Jew, the Mohammedan, and the Christian transact business together as though they were all of the same religion, and give the name of Infidels to none but bankrupts; there the Presbyterian confides in the Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends upon the Quaker’s word. At the breaking up of this … free assembly some withdraw to the synagogue, and others to take a glass. This man goes and is baptized in a great tub in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; that man has his son’s foreskin cut off, and causes a set of Hebrew words—to the meaning of which he himself is a total stranger—to be mumbled over the infant; others [Quakers] retire to their churches, and there wait the inspiration of heaven with their hats on; and all are satisfied.
If one religion only were allowed in England, the government would very possibly become arbitrary; if there were but two, the people would cut one another’s throats; but as there is such a multitude, they all live happy and in peace.15
II. THE DEISTIC CHALLENGE
Many factors worked together to undermine the Christian creed in England: the association of the Church with the rise and fall of political parties, the growth of wealth and the demands of pleasure in the upper classes, the internationalism of ideas through commerce and travel, the increasing acquaintance with non-Christian religions and peoples, the multiplication and mutual criticism of sects, the development of science, the growth of belief in natural causes and invariable laws, the historical and critical study of the Bible, the importation or translation of such epochal books as Bayle’s Dictionnaire and Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus, the abandonment (1694) of state censorship of the press, the rising prestige of reason, the new attempts of philosophy, in Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke, to give natural explanations of the world and man, and—summing up many of these factors– the campaign of the deists to reduce Christianity to a belief in God and immortality.
That movement had begun with Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s De Veritate in 1624; it had grown through the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with Charles Blount, John Toland, and Anthony Collins; now it proceeded with cumulative effect in Whiston, Woolston, Tindal, Middleton, Chubb, Annet, and Bolingbroke. William Whiston, who had succeeded Newton as Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, was dismissed from that post (1710) for expressing some doubts on the Trinity; he defended his Arianism in Primitive Christianity Revived (1712), and labored to show that Old Testament prophecies had no reference to Christ. When the defenders of Christianity abandoned the argument from prophecy, and based the divinity of Christ upon the miracles related in the New Testament, Thomas Woolston let loose his irreverent ebullience in Six Discourses on the Miracles of Our Saviour (1727–30). “Never,” said Voltaire, “was Christianity so daringly assailed by any Christian.”16 Woolston argued that some of the miracles were incredible and others absurd. He found it especially unbelievable that Christ had cursed a fig tree for not producing figs so early in the year as Easter. He wondered what the English woolgrowers would have done to Jesus if he had sent a flock of their sheep to death as he had done with the Gadarene swine; they “would have made him swing for it,” for English law made such an action a capital crime.17 Woolston thought that the story of Christ’s resurrection was an elaborate decep
tion practiced by the Apostles upon their audiences. He covered all this with protestations that he remained a Christian “as sound as a rock.” However, he dedicated each of his discourses to a different bishop with such condemnation of their pride and avarice that they indicted him for libel and blasphemy (1729). The court condemned him to pay a fine of a hundred pounds, and to give security for future good behavior. Unable to raise the required sums, he went to jail. Voltaire offered a third of the amount, the remainder was raised, and Woolston was freed. Doubtless the trial advertised the Discourses; they sold sixty thousand copies in a few years.18 An anonymous Life of Woolston (1733) told how, when he was walking in St. George’s Fields,
a jolly young woman met him and accosted him in the following manner: … “You old rogue, are you not hanged yet?” To which Mr. Woolston answered: “Good woman, I know you not; pray, what have I done to offend you?” To which the woman replied: “You have writ against my Saviour; what would become of my poor sinful soul if it was not for my dear Saviour?—my Saviour who died for such wicked sinners as I am.”19
The deistic propaganda reached its climax in Matthew Tindal, a fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford. After a quiet and respectable life, marked chiefly by conversions to and from Catholicism, he published at the age of seventy-three the first volume of Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730). At his death three years later he left the manuscript of a second volume, which fell into the hands of a bishop, who destroyed it. We may estimate the impact of Volume I from the 150 replies that sought to counter it; it was this book that called forth Bishop Butler’s Analogy of Religion and Bishop Berkeley’s Alciphron.
