Deism

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(Latin Deus, God).

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The term used to denote certain doctrines apparent in a tendency of thought and
criticism that manifested itself principally in England towards the latter end of the
seventeenth century. The doctrines and tendency of deism were, however, by no
means entirely confined to England, nor to the seventy years or so during which most
of the deistical productions were given to the world; for a similar spirit of criticism
aimed at the nature and content of traditional religious beliefs, and the substitution for
them of a rationalistic naturalism has frequently appeared in the course
of religious thought. Thus there have been French and German deists as well as
English; while Pagan, Jewish, or Moslem deists might be found as well as Christian.

Because of the individualistic standpoint of independent criticism which they adopt, it is

difficult, if not impossible, to class together the representative writers who contributed
to the literature of English deism as forming any one definite school, or to group
together the positive teachings contained in their writings as any one systematic
expression of a concordant philosophy. The deists were what nowadays would be
called freethinkers, a name, indeed, by which they were not infrequently known; and
they can only be classed together wholly in the main attitude that they adopted, viz. in
agreeing to cast off the trammels of authoritative religious teaching in favour of a free
and purely rationalistic speculation. Many of them were frankly materialistic in their
doctrines; while the French thinkers who subsequently built upon the foundations laid
by the English deists were almost exclusively so. Others rested content with a criticism
of ecclesiastical authority in teaching the inspiration of the Sacred Scriptures, or the
fact of an external revelation of supernatural truth given by God to man. In this last
point, while there is a considerable divergence of method and procedure observable in
the writings of the various deists, all, at least to a very large extent, seem to concur.
Deism, in its every manifestation was opposed to the current and traditional teaching
of revealed religion.

In England the deistical movement seems to be an almost necessary outcome of the

political and religious conditions of the time and country. The Renaissance had fairly
swept away the later scholasticism and with it, very largely, the constructive philosophy
of the Middle Ages. The Protestant Reformation, in its open revolt against the authority
of the Catholic Church, had inaugurated a slow revolution, in which all religious
pretensions were to be involved. The Bible as a substitute for the living voice of the
Church and the State religion as a substitute for Catholicism might stand for a time; but
the very mentality that brought them into being as substitutes could not logically rest
content with them. The principle of private judgment in matters of religion had not run
its full course in accepting the Bible as the Word of God. A favourable opportunity would
spur it forward once more; and from such grudging acceptance as it gave to the
Scriptures it would proceed to a new examination and a final rejection of their claims.
The new life of the empirical sciences, the enormous enlargement of the physical
horizon in such discoveries as those of astronomy and geography,
the philosophical doubt and rationalistic method of Descartes, the advocated empiricism
of Bacon, the political changes of the times--all these things were factors in the
preparation and arrangement of a stage upon which a criticism levelled at revelational
religion might come forward and play its part with some chance of success. And though
the first essays of deism were somewhat veiled and intentionally indirect in their attack
upon revelation, with the revolution and the civil and religious liberty consequent upon
it, with the spread of the critical and empirical spirit as exemplified in the philosophy of
Locke, the time was ripe for the full rehearsal of the case against Christianity as
expounded by the Establishment and the sects. The wedge of private judgment had
been driven into authority. It had already split Protestantism into a great number of
conflicting sects. It was now to attempt the wreck of revealed religion in any shape or
form.

The deistical tendency passed through several more or less clearly defined phases. All
the forces possible were mustered against its advance. Parliaments took cognizance of
it. Some of the productions of the deists were publicly burnt. The bishops and clergy of
the Establishment were strenuous in resisting it. For every pamphlet or book that a
deist wrote, several "answers" were at once put before the public as antidotes. Bishops
addressed pastoral letters to their dioceses warning the faithful of the danger.
Woolston's "Moderator" provoked no less than five such pastorals from
the Bishop of London. All that was ecclesiastically official and respectable was ranged in
opposition to the movement, and the deists were held up to general detestation in the
strongest terms. When the critical principles and freethought spirit filtered down to the
middle classes and the masses, when such men as Woolston and Chubb put pen to
paper, a perfect storm of counter-criticism arose. As a matter of fact, not a
few educated and cultured men were really upon the side of a broad toleration in
matters of religion. The "wit and ridicule" by which the Earl of Shaftesbury would have
all tested meant, as Brown rightly notes, no more than urbanity and good nature. But
Shaftesbury himself would by no means allow that he was a deist, except in the sense
in which the term is interchangeable with theist; and Herbert of Cherbury, by far the
most cultured representative of the movement, is noted as having been the most
moderate and the least opposed of them all to the teachings of Christianity.

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One phase through which deism may be said to have passed was that of a critical
examination of the first principles of religion. It asserted its right to perfect tolerance on
the part of all men. Freethought was the right of the individual; it was, indeed, but one
step in advance of the received principle of private judgment. Such representatives of
deism as Toland and Collins may be taken as typical of this stage. So far, while critical
and insisting on its rights to complete toleration, it need not be, though as a matter of
fact it undoubtedly was, hostile to religion.

A second phase was that in which it criticized the moral or ethical part of religious
teaching. The Earl of Shaftesbury, for example, has much to urge against
the doctrine of doctrine of future rewards and punishments as the sanction of the moral
law. Such an attitude is obviously incompatible with the accepted teaching of the
Churches. Upon this follows a critical examination of the writings of the Old and New
Testaments, with a particular regard to the verification of prophecy and to
the miraculous incidents therein recorded. Antony Collins performed the first part of
this task, while Woolston gave his attention principally to the latter, applying to
Scriptural records the principles put forward by Blount in his notes to the "Apollonius
Tyanæus". Lastly, there was the stage in which natural religion as such was directly
opposed to revealed religion. Tindal, in his "Christianity as old as the Creation",
reduces, or attempts to reduce, revelation to reason, making the Christian statement of
revelational truths either superfluous, in that it is contained in reason itself, or
positively harmful, in that it goes beyond or contradicts reason.

It is thus clear that, in the main, deism is no more than an application of critical
principles to religion. But in its positive aspect it is something more, for it offers as a
substitute for revealed truth that body of truths which can be built up by the unaided
efforts of natural reason. The term deism, however, has come in the course of time to
have a more specific meaning. It is taken to signify a peculiar
metaphysical doctrine supposed to have been maintained by all the deists. They are
thus grouped together roughly as members of a quasi-philosophical school, the chief
and distinguishing tenet of which is the relationship asserted to obtain between the
universe and God. God, in this somewhat inferential and constructive thesis, is held to
be the first cause of the world, and to be a personal God.

So far the teaching is that of the theists, as contrasted with that

of atheists and pantheists. But, further, deism not only distinguishes the world
and God as effect and cause; it emphasizes the transcendence of the Deity at the
sacrifice of His indwelling and His providence. He is apart from the creation which He
brought into being, and unconcerned as to the details of its working. Having made
Nature, He allows it to run its own course without interference on His part. In this point
the doctrine of deism differs clearly from that of theism.

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The verbal distinction between the two, which are originally convertible terms--deism,
of Latin origin, being a translation of the Greek theism--seems to have been introduced
into English literature by the deists themselves, in order to avoid the denomination of
naturalists by which they were commonly known. As naturalism was the epithet
generally given to the teaching of the followers of the Spinozistic philosophy, as well as
to the so-called atheists, deism seemed to its professors at once to furnish a disavowal
of principles and doctrines which they repudiated, and to mark off their own position
clearly from that of the theists. The word seems however, to have been first employed
in France and Italy about the middle of the sixteenth century, for it occurs in the epistle
dedicatory prefixed to the second volume of Viret's "Instruction Chrétienne" (1563),
where the reforming divine speaks of some persons who had called themselves by a
new name--deists. It was principally upon account of their methods of investigation and
their criticism of the traditional Protestant religious teaching that they had also come to
to be called rationalists, opposing, as has been pointed out, the findings of unaided
reason to the truths held on faith as having come from God through external revelation.
Whether it was by ignoring this altogether, or by attempting actively to refute it and
prove its worthlessness, rationalism was the obvious term of their procedure. And it
was also, in very much the same manner, by their claiming the freedom to discuss on
these lines the doctrines set forth in the Bible and taught by the Churches, that they
earned for themselves the no less commonly given title of "freethinkers."

There are notable distinctions and divergences among the English deists as to the whole
content of truth given by reason. The most important of these distinctions is
undoubtedly that by which they are classed as "mortal" and "immortal" deists; for,
while many conceded the philosophical doctrine of a future life, the rejection of future
rewards and punishments carried with it for some the denial of the immortality of
the human soul. The five articles laid down by Lord Herbert of Cherbury, however, with
their expansion into six (and the addition of a seventh) by Charles Blount, may be
taken--and especially the former--as the formal professions of deism. They contain the
following doctrines:

 that there exists one supreme God,

 who is chiefly to be worshipped;
 that the principal part of such worship consists in piety and virtue;
 that we must repent of our sins and that, if we do so, God will pardon us;
 that there are rewards for good men and punishments for evil men both here
and hereafter.

Blount, while he enlarged slightly upon each of these doctrines, broke one up into two
and added a seventh in which he teaches that God governs the world by His
providence.

This can hardly be accepted as a doctrine common to the deists; while, as has been
said, future rewards and punishments were not allowed by them all. In general they
rejected the miraculous element in Scripture and ecclesiastical tradition. They would not
admit that there was any one "peculiar people", such as the Jews or the Christians,
singled out for the reception of a truth-message, or chosen to be the recipients of any
special grace or supernatural gift of God. They denied the doctrine of the Trinity and
altogether refused to admit any mediatorial character in the person of Jesus
Christ. The atonement, the doctrine of the "imputed righteousness" of Christ--especially
popular with orthodoxy at the time--shared the fate of all Christological doctrines at
their hands. And above all things and upon every occasion--but with at least one
notable exception--they raised their voices against ecclesiastical authority. They never
tired of inveighing against priestcraft in every shape or form, find they went so far as to
assert that revealed religion was an imposture, an invention of the priestly caste to
subdue, and so the more easily govern and exploit, the ignorant.

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