debating against the orthodox, that the flood of error in the hostile camp was due to the benevolent cunning or deliberate self-seeking of unscrupulous men, supported by the ignorant with the obstinacy of prejudice.
Yet deism deserves to be remembered as a strenuous protest against bibliolatry in every degree and against all traditionalism in theology. It sought to look not a few facts full in the face, from a new point of view and with a thoroughly modern though unhistorical spirit. It was not a religious movement; and though, as a defiance of the accepted theology, its character was mainly theological, the deistical crusade belongs, not to the history of the church, or of dogma, but to the history of general culture. It was an attitude of mind, not a body of doctrine; its nearest parallel is probably to be found in the eclectic strivings of the Renaissance philosophy and the modernizing tendencies of cisalpine humanism. The controversy was assumed to be against prejudice, ignorance, obscurantism; what monks were to Erasmus the clergy as such were to Woolston. Yet English deism was in many ways characteristically English. The deists were, as usually happens with the leaders of English thought, no class of professional men, but represented every rank in the community. They made their appeal in the mother tongue to all men who could read and think, and sought to reduce the controversy to its most direct practical issue. And, with but one or two exceptions, they avoided wildness in their language as much as in the general scheme of theology they proposed. If at times they had recourse to ambiguity of speech and veiled polemic, this might be partly excused when we remember the hanging of Thomas Aikenhead in 1697 for ridiculing the Bible, and Woolston’s imprisonment in 1729.
French deism, the direct progeny of the English movement, was equally short-lived. Voltaire during his three years’ residence in England (1726–1729) absorbed an enthusiasm for freedom of thought, and provided himself with the arguments necessary to support the deism which he had learned in his youth; he was to the end a deist of the school of Bolingbroke. Rousseau, though not an active assailant of Christianity, could have claimed kindred with the nobler deists. Diderot was for a time heartily in sympathy with deistic thought; and the Encyclopédie was in its earlier portion an organ of deism. Even in the Roman Catholic Church a large number of the leading divines were frankly deistic, nor were they for that reason regarded as irreligious. But as Locke’s philosophy became in France sensationalism, and as Locke’s pregnant question, reiterated by Collins, how we know that the divine power might not confer thought on matter, led the way to dogmatic materialism, so deism soon gave way to forms of thought more directly and completely subversive of the traditional theology. None the less it is unquestionable that in the period preceding the Revolution the bulk of French thinkers were ultimately deists in various degrees, and that deism was a most potent factor not only in speculative but also in social and political development. Many of the leaders of the revolutionary movement were deists, though it is quite false to say that the extreme methods of the movement were the result of widespread rationalism.
In Germany there was a native free-thinking theology nearly contemporary with that of England, whence it was greatly developed and supplemented. Among the earliest names are those of Georg Schade (1712–1795), J. B. Basedow (1723–1790), the educationist, Johann August Eberhard (q.v.); and K. F. Bahrdt, who regarded Christ as merely a noble teacher like Moses, Confucius and Luther. The compact rational philosophy of Wolff nourished a theological rationalism which in H. S. Reimarus was wholly undistinguishable from dogmatic deism, and was undoubtedly to a great extent adopted by Lessing; while, in the case of the historico-critical school to which J. S. Sender belonged, the distinction is not always easily drawn—although these rationalists professedly recognized in Scripture a real divine revelation, mingled with local and temporary elements. It deserves to be noted here that the former, the theology of the Aufklärung, was, like that of the deists, destined to a short-lived notoriety; whereas the solid, accurate and scholarly researches of the rationalist critics of Germany, undertaken with no merely polemical spirit, not only form an epoch in the history of theology, but have taken a permanent place in the body of theological science. Ere rationalismus vulgaris fell before the combined assault of Schleiermacher’s subjective theology and the deeper historical insight of the Hegelians, it had found a refuge successively in the Kantian postulates of the practical reason, and in the vague but earnest faith-philosophy of Jacobi.
Outside France, Germany and England, there were no great schools of thought distinctively deistic, though in most countries there is to be found a rationalistic anti-clerical movement which partakes of the character of deism. It seems probable, for example, that in Portugal the marquis de Pombal was in reality a deist, and both in Italy and in Spain there were signs of the same rationalistic revolt. More certain, and also more striking, is the fact that the leading statesmen in the American War of Independence were emphatically deists; Benjamin Franklin (who attributes his position to the study of Shaftesbury and Collins), Thomas Paine, Washington and Jefferson, although they all had the greatest admiration for the New Testament story, denied that it was based on any supernatural revelation. For various reasons the movement in America did not appear on the surface to any great extent, and after the comparative failure of Elihu Palmer’s Principles of Nature it expressed itself chiefly in the spread of Unitarianism.
In England, though the deists were forgotten, their spirit was not wholly dead. For men like Hume and Gibbon the standpoint of deism was long left behind; yet Gibbon’s famous two chapters might well have been written by a deist. Even now many undoubtedly cling to a theology nearly allied to deism. Rejecting miracles and denying the infallibility of Scripture, protesting against Calvinistic views of sovereign grace and having no interest in evangelical Arminianism, the faith of such inquirers seems fairly to coincide with that of the deists. Even some cultured theologians, the historical representatives of latitudinarianism, seem to accept the great body of what was contended for by the deists. Moreover, the influence of the deistic writers had an incalculable influence in the gradual progress towards tolerance, and in the spread of a broader attitude towards intellectual problems, and this too, though, as we have seen, the original deists devoted themselves mainly to a crusade against the doctrine of revelation.
The original deists displayed a singular incapacity to understand the true conditions of history; yet amongst them there were some who pointed the way to the truer, more generous interpretation of the past. When Shaftesbury wrote that “religion is still a discipline, and progress of the soul towards perfection,” he gave birth to the same thought that was afterwards hailed in Lessing’s Erziehung des Menschengeschlechtes as the dawn of a fuller and a purer light on the history of religion and on the development of the spiritual life of mankind.
Authorities.—See John Leland, A View of the Principal Deistical Writers (2 vols., 1754–1756; ed. 1837); G. V. Lechler, Geschichte des englischen Deismus (2 vols., 1841); L. Noack, Die Freidenker in der Religion (Bern, 1853–1855); John Hunt, Religious Thought in England (3 vols., 1870–1872); Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the 18th Century (2 vols., 1876); A. S. Farrar, A Critical History of Free Thought (1862, Bampton Lectures); J. H. Overton and F. Relton, The English Church from the Accession of George I. to the end of the 18th Century (1906; especially chap. iv., “The Answer to Deism”); A. W. Benn, History of English Rationalism in the 19th Century (1906); i. 111 ff.; J. M. Robertson, Short History of Free Thought (1906); G. Ch. B. Pünjer, Geschichte der christlichen Religionsphilosophie seit der Reformation (Brunswick, 1880); M. W. Wiseman, Dynamics of Religion (London, 1897), pt. ii.; article “Deismus” in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopädie (vol. iv., 1898).
DEISTER, a chain of hills in Germany, in the Prussian province
of Hanover, about 15 m. S.W. of the city of Hanover. It runs
in a north-westerly direction from Springe in the S. to Rodenberg
in the N. It has a total length of 14 m., and rises in the
Höfeler to a height of 1250 ft. The chain is well-wooded and
abounds in game. There are some coal mines and sandstone
quarries.
