FREETHOUGHT 



factors, the assailing doubt gener- 

 ally suffers from that disadvan 

 tage ; but even in a primitive com- 

 munity the economic factor may 

 at times be negatively on the side 

 of freedom, as when a series of 

 famines may lead to the extinction, 

 as impostors, of all the " rain- 

 makers " of an African people. 

 The primary bias to doubt, how- 

 ever, being by far less common 

 than the contrary, freethought in 

 progressive conditions is always 

 a matter of resort to methods of 

 rational appeal (whether well or 

 ill conducted) as against the com- 

 mon bias to belief reinforced by 

 " authority " on social, political, 

 and economic lines. 



That both attitudes are in some 

 degree primarily temperamental is 

 indicated by the significant fact 

 that many adherents of a modern 

 orthodoxy are found to show a 

 spontaneous animus against an- 

 cient " freethinkers " as such, 

 though the beliefs which those 

 doubters rejected as false are also 

 rejected as false by their modern 

 assailants, and often described by 

 them as pernicious. 



Historically speaking, it is 

 broadly certain that freethought 

 spreads in the ratio of the culture 

 contacts of peoples, whether by 

 way of simple intercourse or of 

 literary communication. The mere 

 differences of early religious beliefs, 

 being so marked and so innumer- 

 able, constitute a propulsion to 

 doubt when they are simply noted. 

 Where the doubt has most intel- 

 lectual elbow-room it will be most 

 developed. 



Ancient Times 



Thus, while doubt concerning 

 the gods can be seen among the 

 priestly circles of ancient India, 

 Babylonia, and Egypt, to lead to a 

 compromise on the lines of a 

 pantheism which conserved the 

 old cults upon economic motives, 

 in the freer world of republican 

 Greece, which enjoyed the maxi- 

 mum of culture contact and free 

 discussion, and had the smallest 

 development of priestly organiza- 

 tion, the critical process was both 

 more general and more searching. 

 Josephus, in his diatribe Against 

 Apion, expressly reproaches the 

 Greeks with the multiplicity and 

 divergence of their historical re- 

 constructions as contrasted with 

 the unquestioned uniformity of 

 tradition among his own race. 



The very fact that that tradition 

 had undergone much priestly 

 manipulation in the historic past 

 had passed out of orthodox Jewish 

 knowledge ; the Jewish community 

 having come to represent a selec- 

 tion or survival of conformists and 

 devout believers from among a 



3335 



race which had parted with multi- 

 tudes of its doubters. 



In that case the retaining power 

 had been the successfully estab- 

 lished cult of the Sacred Book. In 

 Greece there was neither Sacred 

 Book nor centralized priesthood. 

 And the subsequent history of 

 freethought turns mainly on the 

 faith-commanding power of Sacred 

 Books, whether in subordination to 

 or in alliance with other factors. 

 Roughly speaking, the history of 

 the Catholic Church down to the 

 Reformation consisted in the sub- 

 ordination of the authoritarian 

 claims of the Sacred Book to those 

 of the hierarchy, the former having 

 been found to involve constant 

 risks of destructive schism. 

 Protestantism and Schism 



This was freshly illustrated in 

 the schisms which rapidly overtook 

 Protestantism, when that move- 

 ment erected the claims of the 

 Sacred Book to belief above all 

 others ; and to such schism the 

 Catholic hierarchy were able to 

 point as discrediting Protestantism 

 from the point of view of the 

 general bias of faith. 



Since the Reformation, the 

 history of western freethought 

 has been one of more or less con- 

 tinuous gain in intellectual pres- 

 tige as against the authority of the 

 Sacred Book in Protestant coun- 

 tries and that of the hierarchy in 

 others, the lines of advance being 

 those of science, historical criticism, 

 ethics, and democratic politics. The 

 bias of faith may often be found 

 still subsisting in promoters of all 

 of those movements ; but the col- 

 lective result is a growing proclivity 

 to the critical method, broadly 

 known as that of rationalism. 



Perhaps the most generally dis- 

 integrating process is that which 

 systematically develops the early 

 factor of culture-contacts by the 

 scientific comparative study of all 

 the primitive forms of religion, 

 from which the later are now 

 generally recognized to derive. Re- 

 ligious beliefs are thus themselves 

 in a state of increasingly rapid 

 change, even among biased be- 

 lievers ; and the critical process, 

 grounded on the sciences and 

 rationalistic ethics, becomes in- 

 creasingly confident, even while 

 growing less polemical. 



The historic process has been, as 

 regards the more educated classes 

 or sections, one of action and re- 

 action. In post-medieval and Re- 

 naissance Italy, clerical abuses 

 promoted freethought ; and in 

 France and England after the Re- 

 formation it advanced consider- 

 ably after periods of religious 

 strife, being active in the later 

 years of Elizabeth, and again after 



FREETHOUGHT 



the Restoration. Yet again, as a 

 result of both scientific and scholar- 

 ly progress, it spread greatly, 

 under the form of Deism, in the 

 England of the first half of the 

 18th century. 



Commercial and imperial ex- 

 pansion and the Methodist Re- 

 vival later weakened the intellec- 

 tual activity, which, however, was 

 taken up in France, then ripening 

 for the Revolution ; whereafter 

 political reaction in both countries 

 produced a reign of conformity in 

 the middle and upper classes, leav- 

 ing the new democratic freethought 

 partly at work among the lower, 

 in so far as they were accessible to 

 propaganda. 



An organized freethought pro- 

 paganda, mainly democratic, is a 

 notable feature of the second half 

 of the 19th century, alike in Bri- 

 tain, the U.S.A., France, Ger- 

 many, and other European coun- 

 tries. Proceeding as it did on the 

 subversive criticism alike of science 

 and scholarship as against the 

 Sacred Book, it was most active in 

 the period of active religious 

 resistance to such criticism, flagging 

 as a specific activity when the 

 Churches in general began to accept 

 that criticism, thereby weakening 

 their own foundations and turning 

 belief into a passive rather than 

 an active force. 



Influence of Freethought 



The relative subsidence of spe- 

 cific freethought propaganda is 

 thus a mark of its success, the 

 educative process being thence- 

 forth carried on by the specific 

 activities of science and ethics and 

 general truth-seeking research. 

 Churches which a few centuries ago 

 were shedding blood for super- 

 naturalist doctrines of sacraments, 

 and later were battling against 

 Deism for the divinity of Christ, 

 are now concerned to prove His 

 mere historicity. 



Throughout civilized Europe, 

 while a measure of social ostracism 

 still falls in some countries upon 

 those who openly reject the whole 

 body of traditional religion, the 

 shifting of the religious ground has 

 greatly weakened the power of 

 the Churches to resort to forcible 

 suppression of criticism, and the 

 economic and cultural obstacles to 

 freethought are really the more 

 powerful. In Great Britain it has 

 been gradually recognized that 

 persecution merely multiplies the 

 assault, giving it new economic re- 

 sources through popular interest 

 and sympathy. Alike in the time 

 of Thomas Paine and in that of 

 Charles Bradlaugh, persecution 

 greatly strengthened the popular 

 movement. At the same time, grow- 

 ing knowledge of all kinds weakens 



