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of the time of persecution, thought it expedient to make his first appearance in literature with a Religio Stoici (1663), wherein he sets out with a refutation of atheism. It is difficult to believe that his counsel to Christians to watch the
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[385]--a false pretence as it stands--represented any knowledge whatever of professed atheism in his own country; and his discussion of the subject is wholly on the conventional lines--notably so when he uses the customary plea, later associated with Pascal, that the theist runs no risk even if there is no future life, whereas the atheist runs a tremendous risk if there is one; [386] but when he writes of
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[387] he must be presumed to refer at least to deists. And other passages show that he had listened to freethinking arguments. Thus he speaks [388] of those who
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; and again [389] of those who
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His own answers are conspicuously weak. In the latter passage he continues:
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But those miscreants should consider that much of the Scripture's native splendour is impaired by its translators ; and as to miracles he makes the inept answer that if secondary causes were in operation they acted by God's will; going on later to suggest on his own part that prophecy may be not a miraculous gift, but
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[390] Apart from his weak dialectic, he writes in general with cleverness and literary finish, but without any note of sincerity; and his profession of concern that reason should be respected in theology [391] is as little acted on in his later life as his protest against persecution. [392] The inference from the whole essay is that in Scotland, as in England, the civil war had brought up a considerable crop of reasoned unbelief; and that Mackenzie, professed defender of the faith as he was at twenty-five, and official persecutor of nonconformists as he afterwards became, met with a good deal of it in his cultured circle. In his later booklet, Reason: an Essay (1690), he speaks of the
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[393] He further coarsely asperses all atheists as debauchees, [394] though he avows that
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Infidelity is not the cause of false reasoning, because such as are not atheists reason falsely.
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who
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In 1668 was published Meric Casaubon's treatise, Of Credulity and Incredulity in things Natural, Civil, and Divine, assailing not only
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etc., but
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Epicurus ... and the juggling and false dealing lately used to bring Atheism into Credit --a thrust at Gassendi. A similar polemic is entombed in a ponderous folio
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entitled Bentivolio and Urania, by Nathaniel Ingelo, D.D., a fellow first of Emanuel College, and afterwards of Queen's College, Cambridge (1660; 4th ed. amended, 1682). The second part, edifyingly dedicated to the Earl of Lauderdale, one of the worst men of his day, undertakes to handle the
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Atheists, Epicureans, and Skepticks ; and in the preface the atheists are duly vituperated; while Epicurus is described as a gross sensualist, in terms of the legend, and the skeptics as
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In the sixth book the atheists are allowed a momentary hearing in defence of their
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from which it appears that there were current arguments alike anthropological and metaphysical against theism. The most competent part of the author's own argument, which is unlimited as to space, is that which controverts the thesis of the invention of religious beliefs by