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;
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The Touchstone of True Religion ... against the impietie of Atheists, Epicures, Libertines, Hippocrites, and Temporisours of these times (1590); An Enemie to Atheisme, translated by T. Rogers from the Latin of Avenar (1591); the preacher Henry Smith's God's Arrow against Atheists (1593, rep. 1611); an English translation of the second volume of La Primaudaye's L'Académie Française, containing a refutation of atheistic doctrine; and no fewer than three
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Treatises of the Nature of God
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T. B., declares in his dedication that there has been a general growth of atheism in England and on the continent, which he traces to
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Among English atheists of that school he ranks the dramatist Robert Greene, who had died in 1592; and it has been argued, not quite convincingly, that it was to Machiavelli that Greene had pointed, in his death-bed recantation A Groatsworth of Wit (1592), as the atheistic instructor of his friend Marlowe, [27] who introduces
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Machiavel as cynical prologist to his Jew of Malta. Greene's own
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had been for the most part a matter of bluster and disorderly living; and we find his zealously orthodox friend Thomas Nashe, in his Strange News (1592), calling the Puritan zealot who used the pseudonym of Martin Marprelate
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; even as his own and Greene's enemy, Gabriel Harvey, called Nashe an atheist. [28] But Nashe in his Christ's Tears over Jerusalem (1592), though he speaks characteristically of the
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discusses contemporary atheism in a fashion descriptive of an actual growth of the opinion, concerning which he alleges that there is no
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The
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he declares,
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; and he offers some sufficiently primitive arguments by way of confutation.
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They follow the Pironicks [i.e., Pyrrhonists], whose position and opinion it is that there is no hell or misery but opinion. Impudently they persist in it, that the late discovered Indians show antiquities thousands before Adam. For the rest, they not only reject the miracles of Moses as mere natural expedients misrepresented, but treat the whole Bible as
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treat the Apocrypha. And Nashe complains feelingly that while the atheists
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and that
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the preachers who reply to them are men of dull understanding, the product of a system under which preferment is given to graduates on the score not of capacity but of mere gravity and solemnity.
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It is the superabundance of wit, declares Nashe,
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imputed to him is not made out in any detail; but many of the other utterances are notably in keeping with Marlowe's daring temper; and they amount to unbelief of a stringent kind. In Doctor Faustus [31] he makes Mephistopheles affirm that
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Hell hath no limits ... but where we are is hell --a doctrine which we have seen to be current before his time; and in his private talk he had gone much further. Nashe doubtless had him in mind when he spoke of men of
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Not only did he question, with Raleigh, the Biblical chronology: he affirmed
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That Moyses was but a juggler, and that one Heriots [i.e., Thomas Harriott, or Harriots, the astronomer, one of Raleigh's circle]
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; and concerning Jesus he used language incomparably more offensive to orthodox feeling than that of Hamond and Kett. There is more in all this than a mere assimilation of Machiavelli; though the further saying
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--put also by Greene [if not by Marlowe], with much force of versification, in the mouth of a villain-hero in the anonymous play of Selimus [32]--tells of that influence. Marlowe was indeed not the man to swear by any master without adding something of his own. Atheism, however, is not inferrible from any of his works: on the contrary, in the second part of his famous first play he makes his hero, described by the repentant Greene as the