His political and economical pamphlets are almost unmatched as clear presentations of the views of their writer. For driving the nail home no one but Swift excels him, and Swift perhaps only inThe Drapier’s Letters. There is often a great deal to be said against the view presented in those pamphlets, but Defoe sees nothing of it. He was perfectly fair but perfectly one-sided, being generally happily ignorant of everything which told against his own view.
The same characteristics are curiously illustrated in his moral works. The morality of these is almost amusing in its downright positive character. With all the Puritan eagerness to push a clear, uncompromising, Scripture-based distinction of right and wrong into the affairs of every-day life, he has a thoroughly English horror of casuistry, and his clumsy canons consequently make wild work with the infinite intricacies of human nature. He is, in fact, an instance of the tendency, which has so often been remarked by other nations in the English, to drag in moral distinctions at every turn, and to confound everything which is novel to the experience, unpleasant to the taste, and incomprehensible to the understanding, under the general epithets ofwrong, wicked and shocking. His works of this class therefore are now the least valuable, though not the least curious, of his books.
The earliest regular life and estimate of Defoe is that of Dr Towers in theBiographia Britannica. George Chalmers’sLife, however (1786), added very considerable information. In 1830 Walter Wilson wrote the standardLife(3 vols.); it is coloured by political prejudice, but is a model of painstaking care, and by its abundant citations from works both of Defoe and of others, which are practically inaccessible to the general reader, is invaluable. In 1859 appeared a life of Defoe by William Chadwick, an extraordinary rhapsody in a style which is half Cobbett and half Carlyle, but amusing, and by no means devoid of acuteness. In 1864 the discovery of the six letters stirred up William Lee to a new investigation, and the results of this were published (London, 1869) in three large volumes. The first of these (well illustrated) contains a new life and particulars of the author’s discoveries. The second and third contain fugitive writings assigned by Lee to Defoe for the first time. For most of these, however, we have no authority but Lee’s own impressions of style, &c.; and consequently, though the best qualified judges will in most cases agree that Defoe may very likely have written them, it cannot positively be stated that he did. There is also aLifeby Thomas Wright (1894). TheEarlier Life and Chief Earlier Worksof Defoe (1890) was included by Henry Morley in the “Carisbrooke Library.” Charles Lamb’s criticisms were made in three short pieces, two of which were written for Wilson’s book, and the third forThe Reflector. The volume onDefoe(1879) in the “English Men of Letters” series is by W. Minto.There is considerable uncertainty about many of Defoe’s writings; and even if all contested works be excluded, the number is still enormous. Besides the list in Bohn’sLowndes, which is somewhat of anomnium gatherum, three lists drawn with more or less care were compiled in the 19th century. Wilson’s contains 210 distinct works, three or four only of which are marked as doubtful; Hazlitt’s enumerates 183 “genuine” and 52 “attributed” pieces, with notes on most of them; Lee’s extends to 254, of which 64 claim to be new additions. The reprint (3 vols.) edited for the “Pulteney Library” by Hazlitt in 1840-1843 contains a good and full life mainly derived from Wilson, the whole of the novels (including theSerious Reflectionsnow hardly ever published withRobinson Crusoe),Jure Divino,The Use and Abuse of Marriage, and many of the more important tracts and smaller works. There is also an edition, often called Scott’s, but really edited by Sir G. C. Lewis, in twenty volumes (London, 1840-1841). This contains theComplete Tradesman,Religious Courtship,The Consolidatorand other works not comprised in Hazlitt’s. Scott had previously in 1809 edited for Ballantyne some of the novels, in twelve volumes. Bohn’s “British Classics” includes the novels (except the third part ofRobinson Crusoe),The History of the Devil,The Storm, and a few political pamphlets, also the undoubtedly spuriousMother Ross. In 1870 Nimmo of Edinburgh published in one volume an admirable selection from Defoe. It contains Chalmers’sLife, annotated and completed from Wilson and Lee,Robinson Crusoe, pts. i. and ii.,Colonel Jack,The Cavalier,Duncan Campbell,The Plague,Everybody’s Business,Mrs Veal,The Shortest Way with Dissenters,Giving Alms no Charity,The True-Born Englishman,Hymn to the Pillory, and very copious extracts fromThe Complete English Tradesman. An edition of Defoe’sRomances and Narrativesin sixteen volumes by G. A. Aitken came out in 1895.If we turn to separate works, the bibliography of Defoe is practically confined (except as far as original editions are concerned) toRobinson Crusoe.Mrs Vealhas been to some extent popularized by the work which it helped to sell;Religious CourtshipandThe Family Instructorhad a vogue among the middle class until well into the 19th century, andThe History of the Unionwas republished in 1786. But the reprints and editions ofCrusoehave been innumerable; it has been often translated; and the eulogy pronounced on it by Rousseau gave it special currency in France, where imitations (or rather adaptations) have also been common.In addition to the principal authorities already mentioned see John Forster,Historical and Biographical Essays(1858); G. Saintsbury, “Introduction” to Defoe’sMinor Novels; and valuable notes by G. A. Aitken inThe Contemporary Review(February 1890), andThe Athenaeum(April 30, 1889; August 31, 1890). A facsimile reprint (1883) ofRobinson Crusoehas an introduction by Mr Austin Dobson. Dr Karl T. Bülbring edited two unpublished works of Defoe,The Compleat English Gentleman(London, 1890) andOf Royall Educacion(London, 1905), from British Museum Add. MS. 32,555. Further light was thrown on Defoe’s work as a political agent by the discovery (1906) of an unpublished paper of his in the British Museum by G. F. Warner. This was printed in theEnglish Historical Review, and afterwards separately.
The earliest regular life and estimate of Defoe is that of Dr Towers in theBiographia Britannica. George Chalmers’sLife, however (1786), added very considerable information. In 1830 Walter Wilson wrote the standardLife(3 vols.); it is coloured by political prejudice, but is a model of painstaking care, and by its abundant citations from works both of Defoe and of others, which are practically inaccessible to the general reader, is invaluable. In 1859 appeared a life of Defoe by William Chadwick, an extraordinary rhapsody in a style which is half Cobbett and half Carlyle, but amusing, and by no means devoid of acuteness. In 1864 the discovery of the six letters stirred up William Lee to a new investigation, and the results of this were published (London, 1869) in three large volumes. The first of these (well illustrated) contains a new life and particulars of the author’s discoveries. The second and third contain fugitive writings assigned by Lee to Defoe for the first time. For most of these, however, we have no authority but Lee’s own impressions of style, &c.; and consequently, though the best qualified judges will in most cases agree that Defoe may very likely have written them, it cannot positively be stated that he did. There is also aLifeby Thomas Wright (1894). TheEarlier Life and Chief Earlier Worksof Defoe (1890) was included by Henry Morley in the “Carisbrooke Library.” Charles Lamb’s criticisms were made in three short pieces, two of which were written for Wilson’s book, and the third forThe Reflector. The volume onDefoe(1879) in the “English Men of Letters” series is by W. Minto.
There is considerable uncertainty about many of Defoe’s writings; and even if all contested works be excluded, the number is still enormous. Besides the list in Bohn’sLowndes, which is somewhat of anomnium gatherum, three lists drawn with more or less care were compiled in the 19th century. Wilson’s contains 210 distinct works, three or four only of which are marked as doubtful; Hazlitt’s enumerates 183 “genuine” and 52 “attributed” pieces, with notes on most of them; Lee’s extends to 254, of which 64 claim to be new additions. The reprint (3 vols.) edited for the “Pulteney Library” by Hazlitt in 1840-1843 contains a good and full life mainly derived from Wilson, the whole of the novels (including theSerious Reflectionsnow hardly ever published withRobinson Crusoe),Jure Divino,The Use and Abuse of Marriage, and many of the more important tracts and smaller works. There is also an edition, often called Scott’s, but really edited by Sir G. C. Lewis, in twenty volumes (London, 1840-1841). This contains theComplete Tradesman,Religious Courtship,The Consolidatorand other works not comprised in Hazlitt’s. Scott had previously in 1809 edited for Ballantyne some of the novels, in twelve volumes. Bohn’s “British Classics” includes the novels (except the third part ofRobinson Crusoe),The History of the Devil,The Storm, and a few political pamphlets, also the undoubtedly spuriousMother Ross. In 1870 Nimmo of Edinburgh published in one volume an admirable selection from Defoe. It contains Chalmers’sLife, annotated and completed from Wilson and Lee,Robinson Crusoe, pts. i. and ii.,Colonel Jack,The Cavalier,Duncan Campbell,The Plague,Everybody’s Business,Mrs Veal,The Shortest Way with Dissenters,Giving Alms no Charity,The True-Born Englishman,Hymn to the Pillory, and very copious extracts fromThe Complete English Tradesman. An edition of Defoe’sRomances and Narrativesin sixteen volumes by G. A. Aitken came out in 1895.
If we turn to separate works, the bibliography of Defoe is practically confined (except as far as original editions are concerned) toRobinson Crusoe.Mrs Vealhas been to some extent popularized by the work which it helped to sell;Religious CourtshipandThe Family Instructorhad a vogue among the middle class until well into the 19th century, andThe History of the Unionwas republished in 1786. But the reprints and editions ofCrusoehave been innumerable; it has been often translated; and the eulogy pronounced on it by Rousseau gave it special currency in France, where imitations (or rather adaptations) have also been common.
In addition to the principal authorities already mentioned see John Forster,Historical and Biographical Essays(1858); G. Saintsbury, “Introduction” to Defoe’sMinor Novels; and valuable notes by G. A. Aitken inThe Contemporary Review(February 1890), andThe Athenaeum(April 30, 1889; August 31, 1890). A facsimile reprint (1883) ofRobinson Crusoehas an introduction by Mr Austin Dobson. Dr Karl T. Bülbring edited two unpublished works of Defoe,The Compleat English Gentleman(London, 1890) andOf Royall Educacion(London, 1905), from British Museum Add. MS. 32,555. Further light was thrown on Defoe’s work as a political agent by the discovery (1906) of an unpublished paper of his in the British Museum by G. F. Warner. This was printed in theEnglish Historical Review, and afterwards separately.
DEGAS, HILAIRE GERMAIN EDGARD(1834- ), French painter, was born in Paris on the 19th of July 1834. Entering in 1855 the École des Beaux Arts, he early developed independence of artistic outlook, studying under Lamothe. He first exhibited in the Salon of 1865, contributing a “War in the middle ages,” a work executed in pastel. To this medium he was ever faithful, using it for some of his best work. In 1866 his “Steeplechase” revealed him as a painter of the racecourse and of all the most modern aspects of life and of Parisian society, treated in an extremely original manner. He subsequently exhibited in 1867 “Family Portraits,” and in 1868 a portrait of a dancer in the “Ballet ofLa Source.” In 1869 and 1870 he restricted himself to portraits; but thenceforward he abandoned the Salons and attached himself to the Impressionists. With Manet and Monet he took the lead of the new school at its first exhibition in 1874, and repeatedly contributed to these exhibitions (in 1876, 1878, 1879 and 1880). In 1868 he had shown his first study of a dancer, and in numerous pastels he proclaimed himself the painter of the ballet, representing its figurantes in every attitude with more constant aim at truth than grace. Several of his works may be seen at the Luxembourg Gallery, to which they were bequeathed, among a collection of impressionist pictures, by M. Caillebotte. In 1880 Degas showed his powers of observation in a set of “Portraits of Criminals,” and he attempted modelling in a “Dancer,” in wax. He afterwards returned to his studies of the sporting world, exhibiting in December 1884 at the Petit Gallery two views of “Races” which had a great success, proving the increasing vogue of the artist among collectors. He is ranked with Manet as the leader of the “impressionist school.” At the eighth Impressionist Exhibition, in 1886, Degas continued his realistic studies of modern life, showing drawings of the nude, of workwomen, and of jockeys. Besides his pastels and his paintings of genre and portraits—among these, several likenesses of Manet—Degas also handled his favourite subjects in etching and in aquatint; and executed several lithographs of “Singers at Cafés-concert,” of “Ballet-girls,” and indeed of every possible subject of night-life and incidents behind the scenes. His work is to be seen not only at the Luxembourg but in many of the great private collections in Paris, in England and America. In the Centenary Exhibition of 1900 he exhibited “The Interior of a Cotton-Broker’s Office at New Orleans” (belonging to the Museum at Pau) and “The Rehearsal.”
See also G. Moore, “Degas, the Painter of Modern Life,”Magazine of Art(1890); J. K. Huysmans,Certains(Paris, 1889); G. Geffroy,La Vie Artistique(3eSérie, Paris, 1894).
See also G. Moore, “Degas, the Painter of Modern Life,”Magazine of Art(1890); J. K. Huysmans,Certains(Paris, 1889); G. Geffroy,La Vie Artistique(3eSérie, Paris, 1894).
DE GEER, LOUIS GERHARD,Baron(1818-1896), Swedish statesman and writer, was born on the 18th of July 1818 at Finspång castle. He adopted the legal profession, and in 1855 became president of the Göta Hofret, or lord justice of one of the Swedish supreme courts. From the 7th of April 1858 to the 3rd of June 1870 he was minister of justice. As a member of the Upper House he took part in all the SwedishRiksdagsfrom 1851 onwards, though he seldom spoke. From 1867 to 1878 he was the member for Stockholm in the first chamber, and introduced and passed many useful reformatory statutes; but his greatest achievement, as a statesman, was the reform of the Swedish representative system, whereby he substituted a bi-cameral elective parliament, on modern lines, for the existing cumbersome representation by estates, a survival from the later middle ages. This great measure was accepted by the Riksdag in December 1865, and received the royal sanction on the 22nd of June 1866. For some time after this De Geer was the most popular man in Sweden. He retired from the ministry in 1870, but took office again, as minister of justice, in 1875. In 1876 he became minister of state, which position he retained till April 1880, when the failure of his repeated efforts to settle the armaments’ question again induced him to resign. From 1881 to 1888 he was chancellor of the universities of Upsala and Lund. Besides several novels and aesthetic essays, De Geer has written a few political memoirs of supreme merit both as to style and matter, the most notable of which are:Minnesteckning öfver A. J. v. Höpken(Stockholm, 1881);Minnesteckning öfver Hans Järta(Stockholm, 1874);Minnesteckning öfver B. B. von Platen(Stockholm, 1886); and his ownMinnen(Stockholm, 1892), an autobiography, invaluable as a historical document, in which the political experience and the matured judgments ofa lifetime are recorded with singular clearness, sobriety and charm.
SeeSveriges historia(Stockholm, 1881, &c.), vi,; Carl Gustaf Malmström,Historiska Studier(Stockholm, 1897).
SeeSveriges historia(Stockholm, 1881, &c.), vi,; Carl Gustaf Malmström,Historiska Studier(Stockholm, 1897).
(R. N. B.)
DEGGENDORF,orDeckendorf, a town of Germany, in the kingdom of Bavaria, 25 m. N.W. of Passau, on the left bank of the Danube, which is there crossed by two iron bridges. Pop. (1905) 7154. It is situated at the lower end of the beautiful valley of the Perlbach, and in itself it is a well-built and attractive town. It possesses an old town hall dating from 1566, a hospital, a lunatic asylum, an orphanage, and a large parish church rebuilt in 1756; but the chief interest centres in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, built in 1337, which attracts thousands of pilgrims to itsPorta CaeliorGnadenpforte(Gate of Mercy) opened annually on Michaelmas eve and closed again on the 4th of October. In 1837, on the celebration of the 500th anniversary of this solemnity, the number of pilgrims was reckoned at nearly 100,000. Such importance as the town possesses is now rather commercial than religious,—it being a depôt for the timber trade of the Bavarian forest, a station for the Danube steamboat company, and the seat of several mills, breweries, potteries and other industrial establishments. On the bank of the Danube outside the town are the remains of the castle of Findelstein; and on the Geiersberg (1243 ft.), in the immediate vicinity, stands another old pilgrimage church. About 6 m. to the north is the village of Metten, with a Benedictine monastery founded by Charlemagne in 801, restored as an abbey in 1840 by Louis I. of Bavaria, and well known as an educational institution. The first mention of Deggendorf occurs in 868, and it appears as a town in 1212. Henry (d. 1290) of the Landshut branch of the ruling family of Bavaria made it the seat of a custom-house; and in 1331 it became the residence of Henry III. of Natternberg (d. 1333), so called from a castle in the neighbourhood. In 1337 a wholesale massacre of the Jews, who were accused of having thrown the sacred host of the church of the Holy Sepulchre into a well, took place in the town; and it is probably from about this date that the pilgrimage above mentioned came into vogue. The town was captured by the Swedish forces in 1633, and in the war of the Austrian Succession it was more than once laid in ashes.
See Grüber and Müller,Der bayerische Wald(Regensburg, 1851); Mittermüller,Die heil. Hostien und die Jüden in Deggendorf(Landshut, 1866); andDas Kloster Metten(Straubing, 1857).
See Grüber and Müller,Der bayerische Wald(Regensburg, 1851); Mittermüller,Die heil. Hostien und die Jüden in Deggendorf(Landshut, 1866); andDas Kloster Metten(Straubing, 1857).
DE HAAS, MAURITZ FREDERICK HENDRICK(1832-1895), American marine painter, was born on the 12th of December 1832 in Rotterdam, Holland. He studied art in the Rotterdam Academy and at The Hague, under Bosboom and Louis Meyer, and in 1851-1852 in London, following the English water-colourists of the day. In 1857 he received an artist’s commission in the Dutch navy, but in 1859, under the patronage of August Belmont, who had recently been minister of the United States at The Hague, he resigned and removed to New York city. He became an associate of the National Academy in 1863 and an academician in 1867, and exhibited annually in the academy, and in 1866 he was one of the founders of the American Society of Painters in Water Colors. He died on the 23rd of November 1895. His “Farragut Passing the Forts at the Battle of New Orleans” and “The Rapids above Niagara,” which were exhibited at the Paris Exposition of 1878, were his best known but not his most typical works, for his favourite subjects were storm and wreck, wind and heavy surf, and less often moonlight on the coasts of Holland, of Jersey, of New England, and of Long Island, and on the English Channel.
His brother,William Frederick de Haas(1830-1880), who emigrated to New York in 1854, was also a marine painter.
DEHRA,a town of British India, headquarters of the Dehra Dun district in the United Provinces. Pop. (1901) 28,095. It lies at an elevation of 2300 ft. Here the Hardwar-Dehra railway terminates. Dehra is the headquarters of the Trigonometrical Survey and of the Forest Department, besides being a cantonment for a Gurkha force. The Forest School, which trains subordinate forest officials for all parts of India, is a fine building. Attached to it is an institution for the scientific study of sylvi-culture and the exploitation and administration of forests. The town of Dehra grew up round the temple built in 1699 by the heretical Sikh Guru, Ram Rai, the founder of the Udasi sect of Ascetics. This temple is a remarkable building in Mahommedan style. The central block, in imitation of the emperor Jahangir’s tomb, contains the bed on which the Guru, after dying at will and coming back to life several times, ultimately died outright; it is an object of great veneration. At the corners of the central block are smaller monuments commemorating the Guru’s wives.
DEHRA DUN,a district of British India, in the Meerut division of the United Provinces. Its area is 1209 sq. m. The district is bounded on the N. by the native state of Tehri or Garhwal, on the E. by British Garhwal, on the S. by the Siwálik hills, which separate it from Saharanpur district, and on the W. by the hill states of Sirmur, Jubbal and Taroch. The valley (the Dun) has an area of about 673 sq. m., and forms a parallelogram 45 m. from N.W. to S.E. and 15 m. broad. It is well wooded, undulating and intersected by streams. On the N.E. the horizon is bounded by the Mussoorie or lower range of the Himalayas, and on the S. by the Siwálik hills. The Himalayas in the north of the district attain a height between 7000 and 8000 ft., one peak reaching an elevation of 8565 ft.; the highest point of the Siwálik range is 3041 ft. above sea-level. The principal passes through the Siwálik hills are the Timli pass, leading to the military station of Chakráta, and the Mohand pass leading to the sanatoriums of Mussoorie and Landaur. The Ganges bounds the Dehra valley on the E.; the Jumna bounds it on the W. From a point about midway between the two rivers, and near the town of Dehra, runs a ridge which forms the watershed of the valley. To the west of this ridge the water collects to form the Asan, a tributary of the Jumna; whilst to the east the Suswa receives the drainage and flows into the Ganges. To the east the valley is characterized by swamps and forests, but to the west the natural depressions freely carry off the surface drainage. Along the central ridge, the water-level lies at a great depth from the surface (228 ft.), but it rises gradually as the country declines towards the great rivers. In 1901 the population was 178,195, showing an increase of 6% in the decade. A railway to Dehra from Hardwar, on the Oudh and Rohilkhand line (32 m.), was completed in 1900. The district is served by the Dun canals. Tea gardens cover a considerable area, and the valley contains a colony of European tea planters.
History.—Dehra Dun only emerges from the mists of legend into authentic history in the 17th centuryA.D., when it formed part of the Garhwal kingdom. Towards the end of the century the heretical Sikh Guru, Ram Rai, expelled from the Punjab, sought refuge in the Dun and gathered round him a crowd of devotees. Fateh Sah, raja of Garhwal, endowed the temple which he built, round which grew up the town of Gurudwara or Dehra (q.v.). In the 18th century the fertility of the valley attracted the attention of Najib-ud-daula, governor of Saharanpur, who invaded it with an army of Rohillas in 1757 and annexed it to his dominion. His rule, which lasted till 1770, brought great prosperity to the Dun; but on his death it became a prey to the surrounding tribes, its desolation being completed after its conquest by the Gurkhas in 1803. In 1814 it was taken possession of by the British, and in the following year was annexed to Saharanpur. Under British administration the Dun rapidly recovered its prosperity.
DEIOCES(Δηιόκης), according to Herodotus (i. 96 ff.) the first king of the Medes. He narrates that, when the Medes had rebelled against the Assyrians and gained their independence about 710B.C., according to his chronology (cf. Diodor. ii. 32), they lived in villages without any political organization, and therefore the whole country was in a state of anarchy. Then Deioces, son of Phraortes, an illustrious man of upright character, was chosen judge in his village, and the justness of his decisions induced the inhabitants of the other villages to throng to him. At last the Medes resolved to make an end of the intolerable state of their country by erecting a kingdom, and chose Deioces king. He now caused them to build a great capital, Ecbatana, with a royal palace, and introduced the ceremonial of oriental courts;he surrounded himself with a guard and no longer showed himself to the people, but gave his judgments in writing and controlled the people by officials and spies. He united all the Median tribes, and ruled fifty-three years (c.699-647B.C.), though perhaps, as G. Rawlinson supposed, the fifty-three years of his reign are exchanged by mistake with the twenty-two years of his son Phraortes, under whom the Median conquests began.
The narration of Herodotus is only a popular tradition which derives the origin of kingship from its judicial functions, considered as its principal and most beneficent aspect. We know from the Assyrian inscriptions that just at the time which Herodotus assigns to Deioces the Medes were divided into numerous small principalities and subjected to the great Assyrian conquerors. Among these petty chieftains, Sargon in 715 mentions Dāyukku, “lieutenant of Man” (he probably was, therefore, a vassal of the neighbouring king of Man in the mountains of south-eastern Armenia), who joined the Urartians and other enemies of Assyria, but was by Sargon transported to Hamath in Syria “with his clan.” His district is called “bit-Dāyaukki,” “house of Deioces,” also in 713, when Sargon invaded these regions again. So it seems that the dynasty, which more than half a century later succeeded in throwing off the Assyrian yoke and founded the Median empire, was derived from this Dāyukku, and that his name was thus introduced into the Median traditions, which contrary to history considered him as founder of the kingdom.
(Ed. M.)
DEÏOTARUS,a tetrarch of Galatia (Gallo-Graecia) in Asia Minor, and a faithful ally of the Romans. He is first heard of at the beginning of the third Mithradatic war, when he drove out the troops of Mithradates under Eumachus from Phrygia. His most influential friend was Pompey, who, when settling the affairs of Asia (63 or 62B.C.), rewarded him with the title of king and an increase of territory (Lesser Armenia). On the outbreak of the civil war, Deïotarus naturally sided with his old patron Pompey, and after the battle of Pharsalus escaped with him to Asia. In the meantime Pharnaces, the son of Mithradates, had seized Lesser Armenia, and defeated Deïotarus near Nicopolis. Fortunately for Deïotarus, Caesar at that time (47) arrived in Asia from Egypt, and was met by the tetrarch in the dress of a suppliant. Caesar pardoned him for having sided with Pompey, ordered him to resume his royal attire, and hastened against Pharnaces, whom he defeated at Zela. In consequence of the complaints of certain Galatian princes, Deïotarus was deprived of part of his dominions, but allowed to retain the title of king. On the death of Mithradates of Pergamum, tetrarch of the Trocmi, Deïotarus was a candidate for the vacancy. Other tetrarchs also pressed their claims; and, further, Deïotarus was accused by his grandson Castor of having attempted to assassinate Caesar when the latter was his guest in Galatia. Cicero, who entertained a high opinion of Deïotarus, whose acquaintance he had made when governor of Cilicia, undertook his defence, the case being heard in Caesar’s own house at Rome. The matter was allowed to drop for a time, and the assassination of Caesar prevented any final decision being pronounced. In his speech Cicero briefly dismisses the charge of assassination, the main question being the distribution of the provinces, which was the real cause of the quarrels between Deïotarus and his relatives. After Caesar’s death, Mark Antony, for a large monetary consideration, publicly announced that, in accordance with instructions left by Caesar, Deïotarus was to resume possession of all the territory of which he had been deprived. When civil war again broke out, Deïotarus was persuaded to support Brutus and Cassius, but after the battle of Philippi went over to the triumvirs. He remained in possession of his kingdom till his death at a very advanced age.
See Cicero,Philippica, ii. 37;Ad fam.viii. 10, ix. 12, xv. 1, 2, 4;Ad Att.xiv. 1;De divin.i. 15, ii. 36, 37;De harusp. resp.13, and above allPro rege Deiotaro; Appian,Bell. Mithrid.75, 114;Bellum Alexandrinum, 34-41, 65-77; Dio Cassius xli. 63, xlii. 45, xlvii. 24, 48, xlviii. 33.
See Cicero,Philippica, ii. 37;Ad fam.viii. 10, ix. 12, xv. 1, 2, 4;Ad Att.xiv. 1;De divin.i. 15, ii. 36, 37;De harusp. resp.13, and above allPro rege Deiotaro; Appian,Bell. Mithrid.75, 114;Bellum Alexandrinum, 34-41, 65-77; Dio Cassius xli. 63, xlii. 45, xlvii. 24, 48, xlviii. 33.
DEIR,orDeir Ez-Zor, a town of Asiatic Turkey, on the right bank of the Euphrates, 27½ m. above its junction with the Khabor, lat. 35° 20′ N., long. 40° 12′ E. Pop. 8000 and upward, about one-tenth Christians; except in the official classes, there are no Turks. It is the capital and the only considerable town of the Zor sanjak, formed in 1857, which includes Ras el-’Ain on the north and Palmyra on the south, with a total area of 32,820 sq. m., chiefly desert, and an estimated population of 100,000, mostly Arab nomads. Deir itself is a thrifty and rising town, having considerable traffic; it is singularly European in appearance, with macadamized streets and a public garden. The name Deir means monastery, but there is no other trace or tradition of the occupation of the site before the 14th century, and until it became the capital of the sanjak it was an insignificant village. It is an important centre for the control of the Bedouin Arabs, and has a garrison of about 1000 troops, including a special corps of mule-riders. It is also a road centre, the roads from the Mediterranean to Bagdad by way of Aleppo and Damascus respectively meeting here. A road also leads northward, by Sinjar, to Mosul, crossing the river on a stone bridge, built in 1897, the only permanent bridge over the Euphrates south of Asia Minor.
(J. P. Pe.)
DEIRA,the southern of the two English kingdoms afterwards united as Northumbria. According to Simeon of Durham it extended from the Humber to the Tyne, but the land was waste north of the Tees. York was the capital of its kings. The date of its first settlement is quite unknown, but the first king of whom we have any record is Ella or Ælle, the father of Edwin, who is said to have been reigning about 585. After his death Deira was subject to Æthelfrith, king of Northumbria, until the accession of Edwin, in 616 or 617, who ruled both kingdoms (see Edwin) till 633. Osric the nephew of Edwin ruled Deira (633-634), but his son Oswine was put to death by Oswio in 651. For a few years subsequently Deira was governed by Æthelwald son of Oswald.
See Bede,Historia ecclesiastica, ii. 14, iii. 1, 6, 14 (ed. C. Plummer, Oxford, 1896); Nennius,Historia Brittonum, § 64 (ed. Th. Mommsen, Berlin, 1898); Simeon of Durham,Opera, i. 339 (ed. T. Arnold, London, 1882-1885).
See Bede,Historia ecclesiastica, ii. 14, iii. 1, 6, 14 (ed. C. Plummer, Oxford, 1896); Nennius,Historia Brittonum, § 64 (ed. Th. Mommsen, Berlin, 1898); Simeon of Durham,Opera, i. 339 (ed. T. Arnold, London, 1882-1885).
(F. G. M. B.)
DEISM(Lat.deus, god), strictly the belief in one supreme God. It is however the received name for a current of rationalistic theological thought which, though not confined to one country, or to any well-defined period, was most conspicuous in England in the last years of the 17th and the first half of the 18th century. The deists, differing widely in important matters of belief, were yet agreed in seeking above all to establish the certainty and sufficiency of natural religion in opposition to the positive religions, and in tacitly or expressly denying the unique significance of the supernatural revelation in the Old and New Testaments. They either ignored the Scriptures, endeavoured to prove them in the main by a helpful republication of theEvangelium aeternum, or directly impugned their divine character, their infallibility, and the validity of their evidences as a complete manifestation of the will of God. The term “deism” not only is used to signify the main body of the deists’ teaching, or the tendency they represent, but has come into use as a technical term for one specific metaphysical doctrine as to the relation of God to the universe, assumed to have been characteristic of the deists, and to have distinguished them from atheists, pantheists and theists,—the belief, namely, that the first cause of the universe is a personal God, who is, however, not only distinct from the world but apart from it and its concerns.
The words “deism” and “deist” appear first about the middle of the 16th century in France (cf. Bayle’sDictionnaire, s.v.“Viret,” note D), though the deistic standpoint had already been foreshadowed to some extent by Averroists, by Italian authors like Boccaccio and Petrarch, in More’sUtopia(1515), and by French writers like Montaigne, Charron and Bodin. The first specific attack on deism in English was Bishop Stillingfleet’sLetter to a Deist(1677). By the majority of those historically known as the English deists, from Blount onwards, the name was owned and honoured. They were also occasionally called “rationalists.” “Free-thinker” (in Germany,Freidenker) was generally taken to be synonymous with “deist,” though obviouslycapable of a wider signification, and as coincident withesprit fortand withlibertinin the original and theological sense of the word.1“Naturalists” was a name frequently used of such as recognized no god but nature, of so-called Spinozists, atheists; but both in England and Germany, in the 18th century, this word was more commonly and aptly in use for those who founded their religion on thelumen naturaealone. It was evidently in common use in the latter half of the 16th century as it is used by De Mornay inDe la vérité de la religion chrétienne(1581) and by Montaigne. The same men were not seldom assaulted under the name of “theists”; the later distinction between “theist” and “deist,” which stamped the latter word as excluding the belief in providence or in the immanence of God, was apparently formulated in the end of the 18th century by those rationalists who were aggrieved at being identified with the naturalists. (See alsoTheism.)
The chief names amongst the deists are those of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648), Charles Blount (1654-1693), Matthew Tindal (1657-1733), William Wollaston (1659-1724), Thomas Woolston (1669-1733), Junius Janus (commonly known as John) Toland (1670-1722), the 3rd earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751), Anthony Collins (1676-1729), Thomas Morgan (?-1743), and Thomas Chubb (1679-1747).2Peter Annet (1693-1769), and Henry Dodwell (the younger; d. 1784), who made his contribution to the controversy in 1742, are of less importance. Of the eleven first named, ten appear to have been born within twenty-five years of one another; and it is noteworthy that by far the greater part of the literary activity of the deists, as well as of their voluminous opponents, falls within the same half century.
The impulses that promoted a vein of thought cognate to deism were active both before and after the time of its greatest notoriety. But there are many reasons to show why, in the 17th century, men should have set themselves with a new zeal, in politics, law and theology, to follow the light of nature alone, and to cast aside the fetters of tradition and prescriptive right, of positive codes, and scholastic systems, and why in England especially there should, amongst numerous free-thinkers, have been not a few free writers. The significance of the Copernican system, as the total overthrow of the traditional conception of the universe, dawned on all educated men. In physics, Descartes had prepared the way for the final triumph of the mechanical explanation of the world in Newton’s system. In England the new philosophy had broken with time-honoured beliefs more completely than it had done even in France; Hobbes was more startling than Bacon. Locke’s philosophy, as well as his theology, served as a school for the deists. Men had become weary of Protestant scholasticism; religious wars had made peaceful thinkers seek to take the edge off dogmatical rancour; and the multiplicity of religious sects, coupled with the complete failure of various attempts at any substantial reconciliation, provoked distrust of the common basis on which all were founded. There was a school of distinctively latitudinarian thought in the Church of England; others not unnaturally thought it better to extend the realm of theadiaphorabeyond the sphere of Protestant ritual or the details of systematic divinity. Arminianism had revived the rational side of theological method. Semi-Arians and Unitarians, though sufficiently distinguished from the free-thinkers by reverence for the letter of Scripture, might be held to encourage departure from the ancient landmarks. The scholarly labours of P. D. Huet, R. Simon, L. E. Dupin, and Jean Le Clerc (Clericus), of the orientalists John Lightfoot, John Spencer and Humphrey Prideaux, of John Mill, the collator of New Testament readings, and John Fell, furnished new materials for controversy; and the scope of Spinoza’sTractatus theologico-politicushad naturally been much more fully apprehended than ever hisEthicacould be. The success of the English revolution permitted men to turn from the active side of political and theological controversy to speculation and theory; and curiosity was more powerful than faith. Much new ferment was working. The toleration and the free press of England gave it scope. Deism was one of the results, and is an important link in the chain of thought from the Reformation to our own day.
Long before England was ripe to welcome deistic thought Lord Herbert of Cherbury earned the name “Father of Deism” by laying down the main line of that religious philosophy which in various forms continued ever after to be the backbone of deistic systems. He based his theology on a comprehensive, if insufficient, survey of the nature, foundation, limits and tests of human knowledge. And amongst the divinely implanted, original, indefeasiblenotitiae communesof the human mind, he found as foremost his five articles:—that there is one supreme God, that he is to be worshipped, that worship consists chiefly of virtue and piety, that we must repent of our sins and cease from them, and that there are rewards and punishments here and hereafter. Thus Herbert sought to do for the religion of nature what his friend Grotius was doing for natural law,—making a new application of the standard of Vincent of Lerins,Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus. It is important to notice that Herbert, as English ambassador at Paris, united in himself the currents of French and English thought, and also that his De Veritate, published in Latin and translated into French, did not appear in an English version.
Herbert had hardly attempted a systematic criticism of the Christian revelation either as a whole or in its details. Blount, a man of a very different spirit, did both, and in so doing may be regarded as having inaugurated the second main line of deistic procedure, that of historico-critical examination of the Old and New Testaments. Blount adopted and expanded Hobbes’s arguments against the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch; and, mainly in the words of Burnet’sArcheologiae philosophicae, he asserts the total inconsistency of the Mosaic Hexaemeron with the Copernican theory of the heavens, dwelling with emphasis on the impossibility of admitting the view developed in Genesis, that the earth is the most important part of the universe. He assumes that the narrative was meantethically, notphysically, in order to eliminate false and polytheistic notions; and he draws attention to that double narrative in Genesis which was elsewhere to be so fruitfully handled. The examination of the miracles of Apollonius of Tyana, professedly founded on papers of Lord Herbert’s, is meant to suggest similar considerations with regard to the miracles of Christ. Naturalistic explanations of some of these are proposed, and a mythical theory is distinctly foreshadowed when Blount dwells on the inevitable tendency of men, especially long after the event, to discover miracles attendant on the birth and death of their heroes. Blount assaults the doctrine of a mediator as irreligious. He dwells much more pronouncedly than Herbert on the view, afterwards regarded as a special characteristic of all deists, that much or most error in religion has been invented or knowingly maintained by sagacious men for the easier maintenance of good government, or in the interests of themselves and their class. And when he heaps suspicion, not on Christian dogmas, but on beliefs of which the resemblance to Christian tenets is sufficiently patent, the real aim is so transparent that his method seems to partake rather of the nature of literary eccentricity than of polemical artifice; yet by this disingenuous indirectness he gave his argument that savour of duplicity which ever after clung to the popular conception of deism.
Shaftesbury, dealing with matters for the most part different from those usually handled by the deists, stands almost wholly out of their ranks. But he showed how loosely he held the views he did not go out of his way to attack, and made it plain how little weight the letter of Scripture had for himself; and, writing with much greater power than any of the deists, he was held to have done more than any one of them to forward the causefor which they wrought. Founding ethics on the native and cultivable capacity in men to appreciate worth in men and actions, and, like the ancient Greek thinkers whom he followed, associating the apprehension of morality with the apprehension of beauty, he makes morality wholly independent of scriptural enactment, and still more, of theological forecasting of future bliss or agony. He yet insisted on religion as the crown of virtue; and, arguing that religion is inseparable from a high and holy enthusiasm for the divine plan of the universe, he sought the root of religion in feeling, not in accurate beliefs or meritorious good works. He set little store on the theology of those who in a system of dry and barren notions “pay handsome compliments to the Deity,” “remove providence,” “explode devotion,” and leave but “little of zeal, affection, or warmth in what they call rational religion.” In the protest against the scheme of “judging truth by counting noses,” Shaftesbury recognized the danger of the standard which seemed to satisfy many deists; and in almost every respect he has more in common with those who afterwards, in Germany, annihilated the pretensions of complacent rationalism than with the rationalists themselves.
Toland, writing at first professedly without hostility to any of the received elements of the Christian faith, insisted that Christianity was not mysterious, and that the value of religion could not lie in any unintelligible or self-contradictory elements; though we cannot know the real essence of God or of any of his creatures, yet our beliefs about God must be thoroughly consistent with reason. Afterwards, Toland discussed, with considerable real learning and much show of candour, the comparative evidence for the canonical and apocryphal Scriptures, and demanded a careful and complete historical examination of the grounds on which our acceptance of the New Testament canon rests. He contributed little to the solution of the problem, but forced the investigation of the canon alike on theologians and the reading public. Again, he sketched a view of early church history, further worked out by Johann Salomo Semler (1725-1791), and surprisingly like that which was later elaborated by the Tübingen school. He tried to show, both from Scripture and extra-canonical literature, that the primitive church, so far from being an incorporate body of believers with the same creed and customs, really consisted of two schools, each possessing its “own gospel”—a school of Ebionites or Judaizing Christians, and the more liberal school of Paul. These parties, consciously but amicably differing in their whole relation to the Jewish law and the outside world, were subsequently forced into a non-natural uniformity. The cogency of Toland’s arguments was weakened by his manifest love of paradox. Wollaston upheld the “intellectual” theory of morality, and all his reasoning is independent of any authority or evidence derived from revelation. His system was simplicity itself, all sin being reduced to the one form of lying. He favoured the idea of a future life as being necessary to set right the mistakes and inequalities of the present.
Collins, who had created much excitement by hisDiscourse of Free-thinking, insisting on the value and necessity of unprejudiced inquiry, published at a later stage of the deistic controversy the famous argument on the evidences of Christianity. Christianity is founded on Judaism; its main prop is the argument from the fulfilment of prophecy. Yet no interpretation or rearrangement of the text of Old Testament prophecies will secure a fair and non-allegorical correspondence between these and their alleged fulfilment in the New Testament. The inference is not expressly drawn, though it becomes perfectly clear from his refutation of William Whiston’s curious counter theory that there were in the original Hebrew scriptures prophecies which were literally fulfilled in the New Testament, but had been expunged at an early date by Jewish scribes. Collins indicates the possible extent to which the Jews may have been indebted to Chaldeans and Egyptians for their theological views, especially as great part of the Old Testament would appear to have been remodelled by Ezra; and, after dwelling on the points in which the prophecies attributed to Daniel differ from all other Old Testament predictions, he states the greater number of the arguments still used to show that the book of Daniel deals with events past and contemporaneous, and is from the pen of a writer of the Maccabean period, a view now generally accepted. Collins resembles Blount in “attacking specific Christian positions rather than seeking for a foundation on which to build the edifice of Natural Religion.” Amongst those who replied to him were Richard Bentley, Edward Chandler, bishop of Lichfield, and Thomas Sherlock, afterwards bishop of London, who also attacked Woolston. They refuted him easily on many specific points, but carefully abstained from discussing the real question at issue, namely the propriety of free inquiry.
Woolston, at first to all appearance working earnestly in behalf of an allegorical but believing interpretation of the New Testament miracles, ended by assaulting, with a yet unknown violence of speech, the absurdity of accepting them as actual historical events, and did his best to overthrow the credibility of Christ’s principal miracles. The bitterness of his outspoken invective against the clergy, against all priestcraft and priesthood, was a new feature in deistic literature, and injured the author more than it furthered his cause.
Tindal’s aim seems to have been a sober statement of the whole case in favour of natural religion, with copious but moderately worded criticism of such beliefs and usages in the Christian and other religions as he conceived to be either non-religious or directly immoral and unwholesome. The work in which he endeavoured to prove that true Christianity is as old as the creation, and is really but the republication of the gospel of nature, soon gained the name of the “Deist’s Bible.” It was against Tindal that the most important of the orthodox replies were directed,e.g.John Conybeare’sDefence of Revealed Religion, William Law’sCase of Reasonand, to a large extent, Butler’sAnalogy.
Morgan criticized with great freedom the moral character of the persons and events of Old Testament history, developing the theory of conscious “accommodation” on the part of the leaders of the Jewish church. This accommodation of truth, by altering the form and substance of it to meet the views and secure the favour of ignorant and bigoted contemporaries, Morgan attributes also to the apostles and to Jesus. He likewise expands at great length a theory of the origin of the Catholic Church much like that sketched by Toland, but assumes that Paul and his party, latterly at least, were distinctly hostile to the Judaical party of their fellow-believers in Jesus as the Messias, while the college of the original twelve apostles and their adherents viewed Paul and his followers with suspicion and disfavour. Persecution from without Morgan regards as the influence which mainly forced the antagonistic parties into the oneness of the catholic and orthodox church. Morgan “seems to have discerned the dawning of a truer and better method” than the others. “He saw dimly that things require to be accounted for as well as affirmed or denied,” and he was “one of the pioneers of modern historical science as applied to biblical criticism.”
Annet made it his special work to invalidate belief in the resurrection of Christ, and to discredit the work of Paul.
Chubb, the least learnedly educated of the deists, did more than any of them, save Herbert, to round his system into a logical whole. From the New Testament he sought to show that the teaching of Christ substantially coincides with natural religion as he understood it. But his main contention is that Christianity is not a doctrine but a life, not the reception of a system of truths or facts, but a pious effort to live in accordance with God’s will here, in the hope of joining him hereafter. Chubb dwells with special emphasis on the fact that Christ preached the gospel to the poor, and argues, as Tindal had done, that the gospel must therefore be accessible to all men without any need for learned study of evidences for miracles, and intelligible to the meanest capacity. He sought to show that even in the New Testament there are essential contradictions, and instances the unconditional forgiveness preached by Christ in the gospels as compared with Paul’s doctrine of forgiveness by the mediation of Christ. Externally Chubb is interesting as representing the deism of the people contrasted with that of Tindal the theologian.
Dodwell’s ingenious thesis, that Christianity is not founded on argument, was certainly not meant as an aid to faith; and, though its starting-point is different from all other deistical works, it may safely be reckoned amongst their number.
Though himself contemporary with the earlier deists, Bolingbroke’s principal works were posthumously published after interest in the controversy had declined. His whole strain, in sharp contrast to that of most of his predecessors, is cynical and satirical, and suggests that most of the matters discussed were of small personal concern to himself. He gives fullest scope to the ungenerous view that a vast proportion of professedly revealed truth was ingeniously palmed off by the more cunning on the more ignorant for the convenience of keeping the latter under. But he writes with keenness and wit, and knows well how to use the materials already often taken advantage of by earlier deists.
Before passing on to a summary of the deistic position, it is necessary to say something of the views of Conyers Middleton (q.v.), who, though he never actually severed himself from orthodoxy, yet advanced theories closely analogous to those of the deists. His most important theological work was that devoted to an exposure of patristic miracles. His attack was based largely on arguments which could be turned with equal force against the miracles of the New Testament, and he even went further than previous rationalists in impugning the credibility of statements as to alleged miracles emanating from martyrs and the fathers of the early church. That Middleton was prepared to carry this type of argument into the apostolic period is shown by certain posthumous essays (Miscellaneous Works; ii. pp. 255 ff.), in which he charges the New Testament writers with inconsistency and the apostles with suppressing their cherished beliefs on occasions of difficulty.
In the substance of what they received as natural religion, the deists were for the most part agreed; Herbert’s articles continued to contain the fundamentals of their theology. Religion, though not identified with morality, had its most important outcome in a faithful following of the eternal laws of morality, regarded as the will of God. With the virtuous life was further to be conjoined a humble disposition to adore the Creator, avoiding all factitious forms of worship as worse than useless. The small value they attributed to all outward and special forms of service, and the want of any sympathetic craving for the communion of saints, saved the deists from attempting to found a free-thinking church. They seem generally to have inclined to a quietistic accommodation to established forms of faith, till better times came. They steadfastly sought to eliminate the miraculous from theological belief, and to expel from the system of religious truth all debatable, difficult or mysterious articles. They aimed at a rational and intelligible faith, professedly in order to make religion, in all its width and depth, the heritage of every man. They regarded with as much suspicion the notion of a “peculiar people” of God, as of a unique revelation, and insisted on the possibility of salvation for the heathen. They rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, and protested against mediatorship, atonement and the imputed righteousness of Christ, always laying more stress on the teaching of Christ than on the teaching of the church about him; but they repeatedly laid claim to the name of Christians or of Christian deists. Against superstition, fanaticism and priestcraft they protested unceasingly. They all recognized the soul of man—not regarded as intellectual alone—as the ultimate court of appeal. But they varied much in their attitude towards the Bible. Some were content to argue their own ideas into Scripture, and those they disliked out of it; to one or two it seemed a satisfaction to discover difficulties in Scripture, to point to historical inaccuracies and moral defects. Probably Chubb’s position on this head is most fairly characteristic of deism. He holds that the narrative, especially of the New Testament, is in the main accurate, but, as written after the events narrated, has left room for misunderstandings and mistakes. The apostles were good men, to whom, after Christ, we are most indebted; but they were fairly entitled to their own private opinions, and naturally introduced these into their writings. The epistles, according to Chubb, contain errors of fact, false interpretations of the Old Testament, and sometimes disfigurement of religious truth.
The general tendency of the deistical writings is sufficiently self-consistent to justify a common name. But deism is not a compact system nor is it the outcome of any one line of philosophical thought. Of matters generally regarded as pertaining to natural religion, that on which they were least agreed was the certainty, philosophical demonstrability and moral significance of the immortality of the soul, so that the deists have sometimes been grouped into “mortal” and “immortal” deists. For some the belief in future rewards and punishments was an essential of religion; some seem to have questioned the doctrine as a whole; and, while others made it a basis of morality, Shaftesbury protested against the ordinary theological form of the belief as immoral. No two thinkers could well be more opposed than Shaftesbury and Hobbes; yet sometimes ideas from both were combined by the same writer. Collins was a pronounced necessitarian; Morgan regarded the denial of free will as tantamount to atheism. And nothing can be more misleading than to assume that the belief in a Creator, existent wholly apart from the work of his hands, was characteristic of the deists as a body. In none of them is any theory on the subject specially prominent, except that in their denial of miracles, of supernatural revelation, and a special redemptive interposition of God in history, they seem to have thought of providence much as the mass of their opponents did. Herbert starts his chief theological work with the design of vindicating God’s providence. Shaftesbury vigorously protests against the notion of a wholly transcendent God. Morgan more than once expresses a theory that would now be pronounced one of immanence. Toland, the inventor of the name of pantheism, was notoriously, for a great part of his life, in some sort a pantheist. And while as thinkers they diverged in their opinions, so too they differed radically in character, in reverence for their subject and in religious earnestness and moral worth.
The deists were not powerful writers; none of them was distinguished by wide and accurate scholarship; hardly any was either a deep or comprehensive thinker. But though they generally had the best scholarship of England against them, they were bold, acute, well-informed men; they appreciated more fully than their contemporaries not a few truths now all but universally accepted; and they seemed therefore entitled to leave their mark on subsequent theological thought. Yet while the seed they sowed was taking deep root in France and in Germany, the English deists, the most notable men of their time, were soon forgotten, or at least ceased to be a prominent factor in the intellectual life of the century. The controversies they had provoked collapsed, and deism became a by-word even amongst those who were in no degree anxious to appear as champions of orthodoxy.
The fault was not wholly in the subjectivism of the movement. But the subjectivism that founded its theology on the “common sense” of the individual was accompanied by a fatal pseudo-universalism which, cutting away all that was peculiar, individual and most intense in all religions, left in any one of them but a lifeless form. A theology consisting of a few vague generalities was sufficient to sustain the piety of the best of the deists; but it had not the concreteness or intensity necessary to take a firm hold on those whom it emancipated from the old beliefs. The negative side of deism came to the front, and, communicated with fatal facility, seems ultimately to have constituted the deism that was commonly professed at the clubs of the wits and the tea-tables of polite society. But the intenser religious life before which deism fell was also a revolt against the abstract and argumentative orthodoxy of the time.
That the deists appreciated fully the scope of difficulties in Christian theology and the sacred books is not their most noteworthy feature; but that they made a stand, sometimes cautiously, often with outspoken fearlessness, against the presupposition that the Bible is the religion of Protestants. They themselves gave way to another presupposition equally fatal to true historical research, though in great measure common to them and their opponents. It was assumed by deists indebating 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 theEncyclopédiewas 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 theAufklärung, 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. Ererationalismus vulgarisfell 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’sPrinciples of Natureit 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’sErziehung des Menschengeschlechtesas the dawn of a fuller and a purer light on the history of religion and on the development of the spiritual life of mankind.