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Updated: May 3, 2025
It is objected, that by freethinking, men will think themselves into atheism; and indeed I have allowed all along, that atheistical books convert men to freethinking.
Hobbes was a person of great learning, virtue, and freethinking, except in the high church politics. But Archbishop Tillotson is the person whom all English freethinkers own as their head; and his virtue is indisputable for this manifest reason; that Dr. Hickes, a priest, calls him an atheist; says, he caused several to turn atheists, and to ridicule the priesthood and religion.
The Christian record is before us, and it is such that every Church blames the others for its existence. Quite as certainly we cannot point to a society that has been dominated by Freethinking ideals, but we can point to their existence in all ages, and can show that all progress is due to their presence.
Thus the information I received, after my book came out, went to show that the Christian doctrine, in its direct and simple sense, was understood, and had always been understood, by a minority of men, while the critics, ecclesiastical and freethinking alike, denied the possibility of taking Christ's teaching in its direct sense.
Fostered by these circumstances, the great faculty for physical and metaphysical inquiry, with which the people of our race are naturally endowed, developed itself vigorously; and at least two of its products have had a profound and a permanent influence upon the subsequent course of thought in the world. The one of these was English Freethinking; the other, the Theory of Gravitation.
In organic connection with it was a large debating hall, in which the most notorious secularist lecturers held forth every Sunday evening; and next door to it, under its shadow and patronage, was a little dingy shop filled to overflowing with the coarsest freethinking publications, Colonel Ingersoll's books occupying the place of honor in the window and the 'Freethinker' placard flaunting at the door.
Now this is just the very case of the Bramins, Persees, Bonzes, Talapoins, Dervises, Rabbis, and all other priests, who build their religion upon books, as our priests do upon their Bibles; they all equally differ about the copies, various readings and inspirations, of their several Scriptures, and God knows which are in the right: Freethinking alone can determine it.
His writings and sermons are a protest, however decorous, against the orthodox theology; and the protest may be all the more effective, with a certain order of minds, because it does not show them the ultimate consequences of freethinking.
As a rule, instead of trying to familiarise the people with Aeschylus and Sophocles, poets who are essentially Athenian, they generally chose the freethinking and cosmopolitan Euripides, who was easily intelligible, and whose beauties did not seem so entirely to defy imitation. What Euripides was to Greek tragedy Menander was to comedy.
I could hear awful noises from behind the seal cutter's shop front, as if some one were groaning his soul out. Suddhoo shook all over, and while we groped our way upstairs told me that the jadoo had begun. Janoo and Azizun met us at the stair head, and told us that the jadoo work was coming off in their rooms, because there was more space there. Janoo is a lady of a freethinking turn of mind.
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