Godless
Ian Bradley
Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England 16601750 John Redwood (Thames and Hudson £7.00) 'It is a general complaint that this nation of late years is grown more numerously vitious than heretofore; Pride, Luxury, Drunkenness, Whoredom, Cursing, Swearing, bold and open Atheism everywhere abounding'. The words could come from any Festival of Light campaigner today. In fact, they were written by John Milton just three hundred years ago. They express the concern felt by Christians at the avalanche of loose living and free thinking that descended on England with the ending of puritan rule and the restoration of the Court and its manners in 1660. It is the impact of these atheistic influences and the response to them from Churchmen that John Redwood analyses in his interesting and penetrating study of the Age of Enlightenment.
The real danger to Christianity came not from the proliferation of voices catalogued by Milton, but from the assault by intellectuals. Whitelocke Bulstrode was tilting at the wrong target when he condemned a contemporary masque containing references to transvestism on the grounds that it would carry more Christians away from the faith than would be brought to it bY raising ten men from the dead. Much more serious was the growth in scepticism and ridicule which was eroding belief in such central Christian doctrines as the Trinity.
Christian apologists accepted and accommodated much of what the prophets of the new age of reason said. They went out of their way to agree with the sentiments expressed in the leading atheist tract of the time, John Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious, and to eliminate the irrational elements of their faith. John Locke set out in his Essay concerning Human Understanding to demonstrate the existence of God on rational grounds. The trouble was, of course, that by going so far to prove the reasonableness of Christianity and by accommodating it to fit every new scientific discovery, the Christian apologists had in effect conceded that the battle was lost. John Redwood demonstrates convincingly how it was just as much the response of churchmen as the assault of infidel and rationalist philosophers which weakened Christianity and hastened the drift into disbelief in the earlY eighteenth century. They would have been better to have stressed the mysterious elements of Christianity, and expressed their faith in terms of miracles and magic.
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