In Germany the liberation of the masses from the dominion of the Church of Rome was effected with the, at first, active believing concurrence of the nation; in England this was not so. Protestantism here was the result rather of the influence and interests of the King and Court, and of the indifference of the great body of the people. The Reformed Church of England, sustained by the crown and aristocracy, has generally left the people to find their own way to heaven or hell, and has only required abstinence from avowed denial of, or active opposition to, its tenets. Its ministers have usually preached with the same force to a few worshippers scattered over their grand cathedrals and numerous churches as to a thronging crowd, but in each case there has been a lack of vitality in the sermon. It is only when the material interests of the church have been apparently threatened that vigor has been shown on the part of its teachers.
It is a curious fact, and one for comment hereafter, that while in the modern struggle for the progress of heresy its sixteenth-century pages present many most prominent Italian names, when we come to the eighteenth century there are but few such names worthy special notice; it is no longer from the extreme South, but from France, Germany, and England, that you have the great array of Freethinking warriors. Those whom Italy boasts, too, are now nearly all in the Idealistic ranks.
We commenced the list by a brief reference to Bernard Man-deville, a Dutch physician, born at Dordrecht in 1670, and who died in 1733; a writer with great power as a satirist, whose fable of the “Bees, or Private Vices made Public Benefits,” not only served as source for much of Helvetius, but had the double honor of an indictment at the Middlesex session, and an answer from the pen of Bishop Berkeley.
One of the early, and perhaps one of the most important promoters of heresy in the United Kingdom, was George Berkeley, an Irishman by birth. He was born on the 12th of March, 1684, at Kilcrin, and died at Oxford in 1753. It was this writer to whom Pope assigned “every virtue under heaven,” and of whom Byron wrote:
“When Bishop Berkeley said ‘there was no matter,’ And proved it—’twas no matter what he said: They say his system ’tis in vain to batter, Too subtle for the airiest human head; And yet who can believe it?”