2 - Christianity not Mysterious (1696): Deism and the Liberty of the Press

Summary

William Morgan, an obscure army officer, agreed with the Williamite project to improve the morals of the country. Unlike those involved in Anglican renewal, however, he suggested that godly providence could only be delivered by clerical reform. For too long the country had been plagued with priestcraft, practised by a sect of men who had abandoned their reason and were addicted to controversy. Far from bringing men to salvation and peace, as they were ordained to do, too many English clerics engaged in disputes, writing books and pamphlets to the ‘disturbance and confusion of mankind’. In Morgan's view, priests were hypocrites, seeking power for self-interested ends, creating tumults and disturbing the civil peace. Their hypocrisy was most graphically exposed by their attitude to public disputation. It was impossible to say anything against them for they insisted they must not be meddled with, for the press would be broke and the ‘book burned’, and yet far from engaging in reasonable debate they promoted unnatural heats from the ‘pulpit and the press’ constantly disturbing the nation's peace. What good, he continued, had their canting, their ‘preaching and prating, their scribbling and printing’ done in the last sixteen hundred years?

Morgan's tract offered little solution to the canting priests of the age, insisting reform was the duty of politicians. But his tract points to an important development in the 1690s. Both John Locke and John Toland supplemented their anticlericalism with attacks on how clerics distorted public debate with tyrannous actions and their exclusive claims to mediating the truth. In this sense, then, both Locke's and Toland's anticlericalism might be considered as a continuation of Whig ideology, which has been traced back to the exclusion crisis. Anticlericalism can, of course, be made to wear many different guises, but the broad argument has remained much the same in the last decades. Attacking priests for their imposture, distorting power for their own tyrannous ends, helped to form the early English Enlightenment: it was anticlericalism that formed the backbone of Whig civil theology. Whilst Locke's attitude to the press has been extensively studied, it has never been particularly clear how John Toland conceptualised the relationship between anticlericalism and the freedom of the press. Chapter 2 will seek to complicate such claims by reconsidering Toland's understanding of the rules of public debate, which he proposed in Christianity not Mysterious.