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  • Chapter 4 - ‘This degenerate Age … so miserably over-run with Scepticism and Infidelity’

  • Michael Hunter, Birkbeck College, University of London
  • Book:
    Atheists and Atheism before the Enlightenment
    Published online:
    06 July 2023
    Print publication:
    27 July 2023, pp 73-93

  • Summary

    Chapter 4 deals with atheism after 1660, including the legacy of the Civil War and particularly the influence of Thomas Hobbes. It offers vignettes of such freethinkers as John Wagstaffe, Daniel Scargill, Charles Blount and the Earl of Rochester before confronting the issue of the continuing scarcity of named examples of actual atheists. It considers the case of ‘The Second Spira’ and finds it of questionable validity; on the other hand, it prints verbatim a supposed statement of atheistical principles made in 1700 by an apostate, George Smith. It ends with the early eighteenth-century case of Richard Burridge, an atheist who was prosecuted for blasphemy but who subsequently reformed and capitalised on his dubious reputation.