 Welcome to George H. Smith's Excursions into Libertarian Thon, a production of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. Deism, The Age of Reason, and Richard Carlisle. In 1730, the Anglican Bishop of London, Edmund Gibson, warned his flock to be on guard against two dangerous and heretical arguments. First was the argument that, there is not sufficient evidence of the truth and authority of the gospel revelation. This convinced many people to reject the gospel as the word of God. Second was the argument that, reason being a sufficient guide in matters of religion, there was no need of such a revelation. This convinced many people that they could rely on their reason alone to discern moral principles and to live a moral life without recourse to divine revelation. Gibson was referring to the deus and he understood their basic approach quite well. The deus believed in a God of nature, a non-interventionist creator who lets the universe run according to natural laws without tinkering with his handiwork. Those natural laws can be known through reason and knowledge of them, including knowledge of human nature, is both necessary and sufficient to guide our conduct. The derivation, elaboration, and justification of an objective moral code was seen as the essential task of a rational religion, the religion of nature. Knowledge of nature for deus is the means by which God reveals himself to man. 18th century deus often referred to this as natural revelation or knowledge that is available to everyone through the use of reason. They contrasted natural revelation with special revelation or knowledge supposedly communicated by God to a particular person or group of persons. Special revelation was often said to be above, though not contrary to, reason. So it collided with the deistic agenda of subjecting all claims of knowledge to rational examination. Reason should render the final verdict in all spheres of knowledge. Deistic reactions to special revelation ranged from skepticism to outright rejection, most typically the latter. The deus therefore undertook critical examination of the Bible, miracles, prophecy, religious experience, and beliefs based on faith. But this aspect of deistic thought, critical deism, as the historian Leslie Stephen called it, was only one part of the deistic agenda. The other part which Stephen called constructive deism was to explain and defend the particular ethical precepts of the religion of nature. That meant justifying moral and political principles by reason alone, without appealing to any kind of authority, whether human or divine. And this naturalistic approach which appealed to natural laws of human conduct, generated a good deal of skepticism about political authorities. If such authorities could not justify by rational means their claims to wield power, then they deserved neither respect nor obedience. The deistic controversy dominated the theological and political scene in England the first several decades of the 18th century. Many deists were among the libertarians of their day, which put them in the front line of the battle for religious and civil liberties. Deistic tracks and books elicited hundreds of replies, assailing the ideas of this troublesome movement. Orthodox rulers were especially alarmed because some prominent deists hailed from lower class backgrounds, and they circumvented the elite intellectuals by addressing the working class directly, often ridiculing religious and political authorities in language that ordinary people could understand. In a country with an established church, deists thus posed a serious threat to both the religious and political status quo. A primary purpose of the Anglican church, for example, was to instill the virtue of passive obedience in the masses. As King Charles I said, religion is the only firm foundation of all power. Bishop Goodman agreed. The church and state do mutually support and give assistance to each other. Or, in the words of another astute observer, the state pays the clergy and thus they have dependence upon the state. In 1790, Edmund Burke claimed that deism had spent its force decades earlier, who, born within the last 40 years, has read one word of Collins and Toland and Tyndall and Chubb and Morgan and that whole race who called themselves free thinkers. Who now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through? The free thinkers named by Burke were among the leading English deists and it is quite true that by 1750, deism had peaked in England and that the popularity of deistic works was on the decline. But two things should be noted. First, if the popularity of deistic works had ebbed by the later 18th century, this was partly because deism had become far less controversial, having been embraced by leading Enlightenment intellectuals such as Adam Smith, David Hume, Edward Gibbon, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire, and many others. Proponents usually need not argue vociferously for a belief that has become part of the intellectual mainstream. Second, with the publication of Thomas Paine's polemical defense of deism, The Age of Reason, in 1794 and 1795, public interest in deism picked up considerably, an interest that was fueled by vigorous governmental efforts to suppress the book. In 1819, for example, the publisher and bookseller Richard Carlisle was convicted of blasphemous libel for publishing The Age of Reason. Carlisle published the book in part as a test case. In his libertarian free thought periodical, The Republican, he repeatedly mocked the authorities and challenged them to come and get him. The government, prodded by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, finally did precisely that. Carlisle's three-day trial was closely covered by the press, and it was a fascinating trial indeed. Prominent people, including some members of parliament, attended Carlisle's trial, and thousands of commoners gathered outside the London courthouse to support their Doty champion in his battle against government censorship. To publish anything by Thomas Paine was a hazardous enterprise, given Paine's previous conviction for seditious libel in 1792. See my discussion of the trial in Thomas Paine vs. Edmund Burke, Part 2. The eminent legal historian, Leonard W. Levy, made the following observation in his important book, Blasphemy, Verbal Offense Against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie. Political radicalism in the tradition of Paine frequently intersected religious radicalism, while weekly newspaper demanding revocation of the stamp tax, freedom of the press, and equal voting rights most likely also preached deist doctrine or satirized the Bible or flirted with atheism. On the first day of his trial, Carlisle read the entire text of the Age of Reason to the jury as part of his defense, a process that consumed nearly 12 hours. He then printed and sold the book as part of a cheap edition of the trial transcript, and in that form it was reported in Parliament to have sold 15,000 copies. Without doubt, Carlisle was a clever and determined defender of civil liberties, but he paid a heavy price for those qualities. He was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for publishing the Age of Reason and to an additional year for publishing Principles of Nature, a deistic work by an American free-thinker, Ellie Who Palmer. The verdict also demanded that Carlisle post a bond of 1,500 pounds for his release to ensure his future good conduct, but that he refused to do. As a result, Carlisle served an additional three years. Carlisle entered jail a deist but emerged six years later, an atheist, and he continued to thumb his nose at the government by selling seditious and blasphemous works. While Carlisle was imprisoned, his wife kept their bookshop going, and because of the publicity surrounding the trial, she was able to sell thousands of copies of the Age of Reason within a short time. That commercial success earned Mrs. Carlisle two years behind bars. She was followed by Carlisle's sister, Mary Ann, who served three years. Then came a long line of employees who continued Carlisle's work and suffered the same fate. Of this remarkable display of mass civil disobedience, Hypatia Brodlaw Bonner, daughter of the prominent atheist and member of parliament, Charles Brodlaw, wrote the following in Penalties Upon Opinion. Not only Carlisle's wife and sister, but his shopmen and shopwomen came forward to sell the condemned work, and they also were sent to prison after their leader. Volunteers came from all parts of the country to quietly fill their places, first behind the counter in the shop, next in the dock, and finally in the jail. There were at one time as many as eight of Carlisle's shopmen in Newgate under sentence for blasphemy, in addition to the three Carlisles who lay in Dorchester jail, and those in the compter and other prisons. It has been estimated that about 150 persons were imprisoned in this way. This has always seemed to me one of the most honorable and most affecting incidents in the history of the free-thought movement of the first half of the 19th century. Those obscure men and women coming from different parts of the country when traveling was difficult, and almost certainly in the face of the greatest opposition from family and friends, to silently offer themselves to martyrdom for the sake of an unpopular opinion. Their martyrdom was a real martyrdom, for their imprisonment was seldom for days or weeks, but usually for a year or years. The good of their fellow men was the sole motive which inspired their heroism, even as it was their sole reward. Their action seemed to have been accepted without comment as a duty performed, and so little publicity was given to their devotion that we do not even know, and I am not aware that there are any means of ascertaining the exact number of those who actually suffered. But for all that their work was done so quietly, it was effectual, and gained that freedom for the age of reason for which they sacrificed themselves. So far as I can ascertain, since the gallant stand made by Carlisle and his band of co-workers, the age of reason has never again been made the subject of prosecution in this country, although it has been sold continuously and openly up to this day. Thus, with good reason, Leonard Levy dubbed Carlisle, England's foremost blasphemer, and said that he, achieved more for the freedom of the press than any other person in the country's history. This has been Excursions into Libertarian Thought, a production of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. To learn more about Libertarian philosophy and history, visit www.libertarianism.org.