Page images
PDF
EPUB

REMARKS

UPON A LATE

DISCOURSE OF FREE-THINKING:

IN

A LETTER TO F. H., D.D.

BY

PHILELEUTHERUS LIPSIENSIS.

Est genus hominum, qui esse primos se omnium rerum volunt,
Nec sunt

An audes

Personam formare novam? Servetur ad imum

Qualis ab incepto processerit, et sibi constet.

(From ed. 1743.)

ΤΟ

MY VERY LEARNED AND HONOURED FRIEND

F. H., D.D.*

AT LONDON, GREAT BRITAIN.

SIR,

YOUR many and great civilities to me since our first acquaintance in the Low Countries, and the kind officet you then did me in conveying my Annotations on Menander to the press; but, above all, your taciturnity and secrecy, that have kept the true author of that book undiscovered hitherto, if not unguessed; have encouraged me to send you these present REMARKS, to be communicated to the public, if you think they deserve it; in which I doubt not but you'll exhibit a new proof of your wonted friendship and fidelity.

What occasioned you this trouble was the fresh arrival of a countryman of ours from your happy island, who brought along with him a small book, just published before he left London; which (as he says) made very much discourse there. He knowing me to be a great admirer of the books of your nation, and to have competently learned both to write and speak your language during my long stay at Oxford, made me a then agreeable present of that new Discourse of Free-thinking.

[* i. e. Dr. Francis Hare.-In the editions of the Remarks which Bentley put forth after his quarrel with Hare, he substituted "N. N." for "F. H., D.D.:" but in the ed. of 1743, the author being then dead, the latter initials were restored.-D.]

[† To Hare, while resident in Holland as chaplain-general to the Duke of Marlborough's army, 1710, Bentley committed his Emendationes in Menandri et Philemonis Reliquias, &c., auctore Phileleuthero Lipsiensi, to be forwarded to Peter Burman at Utrecht, who published them during the same year. The name of the real author was divulged by Hare, in spite of an injunction that he should keep it secret: hence the playful allusion above.-D.]

VOL. III.

2 P

I, who (as you well know) have been trained up and exercised in free thought from my youth, and whose borrowed name PHILELEUTHERUS sufficiently denotes me a lover of freedom, was pleased not a little at so promising a title; and (to confess to you my own vanity) could not help some aspiring thoughts from pressing and intruding on me, that this rising and growing* Society might one day perhaps admit into their roll a humble foreigner brother, a free-thinker of Leipsic.

But when once the curtain was drawn, and by a perusal of the book the private cabbala and mysterious scheme within became visible and open, that expectation and the desire itself immediately vanished. For, under the specious shew of free-thinking, a set and system of opinions are all along inculcated and dogmatically taught; opinions the most slavish, the most abject and base, that human nature is capable of. And upon those terms, neither you, I fancy, nor I, shall ever make our court for admittance into their club.

[* An allusion to the title of Collins's work, which, while the other writings of that once-distinguished person are now forgotten, is still remembered in consequence of Bentley's incomparable Remarks. It is styled A Discourse of Free-thinking, Occasion'd by The Rise and Growth of a Sect call'd Free-Thinkers. Mundum tradidit hominum disputationi Deus. Eccl. 3. 11. Vulg. Unusquisque suo sensu abundet. Rom. 14. 5. Ib.

Nil tam temerarium, tamque indignum sapientis gravitate atque constantiâ, quam, quod non satis exploratè perceptum sit & cognitum sine ulla dubitatione defendere. Cic. de Nat. Deor. l. 1.

'Tis a hard Matter for a Government to settle Wit. Characteristicks, vol. 1. p. 19. Fain would they confound Licentiousness in Morals with Liberty in Thought, and make the Libertine resemble his direct Opposite. Ib. vol. 3. p. 306. London, Printed in the Year M.DCC.XII. 8vo, pp. 178.-Alarmed, we are told, at a report that the work was to be prosecuted, Collins, soon after its appearance, went over to Holland. There he published an 8vo edition in the same type, with the same London imprint, the same date, and the same number of pages (though not always with the same quantity of matter in each page), as the first edition, with corrections of the Errata enumerated at the end of the first edition, and with a few omissions and alterations in those passages which Bentley had censured. It seems, indeed, that the Discourse was printed in 8vo more than once at the Hague; for Armand de la Chapelle (Pref. to La Friponnerie Laïque, p. xxiv.) says that he possessed two copies of the work in

« PreviousContinue »