Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THEOLOGY AND EELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS The age into which Adam Smith was born was an age of religious doubt and philosophic curiosity. During his lifetime the governing classes in England, undisturbed by enthusiasms, were little disposed to entertain revolutionary ideas in politics or religion. It seemed to be the function of philosophic thinkers to leave the constitution of a tolerably liberal State and a tolerably lax Church, and to advance in other directions. The fierce storms that bent the course of Selden and Milton and Hobbes had abated. Men tried to forget " The lifted axe, the agonising wheel, Luke's iron crown, and Damiens' bed of steel." No one believed that the Deity created kings; many doubted whether there was a Deity at all. Since the great days of Athens, philosophy had seldom reaped a richer harvest than in Great Britain during the eighty years that followed the Act of Union. Newton's Principia, and the philosophy of Shaftesbury, Clarke, Mandeville, Hutcheson, and Butler, as well as of Hume and Adam Smith, all fall within this period. Speculative discovery went hand in hand with mechanical invention. The poetry of enthusiasm, religious and political fervour, persecution, martyrdom, with all theirheroic and squalid accompaniments, preceded and followed this prosaic illumination. It was a chapter of dry light between two of heat and fire and smoke. Reason reigned; and as reason seldom wears an air of originality, we need not wonder if later ingenuity has discovered that all these philosophers borrowed their doctrines either from the ancients or from one another or from foreigners. But though there appears to be just now a tendency to carry the search for the genealogy and pedigree of ideas rather too far, it is certainly not our purpose to...