Of the work done by English deism thus far, it may suffice to say that within two generations it had more profoundly altered the intellectual temper of educated men than any religious movement had ever done in the same time. This appears above all from the literature produced by orthodoxy in reply, where the mere defensive resort to reasoning, apart from the accounts of current rationalism, outgoes anything in the previous history of literature. The whole evolution is a remarkable instance of the effect on intellectual progress of the diversion of a nation's general energy from war and intense political faction to mental activities. A similar diversion had taken place at the Restoration, to be followed by a return to civil and foreign strife, which arrested it. It was in the closing years of Anne, and in the steady régime of Walpole under the first two Georges, that the ferment worked at its height. Collins's Discourse of Freethinking was synchronous with the Peace of Utrecht: the era of war re-opened in 1739, much against the will of Walpole, who resigned in 1742. Home and foreign wars thereafter became common; and in 1751 Clive opened the period of imperialistic expansion, determining national developments on that main line, concurrently with that of the new industry. Could the discussion have been continuous--could England have remained what she was in the main deistic period, a workshop of investigation and a battleground of ideas--all European development might have been indefinitely hastened. But the deists, for the most part educated men appealing to educated men or to the shrewdest readers among the artisans, had not learned to reckon with the greater social forces; and beyond a certain point they could not affect England's intellectual destinies.
It is worse than idle to argue that "the true cause of the decay of deism is to be sought in its internal weakness," in the sense that "it was not rooted in the deepest convictions, nor associated with the most powerful emotions of its adherents." [793] No such charge can be even partially proved. The deists were at least as much in earnest as two-thirds of the clergy: the determining difference, in this regard, was the economic basis of the latter, and their social hold of an ignorant population. The clergy, who could not argue the deists down in the court of culture, had in their own jurisdiction the great mass of the uneducated lower classes, and the great mass of the women of all classes, whom the ideals of the age kept uneducated, with a difference. And while the more cultured clergy were themselves in large measure deists, the majority, in the country parishes, remained uncritical and unreflective, caring little even to cultivate belief among their flocks. The "contempt of the clergy" which had subsisted from the middle of the seventeenth century (if, indeed, it should not be dated from the middle of the sixteenth) meant among other things that popular culture remained on a lower plane. With the multitude remaining a ready hotbed for new "enthusiasm," and the women of the middle and upper orders no less ready nurturers of new generations of young believers, the work of emancipation was but begun when deism was made "fashionable." And with England on the way to a new era at once of industrial and imperial expansion, in which the energies that for a generation had made her a leader of European thought were diverted to arms and to commerce, the critical and rationalizing work of the deistical generation could not go on as it had begun. That generation left its specific mark on the statute-book in a complete repeal of the old laws relating to witchcraft; [794] on literature in a whole library of propaganda and apology; on moral and historic science in a new movement of humanism, which was to find its check in the French Revolution.