David Patrick

“ When his working powers failed him, Groome was assisting in the preparation of a new edition of 'Chambers's Cyclopædia of English Literature' (3 vols. 1901–1903) ; and for more than a year he was a confirmed invalid. He died in London on 24 January 1902, and was buried beside his father and mother in Monk Soham churchyard.
Nothing in Groome's life is more remarkable than that he should have passed so swiftly and cheerfully from a veritable Bohemia of romance into the bondage of systematic labour, and have worked in the new conditions with a rare efficiency. ”

“ Yet English deism was in many ways characteristically English. The deists were, as usually happens with the leaders of English thought, no class of professional men, but represented every rank in the community. They made their appeal in the mother tongue to all men who could read and think, and sought to reduce the controversy to its most direct practical issue, making it turn as much as possible on hard facts or the data of common sense. And, with but one or two exceptions, they avoided wildness in their language as much as in the general scheme of theology they proposed. ”

“ A singularly alert, swift, and eager intellect, he was unwearied in research, impatient of anything less than precision, a frank and fearless critic ; thoroughly at home in wide fields of historical and philological research, and in some of them a master. ”

“ Founding ethics on the native and cultivable capacity in men to appreciate worth in men and actions, and associating the apprehension of morality with the appre hension of beauty, he makes morality wholly independent of scriptural enactment, and still more, of theological forecast ing of future bliss or agony. He yet insisted on religion as the crown of virtue ; and, arguing that religion is insepar able from a high and holy enthusiasm for the divine plan of the universe, he sought the root of religion in feeling, not in accurate beliefs or meritorious good works. ”

“ In Edinburgh he conciliated respect and affection, not less by the native dignity and force of his character than by his geniality and social gifts, although in later years ill-health made him much of a recluse. ”

“ The term deism is not only used to signify the main body of the deists teaching, or the tendency they represent, but has of late especially come into use as a technical term for one specific metaphysical doctrine as to the relation of God to the universe, assumed to have been characteristic of the deists, and to have distinguished them from atheists, pantheists, and theists, the belief, namely, that the first cause of the universe is a personal God, but is not only distinct from the world but apart from it and its concerns. ”

“ Shaftesbury recognized the danger of the standard which seemed to satisfy many deists ; and in almost every respect he has more in common with those who afterwards, in Germany, annihilated the pretensions of complacent rationalism than with the rationalists themselves. Toland, writing at first professedly without hostility to any of the received elements of the Christian faith, insisted that Christianity was not mysterious, and that the value of
religion could not lie in any unintelligible element ”

“ A man of strong convictions and not a few prepossessions, he had a knowledge of the romantic side of Scottish history such as few Scotsmen possess, notably of Jacobite literature in all its ramifications native and foreign. ”

“ Naturalists was a name frequently used of such as recognized no god but nature, of so-called Spinozists, atheists ; but both in England and Germany, in the 18th century, this word was more commonly and aptly in use for those who founded their religion on the lumen naturce alone. ”

“ Locke s philosophy, as well as his theology, served as a school for the deists. Men had becomff weary of Protestant scholas ticism ; religious wars had made peaceful thinkers seek to take the edge off dogmatical rancour ; and the multiplicity of religious sects provoked distrust of the common basis on which all founded. There was a school of distinctively latitudinarian thought in the Church of England ; others not unnaturally thought it better to extend the realm of the adiaphora beyond the sphere of Protestant ritual or the details of systematic divinity. ”

“ Collins, who had created much excitement by his Discourse of Free-thinking, insisting on the value and necessity of unprejudiced inquiry, published at a later stage of the deistic controversy the famous argument on the evidences of Christianity. Christianity is founded on Judaism ; its main prop is the argument from the fulfil ment of prophecy. Yet no interpretation or re-arrangement of the text of Old Testament prophecies will secure a fair and non-allegorical correspondence between these and their alleged fulfilment in the New Testament. ”

“ He left Oxford without taking a degree, spent some time at Göttingen, and for years lived much with gypsies at home and abroad; he travelled on the Puszta with Hungarian gypsies, and elsewhere with Roumanian and Roumelian companies, and he married in 1876 a wife of English gypsy blood, Esmeralda Locke, from whom he afterwards separated.
In 1876 Groome settled down to regular literary work in Edinburgh. He was soon one of the most valued workers on the staff of the 'Globe Encyclopaedia' (6 vols. 1876-9) . ”

“ No two thinkers could well be more opposed than Shaftesbury and Hobbes ; yet sometimes ideas from both were combined by the same writer. Collins was a pronounced necessitarian ; Morgan regarded the denial of free will as tantamount to atheism. And nothing can be more misleading than to assume that the belief in a Creator, existent wholly apart from the work of his hands, was characteristic of the deists as a body. ”

“ At the same time Groome wrote much on gypsies. His article on 'Gipsies,' contributed to the ninth edition of the 'Encyclopædia Britannica,' made him known to the world as a gypsyologist. 'In Gipsy Tents' (1880; 2nd edit. 1881) recorded much of his own experience. He was joint-editor of the 'Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society' (1888-92 ; revived in 1907) , and a paper by him on 'The Influence of the Gypsies on the Superstitions of the English Folk' was printed in 1891, in the 'Transactions of the International Folk-Lore Congress.' Mr. ”

“ In the substance of what they received as natural religion, the deists were for the most part agreed ; Herbert s articles continued to contain the fundamentals of their theology. Religion, though not identified with morality, had its most important outcome in a faithful following of the eternal laws of morality, regarded as the will of God. With the virtuous life was further to be conjoined a humble disposi- tion to adore the Creator, avoiding all factitious forms of worship as worse than useless. ”

“ ANDERSON, ALEXANDER (1845–1909) , labour poet writing under the pseudonym of 'Surfaceman,' born on 30 April 1845, in the village of Kirkconnel in Upper Nithsdale, was sixth and youngest son of James Anderson, a Dumfriesshire quarryman, by his wife Isabella Cowan. When the boy was three, the household removed to Crocketford in Kirkcudbright, and at the village school there Anderson got all his schooling ”

“ Blount assaults the doctrine of a mediator as irreligious ; and much more pronouncedly than Herbert he dwells on the view, afterwards regarded as a special characteristic of all deists, that much or most error in religion has been invented or knowingly maintained by sagacious men for the easier main tenance of good government, or in the interests of themselves and their class. ”

“ And even some cultured theologians, the historical representatives of latitudinarianism, seem to accept the great body of what was contended for by the deists, though they have a fuller appreciation of the power of spiritual truth, and a truer insight into the ways of God with man in the history of the world. ”

“ Herbert starts his chief theological work with the design of vindicating God s providence. Shaftes bury vigorously protests against the notion of a wholly transcendent God. Morgan more than once expresses a theory that would now be pronounced one of immanence. Toland, the inventor of the name of pantheism, was noto riously, for a great part of his life, in some sort a pantheist. And while as thinkers they diverged in their opinions, so too the deists differed radically from one another in their character, in reverence for their subject, and in religious earnestness and moral worth. ”

“ A. Stewart, brought Anderson's work under the notice of George Gilfillan [q. v.] and advised the publication of a volume of collected pieces, 'A Song of Labour and other Poems' (1873) . This Gilfillan reviewed very favourably; and to a second volume, 'The Two Angels and other Poems' (Dundee, 1875) , the friendly critic prefixed an appreciative memoir of the 'Surfaceman,' whose verse now appeared from time to time in 'Good Words,' 'Chambers's Journal,' 'Cassell's Magazine,' and the 'Contemporary Review.' A wealthy Glasgow citizen, Mr. ”

“ And amongst the divinely implanted, original, indefeasible notitice com munes of the human mind, he found as foremost his five articles : that there is one supreme God, that he is to be worshipped, that worship consists chiefly of virtue and piety, that we must repent of our sins and cease from them, and that there are rewards and punishments here and here after. ”

“ The small value attributed to all outward and special forms of service, and the want of any sympathetic craving for the communion of saints, saved the deists from attempting to found a free-thinking church, a creedless communion. They seem generally to have inclined to a quietistic accommodation to established forms of faith, till better times came. ”

“ Chubb dwells with special emphasis on the fact that Christ preached the gospel to the poor, and argues, as Tindal had done, that the gospel must therefore be accessible to all men without any need for learned study of evidences for miracles, and intelligible to the meanest capacity. ”

“ Fortunately, however, the points on which the private opinions of apos tolic men might naturally differ most widely, such as the doctrine of the Logos, are matters which have nothing to do with the salvation of souls, The general tendency of the deistical writings is sufficiently self-consistent to justify a common name. ”