SECT. IX.

AGAINST THE MODERN FREE-THINKERS.
Sir,

THERE arrived in this neighbourhood, two days ago, one of your gay gentlemen of the town, who being attended at his entry with a servant of his own, besides a countryman he had taken up for a guide, excited the curiosity of the village to learn whence and what he might be. The countryman (to whom they applied as most easy of access) knew little more than that the gentleman came from London to travel and see fashions, and was, as he heard say, a Free-thinker; what religion that might be he could not tell; and for his own part, if they had not told him the man was a Free-thinker he should have guessed, by his way of talking, he was little better than a Heathen; excepting only that he had been a good gentleman to him, and made him drunk twice in one day, over and above what they had bargained for.

I do not look upon the simplicity of this, and several odd inquiries with which I shall not trouble you, to be wondered at; much less can I think that our youths of fine wit and enlarged understandings have any reason to laugh. There is no necessity that every squire in Great Britain should know what the word Free-thinker stands for: but it were much to be willed that they who value themselves upon that conceited title were a little better instructed in what it ought to stand for, and that they would not persuade themselves a man is really and truly a Free-thinker in any tolerable sense, merely by virtue of his being an Atheist, or an Infidel of any other distinction. It may be doubted with good reason, whether there ever was in nature a more abject, slavish, and bigotted generation than the tribe of Beaux Efprits at present so prevailing in this island. Their pretension to be Free-thinkers is no other than rakes have to be free-livers, and savages to be free-men; that is, they can think whatever they have a mind to, and give themselves up to whatever conceit the extravagancy of their inclination or their fancy shall suggest; they can think as wildly as talk and act, and will not endure that their wit should be controlled by such formal things as decency and common sense; deduction, coherence, consistency, and all the rules of reason, they accordingly disdain, as too precise and mechanical for men of a liberal education.

This, as far as I could ever learn from their writings, or my own observation, is a true account of the British Free-thinker. Our visitant here who gave occasion for this paper, has brought with him a new system of common sense, the particulars of which I am not yet acquainted with, but will lose no opportunity of informing myself whether it contains any thing worth Mr. Spectator's notice. In the mean time, Sir, I cannot but think it would be for the good of mankind if you would take this subject into your own consideration, and convince the hopeful youth of our nation that licentiousness is not freedom: or, if such a paradox will not be understood, that a prejudice towards Atheism is not impartiality.

l am, Sir, your most humble Servant,
Philonous.