TY - JOUR
AU - Starr, G A
AB - Abstract Many 17th-century arguments over the validity of belief turn from the ontological problem of God’s existence toward the consequences of believing versus disbelieving, and the benefits and risks of either choice. Insistence on the necessity of making a choice, and the application of worldly thought-processes to an otherworldly theological question, is most familiar through the Pascalian wager. Yet many English writers before and after Pascal approached the question of belief from a similarly prudential standpoint, and brought to bear arguments and images drawn from various forms of worldly gambling, such as investing, insuring, and mercantile activity. There were numerous sermons on Matthew 16:26: ‘For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?’ Distinguished preachers like John Tillotson and philosophers such as John Locke made ‘direct appeal to a calculating precautionary self-interest’. This article surveys how English divines marshal the language and mentality of wagering and risk-taking in the service of religious belief, thus pursuing traditional sacred ends by modern profane means. ‘For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?’ (Matthew 16:26) Many 17th-century arguments over the validity of belief turn away from the ontological problem of God’s existence toward a focus on the consequences of believing versus disbelieving, and on calculating the benefits and risks of either choice. The best-known example of an insistence on the necessity of making such a choice, and of the application of worldly thought-processes to the determination of an otherworldly theological question, is the Pascalian wager, which has provoked voluminous commentary by recent philosophers and cultural historians. Most discussions have been concerned, however, with the emergence of probability theory, rather than with the evolution of religious thought and discourse.1 Yet, in England, there was a considerable body of writing which approached the question of belief from a similarly prudential standpoint, and deployed arguments and images similarly drawn from gambling and other forms of worldly risk-taking, such as investing, insuring, and mercantile activity in general. Much of this writing took the form of sermons on Matthew 16:26: ‘For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?’2 Distinguished preachers like John Tillotson and philosophers such as John Locke had no compunction about making—as one recent scholar says of Pascal—‘direct appeal to a calculating precautionary self-interest’.3 Some of the English defences of faith along these lines precede Pascal’s, and none are indebted to the Pensées, but my concern is not with priority or influence.4 What interests me is the way English divines marshal the language and mentality of hazard, venture, wager, and risk-taking of all sorts in the service of religious belief, and thus pursue traditional sacred ends by modern profane means. My survey of this pattern of thought and argument will conclude with an account of Daniel Defoe’s version of the wager, which he reiterated on five different occasions, over a span of nearly thirty years. Much of The Wisdom of being Religious (1664) by John Tillotson (1630–1694) is designed to counter the imputation ‘that Religion is a foolish bargain, because they who are Religious hazard the parting with a present and certain happiness for that which is future and uncertain’.5 The task of assessing one’s long-term, otherworldly wellbeing is presented here in metaphorical terms that are strikingly worldly: religion and atheism are wise and foolish ‘bargains’ competing for our custom. Tillotson addresses a public that constantly calculates present against future costs and benefits, and takes into account complex, fluctuating, imprecise factors. Amidst such uncertainties, there is an unavoidable degree of hazard or risk in all kinds of purchases, investments, and exchanges. Libertine gamesters are not the only people who face these challenges: they are the stuff of everyday life for Tillotson’s bourgeois auditors and readers. The Wisdom of being Religious originated, as its subtitle makes clear, as A Sermon Preached at St Pauls … before the Lord Maior and Aldermen of this City. This was pulpit oratory addressed not to a courtly congregation, but delivered before the most eminent citizens of London, whose orientation and prestige were primarily mercantile—men of the City, elevated not by hereditary rank or rural landholding but by commercial or financial success. Throughout this period, writers of all denominations defended belief by appealing to motives that were intrinsic to the calculated risk-taking of everyday business activity. This was true not only of Defoe and other middle-class Dissenters, but also of reputable Church of England divines. In a crucial passage in The Wisdom of being Religious, Tillotson maintains that: Atheism is imprudent, because it is unsafe in the issue. The Atheist doth, as it were, lay a Wager against the Religious man that there is no God; but upon strange inequality and odds; for he ventures his Eternal Interest: whereas the other ventures onely the loss of his Lusts … or at the utmost, of some temporal convenience; and all this while is inwardly more contented and happy, and usually more healthful, … and lives in a more secure and flourishing condition … th[a]n the Atheistical person does … And after this life, if there be no God, is as well as he; but if there be a God, is infinitely better, even as much as unspeakable and eternal happiness is better th[a]n extream and endless misery. So that if the Arguments for and against a God were equal, and it were an even Question Whether there were one or not, yet the hazard and danger is so infinitely unequal, that in point of prudence and interest every man were obliged to incline to the Affirmative; and what-ever doubts he might have about it, to choose the safest side of the Question, and to make that the Hypothesis to live by. For, he that acts wisely, and is a throughly prudent man, will be provided in omnem eventum, will take care to secure the main chance, what-ever happens: but the Atheist, in case things should fall out contrary to his belief and expectation, he hath made no provision for this case; if, contrary to his confidence, it should prove in the Issue that there is a God, the man is lost and undone for ever.6 This sermon was preached and published before Pascal’s Pensées or Thoughts appeared in print, either in French or English, so its framing of the choice between belief and unbelief explicitly as a wager is independent of Pascal’s.7 The unabashed appeals to ‘secur[ing] the main chance’, to consulting ‘prudence and interest’, and to ‘choos[ing] the safest side of the Question’, make Tillotson’s rhetoric very homely and practical, based on marketplace concepts and values congenial to a bourgeois public. Besides advising businessmen to proceed judiciously, however, Tillotson recognises that they can and must take chances. Pascal was to hold that not choosing between belief and unbelief is not an option, because refusing or delaying to choose is in effect to reject belief. Tillotson does not make this contention explicit, but he too suggests that choice is unavoidable, through his portrayal of the atheist and ‘the Religious man’ as willy-nilly betting against each other about God’s existence. He maintains that the stakes, the odds, and ‘the hazard and danger’ all favour the believer over the atheist, so that there is a ‘strange inequality’ in their positions, yet there is no hint that he sees (or supposes his reader will see) anything incongruous or unbecoming about casting the entire question in gambling terms. On the contrary, Tillotson’s prose reveals a relish for such ‘ventures’, and especially for the potential gains and losses: the passage culminates in a zestful account of the ‘state of ruine and desperation’ of the atheist once he discovers, after death, that he has bet on the wrong side.8 Roughly a decade after the appearance of The Wisdom of being Religious, in a journal entry for 29 July 1676, John Locke (1632–1704) makes the same case in similar terms. He says that if anyone finds in atheism ‘lesse contrariety to reason and experience then in the beleife of a deity’, ‘the great venture he runs … will always stick with a considerate man’. Even supposing (as Locke does not) that ‘the seeming probability lay on the Atheists side’, nevertheless ‘the best estate the Atheist can hope for if he be in the right’ is ‘annihilation or … eternall Insensibility’, whereas ‘the reward of the religious if his perswasion deceive him not’ will be ‘everlasting happynesse’. On the negative side, ‘annihilation … is the worst that can happen to the believer if he be mistaken’, whereas ‘infinite misery … will certainly overtake the Atheist if his opinion should happen to prove false’. Therefore ‘it would make a man very wary how he imbraces an opinion where there is such unequall ods and where the consequences are of such moment and soe infinitely different’. If ‘the best [the atheist] can hope is the worst can follow from [religious belief]’, it does not make sense for any ‘rationall creature … who hath the least care or kindenesse for himself’ ‘to venture the losse of infinite happynesse and put himself in danger of infinite eternall misery and that in exchange for and expectation of just noething’.9 Locke uses the language of wagering and trade—‘venture’ (twice), ‘unequall ods’, ‘reward’, ‘losse’, ‘exchange’, ‘advantage’—rather than the lofty abstractions of conventional philosophy. Choosing between atheism and belief is posed in terms of the hopes and fears of ordinary people, and focuses entirely on the practical ‘consequences of the beleif of a god’, not on the ontological validity of such a belief. Someone facing ‘the choise he is to make of two contrary opinions’ is unable to judge the truth or falsity of atheism or belief, because he cannot know which one is ‘mistaken’ until he dies. Therefore his choice has to be determined by ‘put[ting] in the balance’ the ‘happynesse’ or ‘misery’ either option holds out, at best and at worst. He should act like ‘a considerate man’ and ‘a rationall creature’ in weighing these prospects, but this does not call for the talents or tools of a philosopher; ‘any one who hath the least care or kindenesse for himself,’ Locke suggests, should opt for ‘the beleife of a deity’. Here, and throughout, Locke implies that the best equipment and practice for deciding on otherworldly questions is a prudent grounding in the business of this world. He is not squeamish about discussing lofty issues in mundane terms, drawn from gaming or commerce, and in this he is at one with various English divines and with Defoe. Throughout this period, writers on these problems had to wrestle with the fact that we have ample sense-evidence about the rewards of this world, but only second-hand evidence about any possible afterlife, based on statements of supposed divine authority as recorded in the Bible, or on the speculations of Christian theologians, likewise grounded in scripture. A similar difficulty was posed by the fact that some kinds of propositions can be demonstrated conclusively along logical, mathematical, or empirical lines, whereas those concerning the existence of God, the soul, or an afterlife cannot be confirmed or refuted by bringing to bear any such tests. One response to these difficulties was to maintain that on key doctrinal issues, such as those just mentioned, we do not need and should not demand geometrical proofs or other forms of full-fledged ‘demonstration’, but that the evidence we do have is sufficient for us to embrace belief on grounds that are appropriate and reasonable. Tillotson states this case effectively. He grants ‘that the Assurance which we have of future Rewards falls short of the Evidence of sense’, but maintains nevertheless that: ‘We have sufficient assurance of these things, and such as may beget in us a well-grounded confidence, and free us of all doubts of the contrary, and perswade a reasonable man to venture his greatest Interests in this World upon the security that he hath of another World.’ We have enough assurance, he says: as is abundantly sufficient to justifie every mans discretion, who for the great and eternal things of another World, hazards or parts with the poor and transitory things of this Life. And for the clearing of this, it will be worth our considering, that the greatest affairs of this world, and the most important concernments of this life, are all conducted onely by Moral Demonstrations: Men every day venture their lives and estates onely upon Moral assurance. For instance, Men who never were at the East or West Indies, or in Turky, or Spain; yet do venture their whole Estates in Traffick thither, though they have no Mathematical demonstration, onely moral assurance that there are such Places.10 Just as we should bear in mind when reading Pascal that he evidently envisions interlocutors or readers who (unlike himself) are neither expert mathematicians nor ascetics withdrawn from the world but sophisticated and somewhat jaded worldlings, so too in reading The Wisdom of being Religious it helps to remember that Tillotson is talking and writing to ‘the Lord Maior and Aldermen’ of London, who may be engaged in ‘Traffick’ with ‘the East or West Indies, or … Turky’, and thus well qualified to understand and appreciate the distinction he is drawing between ‘Mathematical demonstration’ and ‘moral assurance’. His hearers and readers are apt to be gratified by his holding up their mercantile activities as ‘the greatest affairs of this world, and the most important concernments of this life’, and by his asserting that the ‘moral assurance’ which validates their commercial ventures is also ‘abundantly sufficient to justifie’ their choosing belief over unbelief. Other writers grapple with the problem that we lack not only ‘the Evidence of sense’ to persuade us of an afterlife, but also any post-scriptural reports from heaven or hell, by those who have returned from either place. William Bates (1625–1699), whom Defoe refers to as one of the distinguished Presbyterian divines of his youth, notes that atheists ‘argue against the reality of future recompences’ on grounds that ‘we have no testimony from others who know the truth of them by experience’. According to ‘the Language of Infidelity’: Of all that undertook that endless Voyage to another World, who ever came back through the immense ocean of the Air to bring us news of such a happy Paradise as to make us despise this World? Do they drink the Waters of forgetfulness, so as to lose the memory of the Earth and its Inhabitants? If there were a place of endless Torments, of the millions of Souls that every day depart from hence, would none return to give advice to his dear friends to prevent their misery? Or when they have taken that last step, is the precipice so steep that they cannot ascend hither? Or does the Soul lose its wings that it cannot take so high a flight? These are idle fancies. And from hence they conclude, that none ever return, because they never come there, but finally perish in the dissolution of the Body, and are lost in the Abyss of nothing: when they cease to live with us, they are dead to themselves. And consequently they judge it a foolish bargain to part with what is present and certain for an uncertain futurity.11 In response, Bates maintains that ‘though the evidence of the future state be not equal to that of sense as to clearness, yet ’tis so convincing, even by natural light, that upon far less Men form their Judgments, and conduct their weightiest affairs in the World’. Just as Tillotson the low-church Anglican maintains that we can and should choose belief over unbelief on the same prudential grounds that we decide ‘the greatest affairs of this world’, so too Bates the Dissenter argues that debates about the existence of God, the soul, and ‘the future state’ can be resolved using the kinds of evidence and deliberation with which we ‘conduct [our] weightiest affairs in the World’. This is to say that the practical habits of mind that govern mundane mercantile activity are deemed appropriate and sufficient for weighing the most momentous theological questions, and arriving at the correct answers to them. In a sermon on Matthew 16:26, Thomas Beverly (d. 1702) similarly addresses ‘the Atheist’, who ‘complains of the want of evidence and asurance of these things’. ‘I’ll yield,’ admits Beverley, ‘there is not such a blockish, bruitish kind of certainty as he requires, that should affect Stocks and Beasts.’ But he asks: What odds therefore does he give against himself, in making nothing of a Soul, for a little of the World, in a Life, that cannot with all it has defray the charge of living, the vanity and vexation of Spirit that certainly attends Life; and the certainty it must end, and wholly uncertain how soon; and yet he stands the hazard of a Soul miserable for ever, in its being lost, and for ever crying out for an exchange for it self that cannot be found, any more than he knows what to give in exchange for his life, if once lost.12 Here too the atheist is represented as making an imprudent wager, against heavy ‘odds’ and with very high stakes; ‘sense’ evidence is deprecated as a ‘blockish, bruitish’ criterion more appropriate to ‘Stocks and Beasts’ than to mankind, and one that the atheist himself does not consistently rely on, but actively transgresses whenever he guards against possibilities he has not actually seen. The implication is that with so much to be gained or lost, and with adequate if not conclusive grounds for belief, atheistic complaints about the ‘want of evidence and asurance’ regarding the afterlife are misplaced, and risk making one ‘miserable for ever’. Most Englishmen have always preferred a good bargain over a bad bargain, whatever the context, yet some thinkers have found it offensive to think or speak of divine subjects in such vulgar, nation-of-shopkeeper terms. Whether rewards and punishments have a legitimate bearing on moral or spiritual decisions has long been a subject of debate. One position has been that considerations of reward and punishment are pertinent to one’s moral choices—regarding actions to be done or avoided—as well as to one’s spiritual choices—regarding beliefs to be embraced or rejected. Whether or not we find this view valid, it is clear that in the decades before and after 1700, it was held widely but not universally. And this concern with rewards and punishments can be seen as having been one aspect of a more general habit of mind, which approached questions of all kinds, worldly and otherworldly, in terms of acceptable and unacceptable levels of profit and loss, benefits and costs, insurance and risk, probability and uncertainty, and so on. In other words, criteria that most of us would identify as mercantile, and would find appropriate to commercial decisions, are liable to be regarded today more as Shaftesbury thought of them in the early 1700s—that is, as alien to the proper spirit of judgments about religious belief or moral behaviour. My object here is not to vindicate prudential religiosity or morality against aspersions of vulgarity, selfishness, materialism, and so on, but merely to establish that many of the most representative writers of the period did not think they were debasing themselves or their subject by treating it in such terms. On the contrary, they shared Locke’s view that one great advantage of Christianity over pagan philosophy was that it appealed not only to men’s intellects but also to their interests: The [ancient] Philosophers indeed shewed the beauty of Virtue: They set her off so as drew Mens Eyes and approbation to her: But leaving her unendowed, few were willing to espouse her. The generality could not refuse her their esteem and commendation; But still turned their Backs on her and forsook her, as a Match not for their turn. But now there being put into the Scales, on her side, An exceeding and immortal weight of Glory; Interest is come about to her; And Virtue now is visibly the most enriching purchase, and by much the best Bargain.13 Contemporary divines therefore applied to questions of religious belief the standards and the very language with which their bourgeois auditors and readers managed their ‘great affairs’ in the marketplace. Of all the writings being considered here, Tillotson’s Wisdom of being Religious was probably the best known and most influential. But for present purposes, a sermon on Matthew 16:26 by Basil Kennett (1674–1715) is no less interesting, for several reasons. First of all, Kennett’s translation of Pascal’s Thoughts on Religion had appeared in 1704, and in various editions was to remain the standard version throughout most of the century. One might expect him to refer to Pascal, as relevant to the questions posed by Matthew 16:26, but there is not the least echo of the wager, or any other Pascalian idea or image, either in this sermon or elsewhere in the volume of Sermons Preached on Several Occasions, to a Society of British Merchants in Foreign Parts (London: J. Churchill, 1715). Pascal is totally absent; on the other hand, Kennett’s thought and language is highly reminiscent of that of his English predecessors. The ‘Merchants in Foreign Parts’ referred to in the title were connected with the British trading factory at Leghorn, of which Kennett was the first chaplain from 1706 to 1712, so it is no surprise that he addresses them in prudential terms. At the outset, Christ’s ‘great Argument’ in this text is said to be ‘an Argument to Interest and Advantage’, and Kennett’s own argument is no less directed to the merchants’ habitual preoccupation with what Tillotson and others called ‘the main chance’. He explicitly compares his auditors’ mercantile calculations with Christ’s ‘Argument’: You accept and embrace such a Proposal in Trade, such a Sale, such a Purchase, such a Bargain, or Exchange, not absolutely because it is your Interest, or Profit … but because to your best Judgment it appears to be so … Again, an Apparent Interest does not move You to give it the Precedence, merely by being present, but by seeming to exceed all that are in Sight, whether near or remote … for here your Reason is not apt to miscalculate. If the parting with a smaller Good that’s certain, for a greater that’s only probable, be the ground of Insurances and Adventures, much more, the giving a little in Hand, for a great deal that will certainly come, or a petty Possession for a large and secure Reversion, is the Principle of Men of Sagacity and Oeconomy. That this is the very Case between your Soul and the World, is what your own Thoughts have determin’d.14 Addressing ‘Men of Sagacity and Oeconomy’, he does not have to harangue them about abandoning their worldly ways if they have any hopes of heaven. On the contrary, he invites them to bring to bear on religious questions the very habits of thought with which they weigh prospective business transactions or investments. No less ingratiating is his observation, a couple of pages later, that: An Argument to Profit or Interest, is peculiarly strong and cogent with those, who are vers’d in the Measures of Interest, and exact in the Comparative Worth or Value of Things. Such an Argument seems to recommend and endear it self to you, by waiting on you in your own Province, speaking your own Language, and using the Terms of that Art, of which you are the profess’d and acknowledg’d Masters.15 Nor is this the sole instance of the New Testament accommodating itself so obligingly to the mercantile mentality; as Kennett points out, ‘not only [this] Text expresses your [the merchants’] great Concernments under the Names of Gain and Loss, of giving and taking in Exchange; but the same Allusion is observable, thro’ the whole Strain and Series of the Gospel’.16 Thus even when (as in Matthew 16:26) Christ advises us to attach less value to this world than to the welfare of our souls in an afterlife, he does so by ‘speaking [our] own Language, and using the Terms’ such as profit, gain, loss, and exchange that are familiar from the marketplace. Modern readers may balk at Kennett’s rhetoric, since he seems so intent on flattering his auditors, and so wary of suggesting that they are merely serving Mammon. More generally, his contention that the soul’s welfare in the afterlife matters more than earthly goods in the present may seem to be at odds with the very worldly air of his arguments and his imagery. But this is true, to a varying extent, of almost every sermon on Matthew 16:26, perhaps because Christ himself, in urging his listeners to look beyond their immediate material concerns, had resorted to such mercantile language. A conviction that the prudential calculations necessary in business are equally appropriate and valuable in determining religious and moral questions was not shared universally, however. Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) is an eloquent exponent of one major strand of opposition, which holds that the mercantile mentality reduces religion and morality alike to sordid self-seeking: ’Tis the most beggarly Refuge imaginable, which is so mightily cry’d up, and stands as a great Maxim with many able Men; ‘that they shou’d strive to have Faith, and believe to the utmost: because if, after all, there be nothing in the matter, there will be no harm in being this deceiv’d; but if there be any thing, it will be fatal for them not to have believ’d to the full’. But they are so far mistaken, that whilst they have this Thought, ’tis certain they can never believe either to their Satisfaction and Happiness in this World, or with any advantage of Recommendation to another. For besides that our Reason, which knows the Cheat, will never rest thorowly satisfy’d on such a Bottom, but turn us often a-drift, and toss us in a Sea of Doubt and Perplexity; we cannot but actually grow worse in our Religion, and entertain a worse Opinion still of a Supreme DEITY, whilst our Belief is founded on so injurious a Thought of him.17 A very different line of opposition is represented by the nonconformist Charles Morton (1627–1698), best known today as an educator: his academy at Newington Green numbered Defoe among its pupils in the 1670’s, and he spent his final decades preaching in Cambridge and teaching at Harvard.18 As a commentator on wagering, Morton draws a sharp distinction between play and profit. He is able to approve gambling so long as it is a mere pastime, even though other forms of recreation or diversion seem to him more wholesome and less dangerous. But if wagering is pursued for the sake of gain, he disapproves, holding that profit is the natural and legitimate reward of labour, and labour alone. He is unable or unwilling to recognise that unless gambling is a matter of mere chance, it may involve a good deal of labour, and not only on the part of professional gamesters. He fails to see the close similarity, if not the identity, between the mental activity required in wagering and the processes of weighing odds and probabilities, potential benefits and losses, and so on, that must enter into most business decisions. For Morton, in other words, profit must grow out of work, and work is bound up with earning bread by the sweat of your brow. Playing at cards or dice might not meet this criterion, yet it is curious that someone as clever as Morton, and in many respects so forward-looking, misses the intimate connection between wagering and the realm of investing. To lend or borrow, to extend or withhold credit, to go long or short on any stock or enterprise, is always a wager. Every wager may contain an element of mere chance, yet it brings into play the foresight, prudence and judgment that characterise labour at almost every level above sheer hewing of wood and drawing of water. Unless labour is entirely physical rather than mental, it is likely to call for the same kinds of exertion and expertise that successful wagering demands and rewards. Not all labour involves wagering, and not all wagering is laborious in the sense that it is onerous, tedious, or exhausting: the two are certainly not identical. Yet as various divines of the period recognised, and as my quotations from them illustrate, mercantile activity of all kinds involves betting on the future. Many contemporaries were therefore less dismissive of wagering than Morton, precisely because they saw that weighing probabilities and taking risks was reputable mental labour, and was a necessary element in the great affairs of that worthy figure, the successful British merchant.19 One long-recognised feature of Latitudinarian preaching was its determination to move away from the gloomy atmosphere of Calvinism, in which religion was associated with severity and anxiety. The new emphasis was on religion and morality as neither morose nor harsh, but as paths to happiness here and hereafter that do not put unduly rigorous demands on our beliefs or actions.20 It is in keeping with this genial Latitudinarian tendency, yet paradoxical in itself, that when Tillotson, Kennett and others expound Matthew 16:26, they do not call for utter renunciation of the things of this world, or of worldly ways of assessing and resolving problems. On the contrary, although they urge us to place a higher value on the world to come, they justify this preference as a better ‘bargain’, ‘venture’, ‘exchange’, ‘wager’, and so on, thus deploying the same worldly criteria brought to bear on decisions about buying, selling, investing, insuring, and the other risks taken daily in the marketplace. Christ wants to detach us from the world, to refocus our attention and our desires on a world to come. The Restoration divines want to nudge us in the same direction, but they do not ask us to abandon our earthly concerns, to become like the lilies of the field, to take no thought for the morrow (Matthew 6:25–34). Just as crucially and paradoxically, far from asking us to give up the prudential thinking and the eye to the main chance with which we manage our earthly affairs, they themselves embrace and recommend such reasoning, as appropriate even to the question of belief in God. So instead of emphatically weaning their auditors and readers from the world, these divines seize on Christ’s imagery of ‘exchange’, ‘loss’, and so on in Matthew 16:26 and proceed to import an unprecedented worldliness into the discussion and defence of religion. Defoe treats the subject using arguments and images that should by now seem familiar. As early as 1704, in his preface to The Storm, he contends that: Certainly Atheism is one of the most Irrational Principles in the World; there is something incongruous in it with the Test of Humane Policy, because there is a Risque in the Mistake one way, and none another. If the Christian is mistaken, and it should at last appear that there is no Future State, God or Devil, Reward or Punishment, where is the Harm of it? All he has lost is, that he … took the pains to live a little more like a Man than he wou’d have done. But if the Atheist is mistaken, he has brought all the Powers, whose Being he deny’d, upon his Back … and must at last sink under the Anger of him whose Nature he has always disown’d. I would recommend this Thought to any Man to consider of, one Way he can loose nothing, the other he may be undone. Certainly a wise Man would never run such an unequal Risque.21 He goes on to quote four lines from a poem he had published the same year, in a format that was to vary only slightly in this and four later versions:  If it shou’d so fall out, as who can tell, But that there is a God, a Heaven and Hell, Mankind had best consider well for Fear ’t should be too late when his Mistakes appear. ‘I would ask the most confident Atheist,’ Defoe says in Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720): what Assurance he has of the Negative, and what a Risque he runs if he should be mistaken? This we are sure of, if we want [i.e. lack] Demonstration to prove the Being of a God, they are much more at a Loss for a Demonstration to prove the Negative. Now no Man can answer it to his Prudence, to take the Risque they run, upon an uncertain supposititious Notion … Methinks these Gentlemen act with more Courage than Discretion; for if it should happen at last, that there should be a God, and that he has the Power of Rewards and Punishments in his Hand, as he must have or cease to be Almighty, they are but in an ill Case. Then follow the four verses already quoted.22 At the very end of his career, Defoe returns to the topic, following the same reasoning and concluding with the four lines of his own verse that he evidently regarded as a clinching argument, in Christianity Not as Old as the Creation: Being an Essay upon the Original of Divine Revelation. Shewing That Religion can only Subsist upon a Divine Revelation. Which may serve for A Short but Full Answer to Mr T-d-ll’s Christianity, &c. And to all our Modern Despisers of Scripture Doctrine (London: T. Warner, 1730).23 Toward the end of the penultimate chapter, defending the authenticity of Scripture, the author declares: suppose, as we may well do, that the Scripture should be the word of GOD, and that it is a real Revelation of his Mind and Will; what Condition will these Men [‘disputing the veracity of the Scripture’] find themselves in then? And thus far is a certain Truth, and I think they will not dispute it, (viz.) That they are not sure of the Negative; nay, … the Affirmative is reasonable, the Negative only presumptive; that it is so, is probable; that it is not so is doubtful; and on which side lies the hazard? Either there is no danger in the Negative, or these Men are unaccountably negligent of themselves, and strangely quiet and tranquil in the greatest imaginable Risque (p. 49). Near the end of the book, in an ‘APPENDIX; Affectionately address’d to the Youth of this Age, to prevent, if possible, their being early debauch’d with Atheistic and Deistic Principles’, Defoe returns to this argument. Having reasserted that Scripture ‘is establish’d upon the Truth of that Being who is essential Truth it self, and is as surely his Word, as that there is a Heaven or an Earth, and as there is a Soul in Man,’ he continues, ‘At least be pleas’d to look back to what has been said in this Work to prove it, and observe that you cannot be certain it is not so, and if the Affirmative should prove really true, how fatal will your Mistake be?  If it should so fall out, as who can tell, But there may be a GOD, a HEAVEN, and HELL, Mankind had best consider well, for Fear ’T should be too late when their Mistakes appear’ (p. 58). These lines bring out an important difference in purpose and tone between Defoe’s writings on the subject and those of the English divines. Their sermons are essentially hortatory, urging on hearers and readers the advantages of belief, the risks of unbelief, and the desirability of making a timely choice between them. Defoe’s discussions of the matter are essentially monitory: he is intent on warning readers, not only of the potentially disastrous consequences of unbelief, but also of the necessity of choosing belief before it is too late. The divines calmly remind audiences of what is in their best interest, and try to reason them into pursuing ‘the main chance’: this emphasis on the benefits rather than the rigours of religion is central to Latitudinarian preaching. Defoe threatens readers, and tries to frighten them out of their complacent indifference to religion; this focus is closer to the strident Calvinism of an earlier generation than to the genteel prodding of a Tillotson or Kennett. Using these lines on multiple occasions, Defoe evidently thought they make a compelling case for embracing belief—or against tarrying in unbelief: putting off choice may be as fatal as deliberately rejecting belief, because we cannot undo our error once we are dead. A modern reader may doubt whether this specimen of it greatly strengthens the argument for belief. But if neither Defoe’s couplets, nor the prose with which he introduces them, raise to a new or higher level the patterns of thought and rhetoric I have surveyed, what are they doing here? The present setting of this discussion, in Literature and Theology, suggests one kind of answer: in these and other works of Defoe, we see not only grave theological topics finding their way into popular literature, but also established homiletic strategies—and often the biblical texts invoked to support them—appearing in lay writings.24 I have noted that during Defoe’s lifetime there were critics like Lord Shaftesbury who found the worldly arguments advanced by men of the cloth for wagering on belief incongruous and unseemly. There were also critics, however, who were disturbed not by homiletics descending to the marketplace, but by lay writers appropriating the topoi and the methods of the pulpit. Thus Charles Gildon found incongruous and unseemly Defoe’s penchant for introducing otherworldly matters—Providence, repentance, scriptural passages, etc.—into such down to earth stories as Robinson Crusoe. Defoe’s writings, including the ones discussed here, thus illustrate an interestingly reciprocal process. British preachers did not think it beneath them to use the homely language and the pragmatic reasoning of the marketplace; Defoe the zealous layman and tradesman-author did not think it presumptuous to handle religious topics and scriptural ‘proofs’ customary in the pulpit. Defoe appears last in the chronological sequence I have traced, but my objective has not been historical. The non-priority and non-influence of Pascal’s wager are not my concerns, nor have I suggested that there is a progression in the works I have cited that reaches a high point in Defoe: nobody betters Tillotson’s rationale or his imagery for betting on belief. Secularisation, however, did go on during Defoe’s lifetime (1660–1731), and although both the historical process itself and Defoe’s relation to it are complex and controversial, it is clear that secularisation was gaining ground, but also that (at least in his later writings, between 1715 and 1731) Defoe was neither an exponent nor an exemplar of it.25 His actual business dealings were no doubt affected by it, but far from advocating the principle of secularisation, he vigorously challenged what he saw as its sinister spawn—freethinking, skepticism, and deism, which he deplored as tantamount to atheism. In the ongoing drama of secularisation, Defoe should therefore be seen as playing a somewhat paradoxical role. Like Tillotson, Locke, et al., he worries over abundant evidence of growing unbelief, and wants to foster a revival of faith; but, like his predecessors, he does so by using arguments and language derived from the very world of commerce responsible in part for the decline of faith. As a consequence, the mercantile imagery of wagering, bargaining, risking, insuring, profiting, and losing, which is brought to bear with obvious sincerity and considerable ingenuity on the question of belief in God, may nevertheless have tended ultimately to weaken the cause, not strengthen it. But what most seriously weakens the prudential arguments for belief is not that securing the main chance is a sordid consideration. The problem is a larger one, to which I shall now turn by way of conclusion. The prevailing modern view is that to think of belief in prudential terms vulgarises religion: it appeals to the lower rather than the higher side of human nature, and brings matters of faith down to mundane selfishness. If we agree with Wordsworth that getting and spending we lay waste our powers, instead of exercising and improving them, we are likely to side with Shaftesbury against Tillotson, Locke, and Defoe, even though this is to take a loftier position on these matters than Christ himself, who boldly posed the issue in just such worldly terms.26 Implicit in all these defences of belief, however, is the fact of a fundamental shift. To argue from the pulpit or in print that it makes more sense to believe than not to believe is to acknowledge that your congregation or your readers have a choice in the matter. But for English Calvinists, the great question had always been whether God had chosen you, not whether you chose God; the choice was his, not yours. On your part, faith was a given, not an option; the challenge was to determine whether you were one of the saved, not whether you believed in God (as of course you did). The first century of Calvinism was an age of faith insofar as any question of belief in God had been forestalled by a more pressing question, whether one was among the elect, chosen by God for eternal life.27 One might have misgivings about the justice or mercy of such absolute decrees, but to doubt the very existence of their author was almost unthinkable. Gradually, of course, doubts did arise and increase, a process traced in modern histories of the emergence of skepticism, atheism, and secularism. That the Leviathan (1651) marked a dramatic step toward the open avowal of unbelief is clear from the storm of controversy it provoked. By representing belief as a matter of personal choice, the divines and philosophers who were intent on defending it actually weakened their case. Their arguments that belief is a better option than unbelief were often resourceful and plausible. Yet every such defence demoted belief from its former status as fundamental, established, unquestionable truth, and reduced it (in effect) to a mere hypothesis, which could be accepted or rejected. The very proliferation and repetition of justifications of belief suggested to contemporaries that belief required defence against unbelief, which in turn implied that this was a doubtful and unsettled question.28 As a result, those who sought to uphold belief tended to undermine their own cause. Belief versus unbelief became a topic for ordinary discussion and debate, according to criteria of the marketplace, the gaming house, and the court of law. This has not been fatal to belief, which persists in many quarters more than three centuries later. Nor has the choice between belief and unbelief become a mere matter of consumer preference, as if accepting or rejecting God’s operating system were on the same plane as deciding between Apple’s and Google’s. Nevertheless, the fact of its having become a matter of choice has played a major role, I believe, in the diminution of its importance in most modern, Western lives, and in our collective evolution toward a secular world. Pascal and his counterparts in England therefore set up their versions of the wager in such a way that even though its outcome was an affirmation of belief, God’s stature shrank. The very idea that you can take him or leave him implies a drastic shift of power. God no longer assigns faith (along with grace and its accompanying benefits) to those whom he has elected once and for all. Humanity now has the capacity to choose whether or not God will play any part in their own mental and emotional scheme of things. The tables are turned: humankind’s status is no longer in God’s hands, but God’s status is in humankind’s hands. A central component of Calvinism has become a dead letter, and the Augustinian rigour of English Protestant theology is called in question if not lost. Footnotes 1 Among studies that examine the religious aspects of the wager, see Jeff Jordan (ed.), Gambling on God: Essays on Pascal’s Wager (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994); Jeff Jordan, Pascal’s Wager: Pragmatic Arguments and Belief in God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). In Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), Barbara J. Shapiro discusses usefully the more general bearing of probability on religion, and indicates that for certain divines, the basic ontological question did remain a challenge; see Chapter 3, pp. 74–118. Douglas Lane Patey’s Probability and Literary Form: Philosophic Theory and Literary Practice in the Augustan Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) deals suggestively with the role of probability in the formation of faith or belief, but focuses on the literary rather than religious implications of these issues. Among more recent studies that link wagering with prose fiction, see Thomas M. Kavanagh, Enlightenment and the Shadow of Chance: The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), and Jesse Molesworth, Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Realism, Probability, Magic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 2 Among sermons on Matthew 16:26, in addition to those discussed below, see Jeremy Taylor, Sermons 18 and 19, ‘The Foolish Exchange’, in XXVIII Sermons Preached at Golden Grove (London: R. Royston, 1651), pp. 224–50; Edward Reynolds, True Gain, opened in a Sermon preached at Pauls (London: G. Thomason, 1659); John Lambe, A Sermon Preached before the King, At His Majesties Free-Chapel of Windsor (London: W. Kettilby, 1680); Richard Werge, The Excellency of Man’s Soul, set out in a Sermon … upon St. Matt. XVI. 26 (London: J. Hall and R. Clavel, 1684); John Tillotson, ‘The Folly of Hazarding Eternal Life, for Temporal Enjoyments’, in Several Discourses On the following Subjects, 14 Vols (London: R. Chiswell, 1704), Vol. 14, pp. 1–32. Among later sermons on this text there is a strong one by John Wesley, The Important Question (London: L. Moore, 1775), and a weak one by George Whitefield, The Polite and Fashionable Diversions of the Age, destructive to Soul and Body (London: C. Whitefield, 1740). There are similar sermons on the nearly identical text of Mark 8:36, such as Moses Capell’s Gods Valvation of Mans Soule (London: N. Bourne, 1632). 3 See Bernard Howells, ‘The Interpretation of Pascal’s “Pari”’, Modern Language Review 79 (1984) 45–63, p. 45. 4 That Tillotson’s version of the wager antedates Pascal’s seems to have been noted first by John K. Ryan, ‘The Wager in Pascal and Others’ (1945), reprinted in Gambling on God, pp. 11–19, 16–18; it is discussed as independent of and different from Pascal’s by Jordan in Pascal’s Wager, pp. 150–3. Molesworth states that Tillotson ‘seems to have been familiar with mathematical investigations of prudence undertaken in France by Pascal, Arnauld, and Nicole’, but provides no evidence; a few pages later, he declares that ‘Tillotson, as we have seen already, was reasonably familiar—almost precociously so—with Pascalian versions of mathematical prudence’, as if his earlier unsupported assertion were now established fact: see Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, pp. 138, 154. In any case, Pascal’s subtle and complex notions about faith had little or no bearing on English thought during the later 17th and early 18th century (see note 7 below), and are therefore not considered further here. 5 See The Wisdom of being Religious. A Sermon Preached at St Pauls … before the Lord Maior and Aldermen of this City (London: S. Gellibrand, 1664), p. 40. Discussions of Tillotson’s sermons have amplified but seldom surpassed Wm. Fraser Mitchell’s pioneering English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson: A Study of its Literary Aspects (1932; New York: Russell & Russell, 1962). Studies of varying usefulness include Louis G. Locke, Tillotson: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Literature (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1954); Thomas Worcester, ‘The Classical Sermon: Tillotson’, in Joris van Eijnatten (ed.), Preaching, Sermon and Cultural Change in the Long Eighteenth Century (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), pp. 167–71; Bob Tennant, ‘John Tillotson and the Voice of Anglicanism’, in Kathryn Duncan (ed.), Religion in the Age of Reason: A Transatlantic Study of the Long Eighteenth Century (New York: AMS, 2009), pp. 97–129; Rosemary Dixon, ‘Sermons in Print, 1660–1700’, in Hugh Adlington, Peter McCullough and Emma Rhatigan (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 460–70. 6 See The Wisdom of being Religious, p. 31. 7 I know of no earlier versions of the wager image; Tillotson’s was published prior to Pascal’s. The Pensées first appeared in Paris in 1670, and there were several 17th-century French and Dutch editions; an initial English translation by Joseph Walker, entitled Monsieur Pascall’s Thoughts, Meditations, and Prayers, Touching Matters Moral and Divine was issued in 1688 (London: J. Tonson), but was not reprinted. Thus as John C. Barker observes, ‘knowledge of the Pensées remained largely confined to France and Holland and spread only slowly among readers elsewhere’, at least until the appearance of Basil Kennett’s 1704 translation (London: J. Tonson), which reached a second edition only in 1727: see Strange Contrarieties: Pascal in England during the Age of Reason (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975), p. 65. I have found only 15 pre-1730 entries for editions of the Pensées in French or English library or sale catalogues, and only three references to the work or quotations from it in the same period, none having to do with the wager. Thus Dryden praises the ‘Pensées of the incomparable Mr Pascal’ as one of ‘the most Entertaining Books which the Modern French can boast of’, owing to the omission of ‘Connexions’, and Addison quotes from Pascal on the immortality of the soul, but gives lengthy passages from Cicero, Xenophon, etc. rather than Pascal’s own thoughts. See Dryden’s ‘Preface to the Pastorals’, in The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis (London: J. Tonson, 1697), sig. *****r, and Addison’s (posthumous) Evidences of the Christian Religion (London: J. Tonson, 1730), pp. 280–6. Further allusions probably exist, but I have located no pre-1750 British references to the choice of belief as a wager that appear to be derived from Pascal. 8 See The Wisdom of being Religious, p. 33. 9 See R.I. Aaron and Jocelyn Gibb (eds), An Early Draft of Locke’s Essay, together with Excerpts from His Journals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), p. 82. 10 See The Wisdom of being Religious, pp. 41–2. John Wilkins (1614–1672), another influential Latitudinarian who also happened to be Tillotson’s father-in-law, works out a very similar argument in Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion (London: T. Basset et al., 1675), pp. 14–16, where his point is that the same reasoning that leads merchants to venture their goods by way of ‘Traffique’ to remote and unfamiliar regions should lead all of us to stake our faith in the existence (and great profitability) of heaven. 11 See William Bates, Considerations of the Existence of God, and of the Immortality of the Soul, With the Recompences of the future state: For the Cure of Infidelity, the Hectick Evil of the Times (London: B. Aylmer, 1676), pp. 233–6; for Defoe’s reference to Bates, see A Dialogue between the Observator and a Dissenter, Concerning The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (London, 1703), p. 14. Bates’s image of the ‘foolish bargain’ recurs frequently. See Thomas Smith (1638–1710), Two Compendious Discourses: The one concerning the Power of God: The other about the Certainty and Evidence of a Future State. Published in opposition to the growing Atheism and Deism of the Age (London: S. Smith and B. Walford, 1699), p. 59: If there be another state in the next life, as there is the highest reason to believe, and no reason to believe the contrary, what a foolish bargain will it appear, the Epicure has made in buying the vain and perishing pleasures of the world at the price of his soul! It will then be an infallible demonstration, that he has acted against the common rules of prudence, in preferring a trifle, a shadow, a humour, before the favour of God … which will heighten his anguish, and make it intolerable: and the thought of this will as much torment him, as the very flames, that he might have been happy as they, but for his own wretched carelessness and obstinate infidelity. Defoe makes the same point in A Letter to the Dissenters (London: John Morphew, 1713), p. 41: Prudence requires all Wise Men to weigh their Actions in the Balance of Reason, and to judge, whether there is any due Proportion between the Hazard run and the End proposed. It seems to be one of the most sensible Parts of the Miseries of a future State, that the Spirits of the Wretched shall be capable to reflect upon, and reproach themselves with the sordid Trifles, for which they forfeited Eternal Happiness. Edward Stillingfleet (1635–1699) puts the argument in positive terms using the same imagery: ‘The loss of this world may be abundantly recompenced, but the loss of the Soul can never be … He will have no cause to repent of his bargain that parts with his share in this evil world for the joys and glories that are above.’ See Sermons Preached on several Occasions (London: H. Mortlock, 1673), p. 237, from a sermon on Matthew 16:26 preached on 18 Feb. 1672 by this influential Church of England divine. About the same text another author says, ‘our Saviour … supposes a Sinner … might gain the whole World … And yet upon this improbable, or rather indeed impossible, Supposition, he gives us to understand that such an one would be very far from a Gainer, nay would be infinitely a Loser by the Bargain; because a Soul lost, in our Saviour’s Sense, is lost irrecoverably and for ever’; see [T. Allett], The Christian’s Support under the Loss of Friends. A Sermon Occasion’d by the Death of Mr Henry Clements, Of London Bookseller (London: C. Rivington, 1720), pp. 10–11. Cf. also George Sendell’s sermon on Matthew 16:26 entitled The Unprofitable Bargain: or, the gain of the whole World, with the Loss of the Soul, consider’d, And Proved to be the greatest Loss (London: J. Lawrence, 1704). 12 See Thomas Beverley, identified by the Oxford DNB as an ‘Independent minister and author, about whom very few biographical details are available’, The Loss of the Soul, the Irreparable Loss, Opened and Demonstrated … in a Sermon, on Matt. XVI. 26 (London: W. Marshall, 1694). ‘Every Wise and Honest Man,’ Beverley declares (p. 3), ‘is able to speak of the Things wherein he deals, according to their true worth and value. We give this Credit to Merchants that deal in Foreign Commodities; to any great Purchaser, we look upon his Judgment, and estimate as a Standard.’ Christ ‘knew above any in Heaven or Earth the price of Souls’, and could assess accurately their ‘true worth and value’ because of his experience in the making and the ‘Purchase’ of them; his qualifications are thus similar (if superior) to the expertise with which a merchant judges ‘Foreign Commodities’. As my quotations from the nonconformists Bates, Beverley, and Defoe indicate, some preachers and writers of the period whose background was strongly Calvinist show no qualms about adopting the patterns of prudential reasoning and rhetoric being traced here. But as my later citations from Charles Morton suggest, some other heirs to the Puritan tradition, including prominent figures such as Richard Baxter (1615–1691), were more or less immune to these modernising, rationalising, secularising tendencies, or actively resisted them. 13 See John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695), ed. John C. Higgins-Biddle, in The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke, gen. ed. M.A. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 162. Henning Graf Reventlow discusses this passage in a chapter on the Latitudinarians, in The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984), pp. 268–9. 14 See Kennett, Sermons Preached on Several Occasions, pp. 133–4. 15 See Kennett, Sermons Preached on Several Occasions, p. 136. Also on Matthew 16:26, and similarly addressed to merchants, but neglecting completely the special interests and aptitudes of its audience, is A Sermon Preached at St Bartholomew Exchange, On Wednesday the 3rd of Decemb. 1701. Before the Honourable Company of Merchants Trading into the Levant-Seas [1702], by John Tisser, who identifies himself as a fellow of Merton and also ‘Chaplain to the Factory at Smyrna’. 16 See Kennett, Sermons Preached on Several Occasions, pp. 137–8. 17 See ‘A Letter concerning Enthusiasm’, in Philip Ayres (ed.), Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 2 Vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), I, 23. Shaftesbury is even more scathing about rewards and punishments as elements of morality: If … there be a Belief or Conception of a DEITY, who is consider’d only as powerful over his Creature, and inforcing Obedience to his absolute Will by particular Rewards and Punishments; and if on this account, thro Hope merely of Reward, or Fear of Punishment, the Creature be incited to do the Good he hates, or restrain’d from doing the Ill to which he is not otherwise in the least degree averse; there is in this Case … no Virtue or Goodness whatsoever. The Creature, notwithstanding his good Conduct, is intrinsecally of as little Worth, as if he acted in his natural way, when under no Dread or Terror of any sort. There is no more of Rectitude, Piety, or Sanctity in a Creature thus reform’d, than there is Meekness or Gentleness in a Tyger strongly chain’d, or Innocence and Sobriety in a Monkey under the Discipline of the Whip. See ‘An Inquiry concerning Virtue’, in Characteristicks, I, 215–16. 18 For the remarks that follow, see Morton’s The Gaming-Humor Considered, and Reproved. Or, The Passion-Pleasure, and Exposing Money to hazard by Play, Lot, or Wager, Examined (London: T. Cockerill, 1684), pp. 32–3 and passim. 19 In a provocative essay that contains illuminating comments on some aspects of Defoe’s 1697 Essay upon Projects, Dwight D. Codr seems to me mistaken in associating projecting so closely with usury, and in supposing that Elizabethan objections to usury still had much bearing on mercantile theory or activity a century later: see ‘“Expectation and amendment maketh me to become an usurer”: Usury, Providentialism, and the Age of Projects’, in Brett C. McInelly (ed.), Religion in the Age of Enlightenment, Vol. I (New York: AMS Press, 2009), pp. 147–69. To approach Defoe’s economic thought, including his ‘projects’, as if they occurred ‘in a climate where anticipatory planning or scheming was relentlessly associated with deviance of moral, epistemological, and theological kinds’ (p. 163) is to misread the prevailing intellectual ‘climate’, in my opinion, as should be clear from my quotations from a wide chronological and denominational range of post-Restoration divines. Codr quotes a paragraph from a 1684 essay by Charles Morton in which ‘he carries the anti-usury arguments of the sixteenth century into the later seventeenth century and passes them on to students like Defoe’ (pp. 159–60). But in the absence of any attempt to demonstrate that Defoe’s thinking on the subject is indebted to Morton’s, this argument has no more force than if I were to quote a passage from Morton’s wonderful Essay towards the Probable Solution of this Question: Whence come the Stork and the Turtle, the Crane and the Swallow, when they know and observe the appointed Time of their coming. Or where those Birds do probably make their Recess and Abode (London: S. Crouch, 1703), and then imply that Defoe too, because he had once been Morton’s student, believed that storks migrate annually to the moon. 20 See the early and still useful essay by Ronald S. Crane, ‘Suggestions Toward a Genealogy of the “Man of Feeling”’, ELH 1 (1934) 205–30, and particularly Mitchell’s English Pulpit Oratory (note 5 sbove). 21 See The Storm: Or, A Collection Of the most Remarkable Casualties and Disasters Which happen’d in the Late Dreadful Tempest, both by Sea and Land (London: G. Sawbridge and J. Nutt, 1704), sigs. [A6r-A7r]. 22 See Serious Reflections, in G.A. Starr (ed.), Novels (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), Vol. 3, pp. 116–17. Near the end of the same volume, in the appended ‘VISION of the AngelickWorld’, Defoe tells the story of a university student who had fallen into atheism but is brought to renounce it: the catalyst to his dramatic conversion is reading aloud the same verses, with the final couplet altered from the third person to the more affecting ‘Had I not best consider well, for fear / ’T shou’d be too late, when my Mistakes appear’ (pp. 264–8). A less solemn version of the situation occurs in The Political History of the Devil (1726), in John Mullan (ed.), Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005), Vol. 6, p. 48. After quoting Rochester’s poem ‘Upon Nothing’ to an atheistic duke, a character named ‘Graceless’ says ‘shall I toss another Poet upon you, my Lord? If it should so fall out, as who can tell, But there may be a GOD, a Heaven and Hell? Mankind had best consider well, for fear ’T should be too late when their Mistakes appear. D[uke]. D—m your foolish Poet, that’s not my Lord Rochester.’ Part of Defoe’s joke is that he himself is the ‘foolish Poet’. 23 See G.A. Starr (ed.), Christianity Not as Old as the Creation: The Last of Defoe’s Performances (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012). In the introduction to this volume, Defoe’s practical and theoretical involvement with insurance, from the Essay upon Projects (1697) onward, is compared with Pascal’s mathematical expertise as an influence on each author’s preoccupation with prudently calculating probabilities and taking risks (pp. xxxi–xxxii). In a poem on ‘Faith’, Defoe goes so far as to exalt ‘Heaven’s High Insurance Office, where we give, / The Premium Faith, and then the Grant receive’: see Serious Reflections, in Novels, Vol. 3, p. 177. 24 For an account of his employment of such materials, see G.A. Starr, ‘Defoe and Biblical Memory’, in Colin Gibson and Lisa Marr (eds), New Windows on a Woman’s World: A Festschrift for Jocelyn Harris (Dunedin, New Zealand, 2006), pp. 316–35. 25 Throughout the 1720s Defoe wrote about trade and was an active wholesale importer of Mediterranean goods; he was steeped in worldly matters, but they by no means monopolised his activity or lessened his interest in moral and spiritual questions. In addition to substantial books such as The Complete English Tradesman (1725–27), A Plan of the English Commerce (1728), and numerous pamphlets and periodicals devoted to the South Sea Bubble, the importation of Asian calicoes, and other questions of trade, he produced in the same decade Religious Courtship (1722), An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727), A New Family Instructor (1727), and other works on religious and supernatural topics. 26 Although all prudential arguments for belief purported to be rational, not all rational arguments for belief were by any means prudential. A notable instance of the latter during this period was the movement known as ‘physico-theology’, which sought to prove the existence of God by tracing observable details in man and the universe not merely to natural laws but to cunning and benevolent Providential design. For an excellent recent study, see Joanna Picciotto, ‘Milton and the People’, in Blair Hoxby and Ann B. Coiro (eds), Milton in the Long Restoration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 483–502. 27 ‘God from all eternity did freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass … By the decree of God, … some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life, and others foreordained to everlasting death. These angels and men, thus predestinated and foreordained, are particularly and unchangeably designed; and their number is so certain and definite, that it cannot be either increased or diminished’ (see The Westminster Assembly of Divines, Confession of Faith (1647), Chap. 3, § 1, 3, 4). 28 The more often and more strenuously a proposition needs defending, the more dubious it may come to seem, e.g. the contention frequently put forward in the 18th-century press and pulpit, that the poor are really better off than the rich. Johnson’s is the classic response: ‘Sir, all the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil, shew it to be evidently a great evil. You never find people labouring to convince you that you may live very happily upon a plentiful fortune.’ See James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson (21 July 1763), George B. Hill (ed.), rev. Lawrence F. Powell, 6 Vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), Vol. 1, p. 441. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press 2019. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press 2019.
TI - Securing the Main Chance: Prudential Belief from Tillotson to Defoe
JF - Literature and Theology
DO - 10.1093/litthe/fry037
DA - 2019-03-01
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