Justified True Belief

(●) The soldier and ambassador who tried to reduce all religion to five truths every human mind already holds. + He was a slow child. His head troubled him, he did not speak until late, and the household had begun to fear he never would. Then the questions started. Writing his own life more than fifty years later, he still remembered the first one: he asked his nurse how he came into this world, and told her that he found himself here indeed, but from what cause or beginning, or by what means, he could not imagine. The women laughed at him. Others in the room said they had never heard a child ask such a thing. He never stopped asking it. Edward Herbert grew up to be a duellist, a courtier vain about his own face, and King James’ ambassador in Paris, and in the hours he could steal from those occupations he wrote a book in Latin about how anybody knows anything at all. That book, De Veritate, argued that the mind does not arrive empty. It comes already furnished with certain truths, the way a room is furnished before anyone moves in, and five of those truths concern God. There is a supreme God. He ought to be worshipped. Virtue and piety are the chief part of that worship. We ought to repent of our sins. And rewards and punishments follow this life. Five, and no more: everything else in every religion on earth, Herbert held, is addition, mostly by priests, and mostly harmful. He is usually called the father of English deism, which is the name for the position that God can be known by reason alone, with no prophet, no Scripture and no miracle required. He did not coin the title; a Dublin minister named John Leland gave it to him in 1754, a century after his death, when he set out to catalogue the deists and found that the list had to start with Herbert. And here is the fact a reader will remember. The man who argued that no report of a revelation could ever count as knowledge for anyone but the person who received it once knelt in a sunlit chamber in Paris, asked God for a sign from heaven, and wrote down that he got one.

(●) 1583 AD: Born on the Welsh border, he lost his father at thirteen and was married at fifteen to a cousin chosen for him. + Edward Herbert was born on 3 March 1583 at Eyton on Severn in Shropshire, in the house of his mother’s mother, Lady Newport. Contemporaries wrote the year as 1582, and by their own reckoning they were right: the legal year in England still turned over on 25 March rather than on 1 January, so a birth in the first week of March fell at the tail end of the old year instead of the beginning of the new one. Modern reckoning moves the year forward to 1583 and leaves the day exactly where it stood. His father was Richard Herbert of Montgomery Castle, one of the Herberts who had policed the Welsh marches for the Tudors. The marches were the border country between England and Wales, the ground where royal authority thinned out and a strong local family was, in practice, the government. His mother was Magdalen Newport, a woman formidable enough to hold the family together for decades after her husband died, and interesting enough that John Donne became her friend and preached her funeral sermon. Seven sons and three daughters stand carved beside their parents on the alabaster tomb in Montgomery church. One of the younger sons was George Herbert, who would write The Temple and become the most loved devotional poet in the English language. The two brothers make an odd pair to have come out of one nursery: one of them wrote hymns that are still sung, and the other wrote the book that gave English unbelief its charter. Richard Herbert died in 1596, the year his eldest son went up to University College, Oxford, as a gentleman commoner: a paying student of good family, who dined above the ordinary scholars and was under no particular pressure to take a degree. Edward was thirteen. On 28 February 1599, in the house at Eyton where the same clergyman had christened him, he was married to his cousin Mary Herbert, daughter of Sir William Herbert of St Julians. The match was a family arrangement to keep an inheritance in the name. Nobody consulted the bridegroom, who was fifteen by his own account, and he says frankly that he noticed the disparity of years between them, for she was some six years the older. He took his wife and his mother back to Oxford, where his mother rented a house and governed them both.

(●) 1603 AD: Knighted at the coronation of James I, he spent the next decade abroad in search of duels and sieges. + On 24 July 1603, the day before James I was crowned, Herbert was made a Knight of the Bath. The ceremony came with a formal oath binding the new knight to defend all women who had no one else to defend them, and Herbert seems to have taken the words more literally than the other young men sworn beside him. He decided to become a knight errant, several centuries late: a wandering knight out of the old romances, riding about the world looking for wrongs that wanted righting. What followed reads like a comedy with a body count that never quite happens. From about 1608 he was on the continent: a long stay with the Duc de Montmorency at his castle of Merlou, an embrace from Henri IV at the Tuileries, a place of honour beside Queen Margaret at her balls, and a string of quarrels that he pursued to the edge of bloodshed and that friends or magistrates invariably interrupted. He was vain about his looks, had himself painted many times, and records with unconvincing embarrassment that ladies kept his portrait about them. In 1610 he crossed to the Low Countries, where an allied army of Dutch, French and English was besieging the town of Juliers, which surrendered on 22 August by the English reckoning of that year. English letters of the period run ten days behind the continental ones they answer, because England had not taken up the reformed calendar most of Catholic Europe adopted a generation earlier, so accounts of the siege written on either side of the Channel never quite agree about the day. He held no command at the siege and did nothing of importance, though his own account hints otherwise. Donne, who knew him well, sent him a verse letter addressed to Sir Edward Herbert at Juliers. He challenged Lord Howard of Walden over some drunken words in Sir Horace Vere’s tent, and the Council stopped that duel too. Then Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Savoy, more compliments, more near misses, and home to England in 1618.

(●) 1619 AD: Sent to Paris as ambassador, he finished De Veritate in the hours he could steal from the embassy. + Buckingham, then a marquess and already the king’s favourite, picked him, apparently on impulse, to represent England at the French court, and the responsibility steadied him. He lived in Paris at a scale far beyond his salary or his estate, which left him in debt for the rest of his life, and he defended English interests with more energy and better judgment than his earlier career would have predicted. He pressed the case of the French Protestants until he and the French king’s own favourite, the Duc de Luynes, came to open words. Luynes complained to London, Herbert followed to explain himself, and, being Herbert, offered to settle the whole diplomatic quarrel by fighting Luynes in single combat. James I declined to arrange it. Luynes died in 1621, and Herbert went back to Paris. All through it, in the spare hours between visits and negotiations, he was finishing a book he had begun in England and carried across the Channel in draft. De Veritate, prout distinguitur a Revelatione, a Verisimili, a Possibili, et a Falso, on truth as it is distinguished from revelation, from the probable, from the possible and from the false, is not a book about religion in the first instance. It is a book about how a mind gets hold of anything true at all, and the religion comes at the end, as the payoff. Before he did anything with it, he showed it to two men whose judgment carried weight anywhere in Europe. One was Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist, who had recently escaped from prison by being carried out in a book chest and had come to France, and whom Herbert welcomed warmly. The other was Daniel Tilenus, formerly professor of theology at Sedan. Both of them read it, praised it more highly than Herbert thought it decent to repeat, and urged him earnestly to print it. Which, for a man of his vanity, ought to have settled the question at once. It did not.

(●) 1624 AD: He knelt and asked heaven whether to print the book, and then he was recalled without warning. + He hesitated for a long time, and his reason for hesitating is worth hearing, because it is not modesty. He saw that the whole frame of his book differed from everything written before it about how truth is found. That left him two roads and no third. He could renounce every previous authority on the subject and insist on his own way, or he could expose himself to general censure. He did not like either one. Then comes the scene. It is a fair summer day, his casement is open toward the south, the sun is shining clear, and no wind is stirring. He takes the manuscript in his hand, kneels, and prays: he is not satisfied enough whether he should publish this book; if it be for God’s glory, he asks for some sign from heaven, and if not, he will suppress it. He had no sooner spoken, he writes, than a loud though yet gentle noise came from the heavens, like nothing on earth, which comforted and cheered him so much that he took the petition as granted. He protests before the eternal God that it is true, and adds that he was not deceived by weather, because the sky was the clearest he ever saw and he thought he saw the place the sound came from. So he sent the book to a Paris printer at his own cost, and then, having asked heaven for permission to publish it, kept it from general circulation. In April 1624 he was suddenly and permanently recalled from the embassy. The autobiography stops there, in the middle of that disappointment, and never resumes. Twenty-four years of his life, the whole of his public quarrel with revealed religion included, went unwritten.

(●) 1629 AD: Made a baron twice over and given no office, he wrote the life of Henry VIII hoping to earn one. + He was given an Irish barony, Castle Island, in 1624, and on 7 May 1629 Charles I made him Baron Herbert of Cherbury in the English peerage. Two titles in five years sounds like a career going well. It was the opposite. Both were, in the currency of that court, cheap honours: the sort handed to men who were owed money and employment and were going to be given neither. So he spent the next twenty years petitioning. The Crown never settled the accounts from his embassy, and he pressed for a settlement in vain. By his own reckoning the Paris years had cost him about five thousand three hundred pounds beyond his salary, of which two thousand five hundred still stood due to him on his privy seal, that is, on a sealed royal warrant authorising the payment, which was as near to money in hand as the Crown often came. In February 1639 he sent Secretary Windebank an itemised bill of his labours, down to what he had laid out writing the Isle of Rhé book, his defence of a failed English expedition to an island off La Rochelle, in Latin and in English, and keeping scholars and clerks at work copying records for his history of Henry VIII. Summoned that same year to attend the king at York for the march against the Scots, he answered with a long recital of his grievances and of the lawsuits that were harassing him. It is not the way a man wins a command. What he could not win by asking he tried to write his way into. Buckingham had come back from the disastrous 1627 expedition to the Isle of Rhé with hasty notes defending his own conduct, and he handed them to Herbert. Then the duke was murdered, before the work had properly begun. When French and English libels began to appear, printed pamphlets attacking the dead man and the expedition together, Herbert finished the defence anyway, at Montgomery Castle on 10 August 1630, and dedicated it to the king. Then he set out to write the life and reign of Henry VIII, the present king’s ancestor, which was a much larger bid for the same thing. Clerks worked for years in the Paper Office at Whitehall, the government’s record store, copying state documents for him, and four thick folio volumes of those materials survive, folio being the largest book size of the day, a sheet folded once. The result is two books in one cover. It is a real piece of research resting on the documents, and it is also an unmeasured eulogy of a king whose private crimes it labours to excuse. Herbert let the pope’s agent in London know that the book would deal kindly with the papacy, and offered to submit De Veritate to Rome for criticism. All of it was meant to buy a place at court. None of it did.

(●) 1644 AD: He surrendered Montgomery Castle to Parliament on terms that spared his library. + When the Civil War came he wanted no part of it, and he took some trouble to say so politely. Prince Rupert, who was commanding for the king in those parts, came to Shrewsbury and asked for his help and offered to garrison his castle. Rupert’s mother was that Electress Palatine whom Herbert had admired in his travelling years, an electress being the wife of one of the German princes whose votes chose the Holy Roman Emperor, so the request came with an old acquaintance attached to it. Herbert wrote back that he could defend himself, that he disliked soldiers about the house, and that he had just started a new course of physic, meaning a course of medical treatment, which made a meeting impossible. On 3 September 1644 Sir Thomas Middleton marched out of Oswestry by night under orders from Parliament, took Newtown, and came on to Montgomery over broken bridges and foul roads. The town gave no resistance. The castle was strongly fortified, and everyone on both sides expected it to fight. But the only people inside it were Lord Herbert, then in his sixties, and his daughter Beatrice, and neither of them was in a fighting humour. Middleton summoned him to surrender. The thing that actually decided him was his books. Days before Middleton ever set out, on 30 August, Parliament had ordered his London property confiscated and his books put up for sale, and then let the sale stand over, unexecuted, while it waited to see how he behaved about his castle. That is not a coincidence and he did not take it for one. He understood the message exactly. Half an hour after midnight on 5 September he signed an agreement with Middleton’s lieutenant, James Till, and the terms were generous: he might stay in the castle with his daughter or be given a convoy to London, none of his property was to be seized, and he was to have the place back in full when peace came, while twenty of Middleton’s soldiers held it as a garrison. One clause he insisted on for himself. No soldier was to set foot in his library or the rooms adjoining it. His editor Sidney Lee put the verdict plainly, that Lord Herbert saved his property at the expense of his honour, and it is hard to improve on that as a summary. The Royalists came and besieged the castle he had handed over. His new friends relieved him. He went up to London, took a pension from Parliament, and lived out the war among the men who had beaten his king. His elder son Richard, who had none of his father’s talent for accommodation, held to the king to the end and was fined two thousand five hundred pounds for it.

(●) 1648 AD: Dying, he asked Archbishop Ussher for the sacrament, and was refused it. + He drafted his will on 1 August 1648, opening it, as wills of that century often did, by bequeathing his soul. Nineteen days later he was dying at his house in Queen Street in London, and he sent for James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, whom he had known well for years. John Aubrey is the one who records what happened, and he records it briefly. Herbert asked to receive the sacrament from Ussher’s hand, and then said why he wanted it: if there was good in anything it was in that, and if it did no good it would do no hurt. On those terms the archbishop refused. It sounds hard, refusing a dying friend at the one hour when nothing else can be done for him. But a sacrament taken as a reasonable precaution is not the thing Ussher had to give. The Lord’s Supper is an act of faith in a particular person and a particular death, and Herbert had asked for it the way a man hedges a bet, which is to say on the footing of his own fifth article, that rewards and punishments follow this life and a prudent man had better cover the possibility. Many blamed Ussher for the refusal, and many have since. Then, Aubrey says, Herbert asked what o’clock it was, said that an hour hence he would depart, turned his head to the other side and expired, very serenely. His will forbade all mourning or show of mourning, and asked his friends nevertheless to love his memory. He was buried at midnight in the church of St Giles in the Fields, under a stone that named him a Knight of the Bath, Baron of Cherbury and Castle Island, and author of the book called De Veritate, and closed with the anagram he had made on his own name, Reddor ut herbae, I am given back as the grass is.

What He Taught

(T1) Five truths about God are written in every human mind, and they are the whole of true religion. + Think of a man who has never been taught any arithmetic being shown two stones, and then two more, and asked how many. He does not need to be persuaded. He is not remembering a lesson, because there was no lesson. Something in him was ready for the question before the question came, and the stones merely woke it up. Herbert thought religion worked the same way, and he built his whole system on that thought. Truths like that, already in the mind before any lesson reaches it, are what philosophers call innate, born in us rather than learned. Herbert’s own name for them is notitiae communes, common notions, and he is precise about what earns a belief that title. It must come before any reasoning rather than out of it. It must not depend on anything else being established first. It must command such wide assent that denying it looks like abandoning human nature. It must carry its own certainty. The race must need it in order to go on living well. And the mind must close on it at once, with no chain of argument in between. Six marks, and he thought exactly five religious beliefs carry all six. They are these. There is a supreme God. He ought to be worshipped. Virtue joined to piety is the chief part of that worship. We ought to be sorry for our sins and repent of them. And rewards and punishments are handed out, in this life and after it. That is the whole list, and it is worth pausing on how little is in it and how much of it a Christian could sign. The startling part is not the five. It is the claim Herbert makes about them, which is that they are complete. Everything else in every religion in the world, every creed and rite and sacred book, is an addition to these five, and additions have generally made religion worse rather than better. Christian readers should notice how much of this Scripture itself says, and where it stops saying it. Paul writes of Gentiles who never had the law of Moses, and says, "They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness" (Romans 2:15). He says that what can be known about God is plain to everyone from the things that have been made (Romans 1:19–20). So a Christian need not deny that something is written in every mind. What Paul draws from it is not that this is enough, but the opposite: it is enough to leave people without excuse, and not enough to save them.

(Q) "I. That there is one Supreme God. II. That he ought to be worshipped. III. That Vertue and Piety are the chief Parts of Divine Worship. IV. That we ought to be sorry for our Sins, and repent of them. V. That Divine Goodness doth dispense Rewards and Punishments both in this Life, and after it." + Source: Edward Herbert, De Religione Gentilium, chapter 1, in William Lewis’ translation, The Antient Religion of the Gentiles (London, 1711), page 4. The five articles in their author’s own enumeration, in the only one of his Latin works that reached English print before the twentieth century. The spelling is the translator’s, from an age that wrote "vertue" for virtue. Herbert introduces them by saying that not only we, but all mankind in general, must needs acknowledge them (T1).

(T2) A God who is the Father of all cannot have left most of the human race without what it needs. + Herbert was an ambassador in France in the years when Frenchmen were still killing each other over the Mass, and he had read the Spanish accounts of the Indies, where whole peoples had lived and died for centuries with no possible way of hearing about Christ. The question that drives his religious writing is the one an honest person asks at that point. What happens to them? And behind it, a harder question: what kind of God arranges things that way? His answer begins with what theologians call divine providence, God’s care over his creation, the hand that keeps and guides what it has made. Herbert calls the version he wants universal divine providence, meaning care that reaches everyone rather than care that reaches one favoured strip of the world. A God like that, he reasons, must have given every human being enough to be going on with. And since millions of them never received a book or a preacher, the enough cannot be something delivered from outside. It must be something they carry inside them, which brings him back to the five common notions. So he went looking for a thread of truth running through the heathen religions, something a Greek or a Roman or a Peruvian could have taken hold of to pull himself out of the labyrinth. The whole of De Religione Gentilium is that search, conducted through Cicero, Seneca, Plato, Lucretius and Ovid. This is where a Christian should be careful to grant what is worth granting. Herbert’s premise is Scripture’s own: God is God of the whole earth and no one is outside his notice. His conclusion is where the gospel refuses to follow. Paul once stood on the Areopagus in Athens, the hill where the city’s council met and where a visiting teacher could expect a hearing, and addressed a crowd of men who had never read Moses. That was Herbert’s exact audience, several centuries earlier, and Paul did not tell them their common notions were sufficient. He said, "The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead" (Acts 17:30–31). All people everywhere: the reach Herbert wanted is there. But what reaches them is a command and a named man, not a list of notions.

(Q) "Their great Defection from the Pure Worship of the Supreme God being justly to be attributed to the Sacerdotal Order, put me upon the Enquiry, whether amongst those Heaps of Ethnical Superstitions, a Thread of Truth might be found, by the assistance of which it was possible for them to extricate themselves out of that Labyrinth of Error, in which they were involv’d." + Source: Edward Herbert, De Religione Gentilium, chapter 1, in William Lewis’ translation, The Antient Religion of the Gentiles (London, 1711), page 4. "Ethnical" here means belonging to the nations, that is, pagan; the sacerdotal order means the priesthood. This is the sentence in which he states his motive, and it explains the shape of everything he wrote afterwards. He is not looking for a way to dismiss the pagans. He is looking for a way to save them (T2).

(T3) Priests, not ordinary people, buried religion under superstition. + Suppose the five truths really are stamped on every mind at birth. Then somebody has to account for the gap between those five plain truths and the actual religious history of the human race, with its temples full of deified emperors, its sacrifices, and its wars fought over the wording of a sentence. Herbert’s answer is the clergy, taken as a class and in every religion including his own. The common people, he says, were passive in the matter. The rites and the mysteries were the invention of the priests, who shrouded the five plain notions in obscurely worded creeds precisely because obscurity is where a professional class makes its living. There is a generosity in this that is easy to miss. He says explicitly that it made him unwilling to pronounce as harshly on the future state of ordinary laypeople as some divines did, because their only real fault was handing themselves over wholesale to the authority of their priests. He was defending the congregation by convicting the pulpit. Two things are worth saying in reply, and the first is a concession. Christians said much of this themselves, and said it harder. The Old Testament prophets are savage about shepherds who feed themselves instead of the flock (Ezekiel 34), Christ was sharper with the religious professionals of his day than with anyone else, and both the Reformers and the reformers inside the Catholic church named clerical abuses without flinching. Herbert was not telling Christendom anything it had not already said about itself. The second is where the argument breaks, and it breaks on its own terms. A theory that explains every doctrine as the invention of priests explains too much to explain anything, because it explains Herbert’s five articles just as neatly as it explains the rites he disliked. Every one of the five had been preached from English pulpits, by paid clergymen, for centuries before he sat down and numbered them. If a doctrine is discredited by having passed through clerical hands, the common notions go down with everything else; and if it is not, then whether a particular doctrine is true has to be settled by looking at the doctrine, not at who taught it.

(Q) "I suppose none will deny but that Priests have introduced Superstition and Idolatry, as well as sown Quarrels and Dissentions where-ever they came." + Source: Edward Herbert, De Religione Gentilium, chapter 1, in William Lewis’ translation, The Antient Religion of the Gentiles (London, 1711), page 3. He is writing in the 1640s, with the wars of religion in living memory and a civil war of his own going on outside the window, and he plainly expects no argument on the point. The sentence that follows it is the one about not judging the laity harshly (T3).

(T4) A revelation counts as knowledge only for the person who receives it. + This is the sharpest edge of the system, and it is not an add-on. It follows straight from the test for a common notion. Universal assent, everybody agreeing without having to be argued into it, is Herbert’s mark of truth. But no reported revelation has ever commanded universal assent. Every one of them is disputed by somebody, and the disputes never end. So no revealed religion can claim the certainty he keeps for truth in the strict sense, because it fails the test at the door, before anyone has looked at the evidence for it. Worse, he thought, a theory on which God repeatedly favours one slice of the human race and passes over the rest cannot be squared with what the common notions themselves tell us about the divine character. He does not say God never speaks. He says that when God speaks to someone else, the report reaches me as history, and history is at best probable, never certain. The only revelation a man can reasonably accept as true is one made directly to him. Anything else has to be examined by ordinary reasoning: who was this person, what condition was he in when it happened, what did he stand to gain by saying so. Those are good questions, and any honest inquiry asks them. The difficulty is that Herbert sets the examination so strictly that no revelation on record passes it. Now put an ordinary life beside that rule. You believe you were born on a particular day, though you cannot remember it. You believe Australia exists, though you have very likely not been there. You swallow the tablet because a chemist you will never meet ran a trial you will never read. Nearly everything any of us knows arrived by testimony, and a rule that disqualifies testimony as a road to knowledge does not leave us with reason; it leaves us with almost nothing. The Christian claim about the resurrection is not that a mystical experience is being passed along. It is that a public event happened in a particular reign, that people who had every reason to stay quiet reported it, and that their report can be weighed the way any other testimony is weighed. And then there is the awkward fact. Having written that no other man’s revelation can be knowledge for you, Herbert knelt down and asked for one of his own, and published the answer for other men to read.

(Q) "I am not satisfied enough whether I shall publish this book, De Veritate; if it be for Thy glory, I beseech Thee give me some sign from heaven; if not, I shall suppress it." + Source: Edward Herbert, The Life of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Written by Himself, page 248 in Sidney Lee’s edition (London, 1886); the memoir was first printed by Horace Walpole in 1764. He is kneeling with the manuscript in his hand, the casement open toward the south, the sun clear and no wind stirring. The prayer opens by addressing the eternal God as author of the light now shining upon him and giver of all inward illuminations, and asks pardon for making a greater request than a sinner ought to make. What he records next is that a loud though yet gentle noise came from the heavens, for it was like nothing on earth, which did so comfort and cheer him that he took his petition as granted. He sent the book to the printer (T4).

(Q) "my rational soul, with all its divine faculties, being, understanding, will, faith, hope, love, and joy to God, my creator, redeemer, and preserver" + Source: the opening bequest of Herbert’s will, drafted 1 August 1648, quoted by Sidney Lee in the introduction to his edition of the Autobiography (London, 1886), page xliii. Read the list of divine titles at the end of it slowly. Creator the five articles can supply, and preserver follows from the providence he argued for all his life. Redeemer does not. Nothing in the common notions calls for a rescue, because nothing in them says the trouble is past mending by repentance. A man who had spent twenty years arguing that religion needs only five truths left his soul to a Redeemer.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) His own generation found the book either unintelligible or alarming, and the men who understood it answered it. + For a book that would later be called the charter of English deism, De Veritate landed very quietly. It was widely bought and, as far as anyone can tell, barely read. Sir William Dugdale, no fool, wrote in 1674 that it much passed his understanding, being wholly philosophical. John Evelyn noted in his diary that Herbert’s brother had given him a copy, and left no sign that he opened it. One Englishman of that generation took it seriously enough to argue with it at length. Nathaniel Culverwel, a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, left behind An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, which his friends printed in 1652, soon after his death. The light of nature is the old name for whatever a person can learn about God without being told: the knowledge available to a man with no Bible, no church and no teacher, standing in a field and thinking. Culverwel is on Herbert’s side about a great deal of that. He defends the light of nature warmly and thinks reason a real road to God. But he denies innate ideas as Herbert framed them, holding that sense and experience are needed to bring our first principles into consciousness, so that the mind has to be woken by the world rather than simply consulted. And when he comes to build a theology on the foundation, he parts company completely. Religion, he says, rests on something firmer than the common notions. When he turns to the men who will not let Scripture say what it says, his language stops being academic altogether: there is now, he writes, a "young and upstart generation of gross antiscripturists, that have a powder-plot against the gospel, that would very compendiously behead all Christian religion at one blow, a device which old and ordinary heretics were never acquainted withal." Every reader in 1652 would have caught the image at once, the barrels of gunpowder stacked under Parliament within living memory, and heard the charge in it: the old heretics argued with one doctrine at a time, and these men are proposing to bring the whole building down in a moment. He does not name Herbert in that sentence. He is describing a party, and the party had barely begun. His nineteenth-century editor supplied the name in a footnote, calling them the deists, of whom Lord Herbert was the first and in every way too favourable a representative. Others answered him by name, from more than one direction. Richard Baxter, the Puritan pastor of Kidderminster, took up Herbert’s arguments in More Reasons for the Christian Religion, and No Reason against It (1672), insisting that no natural evidence can do what the gospel does. Thomas Halyburton, professor of divinity at St Andrews, wrote the classic reply and put his whole case in the title: Natural Religion Insufficient (1714). Abroad it was met on philosophical ground instead of theological. Pierre Gassendi discussed the system at length, agreed with a good deal of the theory of knowledge in it, and then doubted precisely the thing everything else depended on, which is whether the common notions really are universal. Descartes read him too. He said he found much in the book that was very good, thought it took a road quite different from his own, and rated its author well above ordinary minds, which from Descartes was not a small thing to say.

(†) Locke argued with him by name, and the English deists claimed him as their father. + When John Locke sat down to demolish innate ideas in the first book of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), he needed a serious opponent, and he chose Herbert, naming him and taking the five common notions one at a time to ask whether anyone could honestly call them universal. Locke was an empiricist, which means he held that the mind starts out empty, a blank sheet, and that everything written on it arrives through experience. He disagreed with Herbert at every turn. But he set the position out so fairly, and quoted it so fully, that Sidney Lee could say two centuries later that there is no better introduction to Herbert’s system than Locke’s first book. There is an irony worth enjoying in that. Being taken seriously by the man who set out to refute him is what rescued Herbert from obscurity in his own country. The other line of descent is the one he is remembered for. Charles Blount, the one open disciple he had in that century, borrowed from him heavily and not always with acknowledgment: Great is Diana of the Ephesians (1680) reworks the argument of De Religione Gentilium, and Blount’s Religio Laici of 1683 takes the title of Herbert’s own tract for laymen along with much of its substance. From there the argument passed into the English deist controversy of the next fifty years, which is where the modern sense of the word was made: deism, the position that reason alone establishes what religion needs, so that revelation is at best a republication of what any thoughtful person could work out unaided. In 1754 John Leland published A View of the Principal Deistical Writers, examined Herbert closely and unsympathetically, put him first in the catalogue, and gave him the title he has carried ever since, the father of English deism. The title fits the influence better than it fits the man. Herbert believed in providence, prayed, kept prayers twice daily in his house, and recorded an answer from heaven; the clockmaker God who winds the world and walks away is a later invention, and it is not his.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a test that rules out the Incarnation, repentance with no ransom, and a rule he broke himself. + He was a baptised Englishman who wanted the sacrament at the end, so the ledger has to be kept carefully. The objection is not to the man’s sincerity but to what he actually argued, and in his own books the distance is very wide. - The test disqualifies the gospel before examining it. Universal assent is his mark of truth, which means that anything God did once, in one place, at one time, is ruled out in advance. The Incarnation is exactly that sort of claim: a particular child, in the reign of a named emperor, executed under a named governor. Herbert’s rule does not weigh that claim and find it wanting. It declines to weigh it. A test built so that the central Christian claim cannot even be considered is not a neutral instrument, it is the conclusion smuggled into the method. - Repentance is asked for, and no ransom is provided. The fourth article says we ought to be sorry for our sins and repent of them, and Scripture agrees that we ought. What Scripture denies is that sorrow settles the account: "without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins" (Hebrews 9:22). Herbert’s system has a moral law, a judge and a sentence, and nobody to pay. The gospel answers the same problem with a person: "For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5), and there is salvation in no other name (Acts 4:12). - His worry about the unreached is answered on his own ground. He asked how a God of all men could leave most of them without what they need, and it is a fair question, asked in the right spirit. Scripture’s answer is not that the light of nature suffices but that the light of nature convicts (Romans 1:19–20) and that the remedy is announced to everyone: God now "commands all people everywhere to repent" (Acts 17:30). The universality Herbert wanted belongs to the gospel, not to the five articles. - He broke the rule that everything rests on. He argued that another person’s revelation can never be knowledge for you, then knelt for a private revelation of his own, received what he took to be one, and printed the account so that other people could read it. His readers have noticed the contradiction ever since, and it needs no pressing. A test that its own author cannot keep is not a test. The man is worth reading anyway, and Christians have reason to be grateful he wrote. He asked the right question about the peoples who never heard, he was honest that the answer must be worthy of God’s character, and he forced English theology to say clearly what natural knowledge of God can and cannot do. Halyburton’s title is the summary of the whole exchange, and it took Herbert to make the sentence necessary.