ABSTRACT
William Pitt had taken a sympathetic view of Church anxieties even in 1787, and when some of the Paris developments of 1789 and 1790 which shocked or disturbed the normal member, won what was regarded as general Dissenting applause, Edmund Burke entered the fray, with a vehemence and effect that were astonishing. To turn from the Parliamentary debates on Church “rights” to the general controversial field among the theologians is, to turn to a very different scene. In 1791, the Anglican position, under varied criticism though it was from the Roman, the Dissenting and the “sceptical” or “Atheist”, viewpoints, seemed to be a strong one. In 1793 Tom Paine, who in his Rights of Man of 1791–1792 had just done so much to found British working-class politics, was meditating, in Paris, the work which was to originate the working-class “infidelity” both of Britain and America. Supernatural religion has been fertile in inventing systems concerning the origin of the world.
