Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/145

 the object. But he was physically a ruined man. The rack and the lash, the loss of wife, home, and property, had done their work; and he died in England leaving an uncertain pecuniary claim against the Spanish Government to his family.

In the world of theology a furious bigotry still held an almost undisputed sway. The idea that the choice lay not necessarily between blank negation on the one hand and either Puritanism or the Church on the other, that science and religion had relations, that there was a possible connection between the religions and philosophies of the ancient world and Christianity, and that Christianity itself must have existed before the New Testament had been written, were ideas which it was barely possible to hold anywhere, without danger to the property and person of those who asserted them. Such ideas also had no hold on the popular mind, which delighted in definite dogma. The hope indeed of the scientific men and philosophers of the seventeenth century, especially of the school of Cambridge Platonists, which Sir William's old Oxford ally, Dr. Wilkins, had joined, was that the future of religion lay with a rational and unsectarian form of Christianity; and many of the founders of the Royal Society looked forward to establishing religion on a basis of evidence and reason. But these views, though boasting distinguished adherents in England, amongst the masses made no converts, and were equally distasteful to the Protestant and the Romanist theologians. Those who held them were denounced as Socinians, and it is conceivable that, under less favourable circumstances, the fate of Dr. Petty might have been that of his brother-physician, Michael Servetus, who only escaped from the clutches of the Roman Catholic authorities of Vienne to fall into those of Calvin and be burnt at Geneva. 'Being a votary,' he acknowledges, 'neither to any one particular sect or superstition (as a member of Christ's universal Church) nor to any one faith or party, as obedient to my present visible governors, (it being alleged against me that I had termed