9
manners, and as a potential support for republican virtue and political liberty.
37
More
specific to the Scottish Enlightenment, however, was the discussion of the particular role
of Protestantism in the progress of civilization.
The social and political impact of the Reformation, and especially of the Scottish
Reformation, was a fraught subject in eighteenth-century Scottish historiography.
Robertson’s History of Scotland (1759) was the standard Moderate counter-narrative to the
national and exceptionalist accounts of the Scottish Reformation that had thrived since
George Buchanan in the sixteenth century. The History of Scotland treated the Scottish
Reformation as the product of a broad political and intellectual context, including the
revival of classical learning, the political ambitions of Scottish nobility, and the dynamics
of the European system of rival monarchies. In doing so it severed the direct link
between Calvinist theology and early modern Scottish liberty.
38
Following Robertson,
Scottish Moderate historians reinvented a Scottish historiography that denied the ancient
origin of Scottish constitutional liberties, and instead placed the rise of Scotland’s civil
liberties within a larger Whig narrative of British liberty.
Yet this was not incompatible with the celebration of the happy tendencies of
Protestantism on the general progress of European society. Gilbert Burnet’s History of the
Reformation (1681-1714), the standard work on the topic that provided much of the
material used by Hume, Robertson and Millar, had justified the 1688 settlement by
portraying Catholicism as the religion of tyranny, and Protestantism as the religion of
English liberty. From the later Scottish historians’ perspective, the work’s providentialist
perspective could easily be adapted into a celebration of Protestantism as a tool in the
progress of British-wide civilization, which was also fully compatible with their position
as Presbyterian Whigs.
39
Indeed, this was the approach adopted by Robertson in his
History of Charles V (1769), which celebrated the Reformation’s “bold and innovating
spirit”
40
as a “revolution in the sentiments of mankind,” which contributed to “increased
purity of manners, to diffuse science, and to inspire humanity.”
41
Millar and Kames
37
Spector, “Naturalisation des croyances,” 42. See Ferguson’s praise of Montesquieu in Ferguson, An
Essay on the History of Civil Society, 66.
38
Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689-
c.1830 (Cambridge, 1993), 192–94.
39
For examples of Burnet’s providentialism, see for instance Gilbert Burnet, The History of the Reformation of
the Church of England: The Second Part, of the Progress Made in It till the Settlement of It in the Beginning of Q.
Elizabeths Reign (London, 1681), 421.
40
William Robertson, The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V. With a View of the Progress of Society in
Europe, from the Subversion of the Roman Empire, to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century., 3 vols. (London, 1769),
2:258.
41
Ibid, 2:348, 2:451, 2:78.
10
echoed similar sentiments about
“
the spirit of inquiry introduced at the reformation, and
the diffusion of knowledge which followed it,”
42
and the Reformation’s general effect “in
sweetening manners, and promoting the interests of society.”
43
The destruction of the myths of Presbyterian historiography initiated by
Robertson therefore took the form of a historicization and contextualization of religious
change and its consequences. This was how Robertson rejoined Hume’s self-consciously
secular perspective on narratives of religious history.
44
Yet Robertson’s account of
religion was also a qualified exception to the previously-described efforts to secularize
historical and religious progress. As a prominent member of Scotland’s Moderate
Enlightenment, Robertson was only marginally less committed than Hume and Smith to
rescuing the study of history, society and politics from the sacred realm. But he also took
their historical accounts in a less relativistic and less generically Christian direction,
towards praise of Protestantism as a providentialist vehicle for social progress.
Like Hume, Robertson saw the origin of religious belief not in Revelation, but rather in
human psychology – namely, the human tendency to ascribe supernatural origins to
mysterious natural phenomena. But he also sought to reconcile natural philosophy with
the language of providentialism, by arguing that the material and moral progress of
humankind paved the way for the rise of the true Christian religion, through a gradual
process of revelation.
45
In a sermon preached in 1755 before the Society in Scotland for
Propagating Christian Knowledge, he suggested that Revelation had been delayed until
humankind had reached a sufficient material and intellectual state of development. Even
then, he argued, “the light of revelation was not poured upon mankind all at once, and
with its full splendor,” but adjusted to mankind’s ability to receive it. It was then to
unfold further “in proportion as the situation of the world made it necessary.”
46
This
argument informed Robertson’s account of the progress of Reformation in his
History of
the Reign of the Emperor Charles V (1769): early Christianity had remained a rough draft, still
marred by idolatry, superstition and the authority of the Church, but by the sixteenth
century the progress of society and subsequent “bold spirit of enquiry,” as well as the
increasing corruption of the Church, had made it possible for the Word to be further
42
Millar, Historical View, 537, 642.
43
Home (Lord Kames), Sketches of the History of Man, 3:185.
44
Hume, The History of England, 3:134. See also Millar, Historical View, 470; Robertson, The History of the Reign
of the Emperor Charles V, 2:120.
45
Joshua Ehrlich, “William Robertson and Scientific Theism,”
Modern Intellectual History, 10/3 (2013), 519-
542.
46
William Robertson, The Situation of the World at the Time of Christ’s Appearance, and Its Connexion with the
Success of His Religion, Considered (Edinburgh, 1755), 7–8.