The free exercise of reason in matters of religious belief, unrestrained by deference to authority; the adoption of the principles of a free-thinker.
1692[?]. [see FREE-THINKER].
1708. Brit. Apollo, No. 58. 1/2. Free Thinking (to use the Modish Phrase) with them bears too near a resemblance to a very common simile, and is no better than a Sword in a Child’s hand.
1758. Gray, Lett., Poems (1775), 263. The mode of free-thinking is like that of Ruffs and Farthingales, and has given place to the mode of not thinking at all; once it was reckoned graceful, half to discover and half conceal the mind, but now we have been long accustomed to see it quite naked: primness and affectation of style, like the good breeding of Queen Ann’s Court, has turned to hoydening and rude familiarity.
1773. Gentl. Mag., XLIII. March, 122/2. Guthrie, indeed charges them [Quakers] with being Freethinkers, which your correspondent denies, if by freethinking, Deism be meant.
attrib. 1719. Free-Thinker, 118, 8 May, ¶ 2. I proceeded, in my Second and Third Papers, to give Assurances to Both Sexes of many Free-Thinking Feats, which it was, then, generally suspected I never intended to perform.
