1. Holding the principles of a free-thinker.
a. 1716. South, Serm. (1843), II. 109. This, I say, is the guise of our age, our free thinking and freer practising age, in which people generally are ashamed of nothing, but to be virtuous, and to be thought old.
1730. Coventry, Pompey Litt., II. ix. (1785), 66/1. They found there assembled a free-thinking writer of moral essays, a no-thinking scribler of magazines, [etc.].
2. Pertaining or relating to free-thinkers or free-thought.
1726. Amherst, Terræ Fil., xi. 58. The catalogue would not be crouded with any of those heritical, pernicious, and free-thinking tracts, which are the noisom spawn of other modern presses.
1848. Thackeray, Van. Fair, xix. He might make her repent of her shocking free-thinking ways.
1882. The Saturday Review, LIV. 18 Nov., 671/1. The result of reading trashy free-thinking productions upon a man of breeding, education, and intelligence is supposed to be that he leaves his victim to her misery, satisfying is conscience with such puerile rubbish as this.
