The History of British Deism

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About the Book

Deism was often synonymous with "natural religion" (as distinct from "revealed religion") in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; it meant belief in a God, but not in any particular mystical or supernatural powers. The word itself has probable origin in the middle of the sixteenth century in France, but the concept began to emerge in British theology in the seventeenth century, most notably in De Veritate (1624) by Lord Edward Herbert of Cherbury. By the middle of the seventeenth century, deism was beginning to concern orthodox theologians, and any suggestion of it was quickly attacked. Yet other theologians, for example, Humphrey Prideaux, regarded deism as a necessary step to Christianity.

John Locke added his considerable intellectual weight to the debate with The Reasonableness of Christianity in 1695. This was immediately followed by John Toland's Christianity not Mysterious (1696), in which the author asserted that there was nothing in religion that was not above reason and that no Christian doctrine could properly be called mysterious. Interest in deism was not so much a movement or a philosophical system, as it was a conept which allowed those who were uneasy with the elements of superstition in revealed religion to accommodate within the enlarging boundaries of religion difficult theological, or even specifically Christian, ideas. Yet many Christian clerics felt that deism led invariably and inevitably to atheism and vigourously opposed the idea, and were often intolerant of its adherents. The texts reprinted in this collection combine major documents in the history of deism in Britain with other less well-known texts whose relevance to the topic has yet to be properly assessed.