Introduction

In the eyes of nineteenth-century historians the writers known as the English deists were primarily important because they attempted to prove that Christianity was false. This was not a balanced interpretation of either their lives or their writings. These writers were not only religious controversialists. They had a very wide range of interests, and were agents of reform in many areas. They were able to work for reform because of the historically specific conditions of Protestant Enlightenment in England, and because of their constellational placements as related writers involved in controversies which attracted attention internationally. In many different areas, these writers signalled proposals for changes of understanding and practice which were taken up in other times and places by leading participants of the Enlightenments in Europe, America and even the Orthodox world. In this and the following chapter I explore their contributions to reform.

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These writers were not of one philosophy, and their estimation of ‘Philosophy’ varied. For most of them ‘Philosophy’ provided an alternative and more reliable source of guidance than revelation. Their sense of ‘Philosophy’ was wide, and carried the neo-Roman sense of the reform of superstition and the application of reason to the management of human affairs. Several of them (Blount, Toland, Collins, Tindal) were influenced by Spinoza, but it is not clear that any of them were Spinozists in an exact sense. None of these writers repeated Spinoza's views on prophecy, or subscribed to his claim that theology and philosophy were radically different in nature, and all of them took theological questions to be philosophical questions to a large extent.