DEISM

Deism (Lat. deus, god) is etymologically cognate to theism (Gr. theos, god), both words denoting belief in the existence of a god or gods and, therefore, the antithesis of atheism. However, as is customary in the case of synonyms, the words drifted apart in meaning; theism retained an air of religious orthodoxy, while deism acquired a connotation of religious unorthodoxy and ultimately reached the pejorative. Curiously, however, the earliest known use of the term deist (1564) already had this latter intent, although it was by no means consistently retained thereafter. The situation is complicated by a late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century technical metaphysical interpretation of deism, in which the meaning is restricted to belief in a God, or First Cause, who created the world and instituted immutable and universal laws that preclude any alteration as well as divine immanence—in short, the concept of an "absentee God." A further complication has been the acceptance of natural religion (religion universally achievable by human reason) by many eminent Christian theologians throughout the course of many centuries. Such theologians also believed in revelation and in personal divine intervention in the life of man, a position that had been made clear and authoritative by St. Thomas Aquinas. No sharp line can be drawn between the doctrines of such rationalistic theologians and those of deists, especially those who termed themselves "Christian deists." Nor is it accurate to maintain that the historical deists (mainly of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), like the philosophical deists, altogether denied the immanence of God, even though they did tend to become more and more critical of the necessity of any revelation and of the Hebraic-Christian revelation in particular. It is therefore necessary to distinguish between the two types of deists. The remainder of this entry will be devoted to a survey of historical deism.

Early History of Deism

To attempt to disentangle the antecedents of historical deism—intertwined as they are with rationalistic natural religion on the one hand, and with skepticism on the other—would indeed be foolhardy. Skepticism itself might end in Pyrrhonism or atheism or fideism. It is safe to generalize, however, that any tendency away from religious dogmatism, implicit faith and the mysterious, and in the direction of freedom of thought on religious matters, was in some measure a premonitory symptom of deism.

The earliest known use of the word deist was by Pierre Viret, a disciple of John Calvin, in his Instruction chrétienne (Geneva, 1564), Vol. II, "Epistre" (signed, Lyons, December 12, 1563). Viret regarded it as an entirely new word that (he claimed) the deists wished to oppose to atheist: According to him, the deist professes belief in God as the creator of heaven and earth but rejects Jesus Christ and his doctrines. Although those unidentified deists were learned men of letters and philosophy, they were bitterly attacked by Viret as monsters and atheists. This definition and commentary was given wide circulation through Pierre Bayle's citation in his article on Viret in the Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; English translation, 1710). The word deist remained unknown in England until 1621, when it appeared in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (III. iv. II. i). After discussing atheists and near-atheists, Burton continues: "Cousin-germans to these men are many of our great Philosophers and Deists," who, although good and moral, are yet themselves atheists. These "great Philosophers and Deists" likewise remain unidentified. A century and a half later, David Hume (1711–1776), in his History of England, ventured to name James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, and Sir John Wildman, among others, as the reputed leaders of the deists under the Commonwealth. The first interpretation of deist in both French and English as a euphemism for atheist was not followed by Dr. Samuel Johnson, who, in his Dictionary (1755), defined deist as "a man who follows no particular religion but only acknowledges the existence of God, without any other article of faith."

The first appearance of deism seems to have been in John Dryden's preface to his poem Religio Laici of 1682, where he equated it with natural religion. Dr. Johnson agreed: "The opinion of those that only acknowledge one God, without the reception of any revealed religion." Neither Dryden nor Johnson, evidently, regarded deism as disguised atheism. The notion of deism, however, if not the word itself, is to be found in one form or another throughout the Renaissance until, in the late seventeenth century, the Englishman Charles Blount openly acknowledged that he was a deist.

Beginning in the early sixteenth century, general contributions to the development of deism include such broad movements as anti-Trinitarianism, Unitarianism, secularism, anticlericalism, Erastianism, Arminianism, and Socinianism, the rise of the sects, and the general revolt against authority. It may be argued that all of these currents and undercurrents were united in the increasing trend away from religious persecution and toward religious toleration, the glorification of the natural powers of man, and the endorsement of the right to think and to publish freely on all religious and political subjects.

Deism in Britain

The British deists constituted no conspiracy and formed no school of thought; they were highly individualistic, frequently unknown to one another, and sometimes at odds with one another. They were less systematic philosophers than thoughtful writers on practical moral, religious, and political issues. In 1704 the rationalist Anglican theologian Samuel Clarke distinguished four varieties of deists: those who denied providence; those who acknowledged providence in natural religion but not in morality; those who, while denying a future life, admitted the moral role of the deity; and finally, those who acknowledged a future life and the other doctrines of natural religion. The following summary of the leading deists will testify to the general truth of Clarke's subtle distinctions.

leading british deists and the rise of deism

Lord Herbert of Cherbury

Lord Herbert (1583–1648) never called himself a deist and had but a single acknowledged disciple, Charles Blount; nevertheless, he exerted considerable influence and deserves the title of "the father of English deism" bestowed on him in 1714 by Thomas Halyburton in Natural Religion Insufficient. Lord Herbert's De Veritate, Prout Distinguitur a Revelatione, a Verisimili, a Possibili, et a Falso was published in Paris in 1624, in London in 1633, and again in 1645. The first edition, therefore, postdated Burton's avowal of the existence of many deists by three years. In the expanded London edition of 1645, Herbert laid down the religious Common Notions that constitute the rationalistic basis of deism and that were to be assumed, if not always acknowledged, by virtually all succeeding deists. These principles are (1) that there is one supreme God; (2) that he ought to be worshiped; (3) that virtue and piety are the chief parts of divine worship; (4) that man ought to be sorry for his sins and repent of them; (5) that divine goodness dispenses rewards and punishments both in this life and after it. These truths, he argued, are universal, and may be apprehended by reason. Revelation is not openly repudiated, but by implication is rendered supererogatory. (Somewhat incongruously, however, Herbert prayed for a sign from Heaven that would grant permission to publish De Veritate, and was satisfied that he had received it.) Herbert treated Scripture as ordinary history, ridiculed bibliolatry, and overtly attacked priestcraft, and disavowed faith as a basis for religion. His De Religione Gentilium (1663) is one of the earliest studies of comparative religion.

Propagation of Deism

Although precise documentation is not available, deism was ripening between the time of Herbert and Blount, through such various and overlapping influences as humanism in general, the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, the idealism of Harrington, the naturalistic biblical exegesis of Benedict de Spinoza and others, the corruption of the clergy, the widespread religious rationalism of the Cambridge Platonists and other Latitudinarians, the "sweet reasonableness" of John Locke, and the scientific approach of Isaac Newton—all of which were contributing to religious and political toleration. By the close of the seventeenth century, a new and memorable influence was added—the pervasive presence of the skepticism of Bayle. The first direct attack on British deism, Bishop Stillingfleet's Letter to a Deist (1677), acknowledges that owning to the being and providence of God but expressing "a mean esteem" of the Scriptures and the Christian religion had become a common theme.

Charles Blount

Beginning in 1679, Blount (1654–1693) was an indefatigable propagandist who, in the battle for freedom on all fronts, learned to resort to indirect methods in order to keep clear of the law. His Summary Account of the Deist's Religion (1693), which appeared posthumously during the same year in which he committed suicide, is his most outspoken work.

The year 1610 marks the last burning of heretics in England. Yet the matter of legal suppression of heterodox works is of vital importance in understanding and assessing the writings of the deists. The strict Press Licensing Act of 1662 was allowed to drop by 1695, but the blasphemy laws were still in effect. The ecclesiastical courts had the power to imprison heretics for a period of six months; in 1676 Lord Chief Justice Hale ruled that through common law the Court of King's Bench had jurisdiction over blasphemy, because Christianity is "parcel of the laws of England"; and finally, in 1698 a vicious statute was enacted under which any acknowledged Christian who made any accusation whatsoever against the Christian religion could be rendered incapable of holding office, of taking legal action, of purchasing land, and, if the blasphemy was repeated, would be made to suffer three years' imprisonment without bail. Such repressive measures drove the heterodox into various evasive techniques. Irony, innuendo, ridicule, raillery, allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures, fictitious analogies, frequent use of the dialogue and epistolary forms, the claim to be "Christian deists," pseudonymity, and anonymity not only successfully hampered legal prosecution but also made it difficult for modern historians to ascertain the genuine beliefs of the writers.

After Herbert and Blount, the foremost British deists were John Toland, Anthony Collins, and Matthew Tindal, and of somewhat less consequence, William Wollaston, Thomas Woolston, Thomas Chubb, Thomas Morgan, Henry St. John Bolingbroke, and Peter Annet. Others, such as the earl of Shaftesbury and Bernard Mandeville, have been labeled deists with some justification, and many others without justification, even including orthodox clergymen who emphasized natural religion, expressed scruples about specific biblical passages or voiced doubts about specific biblical miracles.

John Toland

Toland (1670–1722) produced in 1696 his most famous deistical work, the very title of which spells out its major thesis: Christianity not Mysterious: Or a treatise Shewing That there is nothing in the Gospel Contrary to Reason, Nor above it: And that no Christian Doctrine can be properly call'd a Mystery. The treatise is basically rationalistic and is reminiscent of Herbert's De Veritate. It opposes not only biblical mysteries, but also challenges the validity of the biblical canon and points out corruptions in biblical texts. It mocks the implicit faith of the Puritans and their bibliolatry, and severely censures the vested interests of priests of all denominations. Philosophically, Toland was in the tradition of Giordano Bruno, René Descartes, Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and, to a lesser extent, of Locke. Eclectic and somewhat inconsistent in his opinions, he was a freethinker and a deist, a materialist and a pantheist (the first use of the word pantheist is found in 1705 in his Socinianism truly stated ). With his great learning, Toland became a figure of international renown, for the first time bringing deism to a wide reading public through a profusion of bold controversial publications.

Anthony Collins

Collins (1676–1729) was a well-to-do and well-educated gentleman and magistrate. At the age of twenty-seven he earned the respect and friendship of Locke. Two early works, An Essay concerning the Use of Reason (1707) and Priestcraft in Perfection (1709), prepared the way for the more famous Discourse of Free-Thinking (1713), in which the right to think and publish freely is examined chiefly as it pertains to religion. Enthusiasm and superstition are considered more evil than atheism; modern science and the Protestant Reformation are presented as examples of courageous freethinking that have relieved many from age-old errors, including witchcraft; and priests are blamed for trivial quarreling among themselves over biblical interpretations and are held responsible for many corrupt texts. An impressive list of freethinkers is furnished from the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews; from the Church Fathers; and from the moderns, ranging from Michel Eyquem de Montaigne to John Tillotson and Locke.

Collins defended his style of writing in A Discourse concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1727); his philosophical doctrine of necessitarianism (wherein he differs from the doctrine of free will espoused by most deists) is developed in a Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty (1715) and a Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity (1729); and his biblical criticism, mainly of the supposed fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies in the New Testament, in the Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1724) and the Scheme of Literal Prophecy Considered (1725). Collins is unquestionably the most readable and urbane of the British deists.

Matthew Tindal

A law fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and advocate at Doctors' Commons, Tindal (1657?–1733) was the most learned of the British deists, as well as the most significant historically. His Christianity as Old as the Creation: Or, The Gospel A Republication of the Religion of Nature (1730), composed in dialogue form, was at once recognized as "The Deist's Bible," and elicited over 150 replies, the most famous of which is Bishop Joseph Butler's The Analogy of Religion (1736). Although a declared admirer of Locke, Tindal deduces the being and attributes of God by a priori reason. As man reasons downward from the knowledge of the attributes of God to knowledge of himself, the religion of nature, including all the moral precepts requisite for leading the life of virtue and achieving ultimate salvation, then follows. Scripture, replete with ambiguities, is not only unnecessary but is actually confusing to men of reason; and according to Tindal, all men of whatever education or status in life are capable of Right Reason. Some Old Testament heroes are inspected in detail and are found wanting in virtue; even some New Testament parables are subjected to critical comment. Tradition is repudiated as a basis for Christianity, since it can be used equally as the basis for any and all religions. The customary deistical castigation of priestcraft is combined with this repudiation of tradition. Tindal, a rationalist, always maintained the title of "Christian deist."

lesser english deists

The remaining British deists, already named, each made some personal contribution to the movement, however small.

William Wollaston

A graduate of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, Wollaston (1660–1724) took holy orders, but through the unexpected inheritance of a large fortune he was able to devote himself to moral philosophy and general learning. His The Religion of Nature Delineated (1724) was well received by Queen Caroline the Illustrious, as well as by the public at large. It was attacked, however, by the American deist Benjamin Franklin and was subjected to ridicule by Lord Bolingbroke, the British deist. Unlike most deistical treatises, it contains no biblical criticism of any sort. Almost purely rationalistic, it has obvious affinities, in a simplified form, with Herbert of Cherbury's religious Common Notions. Man knows truth (that is, things as they are) by means of reason; vice, or the denial of things as they are, is a lie. To seek happiness is man's duty, because happiness, or the excess of pleasure over pain, is part of man's approach to truth. Man is by nature not fundamentally selfish; his search for truth must take into account the happiness of others. It is altogether likely that Bishop Butler, in The Analogy of Religion, had Wollaston at least partly in mind when he reproved extreme religious rationalism as "that idle and not very innocent employment of forming imaginary models of a world, and schemes of governing it."

Thomas Woolston

Woolston (1670–1731), fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and Christian divine, was a deist of another stamp. A disciple of Anthony Collins, who had spearheaded the assault on biblical prophecies, Woolston extended the assault to biblical miracles. Influenced by the writings of the Greek Church Father Origen, he interpreted Scripture allegorically, was subsequently deemed out of his mind by his adversaries and, as a result, in 1720 was deprived of his fellowship. In 1705 he first employed the allegorical method in The Old Apology for the Truth of the Christian Religion against the Jews and Gentiles Revived, and later published a series of anticlerical tracts against those who spurned it. But it was a series of six Discourses On the Miracles of our Saviour, In View of the Present Contest between Infidels and Apostates (1727–1729) that brought prosecution by the government, ending in 1729 with a conviction of blasphemy. Sentenced to a fine of £100, imprisonment for one year, and security for good behavior during life, he died in jail in 1731, unable to pay the fine. A fighter for freedom of thought and publication for all, Woolston ironically fell the victim of his own principles. The six Discourses take a colloquial and frequently witty dialogue form, with a fictitious learned Jewish rabbi presenting Woolston's queries concerning fifteen New Testament miracles. Woolston's madness may possibly have been real (in which case his sentence was truly infamous), but his tracts read more like the strong convictions of a strong mind. He was one of two of the leading British deists (the other being Annet) to suffer punishment by the government.

Thomas Chubb

An Arian and "Christian deist," Chubb (1679–1746) was a self-educated and humble artisan. Writing for the common people, Chubb was also able to hold his own with the educated upper classes, divines, and scholars. He mastered the widespread rationalism of the early eighteenth century and propagated its basic ideas through prolific publication, as is observable in such works as A Discourse concerning Reason, With Regard to Religion and Divine Revelation (1731) and An Enquiry Into the Ground and Foundation of Religion. Wherein is shewn, that Religion is founded in Nature (1740). Another approach is taken in A Discourse on Miracles, Considered as evidence to prove the Divine Original of a Revelation (1741), a work influenced by Toland and Woolston. Although he is skeptical of the Hebrew revelation, Chubb is never skeptical of the Christian, as is manifested in The True Gospel of Jesus Christ asserted (1732) and The True Gospel of Jesus Christ Vindicated (1739). In these two tracts, Chubb employs natural religion as proof of Christian religion. He defends the miraculous propagation of primitive Christianity against the aspersions of the deist Tindal. A believer in free will, Chubb was answered at considerable length by the eighteenth-century American theologian Jonathan Edwards in A Careful and Strict Enquiry into The modern prevailing Notions of the Freedom of Will (1754).

Thomas Morgan

A Welsh "Christian deist," divine, and medical doctor, Morgan (d. 1743) came from a poor family (as did Chubb and Annet). Morgan combined the religious Common Notions of Lord Herbert with some of the principles of historical biblical criticism found in the writings of Toland and Chubb. He opposed Chubb, however, on the question of free will. Morgan's chief contributions to the deistical controversy are to be found in The Moral Philosopher, in a Dialogue between Philalethes, a Christian Deist, and Theophanes, a Christian Jew (1737), and its two sequels. His general historical criticism of Scripture stresses the many ambiguities that permit many different interpretations of biblical texts by believers who truly attempt to understand their significance. All history, therefore, is simply probability, and infallibility is fostered by priestcraft for selfish purposes. Toleration, reasonableness, and freedom are necessary to combat superstition and persecution.

Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke

Tory statesman, historian, deist, and wit, Bolingbroke (1678–1751) left his philosophical and religious compositions to be published posthumously in 1754 by David Mallet. Regarded by Dr. Johnson as a "blunderbuss" against religion and morality, Bolingbroke's Works were regarded by Hume as unoriginal and feeble. In the twentieth century, Voltaire's long-alleged great indebtedness to Bolingbroke has been discredited, and the claim that Alexander Pope's Essay on Man was founded on Bolingbroke's Fragments or Minutes of Essays has been vigorously challenged. As a philosopher Bolingbroke is a rationalist, but a curiously inconsistent one. In one passage he states that only Right Reason can demonstrate the Being of Deity, yet in another, that only empiricism can prove the Being of Deity. Paradoxes abound: No universal revelation has ever been made, but modern religion can benefit by the study of primitive religions—for example, of China and Egypt. Like all the deists, Bolingbroke regarded the baneful influence of priestcraft as a major cause of the corruption of religious texts and religious traditions. With Bolingbroke, the course of British rationalistic deism, stemming from that of Lord Herbert in the middle of the seventeenth century, up to the middle of the eighteenth century, had been pretty well played out, but there was always opportunity for remorseless repetition and intensified publicity.

Peter Annet

Schoolmaster Annet (1693–1769) may be regarded as the last of the old-line deists. An outspoken freethinker, Annet advocated the freedom to divorce and, in a long series of tracts, attacked the Resurrection of Jesus and the character and conversion of St. Paul. His truculent assault on the credibility of all miracles in general, and those of the Old Testament in particular, carried on in The Free Enquirer of 1761, brought a governmental charge of blasphemous libel to which Annet pleaded guilty. The inhumane sentence against a man aged seventy included imprisonment for a month, two pilloryings, hard labor for a year, a fine, and bonds of security for good behavior during life. Annet survived this flagrant miscarriage of justice with its attendant humiliation and returned to schoolmastering until his death. The ascription to him of the authorship of the notorious History of the Man after God's own Heart (1761) has been disproved by modern scholarship. Although he contributed little fresh to the deistical movement, Annet, like Chubb, wrote directly to the people in their own language.

the rationalistic climate of opinion

Little has been said so far about the rationalistic "orthodox" of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, those Latitudinarians, who were closely akin to the deists, except on the one crucial point of raising objections against Christian revelation. Nevertheless, both groups were united in a contemptuous rejection of Tertullian's dictum, credo quia impossibile est ; in this respect, there was no warfare between reason and religion. In a 1670 defense of the orthodox rationalists, a Latitudinarian was succinctly defined as "a gentleman of a wide swallow."

Ralph Cudworth

Cudworth (1617–1688) may be taken as representative of the small but important band of Cambridge Platonists who sought to synthesize the spirit of Christianity with that of Greek philosophy by affirming that reason is spiritual as well as intellectual. Cudworth distinguishes between fundamental and nonfundamental religious doctrines: "I perswade myself, that no man shall ever be kept out of heaven, for not comprehending mysteries that were beyond the reach of his shallow understanding; if he had but an honest and good heart, that was ready to comply with Christ's commandments" (A Sermon before the House of Commons, March 31, 1647. ) In The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), Cudworth argues cogently against fatalism. His posthumous Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (1731) derives morality from natural law rather than from the positive precepts of revelation. Another member of the group, Benjamin Whichcote, states their position admirably: "If you would be religious, be rational in your religion." In short, the Cambridge Platonists stood for reason and moderation.

John Tillotson

Tillotson (1630–1694), archbishop of Canterbury and great champion of Anglicanism, employed rationalistic arguments against the Catholic use of tradition and authority. Observing that these same arguments could be turned against Christianity itself, the deists frequently seized upon Tillotson's authority and quoted his arguments in this new context. Collins went so far as to name him the man "whom all English free-thinkers own as their head."

the new science

It might be expected that the New Science, which had made such great strides from Nicolas Copernicus to Newton, would have precipitated warfare between science and religion as it did in the nineteenth century, following Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). But insofar as Britain was concerned, such was not the case, for Francis Bacon had enunciated the principle of a rigid dichotomy between science and religion that, on the whole, was adhered to during the seventeenth century. Indeed, science was more generally used as a bulwark for Christianity than the reverse—notably, in the case of the Latitudinarians. Newton himself was a student of Old Testament prophecies and believed in the Scriptures as inerrant guides.

The "skeptical chemist" Robert Boyle wrote orthodox religious tracts, one of which had the ancillary purpose of proving that by being "addicted" to experimental philosophy, a man is assisted rather than indisposed to being a good Christian. In 1691 Boyle endowed a lectureship for the proof of the Christian religion against the attacks of infidels. Great efforts were made to replace a priori reasoning with the argument from design. Richard Bentley, the first Boyle Lecturer, corresponded with Newton in preparing The Folly of Atheism and what is now called Deism (1692). William Derham's two lectures, Physico-Theology (1713) and Astro-Theology (1715), continued the effort. Nevertheless, the bulk of the Boyle Lectures, from the beginning to 1732, are almost purely rationalistic, as, for example, Clarke's Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1704) and Discourse concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Religion (1705). Collins gibed that until Clarke's "demonstration" of the existence of God, nobody had doubted the fact; and Franklin, in his autobiography, acknowledged that he became a deist after reading some of the Boyle Lectures. The New Science, in effect, had relatively little influence on the course of the deistical controversy, since neither side squarely faced the problem of the relationship of science to religion.

the decline and fall of reason

Rationalistic refutations of deism were prolific and formidable but achieved relatively little because they had so much in common with those of deism. Tindal had forced upon the apologists acceptance of the natural sufficiency of reason in theology. Thus, if deism was to be defeated, it had to be from a citadel other than that of an infallible and universal reason. One of the infrequent replies to Tindal's direct challenge, "Dare any say that God is an Arbitrary Being, and His laws not founded on the eternal reason of things?" (Christianity as Old as the Creation ) was The Case of Reason, Or Natural Religion Fairly and Fully Stated (1731). Its pietistic author, William Law (1686–1761), better remembered for his A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729) and as a forerunner of John Wesley (1703–1791), totally disavowed Right Reason in the areas of morality and religion, and argued for historical evidence and implicit faith.

Bishop Joseph Butler (1692–1752) offered in the Rolls Sermons (1726) an important revaluation of the authority of conscience and in the Analogy of Religion (1736) a matter-of-fact defense of Christianity; he sought to prove by analogy that all deistical objections against revelation were equally applicable to natural religion. The danger of this argument (which employed some of the methods of science and of Lockean empiricism) was that it might conceivably drive readers to become skeptical of both kinds of religion, to espouse atheism, or to retreat into implicit faith.

Bishop George Berkeley's (1685–1753) Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher (1732), with its subtitle "Containing an Apology for the Christian religion against those who are called Freethinkers," is a brilliant series of polemical dialogues, but it contains little of his highly controversial and much misunderstood philosophical denial of abstract ideas and of "matter," for which Berkeley was frequently accused of being a skeptic. His The Analyst (1734), addressed to an "infidel mathematician" (presumably Edmund Halley), adopts the hazardous method of defending orthodoxy by asserting that the axioms of mathematics are as irrational and incomprehensible as the mysteries of Christianity.

Law and Butler had paved the way for antirationalistic assaults on deism, the former through faith, the latter through matter of fact. The argument for faith was implemented in Christianity Not Founded on Argument (1742) by Henry Dodwell ("the younger"), who had as little use for historical proofs as for intellectual proofs. According to Dodwell, the Boyle Lectures, like all rationalistic efforts, had only succeeded in spreading infidelity; external proofs have no real evidential value; probability reigns; so in the final analysis, there is no other way to approach religion, than to believe because you wish to believe. With Dodwell's appeal to emotionalism, the "enthusiasm" of Wesley was just around the corner.

Conyers Middleton (1683–1750), Anglican clergyman, and equally antirationalistic, pressed the historical argument against external proof of the validity of religious claims in his Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers which are supposed to have subsisted in the Christian Church from the Earliest Ages through several successive Centuries (1749). Professedly denying the supernatural powers associated with the growth of Catholicism, Middleton could scarcely have been unaware that the same arguments could also be used to attack Gospel miracles, and that there is in actuality no breach between sacred and profane history.

Fatal blows to the Age of Reason (as differentiated from the Age of Enlightenment) came simultaneously on two levels—intellectually, from Hume and emotionally, from Wesley. What might be termed the deistical side of Hume can most readily be seen in "Of Miracles" and "Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State" (1748), "The Natural History of Religion (1757), and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779), the last of which comes to the purposefully lame conclusion "that the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence." Natural religion, whether of the rationalistic or matter-of-fact variety, can lead only to doubt, uncertainty, and suspension of judgment. In reality, of course, Hume was no deist, but rather an antideist, a skeptic who destroyed the vulnerable a priori basis of deism.

At about the same time, Wesley attacked deism through "enthusiasm," the doctrine of continuous personal inspiration and inner conversion of the soul: "By grace are ye saved through faith." The fatal blows had been delivered; the Age of Reason had fallen and deism was dead. Or was it? The question will be taken up after brief considerations of deism in France, Germany, and America.

Deism on the Continent

The term Enlightenment was unknown in Britain during the eighteenth century, although its spirit was plainly manifest. When it did appear in the nineteenth century, it was employed in the derogatory sense of shallow and pretentious intellectualism coupled with unreasonable contempt for tradition and authority. In eighteenth-century France and Germany, on the contrary, full-fledged movements of Éclaircissement and Aufklärung were under way and were winning important intellectual and political victories. The present section will confine itself, insofar as possible, to religion and will deal with only a few predominant thinkers.

voltaire

Without stopping to investigate such sixteenth-century precursors as Jean Bodin, Rabelais, Pierre Charron, and Montaigne, or such seventeenth-century precursors as Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, and Bayle, it is well to proceed directly to François-Marie Arouet, universally known as Voltaire (1694–1778), the greatest of the French deists. Banishment to England (1726–1729) by order of the ancien régime put the already widely known poet, playwright, philosophe (and later, historian and novelist) into the scientific atmosphere of Newton, the philosophical and religious atmosphere of Locke and some of the earlier deists (Voltaire had already known Bolingbroke in France), and the literary neoclassical atmosphere of Jonathan Swift and Pope. Much impressed by the relatively tolerant attitudes of the English as compared to the rigid censorship of the ancien régime, Voltaire published in London in 1733 Letters concerning the English Nation. A surreptitiously arranged French version of 1734, Lettres philosophiques, speedily burned by the common hangman, was Voltaire's first bombshell against governmental and church tyranny. Thereafter, his remorseless battle cry of Écrasez l'infâme! was to be heard throughout a long life of polemic.

Although he consistently used the word theist in reference to himself, Voltaire was a deist in the tradition of the British deists, never attacking the existence of Deity but always the corruptions of church and priestcraft. As late as 1770, in a letter to Frederick the Great voicing strong disapproval of the avowed atheism of many of the philosophes, Voltaire repeated his conviction that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. The Lettres philosophiques eulogizes the Quakers as ideal deists for their freedom of thought and their freedom from dogmatism and clericism; attacks Blaise Pascal's Pyrrhonism, which leaves man only the alternative of implicit faith; praises the philosophical empiricism and religious reasonableness of Locke; and seeks to convert the scientists of France to the Newtonian system. Other writings on religion and morality, Poème sur la loi naturelle and Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne, both of 1756, as well as the famous novel Candide (1759), assail the doctrine of philosophical optimism and, indeed, of divine benevolence. Believing as he did in a natural religion based on reason, Voltaire's chief onslaughts were upon dogmatism, superstition, fanaticism, and tyranny. His Traité sur la tolérance (1763), a classic denunciation of oppression, occasioned by the infamous Calas affaire of 1762, was followed in 1764 by the witty and effective Dictionnaire philosophique. Like most of the so-called deists, Voltaire was fundamentally a humanist seeking to better the condition of humankind.

jean-jacques rousseau

Novelist, political writer, deist, philosophe and anti-philosophe, Rousseau (1712–1778) remains one of the most inscrutable literary and philosophical geniuses of all time—a supreme individualist doting upon his own uniqueness. Born a Protestant, he became a Catholic, and finally a deist. His Confessions reveals that it was the reading of Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques that first incited him to study, to think, and to become a dedicated man of letters.

In touching solely upon Rousseau's role as a deist, it is fitting to examine the "Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar," part of the fourth book of Émile, ou de l'éducation (1762). The first book had opened with the affirmation that everything is good as it comes from the Author of all things, but that everything degenerates in the hands of man. The fourth book seeks to develop and clarify this thesis, using, for prudential purposes, a vicar as spokesman. Jettisoning metaphysical proofs of God and subscribing to no strict system, the vicar simply feels God within himself, as a world governor of will, intelligence, power, and goodness. This beneficent deity is to be worshiped from the heart, and not through artificial forms. Yet it is paradoxically evident that while mere animals are happy, superior man is miserable. Why? asks the vicar. He replies to his own question that far from being a simple uncompounded creature, man is actually a being of contradictions. Self-love is natural to him, but a sense of justice or conscience or inner light is innate; he has the power to will things, but does not always exert this power to enforce his will.

Man, therefore, is the author of evil: Born good, he acquires vice. God, infinitely powerful, is infinitely good and supremely just. To emulate God in seeking justice is man's only source of happiness. In this respect, natural religion, learned through conscience, is sufficient. Christian revelation, on the one hand, is fraught with difficulty, mystery, obscurity, and dogma. Its majesty, sublimity, and beauty, on the other hand, bear witness to its divinity: It is not a manmade invention; indeed, it remained Rousseau's "pillow-book" throughout life. Rousseau, in brief, is a sentimental and primitivistic, rather than a "hard," rationalistic deist. Yet, in substance, his "soft" sentimental deism is actually not far removed from the religious Common Notions of Lord Herbert or even from Spinoza's Doctrines of Universal Faith.

Rousseau's device of using the Savoyard vicar as spokesman for his own deism was unsuccessful; Émile was publicly burned and an order was issued for the arrest of the author, who was forced to flee the country. Except for his much later autobiographical writings, Émile was Rousseau's last major work.

atheism

Aside from Voltaire, who subscribed to "hard" deism, and Rousseau, who dispensed the "soft" variety, the philosophes were not deists at all. To them, deism was but the starting point on the road to atheism. Their militant atheism, as well as their dogmatic belief in constant and inevitable progress and the perfectibility of man, shocked Gibbon and Hume, and greatly disturbed both Voltaire and Rousseau. The names of Jean Le Rond d'Alembert and Denis Diderot (editors of the Encyclopédie ), Baron d'Holbach (and his "atheistical club"), Claude-Adrien Helvétius, F. M. Grimm, Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, and Marquis de Condorcet can hardly be excluded from the list of atheistical philosophes or, at least, those well on the road to atheism. Deism in France, although considerably influenced by deism in England, was much more extreme both religiously and politically, simply because England had already made considerable social progress. In France, deism was part and parcel of the general move toward materialism, freedom of thought and publication, freedom from the tyranny of the ancien régime in the affairs of state and church, that ultimately exploded in the Revolution.

deism in germany

The course of the Aufklärung differed in major respects from the analogous movements in Britain and France, and developed later. Under the domination of the earlier Leibniz-Wolff philosophy, rational supernaturalism generally prevailed. After 1740 (the year of the accession of Frederick the Great, the first modern freethinking king), numerous translations of the British deists and of their orthodox refuters (as indicated in G. W. Alberti's Briefe betreffend den allerneusten Zustand der Religion und der Wissenschaften in Gross-Brittannien of 1752–1754, J. A. Trinius's Freydenker-Lexicon of 1759, and U. G. Thorschmid's Freidenker-Bibliothek of 1765–1767) introduced a new influence. Although the German philosophes were widely read, there was little of French radicalism in either their religious or political thinking. Among out-and-out deists (called Freidenkers, or Freethinkers), the names of Karl Bahrdt, Johann Eberhard, Johann Edelmann, and Hermann Samuel Reimarus must be mentioned.

Hermann Samuel Reimarus

The apology of Reimarus (1694–1768) for natural religion as opposed to atheism and materialism, written in 1755, was Englished in 1766 as The Principal Truths of Natural Religion Defended and Illustrated. His direct attacks on Christianity, through a painstaking study of New Testament texts, included "On the Object of Jesus and His Apostles" and "On the Story of the Resurrection," and were published posthumously (1774–1778) by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing as Fragments of an Anonymous Work found at Wolfenbüttel.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Lessing (1729–1781), distinguished man of letters and author of the Laokoon (1766) and Nathan the Wise (1779), was a freethinker in the nonabusive sense of the term. He should probably not be classified as a typical deist, since he professed belief in natural revelation in his last publication, The Education of the Human Race (1780), and at the close of his life he is said to have privately acknowledged pantheistic beliefs. Lessing's lifelong friend Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), a Jewish freethinker, is customarily classified as a deist in the loose usage of the term.

Immanuel Kant

The case of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the greatest of the German philosophers, is highly instructive. Born and educated as a religious Pietist, he came under the influence of Newtonian physics and always remained interested in science. In theology his three most famous critiques, stimulated by the "mitigated scepticism" of Hume, agree with Hume in principle. The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) presses beyond Hume in criticizing proofs of the existence of God; the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) is concerned with moral experience in natural religion; and the Critique of Judgement (1790), in a sense, mediates between the first two. Kant's position as a "Christian deist," however, is best expressed in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1792–1794). The limits of religion, basically naturalistic, are set in conscience or practical religion. Christianity is stripped of mystery and tradition and is treated as a purely moral religion—in fact, the only purely moral one; God is the moral Creator of the world, and it is the duty of the good man to worship him. Kant's transcendental philosophy is beyond the scope of this entry, but it is relevant to say that Kant was the leader of the Aufklärung, which he defined as the freeing of man from the self-imposed bondage of the mind, and proclaimed as its motto sapere aude ("dare to know").

Deism in the United States

The works of the British deists, as well as those of the defenders of the faith, were well known in American intellectual circles, commencing with the second quarter of the eighteenth century. In the latter half of the century, Voltaire's "hard" deism and, especially, Rousseau's "soft" deism were widely disseminated; but the atheism of the philosophes made little headway. The Great Awakening, triggered by the preaching of Edwards in 1734 and bolstered by the preaching of the English Methodist George Whitefield, militated against orthodox Puritanism and in favor of republicanism both in religion and politics, but the atmosphere of rationalism still prevailed. Before the Revolution, however, deism made relatively little progress. Among the intelligentsia at Harvard, nevertheless, the Dudleian Lectures were established in 1755 for the purpose of explicating natural religion. Alarms sounded by the orthodox that deism was sweeping the country were unjustified. However, the Treaty of Paris in 1763 and the French alliance at the time of the Revolution undeniably quickened the spread of radical Gallic ideas.

major american deists

Benjamin Franklin

Franklin (1706–1790), man of letters, scientist, and diplomatist, as early as 1723 acknowledged himself a deist to intimate friends but circumspectly continued church attendance throughout life, thereby setting the conservative pattern followed by most of the leaders of the colonial and Revolutionary periods. In London in 1725 Franklin published his Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain in opposition to the free-will doctrine of the British deist Wollaston. However, Franklin shortly repudiated and suppressed this juvenile work. When he was about twenty-two, he drafted "Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion," a creed not unlike Lord Herbert of Cherbury's religious Common Notions and one that sustained him for life. Prudence and practicality characterize all of Franklin's publications and actions. Poor Richard's Almanack (1732–1757) is the essence of common sense, or how to get along in the world without unduly disturbing society; his list of virtues by no means coincides with the Christian virtues.

Thomas Jefferson

Framer of the Declaration of Independence, diplomatist, vice president and twice president of the United States, and member of the Episcopal Church, Jefferson (1743–1826) was in reality a deist, rationalist, and, above all, a humanitarian. He compiled but never published what later came to be known as The Jefferson Bible, being The Life and Morals of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. This little work, a cento of clippings from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John pasted in a blankbook, extols Jesus as a man for his moral teachings, omits ambiguous and controversial passages, and, while rejecting many of the supernatural elements, presents the core of Christian morality and is genuinely religious in tone. Religion, for Jefferson as well as for Franklin, was essentially a utilitarian moral code.

George Washington

Washington (1732–1799), general and first president of the United States, was a deist of a similar stripe. Although he always maintained a church pew, he was one of the leading statesmen who advocated total separation of state and church and who saw to it that no reference to Christianity or even to Deity was made in the Constitution. In answer to a direct question from a Muslim potentate in Tripoli, Washington acquiesced in the declaration of Joel Barlow, then American consul in Algiers, that "the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."

Thomas Paine

Born in England, Paine (1737–1809) arrived in America in 1774, bearing a letter of introduction from Franklin. A political theorist, diplomatist, and man of letters, Paine was a deist, but not overtly until the publication in Paris of his The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology (1794–1796). The first of its two books, intended to rescue deism from the reigning French atheism, is a more or less scientific assault upon revealed religion in general as being supererogatory to natural religion. The second book carries the attack directly to both the Old and New Testaments, arguing that the Bible is not the word of God and depicting Christianity as a species of atheism. Paine wrote vigorously and extensively and was outspoken in carrying his message to the common people, whose battles he had fought on the political, social, and economic fronts as well. In The Age of Reason the battleground was not new but was considerably enlarged from that of any earlier British deist. The work offended readers in France and shocked many in England and America who were laboring under the delusion that the deistical controversy was over and that orthodoxy had triumphed. Paine was rewarded for his efforts by banishment from England and by social obloquy in America. The patriot who throughout a long and turbulent career had accomplished so much for the new country, the man who had so vigorously combated atheism, was held to be an atheist, infidel, radical, and drunkard.

lesser american deists

Paine was not the first acknowledged American deist, for the year 1784 produced Reason the Only Oracle of Man, or a Compendious System of Natural Religion. Its author, Ethan Allen (1738–1789), Revolutionary hero and leader of the Green Mountain Boys, had acquired his deism through early reading of the British deists. His book is flagrantly anticlerical and anti-Christian; he argues that a rationalistic universal religion of nature that provides the fundamentals of morality is all-sufficient and needs no supplementation. Both the Hebraic and the Christian testaments are subjected to ridicule. Like Paine, Allen was not so much an original thinker as a fearless propagandist.

Beginning in 1793, the blind ex-Baptist preacher Elihu Palmer (1764–1806) led a fiery deistical campaign from the lecture platform and by publication against the divine authority of the Bible. In 1794 he rushed to the defense of Paine's Age of Reason and in 1801–1802 published Principles of Nature; or, a Development of the Moral Causes of Happiness and Misery among the Human Species. From 1803 to 1805 he edited a weekly deistical paper, Prospect; or, View of the Moral World. Palmer also organized the Deistical Society of New York. With his many speeches and tracts designed to disseminate deism among the lower classes, Palmer was a most unusual deist, in that he was deliberately leading a popular crusade.

Philip Freneau (1752–1832), writer of patriotic verse, was also the American poet of the religion of nature and humanity, and his ideas were close to those of Paine. The very titles of such poems as "Belief and Unbelief: Humbly recommended to the serious consideration of creed makers," "On the Uniformity and Perfection of Nature," "On the Religion of Nature," tell their own story, without need of commentary.

decline of deism

During the eighteenth century, Puritanism in America had begun to crumble under the combined attacks of the Great Awakening, Methodism, and deism. "The Triumph of Infidelity" (1788), the poem by Timothy Dwight, orthodox president of Yale University, bears weak witness to the strength of deism. Shortly after 1800 deism became submerged in a revival of enthusiastic evangelism, particularly in the frontier areas, where intellectual attainments were hardly predominant. In New England, Unitarianism began making headway under the influence of Joseph Priestley, who in 1794 had immigrated from England. But elsewhere emotionalism, conservatism, reaction, and fideism were triumphant.

The Legacy of Deism

Historical deism, a term of many connotations, was essentially rationalism applied to religion, and as such was the counterpart to literary neoclassicism. Deism and neoclassicism flourished at approximately the same time, both stressing universality and shying away from particularity. In deism, this cardinal point meant that from the very beginning the Hebraic and Christian revelations were suspect, if not invariably attacked. Deism primarily put forth the view that the aim of religion is morality and that anything traditionally taught beyond morality is superfluous. The widely accepted distinction between constructive deism and critical deism, or, as it has also been put, deism before Locke and deism after Locke, or humanistic deism as opposed to scientific deism, will not survive the careful scrutiny and evaluation of leading deistical texts. Yet the prime position of Right Reason in deism did not prevent empiricism, in the form of scholarly examination of Scriptural texts and historicism, from assuming increasingly important roles. Edward Gibbon's purely naturalistic investigation into the early progress and establishment of the Christian religion in the famous (or infamous) fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Vol. I, 1776) was manifestly influenced, not only by the philosophical skepticism of Hume, but also by the somewhat crude historical investigations of a number of the deists themselves.

One general development of the deistical movement, therefore, was the rise of "the higher criticism": The Bible was no longer deemed sacrosanct, and its verbal inspiration no longer dogmatically assumed. A second development was the greatly intensified study of comparative religion. A third development was the rise of "the philosophy of religion," spurred on by Hume's demonstration that no matter of fact, including the existence of God, can be proved a priori.

In actuality, deism did not die; it did not even fade away, and it still exists in fact, though perhaps not in name, for those who say (with Voltaire) that there must be a God and those who say (with Rousseau) that they know there is a God. Nor was deism vanquished, as has so often been asserted, by the superior talents of its orthodox opponents, by the exhaustion of the subject, or by the incapacities of its protagonists: Certainly, among the English, at least, Toland, Collins, and Tindal were the intellectual equals of most of their adversaries. By and large, both orthodox and heterodox alike were rational theists of a somewhat naive variety. Charles Leslie's Short and Easy Method with the Deists of 1696 proved, in actuality, neither short nor easy. The deists were long subjected to the odium theologicum, and the historians of the movement have almost without exception downgraded or slandered them socially as well as intellectually since the time of John Leland in the mid-eighteenth century. Even the foremost rationalists of the nineteenth century, Mark Pattison and Leslie Stephen (the latter produced the most complete and erudite history to date) are condescending. Rarely have the achievements of deism been acknowledged and appreciated, and then only in passing, in brief comments from specialized monographs, articles, and encyclopedia entries. No really satisfactory, complete, impartial, and scholarly account of the significance of the movement has as yet appeared.

Deism had somewhat different effects in different countries, depending on the different national cultural situations. By the close of the eighteenth century in England, it seemed, superficially at least, to have disappeared or gone underground. Yet in 1790, when Burke triumphantly asked, "Who born within the last forty years has read one word of Collins and Toland, and Tindal, and Chubb, and Morgan, and that whole race who called themselves Freethinkers? Who now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through?" he was historically mistaken and premature in his inference. For in the nineteenth century, radical publishers such as William Benbow, William Hone, and, most notably, Richard Carlile (1790–1843), all of whom were political as well as religious reformers, flooded the popular market with periodicals (for example, The Deist; or Moral Philosopher, 1819–1820), pamphlets, and cheap reprints and excerpts from freethinkers of all ages, including the whole range of the British deists, the skeptical Hume, Voltaire and Rousseau of France, and Paine and Palmer of America. The campaign was continued by others throughout the nineteenth century and survives in the present century on a higher intellectual level by affiliations with Unitarianism, Fabian socialism, and rationalist and humanistic societies, among others.

In France, the true deism of Voltaire and Rousseau was overwhelmed by the atheism of most of the philosophes, a doctrine which inevitably contributed to the upheaval of the French Revolution. The course of these eighteenth-century developments may be said to be paralleled today, on the one hand, by widespread atheism and, on the other, by the militant anticlericism of even many of the devout. In Germany, early intellectual deism was followed by both the fideism of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and a new post-Humean variety of rationalism which began with Kant and the romanticists of the following century.

In America, deism was long submerged by evangelism among the semiliterate masses and by Unitarianism among the well educated. An aggressive antireligionism resurged in the 1870s with Robert Ingersoll, "the great agnostic," and a host of followers, such as William Brann in Texas in the 1890s with his world-famous newspaper Brann's Iconoclast. Today, rationalist and humanistic societies and Unitarianism are omnipresent.

With few exceptions, deists in all countries have been interested in political and social reform, and with the passage of time it has become virtually impossible to isolate the purely religious aspects. Deism remains a symptom of revolt against orthodoxy and dogmatism.

By way of summary and possible oversimplification, deism is the individual's affirmation of his right to think for himself on all subjects and to communicate his thoughts to others for the general welfare. It is the affirmation of the principle of the oneness of humanity. It marks the rise of secularism and the beginning of modernity in theology. In this sense it is still viable, and although freethinking today claims a philosophical substratum different from the simple rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is akin in spirit to historical deism. The early rise of deism in all countries was strongly abetted by the growth of the spirit of toleration, and deism, in its turn, has strongly contributed to the continued growth and acceptance of toleration of other views. Perhaps, in the most universal sense, this is the major legacy of historical deism to the modern world.

Bibliography

useful anthologies

Berlin, Isaiah, ed. The Age of Enlightenment. New York: New American Library, 1956.

Brinton, Crane, ed. The Portable Age of Reason Reader. New York: Viking Press, 1956.

Creed, John M., and John S. Boys Smith, eds. Religious Thought in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, U.K., 1934.

Fellows, Otis E., and Norman L. Torrey, eds. The Age of Enlightenment. New York: Crofts, 1942.

Gay, Peter, ed. Deism: An Anthology. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1968.

Hampshire, Stuart, ed. The Age of Reason: The 17th Century Philosophers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956.

Torrey, Norman L., ed. Les philosophes. New York: Capricorn, 1960.

general histories

Betts, C. J. Early Deism in France: From the So-Called "Déistes" of Lyon (1564) to Voltaire's "Lettres Philosophiques." (1734). Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1984.

Byrne, Peter. Natural Religion and the Nature of Religion: The Legacy of Deism. London: Routledge, 1989.

Herrick, James. The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists: The Discourse of Skepticism, 1680–1750. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.

Lechler, Gotthard V. Geschichte des englischen Deism. Stuttgart, 1841.

Leland, John. A View of the Principal Deistical Writers that have appeared in England in the last and present Century. 3rd ed. 3 vols. London, 1754–1756. Early, voluminous, and vituperative apologetics.

Orr, John. English Deism: Its Roots and Its Fruits. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1934. Discursive, not too sound.

Sayous, Edouard. Les déistes anglais et le christianisme, 1696–1738. Paris, 1882.

Stephen, Leslie. English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. 2 vols. London, 1876; revised, 1902; paperback, New York, 1963. Vol. I is most scholarly study available but with a curious personal animus.

Walters, Kerry. The American Deists: Voices of Reason and Dissent in the Early Republic. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992.

general historical background

Abbey, C. J., and J. H. Overton. The English Church in the Eighteenth Century. 2 vols. London, 1878.

Becker, Carl L. The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1932. Becker's brilliant paradox has dimmed over the years.

Bury, J. B. A History of Freedom of Thought. New York: Holt, 1913.

Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951, and Boston, 1955.

Colie, R. L. Light and Enlightenment: A Study of the Cambridge Platonists and the Dutch Arminians. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1957.

Cragg, G. R. From Puritanism to the Age of Reason. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1950.

Farrar, A. S. Critical History of Free Thought. London: Murray, 1862.

Hall, Thomas C. The Religious Background of American Culture. Boston: Little Brown, 1930.

Havens, George R. The Age of Ideas. New York: Holt, 1955.

Hazard, Paul. La crise de la conscience européenne. 3 vols. Paris: Boivin, 1935.

Hazard, Paul. La pensée européenne au XVIII^e siècle. 3 vols. Paris, 1946. Both of Hazard's works are brilliantly comprehensive.

Humphreys, A. R. The Augustan World. London: Methuen, 1954. Useful survey.

Hunt, John. Religious Thought in England from the Reformation to the End of the Last Century. 3 vols. London: Strahan, 1870–1873.

Jordan, Wilbur K. Development of Religious Toleration in England, 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932–1940. Highly important.

Lecky, W. E. M. History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe. 2 vols. in one. London, 1910. Valuable.

Martin, Kingsley. French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century. Boston, 1929.

M'Giffert, Arthur C. Protestant Thought before Kant. London, 1919.

Parrington, Vernon L. Main Currents in American Thought. 3 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927–1930.

Popkin, Richard, and Argo Vanderjagt, eds. Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1993.

Robertson, J. M. A History of Freethought in the Nineteenth Century. 2 vols. London: Watts, 1929.

Robertson, J. M. A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern. 3rd ed. 2 vols. London, 1915. Both works are indispensable.

Smith, Preserved. A History of Modern Culture. 2 vols. New York, 1930–1934. Wide coverage.

Tulloch, John. Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth Century. 2 vols. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1872.

Urwin, Kenneth. A Century for Freedom. London: Watts, 1946.

Willey, Basil. The Eighteenth Century Background. London: Chatto and Windus, 1940. Somewhat superficial.

specialized studies

Aldridge, Alfred O. "Shaftesbury and the Deist Manifesto." Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s. 41 (2) (1951): 297–385.

Biddle, John. "Locke's Critique of Innate Principles and Toland's Deism." Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976): 411–422.

Boller, Paul F., Jr. George Washington & Religion. Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963.

Bushell, Thomas. The Sage of Salisbury: Thomas Chubb, 1679–1747. New York: Philosophical Library, 1967.

Cole, G. D. H. Richard Carlile. London: Gollancz, 1943.

Courtines, Leo P. Bayle's Relations with England and the English. New York: Columbia University Press, 1938.

Cunliffe, Christopher, ed. Joseph Butler's Moral and Religious Thought: Tercentenary Essays. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

Daniel, Stephen. John Toland: His Methods, Manners and Mind. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1984.

Fruchtman, Jack. Thomas Paine and the Religion of Nature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

Harkness, Douglas. Bolingbroke: The Man and his Career. London: Staples Press, 1957.

Hefelbower, S. G. The Relation of John Locke to English Deism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1918.

Koch, G. Adolf. Republican Religion: The American Revolution and the Cult of Reason. New York: Holt, 1933. Indispensable.

Lovejoy, A. O. "The Parallel of Deism and Classicism." Modern Philology 29 (1932): 281–299. Important.

Luke, Hugh J., Jr. Drams for the Vulgar: A Study of Some Radical Publishers and Publications of Early Nineteenth-Century London. Unpublished PhD dissertation. University of Texas, 1963.

Merrill, Walter. From Statesman to Philosopher: A Study in Bolingbroke's Deism. New York: Philosophical Library, 1949.

Morais, Herbert M. Deism in Eighteenth Century America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1934.

Mossner, Ernest C. Bishop Butler and the Age of Reason. New York: Macmillan, 1936.

Noack, Ludwig. Die Freidenker in der Religion. 3 vols. Bern, 1853–1855.

Pattison, Mark. "Tendencies of Religious Thought in England." In Essays and Reviews. London, 1860.

Popkin, Richard H. "Scepticism in the Enlightenment." Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Geneva, xxiv/xxvii (1963): 1321–1345.

Redwood, J. "Charles Blount (1654–93), Deism, and English Free Thought." Journal of the History of Ideas 35 (1974): 490–498.

Russell, Bertrand. Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, edited by Paul Edwards. London: Allen and Unwin, 1957.

Salvatorelli, Luigi. From Locke to Reitzenstein: The Historical Investigation of the Origins of Christianity. Cambridge, MA, 1930.

Stromberg, Roland N. Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-Century England. London: Oxford University Press, 1954. Sound survey.

Sullivan, Robert E. John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Tennant, F. R. Miracle & Its Philosophical Presuppositions. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1925.

Torrey, Norman L. Voltaire and the English Deists. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1930. Indispensable.

Webb, Clement C. J. Studies in the History of Natural Theology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1915.

Winnett, A. R. "Were the Deists 'Deists'?" Church Quarterly Review 161 (1960): 70–77. Makes distinction between philosophical and historical deists.

Yolton, John W. John Locke and the Way of Ideas. London: Oxford University Press, 1956.

Ernest Campbell Mossner (1967)

Bibliography updated by Christian B. Miller (2005)