Introduction

Although Herbert developed a brace of arguments which could be used to challenge Christianity as a sacerdotal religion, these resources were not deployed until the heterodox publicist Charles Blount drew upon them in his attempts to cast doubt on revealed religion. Blount's contribution here deserves more recognition than it has received. Long ridiculed in Anglophone scholarship, Blount has recently received more attention from historians. Nonetheless, his active reshaping of Herbert's legacy remains neglected, just as the extent of his involvement in European free thought and his influence on later writers are only gradually coming to light. Above all, Blount's interventions are still obscured by totalizing conceptions of deism, and the problem of the ways in which his involvement with multiple deisms related to his various social roles has not been adequately addressed.

In this chapter I attempt to provide a more complicated reading of Blount's career as a background to the work of writers such as Toland, Collins and Tindal. This chapter suggests that the standard practice of beginning the study of the eighteenth-century English deists with Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious may be misguided, and that a range of positions influenced by forms of deism were well developed before Toland. Some of these positions were classical and/or associated with esoteric materialism and vitalist philosophies of nature. Others were more inter-Protestant, as if the sufficiency of natural religion was the central deist claim, a view acceptable to some strands of liberal Protestant opinion. In the context of Protestant Enlightenment, the same individual might draw on several of these positions without much concern for their coherence. They might also argue against belief in revealed religion in some contexts, but insist that they were sincere Christians in others. Read in this way, Blount provides a credible link to Toland, Collins and Tindal. Like them, he was involved with multiple deisms, and the heterodoxy he promoted was not the mild extension of religious liberalism which older historians associated with ‘English deism’, but in large part classical, international and European, albeit mixed with radical Protestantism.