Introduction

Following the English translation of Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1689) and a stream of heterodox works in the 1670s and 1680s, Charles Blount's The Oracles of Reason (1693) seemed a portent of a period in which heterodoxy, including various forms of deism, would explode into print. However, no deist manifesto appeared. Instead, the radical strands of heterodoxy which Blount promoted were veiled from sight. In early eighteenth-century England in the factious conditions of Queen Anne's reign there were few spaces in which critics of Christianity could present their views, and this contextual constraint remained a factor into the 1740s. Critics of Christianity could talk in coffee houses or at meetings of the like-minded, but they could not publish their thoughts under their own names. Christianity was not something which could be attacked with safety. It had powerful support from Newton's physics and from the Royal Society, and was defended by clergy proficient in classical languages.

No public attack on the credibility of Christianity as a revealed or positive religion was published in England until the 1720s when the Jacobites appeared to have been defeated. Even then this attack was in a form which was not inconsistent with civil Protestantism. Both Collins and Tindal ended their lives by publishing attacks on Christianity as a revealed religion, but neither of them renounced their claim to be Low Church Protestants. The two challenges to Christianity found in their late writings were different, however. Collins sought to destroy the argument for Christianity as a revealed religion from the evidence of prophecy.