Introduction

In this chapter I construe Toland, Collins and Tindal as writers who promoted Early Enlightenment within the horizon of Protestant Enlightenment in England. I treat them together in order to bring out their parallel roles in helping to promote a civil society in England. In contrast to older interpretations, I argue that they may have intended the many levels of their texts, which reflect the multiple and under-formed republics of letters in which they were active. Against the tradition which reads them as deists writing works against Christianity, I read them as intra-Protestant thinkers for whom politics, religion and philosophy were to a significant degree civil concerns, and not primarily matters that hinged on personal opinions or ‘faith’. My aim is to emphasize the contextual significance of their writings, without underestimating the fact that these writers may well have had radical private views. On my reading, disbelief coloured their texts, but it was not the primary motivation for most of what they wrote. Instead, they produced Protestant texts with both surface and more radical meanings.

After Blount's death, criticism of Christianity in England was largely confined to coffee-house conversations and to private discussions after the servants had withdrawn. With the Blasphemy Act (1698) in force and the Lower House of Convocation in arms about ‘the Church in Danger’, no explicit manifesto for deism was published for over a generation and prominent citizens were not free to reject Christianity in their public lives. Nonetheless, there were persistent rumours that a sect of ‘deists’ existed, and contemporary observers often alleged that ‘the deists’ were ‘atheists’. Consistent with seventeenth-century usage, Richard Bentley, for example, claimed that the deists held improper conceptions of God: