This volume has continued and further elaborated a revisionist interpretation of the achievements of the writers known as the English deists. Nineteenth-century scholars, working with a paradigm of belief and unbelief, often discussed the work of these writers in terms which they would not have recognized. This study, in contrast, has read their achievements more contextually, in ways which emphasize their location within Protestant Enlightenment. Without minimizing these writers' radicalism, it has sought to locate them in thicker intellectual and social contexts and to portray them as thinkers with various social roles and a range of audiences, including the clergy, politicians, patrons of various kinds, professional scholars and friends in Europe.

From the safety of Protestant Enlightenment, these writers challenged Christianity as a revealed religion. However, they were also agents of reform who sought to change conceptions in many areas and proposed specific organizational reforms which were subsequently implemented in many different parts of the world. To evaluate the achievements of these writers, it is necessary to attend not only to the receptions of their writings in England, but also to take account of the impacts they made in Europe and America. Doing so involves evaluating both their activities as religious controversialists and their wider contributions to philosophy and reform.

These writers were among the first public critics of Christianity as a positive religion in modern times, and it is generally accepted that the debates to which their writings gave rise occupied a significant part of the reading of the literate public in England between 1690 and 1750. Nonetheless, to understand their lives and their writings it is necessary to emphasize the restricted terms of argument of these debates, the extent to which issues of religious government drove some of their interventions and the extent to which they were within the theological and philosophical controversies of the period. The possibility that Christianity as a historical faith was false occurred to all of these writers, but, as far as we know, none of them had a crisis of faith of the sort regularly encountered in England in the nineteenth century.