The aim of this chapter is to see how musical concepts could, in the work of our writers, help to elucidate and express some fundamental areas of Christian belief, including – in David Hartley's words – ‘the origin of evil, free will, the nature of our future existence, the degree and duration of future pun-ishment’. For this purpose our main concern will be to view Hartley's work in the context of Sterry’s, almost a century earlier. Such a comparison throws into sharp relief both the advent of Newtonianism and the new approaches to the anatomy of the brain and nervous system that emerged during this time. Yet behind these far-reaching changes in physical understanding we find two exponents of a controversial Christian doctrine – universal salvation – that continued to pose no less a threat to religious, moral and political orthodoxies in 1750 than it had in 1650. While we are conditioned to classify work such as Sterry's under the heading of ‘religion’, Hartley's as part of the ‘new science’, I hope to show that the commonalities shared by these two thinkers are as revealing as their considerable divergences. Even if the ‘scientific’ elements of Hartley's work have been counted as its most forward-looking and hence most important dimension, we shall see that Hartley himself had a different teleology in mind: that of the Newtonian age's refinement of the knowledge of the physical world leading us to a closer understanding of the divine.

Through his musical discourse, Sterry sought to achieve a resolution of one of the major doctrinal clashes of his time, that between ‘the appearing Harshness’ of Reformed predestination theology and the ‘most absurd Extream’ of Arminian free will, through the meeting of ‘the most pleasant liberty’ and ‘the most potent necessity’ in the ‘Divine Harmony of the supream and universal good’. Convinced that an all-loving God would not forever reject any of his creatures, he nevertheless believed that a final restitution could not be left merely to the competing wills of individual human beings in a fallen world. He conceived God's saving grace aesthetically – ‘[g]race is beauty with its most powerful charms, as it … maketh all things answer it and dance to its music’ – as the final participation and resolution of all in the divine music.