ABSTRACT
The interplay of religion and ideas in the eighteenth century owes much to three seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Isaac Newton, two philosophers and ‘the greatest and rarest genius that ever arose for the ornament and instruction of the species’. The Reasonableness of Christianity probably contains the most succinct statement of the idea of ‘natural religion’ to be found at the end of the seventeenth century. Christianity was transformed into a one-to-one relationship between the individual and God, with individual conscience acting not only as guide but as judge in religious matters. The intellectual logistics of the life-to-come in Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion were complemented by the energetic search for ‘new light’ and spiritual rebirth in this life before one could even think about the next. David Hume had said, leave science and scientific reasoning to subjects where it was appropriate and acknowledge that faith was the best, if not only, sure foundation of religion.
