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The chapter centres on the detailed reading of a little-known treatise on Cicero, written in Latin by the Enlightenment thinker, John Toland. His treatise, Cicero Illustratus, presents Cicero as a cornerstone of the Enlightenment. This chapter looks at Toland's approach to Cicero as representing particular views of criticism that were current at the time. Toland's ambitions for his new edition of Cicero, which was never produced, are presented in some detail. Toland's reading reveals both how far back prejudices against Cicero as an advocate lie, but also that a sensitivity towards the dialogic quality of his writing was easier for Toland than it for today's readers. The chapter reinforces the usefulness of looking at this earlier reading to reveal the difficulties of approaching Cicero caused by subsequent developments in the academic disciplines.

The arrival and coronation of William III were a cause for great optimism and trepidation in the realms of English religion and politics. John Toland believed that the Revolutionary Settlement of 1689 would remove the veil of mystery from the Church of England and usher an era where politics would be freed from party sentiment hoping that this environment might provide him a chance to participate in the nation's governance. Matthew Tindal wrote strong defences of the new king against the Jacobites and High Church Tories, whom he saw as impediments to the advancement of England under William. Both Tindal and Toland anchored their interpretations of 1689 with similar conceptions of God and theological beliefs. Conservatives feared the outcome of 1689 and pointed to the writings of Toland and Tindal as evidence of the danger posed by permitting too much toleration in matters of religion. The deists inserted themselves into the impending political events and used theology as the basis for their arguments. It was against this backdrop of religious uncertainty that the deists wrote and in their own way, attempted to help England chart a new course in politics and theology.

Early in the eighteenth century Leibniz had several interactions with John Toland. These included discussions of materialism, which culminated with the consideration of Toland’s 1704 Letters to Serena. There Toland argued that matter is necessarily active. This chapter argues for two main theses about this exchange and its consequences for our wider understanding. First, despite many claims that Toland was at the time of Letters to Serena a Spinozist, we can make better sense of him as a sort of Hobbesian materialist. The second main point concerns reasons for materialism, and in particular a story Locke tells in the Essay about materialists’ motives and their use of conceivability arguments. Toland did use a conceivability argument, as indeed did Hobbes. But these were not the crude conceivability arguments that Locke suggests motivate materialists. We might tell a Lockean story about reasons for early modern materialism, but not Locke's story

According to John Toland, the only intelligible content of the Gospel is the commendation of mutual love as a social virtue. The chapter situates this claim in the context of Toland’s rhetorical use of the primitive Church as an authority for a pluralistic account of society, and tries to determine his stance on the question of the foundation of morality. In spite of his constant recourse to the vocabulary of natural law, there is little doubt that Toland does not share Shaftesbury’s Stoic views and that he locates the foundation of morality, not in the providential organization of the universe and its acceptance by a self-cultivating individual, but in the interest of society. The moral teaching of the Gospel is somewhere between Epicureanism, the doctrine of utility, and the nineteenth-century idea of a religion of mankind.

This chapter explains why Irish freethinker John Toland, in eighteenth-century London, began to reclassify groups long categorized as heresy as “Jewish Christianity.” More specifically, it argues that Toland invented an incarnational model of Jewish Christianity as the centerpiece of a freethinking reappropriation of Christian apologetic historiography. By the end of the nineteenth century, above all because of the influential work of the German scholar Ferdinand Christian Baur, the concept had become a given within the emerging field of historical-critical scholarship on early Christianity. The chapter then looks at Toland's reconstruction of early Christianity, published under the title Nazarenus in 1718. Toland composed Nazarenus not merely as an account of early Christianity, but as an account of true Christianity. The category “Jewish Christianity” was a by-product of Toland's attempt to divert the authorizing power of Jesus and the apostles from traditional orthodoxy to his own enlightened humanism.

Hume's early critics strongly associated the skepticism of the Treatise with “atheistic” or anti‐Christian intentions. Moreover, they took Clarke's philosophy to be a particularly obvious and prominent target of Hume's battery of skeptical arguments, and present Hume as a freethinking, “minute philosopher” in the school of Hobbes, Spinoza, and Collins (i.e. Clarke's “atheistic” opponents). Scholars have generally dismissed these reactions and responses to the Treatise as coming from bigoted and narrow‐minded critics who lacked either the ability or the will to understand Hume's philosophy. The truth is, however, that these early reactions to the Treatise are entirely consistent with a proper understanding of the wider debate between the “religious philosophers” and “speculative atheists,” which was the dominant philosophical debate throughout the century that preceded the publication of the Treatise. This chapter documents and describes the major figures and contours of this crucial debate.

This chapter explores in detail John Toland's intellectual transactions with Lord Robert Molesworth, one of the commonwealth politicians in his circle, in order to allow a more reflective appreciation of the function of his learning and ideas. The first result of Toland's relationship with Molesworth was the analysis of the Druidical past as a Complete History of Priestcraft. The chapter also discusses Toland's idea, contained in his Clidophorus, that the tyranny of priestcraft meant that the truth could rarely be spoken in public.

This chapter examines the role of John Toland in the print and scribal communities. Toland did more than simply read and write books: he was a key agent in disseminating ideas around the elite salons of early eighteenth-century Europe. His skill at manipulating both print and scribal works laid the foundation for his political ambitions: his literary transactions produced both cultural and political effects. The chapter describes how Toland manipulated and constructed diverse audiences for similar works, and discusses his attempts to communicate his ideas to powerful and politically effective communities.

This chapter focuses on John Toland's efforts to defend the sovereignty of reason in politics by undertaking the adventurous project of republishing the canonical works of the commonwealth tradition between 1697 and 1700. His 1698 King Charles I. No such Saint, martyr, or Good Protestant as commonly reputed made extraordinarily clear the author's commitment to an anticlerical republicanism. The chapter suggests that Toland's work about John Milton entitled Amyntor was a means for reinvigorating the attack upon de jure divino accounts of Church and State, while his folio collection of James Harrington's works was an even more pronounced attempt to make republican texts suitable for contemporary consumption.

This chapter examines how John Toland's books, particularly his Christianity not mysterious, worked in the public sphere, explaining that this book was criticised as the most arrogant and impudent treatment of God and the Holy Scriptures. It suggests that Christianity not mysterious was published in a context riven by orthodox disquiet about the connection between private immorality and public depravity, and that its presentation as a common nuisance was intended to act as a precedent for others to do the like.

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is about the republican political thought of free-thinker John Toland. The first part deals with what we might call the material and social infrastructure for Toland's ‘life of the mind’. The second part of the book explores the dimensions of Toland's political arguments and examines how he used printed work to communicate with a public audience in an attempt to convince them of the best strategy for compromising the tyranny of clerical politics.

This chapter discusses John Toland's religious thoughts and his invocation of the authority of erudition, explaining that Toland's ambition was to deconstruct the credibility of clerical knowledge, or at the very least to expose the institutional processes which made clergymen's opinions masquerade as divine truth. To accomplish this ambition, Toland pursued a process of renovation by subversion from within, rather than one of revolutionary destruction. The chapter argues that the starting point for Toland's cultural hostilities was the canon of orthodox literature, and also analyses his learning, contending that it is neither profound nor shallow, but instrumental in accomplishing his goals.

Both the epigrams that Hume uses on the title‐pages of the Treatise of Human Nature are very significant and reveal his freethinking and irreligious aims and intentions.. More specifically, the epigram from Tacitus that appears in Books I and II was used not only by Spinoza, but also by his followers in the Collins‐Toland circle to proclaim their bold defense of freethinking. At the same time, the Lucan epigram that appears in Book III also appears prominently in Collins's Freethinking and carries the message of Cato, a model of stoic virtue and the oracle of pantheism, freedom of thought, and anti‐superstition. Beyond this, these two epigrams are also intimately connected with Hume's Hobbist title and plan for his Treatise. In this way, Hume's use of epigrams on the title page of the Treatise is a notable and illuminating example of “esoteric” communication.

This chapter examines John Toland's collaboration with elite Whig politicians as a leading defender of Protestant liberty, activities which resulted in the vindication of the legitimacy of the Hanoverian succession under the terms of the Act of Settlement 1701. A key problem for Toland and other republicans in the 1700s was the dynastic insecurity of the platform for their vision of politics, because the principles espoused in his Anglia libera were dependent upon the successful coronation of Sophia or George rather than the restoration of James.

This chapter focuses on the activities of John Toland under Sophia of Hanover, his intimacy with whom Toland used as a theatre for the display of his arguments. He advanced a clear and profound defence of commonwealth principles, especially by supporting the interest of the Protestant succession against popery. The convergence of Toland's public and private discourse resulted in the publication of his Letters to Serena, which established the connections between such metaphysical speculation and more mainstream political thought. The chapter also considers Toland's characterisation of Moses as a republican legislator and an exemplary model for the conduct of contemporary politics. It suggests that Toland's work on Moses laid the foundation for practical suggestions in reforming the confessionalism of political culture, and that the veneration of the Mosaic institution was to be a prescriptive model for political and religious reform.

This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the republican political thought of free-thinker John Toland, which has shown that the challenges which he posed to religious commonplaces were not simply philosophical issues, but were fundamentally linked to the power of contemporary civic and ecclesiastical institutions. His cultural significance was determined not simply by the intelligence and acuity of his ideas, but by the fact that they were circulated in concert amongst the political elite and a wider public audience. Toland's affinity with people in power illustrates the role his ideas played in the elite circles of early eighteenth-century European politics, and indicates how receptive political and intellectual culture in the period was to the cultural intent of such ideas.

Toland's working library had about one hundred and fifty volumes, including a number of foreign-language works. Many of his books, by a variety of continental scholars, formed the basis for intellectual projects undertaken by him. This chapter suggests that the provision, reception and circulation of books, manuscripts and ideas amongst this community brought Toland enormous cultural credibility and status. And in his literary and oral conversations, Toland formed the relationships that meant his ideas had a theatre of influence which unfolded across Europe. The books he wrote, and used, were given cultural value by a combination of the sociabilities necessary to produce them, and he used them not only as bearers of arguments but as means for brokering political and social transactions.

This chapter discusses the activities of John Toland under George I. After the disastrous electoral defeats of 1710, Toland focused his energies on defending the succession and remaining vigilant against popish tyranny. In 1714 he published The reasons for naturalising the Jews, which advanced one of the most radical defences of social toleration in the eighteenth century. The chapter explains that Toland's defence of toleration was premised not upon the theological credibility of the Jewish religion but upon the nature of civil society. This ambition of establishing a tolerant and rational civic culture was taken even further in Toland's most successful political pamphlet, The State anatomy of Great Britain, and its supplement, The second part of the State anatomy.

The central claim of Chapter One is that much early eighteenth-century historicist thought has been woefully overlooked because its historicist logic is couched in the language of religious tradition. I highlight the ways in which historicist thought has been presumed to take the form of a secularization narrative, and I challenge this assumption by arguing that the terms of historicism cohered in important ways in early eighteenth century theological texts. I show that Deists, political theorists, moral philosophers, and freethinkers historicized their present specifically in terms of the twinned problematics of religious sentiment and economic development. In readings of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, John Locke, David Hume, John Toland, and Henry Stubbe, I show the ways in which religious historicisms were simultaneously histories of capital accumulation, and I argue that one of the critical ways that these authors documented the economic development of Britain was by generating religious histories centered on the problem of competing monotheisms. I focus on the historicization of Islam and Judaism, and show that historicizing monotheisms allowed philosophers and political theorists to think through the often contradictory relations between religion and national identity, as well as the uneven development of global economic systems and relationships.