Locke in the network.^17 The most famous Deist work is the Christianity not
Mysterious (1696) of Toland, who was attacked from all sides. Nevertheless,
Toland (107 in the key to Figure 10.1) had excellent connections; he was
recommended to Locke by William Molyneux (in the Newton-Berkeley net-
work); although Locke repudiated Toland after the controversy erupted, the
latter was patronized by Shaftesbury as well as by the government minister
Lord Harley and received diplomatic appointments. Another Deist close to
Locke’s circle of patrons was Blount (109), a nobleman who followed the
materialism of Hobbes; he too avoided persecution under the blasphemy laws
through his high connections. Anthony Collins (111), a rural justice of the
peace, carried on witty controversies against the religiously orthodox, includ-
ing Jonathan Swift; Collins was an admirer and friend of Locke, and became
the trustee of Locke’s estate.
By the 1720s, Deism was close to winning its battle for respectability. The
last gasp of religious coercion occurred in 1729–1731, when the Cambridge
fellow Woolston was jailed for blasphemy for writing pamphlets on the alle-
gorical interpretation of the scriptures. The Oxford ecclesiastical pensioner
Tindal in 1730 produced “the Deist’s bible,” Christianity as Old as the Crea-
tion, and declared that no state authority can compel conformity. By now
Deism was successful enough to split into Christian and non-Christian wings.
The dissenting minister Morgan in 1737 defended a Christian Deism against
its rivals; Butler harmonized Religion Natural and Revealed in 1736, and was
rewarded with a series of bishoprics and the friendship of King George II.
Again we see the significance of stalemate in religious politics and the influence
of career opportunism. Church livings were now the explicit spoils of party
politics, and there were strong incentives to cross over religious lines. Now we
find religious side-switchers who become Deists, in effect rationalizing their
careers by advocating the religious common denominator. Tindal, who began
as an orthodox Anglican at Oxford in the 1670s, converted to Catholicism—at
just the time when Catholic restoration was the policy of the Stuart monar-
chy—and then recanted in 1688 when the Stuarts were overthrown. Butler,
who came from a Presbyterian family, prospered by becoming an Anglican
priest (EP, 1967: 8:139).
This opportunism was not confined to the Deist side; the religious tradi-
tionalist Swift changed his loyalties from Whig to Tory in 1710 with the shift
in his prospects for patronage. Political opportunism was the condition of
intellectual life in this period; the emergence of the party system simultaneously
marked the emergence of a new kind of structural competitiveness among
intellectuals. Literary creativity was underpinned by a publishing market which
depended heavily on the subsidy of aristocratic subscribers. Writers were no
longer household dependents of their patrons, but to make a decent living they
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