ocke, John Toland (1670-1722) goes a step further with
the proof that the Gospel not only contains nothing contrary to reason, but
also nothing above reason, and that no Christian doctrine is to be called
mysterious. To the demand that we should worship what we do not comprehend,
he answers that reason is the only basis of certitude, and alone decides on
the divinity of the Scriptures, by a consideration of their contents. The
motive which impels us to assent to a truth must lie in reason, not in
revelation, which, like all authority and experience, is merely the way by
which we attain the knowledge of the truth; it is a means of instruction,
not a ground of conviction. All faith has knowledge and understanding for
its conditions, and is rational conviction. Before we can put our trust in
the Scriptures, we must be convinced that they were in fact written by the
authors to whom they are ascribed, and must consider whether these men,
their deeds, and their works, were worthy of God. The fact that God's
inmost being is for us inscrutable does not make him a mystery, for even
the common things of nature are known to us only by their properties.
Miracles are also in themselves nothing incomprehensible; they are
simply enhancements of natural laws beyond their ordinary operations, by
supernatural assistance, which God vouchsafes but rarely and only for
extraordinary ends. Toland explains the mysteries smuggled into the ethical
religion of Christianity as due to the toleration of Jewish and heathen
customs, to the entrance of learned speculation, and to the selfish
inventions of the clergy and the rulers. The Reformation itself had not
entirely restored the original purity and simplicity.

Thus far Toland the deist. In his later writings, the five _Letters to
Serena_, 1704, addressed to the Prussian queen, Sophia Charlotte, and
the _Pantheisticon_ (Cosmopoli, 1720), he advances toward a hylozoistic
pantheism.

The first of the Letters discusses the prejudices of mankind; the second,
the heathen doctrine of immortality; the third, the origin of idolatry;
while the fourth and fifth are devoted to Spinoza, the chief defect in
whose philosophy is declared to be the absence of an explanation of motion.
Motion belongs to the notion of matter as necessarily as extension and
impenetrability. Matter is always in motion; rest is only the reciprocal
interference of two moving forces. The differences of things depend on the
various movem