In fact, in Newton’s eyes, all his enterprises were part of a common task of Reformation, which in the case of his religious investigations led him to a discreet dismissal of doctrines like the Trinity. Newton’s task was to recover a lost rationality: ‘the first religion was the most rational of all others till the nations corrupted it. For there is no way [‘without revelation’, he inserted in his manuscript in an afterthought] to come to the knowledge of a Deity but by the frame of nature.’9
