By the end of the seventeenth century, a new generation of English-language writers began to put forward a more “reasonable” and Bible-free understanding of the deity’s existence.24 Partisans of this natural theology included the Irishman John Toland, who, in his 1696 Christianity Not Mysterious, asserted not only that God’s existence was best extrapolated through the experimental method preached by Locke, but that there was a need to demythologize the faith, to make it natural.25 Matthew Tindal developed similar ideas in his 1730 Christianity as Old as the Creation, claiming that the
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