Church authorities declared natural law as ordained by “Nature’s God” to be heretical. They had been saying so for decades. Churches and theologians raged against the enlightened thinkers who would influence the founders: Bruno, Pierre Gassendi, Lucilio Vanini, Galileo, René Descartes, Spinoza, Shaftesbury, and even Locke, to name a few. Priests condemned as “new Epicureans” those who believed that “there is no other divinity or sovereign power in the world except NATURE,” that “God is Nature, and Nature is God.”43
