Christian rationalism held that God created the natural universe and thereafter never interfered with its laws. God seemed less terrifying as learned people reinterpreted epidemics, earthquakes, and thunderbolts as “natural” rather than as direct interventions of divine anger. The Reverend Andrew Eliot, a New England Congregationalist, explained, “There is nothing in Christianity that is contrary to reason. God never did, He never can, authorize a religion opposite to it, because this would be to contradict himself.”
