"He that takes away reason to make room for revelation
puts out the light of both; and does much what the same as if he would
persuade a man to put out his eyes, the better to receive the remote
light of an invisible star by a telescope." He wrote a book to show that
the Christian revelation is not contrary to reason, and its title, The
Reasonableness of Christianity, sounds the note of all religious
controversy in England during the next hundred years. Both the orthodox
and their opponents warmly agreed that reasonableness was the only test
of the claims of revealed religion. It was under the direct influence of
Locke that Toland, an Irishman who had been converted from Roman
Catholicism, composed a sensational book, Christianity Not Mysterious
(1696). He assumes that Christianity is true and argues that there can
be no mysteries in it, because mysteries, that
[134] is, unintelligible dogmas, cannot be accepted by reason. And if a
reasonable Deity gave a revelation, its purpose must be to enlighten,
not to puzzle. The assumption of the truth of Christianity was a mere
pretence, as an intelligent reader could not fail to see. The work was
important because it drew the logical inference from Locke's philosophy,
and it had a wide circulation. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu met a Turkish
Effendi at Belgrade who asked her for news of Mr. Toland.
It is characteristic of this stage of the struggle between reason and
authority that (excepting the leading French thinkers in the eighteenth
century) the rationalists, who attacked theology, generally feigned to
acknowledge the truth of the ideas which they were assailing.
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