The English Deists: Studies in Early Enlightenment

Wayne Hudson is an intellectual historian, formerly of Charles Sturt University, with no confessional stake in Deism as a live position, and this book was published by an independent academic press specialising in the history of ideas. It is a standard scholarly study of the early English Deists of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, including Herbert of Cherbury, John Toland, Matthew Tindal and Anthony Collins, arguing that their positions were considerably more varied than the single label deist suggests, from Herbert's own belief in an afterlife of rewards and punishments to later, more thoroughly naturalistic accounts. The book draws on the deists' own published writing read against the theological controversies they provoked, rather than treating one deist voice as representative of the whole. This record has not independently traced scholarly rebuttal to Hudson's specific claims. Use it for the documented variety among the early English Deists and Herbert of Cherbury's own position; it is centred on England and does not itself cover later developments such as Thomas Paine's deism.