The Christian religion is justified of her children. This means that it is: 1. Justified from the censures of its enemies, and 2. Justified from the infirmities and miscarriages of its friends. If a doctor prescribes an excellent remedy, and the patient observes some of the instruction but neglects the others, and the remedy doesn't hold, no blame should rest on the doctor or his practice - but the blame should reside entirely with the patient. So, it is also with religion. Religion itself remains innocent, and must be considered on its own. Learn more of Poole's compelling argument and why he thought it was a timely argument in his day - and how it is in ours as well.

The Christian religion is justified of her children. This means that it is: 1. Justified from the censures of its enemies, and 2. Justified from the infirmities and miscarriages of its friends. If a doctor prescribes an excellent remedy, and the patient observes some of the instruction but neglects the others, and the remedy doesnt hold, no blame should rest on the doctor or his practice but the blame should reside entirely with the patient. So, it is also with religion. Religion itself remains innocent, and must be considered on its own. Learn more of Pooles compelling argument and why he thought it was a timely argument in his day and how it is in ours as well.

Includes ten volumes, which are suitable for Defoe scholars and academics of eighteenth-century history, religion and literature. This set offers readers texts and a wealth of editorial matter, including introductions, explanatory notes and a consolidated index to the ten volumes.

Arguing for the importance of wit beyond its use as a literary device, Roger D. Lund outlines the process by which writers in Restoration and eighteenth-century England struggled to define an appropriate role for wit in the public sphere. He traces its unpredictable effects in works of philosophy, religious pamphlets, and legal writing and examines what happens when literary wit is deliberately used to undermine the judgment of individuals and to destabilize established institutions of church and state. Beginning with a discussion of wit's association with deception, Lund suggests that suspicion of wit and the imagination emerges in attacks on the Restoration stage, in the persecution of The Craftsman, and in criticism directed at Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and works by writers like the Earl of Shaftesbury, Thomas Woolston, and Thomas Paine. Anxieties about wit, Lund shows, were in part responsible for attempts to suppress new communal venues such as coffee houses and clubs and for the Church's condemnation of the seditious pamphlets made possible by the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695. Finally, the establishment's conviction that wit, ridicule, satire, and innuendo are subversive rhetorical forms is glaringly at play in attempts to use libel trials to translate the fear of wit as a metaphorical transgression of public decorum into an actual violation of the civil code.

Formerly a site of study reserved for intellectual historians and political philosophers, scholarship on religious toleration, from the perspective of literary scholars, is fairly limited. Largely ignored and understudied techniques employed by writers to influence cultural understandings of tolerance are rich for exploration. In investigating texts ranging from early modern to Romantic, Alison Conway, David Alvarez, and their contributors shed light on what literature can say about toleration, and how it can produce and manage feelings of tolerance and intolerance. Beginning with an overview of the historical debates surrounding the terms "toleration" and "tolerance," this book moves on to discuss the specific contributions that literature and literary modes have made to cultural history, studying the literary techniques that philosophers, theologians, and political theorists used to frame the questions central to the idea and practice of religious toleration. Tracing the rhetoric employed by a wide range of authors, the contributors delve into topics such as conversion as an instrument of power in Shakespeare; the relationship between religious toleration and the rise of Enlightenment satire; and the ways in which writing can act as a call for tolerance.