In his definitive study of Cambridge University during the Enlightenment, John Gascoigne described Edmund Law as 'the most influential Cambridge theologian of the mid-eighteenth century'. Law's younger contemporary Richard Watson called him 'one of the best metaphysicians of his time'. Neither has overstated the case. Law's achievement was to establish Locke as the philosopher of English Protestantism. His polemical writings against the rationalist views of Samuel Clarke, Locke's chief rival, were a lucid defence of divine providence and justification of revelation on the grounds of historical reason. As a divine, he envisioned a unified church of broad comprehension, founded on the spirit of tolerance. During his lifetime his works were much in demand and reprinted many times, but the rise of Romanticism in religion and the longing for more tangible forms of authority rendered his views unfashionable and they were for a time forgotten.
This, the first collected edition of Law's works, will prove an indispensable source for the history of English thought in the eighteenth century, especially for an understanding of the reception and interpretation of Locke. They also cast light on the Deist controversy, the Trinitarian controversy, and the controversy over subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles. Philosophers will find suggestive his remarks on the theory of the mind, personal identity, and the foundations of morality. Theologians will discover in them a still viable case for theological liberalism.
--an indispensable source for the historian of the Enlightenment in England, of liberalism, liberal theology and the Deist controversy.
--Law was the most influential latitudinarian divine of the mid eighteenth century.
--crucial for an understanding of Locke's reception and interpretation in the 18th century.
