John Toland Quotes on Truth
John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), Letters to Serena (1704), and the late Pantheisticon (1720) gave the early Enlightenment its most controversial engagement with the question of religious truth. The central commitment is that genuine truth is graspable in propositions whose content can be made fully intelligible to natural reason — what the orthodox tradition had treated as mysteries above reason are either intelligible truths obscured by mystifying language or interpolations of priestly imposture — and the corresponding philosophical theology recovers a Christianity stripped of supernatural claims that the Enlightenment critique of revelation could not accommodate. The framework, developed across Toland’s restless career on the radical edge of early Hanoverian England, founded the English Deist tradition through Tindal and Collins and shaped the broader European Enlightenment debate over the truth-conditions of religious assertion.
Quotes
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Attributed to John Toland:
“Whatever is contrary to reason can be no part of true religion.”
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Attributed to John Toland:
“All matter is essentially active.”
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Attributed to John Toland:
“Pantheism is the worship of the universe as the only divine.”
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Attributed to John Toland:
“A free press is the surest defence of a free people.”
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Attributed to John Toland:
“Mystery has too often been used to disguise the absence of meaning.”
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“If we make a just computation, and take in the primitive martyrs with the Prophets and Apostles themselves, the professed defenders of Truth, only for Truth's sake, will be found to be a small handful with respect to the numerous partisans of error.”
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“Nay, it has come to this, that Truth meets no where with stronger opposition, than from many of those that raise the loudest cry about it, and would be taken for no less than the only dispensers of the favors and oracles of Heaven. If any has the firmness to touch the minutest thing that brings them Gain or Credit, he's presently pursued with the hue and cry of Heresy.”
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“The best method, I think, of communicating to others the Truth, is that by which a Man has learnt it himself.”
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