A specific set of circumstances caused the anti-Christian genie to spring from a dark and angry place within minds angered by fear and persecution. Some of these circumstances were contingent on political events, but others had to do with the intellectual forces unleashed largely by the new science from Copernicus to Newton. The formal philosophical systems and discoveries of the seventeenth century – and the Baroque age will always be remembered for Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza – shattered a previous certainty once given to the philosophy of Aristotle as interpreted by the Christian scholastics. In addition, in the 1680s the promotion of absolutist policies in France and Britain threatened the stability of all of northern and western Europe and the religious independence of Protestants in England, Ireland, the Dutch Republic, and potentially in the German states west of the Rhine.

Throughout Europe, particularly among Protestants, the equation of absolutism with Catholicism was a given. In the minds of many Protestants the equation had suddenly been rendered stark by the reality of what could only be defined as tyranny and persecution. In 1685, all signs pointed to a revival of religious warfare, in words, if not in deeds. Well over 200,000 French Protestants made the journey out of France, and those who stayed behind were imprisoned or submitted to conversion. These were the events that form the essential background to understanding the Enlightened critique of Christianity as it emerged with virulence in the period of the 1680s. From that moment onward, the critique only became more pointed, more strident, sometimes less anonymous, but always suspicious of clerical authority and often bitter. It lay at the heart of the crisis provoked by monarchical absolutism.

The seventeenth century had been the great age of natural philosophical enquiry that began with Galileo and ended with the publication in 1687 of Newton’s Principia. These thinkers