Deism/Bibliography

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Today, the most accessible statement of Deism is Thomas Paine's book The Age of Reason (1795). It is short, readable, and witty. It is still in print and is also downloadable in electronic format from various Web sites.

The best recent study of English Deism is:

• The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists: The Discourse of Skepticism, 1680-1750 by James A. Herrick (University of South Carolina Press, 1997)

Important discussions of Deism can be found in:

• English Deism: Its Roots and Its Fruits by John Orr (1934)
• European Thought in the Eighteenth Century by Paul Hazard (1946, English translation 1954)
• A History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century by Sir Leslie Stephen, 2 volumes (1876, 3rd ed. 1902)
• A History of Freethought: Ancient and modern, to the period of the French revolution by John Mackinnon Robertson (1915)

Other studies of Deism include:

• Early Deism in France: From the so-called 'deistes' of Lyon (1564) to Voltaire's 'Lettres philosophiques' (1734) by C. J. Betts (Martinus Nijhoff, 1984)
• The Seventeenth Century Background: Studies on the Thought of the Age in Relation to Poetry and Religion by Basil Willey (1934)
• The Eighteenth Century Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period by Basil Willey (1940)
• Simon Tyssot de Patot and the Seventeenth-Century Background of Critical Deism by David Rice McKee (Johns Hopkins Press, 1941)
• The Historical Argument for the Resurrection of Jesus During the Deist Controversy by William Lane Craig (Edwin Mellen, 1985)

Anthologies of Deist writings include:

• Deism: An Anthology by Peter Gay (Van Nostrand, 1968)
• Deism and Natural Religion: A Source Book by E. Graham Waring (Frederick Ungar, 1967)