Introduction

Summary

This book is the second of two volumes on the ways in which crucial changes in the relationship between religion and ethics from the mid-seventeenth to the later eighteenth centuries were perceived and expressed. The first volume, Whichcote to Wesley, explores what happened to the Reformation doctrine of grace from the 1650s onwards in response to an increasingly influential emphasis on human reason and free will. The central tenets of the latitudinarian movement in the Church of England – the rational basis of religion, the co-operation of human reason with divine grace, and the resulting happiness of the moral life – were challenged from the 1660s to the 1780s by the leaders of nonconformity, dissent, and methodism, who wanted in different ways to continue or return to aspects of the Reformation protestant tradition but whose views were in varying degrees marked by the dominant religion of reason.

The second volume looks at the relationship between religion and ethics from the point of view not of the tension between reason and grace but of that between reason and sentiment. It explores what happened when attempts were made from the 1690s onwards to separate ethics from religion, not necessarily for anti-religious reasons, and to locate what was known as the foundation of morals in the constitution of human nature. A number of important questions was repeatedly raised.