In the autumn of 1656, the Savilian professor of geometry at the University of Oxford, John Wallis, published an attack on the mathematics of Thomas Hobbes entitled Due correction for Mr Hobbes or schoole discipline for not saying his lessons right. Wallis took aim at several targets presented by Hobbes in his Leviathan, which had appeared five years earlier. These included the use made by Hobbes of the principles of Euclidean geometry, the criticism that Hobbes advanced of the English universities (which he supposed to be stifled by the bonds of Aristotelian or school philosophy), and the attack mounted by Hobbes on the political and intellectual power of the clergy, which was accompanied by suggestions that the author of Leviathan held heterodox ideas about the nature of God. In particular, Wallis focused on the implications of the claim that Hobbes had made elsewhere that he was able to provide a rigorous method of constructing a square equal in area to a given circle. At the heart of the discussion lay the mathematical and philosophical term infinite. What did it mean to suggest that God might not be infinite; how should mathematicians describe the infinite divisions of a line or area; what was implied by talk about an infinite number of terms in a mathematical series? The stance taken by Wallis defined his positions: in defense of a divine being that could not be limited or purely material and in favor of a mathematics based on the principles of arithmetic, as much as those of geometry, and inductive in its reasoning. The quarrel between Wallis and Hobbes (which has been superbly treated in print by Douglas Jesseph) shapes the second part of Amir Alexander's quirky and readable book about the early seventeenth-century history of the use of infinitesimals. The first part concentrates on an Italian story, led by the geometrician Bonaventura Cavalieri, and focusing on the decision in 1632 of the Jesuit order to forbid the teaching of the infinite division of the continuum of material particles into ever smaller units. As in the debate between Wallis and Hobbes, the point of this discussion was not confined to geometry but reached out into questions of the makeup of the physical world, which had profound consequences for teaching. Those consequences extended to issues of the understanding of doctrine as well as nature, not only in terms of the language used about God, but also through consideration of the real presence in the Eucharist. Alexander wants to tell a broad story. His readers are treated to lengthy and digressive potted accounts of the Reformation, the foundation of the Jesuits, and the causes of the

Will Ladislaw's words, which so disillusion the young Dorothea, might also depress the modern interpreter of Newton's theology. Encountering the bulk of Newton's manuscript theology, it is tempting to sympathize with Dorothea's eventual response to The Key to all Mythologies, and to want nothing of it. The assessment of John Conduitt, Newton's son-in-law and executor, that his ‘relief and amusement was going to some other study, as history, chronology, divinity, and chemistry’ has in the past provided an ample excuse for those who have wished to take such a course, and to ignore Newton's biblical criticism. In the last three decades, however, Newton scholarship has come to terms with its hero's twilight activities, and reclassified them as being at least as important to him as the natural philosophy of the Principia, and intimately bound up with the thinking behind that philosophy. But although many modern scholars are now reluctant to see Newton as Stephen Hawking in breeches, historians of science have tended to concentrate on the implications for Newton's philosophy of his religious and alchemical writings, and in the process often have distorted their religious context. Historians of ideas have been beguiled by Newton's disciples, and by the esoteric texts from Newton's library, to ride hobbyhorses of their own which do not always illuminate Newton's reasons for writing theology. There is a danger of ‘knowing what is being done by the rest of the world’ before troubling with what Newton was up to when he worried about religion and theology, channelling his energies into treatise after treatise on the interpretation of prophecy. I want to suggest what some of Newton's concerns may have been, by looking at his ideas of religious duty and of the Church, and to liberate Newton from his disciples for long enough to consider some of his ideas about the relationships of prophetic and natural philosophical explorations of divinity.

ArgumentThis essay describes two styles of natural theology that emerged in England out of a debate over the correct interpretation of divine evidences in nature during the seventeenth century. The first style was exemplified in the work of John Wilkins and Robert Boyle. It stressed the lawful operation of the universe under a providential order. The second, embodied in the writings of the Cambridge Platonists, was more open to evidence for the wondrousness of nature provided by the marvelous and by spiritual phenomena. Initially appearing to be alternative and complementary arguments for orthodoxy, these two approaches to natural theology underwent different transformations during the ensuing decades. In the process, a natural theology predicated on the intellectual demonstration of divine power through the argument from design came to predominate over alternative strategies that placed greater emphasis on the wondrousness of nature.

The letter of Scripture suffering various Interpretations, it is plain that Error may pretend to Scripture; the antient Fathers being likewise dead, and not able to vindicate themselves, their writings may be wrested, and Error may make use of them to back itself; Reason too being bypassed by Interest, Education, Passion, Society, &c…. Tradition only rests secure.The 1680s were a difficult decade for the English Bible, just as they were for so many of the other institutions of the English Protestant establishment. Roman Catholic critics of the Church of England, emboldened by the patronage of James II and his court, engaged in controversy over the rule of faith and the identity of the true Church, much as they had done in the early years of the Reformation or in the 1630s. Nonconformists and freethinkers deployed arguments drawn from Catholic scholarship, in particular from the work of the French Oratorian Richard Simon, and joined in ridicule of the Bible as a sure and sufficient foundation for Christian belief.

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