History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion

by Adam Storey Farrar

Adam Storey Farrar delivered these eight Bampton Lectures before the University of Oxford in 1862. Writing as a Christian apologist, he traces the history of critical and skeptical thought about Christianity: the literary attacks of pagan writers such as Celsus in the early centuries, doubt in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, English Deism before 1760, French unbelief in the eighteenth century, and the long debates of German theology through the nineteenth. A final lecture turns to England in his own day and to what he saw as its present dangers. The lectures are followed by extensive notes on sources, which make the book a useful survey of the period's controversies. It is available to read online in your browser on Vinteuil, and the first chapter is free.