John Wilkins (1614–1672), Warden of Wadham and then Master of Trinity, Bishop of Chester, and the man who more than any other made the Royal Society happen: the experimental club met in his lodgings at Oxford through the Interregnum, and he was its first secretary. He married Cromwell’s sister and kept the friendship of both sides, and held, against the temper of the age, that the reasonableness of religion could be shown to anyone willing to follow an argument.
Works (3)
- A Discourse Concerning the Beauty of Providence — Printed in the year of the king’s execution and offered as very seasonable to quiet and support the heart in these times of public confusion. Wilkins’s subject is the providence that is only beautiful when the whole of it is seen, and the temper proper to those who are inside a piece of history and cannot see it. (2 notes)
- A Discourse Concerning the Gift of Prayer — What the gift of prayer is, why it is ascribed to the Spirit, and how far it may be attained by industry — written in the middle of the quarrel over set forms and free prayer, and answering it by teaching the thing itself. Half the book is a storehouse of matter for confession, petition, intercession and thanksgiving, arranged under the commandments. (31 notes)
- Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion — Left unfinished at Wilkins’s death in 1672 and completed for the press by John Tillotson. The first book argues the reasonableness of believing there is a God, from consent, from the origin of the world, from contrivance and from providence, and then goes through the divine perfections; the second argues that the duties which follow are also the wisest way for a man to live. It is the founding book of English natural theology and was still being set for undergraduates a century later. (28 notes)