Toland, John

John Toland (1670–1722), freethinker, was born into the Irish-speaking Catholic community of Inishowen, Co. Donegal. After receiving primary education locally, he entered Glasgow University and became identified with Presbyterianism and student discontent. Graduating with an M.A. (Edinburgh) in 1690, he moved first to London and then to Leyden (1692–1693). During a year at Oxford, he began work on a never-to-becompleted Irish dictionary. In 1696 he published Christianity Not Mysterious, which caused great scandal, alarming even John Locke, whose influence was discernible in its argument. Toland had to cut short a visit to Dublin in 1697 when the commons ordered that his tract be burned and its author arrested. Back in London he wrote a biography of John Milton (1699) and pamphlets questioning Anglican and Tory pieties. Over the years his religious views became increasingly divorced from mainstream Christian orthodoxy. The controversy over Christianity Not Mysterious in 1697 was a fore-taste of the dismay that his later works would cause. The term pantheist was apparently coined by Toland, whose developing ideas on religion can be traced in Socinianism Truly Stated (1705), Adeisdaemon (1709), and, most shocking to contemporaries, Nazarenus (1718) and Pantheisticon (1720).

A strong advocate of the Hanoverian succession, he was on the delegation to Hanover that presented the Act of Settlement (1701) to the Electress Sophia. Funded by wealthy patrons, he made his living as a Whig propagandist, though he was not to be rewarded with office or emolument after the Hanoverian succession. His only interventions in Irish affairs in the last decade of his life were expressions of anxiety about Catholic revival and criticism, in Reasons Most Humbly Offered (1720), of the British Parliament's Declaratory Act (6th George I). In his last years he depended on the patronage of the Whig radical Robert Molesworth, and he died in relative poverty in London on 11 March 1722. He once described himself as "avowedly a commonwealth's man" (Simms 1969, p. 312), to which might be added William Molyneux's assessment: "a candid free-thinker and a good scholar" (Simms 1969, p. 310).

Bibliography

Harrison, Alan. Béal eiriciúil as Inis Eoghain: John Toland (1670–1722). 1994.

McGuinness, Philip, et al., eds. John Toland's "Christianity Not Mysterious": Text, Associated Works, and Critical Essays. 1997.

Simms, J. G. "John Toland (1670–1722): A Donegal Heretic." Irish Historical Studies 16, no. 63 (1969): 304–320.