Matthew Tindal

Matthew Tindal (1657 – 16 August 1733) was an eminent English deist author. His works, highly influential at the dawn of the Enlightenment, caused great controversy and challenged the Christian consensus of his time. Tindal was baptised on 12 May 1657 at Bere Ferrers in Devon. He studied arts and law at Lincoln College, Oxford, and later at Exeter College, Oxford, becoming a fellow of All Souls College. He had a period of conversion to Roman Catholicism, but returned to the Church of England. Between the early 1690s and his death in 1733, Tindal made significant contributions. As Deputy Judge Advocate of the Fleet, he influenced case-law on piracy. He was a dissident Whig Commonwealthman, and his pamphlet on the freedom of the press was influential in ending the legal requirement for prior licensing of publications. His book *Rights of the Christian Church* (1706ff) significantly impacted church-state relations and the growth of freethinking. Tindal's *Christianity as Old as the Creation* (1730), a statement of the deist understanding of Christianity, became highly influential in England and on the Continent. This work, considered the "Bible" of deism, argued that true Christianity is identical with the eternal religion of nature, based on empirical principles of Locke, emphasizing reason and morality.