Damaris Cudworth Masham contro il deismo. Una difesa di "The Reasonableness of Christianity" di John Locke

In Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life (1705), Damaris Cudworth Masham set out to defend a reasonable Christianity from deism and superstition. Against the deists, Lady Masham insisted on the importance of revelation and faith and denied that natural religion based purely on reason was sufficient for salvation; she employed the same arguments which her friend John Locke had used in The Reasonableness of Christianity to argue against deism. The paper aims at showing that Masham’s intent was to defend the Reasonableness from the serious accusations which the Calvinist John Edwards had brought against it, which had been restated by the devout Anglican Mary Astell in her book The Christian Religion, as profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England, immediately after Locke’s death. Astell’s book appeared in 1705, the same year in which Masham’s Occasional Thoughts was published.