By the early 1700s the European Enlightenment had indeed taken huge steps in putting aside the Puritan religious culture - both in England and America.  Logic and a common-sense approach to life was moving rapidly to replace the previous Christian piety of the early Puritans, and for that matter throughout much of Christian America in general.  Churches found themselves fairly empty on a Sunday morning – and the pastors complained much about the loss of Christian faith afflicting the colonies.

At the same time, many prominent Americans, taking their cues from the strong intellectual or philosophical trends arising in Europe, were becoming more confident of their own intellectual gifts, their own personal enlightenment, their own powers to fathom the mysteries of the universe through personal study and, of course, through the application of ever-expanding human logic.  The old spiritual affections of the early Puritans increasingly appeared to the well-educated American as being nothing more than the result of mere superstition.  And the concept of God was slowly turning itself into little more than the idea of the One who long ago set out the self-operating fundamental principles of natural philosophy.

Without a doubt the one individual who would have the greatest impact on this Secular-Rational trend in the English-speaking world was the English social and psychological philosopher, John Locke.  We have already mentioned Locke's effort in 1670 to draft a constitution for the Carolina colony.  Despite the fact that Locke's Grand Model proved to be too utopian to find practical application in the Carolina wilderness, he was hardly slowed up in his efforts to bring a more rational approach to society and its improvement or reform.  Indeed, his further studies were received with such acclaim among the community of intellectuals that Locke left a deep and permanent mark on Western philosophy, in America as well as in Europe.

In his Two Treatises of Government, written in conjunction with the overthrow of the Stuart monarchy of James II in the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689, Locke in the Second Treatise laid out clearly a very comprehensive worldview that was widely accepted as brilliant and totally compelling, at least to the rising class of enlightened intellectuals.

Locke based this worldview on the belief (a belief held by most everyone in those days) in man's tendency to self-preservation and self-promotion.  But he also believed that man was inherently reasonable and would freely submit to society – as he saw personal or selfish advantage in doing so.

Locke contributed further to the growth of the Secular worldview in another field of endeavor: psychology.  In his work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke treated human life as if it were simply another machine in its operation.  His studies of epistemology (why or how man comes to know what he knows) had a tremendous impact on Western thinking about the process of learning and enlightenment.  To Locke's way of looking at things, the human mind or brain at birth is simply an empty slate (tabula rasa) upon which, as the child begins to encounter life, data ("sensations") from outside the individual are received by the senses and transmitted to the brain.  Locke understood that the mind also had, by some kind of instinct, certain abilities through self-reflection to manipulate this incoming data, by associating ideas into working information.  In an Aristotelian fashion, he saw man as able to categorize and organize logically this information into the knowledge he would need to thrive in life.  It was all very mechanical, this process of thinking and learning.

Locke's philosophy was well greeted by the English Whigs who were looking for justification for bringing James II's government under Parliamentary restraint. James, of course had based his right to expect unquestioned obedience to his rule by his English subjects because he had been appointed to his position as king by God himself.  And who would dare to question what God had willed for England? This was of course the classic Divine Rights Theory of kingship proclaimed widely throughout Europe at the time.  But Puritans had questioned this theory under James's father, Charles I, stating that God had appointed to all of his faithful believers a degree of personal sovereignty.  The Bible itself supported this view, and how could Scripture be questioned, even by kings?

But now Locke had come along and presented a view of life as a natural matter, complete with its own natural laws.  And how could an intelligent person question such natural logic?  This had nothing to do with God, either good or bad.  It was purely natural philosophy (the grandfather of modern science).

With Locke's contribution to Secular thought, the possibility of producing heaven on earth through enlightened human understanding seemed to be beyond the question of any reasonable or enlightened person.  God was not a factor in any of this enterprise of social reform.  God was no longer needed.  History belonged to man, and the decisions he alone made.

According to Locke, this tendency of man to pursue what he understood as self-interest thus could be employed to form a civil society, one able actually to achieve human goodness and development, if properly directed.  It simply needed the right mechanical political and economic social instruments (or government) to bring that about, designed and managed by those who were enlightened to these mechanics.  In short, government was in reality nothing more than a machine, a mechanism – put together by the consent of those who formed the civil society which this mechanism – by way of its officers – directed or governed.

Step by step a new worldview was rising rapidly in Europe and America, one which stood halfway between traditional Christianity and the rising world of scientific atheism (which was not as widespread in America as it was in Europe at the time). It was called Deism.  Deism believed that God had wonderfully assembled all creation in its present, perfect pattern of operation.  God was much like a watchmaker, crafting a perfect self-running instrument.  But now wound up, life operated entirely on its own, according to its own natural laws, the iron laws of nature that scientific inquiry was discovering with breathtaking rapidity.  Natural philosophers (researchers focused on learning about nature and its ways) were beginning to see the earth (and the heavens) simply as machinery – like the well-crafted watch – every item on earth operating according to strict mechanical laws, laws easily discernible by any logical mind.  True, not all laws of nature had yet been discovered.  But they were out there, waiting simply for the scientific mind of some natural philosopher to finally uncover them.

It was all very exciting, watching life seeming to come under the total mastery of man – or at least under the mastery of the Enlightened Ones of mankind.

Meanwhile, in such a universe running under its own mechanics or laws of nature, God played no further role in the day-to-day events in life.  He was now in some kind of distant retirement.  It was up to man now to get along in life according to his own knowledge of how the watch operated.

This piece of logic was so compelling that by the early 1700s even theologians and church officials began to call for a reform of traditional Christian understanding of the Bible – to drop the idea of original sin and to clean up the parts of Scripture that relied on miracles to sell the important moral points that Christianity engendered.  Enlightened Christians would in fact perfect their faith by getting rid of such superstitious material and focus purely on natural religion, that is, the moral instruction found in Scripture.  Jesus was thus viewed by such Christians – John Tillotson, archbishop of Canterbury, 1691-1694, being such an example – no longer as Savior of sinful men but as moral instructor to those who wanted to perfect their lives.  Ah, once again Christianity was sliding into Unitarianism!

Even before the 1600s were out, there had been a call within Christianity itself, notably from bishops in the Anglican church, to reform itself, to make it more enlightened.  Miracles such as Jesus walking on water, or his raising the dead, or Joshua stopping the course of the sun across the sky in order to gain sufficient daylight time to fully defeat his enemies, etc., were raising all sorts of arguments. Some sought to justify these miracles on rational grounds, which by definition makes them no miracle at all, such as the Irishman John Toland in his controversial book, Christianity Not Mysterious (1696).  Others, such as Matthew Tindal in his book, Christianity as Old as the Creation (1731), called for Christianity to avoid such questionable or superstitious matters and instead focus itself on the moral-ethical teachings that abounded within Christianity – and for that matter within all the religions of man which have arisen everywhere in the world out of man's natural religious instinct.  Thus to such enlightened individuals as Tindal, excellent moral conduct was the supreme virtue of any faith, a virtue and related intellectual discipline that was placing in man's hands the responsibility of seeing heaven brought to earth, as Jesus himself had talked of.

This was all very logical.  But to the human spirit, it was deadly.  Little wonder that the church of the early 1700s was losing steam.