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Are you a pantheist? Find out now at Scientific Pantheism.

It is important to note what Toland himself meant by pantheist: he meant the belief that the only divine being is the material Universe itself. Different definitions have been added later by extension and by error, and have crept into dictionaries where they now lead to confusion. But this is the original and fundamental meaning of the word pantheist. The closest embodiment today is Scientific Pantheism.

Toland had a chequered career. Born on November 30, 1670, near Derry in northern Ireland, he was raised as a Catholic but converted to Protestantism at the age of 16. He studied in Glasgow and Edinburgh (where he graduated a Master of Arts in 1690), and then in Leyden and Utrecht. After a spell in Oxford he came to London in 1695.

In the following year he published his first and most famous work Christianity not Mysterious - an outspoken attack on all the trappings of images, garments, altars, fasts, rites and priestly ranks that had been added to the simple doctrine of the gospels since Jesus' time. The first edition was prudently anonymous. After it achieved a succès de scandale Toland saw a chance of fame and put his name to it - an act which was to condemn him to the margins of British society for the rest of his days.

Toland's book was immediately excoriated in England, debated by outraged Members of Parliament and bishops, and condemned by the Grand Jury of Middlesex. Toland retired to Ireland, but the outcry there was even greater. In September 1697 the Irish House of Commons ordered the book to be burned by the public hangman and the author to be arrested and prosecuted by the Attorney General. As John Locke's friend William Molyneux wrote, "This poor man, by his imprudent conduct, has raised against himself so universal a commotion that it was dangerous to be known to have spoken with him even once."

Returning to England without family or fortune, he aspired to live by finding noble or even royal patrons. He wrote tracts defending the house of Hanover's right to the English crown, and courted the electress Sophie of Brunswick, who he hoped would inherit the English throne. In Brunswick and in Berlin, he gave lectures and engaged in debates with the German philosopher, Leibniz. When asked for a brief statement of his credo at these lectures, he answered: "The sun is my father, the earth my mother, the world is my country and all men are my family."

He wrote political pamphlets for the Tory Robert Harley, and when Harley fell from power, for the Whigs. In 1702 he declared himself a member of the Church of England. But his political trimming, and his past as a notorious heretic, meant that no-one fully trusted him. He never secured the stable patron he craved for, and so passed his life in venal or low paid hack-writing jobs on the fringes of political power.

There was a coherent thread to much of Toland's work, in pamphlets favouring free speech and civil liberties and an enlightened Christianity. But at times he would write tracts for payment that he did not believe in, and for most of his life he was obliged to hide his true religious beliefs. "To what sneaking equivocations, to what wretched shifts and subterfuges," he wrote with devastating honesty, "are men of excellent endowments forced to have recourse through human frailty, merely to escape disgrace or starving." (Sullivan p44) He regarded his own chief misfortune as having been "left at large to my own caprice and humours, without any certain patrons or settled business, and having neither estate nor relations to support me." (Sullivan p24)

By 1718 he was meanly lodged in a carpenter's house in Putney, where he spent the rest of his days in poverty and debt, deepened by investment losses in the South Sea Bubble in 1720. By now he was drinking heavily and had gallstones, which gave him "pains in my thighs, veins and stomach total loss of appetite, hourly retchings, and very highly coloured water." He died in 1721.