Thomas Morgan (deist)

Thomas Morgan (died 1743) was an English deist.

Morgan was first a dissenter preacher, then a practicer of healing among the Quakers, and finally a writer.

He was the author of a large three-volume work entitled The Moral Philosopher. It is a dialogue between a Christian Jew, Theophanes, and a Christian deist, Philalethes. According to Orr, this book did not add many new ideas to the deistic movement, but did vigorously restate and give new illustrations to some of its main ideas. The first volume of The Moral Philosopher appeared anonymously in the year 1737. It was the most important of the three volumes, the other two being mostly replies to critics of the first volume. John Leland, John Chapman and others answered the first volume of Morgan's book, and it was these answers that prompted Morgan to write the second and third volumes.

His particular antipathy was to Judaism and the Old Testament, although he by no means accepted the New Testament. He favored Gnosticism, and called himself a "Christian deist". He asserted that the conflict between the Apostle Paul and Peter in Galatians shows that Paul was a true follower of Jesus whereas Peter and James were not following Jesus' teachings à la Paul.

The positive part of Morgan's teachings included all of the articles of natural religion formulated by Lord Herbert of Cherbury. The negative part of Morgan's work was much more extensive than the positive, and included an attack on the Bible, especially the Old Testament.

Recently the scholar Joseph Waligore has shown in his article "The Piety of the English Deists" that Thomas Morgan believed in divine guidance and offered instruction on how to prepare oneself to receive it. To receive divine inspiration, he counseled, one must rein in his personal desires and abandon all concern for wealth, power, ambition, or physical gratifications. Abandoning worldly desires, one might then enter into what he called “silent Solitude.” After a person did this, he can be divinely inspired. “When a man does this, he converses with God, he derives Communication of Light and Knowledge from the eternal Father and Fountain of it; he receives Intelligence and Information from eternal Wisdom, and hears the clear intelligible Voice of his Maker and Former speaking to his silent, undisturb’d attentive Reason.” However, right after the statements just quoted, the dialogue’s orthodox Christian interlocutor then said that this position was religious enthusiasm: “I see there is a sort of enthusiasm, which you not only allow, but naturally run into, and cannot help it.” Morgan did not deny this charge of enthusiasm.

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