Toland, JOHN, deistical writer, was born of Catholic parents near the village of Redcastle, County Londonderry, November 30, 1669. He entered the university of Glasgow in 1687, but removed to Edinburgh, where he abandoned the Roman Catholic faith and took his M.A. in 1690. At Leyden, where he spent two years, he studied theology under Spanheim. He resided for some time at Oxford, and in the Bodleian collected the materials of more than one of his later publications. In Christianity not Mysterious (1696) he expressly claimed to accept all the essentials of Christianity, but maintained that the value of religion could not lie in any unintelligible element, and that no part of the truth could be contrary to reason. He chose his title with evident reference to Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), and professed to have at heart the defence of revelation against deists and atheists. But the tendency of the work was obvious; it created a great sensation in the theological world, and led to several replies (by Payne and Stillingfleet amongst others). Prosecuted in Middlesex, Toland returned to Ireland, where his book was burned publicly by the common hangman, and Toland fled to London. In Amyntor (1699) and other works he fairly raised the question as to the comparative evidence for the canonical and apocryphal scriptures, with professed candour but unmistakably mischievous intent. A pamphlet entitled Anglia Libera, on the succession of the House of Brunswick, led to his being received with favour by the Princess Sophia when he was secretary to the ambassador at the court of Hanover; and from 1707 to 1710 he lived in various continental towns. His after life was that of a literary adventurer, and forms one of the most painful chapters in D'Israeli's Calamities of Authors. In Nazarenus (1720) he insisted, somewhat on the lines developed by Semler and the Tübingen school, that there were two distinctly opposed parties in the early Christian church—one Judaistic (which he identified with the Ebionites) and one Pauline or liberal. His Pantheisticum was an offensive parody of the Anglican liturgy. He resided from the year 1718 at Putney, where he died, March 11, 1722.
Besides the works named, and various defences, apologies, and pamphlets, he wrote a life of Milton (1698); an Account of Prussia and Hanover (1705); Adeisdemon (1709); Origines Judaicæ (1709). See the books cited under the heading DEISM in this work; and for Toland's partial anticipation of Semler and Baur, see an article in the Theological Review, 1877. There is a life by Des Maizeaux prefixed to two vols. of Toland's posthumous works (1747, including a History of the Druids), and a monograph by Berthold, John Toland und der Monismus der Gegenwart (Heidelb. 1876).