Wollaston, WILLIAM, author of the Religion of Nature, was born at Coton near Stafford, 26th March 1659, and educated at Shenstone and Lichfield, till in 1674 he went up to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. In 1681, having taken his M.A., he was ordained, and next year became an assistant-master at Birmingham; but in 1688 he inherited from a cousin a very ample estate. Thereupon he married a wife, who bore him eleven children, and retired to a house in Charterhouse Square, London, from which he was never absent one whole night in upwards of thirty years till his death on 29th October 1724. Not long before he had burned several treatises, as 'short of that perfection to which he desired and intended to bring them'; and the one forgotten work by which he is remembered was first printed in 1722 for private circulation, though it soon reached an issue of over 10,000 copies. It is a development of Samuel Clarke's system, its methods exclusively rational, its conclusions optimistic; all sin, by its showing, is a denial of what is, and heaven is a necessary counterpoise for earthly misery.
See the Life prefixed to the 6th edition of the Religion of Nature (1738), and chaps. iii. and ix. of Leslie Stephen's History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (2d ed. 1881).