Pejorative and ambiguous, the labels ‘deist’ and ‘deism’ were commonly applied in early eighteenth-century England to men who, notwithstanding their protestations of Christian orthodoxy, were judged to have subversive views on clerical authority and the authority of Scripture. One consequence has been a historiography of deism in which familiar figures such as Anthony Collins, John Toland and Matthew Tindal have been placed on a trajectory towards modernity, even associated with what has become known as the ‘radical Enlightenment’. One facet of this reading, to which Jeffrey Wigelsworth takes particular exception, has been a tendency to de-value the theologies of the deists in interpretations that reduce them to cloaks for atheism. In a careful, self-consciously revisionist, study Wigelsworth examines a cluster of deists, adding the names of Thomas Morgan and Thomas Chubb to those above, and insisting that, far from belonging to a radical fringe, they were ‘full participants in the political circumstances and natural philosophical discourse’ of their time. He allows that they differed in their theology from Isaac Newton, whose omnipotent deity had immediate control over natural forces, and differed too from a natural theologian such as William Derham who, like Newton, underlined fear of God as an authentic expression of religious duty. But their wish to cleanse the English Church of priestly corruption should not be equated with a desire for its destruction or the destruction of governmental institutions. One of the attractions of Wigelsworth's analysis is that it reveals an eye for nuance and a refusal to lump even his chosen exemplars together. Too often, he complains, they have been assimilated to Toland as the archetypal radical. But they are bonded together in the service of historical revisionism: ‘Not one of these men advocated removal of the monarchy or anything like a modern democracy.’ And in their respective theologies, Wigelsworth detects a common principle in that their deity was a predictable and immutable God. His point is well taken. It applies to no less a figure than Charles Darwin in the following century. A coherent deism underpinned Darwin's philosophy of nature at the time he wrote his Origin of species, and yet how remorselessly is he enlisted as a clandestine atheist. Wigelsworth's text deserves attention because it refuses to conform to facile models of secularisation and because it rekindles interest in the way in which Newton's science was so often filtered and reinterpreted through distinctive political and theological preferences.