Download or read book Idol Temples and Crafty Priests written by S.J. Barnett and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-27 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barnett traces the Christian critique of the Church and its history in Protestant (English) and Catholic (Italian) thought from the Reformation to the Enlightenment. More than one hundred and fifty years of bitter polemic between the two great confessions and their religious dissidents produced an unprecedented, comparative historical and sociological anticlericalism. In the last decades of the seventeenth century, English dissenting thought was pregnant with a devastating critique of the church, which came to be termed the 'Deist' view of Church history: by 1700 the cornerstone of high 'Enlightenment anticlerical thought' was in ascent.