Edward Stillingfleet

Edward Stillingfleet was an English Christian theologian and scholar, born in 1635 at Cranborne in Dorset, who rose from a Bedfordshire vicarage to become Dean of St Paul's and, in 1689, Bishop of Worcester. A leading latitudinarian within the Church of England, he defended Anglican orthodoxy against Catholics, nonconformists and deists. His Origines Sacrae of 1662 offered a rational account of the grounds of Christian faith, and his Letter to a Deist of 1677 was the first prolonged attack on deism in English. In the 1690s he entered a well known controversy with John Locke, arguing that the epistemology of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding endangered the doctrine of the Trinity and dualism. He was also an antiquarian scholar, and the library of about ten thousand books he left at his death passed to Marsh's Library in Dublin. He died in 1699.