In Chapter 4 we explored the struggles of the Benedictine Serenus Cressy to construct a defence of mysticism in the 1670s in light of the polemical attacks of latitudinarians like Edward Stillingfleet. Writers such as Stillingfleet sought to elevate rationality over revelation, arguing that such personal, subjective and likely deceptive personal religious experiences were unsuitable as the basis of doctrine. This was envisioned as part of a much wider attack on the doctrinal authority of Catholicism, but nonetheless formed a substantial attack on the legitimacy of mysticism. We might see this as a signifier of early Enlightenment thought in England, an endeavour to make a reasonable Christianity which was, in the words of John Toland, ‘not mysterious’. Critics such as Voltaire, Diderot and d’Holbach would later see blind faith, religious tyranny and false religion as obstacles for the emancipation of the individual. As Roy Porter has argued, these thinkers believed that ‘the individual possessed by false religion could not be in possession of himself’. Yet the Philadelphian Society, as well as the works of Jane Lead more specifically, prove to be a jarring contradiction to this narrative. At the very end of the seventeenth century they emerged as a movement which proclaimed mysticism to be at the very centre of their beliefs. As a result, they may be seen as the forerunners of a ‘mystical Enlightenment’ or ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ which occurred in England at the end of the eighteenth century. Regardless, in a period in which criticism of mysticism had gradually mounted, the emergence of the Philadelphian Society provides us with an interesting counterbalance to the assumed dominance of the ideals of the ‘Age of Reason’.

Numerous factors played into the public emergence of the Philadelphians at the end of the seventeenth century. The lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 meant that their publications and writings could be circulated with greater ease, as seen with the printing of the voluminous works of their prophetess Jane Lead. The Glorious Revolution and the subsequent Toleration Act of 1689 meant that the Philadelphians could meet in public if they registered their meeting place and ensured the doors to the building were not bolted or locked, a limitation which caused numerous problems when attempting to prevent curious visitors, and later rioters, from disturbing their meetings.