Rational Religion Examined was the first major production by Baden Powell. It was not a work which influenced contemporary debates nor was it widely read or commented upon-none of these qualifications would apply to Baden Powell's early writings – but it undoubtedly epitomized the complex theological and philosophical scene of its day. Viewed in the right historical perspective, this text provides interesting new insights into neglected features of Oxford and English intellectual life in the 1820s. It also shows that the clear-cut division customarily made between the Hackney Phalanx and the Oxford Movement on the one hand, and the Noetic circle on the other is without factual basis. The failure to appreciate first the actual terms of agreement, and then the dynamics of the widening gap between the two approaches, has prevented a clear appreciation of important philosophical and theological issues debated in the first decades of the nineteenth century.

Several of the themes Baden Powell dwelt upon in his contributions to the British Critic and the Christian Remembrancer featured prominently in Rational Religion Examined, and became essential parts of a systematic treatise on the philosophy of belief. The very systematic character of this work represents a further element of interest to the historian of philosophy and theology. It also provides the historian of science with a closer insight into the dimensions of contemporary epistemological debates. Though the book was professedly a critical analysis of the theological systems ‘which discard reason’, namely Unitarianism, Roman Catholicism, and various Dissenting doctrines, more than two-thirds of the treatise was in fact devoted to the refutation of the Unitarian doctrine.