Biography

Morgan was first a dissenter preacher, then a practicer of healing among the Quakers, and finally a writer.

He was the author of a large three-volume work entitled The Moral Philosopher. It is a dialogue between a Christian Jew, Theophanus, and a Christian deist, Philalethes. According to Orr, this book did not add many new ideas to the deistic movement, but did vigorously restate and give new illustrations to some of its main ideas. The first volume of The Moral Philosopher appeared anonymously in the year 1737. It was the most important of the three volumes, the other two being mostly replies to critics of the first volume. John Leland

John Leland (Presbyterian)

John Leland was an English Presbyterian minister and author of theological works.Leland was born in Wigan, Lancashire on October 18, 1691. He was educated in Dublin, Ireland , and went into the ministry there. He received his Doctor of Divinity degree from the University of Aberdeen in 1739. His...

, John Chapman and others answered the first volume of Morgan's book, and it was these answers that prompted Morgan to write the second and third volumes.

His particular antipathy was to Judaism

Judaism

Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...

 and the Old Testament

Old Testament

The Old Testament, of which Christians hold different views, is a Christian term for the religious writings of ancient Israel held sacred and inspired by Christians which overlaps with the 24-book canon of the Masoretic Text of Judaism...

, although he by no means accepted the New Testament

New Testament

The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....

. He favored Gnosticism

Gnosticism

Gnosticism is a scholarly term for a set of religious beliefs and spiritual practices common to early Christianity, Hellenistic Judaism, Greco-Roman mystery religions, Zoroastrianism , and Neoplatonism.A common characteristic of some of these groups was the teaching that the realisation of Gnosis...

, and called himself a "Christian deist". He asserted that the conflict between the Apostle Paul and Peter in Galatians

Epistle to the Galatians

The Epistle of Paul to the Galatians, often shortened to Galatians, is the ninth book of the New Testament. It is a letter from Paul of Tarsus to a number of Early Christian communities in the Roman province of Galatia in central Anatolia...

 shows that Paul was a true follower of Jesus whereas Peter and James

James the Just

James , first Bishop of Jerusalem, who died in 62 AD, was an important figure in Early Christianity...

 were not following Jesus' teachings à la Paul.

The positive part of Morgan's teachings included all of the articles of natural religion formulated by Lord Herbert of Cherbury. The negative part of Morgan's work was much more extensive than the positive, and included an attack on the Bible

Bible

The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

, especially the Old Testament.

Works

Besides The Moral Philosopher, he wrote:

• Philosophical Principles of Medicine (1725)
• Collection of Tracts (1726), essays dealing with the Trinitarian controversy

External links

• Peter Harrison, ‘Morgan, Thomas (d. 1743)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 20 June 2007