Matthew Tindal

Life

Tindal was baptised on 12 May 1657 at Bere Ferrers in Devon, son of the Reverend John Tindal, who was rector of the parish, and his wife Anne Halse. Through his mother, he was a first cousin of Thomas Clifford, 1st Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, and therefore descended from the Clifford and Fortescue families.

Tindal studied arts and law at Lincoln College, Oxford, under the high churchman George Hickes, Dean of Worcester, and then at Exeter College, Oxford; in 1678 he was elected fellow of All Souls College. In a timely profession of faith, in 1685 he saw "that upon his High Church notions a separation from the Church of Rome could not be justified," and accordingly he joined the latter. But discerning "the absurdities of popery," he returned to the Church of England at Easter 1688.

Between the early 1690s and his death in 1733, Tindal made major contributions in various areas. As Deputy Judge Advocate of the Fleet he had a large influence on the case law on piracy, such as his contributions to the 1693–1694 trial of John Golden. His timely pamphlet on the freedom of the press was hugely influential in the ending of the legal requirement that all publications be licensed before being printed. His book Rights of the Christian Church had an immense impact on church/state relations and on the growth of freethinking. Tindal's Christianity as old as the Creation (1730) was the ultimate statement of the deist understanding of Christianity and was highly influential in England and on the Continent.