Barnett traces the Christian critique of the Church and its history in
Protestant (English) and Catholic (Italian) thought from the Reformation
to the Enlightenment. More than one hundred and fifty years of bitter
polemic between the two great confessions and their religious dissidents
produced an unprecedented, comparative historical and sociological
anticlericalism. In the last decades of the seventeenth century, English
dissenting thought was pregnant with a devastating critique of the
church, which came to be termed the 'Deist' view of Church history: by
1700 the cornerstone of high 'Enlightenment anticlerical thought' was in
ascent.