Lectures on the Universal Principles and Duties of Religion and Morality as they have been read in Margaret-Street, Cavendish-Square, in the Years 1776, and 1777.
[London:]: Printed for the Author; and Sold by the Following Booksellers…J. Dodsley…J. Almon and W. Davis…[et al.], 1779. First edition. Engraved frontisportrait. Joints neatly repaired, title-page and next few pages dog-eared, first and last leaves lightly foxed. Overall a good, clean copy. Contemporary calf. Spine ruled in gilt with burgundy morocco label. Two volumes in one, quarto. [4], 238, [2, ads]; [4], 157, [1] pp. Item #15977
David Williams (1738-1816) was a Welsh-born political and religious theorist and the founder of the Literary Fund, later the Royal Literary Fund, which helps published British writers in financial difficulties. Williams opened a chapel in Margaret Street in 1776 as an "experiment as a form of social worship ‘in which all men may join who acknowledge the existence of a supreme intelligence, and the universal obligations of morality’ (see his Liturgy on the Universal Principles of Religion and Morality, x–xi). The present work publishes his sermons at the Margaret Street chapel, which was dissolved in 1780 and replaced by a Philosophical Society, whose admission was controlled. Williams went on to express his views in the influential Letters on Political Liberty (1782), Lectures on Political Principals (1789) and Lectures on Education (1789). The work of Williams and other deists influenced religious thinking for the next two centuries.
See Oxford DNB, and The Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, published by the Thoemmes Press.
Price: $2,500.00