Thomas Shearer in point of time, the first published document to show it. Shearer, like many of his contemporaries, was much given to devising "harlequin" furniture. He was a designer of high merit and real originality, and occupies a distinguished place among the little band of men, often, like himself, ill-educated and obscure of origin, who raised the English cabinet-making of the second half of the 18th century to an illustrious place in artistic history. Thomas Shearer Thomas Shearer was an 18th-century English furniture designer and cabinet-maker. Shearer was a craftsman and the author of most of the plates in "The Cabinet
Deism in England and France in the 18th century Deism equals atheism. This misunderstanding of Deism is not a contemporary issue but it goes back to the seventeenth century as J. M. Robertson explains: "Before deism came into English vogue, the names for unbelief were simply 'infidelity' and 'atheism'- e.g. Baxter's Unreasonableness of Infidelity (1655) ... Bishop Stillingfleet's Origines Sacrae deals chiefly with deistic views, but calls unbelievers in general 'atheists'... ". So, the term 'atheism' was used as a basis for rational critique before the term 'Deism' being used. But by the first half of the 18th century, when English Deism had explicitly become an intellectual movement, the