The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume VIII. The Age of Dryden.
§ 18. Glanvill’s Lux Orientalis
The spirit of compromise in regard to this conflict of beliefs, combined, however, with a maintenance of personal individuality, is exemplified in Joseph Glanvill, of Exeter college, Oxford, afterwards fellow of the Royal Society and chaplain-in-ordinary to Charles II. In the main, he was in agreement with Cudworth and More—his Lux Orientalis being chiefly a reproduction of the theory held by the latter as to the prior existence of souls, a doctrine which he held to be all the more defensible in that it appeared never to have been formally condemned by any Christian church, while its acceptance serves to vindicate the Divine Being from the charge of injustice, since suffering in the present life may be punishment for sins committed in a previous state of existence. In his Sadducismus Triumphatus (1681), Glanvill defends the belief in witchcraft—a defence pronounced by Lecky “the ablest ever published” of that superstition.