However, there was little evidence within this material of the passionate denunciation of orthodox doctrine that, as we shall see, permeated his early writings on the Church. Some of the monumental research into chronology and prophecy that he carried out in his later years did seep into the public domain after his death, most notably in the two works The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728) and Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. Indeed, they are only now being published in full as a result of the online Newton Project. Newton’s strenuous efforts to prevent his private views from becoming more broadly known had the long-term consequence that his religious writings remained largely hidden for over two centuries. ![]() Had this happened early in his career, Newton would never have composed his great scientific works, and his seminal mathematical contributions (including the discovery of the differential and integral calculus) might never have been recorded for posterity. Publishing these ideas would have made him widely reviled and would have earned him, like it did Whiston, expulsion from his university. For almost all his adult life Newton harbored a guilty secret that he revealed only to a trusted few, and he skillfully put off those who probed too deeply. However, Whiston had in fact accurately captured Newton’s radically unorthodox views. His claims about Newton went largely unheeded, partly because most refused to believe something so hideous about Britain’s greatest natural philosopher (the contemporary term for a scientist), and partly because Whiston, having rejected the authority of tradition himself, was thought to be an untrustworthy source. For those views Whiston had been expelled from both his college fellowship and his professorship at Cambridge.
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