by Gerda J. Joling-van der Sar
An investigation into English religious and philosophical thought during the first half of the eighteenth century focussing on Samuel Richardson, on his second novel Clarissa but especially
on his third and last novel Sir Charles Grandison, which he considered to be
his magnum opus. It will show that ultimately Richardson's goal was to convey a message of love and universal harmony deduced from the ideas of the mystically
inclined George Cheyne, a Newtonian physician and Behmenist, and the theologian William Law, as well as directly and indirectly from the system of the seventeenth-century German theosopher Jacob Boehme.