This third volume covers the period from December 1688 to August 1694. In January 1688/9 Newton was elected one of the representatives of the University of Cambridge in the Convention Parliament, and much of his time was taken up in dealing with his new responsibilities, as may be gathered from his correspondence with Covel, Vice-Chancellor of the University. The letters in question, which were printed in collected form in 1848, provide a picture of the unsettled period which followed the flight of King James II to the court of Louis XIV, and the landing of William, Prince of Orange, on English soil on 5 November 1688. In 1689 there was a possibility of Newton being appointed to the Provostship of King's College, Cambridge, but the only reference in the Correspondence is to be found in Letter 377.
Sir Isaac Newton was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian who is considered one of the most influential people in human history.
Newton remains influential to scientists, as demonstrated by a 2005 survey of scientists in Britain's Royal Society asking who had the greater effect on the history of science, Newton or Albert Einstein. Newton was deemed the more influential.[8]
Newton also wrote on Judaeo-Christian prophecy, whose decipherment was essential, he thought, to the understanding of God. His book on the subject, which was reprinted well into the Victorian Age, represented lifelong study. Its message was that Christianity went astray in the 4th century AD, when the first Council of Nicaea propounded erroneous doctrines of the nature of Christ. The full extent of Newton's unorthodoxy was recognized only in the present century: but although a critic of accepted Trinitarian dogmas and the Council of Nicaea, he possessed a deep religious sense, venerated the Bible and accepted its account of creation. In late editions of his scientific works he expressed a strong sense of God's providential role in nature.
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