In the following article Herbert Spencer’s religious thought is accounted for by reference to a religious group active in the early 1850s through the columns of the weekly radical The Leader. It is showed how the Leader elaborated some important criticisms of the tradition of natural theology. Then, it is argued that the main tenets of the perspective of the Leader – i.e. the unknowability of the ultimate mystery, the instinctive nature of religious belief, and the criticism of natural theology itself – were to find their most powerful expression in Spencer’s essay on the Unknowable (1862).
