This is a dissertation about the Enlightenment. It does not seek to celebrate the triumphant course of reason and the light of science over faith and religious darkness, nor to denounce an assumed Enlightenment project, pointing out its shortcomings and flaws regarding matters of empire, class, gender, race, and ethnicity. Rather, it seeks to understand one particular form taken by this historical phenomenon in a specific context: England, in the wake of the bloody civil and religious war that fractured it in the seventeenth-century. I argue that the English Enlightenment is an intellectual phenomenon endogenous to the religious and political debates that took place in the period known as the Restoration. Conducted mostly in the language of Reformation and opposing various conceptions of the Protestant religion, these debates concerned the relation between belief and civil and ecclesiastic authority. The central point that this Dissertation articulates, through an examination of these debates, is that the cultural operation that gave birth to the English Enlightenment did not merely mean a subordination of religion to civil power, but meant, above all, the invention of a civil religion, which merged the Christian caritas traditions and the principle – particularly important in the protestant religious experience – of the individual’s responsibility concerning his own salvation in the juridical, civic, and, especially, social senses of civil.