 It seems fair to say that although More had a small number of like-minded and devoted followers during his own lifetime, his philosophical theology was for the most part regarded with suspicion by his contemporaries. Even some of those who had been tutored by him, and who admired him personally, most notably John Finch and Anne Conway, could not go along with his claims about the necessity of a dualistic ontology. For those who failed to share More’s necessitarian theology, such as Boyle and Baxter, More’s views were dangerous to religion. There were others, however, who believed that More’s dichotomy between passive matter and active spirit was invaluable for combatting atheism. It was More’s anti-atheistic stratagem which lay behind the rejection of John Locke’s speculation about the possibility of thinking matter by the Bishop of Worcester, Edward Stillingfleet (1635–1699). If matter could think, then the dichotomy between passive matter and active spirit did not hold, and it would be impossible (the Bishop thought) to use the presence of activity in the world to establish the existence of a necessarily spiritual realm. Locke, like Baxter, merely objected that Stillingfleet’s insistence that not even God could make matter capable of thinking, undermined God’s omnipotence, and thereby was likely to undermine the faith (Henry 2011). Samuel Clarke took More’s distinction between inert matter and active spirit even further, insisting that not even God could endow bodies with active powers, and developing what has been called “partial occasionalism” (Sangiacomo 2018). Effectively, therefore, where natural phenomena were concerned, Clarke replaced More’s Spirit of Nature, “the vicarious Power of God”, with the direct action of God himself, or his angels (Henry 2020; see also Thomas 2018).