 It seems clear that from very early on More developed ambitions to promote his own understanding of true Christianity. Indeed, if his autobiographical memoir, written as a preface to his Opera omnia of 1679, is to be believed, More began to develop his own ideas as a result of a schoolboy rejection of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, which he saw as a morally indefensible position for God to uphold, and therefore could not be part of true religion (translated into English in Ward 2000, 15–16; for a later example of More’s anti-Calvinism, see More 1668, 71–78). This recollection is certainly revealing, not only about More’s beliefs, but also about his whole approach to religion. Like Calvin himself, More wanted to establish a system of belief which conformed to what he saw as the dictates of reason. But reasoning from different starting points can lead to very different conclusions. Calvin wanted a God who was immutable and so the concept of predestination seemed to follow as a rational requirement. More, by contrast, wanted a God who was, above all, morally perfect and unimpeachable. His different starting point from that of Calvin led him to a very different rational theology. More’s was a theology in which God was obliged by his goodness to conform to absolute standards of morality, and therefore to create a world which was, as Voltaire’s (1694–1778) Dr Pangloss would have said, the best of all possible worlds (Voltaire [1759] 1966, 2). More’s motive in promoting this theology was not to solve the so-called “problem of evil” (why God allows so much suffering in the world), as it was later for Leibniz (and Dr Pangloss), but to ensure that God created a world which was (according to More at least) most capable of establishing the Creator’s own existence. More believed that the best of all possible worlds was one which demonstrated its dependence upon God and thereby made atheism an untenable position. In his Immortality of the Soul (1659), for example, More wrote that God “ordering the natures of things infallibly according to what is best, must of necessity ordain that the Souls of men live and act after death” (More 1662, Immortality of the Soul, separately paginated, 144). Similarly, in Divine Dialogues (1668), he wrote that the design in nature showed that God always acted for the best (More 1668, 24). It was the effort to demonstrate that God had indeed created the world this way which dictated all the various idiosyncrasies of More’s philosophical theology.