Disputing Leibniz about God. Not surprisingly Newton was criticized, especially by continental thinkers, for what they took to be a philosophy (and theology) laced with problems. In 1710, for example, Leibniz went on record against the idea of action at a distance, which he saw to be equivalent to an embrace of miracles. He even suggested in a review of a Newtonian work that it seemed a return to "a certain fantastic scholastic philosophy," thereby hinting that Newton was trying to take natural philosophy backward rather than forward. It is understandable why Newton spoke out in the face of such accusations.
    He tried once more to answer his critics about matter and attraction in a new edition of the Principia. In preparation for some time, it finally appeared in 1713 under the editorship of Roger Cotes, Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy in Cambridge. At the end of the work there now stood a General Scholium in which Newton waxed eloquent not only about gravity, but about its relation to God. Concerning gravity, he criticized those who insisted on speculating about its cause. He insisted on staying within the limits of his mathematical treatment, declaring in a famous phrase, "I feign no hypotheses." Concerning God, Newton declared that the beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from an intelligent Being who ruled over all. Newton declared that God was omnipresent not only in virtue, but also in substance.
    Leibniz did not think much of Newton's abilities as a philosopher. He later explained to Johann Bernoulli that he recognized that Newton and his editor had him in mind in their new edition of the Principia, and he was ready to reply. To do so he wrote to Princess Caroline of Ansbach, a young girl he had tutored in at the court in Berlin who was now wife of the Hannoverian heir to the English throne. Caroline had read Leibniz's Theodicy and had sought her former teacher's opinion of the theology of her new homeland. Leibniz informed her that Newton made God into a corporeal being who uses space as an organ by which to perceive things, adding that Newton also believed that God had to step in from time to time to wind up the watch of the clockwork cosmos to prevent it from running down. Newton's God "had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion." This latter view Leibniz apparently inferred from a passage in the final query of the Latin edition of the Opticks, in which Newton observed that the irregular movement of comets would eventually disrupt the system of the planets "till this system wants a reformation." Indeed, Newton acknowledged that the repeated elliptical orbits of planets are never exactly identical, and he believed God occasionally caused comets to strike the sun as a means refueling its power.
    The Newton-Leibniz disagreement about how God related to nature would reverberate down through the centuries from that point on. For Newton, God was intimately tied to and in complete control of the physical world, present in it by virtue of the active principles that animated matter. It is an easy matter to understand how Newton's God could, by exercising infinite power and wisdom, not only anticipate the needs of sparrows and all other creatures, but also respond to the prayerful petitions of human subjects to intervene in the normal course of events on their behalf.
    To Leibniz, Newton had demeaned God by suggesting that God's handiwork was in need of repair. Newton's God was, as one historian has characterized Him, no better than a "cosmic plumber," fixing the occasional leaks that sprang in the universal system. Princess Caroline also found the notion distasteful that God had "to be always present to readjust the machine because he was not able to do it at the beginning." As she wrote to Leibniz in the beginning of 1716, she did not believe that any philosophy could give her confidence "if it showed us the imperfection of God." Leibniz's God, of course, did not need to intervene in nature, having perfectly anticipated every contingency from the beginning. His God guaranteed freedom from interference in natural processes by decreeing the laws which nature obeyed and then, in good German fashion, going out for an eternal beer. In these two conceptions of God's relationship to nature lay the seeds of many a controversy for the future.
    Final years. Leibniz died in the fall of 1716, and the bitter controversies that had divided him from Newton began to subside. The next year saw a new edition of the Opticks which was unaltered except for the section containing the queries. Among the eight new queries was what at first glance appeared to be a concession to his critics, the mechanical philosophers. Newton postulated the existence of an aether, "exceedingly more rare and subtile than the Air, and exceedingly more elastik and active," to explain gravity itself. But this aether could never satisfy his critics, since it was composed of particles that repelled each other; in other words, here was action at a distance all over again.
    During his last years Newton gave a great deal of attention to the study of religion, specifically the history of the ancient kingdoms portrayed in the Bible. As the end approached, he began to put his things in order. His health declining, he attended fewer meetings of the Royal Society, presiding for the last time on March 2, 1727. As he lay dying later that same month, Newton affirmed the rebellious religious stance he had so long embraced by refusing the sacrament of the church. Three days after his death on March 20, the records of the Royal Society marked his passing with the terse announcement: "The Chair being Vacant by the Death of Sir Isaac Newton there was no Meeting this Day."