Question: This question refers to the following information.
The following quote is from NAME_1 in response to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake.
My dear sir, nature is very cruel. One would find it hard to imagine how the laws of movement cause such frightful disasters in the best of possible worlds. A hundred thousand ants, our fellows, crushed all at once in our ant-hill, and half of them perishing, no doubt in unspeakable agony, beneath the wreckage from which they cannot be drawn. Families ruined all over Europe, the fortune of a hundred businessmen, your compatriots, swallowed up in the ruins of Lisbon. What a wretched gamble is the game of human life! What will the preachers say, especially if the palace of the Inquisition is still standing? I flatter myself that at least the reverend father inquisitors have been crushed like others. That ought to teach men not to persecute each other, for while a few holy scoundrels burn a few fanatics, the earth swallows up one and all.
—NAME_1, in a letter, 1755
NAME_1's statement in the last sentence, criticizing persecution, is most likely influenced by which of the following?
A: New concepts of legal equity and individual rights expressed by NAME_2 and NAME_3
B: Europeans gaining a more thorough understanding of the rich cultural diversity to be found through trade and travel
C: New concepts of a deterministic mechanical universe based upon the discovery of Newton's mathematical laws
D: Challenges on multiple fronts to the monopoly on truth held by the Roman Cathol