Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke 9780198269427, 0198269420

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Religion and Enlightenment in EighteenthCentury England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke B. W. Young

Print publication date: 1998 Print ISBN-13: 9780198269427 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269427.001.0001

Title Pages (p.i) Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England (p.ii) (p.iii) Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England

This book has been printed digitally and produced in a standard design in order to ensure its continuing availability (p.iv) Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw with associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States Page 1 of 2

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Title Pages by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © B.W. Young 1998 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) Reprinted 2001 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN 0-19-826942-0

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Dedication

Religion and Enlightenment in EighteenthCentury England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke B. W. Young

Print publication date: 1998 Print ISBN-13: 9780198269427 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269427.001.0001

Dedication (p.v) For my parents, Brian and Joyce Young, and in memory of my father-inlaw, Dr Ritabrata Bose

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Religion and Enlightenment in EighteenthCentury England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke B. W. Young

Print publication date: 1998 Print ISBN-13: 9780198269427 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269427.001.0001

(p.vi) (p.vii) ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS THIS book has its origins in my Oxford D.Phil. thesis, which was awarded in 1990. Much revision has taken place since then, some of a major, some of a minor sort, but all necessary in the translation of a technical exercise into a book; I was supported in my original postgraduate research by a Major State Studentship from the British Academy, a Graduate Scholarship at Jesus College, Oxford, and by my parents, a trinity of institutions and benefactors which continued to support me in my years as a research fellow in Oxford. I was extremely fortunate in being awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship in 1990, and doubly so in being elected a junior research fellow of Jesus College for the duration of the award. To the Principal and Fellows of Jesus College I owe many thanks: their generosity and friendliness demonstrate that academic life can be rewarding even in decidedly unpromising times for the scholarly vocation. Scholarship necessarily requires books (and it always will do so), and I am grateful to the librarians of the Bodleian Library, the British Library, Sussex University Library, and the archivists of Magdalene College and Peterhouse, Cambridge for their ready assistance with the demands I made of them. Hilary O'Shea, my editor, has expedited the passage of the book to publication with exemplary efficiency, for which I am most grateful. My debts to colleagues at Jesus are too deep to be easily enumerated, and this is especially so when acknowledging the friendship and influence of John Walsh, my erstwhile moral tutor. The acknowledgements pages of a great many books pay due regard to John's kindness, generosity, learning, and authority, and this book is no exception to that rule: he has been more than merely a guide, philosopher, and friend. David Womersley, Nicolas Jacobs, Sir John Habbakuk, and John Gray taught me a great deal both in conversation (p.viii) and by example. The importance of conversation in one's education cannot be overestimated, and I continue to learn in this way from John Burrow, all too Page 1 of 3

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS briefly my professor at Sussex University, just as I had profited from the instructive example of Reg Ward, with whom I studied a special subject on the ‘Protestant Enlightenment’ as an undergraduate at Durham University. Membership of the Intellectual History Group at Sussex has been of immense importance to my career and, I hope, to my intellectual development. That Sussex should remain committed to Intellectual History in a time of philistine retrenchment in university education is a heartening instance of institutional good sense, and the History Subject Group is also to be congratulated on having the vision to protect the subject when times were more than usually inauspicious. We can look forward to the future with a degree of optimism, albeit fortified with hard-won resilience. The School of English and American Studies provides a congenial atmosphere in which to work, and Jean Ritchie, Sue Murray-Smith, Julie Carr, Penelope Kelly, Joan Astill, and Jane 'Espinasse contrive to make even administration something to enjoy (on occasion). The more than conventional obligations to my teachers are too numerous properly to be acknowledged, but thanks are especially due to Edward Lainchbury, Ray Bradbury, Anthony Halford, Margaret Samuelson, Lorraine Stevenson, George Daniels, Peter Winch, Margaret Harvey, Alan Forey, and Alan Milne. Geoffrey Rowell was a generous supervisor of the thesis, and he has continued to support me in his dual role as a priest and a scholar. Mary Hesse of Cambridge University acted as my supervisor for Hilary Term, 1988, and she encouraged the then tentative arguments which now form the core of Chapter 3 of this study. My old school was daring enough to take its motto from William Blake, and any study of history, both personal and institutional, readily attests that without contraries there can be no progression. A number of friends have read versions of different parts of this book, and particular thanks are therefore due to Scott Mandelbrote, Colin and Lucy Kidd, and Isabel Rivers. John Burrow and Donald Winch were especially penetrating lay readers. John Pocock very kindly and selflessly read through (p.ix) the whole manuscript, suggesting changes and emendations greatly to its improvement. Mark Goldie has encouraged my sense of the importance of the English Enlightenment. Marc Caball has always been ready to remind me of Irish matters when talking about ‘England’, although it would take another book to begin to do justice to the riches of Irish thought in the eighteenth century. My parents have always read what I have written, and something of their salutary combativeness continues to inform my attitudes to scholarship. My gratitude to my parents is boundless, and they, alongside Stuart, Roselyn, Deborah, Peter, Faye, Adam, Helen and Sophie, have combined to teach me about the more important things. Ritabrata and Barbara Bose tolerated my eccentricities, and it is my great sorrow that my father-in-law did not live to see the results of my labours. His love of politics and cricket was inspirational to all enthusiasts of those noble games, and his commitment to medicine was exemplary to all who follow professions which require tact with people, and the need constantly to Page 2 of 3

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS keep oneself informed of scholarly and technical developments in one's field. I know that he would have been encouraged to learn that some of my dramatis personae had the good sense to take up a medical career when the Church proved too difficult for men with tender consciences. I have kept my greatest debt till last. Mishtooni Bose, has been my most trenchant as well as my kindest critic, and her profound learning and literary sensitivity have contributed a great deal to the better elements of this book. What I have long thought about her happily continues to be true—‘de forte est egressa dulcedo’. B. W. Y. Falmer, August 1996

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Abbreviations

Religion and Enlightenment in EighteenthCentury England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke B. W. Young

Print publication date: 1998 Print ISBN-13: 9780198269427 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269427.001.0001

(p.xii) Abbreviations All references to Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding are to the edition of Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1975), and take the following form: book, chapter, and section numbers. Thus, Essay, 1. i. 1, refers to book I, chapter i, section 1. AS Annals of Science BJECS British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies BJHS British Journal for the History of Science ECS Eighteenth-Century Studies EHR English Historical Review ELH Journal of English Literary History HJ The Historical Journal HS History of Science JBS Journal of British Studies JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology JEH Journal of Ecclesiastical History JHI Page 1 of 2

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Abbreviations Journal for the History of Ideas JTS Journal of Theological Studies JWCI Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute MP Modern Philology PMLA Publications of the Modern Languages Association P&P Past and Present SCH Studies in Church History SECC Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture SP Studies in Philology

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Introduction

Religion and Enlightenment in EighteenthCentury England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke B. W. Young

Print publication date: 1998 Print ISBN-13: 9780198269427 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269427.001.0001

Introduction CATHERINE OSBORNE

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269427.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about religion and Enlightenment in England during the 18th century and the theological debate from John Locke to Edmund Burke. This book examines the emergence of the so-called enlightened ecclesiastics and their role in the shaping of an anti-dogmatic tradition in the Church of England during the 1700s and the Cambridge critique of Newtonian religious apologetic. It also explores the mystical critique of rational religion and the historical significance of churchman William Warburton. Keywords:   religion, Enlightenment, England, theological debate, John Locke, Edmund Burke, Church of England, ecclesiastics, religious apologetic, William Warburton

Towards the close of the eighteenth century, Joseph Milner, a noted ecclesiastical historian and the master of Hull Grammar School, dismissed the intellectual activity of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries with marked contempt. A paragon of the Calvinist revival within the Church of England which later gave impetus to the moral reformism of Wilberforce and his Evangelical colleagues, Milner rebuked ‘the spirit of the age’ as one of ‘reasoning to excess’: 1 what later became known as the Age of Reason had compromised religion, and this, Milner felt, was especially true of the work of consciously enlightened divines. Milner nursed a very particular concern in lamenting the Anglican clergy's disregard of the Calvinist doctrine of grace, but it should be more widely realized that his general criticism of a Church overrun by the votaries of reason was voiced by others throughout the eighteenth

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Introduction century.2 It is the religious spirit which they criticized for being merely ‘rational’ and insufficiently ‘spiritual’ which will be analysed in this study. The figure of John Locke is central to any investigation into English religious thought during this period, since he dominated, directly and indirectly, much of the discussion about religion in the period from 1690 to circa 1780 with which this study is most concerned. For Locke, the spirit which Milner castigated had been a positive one, as can be appreciated from his laudatory references to ‘this our knowing Age’ in ‘The Epistle to the Reader’ in the most (p.2) significant of his writings for the eighteenth-century reader, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).3 Other constructions for ‘knowing Age’ abounded in the period under review, and one which recurs again and again is ‘enlightened age’. In his plea for the truthfulnesss of Unitarian theology, An History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782), Joseph Priestley praised ‘this enlightened age’:4 this would, however, have proved too much even for some progressive Anglicans, since Priestley, a Dissenter, consistently derided their defences of the old order in the Church of England and its theology. Priestley knowingly used the language of ‘this enlightened age’ to ends which were not universally accepted by other enlightened divines. The eighteenth-century adjective ‘enlightened’ has plainly different connotations from those of the nineteenth-century noun ‘Enlightenment’, but its use does confirm that England's divines were aware of an intellectual tendency which was especially characteristic of their knowing age. The adumbration of an English variety of ‘Enlightenment’ by modern scholars is not, then, without genuinely eighteenth-century resonance. The intellectual distance between Locke and Priestley is not broad. Locke was a devout Protestant layman intent on finding ‘Truth’ even at the expense of tradition, since ‘that will always be welcome to me, when or whencesoever it comes’.5 It was Locke's supposed Socinianism which Priestley saw as the true precursor of his own Unitarianism.6 Within the spectrum which extends between the thought of Locke and Priestley can be found many of the representatives of England's peculiarly clerical Enlightenment. It is the clerical component of this considerable group which provides the subject-matter of this study. J. G. A. Pocock has argued persuasively that two major works were produced by the intellectual currents at work in England's uniquely conservative experience of Enlightenment, the more famous being Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), the other being William Warburton's The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (p.3) (1738–41).7 It is with the controversial engagements that encouraged the creation of such currently neglected works as the Divine Legation that this study is primarily concerned. Milner, the opponent of a religious as much as of an irreligious Enlightenment, was as critical of Warburton's soteriology, as revealed in Warburton's Doctrine of Grace, as he was of Gibbon's Decline and Fall.8 It is therefore vital to open up discussion of Page 2 of 13

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Introduction England's Enlightenment in terms other than those derived from the analysis of freethinking criticisms of Christianity, an approach which has dominated recent attempts at understanding this important but profoundly complex subject.9 In so doing, this study extends the implications of Pocock's claim that the English Enlightenment was decidedly clerical and intellectually conservative in nature, not least by demonstrating that clerical culture was not inimical to stimulating fruitful intellectual controversy.10 Analysis of this sense of pervasive controversy within the clerical culture of early and mid-eighteenth-century England, as opposed to that between clergy and freethinkers, provides the core of the present investigation.11 (p.4) Students of the eighteenth century have been assured that the roots of England's Enlightenment lay in a confusion of developments, social, political, religious, and intellectual. Some scholars assert that the Enlightenment is rooted in the ‘bourgeois’ triumph of the Restoration, as Charles II's Royal Society promoted the claims of scientific rationality over the combustive theologies of Interregnum radicals. This contention can be traced in the Marxisant studies of Christopher Hill and James R. Jacob.12 The work of Margaret C. Jacob defined this socio-political argument, proposing that it was in the Newtonian apologetic developed after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ that the Enlightenment began to flourish.13 More recently, historians have predicated an English Enlightenment on the development, in the wake of a Hobbes-inspired critique of revealed religion, of a ‘natural history of religion’, that is the effective desacralization of Christian historiography as this was achieved by freethinkers in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.14 In a recent study of Freemasonry, Margaret Jacob has lamented that the idea of Enlightenment ‘ironically veils as much as it illuminates’. Noting that the term ‘conjures up a vast historiography as liberal and self-assured as the phenomenon it seeks to describe’, her own most recent attempt at a workable definition is presented in terms of its alleged ‘ideology’, a mode of identification of historical phenomena typical of the new cultural history. By locating Enlightenment as the modernizing ideology of a profoundly political (p.5) culture, popularized through the didactic channels of the Masonic lodges, Jacob has seen in its programmatic postures ‘a nascent political modernity’.15 Such a conclusion, heavily documented though it is, has about it something of the very mythology which it seeks to undo: the obsessive iteration of ‘modernity’, as a watchword of Enlightenment, which is to be found in writers such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, as well as in Jacob and other practitioners of a notably politicizing cultural history, is also one of the causes of celebration in Peter Gay's classically liberal account, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1967–70).16 An essay by Roy Porter, which is critical of Gay's triumphalist and Gallocentric reading of the Enlightenment, provides a useful guide to the idea of an English Enlightenment. As he has economically described the matter, ‘All the shibboleths Page 3 of 13

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Introduction of Enlightenment were familiar to English lips: reason and experience; law, liberty and justice; happiness, humanity and nature; knowledge is power is progress; sapere aude, and the rest…the baby Enlightenment's first words were spoken in an English nursery.’ Porter also notes the centrality of religion in this experience, contending that ‘Enlightenment goals—like criticism, sensibility or faith in progress—throve in England within piety’, a claim rigorously amplified in a recent study of eighteenth-century notions of progress by David Spadafora.17 It is important to note, moreover, that while many of the philosophical and religious debates in England during the period c. 1690-c. 1780 fall readily under the rubric of a Christian experience of Enlightenment, others, such as the reflections of prominent mid-eighteenth-century anti-Newtonian mystics, bear affinities with the Counter-Enlightenment, which has been described by Isaiah Berlin as the high philosophical analogue to and precursor of the (p.6) religious aspects of Romanticism.18 The origins of this important strain in English thought, which takes in such largely unfamiliar figures as William Law and such familiar ones as John Wesley, will be discussed at length in Chapter 4 of this study. It is the aim of the present study, therefore, to take seriously many of the religious and philosophical options available to thoughtful men and women in eighteenth-century England, and to allow for the considerable influences of political and social pressure which were felt on such thought without presuming an indissolubly determinist link to hold true between them. The study proceeds on the assumption that traditions of thought are often subtle and open-ended, especially in as complex a society as that of eighteenth-century England. Central to the intellectual liveliness of the age was a combativeness which was not conducive to hegemonic elitism, and a major source of this combativeness was a clerical culture which was not as readily cowed as depictions of the period in terms of an intellectual and socio-political inertia have suggested. To begin with, the clergy formed the greater part of the university-trained élite, albeit in an age of declining university attendance.19 The eighteenth-century university was at least as much a seminary as it ever was a finishing-school for the political élite, and such was the power of the university clergy, that even anticlerical Whigs failed to secularize their institutions.20 Similarly, the major alternative to the university, excepting such institutions as the Inns of Court and the military life, was the Dissenting academy, itself a species of Nonconformist seminary with a minority of laymen among its shifting population.21 (p.7) It was in the universities and the Dissenting academies that much of the controversial life of the eighteenth-century intellect was exercised. The reading of Locke, for example, began as a protest against the curriculum imposed by orthodox dons, and ended as an essential part of that curriculum. This readership passed through distinct generational groupings. At Oxford an attempt to suppress informal study of the Essay Concerning Human Page 4 of 13

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Introduction Understanding failed in 1703; the anxiety of its conservative senior members that too much modern philosophy was being read proved to be well founded, and they were powerless to prevent it. The essentially Aristotelian logic books that were then prepared by men like Henry Aldrich, dean of Christ Church, were no longer popular with junior members whose conversation and philosophical interests drew them to the new logic: it is to be remembered that Locke described his own work as originating in such conversation with like-minded friends.22 By mid-century paraphrases of Locke were part of the required reading of Oxford students, a linguistic shift, initiated in the academies, as the Anglophone new logic became the accepted means of intellectual engagement in eighteenth-century England. In broad terms, the traditions of Aristotelian logic and Ciceronian rhetoric gave way from the 1690s into the 1750s to the inductive philosophy of Bacon and Locke, though logic seems to have been more readily transformed than was the rather recalcitrant sister-science of rhetoric.23 These changes were effected rather more quickly in Cambridge; its curriculum had already moved away from Aristotelianism through the pervasive influence of its resident Platonists in the 1650s, whose own systematic thought in turn gave way to Cartesianism before Newtonianism was adopted as the prime motor of the new philosophy.24 The division between Oxford and Cambridge as centres of (p. 8) learning also had a political element, the one often suspected of Jacobite sympathies, the other widely considered to be resolutely Whig (with some exceptions). This apparent division formed the basis of a piece of doggerel, ‘On Cambridge and Oxford, Epigrams’, which conveys something of the self-image both institutions enjoyed: Great George observing with judicious Eyes, The State of both his Universities: To Oxford sent a Troop of Horse; For Why, He knew that learned Body wanted Loyalty. To Cambridge Books he sent, as well discerning, How much that Loyal Body wanted Learning,

The first epigram was quickly answered by a second, which clearly emanated from a defensive Cambridge And wisely different Methods George applies, To govern thus his Universities. To Oxford is dispatcht a Troop of Horse; Since Tories own no Arguments but Force. To Cambridge Ely's learned Books are sent; Since Whigs admit no Force like Argument.25

As Chapter 3 and, to a lesser degree Chapter 4, will demonstrate, such a division of labour and political interest between the products of the two universities was part of the sociology of intellectual life in eighteenth-century England.

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Introduction The Dissenting academies were rather more intellectually daring, and the educational programmes they laid out were correspondingly daunting when compared with the more leisurely approach of the universities. Consider the four-year course of lectures offered at Northampton Academy between 1729 and 1751: in their first year, students studied logic, rhetoric, geography, metaphysics, geometry, and algebra. In the second year they followed courses on trigonometry, conic sections, celestial mechanics, natural and experimental philosophy, and divinity, and they were expected to perform orations. In the third year they studied natural and civil history, anatomy, Jewish antiquities, and divinity; again, (p.9) they performed orations. In the fourth and final year, they received lectures on civil law, mythology and hieroglyphics, English history, the history of Nonconformity, divinity, and, for ordinands, preaching and pastoral care. The presiding genius of Northampton, Philip Doddridge, also began the educationally revolutionary practice of lecturing in English, as well as ensuring that students were well grounded in Scripture by having them read a chapter of the Old Testament in Hebrew in the mornings, which was then translated and ‘expounded’, a system continued with a reading from the Greek New Testament in the evenings. At the Warrington Academy, whose faculty once included the most able of such Dissenting thinkers, Joseph Priestley, the course for lay students was almost as exacting as that for future ministers.26 The combination of science with humanistic education was a major feature of such instruction, as was the concern with those ‘moral’ subjects which opened the academies up to the economics and moral philosophy developed at the Scottish universities, institutions with which the academies had enjoyed long-standing associations since the late seventeenth century.27 In both Scotland and Ireland, much of the impetus for Enlightenment had also emanated from clerical circles.28 The academy at Tewkesbury unexpectedly produced two bishops of the Established Church, Joseph Butler, bishop of Durham and Thomas Seeker, archbishop of Canterbury, both of whom conformed through the influence of Edward Talbot, a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. It was whilst at Tewkesbury that Butler first demonstrated his independence from the newly dominant mode of Newtonian theological apologetic made famous by Samuel Clarke, to whom he wrote critical letters (later published by an admiring Clarke), a correspondence for which the young Seeker quite literally (p.10) played the part of post-boy.29 In this way Dissent played its part in the debate over Newtonianism in the early and mid-eighteenth century, but it is notable that its most able adherent was to conform to the more promising and frequently more comfortable life afforded by the Church of England, the prime motor of England's clerical Enlightenment. Rather than attempt a broad overview of the controversies generated in this culture (the undertaking of a scholarly lifetime), the present study concerns itself with three specific clerical engagements.30 Care was taken when choosing these particular controversies so as to take note of three important areas of dissension: first, the actual width of theological latitude available to clerical Page 6 of 13

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Introduction scholars in intellectual debate; second, the metaphysical systems which underpinned their beliefs; third, the grounds of contention between established clericalism and potentially subversive scepticism. Other themes could have been explored, and other debates analysed, but all three of those selected are peculiarly representative of the clerical culture which predominated in eighteenth-century English intellectual life. Appreciation of these debates demonstrates the religious strength of England's Enlightenment. The study opens with a close reading of the long-standing subscription controversy, which questioned the religious rectitude of requiring clergymen to assent to doctrinal tests in a Church supposedly founded on the assumptions of the sixteenth-century Reformation, one of which was the Protestant right to private judgement. The divines who promoted the cause of Protestant ‘liberty’ were uneasy about the more Catholic conceptions of Christianity which they felt to have long compromised the principles of Protestantism within the Church of England. It was dogmatism, the (p.11) authorization of tradition and history as guarantees of religious truth, which these men resented, and it is chiefly for this reason that they will be described as working according to what John Henry Newman anathematized as the ‘antidogmatic principle’, the creed of the religious ‘liberalism’ which he had always hated.31 Antidogmatism is at least congruent with, and is in many respects a development of, that older tradition within the Restored Church which has become known as ‘latitudinarianism’, and it was such men who promoted many of the principles of a conservative Enlightenment in which reason and experience were praised as important components of religious belief.32 The dilution of antidogmatism in the closing decades of the eighteenth century followed on the defection of some of its younger contingent to the new denomination of Unitarianism, the source of much religious debate in the following century.33 If Christianity suffered from the attentions of such thinkers, it was the doctrine of the Trinity which was gradually sacrificed by some in favour of intellectual clarity and philosophical rather than theological respectability. The second engagement analysed in the present study concerns critiques of Newtonian physico-theology developed both by Lockean divines, notably the Cambridge circle of (p.12) Edmund Law (1703–87) (an important element in the development of antidogmatic theology), and the rather more orthodox theologies of often mystically aligned thinkers, including William Law (1688– 1761), the Hutchinsonians, and John Wesley. Chapters 3–4 offer a challenge to conventional notions of Lockeanism and Newtonianism supposedly combining to form the epistemological and scientific foundations of a wider, European experience of Enlightenment. The reading of the English Enlightenment offered by scholars such as Margaret Jacob is critically examined in these chapters. Chapter 3 on Cambridge critics of the Newtonian apologetic for ‘natural religion’, as this had been developed by Samuel Clarke, argues that intense debates about the metaphysical implications of the new physics occurred in Page 7 of 13

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Introduction circles of thinkers more usually portrayed as the most receptive of its adherents. Chapter 4, concerned with consciously orthodox theologians, demonstrates that, although united in their distaste for much of the rationalistic style of religious apologetic propounded by Clarke and his followers, the likes of William Law, George Home, and John Wesley remained deeply divided amongst themselves about the proper means of defending specifically Christian truths in an age of Enlightenment. The centrality of John Locke to all of these debates incidentally confirms Pocock's suspicion that it is as a philosophical and theological writer, rather than as a political thinker, that he dominated eighteenth-century English speculation.34 Though Locke's ideas were often largely repudiated by champions of mysticism and religious orthodoxy, they were nevertheless carried forward by such admirers as Edmund Law, who declared in his important 1777 edition of Locke's works that ‘they have stood the test of time, and their peculiar tendency to enlarge and improve the mind must continue while a regard to virtue, or religion, science or common sense remains amongst us’.35 Lauding (p.13) Locke as a Christian philosopher, Law praised the Essay as a work which ‘made our author's name immortal, and which does honour to our country’, adding for good measure that ‘His writings are now well known, and valued, and will last as long as the English language.’36 It is the clergy of the Church of England, both the antidogmatic and the resolutely ‘Orthodox’, who provide most of the figures in this study, not least because, despite the intellectual liveliness of Dissenting ministers and teachers, they dominated debates over religion in eighteenth-century England.37 Within this controversial culture one figure dictated much of the intellectual agenda at mid-century, and the present study concludes, therefore, with a wide-ranging discussion of the crucial importance of William Warburton (1698–1779), who absorbed a great many of the discursive currents of his age. Warburton defended Scripture against deists and freethinkers and frequently alienated clerical opinion by the extremity of his own exegesis, as well as by his attacks on what he saw as the feeble assaults of Hume on Christian miracles. Such deliberate emphasis on a neglected and controversial figure requires an initial defence. In an influential article, John Dunn argued that the history of philosophy, like the history of science, ‘must needs be Whig as to subject-matter, just as, like all history, it must be Tory as to truth’.38 This injunction has not been so well followed in the historiography of philosophy (and, a fortiori, in that of the theology which Whiggish historians frequently discount) as it has been in that of the natural sciences. Consider the relative reputations of Hume, and William Warburton, the ‘Tory’ sceptic and the (p.14) Whig bishop.39 Hume's career has served to illustrate the claims of Enlightenment champions, writers whose teleological sense of Hume's importance and current philosophical reputation has tended to encourage a tendentious enthusiasm for his supposed intellectual superiority in eighteenth-century Britain.40 In the attempt to substitute ‘Tory’ description for ‘Whig’ prescription, a reordering of the philosophical and Page 8 of 13

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Introduction theological priorities of the period is demanded of the modern historian, so that the ‘Whig’ question of Hume's modern reputation may be asked within the ‘Tory’ realities of eighteenth-century speculation. Renewed (and corrective) emphasis on the controversial figure of Warburton, shedding light on many of the debates of the mid-eighteenth century, is intended to serve the interests of such contextualization. Thus, although the eighteenth century was, in many ways, the century of Newton, Locke, and Hume, it also belonged to William Law, Warburton, and Daniel Waterland (1683–1740), a major apologist for Christian orthodoxy in Cambridge. In order to appreciate properly the contribution of the former trinity of thinkers, it is vital to engage with that of the latter three in order to counter a relentlessly secularizing interpretation of ‘Enlightenment’. Since recent studies of the profoundly religious connotations of the emerging science of political economy have shown that the secularization of the English mind had not yet come about in the early and mid-nineteenth century, there is very little sense in assuming that such a process had taken effect in the eighteenth century. Intellectual historians interested in (p.15) secularization will have to look beyond these periods to trace the rise of this phenomenon.41 Historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cannot ignore the deeply religious nature of these periods of English thought, and this is especially true when study is undertaken of the uniquely clerical nature of England's experience of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment.42 Notes:

(1) ‘Scriptural Proof of the Influence of the Holy Spirit on the Understanding’, in Essays On Several Religious Subjects (York, 1789), 53–94, at 54. Cf. I. Milner, An Account of the Life and Character of the Late Rev. Joseph Milner, M.A. (London, 1804); F. K. Brown, Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce (Cambridge, 1961). (2) The immediate object of his scorn was a work by William Ludlam, a Cambridge clergyman and mathematician: Two Essays on Justification and the Influence of the Holy Spirit (London, 1788). (3) Essay, ‘Epistle’, p. 9. (4) (Birmingham, 1782), ii. 467. (5) Essay, ‘Epistle’, p. 11. (6) Priestley, History of Corruptions, i. 140. (7) Pocock, ‘Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in England’, in R. Ajello, E. Contese, and V. Piano (eds.), L'età dei Lumi: Studi

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Introduction storici sul settecento europeo in onore di Franco Venturi (Naples, 1985), i. 523– 62, at 553–4. (8) Milner, Essays, 54; id., Gibbon's Account of Christianity Considered: Together with some Strictures on Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (York, 1781). On Milncr's work, see J. D. Walsh, ‘Joseph Milner's Evangelical Church History’, JEH 10 (1959), 174–87. (9) Cf. J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge, 1992); P. Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1990); E. J. Hundert, The Enlightenment's Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge, 1994); M. Goldic, ‘Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism’, in N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993), 209–31; L. E. Klein, ‘Shaftesbury, Politeness and the Politics of Religion’ in Phillipson and Skinner, Political Discourse, 283–301; Klein, Shafiesbury and the Culture of Politics: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994). (10) Pocock, ‘Clergy and Commerce’; id., ‘Post-Puritan England and the Problem of the Enlightenment’, in P. Zagorin (ed.), Culture and Politics From Puritanism to the Enlightenment (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980), 91–112. For a similar view, see S. Gilley, ‘Christianity and Enlightenment’, History of European Ideas, 1 (1981), 103–12. (11) Cf. J. Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England, 1660–1750 (London, 1976), and M. C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London, 1981). (12) C. Hill, Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution (London, 1980), 87 and passim; Jacob, Henry Stubbe, Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1981). (13) The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (Hassocks, 1976); ‘Newtonianism and the Origins of the Enlightenment: A Reassessment’, ECS 11 (1977–8), 1–25; ‘The Crisis of the European Mind: Hazard Revisited’, in Jacob and P. Mack (eds.), Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of H. G. Koenigsberger (Cambridge, 1987), 251–71. (14) Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment; Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken. Champion's central pro-Enlightenment argument, namely that English ‘deism’ inspired the French High Enlightenment, is not new: for a similar view, see F. Venturi, ‘The European Enlightenment’, in Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a Cosmopolitan Century, Eng. trans. (London, 1972), at pp. 5–9.

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Introduction (15) Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York, 1991), 19, 224. (16) Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London, 1973); Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York, 1967–70). (17) Porter, ‘The Enlightenment in England’ in Porter and M. Teich (eds.), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1981), 1–18; Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven, 1990). (18) ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (Oxford, 1981), 1–24. (19) R. Chartier, ‘Student Populations in the Eighteenth Century’, BJECS 2 (1979), 150–62. (20) J. Gascoigne, ‘Church and State Allied: The Failure of Parliamentary Reform of the Universities, 1688–1800’ in A. L. Beier, D. Cannadine, and J. M. Rosenheim (eds.), The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989), 401–29. (21) The best study of these institutions remains H. McLachlan, English Education under the Test Acts: Being The History Of The Non-Conformist Academies 1662–1820 (Manchester, 1931). (22) Essay, ‘Epistle’, p. 7. (23) J. W. Yolton, ‘Schoolmen, Logic and Philosophy’ in L. G. Mitchell and L. S. Sutherland (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford, v. The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1986), 565–91; W. S. Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton, 1971), 42–60, 75–82, 441–47, 695–717. (24) J. Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1989). (25) The epigrams were collected by a Cambridge educated antiquarian, William Cole, and are to be found in BM Add. MS 5832, fo. 147. (26) McLachlan, English Education under the Test Acts, 147, 21, 146, 211. (27) Ibid. 30–33. (28) R. B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1985); M. Goldie, ‘The Scottish Catholic Enlightenment’, JBS 30 (1991), 20–62; D. Berman, ‘The Irish CounterEnlightenment’ in R. Kearney (ed.), The Irish Mind: Exploring Intellectual Traditions (Dublin, 1985), 119–40.

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Introduction (29) McLachlan, English Education, 127–31; The Autobiography of Thomas Seeker, ed. J. S. Macauley and R. W. Greaves (Lawrence, Kan., 1988), 4–9. (30) For a useful study of another long-standing theological controversy in this period, that concerned with cschatology, see P. C. Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England (Cambridge, 1994). Analogous discussion is to be found in B. W. Young, ‘“The Soul-Sleeping System”: Politics and Heresy in EighteenthCentury England’, JEH 45 (1994), 64–81. (31) Newman, Apologia pro vita sua, ed. M. J. Svaglic (Oxford, 1967), 54; id., The Arians of the Fourth Century (Oxford, 1833), 421. For discussion, see R. Pattison, The Great Dissent: John Henry Newman and the Liberal Heresy (New York, 1991), and S. Thomas, Newman and Heresy: The Anglican Years (Cambridge, 1991). On the pre-Tractarian identity of Anglican ‘orthodoxy’, see P. B. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge, 1994). (32) For sceptical analysis of the early history of the term ‘latitudinarianism’, see J. Spurr, ‘“Latitudinarianism” and the Restoration Church’, HJ 31 (1988), 61–82. (33) On the nature of this defection, see M. Fitzpatrick, ‘Latitudinarianism at the Parting of the Ways: A Suggestion’, in J. Walsh, C. Haydon, and S. Taylor (eds.), The Church of England, c.1689-c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge, 1993), 209–27. For an understanding of Unitarian radicalism, see R. E. Richey, ‘The Origins of British Radicalism: The Changing Rationale for Dissent’, ECS 7 (1973–4), 179–92, and J. Seed, ‘Gentlemen Dissenters: The Social and Political Meanings of Rational Dissent in the 1770s and 1780s’, HJ 28 (1985), 299–325. On Unitarian continuities, R. K. Webb, ‘The Faith of Nineteenth-Century Unitarians: A Curious Incident’, in R. J. Helmstadter and B. Lightman (eds.), Victorian Faith in Crisis: Essays on Continuity and Change in Nineteenth-Century Religious Belief (London, 1990), 126–49. (34) Pocock, ‘The Myth of John Locke and the Obsession with Liberalism’, in Pocock and R. Ashcraft, John Locke: Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, 10 December 1977 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980), 3–24, at 21. (35) Law, ‘Introduction’, to The Works of John Locke (London, 1777), vol. i, pp. iixiii, at p. viii. (36) Id., ‘The Life of the Author’, Ibid., pp. xv-xxviii, at pp. xxiii, xxviii. (37) For a study which fruitfully combines discussion of Dissent with analysis of the established Church in an appraisal of late 17th- and 18th-cent. thought, see I. Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, i. From Whichcote to Wesley (Cambridge, 1991). For other appreciations, see D. Davie, ‘Enlightenment and Christian Dissent’ in Page 12 of 13

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Introduction Dissentient Voice: The Ward-Philips Lectures for 1980 and Some Related Pieces (Notre Dame, La., 1982), 1–64, and many contributions by scholars in the area, often emphasizing the ‘Rational Dissent’ of the later 18th cent., contributed to the journal Enlightenment and Dissent (formerly the Price-Priestley Newsletter). (38) ‘The Identity of the History of Ideas’, Philosophy, 43 (1968), 85–104, at 98. (39) It was long a tradition in English historical writing to describe Hume as a Tory, although Dr Johnson famously claimed that he was one only by chance: cf. A. Quinton, The Politics of Imperfection: The Religious and Secular Traditions of Conservative Thought in England from Hooker to Oakeshott (London, 1978), 45– 51. It is, however, more accurate to describe Hume as a proponent of ‘scientific Whiggism’, on which see D. Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1975), ch. 5, and C. Kidd, Subverting Scotland's Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689-c.1830 (Cambridge, 1993), 8– 9, 108, 180, 211–13. (40) See e.g. his treatment as philosopher-hero, in Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume (2nd edn., Oxford, 1980), and, more ambivalently, J. Christensen, Practising Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary Career (Madison, 1987). (41) B. Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford, 1988); A. M. C. Waterman, Revolution, Economics and Religion: Christian Political Economy, 1793–1833 (Cambridge, 1991); D. Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge, 1996). On the broader question, the classic study remains O. Chad wick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1975). (42) On the historiography of this problem, see B. W. Young, ‘Knock-Kneed Giants: Victorian Representations of Eighteenth-Century Thought’ in J. Garnett and C. Matthew (eds.), Revival and Religion since 1700: Essays for John Walsh (London, 1993), 79–93.

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Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition

Religion and Enlightenment in EighteenthCentury England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke B. W. Young

Print publication date: 1998 Print ISBN-13: 9780198269427 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269427.001.0001

Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition CATHERINE OSBORNE

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269427.003.0002

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the emergence of the so-called enlightened ecclesiastics and the development of an anti-dogmatic tradition in England during the 1700s. These developments resulted in the division of the Church of England during this period. The rational theology of progress based on a sola scriptura had condemned orthodox dependence on tradition and its appeal was to a simplified faith free from metaphysical distinction. Contentious issues were left to the understanding of individual believers because the anti-dogmatists believed that to enforce adherence to articles of faith is to encourage persecution, bigotry, and unproductive bickering. Keywords:   ecclesiastics, anti-dogmatic tradition, England, Church of England, faith, religion

The Church of England of the 1700s was a divided body, and its divisions had their political analogues in an age of increasing partisanship. The nature of orthodoxy was disputed by many groups: displaced Nonjurors, separated from the Church by their refusal to take oaths to the monarch since the deposition of James II, made frequent claims to be the upholders of a pure Christian truth, whilst high-flying Tory divines, led by the likes of Francis Atterbury and Henry Sacheverell, attacked Whigs in politics and latitudinarians in the Church.1 The Whig clergy were themselves often divided over doctrine and discipline: controversy was endemic to Anglicanism in this period.2

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Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition If what Locke and other guides to England’s clerical Enlightenment called ‘this our knowing age’ looked forward in the enterprise of redrawing the map of knowledge, it also looked back to the allegedly unfinished work of the Reformers, desiring ‘farther Reformation’ in the purification (p.20) of Christianity from what was routinely castigated as the intellectually compromising legacy of Roman Catholic ‘superstition’.3 A Protestant Enlightenment demanded rights of freedom of enquiry into philosophical and theological questions, and of the ability to act on the beliefs confirmed or created by such enquiries within a Christian framework. These vital questions resulted both from the practical experience of the wars of religion which consumed so much of the older religious order in seventeenth-century Europe, and from the intellectual excitement generated by new developments in natural philosophy and metaphysics.4 It is with the group seeking further Reformation within the Church of England that the greater part of this chapter is concerned, since they, more than any other group, gave voice to the ecclesiology of a clerical Enlightenment in England, denouncing ‘superstition’ in favour of a rationalized Protestantism. The analytical narrative of events offered in this chapter will also serve as a means to introduce many of the dramatis personae who will appear in later chapters, as well as delineating ‘parties’ of opinion, some clearly belonging to a Lockean Enlightenment of antidogmatism and religious toleration, others to a championing of self-conscious orthodoxy.5 It will be further possible to discern within these groups the distinction between the leading thinkers and the journeymen of England’s Enlightenment, since for every theorist there was a myriad of pen-pushers. The ascription of tradition to any mode of thought is notoriously difficult to substantiate, not least when that (p.21) tradition is one largely defined by its enemies.6 In taking the expression ‘anti-dogmatic’ from John Henry Newman in order to describe one distinctive and prevalent style in eighteenth-century English religious and theological thought (a style against which Newman famously reacted), the argument of this chapter is based on just such an ascription.7 None the less, it can be more firmly justified on the grounds that such a tradition recognized itself in the mid-eighteenth century, prior to its eventual break-up in the early 1770s over the question of enforced subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. This tradition of religious liberalism, and its dissolution, have been described by Martin Fitzpatrick as late ‘latitudinarianism’.8 Antidogmatism needs a dogma against which to react, and in the eighteenth century this could be readily found in the issue of the subscription to such manmade formulas as the Athanasian Creed and the Thirty-Nine Articles enforced on clergymen when taking orders, and on undergraduates either on taking their degree (at Cambridge) or in order to matriculate (at Oxford). Although subscription consolidated developments from seventeenth-century thinking, it became an issue in English Enlightenment thought precisely because it Page 2 of 24

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Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition circumvented the exercise of freedom of enquiry among Protestant divines, especially since it precluded subscribers from holding advanced opinions on matters covered by the terms of the Articles. It is to the questions attendant on the priestly policing of dogmatic authority that the following (p.22) discussion will be largely devoted, in the course of which it will become apparent that eighteenth-century antidogmatism was riven from its very inception between those, such as Newton’s theological apologist Samuel Clarke, whose opposition to Trinitarian orthodoxy rapidly turned into a dogmatic plea for the superiority of Arianism, and those Lockean elements of the clerisy who preferred a more open-ended and flexible understanding of ‘Christianity’. This Lockean group, which came to be centred on the Cambridge divine Edmund Law, also split eventually as its younger proponents seceded to a new denomination, Unitarianism.9 Both strands had common origins, central to which was the antidogmatism of Chillingworth and Locke. In England, therefore, as in Europe as a whole, much of what is thought of as distinctively ‘enlightened’ in discussion of religion and its place in society had its origins in the religious controversies of the mid-seventeenth century.10 As has already been suggested, the broadest lineaments of this tradition are considerably older, and may be traced to the very principles of the Reformation itself. As Jaroslav Pelikan has contended, when describing the radicalism of the Reformation: ‘After four centuries of saying, in the well-known formula of the English divine, William Chillingworth, "the Bible only is the religion of Protestants", Protestants have, in this principle, nothing less than a full-blown tradition.’11 Such, at root, is the sola scriptura basis of eighteenth-century antidogmatism, a position whose connection with later, Locke-inspired principles of religious freedom could also be traced back to its locus classicus in William Chillingworth’s The Religion of Protestants (1638). (p.23) Chillingworth had presented his minimal version of the Church of England’s creed in seductively simple terms, referring to the Scriptures as ‘the Pillars and supporters of Christian liberty’.12 ‘Christian liberty’ was the rallying cry of an antidogmatic tradition which took the form of a consciously Erasmian plea for the right of private judgement to prevail over the rigidity of dogmatic divines, a position effectively voiced by Erasmus’s celebrated self-defence in the Praise of Folly: Now for the charge of biting sarcasm. My answer is that the intelligent have always enjoyed freedom to exercise their wit on the common life of man, and with impunity, provided that they kept their liberty within reasonable limits. This makes me marvel all the more at the sensitivity of present-day ears which can bear to hear practically nothing but honorific titles. Moreover, you can find a good many people whose religious sense is so distorted that they find the most serious blasphemies against Christ more bearable than the slightest joke on pope or prince, especially if it touches their daily bread.13 Page 3 of 24

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Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition Erasmus’s pious concern with the clerical hypocrisies of his age ended with a familiar theme of antidogmatism, the claim that, for too many clergymen, material self-interest over-ruled true devotion. This was to prove a strong conceit in the language of the subscription debate as this developed within the Church of England between the 1710s and the 1780s, and it was no accident that one of the strongest critics of clerical subscription, Francis Blackburne, was also a promoter of Erasmianism in his polemical engagement with the supposedly illiberal religious and political principles of Roman Catholicism.14 Together with freethinkers and deists, antidogmatic writers such as Blackburne considered their (p.24) critique of clerical dogmatism to be an Erasmian engagement against the twin evils of Erastianism and ‘Priestcraft’, which left antidogmatists open to the accusation, sometimes made by High Churchmen, that they were the often unwitting allies of antichristian forces.15 Such, in admittedly simplified terms, was the broad area of contention between antidogmatists and dogmatists.

I The restoration of a resolutely royalist and dogmatic Church of England in 1662 was not conducive to the promulgation of a piously minimalist faith; it was not until the reaction against James II’s Catholicizing policies in the 1680s that the politico-theology of latitudinarianism was able to emerge, preparing the way for some sort of Chillingworthian revival.16 This brand of politico-theology reached its apogee early in a work by an admirer of Chillingworth, John Locke, whose A Letter Concerning Toleration, which appeared in 1689, may be considered as the founding-text of the more tolerant element in the eighteenth-century antidogmatic tradition.17 For Locke, toleration was the ‘chief Characteristical Mark of the True Church’, the natural conclusion of an individualization of the faith encapsulated in his claim that ‘every one is (p.25) Orthodox to himself.18 For Locke, religion exercised a strong moral force; forms of worship, ecclesiology and credal formulas were all subsidiary to this pious regulation of virtue. A ‘burning Zeal’ for mere externals was all too often literal, the credal adjunct of ‘Fire and Faggot’.19 The ‘Care of Souls’ was not primarily a duty of the magistrate, since God had given no command to any person outside of Scripture about the nature of Christian authority. It was not to be expected, therefore, that Christians should give up their spiritual welfare to anyone besides themselves; to do so would be to contradict their Protestant duty in seeking their own road to salvation. Religion was true and saving only when it acted as ‘the inward Perswasion of the mind’: punishment was inappropriate, since it could have no effect on thought; assent could not be enforced.20 The observable fact that men worshipped in communities of belief obviously affected Locke’s individualistic case, a difficulty which he bypassed by treating churches as personae fictae, so that individualized imperatives could still be Page 4 of 24

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Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition made in this larger world. The sceptical principle he had applied to the individual was extended to these bodies, ‘For every Church is orthodox to it self; to others, Erroneous or Heretical.’21 Only God was capable of judging between these claims and counter-claims. Things indifferent in worship (adiaphora) were just that; merely human authority, priestly or otherwise, could give them no necessary part in the scheme of things. The civil magistrate had no authority to discountenance such adiaphora: indeed, the law ought not to halt even the sacrifice of a calf as a religious rite, since the ability to do so might, in time, be turned against the rights (and rites) of perceived orthodoxy.22 This plea for toleration faced a major problem: it followed from an interpretation of Christian doctrine which was (p.26) necessarily at variance with established ecclesiological views of order as enshrined in articles of faith and scholarly consensus, Locke’s own attempt at mapping out a ‘reasonable’ Christianity on the single and fundamental concept of an acceptance of Christ as ‘the Messiah’ had provoked attacks from all quarters of the Anglican communion.23 He was held to be a Socinian, doctrinally committed to the thorough humanization of Jesus. Christ was reduced by him to what seems to be the status of an exalted and inspired prophet, and Locke’s thought gives evidence of a concomitant distancing from orthodox Trinitarianism and an apparent denigration of the status of the Holy Ghost.24 Critical of systems of divinity, Locke had turned to ‘the sole Reading of the Scripture (to which they all appeal) for the understanding the Christian Religion’. In The Reasonableness of Christianity, published in 1695, the pacific ecclesiological principles of the Letter Concerning Toleration were accordingly applied to a basic formulation of a faith predicated on the essential belief that Jesus was the Messiah, a title synonymous with being the ‘Son of God’, the denomination given him by John the Baptist and the Apostles. This Messiahship had a threefold declaration in the form of miracles, phrases signifying his corning in the Old Testament, and the ‘plain and direct words’ declared in the New Testament.25 The essential simplicity of the Gospel had been further exemplified in Jesus’s choice of Apostles: simple, poor, and illiterate men, whose condition led them to preach his Messiahship in the simplest and most comprehensible of (p.27) ways. It was for this pragmatic reason, Locke suggested, that the learned Paul was not called upon to preach until after Christ’s death. Locke argued that subsequent systematizers could not improve on this pristine religion, and that their work could in no way alter what God had revealed, namely that Christianity was a way of justifying and bearing faith, and that to prepare for its rewards required repentance on behalf of its followers, from which good works followed.26 Locke’s implied proposals were for a fairly radical Protestantism, but one not immediately reducible to mere Socinianism. He was certainly friendly with and sympathetic towards such Socinians as Thomas Firmin and his associates in the Page 5 of 24

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Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition complex world of late seventeenth-century Anglodutch religious thought, but he had no time at all for those, such as John Toland, who had seen in his theological pronouncements the high road to a Christianity purged of mystery and Trinitarian dogma.27 None the less, both the Letters Concerning Toleration and the Reasonableness of Christianity were attacked as leading to heresy and atheism. On the one hand, Jonas Proast tilted against toleration from the standpoint of an emerging High Church clericalism, while on the other, John Edwards, an embittered, heresy-hunting Anglican Calvinist, denounced the Reasonableness of Christianity as poisonous Socinianism, the enemy of true revelation and of ecclesiastical organization.28 In replying to Proast, Locke reaffirmed his commitment to tolerant doctrinal minimalism, and, in answering Edwards, he declared that his aim had been to have the faith stand on its central principles, and not to have advanced the cause (p.28) of other, merely manmade creeds, be they Socinian or otherwise.29

II Less radical variants of Locke’s ideas were developed in the 1690s and 1700s by latitudiniarian divines, notably John Tillotson, archbishop of Canterbury and Gilbert Burnet, the bishop of Salisbury. Tillotson had sermonized on the sola scriptura foundations of Protestantism, maintaining that to go beyond them was to pervert the Gospel and effectively to preach another. Taking as his text Galatians 1: 8, 9—‘But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. As we said before, so say I now again, If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed’—Tillotson denied the possibility of infallibility being ascribed to dogmatic additions for which there had never been any authority; St Paul’s words anathematized all those who claimed otherwise. For Tillotson, preaching in the wake of James II’s deposition, the Roman Catholic religion was a ready example of such a supposedly blaspheming body.30 Burnet, the foremost apologist for the Reformation in Williamite England, attacked both Roman Catholicism and Calvinism, lambasting subscription as ‘a great Imposition’ in requiring assent to such dark notions as original sin and (p. 29) predestination to salvation or damnation.31 His comprehensive Anglicanism led Burnet to expound and justify the Thirty-Nine Articles in a treatise in 1699. As a theologian who had emerged from the Scottish tradition of Protestant theological disputation he felt the incongruity of an Arminian Church maintaining Calvinist articles; as a theologian of European standing and repute, he felt himself obliged to answer an anonymous German divine on the problem of a Reformed Church squabbling over such indifferent things as its forms of worship and government. Accepting that Chillingworth’s great work was ‘justly reckoned the best book that had been writ in our language’, Burnet took that work as his benchmark, insisting that the Reformers were right to promote one ‘Fundamental Article’, namely ‘That the whole Doctrines of the Christian Page 6 of 24

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Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition Religion are contained in the Scripture, and that therefore we are to admit no Article as part of it till it is proved from Scripture’.32 Burnet argued that, since every man’s beliefs were the results of his reasoning and the exercise of his conscience, then the codification of beliefs into sanctioned systems by princes or legislatures was but an administrative adjunct of such a commitment to the Protestant understanding of religious belief He effectively liberalized both the meaning and the tone of the Articles by presenting them as individual systems, both in intention and result, since the clergy subscribed to them in different ‘Literal and Grammatical Senses’, so that such latitude allowed even directly contrary subscriptions to be made ‘with a good Conscience, and without any Equivocation’. This interpretative liberty was held to agree with the purity of the Anglican faith, ‘And this seems sufficient to explain the Title of the Articles, and the Subscriptions that were required of the Clergy to them.’33 As was consistent with his Chillingworthian convictions in expounding the Articles, Burnet devoted a good deal of space to Article 6, on the sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for (p.30) salvation, for he held, in common with Tillotson, that to impose doctrines beyond the warrant of Scripture was to indulge a spiritual tyranny.34 As a corollary of this, he examined Article 8 on the three creeds rather briskly, accepting the Nicene Creed’s formulations on the Trinity, while registering his unease with its damnatory clauses for those who rejected its doctrinal contents. He denied the authenticity of the Apostles’ Creed, as well as the Athanasian Creed.35 Burnet’s exposition of the Articles was designed to avoid controversy; it was in the nature of that polemical age, however, that it would become enmeshed in it, as dogmatic theologians and High Churchmen proved quick to condemn his work. Jonathan Edwards, principal of Jesus College and vice-chancellor of Oxford University, suspected Burnet of the heresy of Nestorianism, a heresy whose proponent, Nestorius, had been famed for obliqueness in interpreting doctrine: Nestorius undermined the faith from a position of ecclesiastical authority; Burnet, argued Edwards, did the same. Focusing his criticism on Burnet’s exposition of Article 2, Edwards agreed with the charge made against Burnet’s work by the Lower House of Convocation, ‘That it was so far from being a just Exposition, that…it contain’d many things contrary to the Articles themselves and other receiv’d doctrines of the Church of England’.36 Burnet’s unique brand of latitudinarianism, developed in Scotland and polished through his admiring exchanges with Continental divines, was anathema to English High Churchmen; his exposition was accordingly excoriated. In an answer to his critics, Burnet protested that his book had been otherwise well received, and that only the spite of (p.31) orthodox ultras could account for his savaging by them. Such squabbling, he continued, hurt the cause of true religion; the actions of his ultra enemies had weakened the unity of the Church of England, thereby opening the way to the assaults of Roman Catholics and Page 7 of 24

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Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition sceptics.37 Despite this controversial engagement, Burnet’s vigorous eirenicism paved the way for the steady progress of antidogmatism, although, naturally, it did not go uncontested. In his satirical pamphlet against the abolition of Christianity, published in 1717 (but written in 1712), Jonathan Swift, a loyal Churchman, demonstrated that the Church had fallen prey to partisanship and factionalism. He regretted the corrupt instincts of fallen man, which had compromised the faith to an appalling degree; crisis, Swift suggested, was implicit in any form of organized Christianity.38 That such a work could have been conceived at this time confirms that the ecclesiastical equivalent of the ‘peace of the Augustans’ is at least as debatable as that notion has proved to be in literary history.39 Indeed, Swift’s work anticipated one of the major crises of the eighteenth-century Church, the Bangorian Controversy, which originated in the ultra-latitudinarian Benjamin Hoadly’s total separation of the invisible Kingdom of Christ (conventionally understood by more orthodox clergy as being properly represented by the Church) from the temporal kingdoms of earthly states.40 Although Hoadly was (p.32) widely seen as propounding an extreme instance of the antidogmatic case, his orthodox respondents supplied much of the argumentation that would be taken up by their heirs in later controversies over subscription. It is against this background that the first, dogmatically inspired, round of the subscription debate has to be understood. For any understanding of Hoadly’s role in the debate one must also take into consideration the intimate connections between politics and ecclesiology, as orthodox theologians gradually released themselves from loyalism to the Stuart cause, whilst ‘latitudinarians’ were widely perceived to be the immediate ecclesiastical beneficiaries of the Williamite settlement in Church and State. Hoadly’s ambitions for clerical preferment involved conspicuous politicking which was judged by many to be excessive even for his times, and it is to this weakness in his character that an anonymous Nonjuror alluded in a savage poem contrasting Hoadly’s double-dealing attempts on the see of Durham with the honesty of a Jacobite, Stoppard, executed for attempting to assassinate George I in 1717. The imagery for this poem, which is to be found in the papers of the Nonjuror Thomas Brett in the Bodleian Library, is drawn from Judges 3, the political tale of Ehud, a successful tyrannicide who kills a fat king, Eglon, and from which book Hoadly would have read the lesson on 17 March that year: Sincerity makes all our Actions Good Thus Hoadly Preach’t & Stoppard understood. Hoadly’s Sincerity Durham’s words Did bend but Stoppard’s did at Tyburn End. Had this young Ehud but been less Sincere & heard the Lessons of the Day with Care Well might he have sent Eglon to his place & Israel freed from Thraldom & Disgrace Page 8 of 24

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Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition but if to dye for Conscience be a Sign of true Sincerity of heart & mind Thus none can doubt but Stoppards was Sincere or if there be a heaven that Stoppards there whilst Hoadly missing Durham who can tell may yet take Tyburn in his way to hell.41

(p.33) Such sharp dissension keenly demonstrates how extreme was the gulf between the ultra-orthodoxy of the Nonjurors, with their political Jacobitism, and the near-heterodoxy of an ultra-latitudinarian such as Hoadly, who was widely held, with good reason, to be a Whig opportunist and a blatant clerical careerist.

III Adoption of antidogmatic assumptions carried ever-present danger of being accused of heresy by equally self-conscious ‘orthodox’ theologians. Heresy was certainly to be found among antidogmatic thinkers, and this was especially true on the question of the Trinity, leading some to Arian and others to Socinian positions. Arianism, the belief that Christ was not of one being with God, but that he had been created by God, and hence was of only semi-divine status, was one of the earliest and most potent of anti-Trinitarian heresies. Isaac Newton’s theology, largely held back from the public by a love of secrecy and a fear of ecclesiastical censure, was unequivocally Arian.42 It was, moreover, the maladroit proclamation of his own, Newton-inspired propensity to Arianism which ultimately compromised the clerical career of Samuel Clarke, a favourite of Queen Caroline, George II’s theologically aware consort, and a man whose chief role in life was aptly described by Leslie Stephen as that of acting as Newton’s ‘theological lieutenant’.43 In The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity (1712), following his reading of the words of Christ and the Apostles, Clarke adumbrated a rejection of the Nicene orthodoxies concerning the Trinity, on the grounds that these had been merely human formulations of divine mysteries. Challenging a complex and difficult Trinitarian (p.34) formulation which had led to such errors as Tritheism, Sabellianism, and Socinianism, Clarke was widely interpreted as having quietly promoted the Arian cause, opposing the ‘mystery’ invoked by Trinitarians when speaking ‘unintelligibly’ in their defences of perceived orthodoxy. To deny his argument was, he stated in tones of presumed rectitude, to give way to the spirit of ‘Popery’, jettisoning the Protestant right to private judgement. Clarke’s emphatic arguments, therefore, effectively transformed the accents of eirenic antidogmatism into a defence of Arian doctrine.44 It became impossible for Clarke to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles (which had to be undertaken by clergymen when accepting Church preferment), since they enjoined adherence to Nicene and Athanasian Trinitarianism. Clarke had, therefore, examined the principal passages of the liturgy as they related to the Trinity, a doctrine which he subsequently felt obliged to reject. Naturally, the clergy in the Lower House of Convocation, which had assumed the character of Page 9 of 24

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Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition a doctrinally obsessive instrument of the High Church penchant for heresyhunting, were keen to condemn Clarke’s contentions, complaining in June 1714 that his was a subtle heresy which subverted the doctrine of the Church of England as expressed both in its Articles and in the Book of Common Prayer. The bishops of the Upper House fell in line with the findings of the Lower House on this occasion, pressing Clarke to an undertaking never again to preach or write on the Trinity; even this was not enough in itself for the ordinary clergy, who demanded a complete recantation on Clarke’s part.45 Their demand, however, went largely (p.35) unheeded; Clarke and his followers, notably William Whiston, Newton’s successor in the Lucasian chair at Cambridge, continued to fulminate against the official teaching of the Church on the increasingly disputed question of the Trinity.46 A consciously orthodox reply to Clarke was produced by Daniel Waterland, master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, a man perceived by various nineteenth-century commentators as one of the few great theologians to have worked in the eighteenth century.47 The antiquarian William Cole, a Cambridge contemporary of Waterland, described him as a ‘most worthy good man’, and he regretted that a bishopric had not come his friend’s way, noting that ‘his Church Notions did not exactly square with the fashionable Opinions’, an oblique commentary on the perceived disparity between those who enjoyed preferment and those individuals of genuine worth in the Hanoverian Church who never quite achieved what their contemporaries often felt to be their due.48 However that may be, Waterland’s counter to the Arian attack on the creeds took the form of his favoured style of apologetic, the appeal to history and tradition, reverting to a defence of the Athanasian Creed in an attempt to substantiate the claims of Trinitarian orthodoxy against the posited scripturalism of his Arian opponents. His decision to write a treatise in English on a matter which involved the close discussion of Latin and Greek texts had two levels of significance: it both simplified a complex scholarly procedure, thereby placing it within the understanding of a large audience, and also, following this, it indicated the importance of the subject: Waterland had no intention of allowing Arianism to spread to the less educated in society. Orthodoxy demanded a readable and simple defence, such was his fear of the attractions of Arian secession in a period when deists and (p.36) freethinkers were pouring scorn on the intricacies of revealed religion: the truth of the creed was to be established, and ‘For these Reasons, I presumed, an English Treatise might be most proper and Seasonable.’ His attack over, Waterland proceeded to develop an historical case, dating the composition of the Athanasian Creed to Gaul between 426 and 430, and attributing its authorship to Hilary of Aries, a writer who had thus provided a good summation of the orthodox champion Athanasius’s stand at the Council of Nicaea. Orthodoxy was thus vindicated historically against the dangers of Arianism, the Athanasian Creed supported as a shield against doctrinal heresy and the dangers of clerical discord.49 Page 10 of 24

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Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition Waterland had previously set about the destruction of Arianism, which he had earlier denounced in his Vindication of Christ’s Divinity (1719), in a strong indictment of Clarke’s motivation in excusing, as a human infirmity, the permissibility of subscription to the Articles by Arians. In Waterland’s opinion, this was an argument to be challenged by ‘every Honest Man’.50 Arian subscription stood condemned in The Case of Arian-Subscription Consider’d (1721) as a system of wiles and subtleties, the perversion of the plainness and sincerity which Waterland took to be the basis of orthodox subscription. Security in doctrine, morality, and the State itself lay in a strict and honest adherence to the claims of religious sincerity when taking oaths and subscribing to articles of faith. Subscribers had a duty to believe seriously in the truth of those doctrines to which they subscribed, a truth which Waterland objectified as ‘the particular Sense which the Church intended; (so far as That Sense may be known)’. Countering Clarke’s defence of Arian subscription as having been undertaken according to the ‘sense’ of Scripture, Waterland observed that the ‘sense’ of a reading might well (p.37) have taken the form of any number of heretical understandings, including Roman Catholic or Islamic applications of Scripture. Once again, Waterland detected Arian prevarication which contrasted with the moral sincerity of orthodoxy.51 The publication of Newton’s Observations on the Prophecies of Daniel in 1733 opened up the question of Newton’s Arianism beyond mere inference and informed speculation. Waterland was much concerned by this, as is clear in a letter which he sent to another Cambridge don, Zachary Grey: I have been sorry that no one had yet undertaken a just Answer to Sir Isaac Newton’s 14th Chapter relating to the Prophecies of Daniel in which he slily abuses the Athanasians; & Mr. Whiston, in his last about Phlegon, applies & inforces it. That Prophetical Way of managing this Debate on the side of Arianism, is a very silly one, & might be easily retorted. But besides, That, what Sir Isaac has said, is most of it false History. I have scribbled the Margin all the Way: But I have so many other things to do (& besides less able to bear close & intense study) that I cannot, I believe, undertake it myself. I wish somebody else would.52 Grey clearly took the hint, hence Waterland’s gratitude in a later letter: You will be very able to deal with Sir Isaac and I shall be glad to leave him in such good hands. He is a man of such [?] & his Authory is justly celebrated in some things, that his name is of great weight in many matters where he was plainly out of his element, and knew little what he was talking about.53 An aside in a letter to Grey dated 17 March 1736 concerning a now obscure remark made by one Dr Ashton (described by William Cole as having been Page 11 of 24

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Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition ‘remarkable for his Modesty as for his Critical Learning’), is indicative of the level of continuous engagement with this topic which was current among orthodox circles in Cambridge in the 1730s and 1740s: Pray my humble Service to the good Master of Jesus when you see him, x0026; if you think his modesty will not be offended, thank him (p.38) for his very acute & learned Remark upon the old Knight’s Blunder. I never supposed that Sir Isaac was any great Divine, or Ecclesiastical Historian: But that he should be caught tripping up in Calculation, & of failing in his own Art, was what one would not have expected: & it ought to make his Friends blush for exposing his crude Performance. 54 It was the Newtonian legacy of Arianism which had troubled the atmosphere of Waterland’s Cambridge in the 1720s and 1730s, arousing dangerous partisanship.55 A fellow Cambridge don, Arthur Ashley Sykes, launched an Arianorientated tirade against Waterland, while the future bishop of Chichester, Francis Hare, was allegedly committed to the doctrine, as was Thomas Rundle, who thereby lost his promised nomination to the see of Gloucester.56 The persistence of the heresy in a major seat of learning allowed other forms of antidogmatic commitment to develop there, and it was predominantly Cambridge products who carried the antisubscription cause into the middle and later decades of the century. Arian deviations were carried on elsewhere in the country by Dissenters, who had debated the need for subscription to articles of faith by their ministers at Salters’ Hall in 1719:57 the fallout from this meeting was to affect the shape of Dissent for decades, and orthodox Anglicans could have pointed to the dangers of such latitude by instancing the notorious example of Thomas Morgan, an erstwhile Dissenting minister, whose critique of Trinitarianism and enforced subscription to doctrinal tests ultimately led him to the wilder shores of rationalism, ending in his self-description as a ‘Christian deist’, a progress laid out in his controversial (p.39) dialogues The Moral Philosopher (1737).58 It was an Irish Churchman, Robert Clayton, whose open espousal of often eccentrically heretical opinions in An Essay On Spirit (1751) led to a deprivation from his office as bishop of Clogher which he only avoided by his death, who carried Arianism into its later, decidedly extreme stages within the Church.59 Clayton had been emphatic in his rejection of human authority and associated claims for orthodoxy, declaring dismissively that: as to the unthinking Herd, whatever was the Creed of their Father, or Tutor, that will be theirs, from their Infancy, to their Lives End; and accordingly, whatever Country you go into, let that Religion be what it will, the unthinking Part thereof are always the reputed Orthodox.60 Whilst subscription was plainly not to Clayton’s taste, he accepted it as a provisional means to peace, reserving his real animus for the Athanasian Creed, which he dismissed as specious metaphysics, the cause of much profitless Page 12 of 24

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Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition wrangling. For Clayton, Holy Scripture alone was the ‘fountain-head’ of true doctrine.61 Predictably little attention was paid to Clayton’s work in England, where it served only to separate the majority of the Church of England from Arianizing Dissenters.62 Writing to his disciple Richard Hurd in 1751, William Warburton merely observed with an ironic sense of detachment, that: The Bishop of Clogher, or some such heathenish name, in Ireland, has just published a book. It is made up out of the rubbish of old (p.40) Heresies, of a much ranker cast than common Arianism. Jesus Christ is Michael; and the Holy Ghost, Gabriel, &c. This might be Heresy in an English Bishop; but in an Irish, ’tis only a Blunder. But, thank God, our Bishops are all far from making or vending Heresies: though for the good of the Church, they have excellent eyes at spying it out whenever it stalks or lies hid.63 Later, in his Memoirs of the Reign of King George II, Horace Walpole characterized these middle years as having been both bland and religiously indifferent. Eliding his description of the Evangelical Revival with a prescription against religion common to conservative religious sceptics in the eighteenth century, Walpole declared, referring to the Essay on Spirit, that: This little flame was soon extinguished—in fact, there were no religious combustibles in the temper of the times. Popery and Protestantism seemed at a stand. The modes of Christianity were exhausted and could not furnish novelty enough to fix attention. Zinzendorf plied his Moravians with nudities, yet made few enthusiasts. Whitefield and the Methodists made more money than disturbances. His largest group of proselytes lay among servant maids; and his warmest devotees went to Bedlam without going to war.64 Walpole’s irony, with its conscious air of superiority, is, none the less, an accurate if over-neat summation of the condition of the Church at mid-century. The dangerous Old Whig anticlericalism of the House of Commons in the 1730s, whose language reflected the vigorous polemics of The Independent Whig (first published in 1720, alongside the Church debate over Arian subscription), had largely died out with the generation which had reacted against the Tory highflyers. The last efforts of these men against the rights and status of the Church of England petered out after the Lords rejected the Quakers’ Tithe Bill in (p.41) 1736.65 At the opposite end of the political spectrum, Nonjuring Jacobitism had been all but snuffed out as a countervailing force in the wake of the’ 45.66 The conflicts engendered by arguments over the relations of Church and State had quietened down in these middle decades, although dissident voices could still be

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Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition heard on occasion, echoing the fears of ‘priestcraft’ and other such anticlerical bugbears throughout the century.67 Indeed, in the wake of the Arian crisis and altercations with freethinkers, something like self-contentment stole over the apologists for Anglicanism. Doctrine was not so frequently debated: to read the theological literature produced between the 1730s and 1750s is, excepting the polemic over early Methodism, to experience a superficial, but restful, feeling of consensus. The issue of subscription seemed suddenly less urgent; the last great orthodox defence had been made in 1725 by John Conybeare, a future bishop of Bristol.68 Although it was papered over by temporizing compromise, the contest between dogmatic orthodoxy and antidogmatism continued, albeit in subdued forms. The ham-fisted attempts of William Warburton to develop an Erastian apology for a State Church in the 1730s in The Alliance Between Church and State may have won him little support from the clergy, but, while it expressed the views of many laymen, it did not inspire a polemical debate of any mag nitude.69 This was, however, a temporary lull, and the second round of the subscription debate in the late 1760s and early 1770s, once (p.42) again launched from Cambridge, was to have far more damaging consequences for the Church of England than the first round, from which it had developed.70 The leaders of the second round of the controversy, Edmund Law and Francis Blackburne, were idealists, theological reformers who looked forward to the ultimate purification of religion from the corruptions it had acquired over time.71 Such a disposition required as apologetic an ecclesiastical historiography, and this had been provided by John Jortin, a former fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge who was to become a hero of the Law circle, although, somewhat ironically, he was to be criticized in the 1790s by one of its younger members, John Disney, for having defended subscription.72 Jortin’s Remarks on Ecclesiastical History began to appear in 1751; its last two volumes were published in 1773, three years after Jortin’s death. According to Jortin, the original principles of Christianity were plain and simple, and calculated for general utility; they were corrupted into a ‘bulky system’ by Jews, Greek philosophers and the ‘Pomp and Ceremony of Paganism’. Zeal for simplicity led him to echo Burnet, ‘To compel any one to swear that he will never alter his opinions about Controversial Divinity, is a grievous imposition.’73 In common with Bishop Clayton, he relativized religious opinion, claiming that ‘What Men call Heresy is often a local and (p.43) secular crime; for what is Heresy in one century, and in one country, is sound doctrine in another.’ A dedicated champion of the Reformation and of moderation as the child of learning, Jortin saw himself as continuing the eirenic tradition of his Protestant heroes: Tillotson, Erasmus, Chillingworth, John Hales, Locke, Episcopius, and Grotius were all called upon as ancestral worthies.74

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Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition This position can also be attributed to another ex-fellow of Jesus, David Hartley, a slightly younger man than Law, whose major work, Observations on Man (1749), combined philosophy with ecclesiology. Hartley had felt a profound unease when confronted by a formulaic presentation of Christianity and an attendant requirement to subscribe to articles of faith, a situation which had obliged him to take up a medical rather than a clerical career (a route taken, for much the same reason, albeit from a Dissenting background, by Thomas Morgan, the self-described ‘Christian Deist’).75 Hartley’s ‘Rule of Faith’ was founded on the claim that only rational methods could win a man’s assent to religious matters; compulsion was dismissed as being inherently illegitimate. Those men who were not subject to constraint from subscription, unbelievers in natural or revealed religion, were depicted by Hartley as being happy to subscribe if they considered it to be in their interest to take up a clerical career. Those who believed in natural but not in revealed religion would not seek office in the Church, but, argued Hartley, this ought not to be used as an excuse to deprive them of their civil liberties, especially while ‘so many wicked nominal Christians are suffered to enjoy them’.76 In Hartley’s understanding, the claims of Protestant individualism, alongside those of reason, undermined the case for subscription: (p.44) Suppose the Person required to subscribe to be a speculative historical believer, why should his future inquiries be confined? How can he inquire honestly, if they be? How can a Person be properly qualified to study the Word of God, and to search out its Meaning, who finds himself previously confined to interpret it in a particular Manner? If the Subjectmatter of the Article be of great Importance to be understood and believed, one may presume, that it is plain, and needs no Article; if of small Importance, why should it be made a Test, or insisted upon? If it be a difficult, abstruse Point, no one upon Earth has Authority to make an Article upon it. We are all Brethren; there is no Father, no Master, amongst us; we are Helpers of, not Lords over, each other’s Faith.77 The Scriptures were, Hartley insisted, sufficient in themselves; it would not do to force men to subscribe to the metaphorical subtleties of credal formularies.78 Countering a possible objection to this argument, Hartley contended that attempts to halt the preaching of different doctrines from the same texts by subscription to articles of faith had been manifest failures: even after subscribing, clergymen delivered doctrinally disputatious sermons. It would, he continued, have been better for them to preach on simple, scriptural themes rather than to broach such niceties: abstruse debates should have been reserved for the learned press and not preached in the pulpit.79

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Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition Such was the antidogmatic position at mid-century. A ‘rational’ theology of progress based firmly on a sola scriptura base had condemned orthodox dependence on tradition. Its appeal was to a simplified faith, freed from metaphysical distinctions. Contentious matters, such as the nature of the Trinity or the divinity of Christ, were to be left to the understanding of the individual believer. To enforce adherence to articles of faith was, the antidogmatists asserted, to encourage persecution, bigotry, and unproductive bickering. Subscription was therefore seen to be a ‘grievous imposition’ which, ultimately, did great harm to the Church of England, as will be demonstrated in Chapter 2. Notes:

(1) H. Broxap, The Later Non-Jurors (Cambridge, 1924); H. Sacheverell, The Perils of False Brethren, both in Church, and State (London, 1709); Sacheverell, False Notions of Liberty in Religion and Government Destructive of Both (London, 1713); G. Holmes, The Trial Of Doctor Sacheverell (London, 1973); G. V. Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 1688–1730: The Career of Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester (Oxford, 1975). On the broader claims of ‘orthodoxy’, see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Within the Margins: The Definitions of Orthodoxy’ in R. D. Lund (ed.), The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response 1660–1750 (Cambridge, 1995), 33–53. (2) Cf. N. Sykes, Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, 1669–1748: A Study in Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1926); id., William Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1637–1737 (2 vols., Cambridge, 1957); id., From Sheldon to Seeker: Aspects of English Church History, 1660–1768 (Cambridge, 1958); G. V. Bennett, White Kennett, 1660–1728, Bishop of Peterborough: A Study in the Political and Ecclesiastical History of the Early Eighteenth Century (London, 1957). (3) On ‘this our knowing age’, see Locke, Essay, ‘Epistle’, p. 9. Any number of 18th-cent. writings could be adduced to the need for ‘further Reformation’ against Roman Catholic survivals, to which literature much of this chapter is devoted. (4) Cf. P. Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind in the Seventeenth Century, trans. J. L. May (London, 1953); M. C. Jacob, ‘The Crisis of the European Mind: Hazard Revisited’, in cad. and P. Mack (eds.), Politics and Religion in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of H, G. Koenigsberger (Cambridge, 1987), 251–71. (5) On the parties promoting a sense of pre-Tractarian orthodox self-identity from the mid-18th cent., see P. B. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge, 1994). More work needs to be done on the first half of the 18th cent, in order to complement Nockles’s valuable contextualization of later developments. Page 16 of 24

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Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition (6) On the problems associated with the identification of Church parties in the 18th cent., see J. Walsh and S. Taylor, ‘Introduction: The Church and Anglicanism in the “Long” Eighteenth Century’, in Walsh, C. Haydon, and Taylor (eds.), The Church of England c.1689-c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge, 1993), 29–45. (7) J. H. Newman, Apologia pro vita sua, ed. M. J. Svaglic (Oxford, 1967), 54; id., The Arians of the Fourth Century (Oxford, 1833), 421. For Newman, antidogmatism was the forerunner of the ‘liberalism’ he hated: R. Pattison, The Great Dissent: John Henry Newman and the Liberal Heresy (New York, 1991); S. Thomas, Newman and Heresy: The Anglican Years (Cambridge, 1991). For a very broad reading of ‘liberalism’ in 18th-cent. English religious thought, somewhat improbably encompassing both late ‘latitudinarians’ and freethinkers, see R. N. Stromberg, Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1954). (8) ‘Latitudinarianism at the Parting of the Ways: A Suggestion’, in Walsh et al. (eds.), The Church of England, 209–27. On the problem of defining such a group of divines in the late 17th cent., see J. Spurr, ‘“Latitudinarianism” and the Restoration Church’, HJ 31 (1988), 61–82. (9) R. Brinkley, ‘A Liberal Churchman: Edmund Law (1703–1787)’, Enlightenment and Dissent, 6 (1987), 3–18. (10) More generally, see A. Fix, ‘Radical Reformation and Second Reformation in Holland: The Intellectual Consequences of the Sixteenth-Century Religious Upheaval and the Coming of a Rational World View’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 18 (1987), 63–80; A. C. Kors and P. J. Korshin (eds.), Anticipations of the Enlightenment in England, France, and Germany (Philadelphia, 1987); H. Trevor-Roper, ‘The Great Tew Circle’, in Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans (London, 1987), 166–230 id., ‘The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment’, in Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (London, 1967), 193–236; and id., ‘Religious Toleration after 1688’, in From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution (London, 1992), 267–85. (11) The Vindication of Tradition (New Haven, 1984), 11. (12) The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation (Oxford, 1638), 51. (13) Trans. Betty Radice in The Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto, 1986), xxvii. 84. For a suggestive study of this text, see M. A. Screech, Erasmus: Ecstasy and The Praise of Folly (London, 1980). (14) A Preliminary Discourse Addressed to the Roman Catholic Clergy and Laity of Great Britain [ 1749], prefixed to Erasmus’s Preface to his Paraphrase on the Gospel of St. Matthew, and the Apostolical Epistles, in The Works Theological

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Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition and Miscellaneous of the Revd, Francis Blackburne, Archdeacon of Cleveland, ed. F. Blackburne, LLB. (Cambridge, 1804–5), i. 25–89. (15) Dismissal of ‘priestcraft’ was a central element in the political tradition of which Blackburne was a notable adherent, as puritan turned into Whig, and Reformation into Enlightenment: M. Goldie, ‘Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism’, in N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993), 209–31. (16) For a useful study of these developments, see J. Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven, 1991). (17) As Locke remarked, ‘if you have your Son Reason well, let him read Chillingworth’: Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. J. W. Yolton and J. S. Yolton (Oxford, 1989), 240. For useful discussion of the Letter, see J. Dunn, Locke (Oxford, 1984); id., ‘Trust in the Politics of John Locke’, in Rethinking Modern Political Theory: Essays 1979–1983 (Cambridge, 1985), 34–54; and I. Harris, The Mind of John Locke: A Study of Political Theory in its Intellectual Setting (Cambridge, 1994), 185–91. For broader discussions, see R. Ashcraft, ‘Anticlericalism and authority in Lockean political thought’, and G. A. J. Rogers, ‘John Locke: Conservative Radical’, in Lund (ed.), Margins of Orthodoxy, 73–96 and 97–116 respectively. (18) A Letter Concerning Toleration, trans. W. Popple (London, 1689), 1. On Popple, see C. Robbins, ‘Absolute Liberty: The Life and Thought of William Popple, 1638–1708’, in Absolute Liberty: A Selection from the Articles and Papers of Caroline Robbins, ed. B. Taft (Hamden, Conn., 1982), 3–30. Popple was a Hull merchant, a nephew of the town’s MP, Andrew Marvell, himself a major figure in the Commonwealth tradition. (19) Letter Concerning Toleration, 2–5. (20) Ibid. 7–8. (21) Ibid. 9–16. (22) Ibid. 26–33. (23) Locke’s controversial views on toleration had also been attacked with an especial vehemence by an Oxford cleric, Jonas Proast, on which see M. Goldie, ‘John Locke, Jonas Proast and Religious Toleration 1688–1692’, in Walsh et al. (eds.), Church of England, 143–71. (24) Cf. A. W. Wainwright’s editorial introd. to Locke’s A Paraphrase and Notes on The Epistles of St. Paul to the Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, Ephesians (Oxford, 1987), i. 1–88; D. D. Wallace, Jr., ‘Socinianism, Justification by Faith, and the Sources of John Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity’, JHI Page 18 of 24

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Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition 45 (1981), 49–66, and the essays in M. Montouri, John Locke On Toleration and the Unity of God (Amsterdam, 1983). For a strong claim for Locke as a Socinian, see J. Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge, 1994). (25) The Reasonableness of Christianity, As Delivered in the Scriptures (London, 1695), 25–59. (26) Ibid. 152–7, 185, 191–9. (27) J. C. Biddle, ‘Locke’s Critique of Innate Principles and Toland’s Deism’, JHI 37 (1976), 411–22. (28) J. Proast, The Argument of the Letter Concerning Toleration, Briefly Consider’d and Answer’d (Oxford, 1690); id., A Third Letter Concerning Toleration: In Defence of the Argument of the Letter concerning Toleration, briefly consider’d and answer’d (London, 1691); id., A Second Letter to the Author of the Three Letters for Toleration from the Author of the Argument of the Letter Concerning Toleration Briefly Consider’d and Answer’d, And of the Defense of it (Oxford, 1704); J. Edwards, Socinianism Unmask’d (London, 1696). (29) A Second Letter Concerning Toleration (London, 1690); A Third Letter For Toleration, To The Author of the Third Letter Concerning Toleration (London, 1692); A Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity, &c., From Mr. Edwards’s Reflections (London, 1695); A Second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity, &c. (London, 1697). (30) ‘The Sin and Danger of Adding to the Doctrine of the Gospel’, in The Works, ed. R. Baker (London, 1712), i. 228–35. For discussion of such issues, see J. Marshall, ‘The Ecclesiology of the Latitude Men 1660–1689: Stillingfleet, Tillotson and “Hobbism”’, JEH 26 (1985), 407–27. Acknowledging the worth of a mid-18th-ccnt. biography of Tillotson by Thomas Birch, Francis Blackburne, a leading light in the antidogmatic movement, praised Tillotson as ‘one of the brightest Examples of those bishops who adorn the Christian Ministry’. BM Add. MS 4301, fos. 131–2. (31) J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge, 1992), 27–32, 77–88; G. Burnet, History of His Own Time, ed. T. Burnet (London, 1734), ii. 634. (32) An Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (4th corrected edn., London, 1720), pp. iv, ix, 1–11. (33) Ibid. 6–9. (34) An Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, 70–90.

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Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition (35) Ibid. 106–7. (36) J. Edwards, The Exposition Given By My Lord Bishop of Sarum, Of the Second Article of Our Religion Examined (London, 1702), 73–82, 93–4. The lower clergy in Convocation, the elected parliament of the Church of England, proved willing to censure their ecclesiastical superiors throughout the 1690s and 1700s: see M. Goldie, ‘The Nonjurors, Episcopacy, and the Origins of the Convocation Controversy’, in E. Cruickshanks (ed.), Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of facohitism, 1689–1759 (Edinburgh, 1982), 15–35; M. Greig, ‘Heresy Hunt: Gilbert Burnet and the Convocation Controversy of 1701’, HJ 37 (1994), 569–92. (37) Remarks on the Examination of the Exposition of the Second Article of our Church (London, 1702), 1–2, 4–6, 8. (38) An Argument to Prove, That the Abolishing of Christianity In England, May, as Things now stand, he attended with some Inconveniences, and perhaps not produce those many Good Effects propos’d thereby (London, 1717). For useful discussion, see M. Seidel, ‘Crisis Rhetoric and Satiric Power’, New Literary History, 20 (1988), 165–86. (39) Cf. H. A. Weinbrot, Augustus Caesar in ‘Augustan’ England: The Decline of a Classical Norm (Princeton, 1978); H. Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea in English Literature (London, 1983). (40) Hoadly, The Nature of the Kingdom, or Church, of Christ (London, 1717). For useful discussions, see N. Sykes, ‘Benjamin Hoadly, Bishop of Bangor’, in F. J. C. Hearnshaw (ed.), The Social and Political Ideas of Some English Thinkers of the Augustan Age A.D. 1650–1750 (London, 1928), 112–56; H. D. Rack, ‘“Christ’s Kingdom Not of this World”: The Case of Benjamin Hoadly versus William Law Reconsidered’, in D. Baker (ed.), Church, Society and Politics (SCH 12; 1975), 275–91; R. Browning, The Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs (Baton Rouge, La., 1982), ch. 3. (41) Bodleian Library, MS Eng. misc. c.116, fo. 6(v). (42) F. E. Manuel, Isaac Newton Historian (Cambridge, 1963); id., The Religion of Isaac Newton (Oxford, 1974); S. Mandelbrote, ‘“A Duty of the Greatest Moment”: Isaac Newton and the Writing of Biblical Criticism’, BJHS 26 (1993), 281–302. (43) L. Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1876), i. 119–31; L. Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge, 1992), ch. 3. (44) S. Clarke, The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity (London, 1712), pp. i-xxxi. For discussion, see J. P. Ferguson, An Eighteenth-Century Heretic: Dr. Samuel Clarke (Kineton, 1976), ch. 5. Page 20 of 24

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Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition (45) Anon., A Full Account of the Late Proceedings in Convocation Relating to Dr. Clarke’s Writings about the Trinity (London, 1714); L. Stewart, ‘Samuel Clarke, Newtonianism, and the Factions of Post-Revolutionary England’, JHI 42 (1981), 53–72; J. P. Ferguson, An Eighteenth-Century Heretic: Dr. Samuel Clarke (Kineton, 1976), ch. 7. Clarke himself was assailed not only by the orthodox, but also by deists, who continued to write against the authority of those Scriptures whose validity Clarke went on defending throughout the remainder of his career. A freethinker, Thomas Johnson, amicably corresponded with Clarke on this matter long after the proceedings of Convocation. See a letter sent by Johnson from Paris on 14 Sept. 1718 (Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Lett, d.74, fos. 144–7.) (46) E. Duffy, ‘“Whiston’s Affair”: The Trials of a Primitive Christian 1709–1714’, JEH 27 (1976), 129–50. John Jackson, a Yorkshire clergyman, also defended Clarke against his critics: The Grounds of Civil and Ecclesiastical Government, Briefly Consider’d (London, 1718). (47) For a similarly positive appraisal from the perspective of an Anglican theologian, see R. T. Holtby, Daniel Waterland, 1683–1740: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Orthodoxy (Carlisle, 1966). (48) BM Add. MS 5831, fo. 172. (49) D. Waterland, A Critical History of the Athanasian Creed, representing the opinions of antients and modems concerning it (Cambridge, 1724), 2, 99–124, 150, 162. (50) The Case of Arian-Subscription Consider’d, (Cambridge, 1721), 4. Clarke rejected such attempted refutations by emphasizing a perceived incongruity in Waterland’s answering his sola scriptura case by constant recourse to the Church Fathers and modern philosophy: The Modest Plea, &c. Continued (London, 1720). For discussion, see Ferguson, Eighteenth-Century Heretic, ch. 14. (51) Case of Arian-Subscription Consider’d, 7, 67–9. (52) BM Add. MS 5831, fos. 172–3. (53) BM Add. MS 6396, fo. 14. (54) BM Add. MS 5831, fos. 173–5. (55) J. Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1989), 117–26.

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Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition (56) A. A. Sykes, The Case of Subscription to the xxxix Articles Considered (London, 1721); C. J. Abbey and J. H. Overton, The English Church in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1878), i. 490–1, 510–15. (57) W. E. H. Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1878–90), iii. 538–39; J. T. Spivey, ‘Middle Way Men, Edmund Calamy, and the Crises of Moderate Nonconformity (1688–1732)’, unpublished D.Phil, diss., Univ. of Oxford, 1986. (58) In the wake of Clarke’s difficulties, Morgan assembled a collection of his own controversial writings in order to vindicate his defection from the Dissenting ministry, which were published as A Collection of Tracts, Relating to the Right of Private Judgment, the Sufficiency of Scripture, and the Terms of Church-Communion; Occasion’d by the late Trinitarian Controversy (London, 1726). For his later position, drawn from the same principles, see The Moral Philosopher: In A Dialogue Between Philalethes a Christian Deist, and Theophanes a Christian Jew (London, 1737). (59) A. R. Winnett, ‘An Irish Heretic Bishop: Robert Clayton of Clogher’, in D. Baker (ed.), Schism, Heresy and Religious Protest (SCH 9; 1972), 311–21. (60) An Essay on Spirit (2nd edn., London, 1752), p. vii. (61) Ibid., pp. viii-ix, liv. (62) F. C. Mather, High Church Prophet: Bishop Samuel Horsley (1733–1806) and the Caroline Tradition in the Later Georgian Church (Oxford, 1992), 10. (63) Letter xxxvi (18 Nov. 1751), in Letters From a Late Eminent Prelate to one of His Friends (2nd edn., London, 1809), 92. (64) Memoirs of the Reign of King George II, ed. J. Brooke (New Haven, 1985), iii. 8. (65) S. Taylor, ‘Sir Robert Walpole, The Church of England, and the Quakers’ Tithe Bill of 1716’, HJ 28 (1985), 51–77. (66) P. K. Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge, 1989), 138–45. (67) As in the collection of tracts made by the Dissenting minister Richard Baron, The Pillars of Priestcrafl and Orthodoxy Shaken (4 vols., 2nd edn., London, 1768). (68) J. Conybeare, The Case of Subscription to Articles of Religion Consider’d (Oxford, 1725).

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Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition (69) The Alliance Between Church and State: or, the necessity and equity of an established religion and a Test Law demonstrated (London, 1736). For contrasting discussions, see R. W. Greaves, ‘The Working of the Alliance: A Comment on Warburton’, in G. V. Bennett and J. D. Walsh (eds.), Essays in Modern English Church History in Memory of Norman Sykes (London, 1966), 163–80, and S. Taylor, ‘William Warburton and the Alliance of Church and State’, JEH 43 (1992), 271–86. (70) J. Gascoigne, ‘Anglican Latitudinarianism and Political Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century’, History, 71 (1986), 22–38. Some attention ought to be paid to the analogous arguments made by an Oxford-educated clergyman, John Jones, in his Free and Candid Disquisitions Relating to the Church of England, and the Means of Advancing Religion therein (London, 1749). Francis Blackburne quickly came to Jones’s defence in An Apology for the Authors of a Book, intituled, Free and Candid Disquisitions (London, 1750). (71) Edmund Law, Considerations on the State of the World, With Regard to the Theory of Religion (Cambridge, 1745); R. S. Crane, ‘Anglican Apologetics and the Idea of Progress, 1699–1745’, MP 31 (1933–4), 273–306, 349–82; Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1987); D. Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven, 1990), 231–47, 252. (72) ‘There cannot be more decisive reasons for the removal of all subscription, than the apologies of Jortin and Paley for the present prescribed formularies’: J. Disney, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of John Jortin, D.D. (London, 1792), 307. (73) J. Jortin, Remarks on Ecclesiastical History (London, 1751–73), vol. i, pp. xiixiv, xix. (74) Ibid., pp. xxviii, xxxiv, xl—xli. (75) Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment, 128–29; T. Morgan, Philosophical Principles of Medicine (London, 1725). (76) ‘Of the Rule of Faith’ appended to Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, And His Expectations (London, 1749), ii. 351–2. This was an old Dissenting argument. (77) ‘Of the Rule of Faith’ 352. (78) Ibid. 353. (79) Ibid. 354–5.

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Enlightened Ecclesiastics: The Shaping of an Antidogmatic Tradition

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences

Religion and Enlightenment in EighteenthCentury England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke B. W. Young

Print publication date: 1998 Print ISBN-13: 9780198269427 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269427.001.0001

‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences CATHERINE OSBORNE

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269427.003.0003

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the subscription controversy in England during the late 1700s and its religious consequences. The second round of debate was initiated by William Samuel Powell in a commencement sermon at Saint John's College in 1757 in which he appealed to the imperfect nature of anything man-made and to the need for a regulatory measure to be enforced against those who sought to destroy man-made institutions. He also declared that the legacy of history had procured a doctrinal ease for believers which was best shaped by adherence to the Thirty-Nine Articles. Keywords:   subscription controversy, England, William Samuel Powell, Thirty-Nine Articles, religious history

The provocative work of David Hartley notwithstanding, the orthodox had allowed the question of subscription to rest after the dispute between Clarke and Waterland. The second round of the debate was inaugurated by an orthodox divine, William Samuel Powell, the master of St John’s College, Cambridge, in the commencement sermon which he preached before the university in 1757.1 Powell appealed both to the essentially imperfect nature of anything man-made and to the need for a regulatory measure to be enforced against those who sought to destroy viable, man-made institutions in the name of perfection. The way to doctrinal agreement lay in finding a way of reading Scripture which conformed to ‘the general voice of learned men through the nation’. His was an accommodating position which did not open the way even to the tacit acceptance of heresy. A larger compass in articles of faith would have relieved Page 1 of 33

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences the consciences of honest men; how wide a compass it was no part of Powell’s chosen brief to detail. This may seem a disingenuous stance, but it allowed for a latitude of opinions to be exercised within the one, broadly based Church. While, for example, the adoption of certain interpretations of such Articles as those relating to predestination may have caused a good deal of trouble in the past, Powell’s adoption of something akin to pre-Burkean (p.46) prescription led him to conclude that, ‘With whatever violence it was at first introduced, yet possession renders that title indisputable.’ An article may, then, have been understood in an unusual sense, providing it had the authority of learned men behind it, even when this was out of step with the interpretation made by the majority of subscribers. According to Powell, ambiguous expressions were necessitated by the fact that a variety of interpretations had been made of profoundly difficult matters. Powell’s understanding of a latitude in expression made room for those improvements in theology which required such a latitude in their turn. No men, Powell insisted, were sufficiently unprejudiced to be able to frame new articles to equal the candour of those created by the first Reformers.2 The Reformers had refined terms as far as was possible; new wording would only have further confused the issue. For a man such as Powell, candour was the signal property of Protestant theology. Powell declared that the legacy of history (understood as a progressive, Protestant dynamic) had procured a doctrinal ease for believers which was best shaped by adherence to the Thirty-Nine Articles. His peroration took the form of an appeal to latitude and experience, explicitly countering the claims of experiment and perfectionism; ‘Let us therefore, as far as belongs to us, endeavour to maintain our religious establishment; and let us interpret the conditions of it with that candor, which will allow the greatest room for improvements in sacred knowledge, and unite with us the greatest number of sincere protestants.’3 Religious orthodoxy, in Powell’s understanding, was sceptical, probing, historically minded, and undogmatic. His definition was too open for those who found in his argument nothing but sophism and compromise. Enlightened ecclesiastics were ready to quarrel over the identity of the Church; more conservative Churchmen used the debate that ensued to demonstrate the need for (p.47) a reaffirmation of their own notions of ‘orthodoxy’. In this debate, something of the competition between Enlightenment and CounterEnlightenment, which provides the subject of Chapters 3–4 of this study, can be seen to have been adumbrated in the 1770s.

I Francis Blackburne indicted Powell for his latitude, which he feared might spread, as a reaction, to the taking of oaths in society, thereby undermining it (a decidedly Lockean fear). He derided him for relying on the testimony of others, something which Blackburne felt to be incompatible with Powell’s profession of Protestantism. Scrupulosity applied to the taking of oaths had, Blackburne observed, rightly prevented men from taking orders; might not Cambridge men Page 2 of 33

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences legitimately apply their skills in other callings, for want of bread? By cynically defending subscription, Powell was portrayed as destroying the possible future of a learned clergy in England; his decision to deliver a sermon on such a theme before impressionable undergraduates was questionable:4 Powell was seen as undermining that which he sought to preserve, since the orthodox had abandoned attempts at justifying subscription: And now in the midst of this repose and tranquility, steps the zealous Dr. Powell once more to blow the trumpet of defiance in the ears of all dissatisfied dissenters from our establishment; to the great surprise, as I have been informed, of some of the church’s warmest friends, who cannot find out the propriety of reviving on her part a controversy, in which she has seldom gathered any laurels, and which for that reason had been so prudently laid asleep5 Blackburne, a perpetual anti-Catholic, was not above insinuating that Powell’s case could easily give way to anti-Protestant strategies. Might not Powell’s latitude have (p.48) allowed him to take in ‘mental reserves, and other accommodating methods of equivocation?’6 Blackburne, the veteran of an attack on Bishop Butler’s supposed Popish tendencies, went so far as satirically to recommend Powell’s paper to ‘the next session of the congregation de propaganda fide’ 7 Powell’s arguments were consequently castigated as casuistical and Jesuitical; he was a linguistic counterfeiter, a ‘mint-master of sense’ whose comments ‘confound the common use of language’.8 The confrontation between Powell and Blackburne framed the nature of the subscription debate, pro and contra. Powell, something of a ‘latitudinarian’ himself, had assumed that man-made articles of faith could provide a means of maintaining an established confession in a liberal mode, while Blackburne repudiated the very notion of such a system as a denial of religious and moral freedom. Nathaniel Lardner, the ecclesiastical historian and Dissenter, had wanted Blackburne to go into print on the matter as soon as possible, noting in a letter of 15 October 1757 that ‘I am concerned, that I have not heard of the publishing your thoughts concerning subscriptions.’9 A second letter, dated 22 November that year, demonstrates the strength of Lardner’s interest in the piece, and also the sense of an alliance between antidogmatic Protestants, Anglican and Dissenting, on the question: I am glad that your argument on Subscriptions is finished. I hope it will not be lost, but see the Light. I wish a better season may offer. However, I am of opinion that such performances can never be quite useless. If they do not produce a public & general reformation, yet they will be of service to strengthen & support the resolution of those, who are sincere friends of truth & liberty.10

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences (p.49) Doubtless encouraged by such concerns, Blackburne later honed his arguments to a new level of confidence in his historically weighted polemic The Confessional, first published in 1767, and reaching a third, enlarged edition by 1770.11 Preparations for the book were clearly long-standing; in a letter to Thomas Birch of 8 April 1752, Blackburne had enquired if it were true that, according to report, Chilling worth had himself not subscribed to the Thirty-Nine Articles.12 In this work, established confessions were derided as merely human compositions which undermined the right to private judgement over the written word; they caused ‘the distress of many a conscientious minister under the dilemma of, subscribe or starve’. This theme later reappeared in his confrontation with Samuel Johnson over the latter’s antipathetic portrayal of Milton, a hero to Blackburne and fellow-adherents of the Commonwealthman tradition of republican thought.13 As a conscious inheritor of this tradition of political and theological engagement, Blackburne would have been well aware of the arguments made by Milton in Eikonoklastes against the enforcement of a liturgy and in defence of Reformation principles against quasiCatholic ritualism.14 Unsurprisingly, then, Blackburne’s was a decidedly polemical use of history. He attacked the courtly ambit of many seventeenth-century Anglicans, from the participants at the Hampton Court Conference in the reign of James I to those at the Savoy Conference held in 1661, the latter of (p.50) which he condemned as a ‘complication of sophistry, hypocrisy, and virulence on the part of the orthodox, hardly to be paralleled in popish history’.15 Orthodoxy was found out to be a man of straw, since the self-proclaimed orthodox theologians had disagreed in their ‘opinions concerning the sense of particular Articles’.16 Reviewing the literature provoked by the subscription controversy, Blackburne defended Burnet and those Swiss theologians who had earlier repudiated the Calvinist Consensus Doctrinae as a test of faith for Genevan clerics.17 Blackburne was also critical of Waterland’s Arminian reading of the Articles, stating that, if accepted, the principle behind this particular reading would have legitimated any number of such approaches including, ironically, the Arian case he had ostensibly resisted.18 Subscription was once more lamented as a ready way to corruption and a sure means of losing sincere service from conscientious ministers, a situation which could only invite the scorn of Dissenters and the ridicule of infidels. A scriptural image served to undo orthodox claims, since: all these experienced workmen were endeavouring to repair, and daub with untempered mortar, certain strong-holds and partition-walls, which it was the design of the Gospel to throw down and to level. An attempt of this sort could hardly be more agreeable to the Divine will, than the building at Babel.19

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences Material metaphors, as well as economic ones, reflected what Blackburne considered to be the true nature of subscription: ‘An Office of insurance against our respective preferments’.20 (p.51) In common with like-minded clerics in the late 1760s and early 1770s, Blackburne feared that liberty was under attack both in Church and State.21 He invoked the names of Hales, Chillingworth, Clarke, and Hoadly in this struggle; returning to the offensive, he attacked the notion of reading the Articles according to ‘different senses’ as this had been indulged by Laudian divines, whom he naturally detested, as well as by Waterland and other more recent writers. In many ways an ultra-Protestant in an age in which anti-Catholicism was a major feature of English identity, Blackburne desired a new reformation against ‘party-coloured Casuists’, a phrase linking orthodoxy with politically partisan corruption.22 Factions were held to be clerical in cast: Cambridge clergy expelled the Arian Whiston; the Lower House of Convocation proscribed the work of Clarke; the Irish clergy denounced Clayton.23 The familar Commonwealthman fear of ‘priestcraft’, endemic to the cause since James Harrington coined the word in the 1650s, stalked through recent history against the interests of the true faith and the consequent well-being of society.24 Criticism of priestcraft, therefore, was not the peculiar property of deists, freethinkers, or Dissenters in the eighteenth century: even the Established clergy were not above appealing to it in the cause of antidogmatism. In place of the prevarications and dangers of subscription, Blackburne proposed that a personal declaration of faith (of (p.52) the sort later used by his son at Cambridge) be undertaken experimentally by senior divines.25 The old system was, he repeated, corrupt; a new reformation had to be embarked upon if Anglicanism was to thrive.26 His desire for continuous reform as the means of preservation between the twin evils of superstition (Roman Catholicism) and enthusiasm (Methodism) had already surfaced in a letter to Archbishop Herring of 1754, which Blackburne published in 1771 as a further contribution to the subscription debate.27 Blackburne continued throughout his long life to proclaim his loyalty to the Church of England, describing himself as being loyal to the Elizabethan Settlement, and doctrinally a Calvinist ‘of the largest and most liberal cast’.28 Repudiating the imputation of Socinianism made against him, he stated that his reading of the Scriptures convinced him of the blasphemy involved in the Unitarian attempt to ‘debase the Son to the level of a Plato or a Pythagoras’. He piously opposed ‘that curious and polite system, called rational Christianity, the foster father of modern infidelity’. By distancing himself from ‘rational’ Christianity, Blackburne tacitly repudiated the heretical basis of Clarkean Arianism in favour of a purely scriptural Christianity. This testimony of faith was, however, critically two-pronged, as it also called into question the status of manmade tests of orthodoxy as represented by the formulas of the Athanasian Creed. Page 5 of 33

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences It was, he affirmed, Scripture alone which proved the pre-existence and divinity of Christ.29 Blackburne’s Trinitarianism, such as it was, was not formulaic but scripturally based. His faith was that of an adherent to a Chillingworthian religion of (p.53) Protestants, whose open espousal of a Lockean commitment to the principles of Protestant liberty had early lost him his chances of a Cambridge fellowship.30 A correspondent of Blackburne, Thomas Amory, in a letter of 29 July 1769, celebrated a work calculated to promote the purity of antidogmatic religion: As to the Author of the Confessional, I have not heard for certain who he is: but as it is a fine book, I greatly admire…the Writer, & think if it was gradually read with attention, & rightly understood, it would be of important use to Christians; by making them settle upon a rational & wise choice, & by ruining faction in religion…Truth & Holiness would be the glorious objects, as revelation requires, Men would worship the Father, be at Unity among themselves, & believe Jesus of Nazareth to be the Messiah.31 The last element in Amory’s praise is suggestive of a Lockean tentativeness on the question of the Trinity. In holding, whether openly or clandestinely, heretical views on the Trinity, Cambridge Newtonians, from Clarke to Sykes and Jackson, and Cambridge Lockeans, such as Edmund Law, had one thing in common which equally divided them from orthodox theologians such as Waterland. Even here, however, there is a major division within the antidogmatic party, and it is one that can be traced back to a division between the originating beliefs of Locke and Newton. Put boldly, Newton and his followers favoured an Arian Christology, while Locke and his admirers tended to favour something like a Socinian notion of Christ’s nature: Leslie Stephen was near the mark in his contention regarding the Law circle and its young star William Paley, that ‘The intellectual party of the Church was Socinian in everything but name’.32 Edmund Law, the grey eminence of the second round of the subscription debate, had been a friend and admirer of the notably orthodox Waterland when a young fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge in the 1730s. Paley, who wrote a short life of Law, noted a friendship which (p. 54) would have helped in defences of Law’s orthodoxy, an enterprise made necessary by Law’s involvement in the subscription controversy, the roots of which lay in his high regard for Locke, whose works he was to edit.33 Such an esteem was shared by Blackburne, Law’s long-time confidant and polemical adjutant. Edmund Law’s beliefs were less obviously free of the imputation of heresy than those of Blackburne, although, as the nineteenth-century historian W. E. H. Lecky was to note, Law’s omissions rather than any distinctly heretical statements on his part were what led many of his fellow clergy to be suspicious Page 6 of 33

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences of him:34 witness his tacit diminution of Christ’s status in revealed religion, implied by his claim that an Old Testament text, Micah 6: 8, contained ‘the Substance of all true religion, and the sole Foundation upon which it is built’. The text reads simply: ‘he hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?’ There is nothing uniquely Christian in this injunction to lead a moral life; it is a suspiciously simple, doctrinally minimal passage for a clergyman to have enjoined as the true basis of religious truth. It would seem, therefore, that for Law Christianity acted as a sublime ethical system; the doctrinal uniqueness of the faith, however, remained cloudy in his exposition.35 While Christianity was certainly of divine origin, and Christ made clearer the otherwise remote nature of God, his own nature was unclear: Christ was a moral paragon, the champion of love and humility, the zealous prophet of industriousness and social duty, a man, compared, to his great favour, with Socrates, Stoics, monks, and even, somewhat bizarrely, Rousseau.36 Whilst, earlier in his Cambridge career, he had publicly (p.55) acknowledged the importance of Christ’s satisfaction for sin (as expounded in his lectures on the faith in the 1740s), the older Law emphasized Christ’s supremacy as a moralist, tacitly ignoring his relationship with the deity.37 The anonymous author of a squib on Cambridge Socinianism, published in the wake of the Peterhouse-inspired petition to Parliament for clerical relief from subscription in 1772 (hatched at the Feathers Tavern in London), made no distinction between the views of Blackburne and Law. As he blended the many fears endemic to orthodox theologians into a Dunciad-like farrago, the author was typical of many who saw Blackburne as the polemical historian and Law as the heterodox metaphysician in a combined assault on Anglican purity: But chief, O L-w, to thee be honours paid! Well sits the mitre on thy hoary head: Wonder of Bishops! still pursue thy plan, Man to brute…and God degrade to man. How can I count the labours of thy life? With Creeds and Articles at constant strife; With Blackburne leagued, in many a motley page, Immortal war with Mother Church to wage; Each fence that guards her altar to pull down, And take Geneva’s cloak, to Prelate’s gown. Nor ere thy zeal for comprehension ends, Jews, Deists, Musselmen, thy love befriends, Blends Christ and Belial at one sacred table— Delightful mass of an united Babel! O! envied change! when, freed from faith’s strict rules, Law’s latitude of doctrine guides my schools! When, benefic’d by Pitt’s all-powerful-hand, Socinian preachers swarm throughout the land! Page 7 of 33

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences Paul’s mysteries, when each wrangler disbelieves, And Humes and Gibbonses may wear lawn sleeves!38

(p.56) Law’s intellectual commitments were often more consciously heterodox than the Commonwealth conventions articulated by Blackburne. It was a protégé of Law, Samuel Henley, a former Dissenter transformed into a Cambridgeeducated clergyman, who had to defend himself from imputations of Arianism in Virginia in 1774, and it was from amongst the younger fellows of Law’s Peterhouse that the inevitability of an eventual secession to Unitarianism first made itself felt.39 For Law himself, creeds represented a corruption of Christianity’s primitive plainness and practicality, leading him to call, like Clarke and Jones before and Theophilus Lindsey alongside him, for a revised liturgy to be made in order to ease the terms of Christian communion.40 Law repeated the familiar arguments for a sola scriptura faith, in which the meaning of Scripture was to be reached by ‘our own reason on the whole’. He was suspicious of subscription, leading as it often did to the crude self-interest of launching a potentially lucrative clerical vocation, a careerist notion of the ministry which inevitably compromised Reformation ideals.41 Orthodox theologians remained suspicious of Law’s rationalism, seeing in the antisubscription petition ‘a scheme of the Republican Faction to throw all things into confusion’, headed not by Law, but by ‘Mr. Jebb, a professed Arian…the great and busy agitator at Cambridge’.42 Supported by two hundred clerical and fifteen lay signatures, many of which had been gathered by Lindsey in the course of a two-thousandmile journey, the petitition had been couched in the language of Protestant individualism as mediated by a professionalized clerisy:43 (p.57) That such as your petitioners as have been educated with a view to the several professions of Civil Law and Physic, cannot but think it a great hardship to be obliged (as are all in one of the Universities, even at their first matriculation, and at an age so immature for their disquisitions and decisions of such moment) to subscribe their unfeigned assent to a variety of theological propositions, concerning which their private opinions can be of no consequence to the public, in order to entitle them to the academical degrees in their faculties; most especially as the course of their studies, and attention to their practice respectively, afford them neither the means nor the leisure to exercise whether, and how far such propositions do agree with the word of God. Your petitioners, in consideration of the premises, do now humbly supplicate this honourable house, in hope of being relieved from an obligation so incongruous with the right of private judgement, so pregnant with danger to true religion, and so productive of distress to so many pious and conscientious men, and useful subjects of the state; and in that state look for redress, and humbly submit their cause, under God, to the wisdom and justice of a Protestant king.44

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences In the drama which followed the presentation of the petition, an event hatched at the Feathers Tavern in London, Jebb was the doctrinally driven figure, rebuked by the orthodox as a potent heresiarch, and later the subject of such Unitarian encomia as that indulged by Gilbert Wakefield, another radically inclined former Cambridge don, in the 1800s: ‘DR. JOHN JEBB, that true son of liberty, civil and religious! the conscientious patriot! the zealous and intrepid promoter of the best interests of mankind!’45 Jebb’s enthusiastic promotion of the petition involved him in frequent correspondence in the Whitehall Evening Post, where he condemned the Church’s Erastianism, calling on Parliament to expunge this legalistic understanding of the Established confession in the name of true Protestantism, and bemoaning clerical authority as the politicized antithesis of the right to private judgement, a right negated by the Henrician Reformation which had set men free from (p.58) the Pope only to subject them to the monarch as Supreme Head of the Church: ‘Our boasted Reformation, in fact, was little more than an act of justifiable rebellion against our Spiritual head; wherein we renounced the dominion of the Universal Monarch, and set up a Spiritual Head of our own.’46 Repudiating this incorporation of the Church by the organs of State, he also rejected the Erastianism of Warburton’s scheme in The Alliance between Church and State, remarking of its effects that ‘the Reformation is so far from being completed, that it in fact, with respect to a material part of it, is but just begun’. The bishops of a supposedly Protestant Church regrettably preferred subscription to an honest examination of Scripture in their ‘tests of orthodox belief, leaving Jebb to denounce their position as one ‘almost amounting to a reprobation of the word of God’, and which actively promoted unbelief by hiding ‘the genuine simplicity and excellence’ of the Scriptures.47 Jebb’s reformist zeal would soon lead him to examine the curriculum and teaching methods at Cambridge, where he was resident as a fellow of Peterhouse, as well as to adopt ideas for wide-scale political reform.48 He was essentially an organizer and an agitator, whose instincts were those of a younger generation tired of the Olympian detachment of earlier reform-inclined clergymen.49 These younger men, and some who followed after them, resigned from college fellowships and the priesthood: Jebb followed the pattern established in Dissenting circles by Thomas Morgan, and turned to a career in medicine, while John Disney and Lindsey transformed dissent from dogmatism into a new denomination, Unitarianism, in the wake of the failure of the (p.59) antisubscription petitions of 1772 and 1774.50 The resignations of some of their Cambridge allies followed: Garnham of Trinity, Tyrrwhitt, Braithwaite, Tylden, and Wakefield of Jesus.51 A senior Cambridge figure, Peter Peckard, the Oxfordeducated master of Magdalene College, who was widely considered to be a Socinian, also joined the fray after the failure of the petitions.52 A devoted follower of Hooker (a name Page 9 of 33

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences cited by many antidogmatists, and at whose old college, Corpus Christi, Peckard had been educated) and of Locke, and a declared enemy of Erastianism and ‘Popery’, Peckard drew his Enlightened inspiration from the shades of Bacon, Newton, and Locke, praising the ‘plain, practical, and easy…RULE OF LIFE’ that was his conception of Christianity. This was an ideal evoked in his historical examination of the errors allegedly encouraged by subscription.53 In the same work, Peckard celebrated the latitude of Burnet and Hoadly, and condemned the censorious Archbishop Seeker and all who supported subscription, excoriated as ‘that vile remnant of Popish tyranny’. Allusions were made to the secret Arianism or Socinianism of many (p.60) divines, some of whom supported Jebb in their disavowal of the supposedly idolatrous nature of worship of the Trinity, a doctrine which Peckard appeared to regard as being both foreign to Scripture and too much dependent for its promotion into orthodoxy on the influence of the Fathers.54 Peckard enjoined Christians to stop squabbling in order to face up to the common enemy, the impious philosophers who acted as patrons of Enlightenment infidelity, men such as Hume and Voltaire, who ‘agree in assuming the air and title of Philosopher: As if to blaspheme was to philosophise’. Overseeing tests and subscriptions was a waste of energies which ought, Peckard insisted, to have been turned outwards against such would-be secularizers: Athanasians, Arians, Socinians, Lutherans, Calvinists, Arminians, all were called upon to regroup as Christians and charge against blasphemy (Peckard had once served as a regimental chaplain).55 England’s ‘Enlightened’ divines did not, therefore, tire of condemning irreligious philosophes across the Channel and here, in microcosm, is to be found the difference between the English and French experiences of Enlightenment. Peckard’s churchmanship was firmly grounded in an ideal of Christian philanthropy. He desired a ‘Rational Establishment’ that would prevent confusion and promote ‘Christian Charity’.56 His vision was of an antidogmatic faith which could successfully challenge a fashionable world which slighted providence by its scoffing and unbelief, and his great aim was the reevangelization of mankind to moral ends, a programme in which slave emancipation was made a firm priority.57 That Peckard should oversee the fortunes of a (p.61) Cambridge college that was embarking on a pronouncedly evangelical phase of its existence demonstrates how sociopolitical beliefs could somehow unite Churchmen whose theological beliefs were otherwise irreconcilable. A letter which Peckard sent to James Beattie, an orthodox Scottish divine famous as the ‘scourge of Hume’, written in 1789, encapsulates Peckard’s strongly moralizing attitudes and his well-learned experiences of seeking reform, as well as demonstrating his Oxonian academic preferences to the mathematics-dominated syllabus at Cambridge. It is worth quoting at length, since it shows how antidogmatisrn could be reconciled with evangelicalism due to its similarly strenuous tone of utter moral seriousness, something the young Unitarians who sprang from these circles also shared with the Evangelicals: Page 10 of 33

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences About eight years since I was entrusted with the care of a College which had been neglected by my predecessor, and really was in a state very near to ruin. I endeavoured to discharge my duty as well as I could. I made it known that I considered a University not as a place of dissipation and expense, but of economy and education, I also considered that I had young men under my care, and recollected that I had been young myself; therefore, in the rules I laid down, I made all allowances consistent with my duty to the parents and guardians who had trusted their young men to my care. My regulations, requiring strict attention at lectures, hall and chapel, and the prohibition of all excursions to Newmarket, were, however, by some thought too hard; I was told that the times would not bear them; that I should ruin my College. Nevertheless, though when I came not a fourth part of my rooms were inhabited, yet now I have not a single room empty; and my admissions are at least in the proportion of three to one, compared with the admissions before I came. These things I mention not as commending myself, but to show that, notwithstanding many horrible proofs of general depravity, the world perhaps is not so bad as it was sometimes thought to be. As to the general system of education at Cambridge, I cannot entirely approve it. I wish less (p.62) was given to mathematical, and more to classical, moral and religious instruction; but I know too well, by woeful experience, the consequence of attempting to be a reformer, and therefore have done with all beyond my own immediate and proper sphere of action. With respect to myself and those under me— ‘Quid verum atque decens curo et rogo, et ornnis in hoc sum.’58

Another well-placed friend of civil and religious liberty, Jonathan Shipley, bishop of St Asaph, also defended the antidogmatic stance of the petitioners, invoking the familiar litany of names from Hooker to Tillotson, emphasizing the superiority of Scripture over human articles of belief, and advocating the need for constant revision of all credal formularies.59 It should be noted that support for antidogmatism was not necessarily dependent on support for the petition, and the tradition easily survived the parliamentary rejection of the cause promoted by the company assembled at the Feathers Tavern.

II By 1768 consciously orthodox responses to the Confessional, often inspired by the ultra-orthodox Thomas Seeker, archbishop of Canterbury, with whom Blackburne had endured a long enmity, allegedly filled ten volumes.60 In his 1769 letter to Blackburne, Thomas Amory had warned him of ‘an evil conspiracy to maintain discords’ and to be aware that there were more ‘inquisitions afoot’; he had hoped that ‘The Shibboleths of a party should no longer be pronounced; nor the poorer sort of an order handed a strong temptation to dissemble their Sentiments’ so that they were able to show themselves to be hypocrites both Page 11 of 33

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences ‘with God and Man’. Amory regretted that this was not so.61 Many of the (p.63) criticisms of Blackburne’s anonymous work which Amory excoriated took the form of ad hominem argumentation: Gloucester Ridley, an Oxford divine, affirmed that ‘A person of a bitter spirit and overweening disposition, is ill qualified to be a reformer’, while John Rotherham, a protégé of Seeker, condemned his opponent’s vituperative and bigoted tone.62 Samuel Cooper questioned the much-commentedupon wit of Blackburne’s performance, which he heavily satirized, as did a Lincolnshire clergyman, Baptist Noel Turner, in his skittishly antidogmatic and anti-Methodist piece, ‘Intelligence of John Bull’, which he contributed to the London Chronicle in the midst of the controversy aroused by the petitioners in 1772.63 Thomas Rutherforth, who as Regius professor of divinity was a champion of orthodoxy in a frequently antidogmatic Cambridge, addressed the heterodox author directly, insisting that ‘Your plan is to have an anarchy in the church with yourself at the head.’64 James Ibbetson, archdeacon of St Alban’s, saw in the success of the Confessional a testimony to a dangerous atmosphere for the Church, as ultra-Protestantism colluded, wittingly or otherwise, with unbelief: it falls in, very luckily for the bookseller, with the fashionable humour which almost universally prevails, of finding fault with every part of the establishment, in direct opposition to truth and experience, and the most approved principles of Protestant Liberty; whereby infidelity and religion are placed upon the same footing, and the defence of Christianity against heathens and idolaters must be totally unbounded. Ibbetson feared the insidious influence of a recrudescence of Commonwealthstyle sectarianism of the sort promoted by (p.64) ‘Presbyterians, Independents, & Anabaptists; Arians; Socinians, & Anti-trinitarians…who are very much increased of late years’.65 Along with such criticism went attacks on the ‘subscribe or starve’ antithesis integral to the petitioners’ cause. Ibbetson thought it a straightforward obligation for men to give up the cloth if their theology went against the Articles, while Thomas Randolph, president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and a veteran in the orthodox engagement with Clayton, noted equably that ‘If any one like not our Terms he may apply himself to some other Profession, or Business, and has no reason to complain of any Injury done to him.’ He continued in the same vein, asking of the petitioners: Is there no Bread to be got by any other Means, but only by thrusting themselves into the ministry? Our Clergy are indeed in general so meanly provided for, and the rich Benefices, and Preferments, confined to so few, that we can scarce think Men in earnest, who pretend that they are reduced to the Necessity of starving, by being kept out of the Ministry.

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences Instances of these starving, conscientious Non-subscribers, are, I believe, very rare.66 Thomas Rutherforth had already made this point, emphasizing with a sense of world-weary cynicism that ‘the more beneficial the office of public-teaching in the church is made, the greater the occasion there will be to guard against false teachers by requiring subscriptions of those who are committed to it’.67 Furthermore, as Randolph put it, the onus of proof of wrongdoing lay with the petitioners, since (p.65) ‘if Men will trifle with Oaths, and Subscriptions, it is their Fault, and not that of the Imposers’.68 This assumption lay behind every orthodox defence of subscription. Gloucester Ridley cited several of the heroes of the antidogmatic tradition in defending the Articles. He noted that Chillingworth had relied on a Catholic notion of tradition, and not just on the Scriptures in justifying his Protestant beliefs. Condemning ‘Dr. Clarke’s casuistry’ and Clayton’s eccentricities, he praised the work of Waterland and Conybeare in the first round of the subscription debate.69 Whilst careful to praise Chillingworth, Ibbetson slyly observed that the champion of Protestantism had once refused to subscribe because of his doubts concerning two of the Articles.70 John Tottie, a canon of Christ Church, Oxford, testified to the latitude already allowed by the Articles, instancing Article 17, concerned with predestination and election, which had long managed successfully to solicit the assent of both Calvinists and Arminians to doctrines at the heart of their disputes.71 Josiah Tucker, dean of Gloucester and one of the most original minds at work in the eighteenth-century Church, turned the favoured example of recent Swiss reformers against the petitioners, appealing to their enforcement of an ‘Orthodox’ reading of Scripture as being tantamount to the subscription they had overturned. What is more, having already suggested that the transmission of the Scriptures was fallible, Tucker, an anti-Lockean conservative, fatally undermined their argument that human fallibilism weakened articles of faith: So that if Fallibility alone…or, if you please, if the bare Possibility of making a Mistake is to be deemed a Sufficient Reason for rejecting the Use of Creeds,—it will then necessarily follow, that both the original Greek and the several Translations of them must be rejected likewise. And the Objection will never cease, ’till it hath (p.66) ended either in universal Scepticism on one Extreme, or an infallible Pope on the other.72 If Chilling worth and the Swiss pastors could be used to these ends, Thomas Balguy, a richly beneficed clergyman who had benefited from the ecclesiastical interest of Bishop Hoadly, used his patron’s name to apparently orthodox ends even more startlingly, dismissing the petitioners for having ‘fairly brought us back, in this enlightened age, to the same point from which their ancestors set out in the reign of Queen Elizabeth; and all the Labours of Hooker, and Page 13 of 33

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences Stillingfleet, and Hoadly, are slighted and forgotten’.73 A near-reversal of Balguy’s pantheon was undertaken by George Home, the ultra-orthodox president of Magdalen College, Oxford, who was a vivid witness to the unlikely bedfellows thrown together by this defence of the establishment. In language far removed from that of Balguy, Home derided the ‘Hoadleian cant’ of the petitioners, whom he further belittled, as ‘a club of infidels’ and ‘these haughty professors of Reason’.74 Like Ibbetson before him, Home portrayed the Confessional- inspired petitioners as the potential champions of Commonwealth excesses, a fear common to many of their opponents. It was to this experience that Ridley had appealed in his repudiation of Blackburne’s work as a prejudiced mixture of heresy and history, and in his fears of revivified sectarianism should subscription be abandoned. ‘Surely’, he wrote, ‘there is no need to pull down all these fences, and let in the errors of Papists, Anabaptists, Arians, Socinians, Fatalists, Free-willers, Quakers, &c. some of which are not only contrary to (p.67) the gospel truths, but dangerous to the commonwealth.’75 Samuel Hardy, a Suffolk clergyman, likewise adverted to the supposed predecessors of the petitioners whose language he happily burlesqued: The associated Gentlemen have bound themselves in a Bond to attempt Redress in the Matter of Subscription to the 39 Articles of the Church of England.—That same Bond of theirs cannot but remind us of the famous Solemn League and Covenant that once reformed us out of all Religion! And from such Reformations may God of his infinite Mercy deliver us!76 Balguy similarly inquired of the petitioners, What think they of the Anabaptists in Germany? of their follies, their crimes, their cruelties? Or, not to trouble them with foreign instances, what do they think of those swarms of Sectaries, which once overspread this unhappy kingdom; and which appear even now to have some remains of life and motion?77 It was to the origins of Cromwellian rule that Tucker implicitly adverted in his warning that ‘Anarchy in the Church is of the same Nature, and has the same tendency as Anarchy in the State. They both necessarily tend to despotic power; and there they terminate.78 In a sermon delivered in 1765, Rotherham had warned his Oxford auditors to be wary of ‘Commonwealth delusions’, the nature of which were shortly to be anatomized by Randolph in an apologia for Church authority: Nor do we think it would promote either Peace, or Edification, if all men of all perswasions were allowed, and commissioned to teach in our Churches whatever Doctrines they pleased. Would not every other Parish have a System of Divinity peculiar to itself? and perhaps in the same Church one Page 14 of 33

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences Doctrine might be preached in the Morning, and another quite different set forth with equal authority in the Afternoon? And thus that glorious Confusion would soon take Place, which Infidels wish for, and the Church of Rome would (p.68) wish to see. And many well-disposed Persons, not knowing where to find the Church of England, would take Refuge in Popery.79 Such a combustive state of affairs, Randolph continued, was not unprecedented, since: The experiment was in great measure tried last Century: and the Consequence was not Peace, but Strife, and Confusion, and every evil Work. We may well hope that our Governours, both in Church, and State, will have more regard to their own Peace, and that of the Publick, than to be wiling to repeat the Experiment.80 The petitioners may have continued to appeal to the eirenic example of an antidogmatic tradition, but their opponents preferred to associate them with even more radical and turbulent elements in English religious and political history. Much of the fear felt by orthodox clerics had been reinforced by the political disquiet of the 1760s and 1770s, the years of ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ and associations for constitutional reform, such as the Yorkshire Association which was later formed and vigorously led by another ex-petitioning clergyman, Christopher Wyvill, who had written in the controversy, between 1779 and 1784.81 Such fears surfaced, with a faint echo of the language of the hated Commonwealth era, in Tottie’s reference to ‘the late Unconstitutional Attempt against the Articles…which could be made with no other Intent, if we suppose the Actors in them to have known what they were about, than to tear up the Establishment of this National Church, Root and Branch’.82 So also Balguy, who opined that the active encouragement of contradictory religions misguidedly undertaken by the Established confession would ‘end in the ruin of the state (p. 69) itself.83 Ridley had likewise assumed that the Confessional ‘intends little less than the subversion of the whole church of England’, accusing its author of self-serving hypocrisy, since ‘such advocates for liberty as yourself, tolerate no opinions but their own’. ‘Why’, he asked, ‘give delight to papists and infidels by such extravagancies?’84 The fear had been most extremely voiced by Ibbetson in his denunication of antidogmatists as being ‘Utopian Projectors of absolute, free and uncontrouled liberty’.85 Hardy was of the same mind in identifying the illtimed shortcomings of the petitioners’ partisan actions: In Time of Civil Confusion, it is very improper, methinks, to enter upon the Discussion of Religious Subjects. To such Disquisitions Men should come with great Temper and Moderation, and Coolness and Sobriety, with Page 15 of 33

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences Candour and Integrity. And yet this can hardly be the Case when the Tempers of Men are soured and influenced by Party Rage. And therefore I cannot but think that the Gentlemen at the Feathers-Tavern fixed upon a very improper Season for discussing our 39 Articles.—Religious Buildings should never be exposed to Civil Storms.86 Addressing the petitioners, Tucker, having laid down two ‘postulata’, namely that all societies (including ‘the Association at the Feathers Tavern’) had a ‘common Center of Union’, and that they were governed by a rule in order to achieve their purpose, concluded that ‘if you admit of such Reflections, you must likewise admit of Creeds, Articles, and Subscriptions, under some shape or other, or of something equivalent to them. For these are nothing else but so many Rules of Conduct, and Centers of Union.’ To claim otherwise was, he continued in terms designed to compromise the sincerity of the petitioners, ‘in the Judgement of all discerning Persons, as if you had confessed, either that you had no Principles at all, or else, that they were of such a sort, as you did not wish to have discovered, even in the Land of Liberty’. Speculation was of little value to a conservative (p.70) cleric who failed to see the wisdom in ‘demolishing the present venerable Structure, even before we know, what Kind of Building, or whether any Building is to be erected in its Place’.87 Structural metaphors such as those favoured by Tucker abounded in defences of subscription, which acted as ‘the great Bulwark of the Reformation’; to abandon them would be tantamount to ‘levelling the fences of the Church of England’, of ‘throwing down the fortifications to secure the fortress’.88 According to Ibbetson, ‘Subscriptions…are the justification of our national Church, the bulwark of its doctrine and purity.’89 Randolph warned the clergy of Oxford to take care how we listen to the plausible suggestions of those, who under Pretence of the Reformation of our Church, strike at the very Foundation of it. And this especially at this Time, when a spirit of Licentiousness seems to be prevailing, and a Contempt of all Government, which threatens the Subversion of our happy Constitution, both in Church and State.90 Without subscriptions, argued Randolph, ‘we can have…no fence to prevent Popish Emissaries, or any False Teachers whatsoever, from thrusting themselves into the Ministry’.91 It was this public nature of the ministry which determined the ultimate course of the debate, for, as Rutherforth noted of a candidate for ordination, ‘when he is appointed a public teacher it then becomes a matter of public concern; and the governours of the church are warranted by the nature of their duty, and by scripture-precepts, to find it out, and to judge of it’.92 William Jones, the faithful disciple of George Horne, had similarly concluded that ‘To establish all, would be to confound all, and the very attempt would make public authority and public religion ridiculous. All that can be done is to establish one, and tolerate the rest; and this is done (p.71) already.’93 Rotherham had

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences attacked Blackburne for striking at ‘the root of all order in religion’; the public office of clergymen forbade their dissent from declared orthodoxy, since, Error in a private Christian may remain in his own breast. But in a public teacher it is a spreading evil; it is an infection which, by the nature of his office he is obliged to communicate to others, and to circulate as far as his influence reaches.94 This theme provided a major subject in Edmund Burke’s critique of the petition, as enunciated in the House of Commons debate of 6 February 1772, when the Bill for acceptance of their cause was convincingly rejected by two hundred and seventeen votes to seventy-one in the first of the engagements over clerical subscription, both Anglican and Dissenting, which would culminate in the Toleration Bill of 1779.95 Tucker was not the only critic to see in Burke a politique, with little sincerely religious interest in preserving the established rights of the Church of England. Burke’s support for subscription might be regarded as having been purely political.96 The religion of Burke is indeed notoriously difficult to decipher, but Conor Cruise O’Brien is surely right to see in his notion of the Church something which absorbed both the Roman Catholicism which pervaded his upbringing and the Anglicanism which was a necessary part of his identity as a prominent politician in England.97 Such a combination reinforced the arguments propounded by the clerisy of England’s Established confession, albeit at the cost of tacitly renouncing their anti-Catholicism, providing it was Cisalpine Catholicism. In language consistent with his self-image as a defender of (p.72) the ancient constitution, Burke offered to the Commons an oratorical recapitulation of a reform-inclined statement of the orthodox case, presenting the original framers of the Articles as men who were ‘neither so bigoted nor so ill informed as to leave no door open for reformation’.98 The societal impact of religion was central to Burke’s case, as was the familiar distinction between the private and public life of religious teachers to which orthodox divines had drawn attention: In their closets they may entertain what tenets they please, but for the sake of peace and order, they must inculcate from the pulpit only the religion of the state. Nor does this obligation seem to me any hardship; because every man must make a sacrifice of something to society; and allow that society, of two evils, to chance the least, to impose upon a few individuals perhaps a disagreeable restraint, rather than to introduce disorder and confusion into the whole body politic. A careful study of the Bible was not enough to ensure such conformity, since, as Tucker had argued, the inherent problems of canonicity and internal contradiction ensured that adherence to Scripture was not a sufficient rule in Page 17 of 33

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences itself. The Thirty-Nine Articles, the ‘foundations’ of the Church, alone provided the authoritative security desired by Burke. Order, decorum, public peace, a Parliament-centred Erastianism which he traced to the Reformation, all led Burke to vote against the petition.99 A similar position had already been adopted by Samuel Johnson, who, whilst leaving open the question of the strict truth of all of the Articles, accepted them as the means to public peace. He dismissed the petition, since faith in the Bible was an insufficient guarantee of orthodoxy: Muslims could as readily assent to the Scriptures as Christians. Any doctrinal controversy, Johnson observed, tended to undermine the (p.73) authority of the Church, and this erosion of its status had dangerous consequences for the whole of civil society.100 Supported in the Commons by reformist Whigs, such as Sir George Savile (shortly to be associated with the Yorkshire Association), Sir William Meredith, Thomas Pitt, and others, the petition was predictably lost in debate, leading Gibbon, archly on the side of the orthodox, to observe institutional decline and corrupt alliances. He congratulated the religiously sceptical John Holroyd on: the late Victory of our dear Mamma the Church of England. She had last Thursday 71 rebellious sons who pretended to set aside her will on account of insanity: but 217 Worthy Champions headed by Lord North, Burke, Hans Stanley, Charles Fox, Godfrey Clarke &c, though they allowed the thirty nine clauses of her Testament were absurd and unreasonable supported the validity of it with infinite humour. By the bye C[harles] F[ox] prepared himself for that Holy War by passing twenty two hours in the pious exercise of Hazard. His devotions cost him only £500 an hour in all £11000.101 In his Memoirs, Gibbon was later mischievously to claim that his tutors at Magdalen College, Oxford had so manifestly failed in their most elementary duties as not to have obliged him to subscribe to the articles on matriculation, as was the custom at Oxford, which had campaigned vigorously for the retention of undergraduate subscription in 1772.102 As Gibbon had hinted, the debate had a disappointing air (p.74) of complacency about it. The reform of the Church demanded by the petitioners was felt by many to compromise the whole fabric of the state: Oxford University’s MP, Sir Roger Newdigate, and its chancellor, Lord North, saw in the petition a means of subverting all that they and their constituents held sacred. The dissenting element in the Commons, represented in the debate by John Sawbridge (a brother of Catherine Macaulay, the polemically Whig historian admired by Blackburne), supported the petitioners, as did more traditionally minded Whigs, who invoked the names of Hoadly and Samuel Clarke in their speeches.103

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences Despite their failure, many antidogmatists persisted with the case against subscription. Blackburne continued in his Commonwealthman championship of Milton and freedom against Hobbes and Erastianism, denouncing ‘the politican’s religion’ of Warburton’s Alliance, and commenting derisively on what he saw as the new fusion of Wesleyanism with Oxford-sponsored orthodoxy.104 John Disney, echoing many of his predecessors, pleaded the cause of ‘further Reformation’ in an open letter to the archbishop of Canterbury; he also went on to denounce Balguy’s supposed Warburtonianism and to defend the arguments of the Confessional against the supposed orthodoxy of Oxford divines.105 The young William Paley wrote an anonymous (p.75) defence of Law’s anonymous defence of Hoadly-inspired antidogmatism against an orthodoxy which he provocatively identified with the apologists for Rome.106 Orthodox divines rejected all such calls for reform as a cloak for the inculcation of heresy. The secession of younger men to Unitarianism confirmed such suspicions; Edmund Law was himself called upon by one of their number to throw in his lot with them, and encouraged openly to espouse his Socinianism, to leave the Church and act as a champion for opponents of Trinitarian dogma.107 An altogether less friendly critic, Samuel Hardy, who had identified their heretical suspicion of the doctrine of the Trinity as the origin of their unease, had also suggested that the petitioners resign their preferments, since ‘That, I think, will be the only Relief they will ever have in the Matter of Subscription.’108 Tellingly, Law and Blackburne remained in the Church of England, whose theology they had hoped to reform from within. The older Paley, who had famously refused to sign the petition as if to confirm the ‘subscribe or starve’ antithesis by claiming that he ‘could not afford a conscience’, and who would eventually redefine the Articles into an open-ended system for the promotion of ecclesiastical peace, prospered in the post-petition years. Richard Watson, another Law protégé, whose vehement opposition to doctrinal formulations had been and continued to be of the most basic and Reformationminded sort, likewise prospered in the years following the petition.109 Unlike the younger Unitarians, Paley, long suspected of Socinianism, and Watson, who declared that ‘if any one thinks that an Unitarian is not a Christian, I plainly say, without myself (p.76) being a Unitarian, that I think otherwise’, remained genuinely puzzled by Trinitarian formulas without feeling the need, at least openly, to renounce them.110 The legacy of Law and his circle had its chief influence abroad, chiefly in Germany, where the new criticism of scriptural authority was to evolve from native doubts about formulaic, Lutheran expressions of orthodoxy.111 From Germany the new criticism filtered back into England, transforming nineteenthcentury theology, and answering the need for doctrinal clarification felt by Oriel Noetics and Trinity Liberals.112 It is against this background that the 1865

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences decision to allow ordinands to assent rather than to subscribe to the Articles can best be understood.113

III The controversy aroused by the petition deepened fissures in the Church of England. Whilst the Cambridge Baptist preacher Robert Robinson welcomed the creation of more ‘rational’, that is undogmatic, Christians, some Church of England divines had already begun to reconsider the import of the Articles, encouraging a revival of Calvinism in the closing decades of the century.114 Prominent in this revival was Augustus Montague Toplady, a man who for the last two years of his short life was to become thoroughly (p.77) convinced of his own salvation, and staunch in his opposition to ‘the reigning Heterodoxy of Arminius’.115 As early as 1769, Toplady had sought to vindicate Calvinism as the source of ‘the unrepealed standards of our national faith’, defending the Articles from ‘the false charge of Arminianism’. For Toplady, Calvinist doctrines were inherent in the early history of the Church, remaining uncorrupted until the rise of the British monk Pelagius in the fifth century. It was, he believed, the doctrine of the Reformers: he saw Luther as having been a strict predestinarían, whilst vehemently rejecting Wesley’s Arminian reading of Article 17 as a perversion of the creed which was no more credible than that which might have been made by a Turk or a ‘Papist’. Toplady also undermined the orthodox standing of Burnet and Waterland, whose interpetations of the Articles might as well have served those offered by Arians and Socinians, for all alike, according to Toplady, distorted the true, Calvinist import of these formulations. Laud was the villain of the piece, just as Locke’s Calvinist opponent John Edwards was a hero to Toplady, who greeted him as one of Williamite Cambridge’s ‘brightest ornaments’ for having had the courage to keep the true faith in unpropitious times. Arminianism was identified as the cousin of ‘Popery’, as witnessed by the political effects of Laudianism in the reign of the ‘tyrant’ Charles I.116 Despite the similarity between their stances of opposition to Stuart-sponsored Arminianism, Toplady denounced Blackburne and his allies. In his dismissal of the case made by the group he punningly and deridingly identified them as ‘the Feathery Divines’, recalling their meetings at the Feathers Tavern. Again, the theme of self-serving greed was prominent, as he accused heretics and deists of hiding behind antidogmatism in order to abuse ecclesiastical wealth and the social prestige of a clerical calling. The Erasmian topos was (p.78) re-evoked alongside Pauline imagery as he accused the petitioners of staging their campaign so that: they themselves might sit down to the Loaves and Fishes, without the Trouble of previously saying Grace. They want to be supported at the public Expense, for doing nothing, and for believing nothing…. Though they Page 20 of 33

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences have no Regard to the Ark of GOD, let them prudently take some Thought for the security of their Diana.117 They themselves were the ‘Internal Destroyers of our National Church’, the abusers of Chillingworth’s faith, the poisoners of true belief.118 Similarly, Joseph Milner would later plead for Anglican clergy to subscribe literally to the Calvinist doctrines which underpinned the Articles, as he berated clerical selfinterest since it willingly compromised Reformed dogma: Those Clergymen who love the things of this world chiefly, and feel indisposed to renounce the pomps and vanity of this life for the kingdom of heaven’s sake, are never willing that the plain contrariety of their doctrines and spirit to those of the Reformation should be exposed. Their inconsistency in eating the bread of a Church which they love not, must be supported by little cavils and sophisms119 The coincidence of a revival of Calvinism (which was also to be found amongst Dissenters), which drew much of its inspiration from the theology of the Reformers, as instituted in the Thirty-Nine Articles, alongside an antidogmatic assault on those very conditions of belief, led some more orthodoxly inclined clergy to seek a revision in the liturgy which would meet both sets of objections.120 Beilby Porteus, a former Cambridge don who was to become an influential (p.79) bishop of London, projected a mild revision of the liturgy in 1772, designed to stem the more destructive calls of the Feathers Tavern petitioners. His declared aims were to deal with the problem of the potentially combustive survival of Calvinist Articles within a predominantly Arminian confession, and the allied concern with schism.121 His proposals, defended in their scope by Francis Wollaston and John Sturges (who defended revisions which would accord with the manifest progress in religious knowledge which he discerned to have been made since the mid-sixteenth century), were sat upon by Cornwallis, archbishop of Canterbury, who rejected them on the grounds of securing doctrinal ease in the Church, a pacific aim which, he insisted, would have been lost by such an open examination as that proposed by Porteus.122 As a consequence of the complaisant Establishmentarianism of the likes of Cornwallis, the Church would lay itself open to the incursions of Evangelical thought and the reaction of ‘Orthodoxy’ which culminated in the Oxford Movement:123 such was the unintended and largely unforeseeable legacy of those who ignored Porteus’s considered calls for reform in their desire to anaesthetize doctrinal engagement within the Church of England. Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism would also temporarily replace religious liberalism as the main sources of Anglican apologetic following the reaction which developed in devout circles in the wake of the French Revolution. This allowed men such as (p.80) Home and William Jones, author of the significantly entitled The Scholar

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences Armed Against the Errors of the Day (1795), to enjoy a late flowering of mainstream success.124 These opening chapters have revealed the exoskeleton, as it were, of the controversial culture of eighteenth-century Anglicanism. Arguments relating to Church and State, to dogmatism and antidogmatism were, however, only the most public of the apologetic engagements of the clerisy. The anatomy of England’s clerical Enlightenment necessarily begins with a delineation of Protestant, especially Lockean antidogmatism, just as its early CounterEnlightenment experience requires that due attention be paid to defenders of religious orthodoxy. Conservative orthodoxy looked back to the era of Laud and the Anglican patristic scholarship of the later seventeenth century in defending its combative stance against the argumentation of Enlightened ecclesiastics. The outer layers of this twin experience will now be examined through analysis of metaphysical debates, and of those in broader fields of scholarship controversially inaugurated by William Warburton. Notes:

(1) On Powell, see J. Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (2nd edn., London, 1812), i. 566–84. On the background to the sermon, see J. Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1989), 132– 3. (2) W. S. Powell, A Defence of the Subscriptions required in the Church of England (London, 1757), 12–17. On Burke and prescription, see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Burke and the Ancient Constitution: A Problem in the History of Ideas’, HJ 3 (1960), 125–43. (3) Defence of Subscriptions, 17. (4) Blackburne, Remarks on The Revd. Dr. Powell’s Sermons In Defence of Subscriptions, Preached before the University of Cambridge On the Commencement Sunday, 1757 (London, 1758), pp. vii, ix, xviii-xix. (5) Ibid. 3. (6) Blackburne, 8. (7) Blackburne, 24. For his earlier attacks on Butler, see A serious enquiry into the use and importance of external religion (1752), in The Works Theological and Miscellaneous of the Revd. Francis Blackburne, Archdeacon of Cleveland, ed. F. Blackburne, LL. B. (Cambridge, 1804–5), i. 91–171. (8) Remarks on the Revd. Dr. Powell’s Sermon 56–7, 62–3, 70–1. (9) BM Add. MS Eg. 2325, fos. 15–16. Page 22 of 33

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences (10) Ibid., fos. 17–19. (11) For a reading of the Confessional as a defence of religious freedom and a critique of ‘orthodoxy’ as mere utility, see the interesting remarks in P. N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in EighteenthCentury Britain (Cambridge, 1994), 309–13. (12) BM Add. MS Eg. 4301, fos. 127–8. (13) Blackburne, The Confessional (3rd edn., London, 1770), 32–47; Blackburne, Remarks on Johnson’s Life of Milton (London, 1780), 91; S. Johnson, ‘Milton’, in The Lives of the English Poets; and a criticism of their works, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905), i. 84–194. On this confrontation, see D. Griffin, Regaining Paradise: Milton in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1986), 16–18, 203–16. On Blackburne’s politics, see C. Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), chs. 8 and 9. (14) Eikonoclastes, in The Columbia Edition of the Works of John Milton, (New York, 1932), v. 61–309, esp. chs. 16, 17, and 20. (15) Confessional, pp. xlviii-lii. (16) Ibid. 161. (17) ibid. 83–5, 153–7, 214. Burnet was familiar with the ‘Helvetic Trio’, the ablest of the opponents of the Consensus Doctrinae, namely Jean Alphonse Turretini, Samuel Werenfels, and Jean Frederick Ostervald: see E. Duffy, ‘Correspondence Fraternelle: The SPCK, the SPG, and the Churches of Switzerland in the War of the Spanish Succession’, in D. Baker (ed.), Religious Motivation: Biographical and Scociological problems for the Church Historian (SCH 15; 1979), 251–80; L. Kirk, ‘Eighteenth-Century Geneva and a Changing Calvinism’, in S. Mews (ed.), Religion and National Identity (SCH 18; 1982), 367– 80. (18) Blackburne, Confessional, 192–207. (19) Ibid 212–15. (20) Ibid. 216. On the professionalization of the clerical vocation earlier in the period, see G. Holmes, Augustan England: Professions, State and Society, 1680– 1730 (London, 1982), ch. 4, along with the more critical assessment made by M. Hawkins, ‘Ambiguity and Contradiction in “the Rise of Professionalism”: The English Clergy, 1570–1730’ in A. L. Beier, D. Cannadine, and J. M. Rosenheim

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences (eds.), The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989), 241–69. (21) For a sceptical consideration of such fears, see G. M. Ditchfield, ‘Ecclesiastical Policy under Lord North’, in Walsh et al. (eds.), The Church of England, c.1689-c.1833: from Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge, 1993), 228–46. (22) L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992). Political partisanship, as revealed through party labelling, was only just emerging into respectability: cf. J. C. D. Clark, ‘A General Theory of Party, Opposition and Government, 1688–1832’, HJ 23 (1980), 295–325; M. Peters, ‘“Names and Cant”: Party Labels in English Political Propaganda’, Parliamentary History, 3 (1984), 103–27. Burke was central to this process: J. Brewer, ‘Rockingham, Burke and Whig Political Argument’, HJ 18 (1975), 188–201. (23) Blackburne, Confessional, 218–58, 270–353, 355, 399. (24) M. Goldie, ‘The Civil Religion of James Harrington’, in A. Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987), 97– 112. (25) Blackburne, Works, vol i, p. lx. In June 1772, it was agreed that BAs could replace subscription with a declaration that one was ‘bona fide a member of the church of England as by law established’, a provision extended to bachelors of law, medicine, and music in 1779: Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment, 202. (26) Confessional, 400–6. For an able defence of the work, see W. Harris, Civil Establishments in Religion, A Ground of Infidelity; Or, The Two Extremes Shewn to be United (London, 1767). (27) A Letter Written by a Country Clergyman, to Archbishop Herring, In the Year MDCCLIV , in Works, ii. 101–34. (28) Works, vol. i, p. lxxviii. (29) Ibid., app. H, ‘Answer To The Question, Why Are You Not A Socinian?’, pp. cxx-cxxvi. (30) Blackburne, Works, vol. i, pp. iii–iv. (31) BM Add. MS Eg. 2325, fos. 23–5. (32) Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1876), i. 426.

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences (33) A Short Memoir of The Life of Edmund Law, D.D., Bishop of Carlisle (London, 1800), 2. (34) Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1878–90), ii. 537. (35) Law, The True Nature and Intent of Religion, A Sermon Preached in the Cathedral Church of Durham, On the 15th of May, 1768 (Newcastle, 1768), 3, and passim. (36) Law, Reflections on the Life and Character of Christ (Cambridge, n.d.), 6, 16–18, 22–3, 28, 30, 53–5, 59. (37) Ibid. 60–75; Law, Considerations on the State of the World, with Regard to the Theory of Religion (Cambridge, 1745), 120–1. Stephen saw this latter work as marking the starting-point of a distinctively Cambridge school of liberal thought: History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, i. 406. (38) ‘Pasquin’, ‘Cambridge Triumphant’, in J. Almon (ed.), An Asylum for Fugitive Pieces in Prose and Verse, Not in any other collection: With Several Pieces Never Before Published (2nd edn., London, 1795), iii. 136–8. (39) S. Henley, A Candid Refutation of the Heresy Imputed By R. O. Nicholas Esquire to the Reverend S. Henley of Williamsburg (Cambridge, 1774); R. Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC, 1982), 184–203. For a conspiratorial reading of the antisubscription movement, see J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1985), 311–15. (40) Law, Considerations on the Propriety of Requiring a Subscription to Articles of Faith (2nd edn., London, 1774), 2–4; T. Lindsey, The Book of Common Prayer Reformed According to the Plan of the Late Dr. Samuel Clarke (London, 1774). (41) Law, Considerations on the Propriety of Requiring a Subscription, 7, 48–9, 59, 62. (42) Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, i. 570–71. (43) M. Fitzpatrick, ‘Rational Dissent in the Late Eighteenth Century with Particular Reference to the Growth of Toleration’, Ph.D. thesis, Univ. of Wales, 1982, pp. 195–6. (44) ‘Copy of the Petition of the Clergy, &c. Relative to Subscription to the Thirtynine Articles Offered on Thursday 6th of February, 1772’, in Blackburne, Works, vii. 18–19. (45) Memoirs of the Life of Gilbert Wakefield (London, 1804), i. 113. Page 25 of 33

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences (46) Jebb, Letters on the Subject of Subscription to the Liturgy and Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (London, 1772), 2–6, 14. (47) Ibid. 15–16, 19. (48) Remarks Upon the Present Mode of Education in the University of Cambridge: To which is added, a proposal for its improvement (Cambridge, 1774); Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment, 175, 191, 198, 202–5, 208, 213, 224, 226, 228, 271; D. A. Winstanley, Unreformed Cambridge: A Study of Certain Aspects of the University in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1935), 299–334. (49) Cf. Gascoigne, ‘Anglican Latitudinarianism and Political Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century’, History, 71 (1986), 22–38. (50) Jebb, A Short State of the Reasons for a Late Resignation (Cambridge, 1773); J. Disney, Reasons for Resigning the Rectory of Panton and Vicarage of Swinderby in Lincolnshire; and Quitting the Church of England (2nd edn., London, 1783); T. Lindsey, A Farewell Address to the Parishioners of Catterick (London, 1774); id., A Sermon Preached At the Opening of the Chapel in EssexHouse, Essex-Street, in the Strand (London, 1774); id., The Apology of Theophilus Lindsey, M.A. On Resigning the Village of Catterick, Yorkshire (4th edn., London, 1782). (51) Disney, A Short Memoir of the Rev. Robert Edward Garnham (London, 1814), 3–4; Wakefield, Memoirs, i. 116, 201–11. (52) For interesting reflections on Peckard, see E. Duffy’s remarks in P. Cunich et al. (eds.), A History of Magdalene College, Cambridge 1428–1988 (Cambridge, 1988), 184–93. In the fragmentary remains of a letter to Blackburne, dated 10 Oct. 1772, Peckard had noted that ‘2 Bps [were] professedly disposed to reform’. Whether Peckard approved of petitioning as a means to ecclesiastical reform remains an open question, as the letter suggests: ‘If I shall outlive you, I shall always look up to your Character with the warmest Affection, & with the highest veneration. I never blam’d a Principle of yours, nor differ’d from you, except possibly a little as to Mode of Proceeding.’ (Bodleian Library, MS Autogr. d.14, fo. 83). (53) Subscription, Or Historical Extracts (London, 1776), 5, 14–15. For Peckard’s well-attested consistency on these concerns, see A Sermon on the Nature and Extent of Civil and Religious Liberty (London, 1754) and The Nature and Extent of Civil and Religious Liberty: A Sermon Preached before the University of Cambridge, November the 5th, 1783 (Cambridge, 1783). (54) Peckard, Subscription, Or Historical Extracts (London, 1776), 111, 125–6, 132, 135, 147–8, 153. Page 26 of 33

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences (55) Ibid. 166–8, 171, 181. (56) Id., A Sermon Preached at the Visitation of the Rev. Archdeacon Cholwell, At Huntingdon, May 19, 1772 (Cambridge, 1772), 14. (57) A Dissertation on Revelations, xii. Ver. 13 (London, 1756); The Unalterable Nature of Virtue and Vice, A Sermon, Preached at St. James’s, Westminster, Sunday, April 24, 1775. Containing Remarks on the Principles advanced by the late Lord Chesterfield (London, 1776); Piety, Benevolence, and Loyalty, Recommended. A Sermon Preached before the University of Cambridge, January 30, 1784 (Cambridge, 1784); Am I Not a Man? and a Brother (London, 1788); The Neglect of a Known Duty is a Sin, A Sermon Preached Before the University of Cambridge, on Sunday Jan. 31, 1790 (Cambridge, 1790); National Crimes the Cause of National Punishments. A Discourse Deliver’d in the Cathedral Church of Peterborough, on the Fast-Day, Feb. 25th, 1795 (Peterborough, n.d.); Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment, 22–4, 253; H. Gunning, Reminisences of the University, Town, and County of Cambridge From the Year 1780 (2nd edn., London, 1855), 112–13. (58) Cited in M. Forbes, Beattie and his Friends (London, 1904), 247. For Peckard’s religious sense of duty, see the tender, if poetically rather poor sentiments expressed by his widow in Bodleian MS Eng. poet, c.51, p. 237a/b. (59) ‘Charge II. Delivered in the Year 1774’, in The Works of the Right Reverend Jonathan Shipley, D.D., Lord Bishop of St. Asaph, (London, 1792), ii. 25–50. (60) F. Blackburne, Memoirs of Thomas Hollis (London, 1780), i. 371–72, 406. (61) BM Add. MS Eg. 2325, fo. 23–5. (62) Ridley, Three Letters to the Author of The Confessional (London, 1768), letter 1, p. 5; J. Rotherham, An Essay on Establishments in Religion With Remarks on The Confessional (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1767), 129–30. (63) Cooper, A Full Refutation of the Reasons Advanced In Defence of the Petition, Which is intended to be offered to Parliament by some of the Clergy, For the Abolition of Subscription to the Articles and Liturgy (London, 1772), pp. iv-vi, 7; P. Köster, ‘Baptist Noel Turner’s “Intelligence of John Bull”: An Allegorical Satire on the Subscription Controversy’, Church History, 54 (1985), 338–52. (64) Defence of a Charge Concerning Subscriptions, In a Letter to the Author of The Confessional (Cambridge, 1767), 104. (65) A Plea for the Subscription of the Clergy to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (3rd edn., London, 1768), pp. v, 45–6.

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences (66) Ibid. 17; Randolph, A Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity from the Exceptions of a late Pamphlet Entitled An Essay on Spirit &c. (Oxford, 1753), a work later extended to vitiate Lindsey’s Unitarianism as A Vindication of the Worship of the Son and the Holy Ghost Against the Exceptions of Mr. Theophilus Lindsey From Scripture and Antiquity, Being A Supplement to a Treatise Formerly published and entitled A Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity (Oxford, 1775); id., The Reasonableness of Requiring Subscription to Articles of Religion From Persons to be Admitted to Holy Orders, or a Cure of Souls, Vindicated in a Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Oxford in the Year 1771 (Oxford, 1771), 8, 10. (67) Defence of a Charge Concerning Subscriptions, 49. (68) Reasonableness of Requiring Subscription, 19. (69) Three Letters, letter 1, p. 27; letter 3, pp. 9–12, 24–30; letter 2, pp. 193–99. (70) Plea for the Subscription of the Clergy, 6–7. (71) ‘A Charge Relative to the Articles of the Church of England, Delivered to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of Worcester in the Year MDCCLXXII’, in Sermons, Preached before the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1775), 370–2. (72) An Apology for the Present Church of England (2nd edn., Gloucester, 1772), 34–5, 25–6. On Tucker’s political thinking, see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke and Price: A Study in the Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Conservatism’, in Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge, 1985), 157–91, and on his defence of subscription, see G. Shelton, Dean Tucker and EighteenthCentury Economic and Social Thought (London, 1981), 174–81. (73) ‘On Subscription to Articles of Religion, Delivered in the Year 1772’, in Discourses on Several Subjects (Winchester, 1785), 254, 275–6. (74) A Letter to the Right Honourable the Lord North, Chancellor of the University of Oxford, Concerning Subscription to the XXXIX Articles; and Particularly The Undergraduate Subscription in That University (Oxford, 1773), 2–3, 25, 37. On Home, see N. Aston, ‘Home and Heterodoxy: The Defence of Anglican Beliefs in the Late Enlightenment’, EHR 108 (1991), 895–919. (75) Three Letters, letter 1, p. 100, letter 2, p. 204. (76) A Vindication of The Church of England, In Requiring Subscription to Her Thirty Nine Articles; In an Account of the Rise and Occasion of those Articles; Humbly submitted to the Consideration of every sincere Member of the Church of England (London, 1773), 7. (77) ‘On Subscription to Articles of Faith’, 265. Page 28 of 33

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences (78) Apology for the Present Church of England, 47. (79) Rotherham, Government a Divine Institution. A Sermon Preached before the University of Oxford At St. Mary’s, On the Twenty-Ninth of May, 1765 (London, 1766), 33; Randolph, Reasonableness of Requiring Subscriptions, 18. (80) Reasonableness of Requiring Subscriptions, 18. (81) I. R. Christie, ‘The Yorkshire Association, 1780–1784: A Study in Political Organisation’, in Myth and Reality in Late Eighteenth-Century British Politics and Other Papers (London, 1970), 261–83; id-, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform (London, 1962). Wyvill’s contribution to the debate was characteristically political in orientation, Thoughts On Our Articles of Religion, With Respect to their Supposed Utility to the State (London, 1771). (82) ‘Charge Relative to the Articles of the Church of England’, 389. (83) ‘On Subscription to Articles of Religion’, 260. (84) Three Letters, letter 1, p. 6, letter 2, p. 163, letter 3, p. 160. (85) Plea for the Subscription of the Clergy, 3. (86) Vindication of the Church of England, 6. (87) Apology for the Present Church of England, 5, 16, 17, 57. (88) Tottic, ‘A Charge Relative to the Articles of the Church of England’, 390; Horne, Letter to the Right Honourable Lord North, 21, 42. (89) Plea for the Subscription of the Clergy, 48. (90) Reasonableness of Requiring Subscriptions, 30. (91) Ibid. 15. (92) Defence of a Charge Concerning Subscription, 86. (93) Remarks on the Principles and Spirit of a Work, Entitled The Confessional (London, 1770), 70. (94) Essay on Establishments in Religion, 48, 112. (95) G. M. Ditchfield, ‘The Subscription Issue in British Parliamentary Politics, 1772–1791’, Parliamentary History, 7 (1988), 45–80. (96) Pocock, ‘Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke and Price’, 166–7, 189–90.

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences (97) O’Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (London, 1992), 29–31. (98) ‘Speech on Clerical Subscription’, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ii. Party, Parliament and the American Crisis 1766–1774, ed. P. Langford (Oxford, 1981), 360. On the general disposition in Burke of which this was an aspect, see Pocock, ‘Burke and the Ancient Constitution’. Lecky thought Burke’s speech ‘by far the ablest’ in the debate: History of England in the Eighteenth Century, iii. 499. (99) ‘Speech on Clerical Subscription’, 362–4. (100) Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934–50), ii. 150–1, 254–5. For a good summation of Johnson’s Churchmanship, see N. Hudson, Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Oxford, 1988), 223–51. Johnson had become a firm opponent of Hollis and his supporters in the 1760s: W. H. Bond, ‘Thomas Hollis and Samuel Johnson’ in J. Engell (ed.), Johnson and his Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 83–105. (101) The Letters of Edward Gibbon, ed. J. E. Norton (London, 1956), i. 305. Fox’s otherwise tolerant attitudes originated in his own religious scepticism: L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (Oxford, 1992), 242–7. (102) The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon, ed. J. Murray (London, 1896), 83. Gibbon would also undermine the heroic image of Chillingworth by claiming that he died either an Arian or a Socinian: ibid. 129. Gibbon’s publisher, Thomas Cadell, became a Unitarian, attending Lindsey’s Essex Street Chapel: Letters of Theophilus Lindsey, ed. H. McLachlan (Manchester, 1920), 6–7. On subscription at Oxford, see L. G. Mitchell, ‘Politics and Revolution 1772–1800’, in id. and L. S. Sutherland (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford, v. The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1986), 165–77. (103) Blackburne, Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, i. 225. More generally, see B. Hill, The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford, 1992). Dissenting calls for relief from discriminatory legislation, which would shortly prove effective, had their origins in this Commonwealthman atmosphere, on which see, U. Henriques, Religious Toleration in England 1787– 1833 (London, 1961), and J. E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution and English Radicalism: Non-Conformity in Eighteenth-Century Politics and Society (Cambridge, 1990). On the debate itself, see History, Debates, and Proceedings of Both Houses of Parliament of Great Britain, From the Year 1743 to the Year 1774, (London, 1792), vii. 160–71; Gentleman’s Magazine, And Historical Chronicle, 43 (1772), 69–70, 72, 132, 307–12, 363–5.

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences (104) Reflections on the Fate of a Petition for Relief in the Matter of Subscription, Offered to the Honourable House of Commons, February 6th, 1772 (2nd edn., [1774]), in Works, vii. 33–228. (105) A Letter to the Most Reverend the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, On the Present Opposition to any Further Reformation (London, 1774); Remarks on Dr. Balguy’s Sermon, Preached in Lambeth Chapel, at the Consecration of the Bishops of Lichfield and Coventry, and of Bangor, February 12, 1775. In a Letter to that Gentleman (London, 1775); A Short View of the Controversies Occasioned by The Confessional, and the Petition to Parliament for Relief in the Matter of Subscription to the Liturgy and Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (2nd edn., London, 1775). (106) A Defence of the Considerations on the Propriety of Requiring a Subscription to Articles of Faith. In Reply to a Late Answer from the Clarendon Press (London, 1774). (107) Joseph Cornish, A Letter to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Carlise (London, 1777). (108) Vindication of the Church of England, 8, 38–9. (109) G. W. Meadley, Memoirs of William Paley, D.D. (Sunderland, 1809), 48; W. Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (London, 1785), 554–86; R. Watson, A Christian Whig’s Two Letters to the Members of the Honourable House of Commons (London, 1772); Anecdotes of the Life of Richard Watson, Bishop of Landaff (London, 1817), 39–43. As a result of his ultra-Whig politics, however, Watson did not progress beyond the see of Llandaff. (110) Meadley, Memoirs, 165; G. A. Cole, ‘Doctrine, Dissent and the Decline of Paley’s Reputation, 1805–1825’, Enlightenment and Dissent, 6 (1987), 119–30; Watson, Anecdotes, 47. For a similar reading of these men, which understates their heterodoxy, see A. M. C. Waterman, ‘A Cambridge “Via media” in Late Georgian Anglicanism’, JEH 42 (1991), 419–36. It was not until the early 19th cent, that Unitarianism gained a measure of respectability, associated as it long was with political as much as with religious radicalism, on which see G. M. Ditchfield, ‘Anti-Trinitarianism and Toleration in Late Eighteenth-Century British Politics: The Unitarian Petition of 1792’, JEH 42 (1991), 39–67. (111) N. Boyle, ‘Lessing, Biblical Criticism and the Origins of German Classical Culture’, German Life and Letters, NS 35 (1980–1), 196–213. (112) R. Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion, and Reform 1830– 1841 (Oxford, 1987), chs. 3 and 4. (113) Fitzpatrick, ‘Rational Dissent in the Late Eighteenth Century’, 177. Page 31 of 33

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences (114) Robinson, Arcana: Or the Principles of the Late Petitioners to Parliament for Relief in the Matter of Subscription (Cambridge, 1774). (115) Anon., A Memoir of Some Principal Circumstances In The Life and Death of the Reverend and Learned Augustus Montague Toplady, B.A. Late Vicar of Broad Henbury, Devon (2nd edn.; London, 1778), 11, 16. (116) Toplady, The Church of England Vindicated From The Charge of Arminianism; And the Case of Arminian Subscription particularly considered: In a Letter to the Revd. Dr. Nowell, (London, 1769), 6, 11, 17, 19, 31–4, 38–9, 50, 62, 67–70. (117) Clerical Subscription no Grievance: Or, The Doctrines of the Church of England proved to he the Doctrines of Christ, In a Sermon Preached at the Annual Visitation of the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of Exeter, Held at Columpton, Tuesday, May 12, 1772 (London, 1772), 41–4. (118) Ibid. 4–5. (119) ‘On the Doctrines of the Church of England’, in Essays on Several Subjects (York, 1789), 150–62, at 161. (120) Some 2,000 signatures were collected from Calvinist Dissenters in their attempt to halt the progress of Dissenting relief from subscription to the doctrinal contents of the Articles in 1773. They too were suspicious of heterodoxy amongst those clergy keen to gain such relief: Ditchfield, ‘Subscription Issue in British Parliamentary Politics, 1772–1779’, 58–9. (121) ‘An Attempt to Revise the Articles of the Church of England. 1772’, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. misc. c.816, fos. 57–60. (122) R. Hodgson, The Life of the Right Reverend Beilby Porteus, D.D., Late Bishop of London (London, 1811), 38–41; F. Wollaston, An Address to the Clergy of the Church of England in particular, and to all Christians in general. Humbly Proposing An Application to the Right Reverend the Bishops, or through their means to the Legislature, for such Relief in the Matter of Subscription, as in their Judgements they shall see proper, together with the Author’s Sentiments on the Present Forms; and his Reasons for such an Application (London, 1772); J. Sturges, A Letter to a Bishop; Occasioned by the Late Petition to Parliament, for Relief in the Matter of Subscription (London, 1772). Sturges felt it better that such matters be dealt with by the bishops rather than the lower clergy. (123) See the arguments of R. A. Burns, ‘A Hanoverian Legacy? Diocesan reform in the Church of England c.1800–1833’, and P. Nockles, ‘Church Parties in the Pre-Tractarian Church of England 1750–1833: The “Orthodox”—Some Problems

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‘Subscribe or Starve’: The Subscription Controversy and its Consequences of Definition and Identity’, in Walsh, Haydon and Taylor (eds.), The Church of England c.1689-c.1833, 265–82, and 334–59 respectively. (124) N. U. Murray, ‘The Influence of the French Revolution on the Church of England and its Rivals, 1789–1802’, D.Phil, thesis, Univ. of Oxford, 1975.

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic

Religion and Enlightenment in EighteenthCentury England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke B. W. Young

Print publication date: 1998 Print ISBN-13: 9780198269427 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269427.001.0001

Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic CATHERINE OSBORNE

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269427.003.0004

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines criticism on Newtonian religious apologetic during the English Enlightenment period and discusses the conflict between physics and metaphysics. Philosopher P.M. Harman argued that Isaac Newton's physical theory was based on metaphysical foundations which ultimately depended on the sustaining action of God. This chapter discusses the positive connection between Newtonianism and Lockeanism and argues against the predominance of a particular branch of the contextualist school of intellectual history. Keywords:   religious apologetic, English Enlightenment, physics, metaphysics, P.M. Harman, Newtonianism, Lockeanism

A considerable element in discussion of an English Enlightenment is the notion of empiricism as its guiding philosophy, a pragmatic ideal which acted as the foundation of all but the most obscurantist and mystically inclined argument of the period. John Locke and Isaac Newton are conventionally held to be the patron saints of this all-encompassing philosophy, with Francis Bacon and the original members of the Royal Society enjoying the status of founding fathers.1 The desire for proof (or at least probability) is held to have lain at the root of empiricism, and its gradual adoption followed naturally from such optimistic assertions as that made by Bacon in 1622, ‘Be not troubled about the Metaphysics. When true Physics have been discovered, there will be no Metaphysics. Beyond the true Physics is divinity only.’2

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic The piety of Bacon's observation is central to the argument of this section of the present study, where it will be argued that early modern epistemology was largely secured through religious presuppositions which denied the possibility of a total absorption of metaphysics by physics of the sort adumbrated by Bacon. Indeed, it will be demonstrated that (p.84) epistemology was more important than physics in the argumentation of Lockean empiricists, a position which allowed them to develop a critique of the brand of Newtonian physico-theology promoted by Samuel Clarke, which is often supposed to have provided the motor of England's Enlightenment alongside Lockeanism. Elucidation of this disjunction in apologetic gives the lie to a ready assimilation of the philosophy of Enlightenment as originating in a fusion of Lockeanism and Newtonianism. Furthermore, as P. M. Harman has persuasively argued, Newton's physical theory was itself based on metaphysical foundations, particularly in the formulation of a relationship between force and gravity which ultimately depended on the sustaining action of God.3 This is a large claim, and it will be argued in a particular connection, that of the relationship between the conceptions of space and the nature of God.4 This is not to suggest that there was no positive connection between Lockeanism and Newtonianism (as there plainly was), but it is to refine the nature of that relationship and to suggest the presence of considerable disagreement, both latent and explicit, within it. The intellectual dissension of Butler, Berkeley, and Hume is also notable in this connection. As a student at a Dissenting academy, Joseph Butler accused Clarke of reifying space and time, and thence illicitly ascribing them as properties of God. George Berkeley radically undercut the epistemology of the new philosophy, a process continued by David Hume in his septical arguments concerning our knowledge of space and time. In his posthumously published Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume also effectively demolished the style of a priori argumentation popularized by Clarke in his first series of Boyle lectures.5 (p.85) By focusing on the case for a firmly Christian and Lockean apologetic as having acted against Clarke's systematic elaboration of Newton's physics, a subsidiary argument has to be appreciated, namely that attention to the procedures of particular philosophies prevents the sort of assimilation of differing viewpoints which has been typical of recent historical work in this field. Through questioning the alleged fusion of Lockeanism with Newtonianism, the study of detail will predominate over socio-historical speculation. In the process, the politicization of abstract ideas into coherent socio-political ideologies so prevalent in much recent historical writing will be questioned. The argument to be pursued here, therefore, offers a challenge to the predominance of a particular branch of the contextualist school of intellectual history.6 Led by Margaret C. Jacob and other Marxisant historians, the contextualists argue that the surrounding culture, especially as dictated by the Page 2 of 31

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic political élites of an age, determines the nature of much of its intellectual reflection. Such reflection is held by contextualists of this sort to demonstrate the hegemonizing tendency of dominant ideologies. Locke and Newton, identified by such writers as latitudinarians in religion and Whigs in politics, are read in this way as the apologists of balance and eirenic Protestantism, the (p. 86) philosophically sophisticated guardians of the post-1688 settlement.7 Even allowing for a coherence behind the idea of latitudinarianism which the term does not actually possess, Jacob's identification of Newtonian apologetic with Whig politics invites refutation. Furthermore, as scholars concerned with politics occasionally acknowledge, the notion of a ‘Whig’ needs to be refined: it all too frequently seems to be a negative identification, indicating that which is neither Tory nor Jacobite.8 Jacob's analysis of an alleged Whig-latitudinarian triumphalism is not new, although the vocabulary and social theory used to substantiate her claims are very obviously so. In 1829, the year of Catholic emancipation, Peter, Lord King, published a life of Locke which identified his major work and that of Newton in similar terms: ‘His great work, the Essay on Human Understanding was first published in 1690, nearly at the same time as Newton's Principia, both contributing to render illustrious the era of the Revolution.’9 The celebratory tones of the early nineteenth-century Whig may differ from the critical interpretations of recent cultural historians, but the implicit teleology of their conclusions is apparent when laid against those of an avowed partisan. King's ideologically inspired conflation of the Essay and the Principia was reaffirmed in Sir David Brewster's heroic biography of Newton, first published in 1831. While noting (p.87) Locke's comparative weakness in mathematics, Brewster none the less emphasized his acceptance of the ‘physical truths’ expounded in the Principia, and his equally devoted study of the Optics. Locke was presented in the role of near-disciple: having ‘taken a great interest in the sublime truths demonstrated in the Principia, he lived on the most affectionate terms with its author till the time of his own death’.10 Developing his argument from the text of an oration which he had delivered in his college chapel in 1832, Adam Sedgwick, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, attacked the dubious philosophical union celebrated by King and Brewster. This critique indicates the presence of a major disjunction between Newtonian and Lockean metaphysics which was readily discernible to theologians and natural scientists in the very decade, the 1830s, when that supposed union was also being firmly applauded as a religiously efficacious moment in the history of English thought. Sedgwick's praise for Newton was grounded in profoundly religious terms; the natural philosopher gave to God the glory of his discoveries, and his character evinced ‘the simplicity of a child, and the humility of a Christian’. Study of

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic Newton's philosophy revealed a natural religious apologetic, a physico-theology traditionally understood as complementing the truths of revelation: It teaches us to see the finger of God in all things animate and inanimate, and gives us an exalted conception of his attributes, placing before us the clearest proof of their reality; and so prepares, or ought to prepare, the mind for that reception of the higher illumination, which brings the rebellious faculties into obedience to the divine will. Close study of Locke's Essay, considered to be both defective in its execution and faulty in its principles, yielded directly contrary consequences. The Essay sought to ‘extend too far the boundaries of demonstration’, thereby minimizing the importance of mystery: its rejection of innate principles was (p.88) a cause of particular distress to Sedgwick, who held to a decidedly moralistic idea of human psychology.11 A footnote in the published oration revealed a central plank in the Newtonian case against Locke, as Sedgwick adverted to the presence of further witnesses regarding this double complaint: ‘Locke's account of the origin of our idea of time is universally considered as wrong—[and] that by a large school of metaphysicians his account of our knowledge of space is regarded as no less erroneous’.12 Sedgwick's orthodoxy was firmly Newtonian, and, in tracing the eighteenth-century alignments of the debate to which he refers, the ascription of ‘orthodoxy’ becomes a more delicate matter. Analysis of Sedgwick's complaint also raises the historiographical question of understanding a perceived problem as this developed over a considerable portion of time. Sedgwick's passionate argument against Locke's philosophy reveals a divergence from Newtonianism which few recent scholars seem happy to accept as a fact in the history of philosophy. Yet to Sedgwick, and to many of his eighteenth-century intellectual forebears, a fact it had come to be. The most authoritative recent study of Locke's philosophy, a two-volume work written by Michael Ayers, has placed Locke alongside Newton as a metaphysical realist when it came to an understanding of the concepts of space and time.13 This assumption runs directly contrary to interpretations of Locke which animated much of the eighteenth-century controversy which ensued from contemporaneous discussion of these concepts as well as the arguments marshalled by Sedgwick. Ayers's case is meticulously laid out, following firm historical principles in his comparison of the Essay with other seventeenthcentury philosophical texts. The exposition of the eighteenth-century (p.89) debate which follows in the present study rests on the interpretations made at that time, and, accordingly, it makes no firm claims as to the validity or invalidity of Ayers's arguments. In this important respect, the present study is very obviously concerned with intellectual history per se, including the study of what are possibly mistaken notions and interpretations, and not with issues Page 4 of 31

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic concerning the continued applicablity of Locke's arguments to current philosophical problems, a central feature of Ayers's primarily philosophical engagement with the history of his discipline. Other scholars have commented on a perceived contrast between Newton's realist and absolute presentation of space and time, and the relativistic notions held by Locke.14 This contention, fuelled by those of eighteenth-century metaphysicians, will determine the historicized reading of Locke and Newton offered in this chapter. In so doing, it will be demonstrated that a political reading of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century metaphysical thought ignores the subtleties and commitments of rather abstract questions of philosophy and theology in favour of a neatly reductive materialism. As Quentin Skinner has noted in an otherwise appreciative aside concerning Jacob's work, there is a danger of mistaking the social attraction of some physical ideas for Newton and his acolytes as being the sole legitimating cause of their actual adoption of those ideas.15

I The friendship which subsisted between Locke and Newton was primarily intellectual in nature. They exchanged letters on mathematics and astronomy, the alchemical recipes of Robert Boyle, variant readings of the New Testament, particularly those such as 1 John 5: 7 and 1 Timothy 3: 16 (p.90) which gave ground to Trinitarianism, and, similarly, the true meaning of prophetic remarks in Daniel 7.16 Newton lent Locke his manuscript work on the New Testament, while Locke lent Newton a copy of his Third Letter for Toleration; Newton speculated on the probable date of the cessation of credible miracles in the postApostolic age; Locke schemed, unsuccessfully, to secure Newton the mastership of the Charterhouse and the provostship of King's College, Cambridge.17 When he was working on his treatise on the money supply, Locke naturally appealed for information on foreign coinage to Newton in his capacity as Master of the Mint.18 Typically, the last letter Locke received from Newton was to congratulate him on his Pauline paraphrases, which Newton had read in manuscript form.19 One notably antagonistic letter stands out from this mutually admiring, if noticeably intermittent, exchange. Written during a period of mental depression in 1693, it revealed Newton's preoccupations with certain aspersions he had recently cast on Locke's character and thinking: Being of opinion that you endeavoured to embroil me with women, and by other means I was so much affected with it as that when one told me you were sickly and would not live I answered twere better you were dead. I desire you to forgive me this uncharitableness. For I am now satisfied that what you have done is just and beg your pardon for having had thoughts of you for it and for representing that you had struck at the root of morality in

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic a principle you laid down in your book of ideas and that I took you for an Hobbist.20 (p.91) In due course a disclaimer appeared in which illness was proferred as the cause of his concerns, a letter prompted by Locke's anguished reply.21 The heuristic pitfalls attendant on extrapolating much from letters written under such conditions are obvious. Nevertheless, something can be gained from such an undertaking. Newton really did seem to have believed, however much he invariably tried to keep the idea to himself, that Locke was a materialist and, quite possibly, a Hobbist. Locke's attack on innate ideas was interpreted, at least once, in a manner reminiscent of many other critics of this section of the Essay, as a covert operation against Christian belief. Newton tended to ally himself with his mentors among the Cambridge Platonists in his justification of Christianity, and not with Locke's apology for beef.22 The scrupulously oblique narrator of John Banville's richly suggestive novella The Newton Letter (1982) reads this notorious part of the Locke-Newton correspondence as evidence of their latent dispute over space and time, an intense, absolutist, and nervous intelligence seeking to overcome a calmly relativistic mind.23 This fictional insight ought to be seriously considered in any reading of the disjunction between Lockean and Newtonian apologetic which developed in the early and middle decades of the eighteenth century. Newton's reflections on the nature of space and time are conveniently summarized in the first Scholium to the Principia Mathematica (1687), where he emphasized his intention of distinguishing real and absolute time and space from their vulgar and practical definitions. The Vulgar’ thought of time and space in relation to sensible objects, a conception which gave rise to ‘certain prejudices’ which it was Newton's (p.92) avowed purpose to undo. Absolute, true, and mathematical time (also known as duration), flowed equably without regard to external relations; relative, apparent, and common time was related to sensible and external concerns, and was measured by the means of motion: hence hours, days, months, and years. Similarly, ‘Absolute Space, in its own nature, without regard to any thing external, remains always similar and immoveable/ Relative space was understood through its relationship with the position of bodies, and it was often ‘vulgarly taken for immovable space’. A proper understanding of space (and of time) required of the philosopher (and the astronomer) an ability to ‘abstract from our senses, and consider things themselves, distinct from what are only sensible measures of them’.24 As has been ably argued by J. E. McGuire, space and time, in Newton's thought, were neither substances nor an affectation of substance; they were that which provided the essence of existence for all things, as all physical things necessarily required space (extension) and time (duration) if they were to exist at all. Time and space, then, were not the attributes or properties of existence, but they Page 6 of 31

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic were actualized existence: in their absolute selves they were independent of human cognition. Constituted by God's infinite existence, they were not to be conflated with his existence, as space and time were not real attributes of God's nature, but were, rather, coeval with God's eternal existence.25 If Newton, as a natural philosopher and metaphysician, was preoccupied with the absolute veracity of space and time, then Locke seems to have been largely concerned, as a philosopher principally interested in the nature of cognition, with human perceptions of space and time. This epistemologically based contrast can be traced in the argumentation regarding space and time in Locke's Essay, a study concerned with developing a coherent exposition of human knowledge rather than with the rigorous theoretical (p.93) precision which determined Newton's Principia. The elucidation of such a distinction behind their philosophical enterprises is vital in appreciating their different contributions to metaphysical debate in eighteenthcentury England. For example, Newton is twice mentioned by name in the Essay, although the company he keeps in the ‘Epistle to the Reader’ alerts the modern reader to the possibility of contrast between his thought and that of Locke, for, as R. L. Colie noted, of the four intellectual heroes mentioned there, only Newton created a coherent theoretical system: Boyle, Sydenham, and Huygens were far more interested in experiment than in systematic theory.26 In assessing Locke's praise of ‘Mr Newton, in his never enough to be admired Book’, it is also important to bear in mind its near total inaccessibility to all but a few, among whom Locke was not obviously included, since, for all his assiduous attempts to master the work, he was an indifferent mathematician.27 The development of a systematic, mathematically based philosophy was clearly distinct from the epistemic concerns of the Essay. Similarly, it is important not to neglect Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) when considering this significant divergence in the intellectual activity of Locke and Newton. In this work Locke entertained doubts regarding the status of contemporary natural philosophy, ‘though the World be full of Systems of it, yet I cannot say, I know of one which can be taught a Young Man as Science, wherein he may be sure to find Truth and Certainty, which is, what all Sciences give an Expectation of. He was, though, complimentary to the ‘incomparable Mr. Newton’ and his ‘admirable Book’, a work ‘which will deserve to be read, and [which will] give no small light and pleasure to those, who willing to understand the Motions, Properties and Operations of the great Masses of Matter, in this our Solar System, will but carefully mind his Conclusions, which may be depended on as Propositions (p.94) well proved’.28 It is surely significant, however, that these approving remarks concerned Newton's physics and mathematics, and not his metaphysical assumptions. Hence, perhaps, Locke's observation that:

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic I think the Systems of Natural Philosophy, that have obtained in this part of the World, are to be read, more to know the Hypotheses, and to understand the Terms and Ways of Talking of the several Sects, than with hopes to gain thereby a comprehensive, Scientifical, and satisfactory Knowledge of the Works of Nature.29 Locke's attitude towards Newton's natural philosophy remains ambivalent; he was an admirer, but not an uncritical one. Locke's discussion of space was largely taken up with analysis of what Newton would have dismissed as a vulgar misconception.30 Defining the ‘simple modes of Space’ as being understood through the immediacy of perception and the associations thereby given rise to, Locke supposed that sight and touch originated the ‘Idea’, whose measurement was induced by custom. This, in turn, allowed the ‘Mind’ by the ‘Power of Repeating or doubling any Idea’ to remove itself from visual and tactile representation of space towards the more abstract notion of immensity. The intellect thus took up and abstracted from experience. These definitions followed from a humanized relativism which continued with the ‘Modification of Distance, we call Place’, denoted purely as the ‘relative Position of any thing’.31 Locke's argument reached a more abstract level when he (p.95) drew a distinction between space and solidity, of pure space as being removed from a body. What this did for the being of the Divinity was left an open question, for, unlike Newton and his apologist Clarke, who would later find themselves in difficulty here, Locke hesitated to use anything like the notion of substance in relation to God. A metaphysical problem which compromised Newtonian speculation was courted but, in typically Lockean style, rejected as unfathomable word-play. The pious and intellectually humble philosopher left his reader with a reflection on man's epistemological weakness in contrast with the inspired wisdom of Scripture: But whether any one will take Space to be only a relation resulting from the Existence of other Beings at a distance; or whether they will think the Words of the most knowing King Solomon, The Heaven, and the Heaven of Heavens cannot contain Thee; or those more emphatical ones of the inspired philosopher St. Paul, In Him we live, move, and have our Being, are to be understood in a literal sense, I leave every one to consider.32 Two levels of knowledge were left in a delicate balance between the limitations of merely human reason and the bounds of faith that was the essence of Locke's very Protestant philosophy. Locke's arguments concerning time were yet more relativized. The idea of duration was arrived at inwardly as the ‘fleeting and perpetually perishing parts of succession’ in the mind. Ideas as simple as hours, days, and years were at one Page 8 of 31

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic with those which were popularly held of time and eternity: here was no ready Newton-like demarcation of the real from the apparent, the mathematical from the Vulgar’. Human ignorance of the true nature of time was further enforced in his citation of St Augustine's celebratedly pithy enunciation of the problem in the Confessions, ‘Si non rogas intelligo’ (I understand if not asked). The idea of succession itself was relativized into the flow of ideas in the mind; sleep was discovered to be a temporary distortion, for during that state ‘we have no succession of Ideas in our Minds’. For these (p.96) reasons, motion was rejected as being the source of time, which, accordingly, was measured and understood by the relativistic assertions of customary procedure. The turning of the Sun provided a useful measure, but duration and motion were not themselves equivalent, so that the Sun could not be the indicator of some real time. In a typical deployment of travel literature to the undermining of a conservative or absolutist stance, Locke appealed to the relativity of temporal measurement inherent in the calculations of peoples indigenous to America who measured time by the migrations of birds.33 Scientific and mathematical claims were undercut by Locke's argument. A startling premiss, ‘two successive lengths of Duration, however measured, can never be demonstrated to be equal,’ was used to demonstrate the difficulty of arriving at unassailable proofs. The same doubt belied the reliability of the pendulum—how could one know each sucessive swing to be equal? The level of certainty which natural philosophers sought was impossible to attain as, by definition, two portions of succession could not be brought together in order to ascertain their equality. Only appearance and memory could ‘perswade us of their Equality’.34 This was the strongest claim which could be made. Abstracting from these ideas, the concept of eternity was reached by the additions of time which led to that of infinity. Again, fallible reason was aided by Christian revelation, so that one was as aware of the eternal duration of one's soul as one was of the necessarily existing Deity. In considering duration and expansion together, Locke united, in a fideistic way, the idea of God's existence as being allowed to fill eternity and immensity, while he indulged the most anthropocentric analyses so that ‘Time begins and ends with the frame of this sensible World.’ One's knowledge of the supernatural was constrained—-one could not know what (p.97) spirits had to do with space, or how they communicated in it—yet faith allowed the traditional ascriptions to be made of God: hence ‘God's infinite Duration being accompanied with infinite Knowledge, and finite Power, he sees all things past and to come; and they were no farther removed from his sight, than the present.’35 Locke's open strategy of scepticism in human knowledge and faith in revelation avoided the pitfalls facing a Newtonian cosmology with its tendency to circumscribe God by the diktat of an absolute mathematical system. Locke's was a more accommodating philosophy than Newton's; perhaps he was wryly Page 9 of 31

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic alluding to this in his remarks on the applicability of his associationist reading of infinity: Some Mathematicians, perhaps of advanced Speculations, may have other ways to introduce into their Minds Ideas of Infinity: But this hinders not, but that they themselves, as well as all other Men, got this first Idea, which they had of Infinity, from Sensation and Reflection, in the method we have here set down.36 Consider, by contrast, the observations on God which appear in the Quaestiones appended to the second edition of Newton's Opticks, where he attempted to overcome the problems of a God bounded by substance and acting as the anima mundi which many of his critics had drawn from their readings of the Principia: And yet we are not to consider the World as the Body of God, or the several Parts thereof, as the Parts of God. He is an uniform Being, void of Organs, Members or Parts, and they are his Creatures subordinate to him, and subservient to his Will; and he is no more the Soul of them, than the Soul of Man is the Soul of the Species of Things.37 Newton had felt obliged to expand on a similar disclaimer in the Principia which, though very carefully worded and expressed, had plainly been insufficient in itself to save him (p.98) from the accusation of conflating God with infinite space and eternity: He is Eternal and Infinite, Omnipotent and Omniscient; that is, his duration reaches from Eternity to Eternity; his presence from Infinity to Infinity; he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done. He is not Eternity or Infinity, but Eternal and Infinite; he is not Duration or Space, but he endures and is present; and by existing always and every where, he constitutes Duration and Space.38 The expanded version of this argument in the Opticks is suggestive of the restricted room for manoeuvre into which his published opinions had driven him. By saying what God was not and leaving open a wider definition of his being, Newton could be seen to be correcting the embarrassments caused by his absolute mode of theorizing. In shifting from the near a priori and theoretically sustaining God of the Principia to the more numinous account in the Opticks, Newton attempted to evade the problems generated by his own system. It was the God located in the Principia by Newton's critics, and the absolutism of that text, which contrasted so strongly with the humanized piety of the Essay, especially when compared with the a posteriori arguments for the existence of God which were brought in by Locke in book IV.39 These were the aspects of Locke's apologetic which his followers developed in their critique of the Newtonian physicotheology created by Samuel Clarke. In order to appreciate Page 10 of 31

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic this later engagement it is important to understand that its roots lay in this implicit divergence between the metaphysical assumptions of Locke and Newton.40

(p.99) II In a recent study, John Gascoigne made strong claims for Cambridge as forming a Newtonian preserve, depicting it as an institution which had moved away, in the early decades of the eighteenth century, from its immediate Restoration legacies of Platonism and Calvinistic puritanism and also from the Cartesianism which had followed on from these theologies in the closing decades of the seventeenth century. In Gascoigne's view, Newtonian physico-theology provided the religious apologetic for an advanced form of politically powerful Whig-allied latitudinarianism, which was to be opposed in turn by resolutely Tory mystics and independently minded scholars.41 Even if one were to accept the broad contours of Gascoigne's institutional history, it has to be allowed that his concentration on Cambridge—Newton's own university, for which he had briefly served as a Whig Member of Parliament— could have a distorting effect on any understanding of the wider implications of this supposed ideological alliance. The consideration of Newtonianism as a convenient resource for a Whig-latitudinarian hegemony is a familiar refrain in Margaret Jacob's harmonization of late seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury intellectual history, and it is one played with little variation in Gascoigne's work. There is, however, no necessary thematic linkage of the sort they describe; indeed, politics and theology were often more discordant than either historian allows. It has recently and convincingly been argued that in Scotland, where Newton oversaw the work of his followers through correspondence and the operation of friendship networks, the Pitcairne-Gregory circle of natural philosophers and astronomers remained strongly Tory in politics and resolutely episcopalian in religion. Once transported to Oxford in the 1690s, David Gregory emphasized these commitments in what was a fiercely Tory environment. It (p.100) was also possible for adherents of the new philosophy to be religiously indifferent or even, as in the case of Edmund Halley, openly sceptical (much to Newton's displeasure).42 Newtonianism was not, then, the coherent ideology of contextualist myth.43 Moreover, the situation at Cambridge was somewhat more complex than that described by Gascoigne. Edmund Law, a fellow of Christ's College in the 1720s and 1730s, turned against the sort of theology expounded by Newton's epigonoi, particularly that developed in the 1704 Boyle lectures (which were themselves the preserve of Newtonian apologetic) by Samuel Clarke.44 The ideological significance of this exchange deserves consideration, as even Gascoigne, who makes no mention of this aspect of Law's career, accepts that he was ‘the most Page 11 of 31

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic influential Cambridge theologian of the mid-eighteenth-century’.45 For similar reasons, the allied critique offered by Daniel Waterland merits investigation. That these two men, the one a reforming theologian of Socinian tendencies, the other a firm defender of Trinitarian orthodoxy, should feel able to combine in an attack on Newtonian physico-theology is significant in itself. That Law was a friend of Waterland should remind the intellectual historian of the importance of personal relationships, something obscured by a purely ideological reading of the past.46 What united Law and Waterland was a shared antipathy to the intellectualist defence of religion made by Samuel Clarke, Newton's closest intellectual protégé. Clarke was an avowed disciple of Newton, declaring in a riposte to Leibniz's notorious attack on his theology that ‘It appeared to Me…a most certain and evident Truth, that from the earliest (p.101) Antiquity to This Day, the foundations of Natural Religion had never been so deeply and so firmly laid, as in the Mathematical and experimental Philosophy of that Great Man.’47 The title of his first set of Boyle lectures, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1705), which, he insisted, followed only a mathematical mode of reasoning, sufficiently reveals the a priori commitment of Clarke's influential apologetic. Openly confronting philosophical atheism, Clarke had presumed in his lectures that it was undeniable that there existed something from eternity, and that this was a ‘Plain and Self-evident Truth’ than which ‘there is nothing in Nature more difficult for the Mind of Men to conceive’. Hence the demonstrable proof of God's existence, since ‘the only true Idea of a Self-evident or Necessarily Existing Being, is the Idea of a Being, the Supposition of whose Non-Existence is an express Contradiction’. To deny the conclusion was held to be the equivalent of an attempt to ‘take away the idea of Equality of twice two to four’.48 God's existence was, then, as certain as the most elementary mathematical proof; absolutely no doubts were entertained as to the epistemological surety of mathematics. Clarke insisted that only Plato wrote ‘worthily’ of God before the advent of Newton; all other thinkers were overwhelmed by error. Cudworth's idea of infinity was disavowed: supposing Infinites to be made up of Numbers of Finites; that is, ’tis supposing Finite Qualities to be Aliquot or Constitutent Parts of Infinite; when indeed they are not so, but do all Equally, whether Great or Small, whether Many or Few, bear the very same proportion to an Infinite, as Mathematical Points to a Line, or Lines to a Superficies, or as Moments do to Time; that is, None at all.49

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic (p.102) Space and time were real entities for Clarke, bearing no relationship to merely imagined propositions as Cudworth and others seem to have thought. God was defined largely according to Newton's idea of the universe and thus a physics which had seen itself as an apologetic device was, according to some later commentators, in danger of forcing itself to circumscribe any possible apologetic within its own parameters. ‘Newton's God’ became ultimately just that—the God Newton's followers drew from his writings. Clarke ‘demonstrates’ that, having no external cause, the self-existent being must have been unchanging and eternal, though the nature of his infinity remained unknowable. God's omnipresence was accepted in tandem with his other traditionally ascribed attributes, his infinity and necessary unity.50 Such positive, a priori assertions were not to the taste of the Lockean Law or the consciously orthodox Waterland. The Cambridge critique of Clarke's natural theology, spearheaded by Waterland, Edmund Law, and Joseph Clarke, a fellow of Waterland's college, Magdalene, demonstrates that metaphysical debate did not necessarily follow strongly demarcated, institutionalized directions. Indeed, the opening salvo in this critique had been fired in a treatise published in 1726 by Philipps Gretton, a former fellow of Trinity College, who defended a posteriori arguments for God's existence over those of Clarke's a priorism, accusing his opponent of intellectual shallowness and inherent self-contradiction. In an appendix to this work, Gretton republished a correspondence between Philip van Limborch and John Locke, in which the latter had concluded that a priori arguments for God's existence could not be convincingly substantiated. Lockeanism had thus been held to traduce Clarke's version of Newtonianism. Clarke's philosophical reasoning was challenged as being overly Scholastic, and numbingly implausible: (p.103) Necessity before any thing necessarily existing. Eternity prior to every Being eternal. Immensity antecedent to that divine Being who is infinite alone. Modes, properties, Attributes, not only subsisting without, but a Priori to the several Subjects of their Inherence. Absurdity beyond Transubstantiation. Contradiction to Grammar, Philosophy, Sense, not to be endured. How could a Man of Parts and Learning indulge a bewildered Fancy at such a Rate?51 Waterland's dissertation against a priori reasoning was appended anonymously, as the work of ‘a learned hand’, to Law's enquiry into the concepts of space and time in 1734, some thirty years after Clarke's Boyle lectures had been delivered, suggesting that it was the favourable reception of Clarke's metaphysics amongst some Cambridge dons that later inspired the two men to go into print. The brand of Newtonian apologetic that had become comfortably ensconced in a favourable

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic academic environment was the real target of their animus; they therefore developed the apologetic concerns of Gretton. Waterland's critique is further complicated since, although he had included works by Newton and Clarke in his recommended reading for young students, it was Locke who originally seemed to have incurred the brunt of his qualified suspicion, as in his espousal of the merits of the Essay: ‘Locke's Human Understanding must be read, being a Book so much (and I add so justly) valued, however faulty the Author may have been in other Writings.’52 None the less, it was Newtonian a priorism which he later chose to berate, and not the allegedly ‘faulty’ writings of Locke. Such a reaction is suggestive of deeply held suspicions regarding the apologetic consequences of Newtonian speculation, suspicions that were held in check until they could follow on from a throughgoing critique of the sort offered by a Lockean like Law. It was, however, a critique couched by (p.104) Waterland in explicitly orthodox language, indicating a more profound repudiation of the new philosophy than that enunciated by his younger colleague. Waterland's was a doctrinal rejection of Clarke's arguments, a traditionally historical exposition of the failures of his chosen opponent's reasoning. An abstract, intellectually grounded natural religion was dismissed as the antithesis of Christianity, which was a historical, revealed, traditional faith: Waterland appealed to authoritative witnesses, from the Church Fathers to revived scholasticism, in his condemnation of a priori apologetic. Cudworth served his turn as a potent symbol of English Protestant sense, demonstrating that Catholic apologetic was considerably stronger than the confessionally weak claims of physico-theology: ‘Dr. CUDWORTH'S Judgement on this Article cannot but be of great Weight, as he was a Person of eminent Learning and Abilities, a Protestant Writer, and therefore the less apt to take any thing, implicitly from the Popish Schoolmen.’53 Tradition countered rationalism, and central aspects of English religious thought, more particularly those which predated the rise of physicotheology, were esteemed as a continuation of Catholic orthodoxy. Rather than declare for the new theology, Waterland clarified his metaphysical commitments by negating metaphysical heresies. A priori argumentation was, in Waterland's telling phrase, a ‘mere ringing of Changes upon the word Necessity’, which was itself to be rejected as a word of pagan and merely philosophical origin the importation of which into theological vocabulary had been a source of mischief. Against Clarke, Waterland asserted that there could be no basis for arguing from ideal to real existence: a real connection had to be shown between ideals and realities, thoughts and things, which could only be traced in a posteriori terms, from effects (p.105) to causes, ‘from things posterior to something antecedent’. God's existence could not, then, be traced causally and, consequently, the language employed by Clarke had been unwarranted, and the grammar of necessity was completely Page 14 of 31

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic inappropriate: God's very lack of a cause, ground, or other such point of origin was the ‘Top Perfection of Being, the very highest and best thing we can either say or conceive of it’. To specify a cause of God was to make him a dependent being, and thus to destroy his literally vital independence. In undoing Clarke's logic, Waterland stressed the traditional notion of the impenetrability of God: And though an uncaused Being is an unfathomable Abyss, and we can scarce forbear asking childishly, how and why, or for what Reason it exists, and must exist? yet such recollected Thoughts must tell us, that such Questions are improper and impertinent, and resolve only into a fond Conception, or contradictory notion of something still higher than the highest, and prior to the first.54 Orthodoxy required acceptance of scriptural priority and the injunctions of faith over the merely intellectual claims of mathematically pure demonstration, as evinced in Waterland's satirical benediction: ‘Blessed are they, who having neither had ocular nor other Demonstration, but moral Probabilities only, have yet believed.’ Rational proofs were to be rejected as subverting the very religion they were supposed to validate; unfavourable to a revealed faith, they endangered the doctrine of the Trinity by favouring an abstract notion of a God whose principal role was to sustain the motion of a Newtonian universe. In Waterland's view, time and space were not the same as eternity and immensity, but they were only the attributes of something, of a substance: God, being neither substance nor the substratum suggested by Clarke, could not have had such ‘general ideas’ predicated on him. Time and space were indeed mental attributes, ‘for the better Judgement, Rangement, and Adjustment of our Ideas’. The solecism of God as substratum was an evasion wrought by epistemological error. A priori theology undermined the articles of faith, and it crossed the (p. 106) limits of true science:55 Clarke, whose perceived involvement with the Arian revival had already been subject to Waterland's doctrinal disparagement, stood condemned as an enemy of true religion and sound logic. Redolent as some of Waterland's arguments are of a Lockean suspicion of a priorism, it was the authority of Church tradition which he chiefly drew upon in his rejection of Clarke's Newtonian synthesis. It was in the work of Edmund Law that a thoroughly Lockean counter to the new metaphysics was developed. Law, who could readily be described as having been the most convinced adherent of Locke's philosophy in eighteenth-century England, had won a high reputation for himself by translating and copiously annotating the celebrated theodicy De Origine Mali, written by William King, the archbishop of Dublin. Published in 1731, Law's notes to this important work contain the basic material for his controversial encounter with Clarke's amanuensis, John Jackson, which would form the centre of the polemical engagement in which Waterland was to take part. These notes are fundamentally Lockean.

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic Law had decried the promiscuous deployment of the word substance, a notion which simply could not be used in talk of God. To attribute substantiality to the deity was to promote the abuse of words, merely encouraging the useless wranglings of the learned and the half-learned. He drew explicitly from Locke in examining the notion of abstraction as this related to certain ideas: abstract ideas were mental fictions, ‘entia rationis’—-duration, space, and number were such entities, enjoying no real existence, no proper ‘Ideatum, or Objective Reality’. He also quoted Leibniz's Baconian dismissal of ‘real’ space as an Idola Tribus with firm approval. The reification of space was a logical error, as was apparent in Clarke's discussion of infinity: Hence appears the Weakness of that common Argument by Gassendus, Dr. Clarke, and Raphson, for the absolute infinity of Space, viz. From the impossibility of setting bounds or limits to it; since that, say they would be to suppose Space to be bounded by (p.107) something which itself occupies Space, or else by nothing, both which are contradictions.56 Similar considerations applied to the nature of God's existence, which was such as to exclude a cause, so that ‘the Divine Nature includes Existence in itself’: its logic was internal, and hence unknowable by a priori speculation. Clarke's error was located in ‘the great confusion caus'd by a jumble of Mathematics and Metaphysics together’. Space did not and could not be described as having a necessary existence; it was a purely mental construction.57 Law was soon answered by John Jackson, who lost his Cambridge MA through his fidelity to Clarke's theology in the wake of Clarke's Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity (1712), which entailed a widely perceived adherence to the Arian heresy. Jackson was left to write metaphysical tracts in Yorkshire as the price for such intellectual consistency.58 Intriguingly, in light of the recent work of Ayers, it seems that Jackson read Locke with Clarkean ends in view, radically translating Locke's notion of negative ideas into a Newtonian nexus: In forming the Idea of Eternity and Immensity, we grasp as it were, a large Idea of Time and Space, and by the additional Idea of Absence of Bounds, we form what Mr. Locke calls a Negative Idea: And this is what Mr. Locke means by calling them Negative Ideas. Not that he supposed the Things themselves to be negative; but, on the contrary, he suppos'd them to be real and positive Attributes of God.59 Jackson's argument is a very early instance of the synthesis of Lockeanism and Newtonianism into the hybridized metaphysics familiar from the propaganda of philosophes and the (p.108) contextual studies of some more recent historians. Plainly, the synthesis was promoted by contemporaries, but it was also rejected by others, and not least by a Lockean of the calibre of Edmund Law.

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic Jackson drew a decidedly un-Lockean distinction between the negative ideas of the imagination and the positive ones of ‘pure Intellect’, thereby allowing time and space to have a real existence in the world which was comprehended by this purified consciousness. In this way, Jackson pleaded, since one could not conceive of space and time as ceasing to exist, they must necessarily and always have existed. As properties they must, again of necessity, have belonged to an ‘eternal, infinite, or immense Being’ at least commensurate with God. This reification of time was levelled against Jackson's targets in a reductio ad absurdum of their case, for ‘If Time is nothing, then a Child is as old as Methusala; the Difference being a Difference of Nothing, i.e. no Difference.’60 Law replied to Jackson with an acerbity of tone in evident contrast with the smooth disquisitions he had appended to King's theodicy. Jackson was attacked for setting up the imaginative intellect over its intuitive correlate, thereby succumbing to a ‘false Standard of truth’, leaving Law free to declare that ‘till we have a clear perception of a thing, we ought to determine nothing about it’. Jackson's replies to Leibniz's critique of Clarke were seen to be ‘but a very insufficient Answer’, as Law castigated the ‘heap of Contradictions Mr. Jackson has compiled’.61 Law's arguments for God's existence were directed against Clarke's system, inferring his being from the wisdom he found in the ‘regular System of things in the Universe’: it was, then, easier to prove the existence of a Creator than it ever would have been to have done the same for space. Space and time were simple ideas which did not force themselves on the mind, since one could imagine immaterial things (p.109) without space, just as God, who pre-existed all creation, was without time.62 Space itself was nothing but a ‘Mathematical Solid’; having no properties of its own, it was only knowable through negation. In making time and space properties of God, Clarke and his followers could not have allowed them any part in anything else. Time was particular and not universal, it could not be an ‘abstract Idea of Eternity in any tolerable Sense’. To predicate time on God was to contradict him: time necessarily involved change and succession, events which were essentially removed from God's immutability. Law's was a philosophical scepticism built on the shores of faith, piety rejecting the false allurements of metaphysical speculation: ‘I HUMBLY apprehend that the Manner of the Divine Being ought to be left in its proper Incomprehensibility, without determining positively upon it from any of our particular ways of conceiving things.’63 Following Locke, Law attacked the notions of substance and accident, castigating the ‘Scholastic Notion of a Substratum’. Clarke's refinement of Newton's idea of God into a sustaining substratum was seen as dividing him into parts, physicalizing the perfection of his being, both of which were blasphemous enterprises. Clarke was abjured as a pantheist, since ‘your hypothesis makes God corporeal…[it] not only makes God corporeal, but in consequence makes Page 17 of 31

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic every Part of the material World a Part of his Substance’. Clarke's apologetic was a disastrous and a very dangerous failure: to assign the ‘mode’ of God's existence was ‘too great Presumption’, as all that could be affirmed of it was done in a ‘manner purely spiritual and incomprehensible’, a conclusion which Law drew from Cudworth. God's necessary existence was an a posteriori discovery, it could not have been dictated a priori, for ‘If his Existence had any Ground, Cause, or Foundation, it would be dependent on that ground, and less firm or stable than the Ground which supports it, and so would not be the most perfect existence.’ God had no antecedent; in the Divine nature essence and existence were uniquely one. In detailing God's unity Law stressed the importance of revelation: pace the Clarke of the first series of (p.110) Boyle lectures, natural religion was not enough for apologetic purposes.64 Law had also been answered by John Clarke, Samuel Clarke's younger brother, and a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. John Clarke applied the notion of duration to a substance, that is God, defining it as the ‘uniform perpetual Flowing of the Existence of the Deity’. Time and space were real properties, for, if they did not exist, they would be, as Jackson had argued, literally nothing, making it impossible to distinguish between them, ‘it being impossible that there should be any distinction between Nothing and Nothing’. They were also simple ideas; Leibniz and Locke had both been mistaken in defining time and space in terms of the relations between objects and events, for that made them complex ideas.65 John Clarke essentially restated his brother's argumentation, and much the same holds true of the two further defences which he wrote against Law. The third of these is of interest in that it throws light on the origins of the attacks made by Law and Waterland. In the preface to this pamphlet, John Clarke observed a decline in Samuel Clarke's influence and reputation in his old university, a decline which stirred him into writing through a loss of prestige in ‘the Character I found it had got amongst many learned men at Cambridge’.66 It would seem, then, that by the 1730s the alleged hegemony of Whig-Newtonian Cambridge had suffered an appreciable loss in support, as guardians of orthodoxy and Lockean tyros repudiated the legacy of Clarke's comfortable physico-theology. That at least two of the most influential of these critics, Law and Waterland, were both firm Whigs with diverging political-theologies suggests that intellectual life in mid-eighteenth-century Cambridge was a complex affair, and not as partisan as one might otherwise assume. A good part of this critique originated in readings of the Essay, a text (p.111) which is at least as significant in any understanding of eighteenth-century culture as is Newton's abstruse Principia. Joseph Clarke, Waterland's Magdalene colleague, made a witty critique of his namesake in a 1733 vindication of Law's notes to King's theodicy. In this work, a Lockean concern with the precision of language was to the fore: space as an Page 18 of 31

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic idea was misrepresented by Clarke and his followers, who had made it conform to the expression rather than have the expression conform to the idea. John Clarke was taken to task for his evasiveness concerning space, denying it to be a substance while asserting it to be a ‘Thing’. What could this ‘thing’ be other than a ‘Thing (sui generis)’, as Samuel Clarke had been driven to call its status as an attribute? An appeal to linguistic purity revealed the muddles of Clarkean metaphysics: they defined the usual meanings of terms away and were left with the confusions of logomachy—words were drained of their referent value. Linguistic stringency was essential to metaphysical debate, as Joseph Clarke noted when drawing a distinction between the need for positive terms and the actual nature of the things which they served to describe: ‘for tho’ we are forced through the Defect of Language to make use of positive Terms, and to say that there is a vacuum, here or there; yet to say that a Vacuum, a Void, or Nothing, has a real Existence, is a direct Contradiction.’67 Time and space were, then, constructions of the mind; to make them real or parts of God was to indulge in philosophical blasphemy: Leibniz's fear was all too literally realized as space became the ‘Idol of some modern English-men’. Duration was not part of the Divine flowing existence of God, as it was a purely human construct, ‘It is the flowing of nothing, unless it be the Ideas in our own Minds, or of created Beings, from whence we have those Ideas.’68 (p.112) A coherent, Locke-inspired critique of Clarke's Newtonian systematization had been effectively made by members of a university supposedly given over to Newtonian apologetic. In bypassing this engagement, scholars of eighteenth-century metaphysical thought have reduced a rich vein of Christian speculation to a narrow conspectus of physico-theology, assuming that orthodox Christian theology had been undermined by an incipiently materializing philosophy that would culminate in the necessitarian materialism of Joseph Priestley.69 Piety dictated that a rather more mystically inclined conception of religion would prevail, so that even a Newtonian technocrat like the lexicographer Ephraim Chambers hesitated when seeking to describe God's nature— ‘GOD. No just definition can be given of the being signified by this name, as being infinite, and incomprehensible.’70 Despite such protestations of piety, Lockeans and Newtonians have been elided as proponents of secularizing theologies, for which they have either been praised as opening the gates to Enlightenment or criticized for undermining orthodox belief. It is only within such an interpretative scheme that J. C. D. Clark could make the extraordinary claim that Edmund Law, as bishop of Carlisle, ‘represented the survival of Samuel Clarke's doctrines among the grandly beneficed of the Anglican intelligentsia’.71 The grounds for this interpretation lie in insufficient reading of metaphysics and, as a consequence, misjudging what might be termed the politics of heresy in eighteenth-century England, as discussed in Chapter 2.72

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic (p.113) III In the ‘Discours préliminaire’ to the Encyclopédie, Diderot and D'Alembert asserted that Locke had created metaphysics in the same way as Newton had created physics. Five years previously, in 1746, Condillac in his Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines had sought to create a new metaphysics, on Lockean foundations, which would undermine the faulty physical and metaphysical theories of earlier thinkers.73 While the chronology of these major works placed Newtonian physics before Lockean metaphysics, the epistemology so created was unique to the Encyclopédie. D'Alembert and Diderot had recreated Locke and Newton in their own image, forging a hybrid symbol of synthesized knowledge in a challenge to the ruling philosophies of ancien régime France. Their goal of displacing theology from its pre-eminence as queen of the sciences in favour of a new secular epistemology involved a melding of English ideas to what they conceived to be progressive and cosmopolitan ends.74 Whatever its impact in France, this fundamentally mistaken fusion between Lockeanism and Newtonianism has had a deleterious effect on historiography, not least in promoting a bogus identification between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century physics and metaphysics. As his disciples well knew, Newton's system contained an implicit metaphysics: this was a prime ingredient in the apologetics which they developed from it. The neglect of this dimension in Newton's thought has been unfortunate, especially as regards a proper appreciation of eighteenth-century Lockeanism. In reading the Principia as a work of theology and metaphysical speculation, it has been possible to discern a disjunction between Newton's thinking and that (p.114) of Locke on the ideas of time and space which developed into a major fissure in eighteenth-century English thought. In collapsing the hybrid of the philosophes, which has its own history, the complexity of these metaphysical issues has been recovered from the equally homogenizing instincts of recent scholarship. The frequent neglect of metaphysical literature from this period has allowed the image of a scientifically grounded Enlightenment to gather respectability, ensuring the progress of Newton as the icon of the new philosophy (alongside Bacon, who was reverenced from the foundation of the Royal Society). As a result, contemporary work in this area, even when concerned with Newtonianism as a conscious ideology, tends to a distortion of eighteenthcentury thought as being in thrall to Newton. A tidy progress is described from Voltaire's simplified propagation of the creed and an allied iconography culminating in Boullée's celebrated proposal for a cenotaph to Newton's memory, to the rejection of the Newtonian universe in Blake's attempted reenchantment of the world.75 In this way a peaceful Whig-Newtonian hegemony is supposed to have been shattered in the revolutionary climacteric of Romanticism. Any challenge to this compelling evolution involves dissolving the Locke-Newton hybrid into its component parts within a primarily English setting, since it is a Gallocentric ideal of Enlightenment which has tended to Page 20 of 31

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic enshrine the error of Newtonian cosmology and Lockean epistemology as paving the way to a high Enlightenment. Gibbon, the most cosmpolitan of English writers, in a short work composed in 1758, similarly praised Newton in ecstatic terms: ‘Le nom de Newton reveille l'idée profond, lumineux, et original. Son système de (p.115) chronologie suffiroit ceul pour lui assurer l'immortalité.’ Such praise for Newton's Chronology did not prevent Gibbon from developing an elaborate and convincing critique of it, one suggested to him by another historian of Rome, Nathaniel Hooke.76 Neither Gibbon nor Hooke were philosophers, but as historians they were ready to criticize a work on which Newton had expended considerable energy and which had also earned him commensurate praise. As the century wore on, the edifice of Newtonianism was subject to subsidence. It was principally in continental European debates that the thought of Locke and Newton was fused, with their empirical studies being regularly cited in attacks on older systematic philosophies. In France, Newton was praised by propagandizing philosophes as an apostle of intellectual progress, as is rather subtly apparent in Voltaire's subversive letters from England. Written between 1728 and 1731, these opinionated writings inaugurated Voltaire's reign as a lionized popularizer of abstract ideas. Voltaire had been introduced to Newton's thought by Samuel Clarke, whom the philosophe referred to in suitably religiose language as an Arian disciple of Newton, presenting his guide rather unhappily as a ‘mere reasoning machine’ whose works were described as controversial and little understood. Newton, praised over the dictatorial shade of Descartes, was none the less criticized for enjoying an overblown reputation in his native land; ‘In a Word, Sir Isaac Newton is here as the Heracles of fabulous Story, to whom the Ignorant ascrib'd all the Feats of Ancient Heroes.’ Ambivalence of this sort even carried over into discussion of Newton's discoveries: some of his notions, such as vortices, were considered occult, for they remained unproved, but others, such as attraction, could be convincingly demonstrated, even while attraction itself was considered to be ‘among the Arcana of the Almighty’.77 (p.116) By 1738 Voltaire had decided to aggrandize Newton more aggressively. In his eulogistic work Elémens de la philosophie de Newton (which was devoted to the exposition of Newtonianism), the dedicatory poem of praise allegorized Newton's genius, as God's voice, echoed by the elements, lauded the scientist: Newtonianism and truth were thus run together, as in the devotions of the work's dedicatee, the Marquise Du Ch☆☆, identified as a ‘Disciple de Newton, & de la Vérité’. A progressive schema underlined these reflections: Newton had overwhelmed the primitive notions of the laws of nature; his mature philosophy was held to have refuted the sillinesses of the ancients, allowing men to move forwards (and Voltaire to make up for his systematic denunciations of Descartes) — ‘Ce Siècle est autant supérieur à Descartes, que Descartes 1’étoit à 1‘Antiquité.’ It seems at least possible that Blake's famous pictorial critique of a sternly naked Newton pointlessly calculating the dwarfing dimensions of the Page 21 of 31

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic Heavens is an iconographical reversal of Voltaire's image in this decidedly celebratory text of ‘Le compas de Newton mesurant l’Univers’.78 Recent work on Blake has emphasized the eclectic richness of his surrounding culture, one in which such images as that created by Voltaire could have found their way to any number of otherwise unlikely recipients.79 As the guiding light of Newtonian haute vulgarisation, Voltaire had been called in by his admirer Frederick the Great to institute the 1751 essay competition of the Berlin Academy which acted as the great instrumental step towards the eradication of the Wolffian system in Prussia. The new Hanoverian university at Göttingen opened up the North German states to English science, a connection exploited by Anglophilic scholars of high calibre such as the aphorizing physicist Lichtenberg.80 In these and similar institutions a taste for novel philosophies ensured the prominence of a (p.117) Newton who was well on the way to acquiring legendary status. Interestingly, Locke's thought exercised remarkably little influence on German thinkers, whose spiritual priorities left them unreceptive to what they considered to be pure empiricism.81 In the Italian states, the presence of the Jacobite court of James III, along with such luminaries as Sir Henry Newton (who promoted Clarke's Latin translation of his master's Optics for international consumption), allowed the intellectually discontented to come to grips with the new philosophy. The risks of such a discovery were obvious: Algerotti's dangerously didactic Newtonianismo per le dame was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum’ in 1739. Not that Newtonianism could be so easily checked: the ecclesiastical body charged with reforming the Gregorian calendar was itself dependent on English astronomical works. Beyond the confines of the Roman Catholic Church, the new science opened up a ‘libertas philosophand’ in which Newton was readily elided with Locke and the resulting hybrid applied to every conceivable topic, including Vico's speculative histories.82 Newtonianism managed to seep through gradually in more remote regions, as in the Hungarian reaches of the Habsburg domains, where Catholic scholasticism and a Protestant attachment to Cartesianism were slow to change. Tentative experiments and textbooks of the 1730s represented a flirtation with the new ways which would take on more lasting forms as links with Göttingen and the Calvinist universities of Holland evolved over the second half of the century.83 Like France and the Italian and German states, the Habsburg lands faced confessional crises which England avoided. Catholicism was a potent enemy to aspects of the new philosophy, encouraging the application of the energies (p. 118) of anticlerical polemicists and religious reformers to the promotion of challenging English thought.

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic In continental Europe, religion was the frequent victim of intellectual experiment, a state of affairs guaranteed by the politics of clerical repression. The Anglophobia of the ‘Index’ served as an instrument of the increasingly desperate Church Militant which repudiated both Newtonianism and Lockeanism, blending both together, and branding them enemies of the faith. The frequently fraught and unwitting collusion between Catholicism and ‘Enlightenment’ in continental Europe has thus served to give credibility to the fusion of Lockeanism and Newtonianism familiar in academic discussion of eighteenth-century intellectual history. The detail of English metaphysical and theological discussion considerably complicates the traditional representation of a siècle des lumières. Moreover, English scholars challenged this hybridization of Locke and Newton, and the ends to which it was put. In 1800 Samuel Horsley, the Cambridge-educated High Church bishop of Rochester, delivered a charge to his clergy in which he regretted that both Newton and Locke, men whom he revered and whose philosophies he valued and had learned from, had been distorted into seemingly materialist thinkers by the French philosophes. 84 A Tory bishop thus rued the revolutionary image of a Locke-Newton hybrid in the years of most intense reaction to the tempestuous consequences of the French Revolution. The propagandist image of Enlightenment, which many historians suppose to have been initiated by adoption of Newtonianism and Lockeanism, had been deconstructed by a prominent English cleric in (p.119) order to do justice to the reputations of Locke and Newton. Horsley's words encourage historians to refine judgements of a decidedly ambiguous age, and, rather than labelling him solely as a conservative herald of the Counter-Enlightenment, one can see how truly representative he was of England's predominantly clerical culture, the culture in which the intricacies of Lockeanism and Newtonianism make most historical sense. Notes:

(1) In his study The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge, 1992), Larry Stewart postulates Newtonianism as the dominant intellectual system in England. He pays scant regard to Locke's status in Enlightenment England. (2) Bacon, letter to Father Baranzano, 30 June 1622, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, R. Leslie Harris, and D. Denon Heath (London 1857–74), xiv. 374–78, trans, by the editors from the original Latin. (3) Metaphysics And Natural Philosophy: The Problem of Substance in Classical Physics (Brighton, 1982), ch. 2. (4) ironically, it was Bacon's denunciation of the Idola Tribus which Leibniz used against Samuel Clarke's Newtonian argumentation regarding space and time. Page 23 of 31

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic (In S. Clarke, A Collection of Papers, which passed between the late learned Mr. Leibnitz, and Dr. Clarke, in the year 1715 and 1716, relating to the principles of natural philosophy and religion ((London, 1717), 101.) (5) J. Butler, Several Letters to the Reverend Dr. Clarke, From a Gentleman in Gloucestershire, Relating to the First Volume of the Sermons Preached at Mr. Boyle's Lecture; With the Dr.'s Answers Thereunto (London, 1716); G. Berkeley, Philosophical Commentaries, in The Works of George Berkeley, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, (London, 1948–57), i, on which see R. B. Schwartz, ‘Berkeley, Newtonian Space, and the Question of Evidence’ in P. R. Backscheider (ed.), Probability, Time and Space in Eighteenth-Century Literature (New York, 1979), 259–73, and A. C. Grayling, Berkeley: The Central Arguments (London, 1986), 175–8. On the relationship between the thought of Berkeley and Hume, see M. Ayers, ‘Berkeley and Hume: A Question of Influence’, in R. Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Q. Skinner (eds.), Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy (London, 1984), 304–27. For Hume on space and time, see A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1978), 33–9, and Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. H. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), 156–58. On his critique of a priori argumentation, see Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. J. V. Price (Oxford, 1976), 162–3, 219. (6) For an expository defence of this approach, see S. Shapin, ‘Social Uses of Science’, in G. S. Rousseau and R. Porter (eds.), The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Science (Cambridge, 1980), 93–139. (7) For an efficient statement of the claim, see J. R. Jacob and M. C. Jacob, ‘The Anglican Origins of Modern Science: The Metaphysical Foundations of the Whig Constitution’, Isis, 71 (1980), 251–67. For further studies justifying this contention, see the following works by M. C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution 1689–1720 (Hassocks, 1976); The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London, 1981); Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York 1991); ‘Newtonianism and the Origins of the Enlightenment: A Reassessment’, ECS IT (1977–8), 1–25; ‘The Crisis of the European Mind: Hazard Revisited’, in ead and P. Mack (eds.), Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of H. G. Koenigsberger (Cambridge, 1987), 251–71. See also F. Wagner, ‘Church History and Secular History as Reflected by Newton and his Time’, History and Theory, 8 (1969), 97–111. (8) On the problems surrounding the term latitudinarian’ see the persuasive argument of J. Spurr, ‘“Latitudinarianism” and the Restoration Church’, HJ 31 (1988), 61–82.

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic (9) The Life Of John Locke, with Extracts from his Correspondence, Journals and Common-Place Books (2nd edn., London, 1830), ii. 47. (10) Memoirs of the Life, Writings, And Discoveries Of Sir Isaac Newton (2nd edn., London, 1855), i. 339; ii. 115. (11) Adam Sedgwick, A Discourse On The Studies Of The University (2nd edn., Cambridge 1834), 4, 14, 46–7, 51–7. (12) Ibid. 47 n. Sedgwick also ensured that the errors of defining God by worldly epistemological standards were kept at bay: ‘Applied to an Almighty Being with the attribute of ubiquity, in whose mind all things past and to come co-exist in eternal presence, time and space have no meaning, at least in that sense in which they are the conditions of our own thoughts and actions.’ (Ibid. 12.) (13) Locke (London, 1991), vol. i, chs. 25 and 26. (14) L. W. Beck, ‘World Enough and Time’, in Backscheider (ed.), Probability, Time and Space, 113–39; Wolfgang Von Leyden, ‘History and the Concept of Relative Time’, History and Theory, 2 (1963), 263–85. (15) ‘A Reply To My Critics’, in J. Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Oxford, 1988), 231–341, at 332 n. (16) The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. H. W. Turnbull et al. (Cambridge, 1959–77), iii. 71–7 (Newton to Locke, Mar. 1689/90); 192–3 (Newton to Locke, 16 Jan. 1691/2); 215 (Newton to Locke, 7 July 1692); 216–17 (Locke to Newton, 26 July 1692); 217–19 (Newton to Locke, 6 Aug. 1692); 82 (Newton to Locke, 14 Nov. 1690); 129–44 (Newton to Locke?, 1 Nov. 1690); 147–8 (Newton to Locke 7 Feb. 1690/1); 152–54 (Newton to Locke, 30 June 1691). (17) Ibid. iii. 79 (Newton to Locke, 28 Oct. 1690); 216–17 (Locke to Newton, 26 July 1692); 195 (Newton to Locke, 16 Feb. 1691/2); 214 (Newton to Locke, 3 May 1692); 184–5 (Newton to Locke?, Dec. 1691). (18) Ibid. iv. 282 (Newton to Locke, 19 Sept. 1698). (19) Ibid. iv. 405–6 (Newton to Locke, 15 May 1703). (20) Ibid. iv. 280 (Newton to Locke, 16 Sept. 1693). (21) Ibid. iv. 283–84 (Newton to Locke, 15 Oct. 1693; Locke to Newton, 5 Oct. 1693). (22) For a rather different argument, see G. A. J. Rogers, ‘Locke, Newton and the Cambridge Platonists’, JHI 40 (1979), 191–205. Rogers tends to conflate Locke and Newton according to the Enlightenment hybridization of their ideas, referring to ‘the common intellectual outlook of the twin founders of the Page 25 of 31

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic eighteenth-century Enlightenment’. He also affirmed this argument in another essay, ‘The Empiricism of Locke and Newton’, in S. C. Brown (eds.), Philosophers of the Enlightenment (Hassocks, 1979), 1–30. (23) The Newton Letter: An Interlude (London, 1982), 5–6, 50. (24) The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. A. Motte (1729; London, 1968), i. 9–12. (25) McGuire, ‘Existence, Actuality and Necessity: Newton on Space and Time’, AS 35 (1978), 463–508. (26) Essay, ‘Epistle’ pp. 9–10; Colie, ‘The Social Language of John Locke: A Study in the History of Ideas’, JBS 4 (1965), 29–51. (27) Essay, iv. vii. 3; J. Axtell, ‘Locke, Newton, and The Two Cultures’ in J. W. Yolton (ed.), John Locke: Problems and Perspectives (Cambridge, 1969), 165–82. (28) Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. J. W. Yolton and J. S. Yolton (Oxford, 1989), 247–9. (29) Ibid. 244–5. He also recommended Cudworth's Neoplatonist metaphysics, A True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), (Ibid 247–8). (30) G. A. J. Rogers, ‘Locke's Essay and Newton's Principia’, JHI 39 (1978), 217– 32, admits to a disagreement between these works regarding the question of space. (31) Essay, 11. xiii. 2, 4, 9–10. Cf. Newton's absolute and relative definition, Mathematical Principles, i. 10: ‘Place is a part of space which a body takes up, and is, according to the space, either absolute or relative. I say, a Part of Space; not the situation, nor the external surface of the Body’. For a reading of Locke on the notion of absolute place which connects his views positively with those of Newton, see Ayers, Locke, i. 235–6. (32) Essay, ii. xiii. 11, 13–14, 18, 26. (33) Essay, II. xiv. 1–4, 16–19. Locke accepted, along with Newton and many other thinkers, that there was a coherent notion of duration which lay behind these relative conceptions of time; duration remained unmeasurable by humans. On which see Ayers, Locke, i. 232–3. (34) Essay, 11. xiv. 21. (35) Ibid. xiv. 27–31; xv. 3, 6, 11–12. (36) Ibid. xv. 22.

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic (37) Opticks: Or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light (2nd edn., London, 1718), Qu. 31, p. 379. (38) Mathematical Principles, ii. 389–90. (39) For discussion of Locke's ‘proofs’ see M. Ayers, ‘Mechanism, Superaddition, and the Proof of God's Existence in Locke's Essay’, Philosophical Review, 90 (1981), 210–51; Ayers, Locke, vol. ii, ch. 14. (40) Gerd Buchdal has demonstrated that the myth was a contemporary simplification: The Image of Newton and Locke in the Age of Reason (London, 1961), 2. On further distinctions in the natural philosophies of Newton and Locke, along with some of their later developments, see P. M. Heimann and J. E. McGuire, ‘Newtonian Forces and Lockean Powers: Concepts of Matter in Eighteenth-Century Thought’, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 3 (1971), 233–306. (41) Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1989). (42) A. Guerrini, ‘The Tory Newtonians: Gregory, Pitcairne, and their Circle’, JBS 25 (1986), 288–311. (43) Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment, 147–9, notes Guerrini's argument, but he docs not counter it. The patronage afforded them by the Whig bishop Gilbert Burnet, which Gascoigne adduces against her case, does not detract from the active Toryism of the Pitcairne-Gregory circle. (44) H. Guerlac and M. C. Jacob, ‘Bentley, Newton, and Providence (The Boyle Lectures Once More)’, JHI 30 (1969), 307–18. (45) Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment, 129. (46) On Law's close acquaintanceship with Waterland, see W. Paley, A Short Memoir of The Life of Edmund Law, D.D. Bishop of Carlisle (London 1800), 2–3. (47) Collection of Papers, p. v. (48) A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God: More Particularly in Answer to Mr. Hobbes, Spinoza, and their Followers (London, 1705), 1–5, 18–19, 30, 41. Clarke's arguments were close to the cosmological and ontological arguments of the very Schoolmen whom he affected to despise, on which see J. P. Ferguson, ‘The Image of the Schoolmen in 18th Century English Philosophy, with Reference to the Philosophy of Samuel Clarke’, in Arts libéraux et philosophie au Moyen Âge: Actes du quatrième congrès international de philosophie médiévale (Montreal, 1969), 1199–1206.

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic (49) Demonstration, 58–70, 72. (50) Demonstration, 82, 87. On the originally positive reception of these lectures, see J. P. Ferguson, An Eighteenth-Century Heretic: Dr. Samuel Clarke (Kineton, 1976), ch. 3. (51) Gretton, A Review of the Argument A Priori, In Relation to the Being and Attributes of God: In Reply to Dr. Clarke's Answer to a Seventh Letter concerning that Argument, printed at the end of the last Edition of his Boyleian Lectures, (London, 1726), pp. iii-xiii, 1–9, 18–21, 27–30, 37, 56, 112. (52) Waterland, Advice to a Young Student. With a Method of Study for the First Four Years (Cambridge, 1730), 23. (53) D. Waterland., A Dissertation Upon The Argument A Priori For Proving The existence Of A First Cause (Cambridge, 1734), 1–40. For a high estimate of the value of this work, see the remarks of Waterland's memorialist, the Oxford don Jeremiah Seed, The Happiness of the Good in a Future State set forth: In a Sermon Occasion'd by the Death of Dr. Waterland (London, 1741), 11 n. For reference to Waterland's use of Duns Scotus against Clarke, see Ferguson, ‘Image of the Schoolmen in 18th Century English Philosophy’, 1204. (54) Dissertation, 46–7, 52–4, 62–3, 65–6, 82. (55) Dissertation, 78, 90–5, 98. (56) W. King, An Essay on the Origin of Evil, ed. and trans. E. Law (London 1731), notes to pp. 2–3, 6–10. For a good discussion of Law's criticism of absolute space and the materialization of God in Clarke's physico-theology, see J. W. Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 1984), 80. (57) King, Essay, Law's notes to pp. 19, 26, 31, 33–4. (58) J. Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (2nd edn., London, 1812), i. 519–31; cf. Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment, 119. (59) Jackson, The Existence and Unity of God: Proved from his Nature and Attributes, Being a Vindication of Dr. Clarke's Dissertation on the Being and Attributes of God (London, 1734), 17. (60) Jackson, 18, 49–52, 58. (61) An Enquiry Into the Ideas of Space, Time, Immensity, and Eternity; As also the Self-existence, Necessary existence, and unity of the Divine Nature: In Answer to a Book lately Publish'd by Mr. Jackson, Entitled, The Existence and

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic Unity of God Proved from his Nature and Attributes (Cambridge, 1734), 6, 8–9, 22, 47. (62) Ibid. 24–5, 37, 44–5. (63) Ibid. 49, 52, 71, 81, 85, 92–3, 95. (64) An Enquiry Into the Ideas of Space, Time, Immensity, and Eternity, 114–16, 1:25, 140–2, 150, 155–6, 176–7. (65) Clarke, A Defence of Dr. Clarke's Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (London, 1732), 41–5, 50, 60–3. (66) Id., pref. to A Third Defence of the Being and Attributes of God (London, 1733). (67) Dr. Clarke's Notions of Space Examin'd. In Vindication of the translator of Archbishop King's Origin of Evil (London, 1733), 3, 14, 34. (68) Ibid. 47, 105. For Leibniz's dismissal, see Samuel Clarke (ed.), A Collection of Papers, which passed between the late learned Mr. Leibnitz and Dr. Clarke, in the years 1715 and 1716 relating to the principles of natural history and religion (London, 1717), 101. (69) For a more nuanced account of this trend, see P. M. Heimann, ‘Voluntarism and immanence: Conceptions of Nature in Eighteenth-Century Thought,’ JHI 39 (1978), 271–83. (70) Chambers, Cyclopaedia (2 vols., London, 1728), art. God. This definitional piety was notably present in Newton's own work. (71) English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regine (Cambridge, 1985), 313. Clark's opprobrium of Clarke and Law is a pronounced feature of his High Anglican and High Tory interpretation of the period. (72) For detailed discussion of this idea, see B. W. Young, ‘“The Soul-Sleeping System”: Politics and Heresy in Eighteenth-Century England’, JEH 45 (1994), 64– 81. (73) ‘Discours préliminaire des éditeurs’, in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire des sciences, des arts et des métiers par une société de gens de lettres (Paris, 1751), vol. i. pp. i–xlv, at p. xxvii. For discussion, see J. Derrida, The Archaeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac, trans, J. P. Leavey, Jr. (London 1987), ch. 1. (74) Darnton, ‘Philosophers Trim the Tree of Knowledge: The Epistemological Strategy of the Encyclopédie’, in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (London, 1984), 185–207. Page 29 of 31

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic (75) P. M. Rattansi, ‘Voltaire and the Enlightenment Image of Newton’, in H. Lloyd-Jones, V. Pearl and B. Worden (eds.), History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper (London 1981), 218–31; H. Guerlae, ‘Where the Statue Stood: Divergent Attitudes to Newton in the Eighteenth Century’, in E. R. Wasserman (ed.), Aspects of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1965), 317–34; F. Haskell, ‘The Apotheosis of Newton in Art’, Texas Quarterly, 10 (1967), 218–37; B. M. Stafford, ‘Science as Fine Art: Another Look at Boullée's Cenotaph for Newton,’ SECC 11 (1982), 241–78; D. D. Ault, Visionary Physics: Blake's Response to Newton (Chicago, 1974). (76) ‘Remarques Critiques Sur Le Nouveau Systéme De Chronologie Du Chevalier Newton’, in The Miscellaneous Works, ed. John, Lord Sheffield (London, 1796–1815), iii. 63–73; N. Hooke, The Roman History, from the Building of Rome to the Ruin of the Commonwealth (London, 1738–71), i. 117–26. (77) Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation (London, 1733), 48–50, 117– 18, 122–41. (78) Elémens de la Philosophie de Newton, Mis à la portée de tout le monde (Amsterdam, 1738), 3–8, 11, 15–18. (79) J. Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford, 1992). (80) R. S. Calinger, ‘The Newtonian-Wolffian Controversy (1740–1759)’, JHI 30 (1969), 319–30; J. P. Stern, Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions (London, 1963). (81) K. P. Fischer, ‘John Locke in the German Enlightenment: An Interpretation’, JHI 35 (1975), 430–46. (82) V. Ferrone, Scienza natura religione: Mondo newtoniano e cultura italiana nel primo setteccento (Naples, 1982), 23–7, 33–5, 45–7, 57–9, 110–11, 237–98, 671–4. (83) D. Kosary, Culture and Society in Eighteenth-Century Hungary (Budapest, 1987), 175–79. I am grateful to Nora Kelecsenyi-Palatos for drawing my attention to this book. (84) ‘The Charge of Samuel, Lord Bishop of Rochester, To the Clergy of his Diocese; Delivered At His Second General Visitation In The Year 1800’, in The Charges of Samuel Horsley, LL. D. F.R.S. F.A.S. Late Lord Bishop of St. Asaph; Delivered At His Several Visitations Of the Dioceses of St. David's, Rochester, and St. Asaph (Dundee, 1813), 116–77, at 120–2. For a full account of Horsley's life, works, and historical significance, see F. C. Mather, High Church Prophet: Bishop Samuel Horsley (1733–1806) and the Caroline Tradition in the Later Georgian Church (Oxford, 1992). in elucidating Horsley's commitment to Page 30 of 31

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Metaphysics before Physics: The Cambridge Critique of Newtonian Religious Apologetic Newtonian science, Mather rightly distances himself from the contextualist arguments of Gascoigne and Jacob (ibid. 48).

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion.

Religion and Enlightenment in EighteenthCentury England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke B. W. Young

Print publication date: 1998 Print ISBN-13: 9780198269427 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269427.001.0001

The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. CATHERINE OSBORNE

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269427.003.0005

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the mystical critique of rational religion in England during the 1800s. In 1820, clerical historians elucidated and criticised the heterogeneity of mysticism. It is shown that the mystics were never incorporated into a distinct sect and that while some professed high-wrought piety, others delighted in allegorizing the Scripture. The most notable mystics who opposed metaphysical rationalism were William Law, George Horne, and John Wesley. They lambasted the complacencies of Newtonian physico-theology just as others anathematized the impious systematization developed in its wake. Keywords:   mystics, rational religion, England, mysticism, William Law, George Horne, John Wesley, Newtonian physico-theology

In 1820 the clerical historian Johnson Grant, praising the piety of William Law and the Moravians, nevertheless noted the danger of this very characteristic, for ‘When carried into excess, it becomes sublimated into mysticism: an evil which prevailed during the reign of George ‘I’. Such a conclusion, which considerably complicates notions of eighteenth-century England as a defining moment in the history of secularization, was affirmed by Grant’s elucidation and castigation of the heterogeneity of mysticism: ‘The Mystics were never incorporated into a distinct sect…Some of them profess a high-wrought piety; and others delight in allegorizing Scripture. Among the former may be numbered Fenelon and Law; among the latter, the whole school of Hutchinson.’1 Opponents of metaphysical ‘rationalism’, William Law, George Home, and John Wesley lambasted the complacencies of Newtonian physicotheology, just as the poets Christopher Page 1 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. Smart and William Blake anathematized the impious systematization developed in its wake. This is not to superimpose coherence of thought on a disparate quintet of thinkers merely by labelling them ‘anti-Newtonian’ mystics, but it is to suggest something of the dynamics of England's early Counter-Enlightenment experience. (p.121) The intricacies of these pervasive strains of anti-Newtonianism will be examined in this chapter as a means of understanding the complexities of metaphysical speculation in a period of supposed secularization. The argument will demonstrate that a widespread Christian scepticism regarding the claims of Newtonian physico-theology did not therefore unite its proponents in any obvious way. Indeed, squabbles over doctrinal issues as disparate as the claims of reason over mysticism or the nature of salvific faith firmly divided them. Nor yet was there any obvious political demarcation at work here, since, with the exception of the politically radical Blake, many of the thinkers who form the subject of this chapter were Tories of some description.2 Once again, it was religious commitment and theological belief, and not mere political ideology, which separated the contending factions. If they united against Newtonian apologetic it was not simply because they feared a Whig-Newtonian hegemony, but rather that they believed, for theological and philosophical reasons, that such apologetic was fundamentally erroneous. In the course of the ensuing discussion, it will become apparent that, far from being a rationalistic monopoly, religious debate in eighteenth-century England contained significant mystical, visionary, and essentially biblical elements. Nor were these elements necessarily discrete: the eclectic physico-theology of John Wesley, and the linguistically based Biblicism of the Hutchinsonians betray the existence of fluid boundaries. The world of Blake's religious imagination was even more porous: at the close of the eighteenth century, mystical Dissent drew from a wide variety of sources, including the previously impervious High Church tradition of mysticism. In properly evaluating these developments, it is necessary to consider the multivalent strands of Anglican debate concerning cosmological speculation, from the Nonjuring mysticism of William Law to the eclecticism of his erstwhile follower John Wesley.

(p.122) I In his Bampton lectures of 1899, W. R. Inge challenged the assumption that Britain had produced few mystics, evincing in response a rich crop of English writers. Within this context, William Law's intense mysticism was cited as evidence of a style of thought long considered inimical to the pragmatism supposedly typical of England.3 Inge's corrective acquires added impetus when applied to eighteenth-century mysticism, of which Law was the supreme representative, since, writing over a decade later, even Caroline Spurgeon, perhaps the most sympathetic student of Law's thought, felt obliged to accept that the notion that mysticism flourished in the era of English rationalism was Page 2 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. ‘almost a contradiction in terms’.4 Before attempting an evaluation of the status of mysticism in the period (described by Law's critic as an ‘undercurrent of thought’ which helped to green an otherwise arid intellectual and spiritual landscape), it is necessary to adopt a working definition of what has long been a notoriously vague term.5 Inge's own definition of mysticism is both authoritative and suggestive. For Inge, religious mysticism encompassed an attempt to realize the presence of God in the soul and in nature; the mystic sought to transform himself into a likeness of God, a process of identification which enjoined a denial of self in a ‘dying life’ (which was not equivalent to a living death). Mystics frequently enjoyed a ‘sunny confidence in the ultimate triumph of good’; they felt that God's immanence pervaded nature, so that ‘God is in all, and all is in God.’ The human personality, so understood, was itself directly related (p.123) to God.6 Inge described a contemplative frame of mind, insisting that mysticism ‘is not itself a philosophy, any more than it is a religion’.7 To thrust rigid coherence on any mystical outlook is, then, to misunderstand the open-endedness of many styles of religious reflection. The history of Behmenism (the varieties of English attachment to the teachings of the Silesian mystic Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), of which William Law is conventionally held to be the supreme exemplar), demonstrates the sheer vitality of even the most philosophically specific of mystical systems when adopted by different circles. What is more, the English experience of adherence to the ‘Teutonic Philosopher’ is decidedly different from that sketched by Hegel, who, in his Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, accorded the status of a chief instigator of ‘modern philosophy’ to Boehme alongside Bacon and Descartes, a claim that would be barely credible to most Anglo-Saxon philosophers and intellectual historians.8 Hegel's valuation interestingly complicates any easy genealogy of Aufklàrung philosophies as these might be traced from the seventeenth into the early nineteenth centuries. Boehme's English career began in the period of the Civil War and the Interregnum. A considerable aspect of this experience assumed the character of antisectarian, confessionally eirenic mysticism: this can be gauged in the work of Charles Hotham, a fellow of Peterhouse, who was probably the first Englishman to enthuse over Boehme in the 1640s. Similarly, Boehme's translator, John Sparrow, was a loyal Churchman, who found in Behmenism a pacific escape (p.124) from the militant sectarianism of the 1640s and 1650s. Boehme's reputation was also advanced in learned circles presided over by Elias Ashmole, Samuel Hartlib, and, more ambiguously, among the Cambridge Platonists.9 Much alchemical experimentation was, after all, to be found among Royalist circles after the Restoration, and Behmenism was not of itself antipathetic to such developments.10 Behmenism, however, also appealed to sectarians and ultra-Protestants: the Puritan John Pordage was expelled from his Page 3 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. living in 1654 when accused of a style of mystical pantheism drawn from his readings of Boehme; Richard Baxter, a committed searcher-out of heresies, noted a congruence between Quakerism and Behmenism: Boehme had indeed exerted a strong influence on George Fox.11 It has also been alleged that Milton's writings betray some allegiance to Boehme's thought, although these supposed links are admittedly rather vague in character.12 Boehme's works were first translated into English between 1644 and 1662; his earliest readers tended to be close followers of his entire scheme, assiduously seeking out every emblem from his profoundly symbolic theosophy in their experience of a divinely penetrated world of portents and signs.13 Boehme had lived in accordance with the promise of Luke 11: 13, ‘If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?’: accordingly, the light afforded by this counsel became central to his thought. It informed his first vision, experienced in 1600 (some twelve years before he published his first work, the Aurora): Viewing the Herbs and Grass of the field, in his (p.125) inward Light, he saw into their Essences, use, and properties, which was discover'd to him by their Lineaments, Figures, and Signatures’.14 The works of Boehme which resulted from such effusions are notoriously obscure and deeply repetitious. His cosmology may be extrapolated from two of his fundamental texts, both of which laid out the mystery of the creation: Mysterium Magnum and The Third Book of the Authour. In the latter work, Boehme penetrated the mystery of the Originall Matrix’ or ‘Genetrix’, God drawing out matter from its origin in the two forms of light and darkness: The pure Deity is in all places, and all corners, and present every where all over: the Birth of the Holy Trinity in one Essence is every where, where ever you can thinke, even in the Midst of the Earth, Stones, and Rocks: as also Hell and the Kingdom of Gods wrath, is every where and all over.15 The ‘Genetrix’ was the essence of all essences, the generator of all things which were in being, the formulator of the three essential substances: sulphur, mercury, and salt. These three substances corresponded to a Paracelsian reading of man's nature: salt was the soul, a brimstone spirit, light breathing fire in the soul of man, the eternal breath of God enlightening his mind and being.16 Light was the guiding symbol, the wellspring or fountain of the ‘holy Tenancy’, the ‘Eternal Essentiality’ of God's Triune being. The perpetuity of this light reflected God's essentiality, its activity enlightened his very self, making distinct the three persons of the Divine Trinity.17 In Mysterium Magnum, Boehme provided a reading of Genesis which was grounded on a mystical apprehension of Christology: the first book of the Bible prefigured the drama of the Redemption, Christ playing the role of the second Page 4 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. Adam in a detailed elucidation of a complex web of (p.126) symbolism. In his exegesis of the creation narrative, Boehme offered his readers the core of his theosophy. The creation of solid matter originated with the fall of Lucifer and his legions; their fall gave vent to the three principles of creative matter—desire (astringent and associated with Saturn), attraction (a stirring motion associated with Mercury), and anguish (associated with Mars). The world was thus effectively created through the wrathful desire of Satan (styled by Christ the prince of the world), and by the breath of God; hence its good and evil parts: there is nothing in this world so evill, but it hath a good in it: the Good hath its rise originally out of the good or heavenly Property, and the Evill hath its descent from the property of the darke world; for both worlds, viz. light, and darkenesse, are in each other as one.18 The three principles of creation were contained within the seven properties of ‘Eternall nature’ (note Boehme's use of conventionally Christian mystical numerology): desire, attraction, and anguish were intimately related to the fire of the spirit (which purified the ‘roughnesse’ of desire), and to the ‘holy Spirituall Love-desire of God (identified with His will). The sixth form was the ‘Sound of the divine Word’, the form of God's wisdom. All of these six principles or forms were subsumed within the seventh, that of essence and being in the cumulative, all-inclusive ‘Out-Birth or Manifestation’ of the divine creation.19 The necessary obscurity of revelation was ‘the greatest Mystery, wholly hidden to the externall Reason’; as a polluted instrument, reason had removed Satan himself from his apprehension of the divine: Yes! deare Reason smell into thy owne bosome; of what doth it Savour: contemplate thine owne Minde; after what doth it long; likely, after the cunning delusions of the Devill: had not he known this ground, very like he had been yet an Angelí; had he not seen the Magicall birth in his high light, then he had not desired to be a selfish Lord and maker in the Essence.20 (p.127) A similarly deep suspicion of reason connects Wiliam Law's brand of Nonjuring asceticism, delineated in two celebrated texts of eighteenth-century spirituality, A Practical Treatise Upon Christian Perfection (1726) and A Serious Call To A Devout And Holy Life (1729), with his espousal of Boehme, to whose works he had been introduced in the 1730s by George Cheyne, the mystically inclined Newtonian physician.21 The critique of reason developed by Law was a consciously spiritual repudiation of what he decried as ‘carnal’, worldly epistemologies. In a Practical Treatise, he had noted a necessary opposition between worldliness and the spiritual life: ‘HAD we been made only for this World, worldly Wisdom had been our highest Wisdom; but seeing Christianity has redeem'd us to a contrary State, since all its Goods are in opposition to this Life, worldly Wisdom is now our greatest Page 5 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. Foolishness.’22 In a Serious Call, he argued that true reason originated in devotion, concluding then that ‘Reason is our universal law, that obliges us in all places, and at all times; and no actions have any honour, but so far as they are instances of our obedience to reason.’23 This line of thought was clarified against the freethinking Matthew Tindal's claim, expressed in Christianity as old as the creation (1730), that, as reason was the all-sufficient means of religious and philosophical understanding, then a Christianity which was (p.128) dependent on mystery (the antithesis of reason) could not be a true religion of nature. Law's counter-arguments were at once epistemological and experiential, theological and sociological. He began with a piously cautious appraisal of Tindal's faith in human rationality: If sin had its beginning from pride, and hell be the effect of it, if devils are what they are through spiritual pride and self-conceit, then we have great reason to believe, that the claiming this authority to our Reason in opposition to the reveal'd wisdom of God, is not a frailty of flesh and blood, but that same spiritual pride which turn'd Angels into apostate Spirits. Tindal's logic was confuted by Law, as he felt that it failed to accommodate the essential mystery of God's reasoning: how could men have made God conform to their pattern of reasoning, let alone have found him wanting in comparison with it? Men were ‘vastly impotent judges’ of God's government of ‘so small a part of the universe, as mankind are’. This was not to attribute arbitrariness to God's actions, which conformed with his own will and pleasure; it was to accept man's essential ignorance of that will. God's reason was at once like man's and yet, more significantly, ‘infinitely and beyond all conception different from it’. Tindal's very tidy argument about the relationship between things and actions was shown to be a limited notion when applied to God: For if the fitness of actions results from the nature and relations of beings, then the fitness of God's actions, as he is an omniscient creator and governor, to whom every thing is eternally foreknown, over beings endu'd with our freedom of will, must be to us very incomprehensible.24 Knowledge was rooted in social life, ‘so that which we call generally natural knowledge, or the light of nature, is a knowledge and light that is made natural to us, by the same authority which makes a certain language, certain customs, and modes of behaviour, natural to us’. What was natural to all (p.129) men was merely ‘the bare capacity to be instructed’; there was, then, little cause for pride in an alleged ‘absolute perfection of human reason’. Indeed, a proper humility ought to have been exercised in the face of reason's obvious shortcomings:

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. For what can make an undue use of reason, but itself? And if reason is so universally liable to an undue use of itself, that the universal ignorance and corruption of mankind is to be ascrib'd to it, then this undue use of reason is as great a sign of its universal weakness and imperfection, as any thing else can be.25 The unequal distribution of reason among mankind was also noted, as was the fact that, since reason acted as the means of moral choice, it was not only to be celebrated for being responsible for virtue but also to be condemned as engendering base, horrid, and shameful actions. Furthermore, as it alone could discover truth it also followed that ‘it alone leads us into the grossest errors’. Interestingly, Law seems to have anticipated Hume in noting the necessary influence of the body and the passions over reason, accepting the force of the resulting paradox that ‘he that is made the most positive of the sufficiency of his own right reason, will be the most likely to be govern'd by the blindness of his own passions’.26 The religious struggle with reason lay at the root of Law's conversion to Behmenism within a few years of his engagement with Tindal.27 Something like a revocation of some of his earlier controversial works can be found in the claim in (p.130) his first explicitly Behmenist treatise, An Appeal to All that Doubt, that ‘it signifies little…how many Books we have written in Defence of Orthodoxy’ if merely worldly learning was not repudiated. Trust in human reason was vain idolatry, ‘the Devil under the Appearance of an Angel of Light’; Scripture was directed against ‘the Vanity and Falsenesse of that Light and Knowledge, which is got from human Reasoning’.28 In The Spirit of Prayer (one of the three treatises in dialogue form which Law produced to advance Behmenism), even the suitably studious Academicus was moved to berate ‘the miserable Folly and Ignorance of those, who would set up a Religion of Human Reason’, while in The Way to Divine Knowledge the Behmenist dévot Theophilus was equally dismissive of ‘learned Christianity’.29 Inspired by Boehme's optimistic teachings regarding redemption and the Atonement, Law's spokesmen regretted the energy wasted on learned analyses of abstruse notions of Christian dogma, be it the nature of the Fall and original sin, the squabbles of Augustinians and Pelagians, or notions of election and reprobation.30 Deism, the immoderate philosophy of reason, had no natural strength, but grew only because of ‘the bad state of Christendom, and the miserable use that heathenish learning, and worldly policy, have made of the Gospel’.31 Truth was to be experienced as a movement of conversion, of a new birth in the soul, the central and most practical message to be gleaned from Boehme: (p.131) This is the philosophy opened in this mystery. It is not to lead you after yourself; but to compel you, by every Truth of Nature, to turn to Christ, as the one Way, the one Truth, the one Life and Salvation of the

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. Soul; not as notionally apprehended or historically known; but as experientially found, living, speaking, and working, in your soul.32 The mysteries of religion were no higher or deeper than those of nature, since nature was ‘typical’ of religion; man (in Renaissance fashion) was seen as a microcosm of nature. Law concluded that Christianity was indeed the religion of nature, but contrary to the argumentation of men like Tindal, who had sought to naturalize religion away from the premisses of revealed dogma, this was because nature was the living creation of an omnipresent Triune deity.33 This knowledge, as old as creation itself, had been granted to ‘the heavenly Illuminated and blessed Jacob Boehme’ as ‘a chosen Servant of God’.34 Boehme's cosmology was explicated by Law in familiar terms, but without the profoundly Paracelsian and Cabbalistic imagery which permeated Boehme's own writings. Law explicitly removed himself from some of what he called his guide's ‘strange Notions’.35 Accordingly, Law's readers were informed that the world, a creation of Heaven and of Hell, had been made evil by the agency of rebellious angels/devils. Necessarily fallen, the earth was open to the malign influence of the Devil, the prince of the world. Matter itself, thick, dark, and compressed, was the effect of sin.36 Fire, light, and air were the elemental effects of the Triune deity; the three creative (p.132) principles effected creation aided by the ‘magic’ of God's creative will and the inspiration of the eternal fire (identified by Law with the Sun).37 Law rejected the notion of a creation ex nihilo, dismissing it as a ‘Fiction big with the grossest Absurdities, and contrary to every Thing that we know, either from Nature or Scripture, concerning the Rise and Birth, and Nature of Things, that have begun to be’.38 In reading William Law as an opponent of Newtonian physico-theology, it is necessary to note that his advocacy of ‘that wonderful man’ Jacob Boehme also involved an allied belief that Newton himself was a Behmenist, albeit an intellectually and spiritually timorous one. A Behmenist conception of God's creative order had supposedly inspired the ‘illustrious’ Newton's discovery of the three ‘great Laws of Matter and Motion’; however, Newton's were limited achievements when compared with those of Boehme: In the mathematical System of this great Philosopher, these three Properties, Attraction, equal Resistance, and the orbicular Motion of the Planets as the Effect of them &c. are only treated as Facts and Appearances, whose Ground is not pretended to be known. But in our Behmen, the illuminated Instrument of God, their Birth and Power in Eternity is opened. Newton had merely ‘ploughed with Behmen's Heifer’;39 a rationalist cosmology could not, in Law's estimation, begin to compare with the inspired insights of Page 8 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. Boehme, but Newton had been all too aware that it was impolitic to make any reference in the Principia to ‘an Author that was only called an Enthusiast’. 40 (p.133) Law had little sympathy with anti-Trinitarian heresies, and his hatred of Arianism was a major component in his rejection of Clarke's rationalist theology and apologetic. Arian theology, for all its espousal by prominent thinkers, had neither Catholic tradition nor revelation to recommend it; hence his ready dismissal of the doctrine in an Appeal to All that Doubt: If you are an Arian, don't content yourself with the Numbers that are with you, or with a Learned Name or two that are on your Side: Arianism has never yet been recommended by the Genius and Learning of a Baronius, or Bellarmin; and nothing but a poor, groping, purblind Philosophy, that is not able to look either at God, Nature, or Creature, hath ever led any Man into it.41 Similarly, his notions concerning the problematic questions of space and time were notably different from those propounded in Clarke's Newtonian system. Time, and the existence of temporary creation, were dependent on God's ‘Eternal Nature’, just as finitude was understood to be an aspect of a ‘mutual Intercourse’ between nature and God: time's relationship with eternity, and finitude’s with infinity, were ‘two great fundamental Truths’ that could not be shaken. Time was defined as ‘something of Equal Duration become finite, measurable, and transitory’. 42 When Law claimed that ‘Time comes out of Eternity, and Space comes out of the Infinity of God’, he was not limiting God, as Clarke had been accused of doing, but expressing a mystical notion of creation in which the Trinity permeated all things at all times.43 For Law, the mystery of man's relationship with God was sublimely and succinctly expressed in the Pauline conviction that ‘In God we live, and move, and have our being.‘44 Warburton claimed that Law had thus declared himself a Spinozist and pantheist (in the manner of Toland), a charge refuted by Law as having ‘all the folly and weakness, &c. &c. (p.134) that can be well imagined’. Law protested, in a private letter, that he had always made clear the essential distinction between created nature and a creator God, a distinction made from close study of the miraculous work of Boehme, a ‘wonderful gift of God to these last distracted ages of the world’.45 Warburton's imputation of enthusiasm failed to meet the challenge of Law's claim that ‘enthusiasm’ characterized all aspects of human activity, being a psychological condition rather than merely a religious state. In so far as it might enter religion, it was not ‘blameable’ when ‘true Religion’ had kindled it. It was simply wrong to derogate the ‘perpetual Inspiration’ which resulted from ‘the Breathing, the Life, and the Operation of God in the Life of the Creature’ as fanaticism or enthusiasm. Having interpreted the life of the spirit so completely, Page 9 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. Law turned the tables on deism, ironically denoting its worship of reason as ‘visionary Faith, and enthusiastick Religion’:46 such was the certainty of his belief in a God-irradiated creation. Law's spiritualized divorce from Newtonian physico-theology led to a distinctive attitude to notions of time and space. Eternity was the ultimate consummation, since it was the ‘Goodness of God, which has created Time and all Things in it, to have a Happy End in Eternity’. It was the vanity of the soul to be ‘living in, and loving the things of time’; its cure lay in ‘loving and living in the truths, which are the riches of eternity’.47 Such a mystical apprehension of time and eternity seems to have led William Blake, who had been strongly influenced by Law, to his poetic paraphrase: ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time.’48 (p.135) Law's brand of mysticism, with its ideal of detachment from worldliness, may be characterized as a counter-ideology (or as a reactionary gesture of despair). Anatagonistic to the world, devoting his resources to charity (along with those of the two women with whom he lived in chaste retirement), Law was increasingly unconcerned with diurnal politics.49 Once sufficiently committed to Jacobite politics, and to Nonjuring ecclesiology, to lose his Cambridge fellowship, he nevertheless became increasingly removed from such attachments in the latter half of his life, attending his local church and ignoring the pressures of political engagement.50 The claims of spirituality and religious commitment thus transcended the politico-theology of Law's early life, and this had been considerable as the tone of a letter to his brother following his expulsion from Cambridge for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to George I demonstrates: My Prospect indeed is Melancholy enough, but had I done what was requir'd of me to avoid it, I should have thought my condition much worse. The benefits of my Education seem partly at an end, but that same Education had been most miserably lost, if I had not learnt to fear something more than misfortunes. As to the multitudes of swearers, that has no influence upon me, their reasons are only to be considered, and every one knows no good ones can be given, for peoples swearing in direct contrary to what they believe. (p.136) Would my conscience have permitted me to have done this I should stick at nothing, where my interest was concerned, for what could be more heinously wicked, than heartily to wish Success of a Person upon the account of his right, & at the same time in the most solemn manner in presence of God, & as you hope for mercy, swear, that he has no right at all.

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. He went on to lament in tones that would eventually be amended by his own arguments in practical divinity, that ‘I expected to have had a greater share of worldly advantages, than what I'm now likely to enjoy, but am fully perswaded that if I am not happyer for this trial, it will be my own fault.’ A consistent element in Law's judgement of the world revealed itself at the close of this letter: ‘Our lot is fallen in an age that will not be without more trials than this. God's judgments seem now to be upon us & I pray God they may have their proper effect.’51

II There is a danger, apparent in recent scholarship, of the Hutchinsonian movement being turned into the mirror image of the Newtonian ideology; Jacob's posited Whig-latitudinarian hegemony has been balanced by the creation of a Tory opposition grouping of decidedly antipathetic tendencies.52 This reading, interesting and suggestive as it undoubtedly is, does not go far enough in challenging the (p.137) Jacob thesis. As has been demonstrated in Chapter 3, Newtonianism faced many challenges other than that initiated by Hutchinsonians. Furthermore, such a political reading is too crudely partisan; some Newtonians were Tory in their politics, just as some critics of Clarke's system were Whig— the Tory element in Hutchinsonianism was not a necessary one, and opponents of this theological system were not necessarily unsympathetic to Toryism. Politically hegemonic readings make little sense of this state of affairs; it was High Churchmanship and not Toryism which was defended by Hutchinsonian clergy in Sussex, many of whom had moved over into championship of the Whig interest in local politics.53 Hutchinsonianism originated in the work of the autodidact John Hutchinson, a former surveyor to the duke of Somerset and an ertswhile associate, in the early 1700s, of the geologist and virtuoso John Woodward, with whom he subsequently quarrelled.54 Hutchinson's provocatively titled exposition of Genesis, Moses's Principia, appeared in 1724, two years before the third edition of Newton's Principia. Condemning what he considered the blasphemous errors attendant on Clarke's physico-theology, Hutchinson contended that God was the cause of all movement in the universe; there was, then, ‘no ‘material Cause’, pace ‘present Philosophers’ who assumed the existence of ‘imaginary Powers’. A particular reading of Hebrew which involved undoing its points (that is the vowel sounds given to it by scholars in the fifth century) delivered the truth of things as they were at the Creation; Moses, as the inspired author of the Pentateuch, explained all. It was, then, Hutchinson argued, wrong to abandon such truths in favour of Aristotelian metaphysics explicated by unreliable and religiously suspect Arab translators in the Middle Ages, an (p.138) error Hutchinson imputed to the Schoolmen.55 Hutchinson demanded that modern believers, like the primitive Fathers, should oppose those who philosophized the faith, appealing instead to Scripture and the constant superintendence of God's ordinary providence.56 God's ordinary providence was effected through the mechanical operations of Page 11 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. the ether, a fusion of air and light; such, Hutchinson claimed, had been the cosmology of the Fathers which they had upheld against the subtle, Chaldean mystifications of the apostate Jews who had fallen away from the pure knowledge which pervaded the Mosaic creation narrative.57 Hutchinsonianism flourished at Oxford in the 1740s and 1750s through the influence of Alexander Catcott, a student of Wadham College in the 1740s, whose father, a convinced Hutchinsonian, had delivered a controversial sermon on familiar Hutchinsonian themes at Bristol in 1735.58 The younger Catcott was a geologist whose researches encouraged him to reply both to the heretical bishop Robert Clayton of Clogher on the nature of the deluge, and against the secular, antiscriptural hypotheses of French natural scientists such as Buffon.59 It was through his friendship with Catcott that George Home was converted to Hutchinsonianism as an undergraduate. Home denied that attraction was a physical principle, assuming also that the vacuum was not capable of demonstration. He traced the sources of unbelief back to mistakes in natural philosophy, especially as these concerned the doctrine of innate powers present in matter, which he considered to be as fallacious a notion as the materialism of Democritus and Epicurus; both led, inevitably, to atheism. Hence, in part, his move to Hutchinson's system: a profound commitment, for, as Home's biographer William Jones opined, ‘When a student hath once persuaded himself that he sees truth in the principles of Mr. Hutchinson, a great (p.139) revolution succeeds in his ideas of the natural world and its economy.’60 Home and his ally Jones thus fought two metaphysical enemies, ancients and moderns. In Jones's opinion all Greek philosophy was, at bottom, some species of materialism, and, therefore, all moderns who followed in the manner of those speculations would have ended up defending the same antichristian dogma.61 The Hutchinsonians, with their academic involvements and their particular devotion to the Hebrew of the Old Testament, were also natural targets for William Law's ridiculing approach to learned religion. Law's attitude of neartotal detachment from currently orthodox notions of politico-theology allowed him to berate those who, while critical of rational theology, none the less managed to voice a ringingly Tory repudiation of Newtonian apologetic. Academicus, the scholarly participant in Law's dialogues, thus quietly lampooned the injunctions of a don, clearly a Hutchinsonian, whom he had consulted regarding the best means of finding religious truth—‘One told me, that Hebrew words are all; that they must be read without points, and then the Old Testament is an open book: he recommended to me a cart-load of lexicons, critics, and commentators, upon the Hebrew Bible.’62 This proved to be a mutual antagonism.63 Home, the most significant Hutchinsonian thinker, dismissed Behmenism in his ‘Cautions to the Readers of Mr. Law’, written in the 1750s, as ‘ENTHUSIASM’, a ‘mystic jargon completely at odds with the language of Scripture. Home understood the world to have Page 12 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. resulted from the creation of matter, challenging Behmenist belief in creation from pre-existent matter: the creation ex nihilo denounced by Law was central to Home's account. Home charged Law with the heresy of making matter coeternal with God, or else of having thought it an (p.140) emanation from God's essence which was ‘the abomination of Platonism brought into Christianity’. This confounding of God with created nature was ‘the essence of Paganism, the foundation of all those errors against which the Scriptures constantly warned. Resorting to Law's own language, Home suggested that he had been misled by the Devil disguised as an angel of light, thereby falling into ‘the sink and complication of Paganism, Quakerism, and Socinianism, mixed up with chymistry and astrology, by zpossest cobbler.64 In a private letter of 1758, Home denounced Boehme as being either a hypocrite or a madman, whose writings were ‘utterly to be rejected by every sober Christian’. Following the warning of Acts 2:17 concerning the prophetic imposters of the last days, he considered it likely that Boehme had been inspired by Satan: the clarity of Scripture language had been denied by the dark verbosity of Paracelsian alchemy; the depths of Behmenism were ‘the depths of Satan’. and Boehme's doctrine of the Light of Nature was ‘the great mystery of pagan enthusiasm, and the root of modern infidelity’.65 William Jones, Home's biographer and disciple, likewise abhorred ‘the stupendous reveries of Jacob Behmen the German Theosophist’.66 It was the supposed materialistic alliance of ancient and Newtonian thought, however, which provided the theme of Home's first venture into print in 1751, a pamphlet tracing the similarities between Ciceronian and Newtonian conceptions of the universe. In Home's account, the Newtonian fusion of ‘heathenism and Christianity’ was held to demonstrate just how far ‘pure, genuine, unassisted right reason’ could go, as philosophy and divinity supported each other to the ‘unspeakable satisfaction and delectation of the general (p. 141) reader’.67 The heavy ironies of such language were never far below the surface, as when Cicero's appeal to the knowledge of the ancients was held equivalent to seeking wisdom from the wise men of Gotham. Likewise, in repudiating modern natural philosophy, Horne decried the use of experimentation in attempting to evince knowledge of God; as he was not an object of sense, God could not be revealed by natural phenomena, leaving Home to cite Scripture with becoming piety: ‘the World by Wisdom knew not God.’ Newton's opaque notion of God's sensorium was dismissively considered to be at one with the Ciceronian identification of God as the anima mundi; Clarke's allied claim regarding God's infinite extension was accordingly rejected as a sentiment ‘that would disgrace a Talmudist or a Mahometan’. The god of the Principia was a heretical construct, an effective denial of the Trinity acting as the legitimating metaphysics of Arianism in which ‘high treason is committed against the King of kings’. Throwing out Newtonian notions of the vacuum and the ether, Home aggressively attacked ‘that chaotick hodgepodge of contradictions, [Newton] calls a system of philosophy’.68 With his customary heavy wit, Home even Page 13 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. proposed a new tax on the light of nature in men's minds in order to make up for the loss of the Sun's powers in the new philosophy, a system which posited individualist anarchy against the eternal verities. Home wearily concluded that sectarianism was as dangerous in philosophy as it was in religion.69 Horne's tone was intemperate, and Jones was to regret the pamphlet's publication, criticizing it for suffering from a characteristic fault amongst Hutchinsonians, that of ‘treating their opponents with too great asperity and contempt’.70 Jones, rather pointedly, neglected to reprint the piece in his edition of Home's works, printed posthumously in 1818. He did, however, republish an altogether more emollient tract, originally printed in 1753, in which Home attempted to (p.142) demonstrate a way of melding together Newton's work with that of Hutchinson. Accepting that the study of physics was strongly favoured in the learned world, Home had attempted to define the procedures and extent of that science in order to effect a rapprochement between what he considered to be the misguided systematizers of Newton's philosophy and the loyal followers of Hutchinson, who was, in Home's view, an unduly neglected thinker, more disparaged than read.71 Physics was defined as the science by which students understood the operations of nature, that is, the various ways in which matter acted upon matter, while mathematics was, essentially, concerned with measurement: mathematics could not, then, discover the causes of nature although their measurable effects could be ascertained by that particular area of study. Such definitions struck at the heart of what many understood by Newtonianism; it was Home's purpose to show how Newton's followers had abused his writings by conflating mathematics with physics, and thereby to undo this confusion. Central to this contention was the claim that the Principia Mathematica ‘was mathematical philosophy’and that it had nothing to do with physics per se. Home concluded ‘that I have here the pleasure and satisfaction to find, that I fight this battle with Sir ISAAC on my side’: it was Newtonians, and not Newton who formed the subject of Home's attack, a familiar refrain in antiNewtonian apologetic.72 Newton had, in Home's opinion, discovered the laws of motion and gravity, not their causes. Mistaken interpretations, Home conjectured, stemmed from Newton's improper use of exact language, particularly in his deployment of terms such as attraction, repulsion, and vacuum. It was, most significantly, Newton's use of the word ‘infinite’ as a synonym for ‘indefinite’ which caused confusion in his description of the universe, and hence gave rise to the unfortunate consequences of either a limited and bounded God or a deity identical with that universe.73 Having clarified (p.143) these matters to his satisfaction, Home turned to a defence of Hutchinson's system which was compatible with the picture of the universe which Newton had sought, however unsucessfully, to develop. At the core of this apologetic was the idea of the ether, Page 14 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. a conception of which first surfaced in published form as a hypothesis in the General Scholium to the 1713 edition of the Principia Mathematica and which was further refined in appendices to the second edition of the Opticks in 1717. Newton had proposed a solution to the many and notorious physical and metaphysical problems concerning gravitation in his cosmology by developing a notion of a fluid medium, a supremely dense and rarefied substance which pervaded the universe.74 This was the ether, used by God to control the universe; it proved to be the surest means of overcoming the problem of a mechanistic God as this had arisen in the argumentation of the Principia, and in Clarke's creation of a correlative physico-theology. Before its promotion had been undertaken by George Cheyne (who had also introduced Law to Boehme's writings), few Newtonians took the idea of the ether very seriously until the 1730s and 1740s.75 Home's fusion of Newton and Hutchinson was therefore predicated on the reality of a controversial entity which strongly divided Newtonians at mid-century. By emphasizing that a mutual concern in identifying the ether as the prime cause of motion in a material system connected Hutchinson's theory regarding the ‘laws of mechanism’ with Newton's notion of gravity, Home was also able to confirm the importance of Hutchinson's independently formulated elucidation of a ‘subtle agent’ performing the (p.144) operations of nature. His identification of the ether as a fiery light produced by a rarefaction of the air, was considered by Hutchinson's clerical apologist to be a universal principle which bound together the generality of natural philosophers from the time of Thales to that of Newton.76 In his disavowal of Newtonianism, published within two years of Horne's attempt at bridging the theoretical divide between the two systems, Robert Spearman, a theologian resident in Durham and a close disciple of Hutchinson, was more antagonistic towards Newton. Spearman rejected the epistemological foundations of Newtonianism, berating abstract reason for having failed to bring men to the supposed truth for ‘so many thousand years’: if Newtonianism had really been so self-evident a philosophy, why had its principles taken so long in becoming known? Two blasphemous propositions were judged to be necessary effects of Newtonianism, the one being to deny Mosaic philosophy by accusing Moses of fabricating a false creation narrative, and the other being to impute to God the inspiration behind that erroneous tale, the promulgation of a ‘formal untruth’. Accordingly, Newtonianism was denounced as being both ‘repugnant to common sense’ and ‘harsh to a Christian ear’. Philosophy may have been necessary to the strengthening of theology, but it could not of itself ‘find out the true system of the world’. Pharaoh, after all, had been misled by ‘the fellows of his royal society’ (a deliberately anachronistic reference to parallel English mistakes) into the errors of materialism; Newton's philosophy, subservient to the heresies promoted by Clarke, had served to corrupt theology into a unitarian conception of God.77 Page 15 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. Against Home's diplomatic rendering of the case, Spearman attacked the Newtonian idea of gravity acting as the force behind motion, arguing that Newton's attempt to solve the problem by recourse to the ether was incompatible with his earlier, and more influential, theories.78 Solomon's (p. 145) account of the movement of the earth was pointedly preferred as the insight of ‘the wisest of men, and the greatest naturalist, completed by the spirit of prophecy’; Newton's theories were therefore abandoned in favour of the scriptural image of the shemesh, the solar light, a spiritual and angelic force which moved the earth.79 Spearman advocated a correspondence theory between true philosophy and true theology in which natural theology validated the doctrine of the Trinity, acting as a countervailing force against the errors subsumed under the character of ‘natural religion’. Natural knowledge was consonant with physics, and supernatural knowledge, of the sort vouchsafed to Hutchinson and his followers, was consonant with metaphysics. In Spearman's biblicist cosmology, the Scriptures displayed the perpetual presence of the superintending God, the driving agent of the universe in his triune form; ‘IF we consult the writings of the Old and New Testament, we shall find the persons of the Deity represented under the names and characters of the three material agents, fire, light, and spirit; and their actions expressed by the actions of these, their emblems.’80 William Jones, Home's biographer and champion, attempted to justify his own non-Newtonianism through an experimental examination of what he thought of as the Mosaic principles of nature. The resulting treatise, a solid defence of the Hutchinsonian notion of the universe as a God-driven mechanism advocated against the supposed arbitrariness of other systems, appeared in 1762. A letter which Jones sent to George Berkeley, the philosopher's son and a fellow Churchman, on 29 January 1762, attests Jones's high valuation of this book, which he saw as ‘a means of putting the subject of Natural Philosophy on a more serviceable footing’.81 Opposing the vacuum and the centrality of matter, Jones extracted his notion of the world as God's machine from a reading of Scripture in an unequal contest with a priori speculation; in this interpretation, the worldas-machine was driven by the ether which controlled the actions (p.146) of matter.82 Unusually for a Hutchinsonian, Jones appealed to the testimony of ancient philosophers, citing Plato, Pythagoras, and Aristotle as witnesses against the vacuum and as believers in the efficacy of material causes. Bacon, Boyle, and Cudworth also served their turn, as Jones restored Bacon's evocation of the two books, the Bible and nature, in defending his contentions. God, a spirit, used material causes in his government of the universe; matter, according to divinely inspired revelation, was instrumental to his purposes in a cosmos in which certain elements were appointed to rule over and give motion to the rest.83 Jones's politics, like those of his mentor, were resolutely conservative, and though, ironically, a descendant of a Cromwellian colonel, he developed a coherent counter-revolutionary programme in letters praising the example of Page 16 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. Burke which he exchanged with Thomas Percy, a fellow of St John's College, Oxford (one of the two Percys who worked on Percy's Reliques). 84 In a letter of 7 December 1790, he informed Percy that: I read that part of Mr. Burke's book attentively in which he describes the policy of the French Atheists to gain in the direction of the public opinion. Just such have been the proceedings of our infidels & dissenters; who have been so neglected by the supineness of the honest party, that it is miraculous they have not already overthrown it.85 This supposed union of dissent and infidelity was expanded upon in typically extreme hortatory language in a letter of 5 January 1791: Mr. Burke's account of the literary cabal in France, applies very closely to the proceedings of our Disaffacted Dissenters and Infidels in England. The Church and government in France have been ruined by their supineness; may better measures be adopted here; and may you have your use in bringing them to effect.86 (p.147) In the closing years of the Pittite reaction, Jones was attempting to bring over the higher echelons of the Church's laity to counter-revolutionary action:87 hence the importance of his The Scholar Armed Against the Errors of the Times (1795). Through Alexander Catcott, Horne, and Jones, therefore, Hutchinsonianism had flourished mainly at Oxford, an institution which lacked a historical connection with Newton and his immediate followers. That Oxford was a decidedly Tory and High Church bastion throughout the eighteenth century is well known;88 but whether this is in itself enough to explain the prevalence of Hutchinsonianism, in a decidedly confined circle, is doubtful. Some of its staunchest critics, such as the Hebrew scholar Benjamin Kennicott, were also Oxford dons, and there seems to have been as much division over this theological grouping as there had earlier been over the Oxford Methodists.89 Indeed, to complicate the picture yet further, one of their number, William Romaine, took Hutchinsonianism with him into a wider world as a champion of the Evangelical Revival.90 Intellectual tendencies and sympathies were not, then, anything like as rigidly coherent as many recent historians claim them to have been. More problematic still for historical typologists is the case of probably the best known of all those sympathetically disposed to such reflections: Christopher Smart, who, far from moving in the theological circles presided over by George Home, had served his comparatively short academic career as a demonstrator in natural philosophy at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Whilst at Cambridge in the late 1740s, Smart had been a fairly conventional exponent of the Newtonian physico-theology inherited from the opening decades of the century, as can be appreciated from the (p.148) Seatonian prize-winning poems he composed on Page 17 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. the Divine attributes.91 He had held, conventionally enough, that to describe God was presumptuous; that God was present throughout the universe, especially in the works of nature, and that he was immensely good, as were all the things he had created. Instinct was understood by the young Smart as a prompting from God; thus it was that birds knew the longitude. Newton was naturally celebrated as a genius, but even he was as nothing before God and nature, both being greater than men's thoughts.92 Reason was plainly inferior when confronted by God's power, a conclusion which led Smart to draw a scientific image which, although presented in naturalistic terms, may yet have had something in the way of supernatural mystery attached to it: By his omnipotence, Philosophy   Slowly her thoughts inadequate revolves,   And stands, with all his circling wonders round her,   Like heavy Saturn in th'ethereal Space   Begirt with an inexplicable ring.93

By 1763 Smart's attitude had grown infinitely more accommodating towards mystery, his work evincing a biblical orientation which overwhelmed his earlier advocacy of the physico-theology which the Seatonian Prize had been designed to memorialize: But now, a vet'ran for the prize,   I claim a license to advise.   Let not a fondness for the sage   Decoy thee from a brighter page,   THE BOOK OF SEMPITERNAL BLISS, (p.149)   The love where nothing is amiss,   The truth to full perfection brought,   Beyond the age's deepest thought;   Beyond the poet's highest flight;   Then let Invention reason right,   And free from prejudice and hate,   And false refinement's vain debate,   Since GOD'S the WORD, the Christians read,   By love their everlasting deed.94

This new orientation had found its strongest enunciation in Jubilate Agno, a poem written during his confinement for lunacy around 1760, but unpublished until the twentieth century. It was profoundly antithetical to Newton and Newtonianism, as well as being a consciously patriotic poem of a Messianic and millennialist cast of mind.95 Literary historians have argued for a revulsion against physico-theology which picked up momentum at mid-century, poets reverting to complete cosmologies in which metaphor and analogy displayed the immanence of God in the creation. Faith became the interpreter of the natural world as natural religion was Page 18 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. relegated in a distancing of apologetic from mechanistic materialism. Smart, who was a considerable figure in this development, opposed mere a priorism, preferring to find God in the world, ‘For the Argument A PRIORI is GOD in every man's CONSCIENCE. | For the Argument A POSTERIORI is GOD in every man's eyes.’96 Scripture evinced truth, not rationality, which was merely ‘vain deceit’. The Johannine metaphor of the Word undermined Newtonian systematization, ‘For Newton nevertheless is of more error, than of the truth, but I am of | the WORD of GOD.’ Matter, motion, resistance, central and centrifugal (p.150) forces, elasticity, and attraction were interpreted against Newton in Hutchinsonian fashion as the heavens were described through their celestial origins, ‘For the perpetual motion is in all the works of Almighty | GOD.’97 Light was ‘enacted by the divine conception,’ as ‘quick as the divine conception’, a Mosaic belief far removed from Newton's ‘unphilosophical’ notion of colours; ‘For the Colours are spiritual’. Newton was blessed only in an obscure reference to Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry.98 It is perhaps significant that Smart's notorious confinement in an asylum, leaving him to suffer under the dubiously romantic appellation of a ‘mad poet’, originated in a reborn Anglican religious enthusiasm which had embarrassed his respectable family:99 Smart had collapsed through physical and mental illness in 1756, the year in which Wesley finally distanced himself from Law's mysticism. Smart's sense of revived religious commitment further challenges any straightforward ideological reading of anti-Newtonianism, since Home was notably unsympathetic towards evangelical religion, be it Anglican or Methodist, opposing Methodism as a religion of the mob which culminated in ‘Spiritual Republicanism’. 100 For his part, Wesley was rather more open (p.151) to Hutchinsonianism than Home ever was to religious revival. Fundamentally orthodox though its adherents assumed it to be, Hutchinsonian doctrine was attractive to a wider circle of Christians than much recent scholarship might lead one to believe.

III Any attempt at characterizing John Wesley's thought has to confront its essential feature—its eclecticism. It has also to be remembered that, in the words of J. H. Overton, Wesley's was ‘a life which was all but commensurate with the eighteenth century, and which was certainly the busiest, and in some respects the most important life in that century’.101 One ought not, then, to look for a theoretically consistent evolution in Wesley's ideas; his theology was predicated on practice, and that effectively precluded too close a concentration on systematic philosophizing. As a result, Wesley's physico-theology was never more than broadly defined, and so far as it can be characterized at all it is as an unsystematic approach to problems of natural description, the basis of which lay in a commitment to the supreme veracity of Scripture.

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. There was something of the spiritual encyclopaedist about Wesley, whose Christian Library, consisting of some fifty volumes compiled between 1750 and 1756, was symptomatic of an editorial enthusiasm for abridgement and didactic condensation, an appetite which continued unabated in the listings of prescribed reading which he provided for the boys of Kingswood School. Revisions and redactions continued to be made into the 1780s, selections which were made to profoundly spiritual rather than narrowly theological ends; Wesley's was an emotional, affective faith, a religion of the heart rather than a systematic theology.102 In thus (p.152) circumventing the noticeably intellectualist strain of much eighteenth-century theological reflection, Wesley opened up religion to the poor and the neglected; consequently, his much-vaunted Toryism was of a subversive kind, more akin to that of a Southey or a Cobbett than to that of the high and dry divines.103 By placing the claims of spirituality so centrally, Wesley continued—and transformed—a High Church tradition of mysticism, latching on to French and German elements in a style reminiscent of Law, of whom he had once been something like a disciple. The discipline of the Oxford Holy Club, over which Wesley had presided as a fellow of Lincoln College, absorbed much of Law's devotional teaching. It was Wesley's later dissatisfaction with Law's almost pedantic otherworldliness, his rigid rules and exacting regimen, that led Wesley, impressed by the vivid and practical life of the Moravian Brethren, towards a more emotionally liberating and experiential faith; the ‘heart-warming’ of his conversion experience confirmed this sense of disenchantment. From 1738 Wesley could be placed beyond the ambit of Law's precise spirituality; in 1756 he removed himself definitively from Law's Behmenism.104 Wesley's conversion centred on his conviction regarding the primacy of the doctrine of justification by faith. In a letter to Law of 14 May 1738, he regretted that Law's spiritual (p.153) treatises had laid down a regimen which was ‘too high for men, and that by doing the works of this law should no living flesh be justified’. He lamented the deadening faith espoused by Law as being ‘the faith of a devil, the faith of a Judas, that speculative notional, airy shadow which lives in the head, not the heart. But what is this to the living justifying faith in the blood of Jesus?’105 In reply, Law assumed that Wesley had sadly dissented from the true Christian wisdom to be encountered in two works which he had recommended to him, Thomas à Kempis's De Imitatione Christi and the Theologia Germanica, the latter a work ‘which most deeply, excellently, and fully contains the whole system of Christian faith and practice’:106 for Wesley, late medieval Catholic mysticism had effectively given way to the experiential faith of Reformed theology. This disjunction was confirmed by Law’s 1761 dialogue between a Methodist and a Churchman, Of Justification By Faith and Works, a critique of two letters by the Methodist preacher and former Cambridge don John Berridge, which Page 20 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. were anonymously published in 1760.107 Interestingly, Wesley rapidly republished the first of these letters, furnishing it with a preface entitled ‘A Word or two upon Justification by Faith’:108 Law surely cannot have ignored this consideration when planning his counter-offensive. Repudiating the doctrine of justification by faith alone, Law stressed the salvific importance of a concomitant commitment to good works, reading Pauline texts to this effect. Berridge's claim that with faith works did not matter, stood ‘in full Contrariety to many of the best Prayers in our (p.154) Liturgy’; Law condemned the Calvinistic notions of faith without works, the outward imputation of Christ's righteousness, and absolute election and reprobation as ‘the Scandal and Reproach of the Reformation’, declaring strenously in consciously liturgical language that: THIS DO AND THOU SHALT LIVE is the Law of Works, which was from the Beginning, is now, and always will be, the one Law of Life.— And whether you consider the Adamical, Patriarchal, Legal, Prophetic, or Gospel State of the Church, DOING is ALL. Nothing makes any Change in this. Nay, it is not only the one Law of all Men on Earth, but of all Angels in Heaven—And this is certainly, as our best and highest Prayer is this, Thy will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven 109 He appealed, in Behmenist tones, against the reforming contentions of Moravianism and Calvinism, favouring in their stead the pristine faith of Catholic Christianity: But if you come forth with the new-fangled Ungospel Doctrines of a Calvin, a Zinzendorf, &c. be your Zeal as great as it will, it only unites you with the Brick and Mortar-Builders of that anti-Christian Babel, which the Prince of the Power of the Air has set up, in full opposition to that Rock, on which Christ has built his one, Catholic universal Salvation-Church.110 By the time that Law had written those words, Wesley had set out an Arminian doctrine of perfection, repudiating antinomianism and predestination as theological errors.111 This did not prevent George Home from condemning both Whitefield and Wesley (identified through their respective headquarters of ‘the Tabernacle and Foundery’) as deluded and religiously dangerous antinomians and heretics in a sermon delivered before the University of Oxford in 1761.112 Home's argument is very similar to that offered by Law in (p.155) his reply to Berridge, suggestive of the apologetic vitality and strength of their shared High Church pedigree. Wesley's reply to Home's indictment was surprisingly emollient. Rejecting accusations of heresy, Wesley reaffirmed his belief in justification by faith and emphasized his Catholic rationality—‘Authority, be pleased to observe, I plead against authority, reason against reason’—before concluding with an observation Page 21 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. that, from all that he had heard concerning Home, he could not but ‘very highly esteem you in love’.113 The contrast with his despairing attitude towards Law is instructive; this can be explained through consideration of Wesley's ambivalence regarding mysticism, and his concomitant privileging of Scripture. Wesley's position was made explicit in an open letter to Law of 6 January 1756, in which he declared his allegiance to ‘inspired writings’ (specifically to St Paul), and emphasized his distance from Tauler, Boehme and ‘a whole army of Mystic authors’; punning on Behmenist language, he stated of Law that ‘I have scarce met with a greater friend to darkness, except "the illuminated Jacob Behman." ‘114 In rejecting Law's ‘strange system’, Wesley laid out a four-point critique of the Spirit of Prayer and the Spirit of Love: (1) That the whole of it is utterly superfluous: a man may be full both of prayer and love, and not know a word of this hypothesis. (2) The whole of this hypothesis is unproved; it is all precarious, all uncertain. (3) The whole hypothesis has a dangerous tendency; it naturally leads men off from plain, practical religion, and fills them with the ‘knowledge’ that ‘puffeth up’ instead of the ‘love’ that ‘edifieth.’ And (4) It is often flatly contrary to Scripture, to reason, and to itself.115 In Wesley's letter, the creation ex nihilo was reinstated as a Scripture doctrine through the deployment of a rhetorical question of some force—‘Is it not supported (as all the Christian Church has thought hitherto) by the very first verse of Genesis?’ Denying that immaterial entities could (p.156) desire anything in any way, Wesley undercut the principles of creation which girded Law's Behmenist scheme. He opined that bad philosophy had created bad divinity; Law's system blasphemously curbed God's creative omnipotency.116 In denying God's judgemental anger, which he reattributed to the fallen angels, Law had undermined both Scripture and Reformation doctrine, leaving Wesley to observe ‘that this is the very essence of Deism; no serious infidel need contend for more’.117 Law's recipe for salvation was no better than a quack medicine; avoiding the pain and difficulties of the gospel in favour of a specious philosophy, Law abandoned reason for imagination, creating in the process a gospel quite separate from that laid down in the Bible.118 Wesley's earlier charges of heresy over Law's interpretation of the new birth and the means to salvation, first made in 1738, were also reaffirmed. Demolishing Law's claim that Newton derived his gravitational theory from Boehme, Wesley dismissively paralleled an antithetical poetic and political example, a High Church royalist against a republican puritan-—‘Just as much as Milton ploughed with Francis Quarles's heifer.’119 Not that he sought to defend Newtonianism; it was his distance from such physico-theological apologetic that made him receptive to aspects of Hutchinsonianism. This receptivity is apparent in the argumentation of his encyclopaedic scientific treatise, A Survey of the Page 22 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. Wisdom of God in the Creation (1763), where he pleaded that natural philosophy should be freed from ‘all the Jargon of Mathematics, which is mere Heathen Greek to common Readers’. Reminiscent as this statement is of Home's demarcation between physics and mathematics, laid out in his defence of Hutchinson against Newtonians, it is also clear that Wesley had been influenced by Locke: hence, perhaps, his conviction that men could know next to nothing of immensity or eternity.120 None the less, Wesley believed (p.157) in the vacuum and in empty space, although a long disquisition on light followed a Hutchinsonian style of reasoning, ending in the relationship of fire with the Sun. Attraction and gravity were plausible hypotheses, but they remained incapable of demonstration. It was a fundamental proposition in this treatise that knowledge of God was arrived at negatively; Wesley's understanding of the natural world was far removed from the certainties of Clarkean metaphysics.121 Wesley had recommended that the boys of Kingswood be instructed in the argumentation of the Principia (although he omitted the Opticks from study), but it was suggested as a text which was to be studied alongside Hutchinson's works. His respect for the Hutchinsonian system lay in its profound biblicism, a position which he shared with them—in evaluating the influence of this biblicism it is well to consider that Wesley's Survey may have provided the only introduction to the natural world which many of his followers would ever enjoy.122 It was, however, a qualified approval which Wesley extended to the Hutchinsonians, as in his remarks on Jones's treatise in a journal entry for 9 October 1765: ‘I read Mr. Jones's ingenious Essay on the Principles of Natural Philosophy. He seems to have totally overthrown the Newtonian principles; but whether he can establish the Hutchinsonian is another question.’123 Wesley's conscious separation from Law's mysticism did not affect all of his followers, particularly those of an altogether more independent turn of mind. It was through the elusive world of men like Francis Okely, a defector from Methodizing Anglicanism to Moravianism, that High Church mysticism was introduced into Dissenting circles and hence, perhaps, into the religious poetic of Blake.

(p.158) IV The apprehension of divine mystery, which had played so great a part in the reconversion of Christopher Smart, was far from being an isolated experience. A small group of Cambridge undergraduates, dissatisfied with prevailing modes of spirituality, came together in the late 1730s in a manner reminiscent of the Oxford Holy Club. Like Wesley's early associates, they had followed the injunctions and appeals of Law's devotional works, but like them they turned away from his unrelenting rigour towards the vitality of the Moravians and the Methodists themselves. One of their number, Francis Okely, who joined the Moravians after a flirtation with the Baptists, had later become an adherent of the mystical theology developed in Law's Behmenism. Serving the Moravian Page 23 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. community in Northampton until his death in 1794, all the time translating and editing mystical works, Okely's isolated and intense life nevertheless demonstrates the fluidity of the boundary between evangelicalism and mysticism, fruitfully complicating any ready demarcation of mid and late eighteenth-century religious and theological experience and reflection.124 In common with many English mystics who had drawn their inspiration from representatives of diverse denominations, Okely hated divisions within the Church, viewing his heart-orientated religion as an essentially eirenic experience of the divine. In a poetic fable of 1783 which he had fashioned after a German original, Okely expressed this conviction through the story of a journeying father whose treasured watch had been damaged by his restlessly inquisitive children, eager to understand its workings. Okely unravelled his antisectarian meaning at the fable's close, subjoining appropriate scriptural references: (p.159) Reader, without a long Research, Thou'lt find this WATCH to be the CHURCH, Pillar and Ground of Truth ENTIRE ; Which doth right Faith and Love inspire. And can't you in these CHILDREN see Beguiling SATAN'S SUBTILTY? Wherein, alas! ev'n now abide ALL SECTS, which CHRISTENDOM divide.125

This charge had been laid at the door of learned reason in the preface to Okely's translation of a German account of Boehme's life in 1780, where it served as an a posteriori proof of the divisive insufficency of reason when compared with the perfectly orthodox’ writings of Boehme.126 Eschewing seventeenth-century readings of Boehme because of their tinge of enthusiasm and fanaticism, Okely favoured the plain and spiritually efficacious notions of Behmenism which had become available to eighteenth-century readers through Law's writings. In this way, two errors could have been avoided: infidelity and ‘Christian Pharisaism’— Behmenism, properly understood, was more effective in mending the wreckage of sectarianism than any number of well-meant ‘Trenicd’ had proved to be.127 The means of eradicating sectarianism lay, therefore, in ‘the great essential HARMONY, amidst all circumstantial DIVERSITY, in the Mystic Writers’. 128 Knowledge of mystical authors was of great existential import, as Okely reminded his readers in the preface to his translations of the visions vouchsafed to a contemporary of Boehme, Johann Engel-brecht—‘In such Tracts, thou readest for thy Life!’129 Such an (p.160) injunction expressed the distance between Wesley and Okely. Although in his later years Wesley had begun to turn again to mystical writers, he continued to see in much of their work a signal cause of the very sectarianism which mystics considered that their philosophies had effectively opposed. Okely, having toyed with Methodism in the 1760s, Page 24 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. permanently renounced it in favour of Law's brand of Behmenist mysticism just as Wesley had denounced it as being dangerously illusory.130 Ironically enough, it was a reading of Wesley's sanitized abridgement of the devotional works, Some Extracts from Mr. Law's Writings, that led Christopher Walton, a Lancastrian resident in London, to compile his privately printed Notes And Materials For An Adequate Biography Of The Celebrated Divine And Theosopher William Law in 1854. Describing himself as ‘being of pure methodist origin and understanding in religion,’ Walton bears witness to the permeability of evangelicalism and mysticism that was so marked a feature of late eighteenthcentury and early nineteenth-century religious thought.131 This was the atmosphere, further heightened by commitment to religious dissent and the absorption of Swedenborgian doctrine, within which Blake's theosophy flourished. The suggestive connection between Blake's Proverbs of Hell and Law's mysticism has already been remarked upon; any assessment of Blake's religion and its attendant release in political radicalism needs to consider the strange irony that the seeds of much of his Dissent could be found in the mystical piety of a High Church Jacobite.132 Mistaken though Blake was in accepting Law to have been the actual translator of an English edition of Boehme which appeared under his name in four volumes between 1764 and (p. 161) 1781, he none the less valued him as having conveyed the words of ‘a divinely inspired man’.133 Mystical criticism of Newtonianism covered a wide arc of political and theological opinion, from High Church Jacobitism to Dissenting radicalism, just as biblicism evinced a disparate panorama of religious commitments, from the clerical Toryism of the Oxford Hutchinsonians to the potentially subversive charitableness of Wesley. Any attempt at subsuming such attitudes under the rubric of Tory disenchantment with a supposed Whig-latitudinarian hegemony is simplistically reductive, ignoring as it does the fundamentally theological differences which helped to define these groupings. This is not to deny the usefulness of political understandings of anti-Newtonianism; it is, however, to suggest that such interpretations are but part of a necessarily wider investigation in which a more nuanced appreciation of directly religious questions has to play a dominant role.134 It was disgust at what he perceived to be gross theological irregularities which led William Warburton to attack Law, the Hutchinsonians, and Wesley alike. In The Doctrine of Grace, Warburton lamented Law's descent into the dregs of enthusiasm, and his folly at accepting the false claims of Boehme against the true values of reason and human learning.135 Identifying Law, along with Zinzendorf and the Moravians, as a progenitor of Methodism, he proceeded to lambast the religious claims of Wesley, particularly as these (p.162) were evinced in his published journals.136 According to Warburton, Christianity was founded on faith and reason; reason was praised accordingly, along with ‘her fair Page 25 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. and celestial offspring, NATURAL RELIGION and HUMAN LEARNING’.137 Warburton's aspersions on the Hutchinsonian system were made in a letter to Richard Hurd in September 1751, following the publication of Home's Somnium Scipionis, which he decried as the ‘ne plus ultra of Hutchinsonianism. In this twelve-penny pamphlet Newton [is] proved an Atheist and a Blockhead…But if you are no friend to supercelestial slights…content yourself to grovel on amidst the dregs of human reason’.138 The Hutchinsonians naturally loathed Warburton as an uninspiring rationalist; William Jones dismissed his ‘Empirical Divinity’ and derided ‘the rash reasoners of the Warburtonian school’.139 Rather than construct a Whiggish picture of Warburton as the established mid-century bishop, busily picking off a Jacobite recluse, a Tory ‘enthusiast’, and Tory Oxford dons, it is well to remember that without Warburton's encouragement and philosophical knowledge, Pope would never have constructed the antiNewtonian lament that constitutes so much of the fourth book of the revised Dunciad. 140 No simple demarcation of attitudes to Newton and Newtonianism can be (p.163) constructed by the historian without riding roughshod over such ambiguities. Warburton, the creator of many ambitious confutations of mysticism and the editor of the Dunciad, personifies many of the ambiguities latent in mid-eighteenthcentury theology and controversy. It is therefore only fitting to complete this study of a complex period in English intellectual history with an appreciation of Warburton and his works. Notes:

(1) A Summary History of the English Church (London, 1811–25), iii. 291, 292. On the importance of this neglected work by the High Church vicar of Kentish Town, see P. B. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge, 1994), 11. (2) As has already been shown, Tories could also be Newtonians. On which see A. Guerrini, ‘The Tory Newtonians: Gregory, Pitcairne and their Circle’, JBS 25 (1986), 288–311. (3) Christian Mysticism (London, 1899), pp. xii, xiii-xiv. (4) C. F. E. Spurgeon, ‘William Law and the Mystics’, in The Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge, 1912), ix. 305–28, at 305. For recent studies of Law's mysticism, see P. Grant, ‘William Law's Spirit of Love: Rationalist Argument and Behmenist Myth’, in Literature and the Discovery of Method in the English Renaissance (London, 1985), 124–45, and G. Cantor, ‘Light and Enlightenment: An Exploration of Mid-Eighteenth-Century Modes of Discourse’, in D. C. Lindberg and G. Cantor, The Discourse of Light from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985), 67–106, at 76–83. (5) Spurgeon, ‘William Law and the Mystics’, 305. (6) Christian Mysticism, 5, 9, 11, 26, 28. Page 26 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. (7) Ibid. 22. (8) Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. T. M. Knox and A. V. Miller (Oxford, 1985), 183. On Hegel's relationship with Boehme, see S. Hutin, Les Disciples anglais de Jacob Boehme an XVIIe Stècle (Paris, 1960), 174. For a reading of the young Hegel as the product of a unique dialectic between Lutheran politico-theology and the political economy developed by Adam Smith, see L. Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807 (Cambridge, 1987). For Behmenist mysticism in the 18th-ccnt. Rhineland, see W. R. Ward, ‘Mysticism and Revival: The Case of Gerhard Tersteegen’, in J. Garnett and C. Matthew (eds.), Revival and Religion since 1700: Essays for John Walsh, (London, 1993), 41–58. (9) M. L. Bailey, Milton and Jakob Boehme: A Study of German Mysticism in Seventeenth-Century England (New York, 1914), 57–03, 76–9, 83–9, 91–3. For a very particular perspective, see B. J. Gibbons, Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought: Behmenism and its Development in England (Cambridge, 1996). (10) J. A. Mendelsohn, ‘Alchemy and Politics in England 1649–1665’, P&P 135 (1992), 30–78. (11) Bailey, Milton and Boehme, 94–100; D. Hirst, Hidden Riches: Traditional Symbolism from the Renaissance to Blake (London, 1964), 99–109; N. Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1989), ch. 5. (12) Bailey, Milton and Boehme, ch. 5. (13) Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, ch. 5. (14) D. Hotham, The Life of Jacob Behmen (London, 1654), unpaginated. Hotham, an East Yorkshire JP, was the brother of Charles Hotham. (15) The Third Book of the Authour being The Highe and Deepe Searching out of the Threefold Life of Man (or according to) The Three Principles, trans. J. Sparrow (London, 1650), 7, 11. (16) Ibid. 13, 15, 19, 21. (17) Ibid. 47, 57. (18) Mysterium Magnum, Or An Exposition of the First Book of Moses called Genesis, trans. J. Ellistone (London, 1654), 7, 37. Ellistone was a kinsman of Sparrow. (19) Ibid. 2T-2. (20) Ibid. 49, 45. Page 27 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. (21) See J. H. Overton, William Law, Nonjuror and Mystic: A Sketch of his Life, Thought and Character (London, 1881), esp. chs. 7, 8 and 11. Cheyne, a Platonist, has been described as a Newtonian heretic: G. Bowles, ‘The Place of Newtonian Explanation in English Popular Thought, 1687–1727’, D.Phil, diss., Univ. of Oxford, 1977, pp. 94, 106; id., ‘Physical, Human and Divine Attraction in the Life and Thought of George Cheyne’, AS 31 (1974), 473–88; G. S. Rousseau, ‘Mysticism and Millenarianism: “Immortal Dr. Cheyne”’, in I. Merkel and A. G. Debus (eds.), Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe (Washington, 1988), 192–230. On the immediate cause of Law's conversion, see S. Hobhouse, ‘Fides Et Ratio: The Book Which Introduced Jacob Boehme To William Law’, JTS, NS 36 (1936), 350–68. For a useful modern biography, see A. K. Walker, William Law: His Life and Thought (London, 1973). For analysis placing Cheyne in a strongly politicized context, see S. Schaffer, ‘The Consuming Flame: Electrical Showmen and Tory Mystics in the World of Goods’, in J. Brewer and R. Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993), 489–526. (22) (London, 1726), 21. (23) (London, 1729a), 498. For further analysis of Law's devotional attitudes, see B. W. Young, ‘William Law and the Christian Economy Of Salvation’, EHR 109 (1994), 308–22. (24) Law, The Case of Reason, Or Natural Religion, Fairly and Fully Stated. In Answer to a Book entitul'd, Christianity as Old as the Creation (London, 1731), 3, 7–8, 64, 67, 78. (25) Ibid. 126–27, 135, 147. Cf. The Way To Divine Knowledge: Being Several Dialogues Between Humanus, Academicus, Rusticus, and Theophilus; As preparatory to a new Edition of the Works of Jacob Behmen, and the right use of them, in The Works (London, 1762–85), vii. 92, ‘Thus, the learned Papist has one creed, and the learned protestant has another; not because Truth and Light have helped them to it; but because birth and education have given to the one Popish, to the other protestant eyes. For reason, which is the eye or light of both, finds as much to its purpose, and as many good tools to work with, in Popish, as in Protestant opinions.’ (26) Case of Reason, 149, 151–2, 159, 163, 167. John Sitter, in Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England (Ithaca, NY, 1982), has noted similarities between Hume and Law, although he makes little of the suggestively similar sociological critique of reason which is to be found in both writers. (27) P. Malekin, ‘Jacob Boehme's Influence on William Law’, Studia Neophilologica, 36 (1964), 245–60; Hirst, Hidden Riches, ch. 7.

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. (28) An Appeal to All that Doubt, or Disbelieve The Truths of the Gospel, Whether They be Deists, Arians, Socinians or Nominal Christians, in Works, vi. 238, 328, 332. (29) The Spirit of Prayer or, the Soul Rising out of the Vanity of Time, into the Riches of Eternity, in Works, vii. 165; Way to Divine Knowledge, 123. The suitably bucolic and unlettered Rusticus lamented Academicus's desire for a clear elucidation of Boehme's writings, considering it a sign of his still unconquered allegiance to ‘Babylonian reason’ (Spirit of Prayer, 91). Cf. Hume: ‘It has been remarked…that, tho’ the antient Philosophers convey'd most of their instruction in the form of Dialogue, this Method of Composition has been little practie'd in later Ages, and has seldom succeeded in the hands of those, who have attempted it.’ (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. J. V. Price (Oxford, 1976), 143.) Law was not, however, a natural master of the dialogue form he chose to harness; on which see, P. Malekin, ‘The Character-Sketches in the Serious Call’, Studia Neophilologica, 38 (1966), 314–22. (30) Spirit of Prayer, 26, 27; Way to Divine Knowledge, 243–4; Spirit of Love, 169. (31) Way to Divine Knowledge, 69. (32) Ibid. 251. A point elaborated in the same work (p. 131): ‘Would you, therefore, be a divine philosopher, you must be a true Christian’, for darkness is every-where, but in the kingdom of God; and Truth is no-where to be found by Man, but in a New Birth from above’. (33) Appeal, 69; Way to Divine Knowledge, 121; Spirit of Love, 136. (34) Spirit of Prayer, 101; Some Animadversions Upon Dr Trapp's Late Reply, in Works, vi. 322–3. (35) Id., Some Animadversions, 313–14. For detailed studies of the contemporaneous environment in which Boehme's mysticism developed, see R. J. W. Evans, Rudolf II and his World: A Study in Intellectual History 1576–1612 (Oxford, 1973), and F. A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London, 1972). (36) Law, Appeal, 19, 129; Way to Divine Knowledge, 32, 33, 50; Spirit of Love, 23, 27. (37) Appeal, 133; Way to Divine Knowledge, 142, 196–203, 206, 213–14. (38) Appeal, 2; Spirit of Prayer, 55. (39) Way to Divine Knowledge, 5; Spirit of Love, 38. For discussion of Law's claim regarding Newton, see S. Hobhouse, ‘Isaac Newton and Jacob Boehme’, Philosophia, 2 (1937), 25–54; A. Wormhoudt, ‘Newton's Natural Philosophy in Page 29 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. the Behmenistic Works of William Law’, JHI 10 (1949), 411–29; J. Hoyles, The Edges of Augustanism: The Aesthetics of Spirituality in Thomas Ken, John Byrom and William Law (The Hague, 1972), 83–5. There is no convincing testimony that Newton ever read Boehme. (40) Some Animadversions, 314–15. Similarly, Law claimed to follow Boehme's mystical arguments for the place of the Sun in the solar system, rather than those developed by Copernicus (Way to Divine Knowledge, 215–16.) (41) P. 66. Cf. the apparent charitableness of Spirit of Love, 229: ‘Let then Arians, Semi-Arians, and Socinians, who puzzle their laborious Brains to make Paper-Images of a Trinity for themselves, have nothing from you but your Pity and Prayers’. (42) Appeal, 112, 135. (43) Spirit of Love, 137. (44) Cited in Way to Divine Knowledge, 246. (45) Warburton, The Doctrine of Grace: Or, The Office and Operations of the Holy Spirit Vindicated from the Insults of infidelity, And the Abuses of Fanaticism: With some thoughts (humbly offered to the consideration of the established clergy) regarding the right method of defending religion against the attacks of either party (3rd edn., London, 1763), 114; M. C. Jacob, ‘John Toland and the Newtonian Ideology’, JWCI 32 (1969), 303–31; Law, Letter xxv, in A Collection of Letters on the Most Interesting and Important Subjects, And on Several Occasions, in Works, ix. 191–3. (46) Appeal, 306–10; Spirit of Love, 28, 143. (47) Appeal, 132; Way to Divine Knowledge, 153. (48) Blake, Proverbs of Hell, in Writings, ed. G. E. Bentley, Jr. i. 81. Cf. H. Talon, William Law: A Study in Literary Craftsmanship (London, 1948), 77: ‘There are sentences in The Spirit of Love which read like Blake's dicta.’ More generally, see Hirst, Hidden Riches, 93–7, and E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge, 1993), 35n., 36–7, 47, 53, 96 n., 145. (49) [E. Hutcheson], A Short Account of the Two Charitable Foundations At King's-Cliffe, In the County of Northampton (Stamford, 1755). (50) As Henry Broxap noted, ‘William Law, regarded as a Non-Juror, stands apart. He cannot be classed as belonging to any particular section, and his mysticism which coloured the whole of his later life was foreign to the genius of the movement.’ (The Later Non-Jurors (Cambridge, 1924), 217). He has been Page 30 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. described as a leading exponent of ‘conservative Behmenism’: Gibbons, Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought, 173–9. Throughout 1731–2 Law had been involved in correspondence with several fellow Nonjurors on the grounds for a reunion of the two dominant factions within the Nonjuring schism: Bodleian MS Eng. th. c.40, fos. 97–8; MS Eng. th. c.41, fos. 214–15, 224–9; MS Eng. th. c.41, fos. 16–17, 31–2, 88–90, 163–65; MS Eng. th. c.53, fos. 9–10; MS Eng. th. c.31, fos. 339, 367–70. (51) BM Add. MS 34, 486, fo. 28. For a broader sense of Law's relationship with his times, see The Private Journal and Literary Remains of John Byrom, ed. R. Parkinson (2 vols., Manchester, 1854–7). (52) Hence the interpretative framework of C. B. Wilde, ‘Hutchinsonianism, Natural Philosophy and Religious Controversy in Eighteenth Century Britain’, HS 18 (1980), 1–24. Cf. the ill-defined remark that Hutchinsonianism was ‘an important English anti-Newtonianism of “the right”’ (S. Shapin, ‘Social Uses of Science’, in G. S. Rousseau and R. Porter (eds.), The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science (Cambridge, 1980), 68), and an analogous elaboration in J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832: ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Anclen Regime (Cambridge, 1985), 218–21. For a more subtle identification of the springs and purposes behind anti-Newtonianism, see S. Schaffer, ‘Natural Philosophy’, in Rousseau and Porter (eds.), Ferment of Knowledge, 55–91. (53) See the argument of J. S. Chamberlain, ‘“The Changes and Chances of this Mortal Life”: The Vicissitudes of High Churchmanship and Politics among the Clergy of Sussex, 1700–1745’, Ph.D. thesis, Univ. of Chicago, 1992, ch. 9. (54) On which see J. M. Levine, Dr. Woodward's Shield: History, Science, and Satire in Augustan England (Ithaca, NY, 1977), 42–3. For an extended discussion, see A. J. Kuhn, ‘Glory or Gravity: Hutchinson vs. Newton’, JHI 22 (1961), 303–22. (55) Moses's Principia. Of The Invisible Parts of Matter; Of Motion; Of Visible Forms; And of their Dissolution, and Reformation (London, 1724), pp. ii-iv, vii-xv, xxxv-xxxvi. (56) Ibid., pp. xl, xlvi. (57) Ibid., passim. (58) A. S. Catcott, The Supreme and Inferiour Elahim (London, 1736). (59) M. Neve and R. Porter, ‘Alexander Catcott: Glory and Geology’, BJHS 34 (1977), 37–60.

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. (60) W. Jones, Memoirs of the Life, Studies, and writings of the Right Reverend George Home, D.D., Late Lord Bishop of Norwich. To Which is Added, His Lordship's Own Collection of Thoughts on a Variety of Great and Interesting Subjects (London, 1795), 23–5, 32, 36. (61) Ibid. 69. (62) Way to Divine Knowledge, 99. (63) Cantor, ‘Light and Enlightenment’, 83. (64) ‘Cautions to the Readers of Mr. Law’, appended to Jones, Memoirs of Home, 198–204. (65) ‘A Letter to a Lady on the Subject of Jacob Bchmen's Writings’, in Jones, Memoirs of Home, 205–21. (66) Memoirs of Home, 73. For a similar critique, see M. Madan, A Full and Compleat Answer to the Capital Errors, Contained in the Writings of the late Rev. William Law, M.A. In A Letter to a Friend. To which are prefixed, some cautions to the readers of Mr. Law's Works (London, 1763). (67) The Theology and Philosophy in Cicero's Somnium Scipionis, Explained. Or, A Brief Attempt to demonstrate that the Newtonian System is perfectly agreeable to the Notions of the Wisest Ancients: And the Mathematical Principles are the one sure ones (London, 1751), 2. (68) Ibid. 3, 10–12, 14, 16, 19, 26–34, 41. (69) Ibid. 39–41, 49–50. (70) Memoirs of Home, 60. (71) Home, A Fair, Candid, and Impartial State of the Case, in The Works, ed. W. Jones (London, 1818), i. 443, 446. (72) Ibid. 448, 450, 460, 463, 468, 475. (73) Ibid. 474–5, 477, 480–1. (74) The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. A. Motte (1729; (London, 1968), ii. 393; Opticks: Or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Reflactions, Inflections and Colours of Light (2nd edn., London, 1718), 324–8. For further discussion see H. Guerlac, ‘Newton's Optical Aether: His Draft of a Proposed Addition to his Opticks,’ Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 22 (1967), 45– 57, and J. L. Hawes, ‘Newton's Revival of the Aether Hypothesis and the Explanation of Gravitational Attraction’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society,

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. 23 (1968), 200–13; P. M. Heimann, ‘“Nature is a Perpetual Worker”: Newton's Aether and Eighteenth-Century Natural Philosophy’, Ambix, 20 (1973), 1–25. (75) Bowles, ‘Place of Newtonianism in English Popular Thought, 1687–1727’, 46–105. (76) Home, Fair, Candid, And Impartial State of the Case, 487–504. (77) An Enquiry Afier Philosophy and Theology. Tending to show when and whence mankind came at the knowledge of these two important points (Edinburgh, 1755), 8, 10, 14, 20–2. (78) Ibid. 28–128. (79) Ibid. 129–210. (80) Ibid. 306–10, 322–52. (81) BM Add MS 39, 311, fo. 109. (82) An Essay on the First Principles of Natural Philosophy (Oxford, 1762), 1–10. (83) Ibid. 195–207, 218–43. (84) On his alleged descent, see a letter of 21 Feb. 1785, in Bodleian Library, MS Eng. misc. d.150, fos. 154–5. (85) Bodleian Library, MS Percy, c.3, fos. 45–6. (86) Ibid., fo. 47. (87) Ibid., fos. 78–9 (letter dated 3 Jan. 1799). (88) P. Langford, ‘Tories and Jacobites 1714–1751’ in L. G. Mitchell and L. S. Sutherland (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford, v. The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1980), 99–127. (89) [Kennicott], A Word to the Hutchinsonians: Or remarks on three extraordinary sermons lately preached before the University of Oxford, by the Reverend Dr. Patten, the Reverend Mr. Wetherall, and the Reverend Mr. Home (London, 1756). (90) E. G. Rupp, Religion in England 1688–1791 (Oxford, 1986), 473. (91) K. Williamson, ‘Smart's Principia: Science and anti-Science in Jubilate Agno’, Review of English Studies NS 30 (1979), 409–22.

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. (92) Smart, On the Eternity of the Supreme Being (1750); On the Immensity of the Supreme Being (1751); On the Goodness of the Supreme Being (1755); On the Omniscience of the Supreme Being (1752): in The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, ed. K. Williamson et al. (Oxford, 1980), iv, 148–52, 185–8, 205–10 respectively. For sensitive analysis of Smart's Seatonian poems, see H. Guest, A Form Of Sound Words: The Religious Poetry of Christopher Smart (Oxford, 1989), ch. 1. (93) On the Power of the Supreme Being (1753), in Poetical Works, iv. 274–7, at 11. 86–90. (94) Reason and Imagination, A Fable; Address’ d to Mr. Kerrick, in Poems by Mr. Smart (1763), in Poetical Works, iv. 334–43, at 11. 147–60. (95) On the religious nature of the poem, see A. J. Kuhn, ‘Christopher Smart: The Poet as Patriot of the Lord’, ELH 30 (1963), 121–36. (96) Guest, Form Of Sound Words, ch. 4; D. J. Greene, ‘Smart, Berkeley, the Scientists and the Poets: A Note on Eighteenth-Century Anti-Newtonianism’, JHI 14 (1953), 327–52; W. P. Jones, ‘The Idea of the Limitations of Science from Prior to Blake’, Studies in English Literature, 1 (1961), 97–114; J. Block Freidman, ‘The Cosmology of Praise: Smart's Jubilate Agno’, PMLA 82 (1967), 250–6; Smart, Jubilate Agno, in Poetical Works, i, fragment B., 11. 359–60. (97) Jubilate Agno, fragment B., 11. 130, 195; 160–5, 186. (98) Ibid., 11. 284, 325, 648–9; fragment C, 1. 124. This is a difficult point to account for by a historian like Margaret Jacob, with her identification of Freemasonry as an aspect of political activity central to the Radical Enlightenment presided over by such religiously ambiguous thinkers as J. Toland: The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London, 1981), and Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York, 1991). (99) R. Porter, Mind-Forg'd Manacles: a History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (Harmondsworth, 1990), 80, 98–9, 157, 268. (100) Jones, Memoirs of Horne, 156, 159. This is not to deny the political similarities between Home and Smart. Horne's High Tory championship of Charles I, as evinced in The Christian King: A Sermon Preached before the University at Oxford, At St. Mary's, On Friday, January 30. 1761, Being the Day appointed to be observed as the Day of the Martyrdom of King Charles I (Oxford, 1761), has its poetic analogue in Smart's 1765 hymn for the same feast day, whose closing verses recall the Christocentric notion of kingship cherished by High Churchmen: ‘When Christ was spitted on and slain, | The temple rent her veil in twain; | And in the hour that Charles was cast | The church had well nigh Page 34 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. groan'd its last. | | But now aloft her head she bears, | Accepted in his dying pray'rs;— | Great acts in human annals shine— | Great sufferings claim applause divine’ (Hymn V, KING CHARLES THE MARTYR, in Hymns and Spiritual Songs for the Fasts and Festivals of the Church of England, in Poetical Works, ii. 40–1, at 11. 17–24.) (101) John Wesley (London, 1891), p. v. (102) For further discussion, see H. Abelove, The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists (Stanford, Cali. 1990), ch. 6; I. Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England 1660– 1780, i. Whichcote to Wesley (Cambridge, 1991), ch. 5. (103) J. Walsh: ‘Origins of the Evangelical Revival’, in G. V. Bennett and Walsh (eds.), Essays in Modern English Church History In Memory of Norman Sykes (London, 1966), 132–62; Walsh, ‘John Wesley and the Community of Goods’, in K. Robbins (ed.), Protestant Evangelicalism: Britain, Ireland, Germany and America c.1750-c.1950: Essays in Honour of W. R. Ward (Oxford, 1990), 25–50. On Southey's style of conservative thought, see D. Eastwood, ‘Robert Southey and the intellectual Origins of Romantic Conservatism’, EHR 104 (1989), 308–31. It is surely no coincidence that Southey wrote a biography of Wesley. (104) For discussion of these issues, see J. Orcibal, ‘The Theological Originality of John Wesley and Continental Spirituality’ in R. Davies and G. Rupp (eds.), A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain, (London, 1965), i. 81–111; J. Brazier Green, John Wesley and William Law (London, 1945); E. Duffy, ‘Wesley and the Counter-Reformation’, in Garnett and Matthew, Revival and Religion since 1700, 1–19; E. W. Baker, A Herald of the Evangelical Revival: A Critical Inquiry into the Relation of William Law to John Wesley and the Beginnings of Methodism (London, 1948); P. Malckin, ‘William Law and John Wesley’, Studia Neophilologica, 37 (1965), 190–98. (105) The Works of John Wesley, ed. F. Baker et al (Oxford, 1980), xxv. 540–2. For an earlier letter, detailing his attempts to save an associate according to the principles recommended by Law, see his letter to Law of 16 June 1734: Ibid. xxv. 386–8. (106) Law to Wesley, 19 May 1738, and 22 (?) May 1738, in Wesley, Works, xxv. 543–6, 548–50. On Wesley's disavowal of Law's recommended reading, see his letter of 20 May 1738, Ibid. 546–8. (107) [Berridge], A Fragment of the True Religion, Being the Substance of Two Letters From A Methodist-Preacher in Cambridgeshire, to a Clergyman in Nottinghamshire (London, 1760). Law's dialogue assumed the form of a rebuttal of the preacher's case made by a clergyman.

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. (108) Justification by Faith Alone: Being the Substance of a Letter from the Rev. Mr. Berridge in Cambridgeshire, to a Clergyman in Nottinghamshire (Sherborne, 1760), 4–6. (109) Of Justification By Faith and Works, A Dialogue Between A Methodist and a Churchman, in Works, ix. 38–9, 52, 53. (110) Ibid. 78. (111) For a useful description of Wesley's Arminianism, see M. R. Watts, The Dissenters, i. From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1987), 428–34. (112) Works Wrought Through Faith A Condition Of Our Justification, in Works, iii. 437–58. (113) ‘A Letter To The Rev. Mr. Horne’, in Works, ed. G. R. Cragg (Nashville, 1989), xi. 441–58, at 453, 458. (114) In The Letters of Rev. John Wesley, ed. J. Telford (London, 1931), iii. 332, 342. (115) Ibid. 332. (116) The Letters of Rev. John Wesley, 336, 338, 343–4. (117) Ibid. 347–57. (118) Ibid. 364–5, 367. (119) Ibid. 334. (120) Survey of the wisdom of God in the Creation: Or A Compendium of Natural Philosophy (Bristol, 1763), vol, i, pp. iii, vi. On his Lockeanism, see R. E. Brantley, Locke, Wesley, and the Method of English Romanticism, (Gainsville, Fla., 1984). (121) Wesley, Survey, ii. 136–39, 160, 165–75, 186, 206–7. (122) R. E. Schofield, ‘John Wesley and Science in 18th Century England’, Isis, 44 (1953), 331–40. (123) The Journals of John Wesley, ed. N. Curnock (London, 1909–16), v. 149. (124) For an excellent discussion of these matters, see J. Walsh, ‘The Cambridge Methodists’, in P. Brooks (ed.), Christian Spirituality: Essays in Honour of Gordon Rupp (London, 1975), 249–83. (125) The Disjointed Watch, Or Truth rent asunder and divided: a similitude, attempted in metre (Northampton, 1783), 8. Page 36 of 38

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. (126) Memoirs of the Life, Death, Burial and Wonderful Writings of Jacob Behmen (Northampton, 1780), pp. ii, xii. (127) Ibid., pp. iii, vi-vii, ix. (128) Okely, pref. to A Faithful Narrative Of God's Gracious Dealings With Hiel (Northampton, 1781), p. v. (129) The Divine Visions of John Engelhrecht, A Lutheran Protestant, Whom God Sent From The Dead To Be A Preacher of Repentance and Faith to the Christian World (Northampton, 1780), p. xxi. (130) Walsh, ‘Cambridge Methodists,’ 276–8. (131) (London, 1854), pp. ii, xxv. For some account of Walton himself, see Hutin, Disciples anglais de Jacob Boehme, 171–2. (132) For useful discussion of Blake's theosophy, see D. D. Ault, Visionary Physics: Blake's Response to Newton (Chicago, 1974); J. H. Hagstrum, ‘“What Seems to Be: Is” Blake's Idea of God’, in J. Engell (ed.), Johnson and his Age, (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 425–58; Thompson, Witness Against the Beast; J. Mcc, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford, 1992). (133) Blake's high estimation of Law was noted in a diary entry made by Cragg Robinson in Dec. 1825. Robinson also noted that Blake had denounced Bacon, Locke, and Newton as ‘the three great teachers of Atheism or of Satan's doctrine’, Cited in G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Records (Oxford, 1969), 313. (134) The analogous limitations inherent in too ‘spiritualized’ a reading of such works can be discerned in the homogenizing tendency which vitiates A. J. Kuhn's otherwise suggestive article, ‘Nature Spiritualized: Aspects of AntiNewtonianism’, ELH 41 (1974), 400–12. The question of conscious coherence in 18th-cent. thought has been raised by C. B. Wilde, ‘Matter and Spirit as Natural Symbols in Eighteenth-Century British Natural Philosophy,’ BJHS 15 (1982), 99– 131. Wilde assumes an ideological parity in the social, religious, political, and scientific thought of Hutchinsonians, although he admits that coherence may be imposed by historians rather than inhering naturally in the subjects of their analyses. (135) Doctrine of Grace, 28 n., 110–12, 213–23. (136) Ibid. 117, 122–88. For Wesley's detailed and reasoned replies to what he considered gross calumnies, see A Letter to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Gloucester, Occasioned by his Tract, On the Office and Operations of the Holy Spirit, in Works, xi. 463–538.

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The Way to Divine Knowledge: The Mystical Critique of Rational Religion. (137) Doctrine of Grace, 212. Warburton was soon answered by the mystically inclined Northamptonshire clergyman Thomas Hartley, who denounced Warburton's idolatry of reason in favour of the charitable spirituality of the mystics, such as Law, and the Methodists, exemplified by Wesley: A Short Defence of the Mystical Writers, Against some Reflections in a late Work, Intitled, The Doctrine of Grace, appended to Paradise Restored: Or A Testimony to the Doctrine of the Blessed Millennium (London, 1764), 357–476. (138) Letter xxxv in Letters From A Late Eminent Prelate to One of His Friends, ed. R. Hurd (London, 1808), 62–5. (139) Memoirs of Home, 42, 45. (140) B. W. Young, ‘“See Mystery to Mathematics Fly!”: Pope's Dunciad and the Critique of Religious Rationalism’, ECS 26 (1992–3), 435–48. Despite this involvement, Warburton recommended study of Clarke's Boyle lectures as providing ‘every thing that the most solid metaphysical reasoning can supply’, (‘A Charge On The Study Of Theology’, in A Selection From Unpublished Papers Of The Right Reverend William Warburton, D.D. Late Lord Bishop of Gloucester (London 1841), ed. F. Kilvert 358–68, at 362–3).

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine

Religion and Enlightenment in EighteenthCentury England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke B. W. Young

Print publication date: 1998 Print ISBN-13: 9780198269427 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269427.001.0001

William Warburton, A Polemic Divine CATHERINE OSBORNE

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269427.003.0006

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the role of William Warburton in the religious history of England during the 18th century. Warburton has been largely neglected by modern scholarship, appearing only as a secondary figure in studies by literary historians or as the proponent of an Erastian ecclesiology in studies by Church historians. This chapter explains that Warburton epitomized the figure of the polemic divine and he was necessarily more guarded about his comments on polemic divinity. He considered polemical divinity as the fancy of a Libertine and a squabble for preference between two falsehoods. Keywords:   William Warburton, polemic divine, religious history, England, religion

William Warburton (1698–1779) has been largely neglected by modern scholarship, only appearing either as a secondary figure in studies by literary historians of his involvement with Pope and Sterne, or as the proponent of a uniquely Erastian ecclesiology in studies by Church historians.1 This is a valuation which would have been barely credible to most mid-eighteenth-century readers: as a student of his writings has remarked, Warburton, overestimated during his lifetime and underestimated since his death, ‘almost epitomizes the mid-eighteenth century’.2 Warburton epitomized the figure of the ‘polemic divine’, derided by his one-time admirer Sterne in terms which would have been readily accepted by many of his readers: ‘I wish there was not a polemic divine, said Yorick, in the Kingdom;—one ounce of practical divinity—is worth a painted ship load of all their reverences have imported these fifty years.’3 Warburton himself was necessarily more guarded in his comments on the phenomenon:

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine (p.168) In a word, POLEMICAL DIVINITY is, in the fancy of a Libertine, a squabble for preference between two Falsehoods; in which, there is no room enough for ridicule: but on the Principles of a Believer, it is a conflict between Truth and Falsehood; in which, there is nothing to be laughed at, though much to be lamented.4 This self-valuation was made most clearly in a Lords debate in November 1763 on the prosecution of John Wilkes, who had libelled Warburton as the supposed editor and annotator of the parodic Essay on Woman, a dig at his edition of Pope's Works: My lords, the life and health which Providence has been graciously pleased to bestow upon me, has been all employed (and I hope neither unfruitfully or ingloriously) in the service of religion. In defending Revelation, and the established church of this land, against the rude attacks of ribald writers of all denominations, atheists, deists, libertines, freethinkers, bigots, and fanatics; and what is the accumulation of all that is execrable in one— political scribblers of all sides and parties—the trumpeters, the incendiaries of sedition and confusion.5 In the opinion of Richard Hurd, Warburton's closest disciple (and George Ill's favourite bishop), an edition of the collected works of Warburton would ‘deliver him down to posterity as the ablest Divine, the greatest Writer, and the first Genius of his age’.6 Defending Warburton's censure of Bolingbroke's posthumously published philosophical writings, Hurd vilified Hume as one of freethinking's ‘inferior adventurers’, dismissing the Treatise and Enquiries as ‘some super-subtile lucubrations of the metaphysical kind: which however did no great mischief to religion; and, what chagrined [Hume] almost as much, contributed but too little (p.169) to his own fame, being too sublime, or too dark, for the apprehensions of his readers’. Interpreting the Essays as an attempt to assist in ‘the common cause of impiety’, Hurd opined that they were ‘a hash of his stale notions’ and ‘a more undisguised mixture of Atheism than before’. The answer to Hume's Natural History of Religion, which he co-authored with Warburton, was assumed to have been a palpable hit, effectively putting an end to Hume's malign purposes.7 The specific historical circumstances of this apparent complacency need to be understood if sense is to be made of this evaluation. Hurd was writing in the early 1790s, in the wake of the French Revolution and its theologically dangerous aftermath. A conservative opponent of ‘those insect blasphemers, of whatever condition, which the fashion rather than the philosophy of the age has generated, and sent forth in swarms over a great part of modern Europe’, Hurd insisted that the real damage of unbelief had already been safely contained by Warburton's rebuttals of Bolingbroke and his admirers, in an engagement in which he had become ‘the terror of the infidel world, while he lived’, and Page 2 of 39

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine through which he would become ‘their disgrace to future ages’. The perils of revolutionary atheism were thus contained by the extant writings of a recently deceased prelate. It is possible that Hurd was disguising his real fears at the upsurge in irreligion which alarmed many clergymen in the 1790s, but it seems more likely that he sincerely believed that established apologetic had triumphed over such enemies. After all, he had some twenty years earlier assured Warburton that Voltaire's ruminations on Judaism and divine revelation were so insignificant as to render Warburton's planned reply to them superfluous. In Hurd's extended entomological metaphor, the infidels of the 1790s were ‘but as the summer flies, which teize a little by their murmurings (for stings, [Warburton] would say, have they none) and are easily (p.170) brushed away by any hand, or vanish of themselves’.8 Voltaire had criticized both the style and the substance of Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated in two works published in 1767, La Défense de mon oncle and A Warburton, although Warburton was already in the early stages of prolonged mental decline when these works appeared.9 Rousseau was also a critic of the political theory he saw at work in the Divine Legation, as can be appreciated from his comments on the nature of civil religion in chapter 8 of book IV of Du contrat social. Philosophe and anti-philosophe considered themselves to be at war with an Enlightened English cleric, an interesting comment on the different natures of the French Enlightenment and its English analogue, and a sufficient demonstration in itself of Warburton's high profile in eighteenth-century Europe. Allowing for his particular partiality towards Warburton and his ready dismissal of revolutionary challenges to religious orthodoxy, a reading of Hurd necessarily emphasizes the marginal nature of Hume's status in eighteenth-century intellectual life, and also the relative importance of politically subversive ‘atheism’ in the 1790s. However, it is in the mid-eighteenth century that Warburton's greatest impact will be found: in a despondent letter of January 1795, Hurd had admitted to his old friend, the dramatist and clergyman William Mason, that only half of the two hundred copies of his edition of Warburton's Works had been sold, a failure which he sarcastically attributed ‘to the honour of these enlightened times’.10 An examination of the number and variety of debates in which Warburton took part, and which he himself frequently initiated, allows some of the central religious controversies of eighteenth-century England to be better appreciated: these (p.171) will be resolved into specific discussions relating to the eschatology of his Divine Legation, the development of scriptural hermeneutics, and the clerical critique of free thinking.

I In reading the Divine Legation, it is necessary to appreciate the opposition to Christianity which Warburton had attempted to counter in this and later works: particularly that of Bolingbroke, ‘guide, philosopher, and friend’ to Pope who, Page 3 of 39

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine late in life, had become Warburton's most prized literary associate. Here the conservative, clerical Enlightenment exercised its considerable apologetic resources against the anticlerical challenge mounted by English critics whose opposition to revealed religion would ultimately recur in the dogmatic irreligious certainties of French anti-Catholic philosophes. 11 In replying to Bolingbroke's Philosophical Essays, published posthumously in 1754, Warburton was also nullifying the retired statesman's apologetically damaging association with Pope. Warburton's A Vindication of Mr. Pope's Essay on Man (1740) had already salvaged the reputation of a theologically compromised work; as a result of this considerable favour, Pope drew close to Warburton, allowing the ambitious cleric to displace the elder statesman in his affections.12 In rescuing the Essay on Man, however, Warburton also incurred the displeasure of the ultra-orthodox who had discerned in the poem something of a philosophy damaging to the faith. The irony of one Martinus Scriblerus junior regarding Warburton's commentary was nicely apposite. According to Scriblerus junior, the Vindication demonstrated ‘the masterly Skill of our ILLUSTRIOUS AUTHOR himself, who hath shewn beyond all Contradiction, that what by some ignorant Readers had been mistaken for a (p.172) System of ATHEISM, is as staunch Morality, as fit to be preached from the Pulpit as St. PAUL'S Epistles’.13 Whatever the apologetic consequences of this early work, Warburton's obligations to Pope, whom he served as executor and editor, extended to ironing out the intellectual consequences of his ambivalent association with Bolingbroke long after the poet's death in 1744. Bolingbroke's ‘godless volumes’ were written from the perspective of a convinced materialist, for whom the mind was as much an object of physics as was the body from which it was supposedly separable, since, in following the dictates of the senses, he ruled out dualism in favour of a materialism drawn from Locke. Noting that Ralph Cudworth, the Cambridge Platonist, had defined the union of body and soul as ‘magical’, a word denoting mystery and awe in Neoplatonist vocabulary, Bolingbroke turned its meaning round, undermining visionary metaphysics through the common-sense appellation of the word as denoting fanciful make-believe. Furthermore, adopting the condemnatory language of the orthodox, Bolingbroke claimed that to deny the admittedly unsettling Lockean hypothesis of the human mind as ‘thinking matter’ was to blaspheme, since this theological negation seemingly undercut the abilities of an omnipotent Creator. Bolingbroke concluded his metaphysical observations with an appeal to a strongly physical notion of man's awareness of his existence, ‘that corporeal animal sense…the foundation of all our knowledge’.14 From pure philosophy, Bolingbroke had turned to a quasi-sociological delineation of the origin of immortalist and immaterialist beliefs. A doctrine of a next life flattered men and women into believing that they would accompany the (p.173) gods in a celestial eternity, a vision which encouraged the perpetuation of ‘a little metaphysical jargon about essences, and attributes, and modes’. Page 4 of 39

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine Tracing the idea back to pagan mythologies, while simultaneously denying its presence in Judaism and the Mosaic texts, Bolingbroke decried the doctrine as a pollution originating in the ‘vulgar’ superstitions of the Egyptians, for whom it had acted as a functional belief with a twofold purpose: it overcame the objections of atheists to the perceived injustices of so-called providence, and it ensured that men and women would prefer virtue over vice in order to qualify for the rewards of eternal life. Homer and Plato poeticized the notion, and it was their authority which ensured its later popularity. Against these influential pagans, Bolingbroke claimed to follow the conclusions of the Jewish scholar Josephus and the Sadducees (whom he celebrated as the closest followers of the Mosaic law) in their rejection of the doctrine. Before Christ, whose advocacy of the doctrine Bolingbroke effectively ignored, the religious authority for the idea came only from Egyptian priests, greek poets, and pythagorean and platonic hypotheses’.15 Warburton's reply, A View of Lord Bolingbroke's Philosophy, was celebrated as a great success in Hurd's estimation: ‘As to the View itself, it was universally read and admired. The followers of Lord Bolingbroke and his philosophy hung their heads: the friends of religion took heart: and these big volumes of impiety sunk immediately into utter contempt.’16 Warburton had responded authoritatively with an appeal to the arguments of Samuel Clarke, William Wollaston, and Andrew Baxter. Where Locke merely ‘skimmed’, Clarke and Baxter went deep; their Newtonianism allowed them to ‘demonstrate’ their conclusions. Playfully invoking the language of patronage, an idiom of obvious deflationary force in this context, Warburton emphasized the opposition between the intellectual and social positions of Locke and Bolingbroke as a strategy for undoing the latter's argumentation: ‘Locke only contended for a bare possibility, his Lordship sees the necessity, so much wiser is the Disciple than his (p.174) Master.’17 In a sermon which he delivered as a preacher at Lincoln's Inn, Warburton had earlier stressed the natural agency of the immaterial mind over the lumbering nature of the body: dualism acted as a necessary component of God's moral government in Warburton's orthodox interpretation of the twin dogmas of immaterialism and immortality.18 Warburton tended to play his chosen opponents at their own game. The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated was an attempted refutation of freethinking, argued, as the work's full title stated, ‘On the Principles of a Religious Deist’; small wonder, then, that the guiding principle of the ‘deistic’ critique of religion, the idea that the dogmas and ceremonies of revealed religion originated in the political intrigues of power-hungry ‘priestcraft’, led Warburton to adopt ironic tones when occasion demanded it. The intricacies of such an argumentative stance necessitated the employment of paradox and irony in the defence of orthodox Christianity against the philosophical and discursive strategies of the so-called ‘Radical Enlightenment’, creating in the process what Pocock has declared to be one of the two major works of England's intellectually Page 5 of 39

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine conservative and uniquely clerical ‘Arminian Enlightenment’ (the other being Gibbon's Decline and Fall).19 The costs of such a theologically delicate enterprise were correspondingly high, particularly in the case of what was often perceived to be Warburton's maladroit execution of his self-imposed task. Even a religious sceptic like Horace Walpole could feel free to malign Warburton's reputation, (p.175) claiming that Pitt had been seriously mistaken in preferring him to the episcopal bench in 1760 since the new bishop was a man ‘whose doubtful Christianity, whose writings and whose turbulent arrogance made him generally obnoxious’.20 The Divine Legation, the two volumes of which appeared in 1738 and 1741, had anticipated Bolingbroke's conventionally freethinking appeal to the socialized interpretation of Egyptian religion. Warburton adopted a similarly regressive view of that system, albeit as part of an overall attack on deism, Spinozism, and pantheism, some of whose adherents deployed Neoplatonism in opposition to the Christianity Warburton defended against the alleged superstition and clerical dogmatism of the Egyptian priesthood. Where freethinkers had drawn an implicit parallel between the Christian clergy and their Egyptian counterparts, Warburton repudiated such a notion, favouring the dogmas of Christianity over the speculations of paganism.21 In undoing this parallelism, Warburton inverted a familiar device of philosophical atheism and religious scepticism, the idea of the double doctrine or double truth. The notion of the double doctrine has been controversially restated in recent times by the late Leo Strauss, an influential (if tendentious) political theorist and intellectual historian. Denying what he considered to be the delusory consolations of religion in favour of the allegedly tragic truths of godless philosophy, Strauss traced a division in philosophical writing between exoteric and esoteric teaching, the former being composed in order to guard the populace from the potentially ruinous consequences of atheism by explicating and defending the myths of religion, the latter in order to instruct the élite in the painful realities of a godless universe. According to Strauss, the guardians of religious orthodoxy may adopt the strategies of persecution, but the heterodox philosopher (p.176) has his own way of surviving and of passing on his subversively conservative message: he has to learn to write ‘between the lines’, to adopt the rhetorics of exotericism as a smokescreen for esoteric teaching.22 The consequences of this procedure were delineated in Strauss's reading of Lucretius's poeticized Epicureanism: There is only one protection against the fear that the walls of the world will someday crumble: the will of the gods. Religion thus serves as a refuge from the fear of the end and the death of the world; it has its root in man's attachment to the world…The recourse to the gods of religion and the fear of them is already a remedy for a more fundamental pain; the pain stemming from the divination that the lovable is not sempiternal or that Page 6 of 39

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine the sempiternal is not lovable. Philosophy transforms the divination into a certainty. One may therefore say that philosophy is productive of the deepest pain. Man has to choose between peace of mind deriving from a pleasing delusion and peace of mind deriving from the unpleasing truth.23 Such argumentation is closely related to that utilized by freethinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which stemmed in turn from Francis Bacon's deployment of the notion of the ‘double truth’, the idea that truths of religion may be different from or opposed to reason.24 (p.177) Bolingbroke's social interpretation of immaterialism and immortalism critically utilizes the notion of the double doctrine, a familiar charge which Warburton turned in on itself by arguing that the critique from social utility only undercut the doctrines of paganism, and that the explicit lack of such a dogma in the Mosaic dispensation was a proof of that religion's divine origin. This is the pivotal paradox of the Divine Legation. Warburton did not deny the social utility of religion—it was, after all, the cardinal point of the Alliance Between Church and State—insisting that, since ‘Civil Society has not, in itself, the Sanction of Rewards, to secure the Observance of its Laws…it follows that, as Religion, only, can supply the Sanction of Rewards, which Society wants, and has not, Religion is absolutely necessary to Civil Government’. He also accepted that providence did indeed make up for the perceived injustices of this life through the rewards of the next: Bolingbroke's cynical interpretation of this notion was the very reverse of that espoused by Warburton. Accordingly, the society of atheists proclaimed as a viable state by Bayle and Mandeville could not, in Warburton's view, actually subsist: unbelievers lacked the true incentives to moral existence which were necessary for the survival of civil society. All of these religiously efficacious doctrines had been adumbrated by ancient pagans, who appreciated their utility, although many ancient legislators understood them more cynically as socially necessary untruths. This was the politic practice of the twofold doctrine or double truth, the ‘EXTERNAL, and the INTERNAL’, the vulgar and the secret, since ‘the ancient Sages held it allowable, for the public good, to say one thing when they thought another’ and ‘The Genius of the national Religions taught them to conclude, THAT UTILITY AND NOT TRUTH WAS THE END OF RELIGION, THAT IT WAS LAWFUL AND EXPEDIENT TO DECEIVE FOR THE PUBLIC GOOD’, Furthermore, many ancient philosophers had indulged in (p. 178) materialist explanations of the soul which precluded immortality; in Warburton's opinion only the Platonists really believed in a future state of rewards and punishments.25 Paganism thus stood accused of the familiar hypocrisies of ‘priestcraft’; in the second volume of the Divine Legation, Warburton obviated the parallel which freethinkers drew with revealed religion.

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine Warburton's Moses paid no heed to the popular Egyptian doctrine of a future state, maintaining a studious silence ‘in all those principles that lead to the Propagation of it’, and this despite ‘the strongest Prejudices of his People; who were violently carried away to all the Customs and Superstitions of Egypt’. The Jewish people were, in Warburton's account, so confessionally unreliable and spiritually weak that their very survival demanded the interposition of an ‘extraordinary providence’, of which the ‘whole bible’ is ‘but one continued History’. Since ‘Temporal Rewards and Punishments, the Effects of this Providence, and not future, were therefore THE SANCTION of their Law and Religion, there was no need for a doctrine of future rewards and punishments in the Mosaic Institutes, in which there was not ‘the least Mention, or any intelligible Hint of the Rewards and Punishments of another Life’. Nor yet was this an accidental oversight, but, rather, ‘a designed Omission; and of a Thing well known by [Moses] to be of high Importance to Society’; so it was that his history of Enoch's translation from this life to the next (Genesis 5: 24) was of ‘so studied an Obscurity’. Not one of the characters encountered in the Old Testament ever acted on, or was influenced by, the prospect of a future state, about which they expressed neither hopes nor fears, ‘But every Thing they do or say respects the present Life only; the good and 111 of which are the sole Objects of all their Pursuits and Aversions’. Even more strongly to Warburton's apologetic purpose, the Christian witnesses supposedly made the same claim, namely ‘that the Doctrine of a future State of Rewards and Punishments did not make Part of the Mosaic Dispensation’.26 (p.179) The question remained as to what the sentiments of the Jews concerning the nature of the soul actually were. Warburton glossed a summary response: They were doubtless the same with those of the rest of Mankind who have thought upon the matter; that IT SURVIVED THE BODY. But having from Moses's Silence, and Establishment of another Sanction [the interposition of extraordinary providence], no Expectation of future Rewards and Punishments, they simply concluded that it returned to him who gave it. But any interesting Speculations concerning its State of separation, ‘tis plain they had none. Moses propounded no doctrine of the separate existence of the soul; the evidence of the Book of Job was also found, somewhat controversially, to be similarly negative, as it was concerned neither with resurrection nor with a doctrine of a future state.27 As God's chosen instrument, Moses did know of a future state, but it was simply unnecessary for him to reveal this to a people already sufficiently well governed by God's particular providence. Moses and the Prophets alluded to this truth, but the time was not ripe for its fullest revelation which would be made through Page 8 of 39

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine Christ ‘in the fulness of time’.28 Aside from skirmishes with freethinking writers and extensive learned digressions, the remainder of Warburton's rather prolix work was taken up with a familiar recital of the doctrine of types, the idea of the prefiguration of Christ in Old Testament figures and incidents: a conventional conclusion to a decidedly novel interpretation of biblical eschatology. Apart from Hurd and a select group of theologians, who formed a ‘Warburtonian school’, the paradoxical claims of the Divine Legation did not win its author many converts or uncritical admirers.29 It did serve to make him a central (p. 180) figure in English life and one whose contribution to its intellectual culture was unavoidable. Two disciples of Samuel Clarke were particularly displeased by the performance. Arthur Ashley Sykes, a fairly advanced Arian theologian who had defended Clarke in the first round of the subscription controversy, criticized the work severely, undermining many of Warburton's contentions. Sykes stressed that Moses was not alone among ancient legislators in not referring to the sanction of a next life, and while he may not have mentioned the doctrine with any degree of explicitness, his acceptance of its truth was made clear by many of the sanctions of the Law as well as by the general spirit of the Old Testament. In particular, the Jewish belief in a future state was obviously indicated by the fact that the Mosaic Law forbade its adherents to consult necromancers. Sykes also defended the sincerity of Plato, Pythagoras, and Aristotle with reference to their arguments for the immortality of the soul. Attacking Warburton's overly providentialist analysis of the Jewish theocracy, he championed Jewish learning and knowledge, turning here to a defence of Newton, whose chronology Warburton had criticized for its heavy reliance on Egyptian antiquity.30 John Jackson, Clarke's closest disciple, explicated scriptural typologies on the assumption that the future life of rewards and punishments was known to all the descendants of Noah before it was wrongly denounced as an illusion by the philosophical atheists of late antiquity. In the third chapter of Galatians, St Paul had argued incontrovertibly that the future state was the ‘grand Fundamental Principle’ of the Patriarchal and Jewish faith; accordingly, the Book of Job was interpreted by Jackson as a parable illustrating that the sufferings of this life were to be rewarded in the next.31 Francis (p.181) Blackburne rounded on Warburton's critique of soul-sleeping, the heretical idea that the human soul was not sentient in the period between death and the resurrection (an idea favoured by Edmund Law's circle) as this had been made in the 1765 edition of the Divine Legation, rebuking the bishop for writing in the style of an anathematizing theologian at the Sorbonne.32 A decade earlier, Blackburne had noted a marked congruity between Warburton's Mosaic hypothesis and Edmund Law's readings of disputed Old Testament texts relating to notions of a future life. The Jews were utterly dependent on Moses for revelation on the matter; he did not give it, therefore there had been none received by them. Taking issue with Warburton's analysis of Enoch's translation, Blackburne denied any obscurity on Moses’ part Page 9 of 39

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine in delineating the event: as Enoch did not taste of death, then the separate existence of his soul ‘never commenced at all. For translation separates nothing, but the whole living man from his earthly nature and connections.’33 Warburton, then, sheltered behind the arguments of natural reason in order to defend a notion of a separate state which he could not have legitimately formed from Scripture, hence his self-contradiction on the matter. Blackburne's critique was logical, lucid, and consistent: he himself held the work in high regard, whilst his son had no hesitation in describing it as ‘Mr B's master piece’.34 At the other end of the established theological spectrum, William Law sought to confute Warburton's controversial thesis in a work published in 1756. Law insisted that the immortality of the soul had been a doctrine known since the days of Adam; Moses had never made a secret of it: (p.182) Warburton was building a castle in the air. The only secret kept by Moses had been that Christ was to be the way to immortality, which was his supernatural gift to mankind, rather than a natural property inherent in man. The Gospel never asserted natural immortality, although it demonstrated its status as a divine gift: And this is the whole Truth of the Matter, with regard to the Mosaic History and types; they just hide it, in the same Manner as the gospel hides it, that is, not at all; and they fully prove it, in the sanie Manner as the Gospel proves it, by doctrines which necessarily require, and absolutely imply it, in the first Conception of them. This truth was known to the generations before Christ through faith and by the examples of Abel's death and Enoch's translation. Warburton's contrary interpretation of the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews was dismissed by Law as ‘heathenish’, acting in ‘direct Opposition to all Christian Theology’. A partial God such as that created by Warburton—a divinity who withheld the one true power of salvation until the last ages of the world—was only fit to be the subject of atheistical and Epicurean irony.35 Law's reading of the Old Testament was typological and close. Immortality followed the Mosaic doctrine of man's creation in the likeness of God, the breath of life containing the ‘Nature and Properties of God’, which necessarily included immortality. Abstract reasoning could not under-mine Scripture truths; nothing was added to them by appeals to metaphysics or logic. The life of the soul was owed entirely to the breath of the Divine Trinity which was infused into man at the Creation, a quality described by Law in Behmenistic language as the indwelling ‘Will-Spirit’ of God. Law's consciously spiritualized idiom led him to challenge Warburton's worldly tones; it was absurd to call a future state a ‘sanction’ when it was in fact the very nature of the life given to man by God. Against the legalistic impetus of his opponent, Law contended that ‘a Project in Defence of (p.183) Christianity, is not more promising, than a Trap to catch

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine Humility’. He pointedly opined that theologians ought to embrace Christ as sinners rather than to lead their lives arrogantly as scholars.36 Hutchinsonian divines had presaged this repudiation of Warburton in the early 1740s. Julius Bate defended the third chapter of Genesis against the readings of Warburton and the Newtonians (among whom were Sykes and Jackson). According to Bate, knowledge of spiritual things was borrowed from knowledge of material things, in the midst of which was the triune energy of God; such was the air itself, a substance so imbued with God that talk of infinite space or divine extension was tantamount to a rejection of Scripture and of common sense. The Newtonian bias of Warburton's world-view, as perceived by Bate, was therefore used to invalidate his reading of Scripture, just as his controversial understanding of hieroglyphics (one of the many subsidiary concerns of the Divine Legation) was attacked as falling away from the reading Bate proposed. To accept Warburton's account would be to make room for those very critiques which he had set out to counter, an irony later expounded by another of his critics, Benjamin Newton, in a squib depicting Warburton as the great patron of freethinking.37 Bate read the history of Adam and Eve as one couched in typological terms, inferring from it that Christ's resurrection image of the Tabernacle followed from the Jewish interpretation of the Law which held that the Temple, the Priest, and the Sacrifice were the same ‘Person’: the second Adam. This scriptural priority was central to Christian ethics, since only the Bible gave true knowledge of eternal life, a doctrine which Bate viewed as being the very foundation of morality. Abraham's religion was likewise considered to be Christian (p.184) in its nature; Christ alone conquered death, but others before him knew that death was to be conquered: hence the major claim that the sixteenth Psalm ‘contains an Express, literal, predictive Description of Christ's Resurrection’. The logic of types, integral to Bate's account, supposedly reached its fulfilment in Christ's declaration to the Sadduccees that if they had truly known their scriptures they would not have denied a future life.38 Bate further denied the validity of Warburton's argument regarding the alleged obscurity of Enoch's translation; it was, on the contrary, as well known and as clear in the Jewish oral tradition as it was in the Scripture account. In concluding his analysis, Bate invoked the claims of the humility which he thought naturally allied to Christian commitment against Warburton's selfadvertising conceit: But my Advice will be of some Service to him if he will take it: which is, to pull down the Self that stands so high in his own Opinion, and submit to think it possible he may be mistaken, and he will be so much better qualified to see whether he is or no; as well as the more disposed to treat

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine his Opponents with good Manners, and a greater Command of Temper. Pride of Heart deceives Men.39 A similar warning against intellectual pride, and the infections it could transmit to those who preferred intellectual innovation to orthodox reflection, formed the basis of William Romaine's first Oxford sermon, delivered in 1739, a major Hutchinsonian testament from a future Evangelical.40 In this repudiation of moral and scholarly error can be discerned something of the moralizing strain common to orthodox piety and the devotional priorities of the Evangelical Revival. Romaine argued that, as the New Testament was the natural expansion of the Old, the Mosaic doctrine of man (p.185) recurred in the record of the Christian dispensation. There were no omissions in the Mosaic account of a future life; it was ‘delivered there in such plain literal Terms, that he who can barely read, may read and find it there’. Arguing against the ‘Modern Sadducees’, Romaine assured his congregation that ‘if Christ hath said that a future state is to be found in Moses, I am satisfied every one here present will conclude that it actually is there’. Accepting that knowledge of a future life may have been lost at the Fall, Romaine argued that it had been restored to his people by Moses, thereby strengthening rather than replacing those temporal favours granted to the Jews, favours which were themselves founded on eternal rewards. Romaine laid out a number of scriptural proofs, following the clarity of typologies in which the Law is made to seem a readily intelligible schoolmaster, all of which justified the Mosaic content of the Church's Articles and homilies.41 He also rehearsed a familiar eudemonistic premiss: God made man to be happy, therefore reason pointed to the necessity of a future life as a natural consequence. Hence also free agency, as man was either to be rewarded or punished; here, unusually for a Hutchinsonian, Romaine cited Locke's Essay on the nature of the will and the reality of human choice.42 A good deal of attention to Warburton's attitude of mind and argumentative style was paid throughout these and other responses to the Divine Legation. Blackburne expostulated with all the freedom of an ultra-Protestant, ‘Must no man make use of his eyes or his intellects for fear of squinting at, or differing from Dr. W? Is every man to keep his sentiments to himself till he is sure of being in perfect accord with Dr.W?’ Referring to Warburton's association with Pope, Blackburne warned all the opponents of the Divine Legation to expect to be pilloried in a new edition of the Dunciad. 43 William (p.186) Webster had earlier lamented that Warburton's ‘mischievous’ work was conducted under ‘such an assuming and Scornful Air of Superiority as was never exceeded, [and] hardly ever equal’d by any Writer’, while his paradoxes would have given credit to the dangerous ploys of Pierre Bayle.44 Philip Carteret Webb inveighed against Warburton's ‘Cavaleer and Magisterial Manner, calling on him to cool his intemperate habits of expression, and to bring down his ‘Air of Superiority and Page 12 of 39

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine Triumph’, traits which lessened his character as a writer, while Henry Stebbing, the chancellor of Sarum, enlarged on Warburton's rudeness and his lack of even the most rudimentary manners. Stebbing was confident that this style would ultimately prove Warburton's undoing: As to his Manner of treating, be it to himself, it gives me no kind of Uneasiness. For I think it impossible that any Person should mistake in judging of the true Value of his Censures or his Commendations, who has observed with what Honour and Conscience he bestows them.45 Stebbing had noted a tendency to heterodoxy in War-burton's system, as ‘I could never think his Notions about the Jewish Religion to be harmless Things’, a suspicion confirmed by Warburton's Fast Sermon commemorating the final defeat of the Jacobite forces at Inverness, a performance which, in Stebbing's opinion, had served to undermine the orthodox Christian view that the rebellion had been a judgement from God on the dissoluteness of the nation, the orthodox clergy rightly considering the Fast services as a collective act of national repentance. The punishments of Israel had been a warning to all future nations against incurring God's wrath; this was the view of all true Christians since the time of St Paul. Warburton's insistence on the uniqueness of Israel's punishments, and his consequently secular interpretation of the ‘45, extolling the public (p.187) virtue of Britain, was ‘SUCH THEOLOGY as was never before heard from a Christian Preacher, and as I hope never will be heard again in Times to come’.46 In reply, Warburton accused Stebbing of distortion, implying that his politico-theology was that of Sacheverell, a ‘Gothic System’ which stood for no more than ‘the Monkey-faces in your old Cathedral at Sarum’. Stebbing's pleas for orthodoxy were interpreted as solipsistic and tyrannical: ‘What you mean by the received System of Divinity I don't understand, unless you mean, that received by your self.’47 More damagingly for Warburton, Stebbing accused him of doing active wrong to religion and of giving ground to unbelievers, his supposed apologia acting as a disservice to the Christian faith.48 Such accusations led Warburton to defend his undertaking as a profoundly Protestant enterprise, expounding it as a primarily scriptural argument, a claim which allowed him further to lambast his critics as time-serving hypocrites and censorious self-servers, the servants of idolatry akin to the silversmiths condemned by St Paul (Acts 19: 28): The Subject of the Divine Legation is an Exposition of Revelation, as it lies in the Bible: And the End of it, to convince Unbelievers of the Reasonableness and Truth of our holy Religion. Whatever human Systems, therefore, lye in the way of the Bible, it is no Wonder they should fall at its Approach, like Dagon before the Ark, into Confusion. And the ill Consequence of this let them look to who make or support the Idol. To Truth, to the Lovers of Truth, to a pure Church, to an equitable State, it Page 13 of 39

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine can be of none. I know not whom it affects but the Silversmiths alone. Let Systems therefore rise or fall, as Fashions favour, or as party supports: But let the Bible, and our established Church, built upon it, be immortal.49 (p.188) Warburton's defence seemingly discountenanced even the possibility of theological attack by fellow Christians. It could not, however, rebut the arguments of those who were aghast at his interpretation of paganism and the double doctrine. John Tillard argued that the ancients were frequently the victims of time and circumstance; it was not always safe for them to publicize their faith in the principles of natural religion. They repudiated materialism— accepting the immaterial and immortal character of the soul—and looked forward to a future life.50 Thomas Bott accused Warburton of an unfair method of citation in his prejudiced use of non-Christian ancients; his arguments from antiquity were, Bott claimed, utterly confused.51 In an anonymous work, presented as the contribution of ‘a Society of Gentlemen’, Thomas Morgan, a self-styled ‘Christian Deist’ turned on the Divine Legation as a product of ‘sacerdotalism’ and priestcraft. Aiming to clear up the distinction between ‘the true universal Religion of God and Nature, founded in the eternal, immutable Reason and moral Fitness of Things’ and the ‘false Religion’ of ‘sacerdotal Superstition’, Morgan traced the origins of priestly religion to the time of Moses, who brought ‘this separate mystical Order’, the ‘Monopolizers of Truth and Knowledge’, from Egypt, which he dismissed as ‘that Land of predestinated Darkness, Superstition and arbitrary Government’. He also derided the identification of their merely tutelary deity with the God of natural religion: it was, then, with great irony that Morgan returned the thanks of the freethinkers to Warburton for having dedicated the Divine Legation to them.52 Defending the religion of nature and reason, Morgan averred that Warburton's display of (p. 189) learning undermined his alleged defence of Christianity, since ‘true Religion, Virtue, and Godliness, cannot depend upon dark Antiquity, verbal Criticisms, and the painful laborious Study of dead Languages. Were this so,’ he pointedly concluded, ‘what must become of the Bulk of Mankind’? Morgan accepted that Moses had not revealed the doctrine of a future life, but he also dismissed Warburton's notion of a particular providence as having acted in the national life of the Jews, so that little was left of the second proposition of Warburton's paradoxical syllogism.53 Warburton's position was criticized accordingly: he was satirically congratulated on his sincerity and impartiality, since he differed ‘from the whole World, and [had] the distinguishing Honour of standing alone’. Furthermore, invoking the doctrine of the double truth, Morgan allowed Warburton's readings of the merely social and political utility of belief in a future state while leaving open the possibility that, judging the nature of Warburton's own faith from the reasons he gave for it, he was of the same opinion as the learned heathens: Warburton might not, then, in Morgan's opinion, have been a sincere believer in the doctrines he taught and defended.54 Discerning in the corruptions that entered into Christianity following Jesus's Page 14 of 39

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine death and what he saw as the triumph of St Peter over St Paul, Morgan blamed an ‘Egyptianized’ Judaism and the leavenings of paganism for the sorry state of Warburton's apologetic, hence his dismissal of the sacredotal dreaming Religion of all Ages; a Religion which has always discovered something of the variable Power and Influence of the Moon; and which could never support itself by Reason and Argument, or make any Stand against moral Truth, but where its Priests and Votaries have been arm'd with the Thunder of Jove, to fight for Diana.55 (p.190) Warburton's attempted refutation of freethinking, the enemy of Christian cultural and intellectual dominance, had thus succeeded in alienating an unprecedentedly wide arc of clerical and lay opinion, from ‘Christian Deists’ and Arianizing Newtonians to ultra-orthodox Hutchinsonians and Nonjurors.56 This considerable failure in apologetic left Warburton open to ridicule on a wide front. It was, however, a comparatively small aspect of this argument, his treatment of the Book of Job, which exposed him to the most damaging slights. These came from Robert Lowth, the professor of poetry at Oxford, and an exponent of a new, critical and profoundly literary approach to Hebrew poetry, and from Warburton's erstwhile admirer Laurence Sterne.57

II Historians of scriptural exegesis have emphasized the dominance of the ‘plain style’ as a mode of biblical interpretation in late seventeenth and eighteenthcentury England. It was in the ‘school’ of Isaac Barrow, Robert South, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson that literalism consolidated its long association with Protestant hermeneutics: analogy and allegory were largely written off by these influentially placed clerical scholars as Roman Catholic mystifications.58 A typically denunciatory passage in the Divine Legation is of a piece with such an attitude, as Warburton thundered that ‘The Extravagance of allegorizing in Religion has affected all (p.191) Ages: A plain Proof that the original Mode was founded in the common Conception of Mankind. The Pagans began the Abuse, and the pestilent Infection soon spread amongst the Followers of true Revelation.’ 59 It was, however, just such an allegorical reading of scripture—his interpretation of Job—that led Warburton into yet further controversy.60 Job 19: 25–7 contains an ambiguous allusion to futurity which was variously interpreted as a vision of temporal restoration following his degradation, or as a divinely inspired intuition of a future state: For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God:

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my reins be consumed within me. If the latter interpretation was accepted, as it had been by the generality of divines, then Warburton's insistence that the Old Testament Jews had not been vouchsafed any knowledge of a future state was severely compromised.61 His interpretation of Job, therefore, like that of Grotius and Jean Le Clerc, opted for the notion of temporal restoration as the (p.192) meaning of the disputed passage, an interpretation which demanded an allegorical reading of the text. Any allegorization of Scripture was bound to be disruptive in the newly emphatic hermeneutic atmosphere of the ‘plain style’ and literalism. This was especially true of the Book of Job, which had been explicated by Thomas Sherlock, bishop of London, in a dissertation appended to an influential series of lectures on prophecy which he had delivered in his earlier capacity as Master of the Temple. The lectures themselves, published as The Use and Intent of Prophecy in 1725, intimated that knowledge of a future state could be discerned, however dimly, in the Old Testament: But though the first Covenant given to Noah, and the Law of Moses founded upon the terms of that Covenant contain no express Promises of future Rewards, yet it is not to be imagined that all who lived under this Covenant were void of such Hopes, and Expectations. This designed obscurity explained the typology of the Abrahamic revelation: The Blessings belonging to the special Covenant, given to Abraham and his seed, were reserved to be revealed in God's appointed time. The Prophets under the Law cou'd not be commissioned to declare these Blessings openly and nakedly, without anticipating the Time of the Revelation. Hence it is that the Predictions, concerning Christ and his Kingdom, are clothed in such Figures, as were proper to raise the Hope and attention of the People, without carrying them beyond the Bounds of Knowledge, prescribed by God to the Age of the Jewish Covenant.62 Warburton had accepted the significance of such typological understandings of Scripture, assimilating the concept within the ‘plain style’ on the grounds that ‘a Type is neither visionary, nor senseless…but a just, and reasonable Manner of denoting a Thing by another’. As a theorist of the origin of sacred languages (in which function he has drawn the interest of structuralists, post-structuralists, and deconstructionists, including work by Derrida), Warburton (p.193) defended the essential simplicity of typology against those who used it to more mystical ends.63 Types were:

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine as natural and apposite a Figure as any used in human Converse. Which appears from hence, that Types arose from that original Mode of Communication, Conversing by Actions: the difference being only this, that, where the Action is simply significative, it has no moral Import; where it has a moral Import, it is Typical.64 However, as his argument with Stebbing demonstrated, Warburton had little time for overly detailed analysis of Abrahamic typologies: his distance from Sherlock was implicit; disagreement over Job was inevitable.65 Almost the whole of Sherlock's dissertation ‘The Sense of the Antients before Christ, upon the Circumstances and Consequences of the Fall’ was devoted to an analysis of Job which corroborated his remarks on Old Testament expectations of a future state. Contending that Job was the oldest remaining book of the Bible, a claim which he defended against Grotius, who had dated it to the Babylonian captivity of the Jews, Sherlock argued that as Job 19: 25–7 revealed Job's faith in a Resurrection and a Saviour, then knowledge of God's ‘Covenant of Immortality’ had been known in authentic records of the greatest antiquity.66 He concluded (p.194) that Job's faith demonstrated the central truth of Christian revelation, albeit conceived of ‘at a Distance’: the Evidence arising from this Book is in all Respects considerable, and ‘tis of great Moment to see those great Strokes of true Religion, and of God's Purpose from the Beginning with respect to the Children of Men, preserved in an Author, who cannot be charged with Jewish Education or Prejudices; but who was born in another Country, of another Family, and does not appear to have heard of Moses, or his Law; and yet the Secret of God was with him.67 Writing over a decade later, Warburton's rather literal-minded approach was, paradoxically, at the root of his allegorical reading. He assumed that the Book of Job was not a true history (which the Jews customarily wrote ‘with the utmost Plainness and Simplicity’), partly on the grounds that Job and his comforters could not have kept silent for seven days and nights, a contention based on a uniformitarian presumption—‘Human Nature is ever uniform; and the greater Passions, such as those of Friendship and Natural Affection, shew themselves the same at all Times.’ Their silence was therefore adduced as part of the dramatic nature of the plot of a poetic ‘Work of Imagination’. Job, so understood, was thus ‘wholly Allegorical’, and the speeches contained in it ‘extremely parabolical’.68 Having declared that the introduction and conclusion were the work of a different author from that of the main body of the text, Warburton went on to argue that ‘it was written some time under the Mosaic Dispensation’ as could be inferred from internal allusions to the history of the Jews, including the years spent under Moses’ leadership. These allusions were so worked as to effect ‘a Page 17 of 39

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine sober Image of ancient Manners’; but the question which the work addressed, that of theodicy, proved it to be of a more recent date. Beneath the allegory was to be found a politically necessary theodicy; the work was composed by ‘one of their Prophets’— namely Ezra—in order to quieten the anxieties of the Jews between the captivity and the settlement in Judaea.69 (p.195) Job was identified as representing the Jewish people (the twenty-ninth chapter was ‘an exact and circumstantial Description of the prosperous Times of the Jewish People’), while the dark image of his grave served as a prophetic ‘Figure’ for the captivity. Job's wife, so utterly unlike those of the patriarchs’, was a foreigner, ‘a rank Idolater’; similarly, Job's three friends stood for the ‘three capital Enemies of the Jewish people’. God's ultimate condemnation of these comforters supposedly illustrated the providential withdrawal of the enemies so identified, while the figure of Satan signified this very assault on the Jews—Satan's presence also confirmed Warburton's dating, as well as reinforcing his double-doctrine interpretation, since ‘This evil Being was little known to the People till about this Time.’ Elihu's survival, despite his having provoked Job, was neatly accounted for, since ‘under the Person of Elihu was designed the Sacred Writer himself’.70 Naturally, Warburton's view of the Old Testament precluded express references to a future life: the conventional depiction of chapter 19 as declaring Job's belief in God-given immortality was dismissed accordingly. Job had looked for a ‘temporal Deliverance from his Afflictions’; to understand the text in terms of bodily resurrection was ‘repugnant to the whole Tenor of the Argument’. Bodily metaphors of the type so addressed had ‘most Efficacy where the religious Doctrine of the Resurrection was unknown’; indeed, ‘Life from the Dead was used proverbially, to express the most unexpected Deliverance, by the mightiest act of Omnipotence, and is common amongst the Prophets.’71 This sharp variance between Sherlock and Warburton was extended by numerous commentators, and was at least latent in the work of less partisan exegetes. Indeed, examination of the spectrum of responses to the book of Job during this period forces a profound confrontation with English clerical culture at its most densely textual. While Warburton was at work on the Divine Legation in his Lincolnshire rectory at Brant Boughton, in the fenlands of the same county, (p.196) Samuel Wesley, rector of Epworth, was engaged in a hugely digressive study of almost every conceivable aspect of Job, which was published in Latin in 1735. Wesley's reading argued for Job as a work of true history, noting that Old Testament events were frequently parabolic in nature. The problem of Job's knowledge of the doings of Satan and God was explained as the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, while the use of the work by St James and St Paul was appealed to as evidence of its essential truthfulness.72

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine Identifying Job himself as the author, Wesley rejected the reading of the text made by Grotius, defending not only Job's belief in resurrection but also his supposed faith (shared by Elihu) in the Holy Trinity.73 Richard Grey, the author of an analogous study of Job, opposed Warburton's reading: claiming that Moses was the author of the book, Grey judged Job to be a work of true history, stressing that chapter 19 was to be understood as a declaration of faith in the resurrection, a conclusion drawn from ‘the just Construction of the Words, without regard to any Hypothesis whatsoever’.74 Similar judgements were maintained by two explicit defenders of Sherlock against Warburton's hypothesis: Richard Brown, at the centre of intellectual and academic debate as a fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, upheld Sherlock's thesis in three university sermons delivered in 1746; Charles Peters, at its (p.197) periphery as rector of St Mabyn in Cornwall, censured Warburton in A Critical Dissertation on the Book of Job, published in 1751. Citing Sherlock, Brown opined that Job, ‘the work of the earliest writer of Scripture’, and therefore written before the promulgation of the Law, had probably had an eponymous author, while Peters argued that it was the oldest book in the world, a true history of which Job himself was the inspired author, a presumption partially grounded on the fact that there was no other ancient history of Job extant.75 William Worthington, a Shropshire clergyman, opposed Warburton's hypothesis while delineating an idiosyncratically allegorical reading of Job. Denouncing Warburton's advocacy of an apparent inequality in the distribution of providence as being both ‘harsh in Language, and injurious to Providence’, Worthington censured his supposed impiety in the strongest terms—‘Whom shall we believe? GOD himself, or this presumptuous Man, who, to establish his own fond Notions, feareth not to pervert the right ways of the Lord?’ His interpretation was, in Worthington's view, utterly without foundation, so that ‘it needs not to be said what the Fate of the Superstructure must be’. In Worthington's account of the matter, 19: 25 revealed Job's ‘Faith in the Resurrection in as strong Terms as that doctrine is delivered in any other part of Scripture’: both he and Elihu believed in a mediator, identified by Worthington as Christ.76 Warburton's allegorization also had its defenders from both inside and outside the universities. The former were particularly welcome, since Warburton, who had not enjoyed a university education, was both peculiarly sensitive and (p. 198) vulnerable to academic criticism. John Garnett, a fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (and, through the interest of the duke of Devonshire whom he had served as chaplain, a future bishop in Ireland), judged it politic to pay deferential respects to Sherlock, praising him as ‘a great and eminent author, from whom I always find great disinclination to differ, and from whom indeed, there is no differing without suspecting that one is in error’.77 G. Costard, a fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, was more circumspect, limiting his task to a close reading of Job 19: 25, and avoiding discussion of Sherlock's opinions, while John Towne, a Lincolnshire clergyman such as Warburton had been for a great Page 19 of 39

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine part of his career, was decidedly acrimonious in the ad hominen mode of his master's argumentation, offering a thorough critique of Sherlock's exegetical opinions.78 Other, more critical exegetes were also at work on the Book of Job; it is obvious that much of their work was undertaken in full cognizance of the controversy between Sherlock and Warburton. Thomas Heath, a layman from Exeter, accepted Warburton's arguments regarding the dating of the book, and also the repudiation of 19: 25–7 as presaging the Christian doctrine of futurity, while Walter Hodges, the Hutchinsonian provost of Oriel College, Oxford, produced a study of Job which contained a condemnation of the sort of ostentatious display of learning indulged by Warburton: ‘This kind of Embroidery placed on the Margin of a Book, where the Contents do not seem to require or excuse it, betrays, I think, a want of Substance or good Sense, instead of being a suitable and graceful (p.199) Ornament.’79 Acting as ‘a summary of the Patriarchal Religion’, and therefore predating the Mosaic dispensation, Job, the work of Elihu himself, was read by Hodges as undoing the claims of freethinkers whose promotion of natural religion was detested by him as deeply as it was by Warburton.80 Freethinking's onslaught on revealed religion still worried established apologists in the 1750s: Warburton's ham-fisted defence of revelation was regretted by Hodges and other theologians of a more consciously traditional frame of mind. The revival of the Sherlock-Warburton antagonism in the work of Robert Lowth only emphasized this division among the clerisy. In turning to the work of Lowth one moves from the speculative and firmly occidental orientalizing of Hutchinsonians, whose concerns were always with a mystically aligned notion of the Hebrew language rather than with a comparative understanding of Semitic languages, to the more critical methods of Arabists and Hebraists. The appreciation of Hebrew was to be transformed from the numinous Messianic desire apparent among seventeenth-century sectarians, and which had acted, suitably modified, as the foundation of Hutchinsonian physico-theology, into a linguistically grounded object of piously learned enquiry.81 The Book of Job played no small part in this process. (p.200) Leonard Chappelow, professor of Arabic at Cambridge when Lowth was serving as the professor of poetry at Oxford, produced a commentary on and a paraphrase of Job in 1752, which discerned original Arabisms beneath the finished Hebrew, thereby inferring that the original work of Job, an Arab, was to be found beneath the polish of a later, divinely inspired, Jewish scribe. Naturally, then, Chappelow interpreted the work as history, so that ‘the history of Job and his sufferings, is not a studied parable, or an artfully contrived drama; but a matter of real fact and truth; very consistent with the simplicity of former ages’. Such a reading, undertaken ‘without regard to any private hypothesis’, nevertheless led Chappelow to conclude that the controverted text of 19: 25–7 revealed that ‘Job's thoughts were deeply fixed not only on the prospect of a Page 20 of 39

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine Future State; but even in the Christian sense, a Future Resurrection.’82 The new appreciation of Hebrew did not prevent its exponents from reaching older, more orthodox conclusions than might otherwise be expected by critics who discern in its methodology the logic of secularizing readings of sacred texts. This is most apparent in the work of Lowth, whose lectures on the sacred poetry of the Hebrews (De sacra Poesi Hebraeorum), delivered at Oxford between 1741 and 1750 and published in 1753, have been seen as both inspiring the aesthetics of the sublime, fashionable in England from the 1750s, and as providing the seeds of Romantic poetics and religious reflection.83 Lowth was the virtual antitype of (p.201) Warburton; the son of a divine, the Old Testament scholar William Lowth, and educated at Winchester and Oxford, he enjoyed the easy patronage of aristocrats and the university, and, according to his biographer, ‘had no superior in piety, virtue, and humanity’. Towards the end of his life he was offered the primacy by George III, but declined it on the grounds of ill health.84 Warburton, envious of such men and their comfortable careers, did not spare them in controversial debate: Lowth unwittingly became the particular object of this animus.85 Lowth's memorialist claimed that his published lectures on Hebrew poetry, especially in the English translation made by Gregory in 1783, ‘is the first critical production of the age’. Praising them as having been ‘built upon the basis of common sense’, the anonymous author pointed to the simple interpretative principles on which the lectures were constructed as the primary means of their value.86 Lowth had stressed these principles in his concluding lectures, an extended exegesis of Job. His aim was not to pretend to new discoveries, but only to clear up obscurities, to ‘collect from such passages as appear the least intricate, the most probable conjectures: and what I conceive to have any tolerable foundation in fact, that I mean to propose, not as demonstration, but as opinion only’. Explication was aided in this instance by the admirably plain Hebrew of the work under discussion, the very clarity of which demonstrated that it was not the work of Moses, ‘for it is much more compact, (p.202) concise, or condensed, more accurate in the poetical confirmation of the sentences’: this was a book that stood ‘single and unparalleled in the Sacred Volume’.87 Lowth opted for the opinion that Job himself was the author, since ‘it is the most ancient of all the sacred books’, as was ‘manifest from the subject, the language, the general character, and even from the obscurity of the work’. This obscurity was not aided by allegorization: The truth of the narrative would never, I am persuaded, have been called in question, but from the immoderate affection of some allegorizing mystics for their own fictions, which run to such excess, as to prevent them from acceding to any thing but what was visionary and typical…Indeed I have Page 21 of 39

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine not been able to trace any vestige of an allegorical meaning throughout the entire poem. Admitting that some passages were too obscure ever to be unravelled, Lowth did not accept that the whole work was subject to ‘impenetrable darkness’. Indeed, an explication of the entire text was to hand: ‘the whole history, taken together, contains an example of patience, together with its reward’.88 The nature of this reward was not, however, expatiated upon at any length. It was the aesthetic of Job which was Lowth's primary concern, although any aesthetic value was necessarily bound up with religious purpose, since the study of ancient Hebrew was ‘essential to all who would be proficients in theology’. Job, ‘an example of perfect Virtue’, exhibited a patience that was ‘very remote from that insensibility or rather stupidity to which the Stoic school pretended’: this superiority in doctrinal achievement was strengthened by the fact that the Book of Job ‘is universally animated with the spirit of sublimity’. Dogma was aided by literary simplicity and aestheticized spirituality, ‘as this production excels all the other remains of the Hebrew Poetry in economy and arrangement, so it yields to none in sublimity of style, and in (p.203) every grace and excellence of composition’.89 An alliance between doctrine and aesthetics provided the implicit valuation of Job for a Christian readership; the niceties of that doctrine went unexplored in this supremely literary estimate of the Old Testament. Within three years of the original, Latin publication of the lectures, Lowth was obliged to correspond with Warburton, having learned of his belief that the lectures on Job were directed against him. A testy reply from Warburton ensured the confirmation of his original misapprehension, leaving Lowth with no option but to affirm his denial that the Hebrews had been destitute of knowledge concerning the immortality of the soul, and to continue his opposition to allegorical readings of Job.90 Replying to Warburton's further aspersions in an appendix to the second edition of the Divine Legation, Lowth derided his ‘investiture in the high office of Inquisitor General’, and scorned his ferocious literary despotism: Warburton's interpretative claims were strongly compromised as Lowth noted his lack of ‘a competent knowledge of Hebrew’.91 A moot point was raised when Lowth reflected on the dangerous consequences of two richly beneficed clergymen debating in public over such a relatively minor matter as the dating of the Book of Job.92 The derision of Protestant ultras, such as William Sharpe, was indeed aroused by this ecclesiastically embarrassing spectacle: ‘when CIVIL POWER is kept out of their hands, there is no entertainment so pleasing…as the battle of two high-bred and well fed Ecclesiastics’.93 Richard Cumberland, a Cambridge classical scholar, lamented the effect of the squabble on the reputation of learning:

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine (p.204) I cannot see Professors, dignified Divines and Bishops tilting at each other, without a blush: ‘tis this unpardonable petulancy that makes the company of men of learning so little sought after; it reduces literary science to the rank of a mechanical art; when the scholar is found to give way to as many little mean distracting insinuations in his profession, as a Fiddler, or a Taylor does in his.94 In an age of replies (and replies to replies), much was made of this clerical debate.95 It was this engagement which spurred on Richard Parry, a Dorset clergyman, in his defence of Sherlock's exposition of Job, resuscitating the earlier debate as a necessary element of the later one. Parry considered that the supposed apologetics of the Divine Legation were singularly weak; far from combating deism, its arguments only served to revolt deists, confirming them in their religious antagonisms.96 Theologically significant though Warburton's debate with Lowth was, the strongest literary reminders of the argument are to be found in two novels of the 1760s: Tristram Shandy, by omission, and The Vicar of Wakefield, in its very nature, display authorial connections with the Lowth camp (or at least with antiWarburton sentiment). Laurence Sterne had met Warburton through David Garrick, and his hoped-for patron had defended the early books of Sterne's new novel against some of its more outspoken clerical critics. The evidence of a purse of gold which Warburton paid to Sterne is more ambiguous: recent scholars, including the novelist's biographer, have suggested that this was paid in order to (p.205) circumvent the dubious fictional compliment of Warburton's being made Shandy's tutor; certainly, his patronage was short-lived.97 Furthermore, in sermons delivered by Sterne in the 1760s, the characters of Job and his wife were delineated in a notably realistic manner, undercutting Warburton's allegory in favour of Lowth's literalism.98 Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield has long been read as an extended meditation on (or parody of) the Book of Job. The vicissitudes of the Reverend Mr Primrose, taken together with his other-worldly theodicy (especially as expressed in the Prison sermon in chapter 29), have been variously interpreted: Goldsmith's loyalties have been identified as those of an orthodox interpreter of Job; either he saw in that work the unambiguous foretelling of immortality and a future state, or else, adopting the orientalizing sublime of Lowth's biblical analysis, his was a consciously secularized reading of the same text, reminding Goldsmith's readers of the supremacy of a this-worldly imperative behind necessarily temporal human existence.99 The ever-prevalent tendency to secularize eighteenth-century texts is, though, unusually forced in this context: while the Vicar of Wakefield is admittedly a decidedly complex literary work, it demands a disproportionately sophisticated argument to turn a narrative which is directly predicated on the workings of providence and the restitution of the

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine injustices of this life promised in the (p.206) life to come, into a secularizing strait-jacket which conforms with the demands of literary theory.100 All of these commentators on the Book of Job, whether clerical or lay (or, in Sterne's case, an uneasy union of the two), and in particular those who invoked parallels with pagan literature, emphasized the superiority of the sacred scriptures over other ancient writings. Charles Peters called for the attention which scholars gave to Latin and Greek to be diverted to the study of biblical Hebrew, a piously Protestant exhortation to sola scriptura tradition.101 Scriptural priority was also evident in Richard Grey's contemptuous glance at Warburton's exegesis of Job: I own then, that 1 admire it greatly; that I look upon it as a Masterpiece in its Kind; as one of the most ingenious and entertaining Parts of the whole Book. But after all this, for the Truth of it, I do no more believe it, than I do (that other helium somnium of yours) the sixth book of the Aenis to be a Description of the Mysteries.102 A young layman, whose priorities reversed those of Grey and his colleagues, entered the lists on this very matter, repudiating Warburton's Virgil as much as they had his Job. In Gibbon's own words: I too, without any private offence, was ambitious of breaking a lance against the Giant's shield; and in the beginning of the year 1770, my Critical observations on the sixth book of the Aeneid were sent, without my name, to the press. In this short Essay, my first English publication, I aimed my strokes against the person and the Hypothesis of Bishop Warburton.103 (p.207) Once Gibbon's pamphlet has been retrieved from a mass of replies, the breadth of Warburton's enmities can begin to be appreciated.104 Warburton had assumed that the mysteries, especially those celebrated at Eleusis, were instituted to teach the doctrine of a future state. The lesser mysteries were known by the people; the greater, chiefly that the gods were but deified dead men and that, accordingly, the errors of polytheism were to be replaced by a knowledge of providence, were to be revealed only to the initiated. Hence, in Warburton's reading, the true meaning of the sixth book of the Aeneid, the account of Aeneas’ descent into the world of the dead, is nothing else but a Description, and so designed by the Author, of the Hero's Initiation into the Mysteries of one part of the ELEUSINIAN SPECTACLES; where evry thing was done in Shew and Machinery; and where a Representation of the History of Ceres afforded Opportunity of

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine bringing in the Scenes of Heaven, Hell, Elysium, Purgatory, and all that related to the future State of Men and Heroes. Identifying the work as an epic about politics, Warburton saw in Aeneas the typification of the lawmaker who was necessarily obliged to codify a religious system for his nation: Aeneas, ‘the perfect Legislator’ therefore needed to be initiated into the mysteries to sanctify his character and function. The mystery itself, so as not to be undone by the poet, had to be spoken of ‘in high Allegorical Terms’.105 Intriguingly, Gibbon turned on this allegorization, noting that he had heard Warburton's explication praised as ‘an ingenious improvement on the plain and obvious sense of Virgil’. It was, then, the plain style and its allied hermeneutic (p.208) that Gibbon utilized in his indictment of the bishop's ‘luxuriant Systems’. However, Gibbon's ‘plain style’ was noticeably secular. A cutting reference to Warburton's notoriously Erastian ecclesiology introduced an allusion to the freethinking critique of ‘priestcraft’ (against which Warburton had written his defence) in a dismissal of the Oracles: ‘Yet when we study their history with attention, instead of the Alliance between Church and State, we can discover only the antient Alliance between the Avarice of the Priest and the Credulity of the People.’ Gibbonian irony permeates this allusive undercutting of revealed religion as the language of the ‘plain style’ is drawn upon in order to challenge Warburton's allegorizing fancies. What was not apparent to ‘the naked eye of common sense’ stood revealed by ‘the CRITICAL TELESCOPE of the great W—n’. Horace's distance from this method was due to his ignorance ‘of his friend's allegorical meaning, which the Bishop of Glocester has since revealed to the World’: Gibbon chose to remain satisfied ‘with understanding Virgil no better than Horace did’. Warburton's ‘lifeless Allegory’ robbed the poem of its worth; philosophy aimed for truth, poetry for pleasure: the soul of a ‘grave Doctor’ was very different from that of Virgil.106 Such a disjunction was merely theoretical, since Gibbon conjectured, with some force, that the factual grounds for Warburton's allegorical reading were simply wrong. Virgil, an Epicurean materialist, never attended the mysteries whose theology he naturally despised: he could not, then, have revealed what he did not know. Furthermore, as the initiated were not to reveal the secrets they had come to know, it was also dishonourable of Warburton to suggest that Virgil, had he indeed been so initiated, would have violated this basic law. In a postscript to this short work, Gibbon praised a ‘moderate, learned, and critical’ dissertation by an eirenic clergyman, John Jortin, ‘On the State of the Dead, as described by Homer and Virgil’ (1755).107 (p.209) The last of six dissertations, of which the rest had concerned themselves with practical matters of history and theology, the essay on Homer and Virgil was father of the philological kind’, intended for Jortin's more learned Page 25 of 39

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine readers.108 Having denied the existence of any metaphysical speculation regarding the nature of the soul in Homer's writings, Jortin devoted the second half of his study to a close reading of the sixth book of the Aeneid, which suggested that, as an Epicurean materialist, Virgil denied the reality of those regions which he had detailed in Aeneas’ itinerary.109 In letting Aeneas enter into these realms through the plain gate of sleep, and having him leave through the ornamented gate of ‘false dreams’, Virgil advertised his removal from the mythologies contained in this sequence: Aeneas’ journeyings in the world of the dead were an acknowledged fantasy, and nothing like an allegorical tale whose meaning could be unpicked by mythographers and theologians. Hence the force of Jortin's reflection that: IT would make one smile to see the poetical divines wonderfully tender and candid in their judgments of Virgil's philosophical and theological principles, looking upon him as a devout and religious creature, one who was honoured with glimpses of the glad tidings of salvation, and a kind oí Minor prophet. Yet I would not willingly censure them; for after all, a man can have no more judgment than falls to his share; and besides, it seems to be an error on the right side, a good-natured mistake, an innocent simplicity which thinketh no evil.110 Clearly, these innocent errors were not those of Warburton; but his faulty allegorizations had been adverted upon, and it fell to Hurd to denounce Jortin in an ill-tempered pamphlet, berating him for not having openly announced his criticisms of Warburton's thesis.111 Whatever the nature of Gibbon's religious opinions at the (p.210) date of the Critical Observations, it is plain that they were not identical with those of Jortin, a scrupulous divine and the author of an important study in ecclesiastical history. If Pocock is right in claiming that the critique of early Christianity apparent in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is strongly indebted to Gibbon's study of Hume's Natural History of Religion, then this early engagement with Warburton acquires added significance, as it was this last work, along with the essay ‘Of Miracles’, which led to Warburton's splenetic attacks on the Scottish philosopher in the decades during which Gibbon's complicated relation to religion was slowly evolving.112 Warburton had little respect for Hume, preferring the work of Scottish ‘common sense’ philosophers such as his friend James Beattie, whom he defended in a letter to Hurd against ‘the whole crew of Scotch Metaphysicians’ whose works, he complained, were ‘full of moonshine’. In an earlier letter he had observed that he would like to counter the argument of Hume's work on miracles, ‘which might be done in a few words’. He had some doubts about the wisdom of this course, asking ‘does he deserve notice? Is he known amongst you?’, and observing that ‘if his own weight keeps him down, I should be sorry to Page 26 of 39

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine contribute to his advancement to any place but the pillory’.113 Such, in the eyes of the tyrant of English letters, was Hume's position at mid-century. Warburton did, however, essay an answer to Hume, albeit one he did not bother to publish; other answerers had already appeared in print.114 In a clerical culture, Hume had reason to fear Warburton, who used his friendship with William Murray (later Lord Chancellor Mansfield) to procure a ban on the publication of Hume's sceptical essays ‘Of Suicide’ and ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’. For similar reasons, Hume had been obliged to (p.211) redraft The Natural History of Religion; 115 nevertheless, having failed to prevent publication of the work as a whole, Warburton co-wrote an anonymous critique of the piece with Hurd, belittling Hume as a man who had somehow ‘usurped to himself the name of Philosopher’. Their Popean dismissal of Hume, with its echoes of the Dunciad, can now be appreciated as one of the nicer ironies of eighteenth-century intellectual history: Hence it is, that CHUBB, MORGAN, COLLINS, MANDEVILLE, and BOLINGBROKE are names which nobody hears, without laughing. It is not for me, perhaps, to predict the fate of Mr. David HUME. But if You, Sir, had taken upon You to read his destiny, the public had, now, seen this Adorer of. Nature, this last hope of his declining family, gathered to the dull of ancient days; ‘Where wretched TOLAND, TINDAL, TILLARD rest, Safe, where no critics, no divines molest.’116

Ironic though these musings have come to be, they are indicative of the comparative standing of Hume and Warburton in the mid-eighteenth century, and they act as a valuable corrective to the image of Hume as the progenitor of an inexorably secularizing force in English intellectual history. Despite being obliged to endure the reputation of having acted as a recklessly disputatious and frequently maladroit defender of Christian orthodoxy—for which he was subjected to relentless criticism on the part of his fellow clergy as well as by sceptics—Warburton commanded a high degree of respect as the most prominent of would-be literary dictators at mid-century. However peculiar his scholarly and philosophical claims, opponents, Christian or otherwise, felt obliged to favour them with seriously considered replies. A consideration of the plethora of replies to Warburton with the much smaller number devoted to Hume demonstrates the comparative reputations, both positive and negative, of (p.212) the two men during their own lifetimes. Historians, therefore, have to do proper justice to such neglected figures as Warburton if any sense is to be made of the complex of religious and philosophical debates in which Hume was but one of many contributors. England's complex Enlightenment experience encompassed both Gibbon and Warburton, as well as divines opposed to both men. Page 27 of 39

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine Notes:

(1) M. Pattison, ‘Pope And His Editors’, in Essays, ed. H. Nettleship (Oxford, 1889) ii. 350–95; A. W. Evans, Warburton and the Warburtonians: A Study in Some Eighteenth-Century Controversies (London, 1932), ch. 5; B. Hammond, Pope and Bolingbroke: A Study in Literary Friendship (Columbia, Miss., 1984), 105–9; F. M. Doherty, ‘Sterne and Warburton: Another Look’, BJECS 1 (1978), 20–30; M. New, ‘Sterne, Warburton, and the Burden of Exuberant Wit’, ECS 15 (1981–2), 245–74. R. W. Greaves, ‘The Working of the Alliance: A Comment on Warburton’, in G. V. Bennett and J. D. Walsh (eds.), Essays in Modern English Church History in Memory of Norman Sykes (London, 1966), 163–80; S. Taylor, ‘William Warburton And The Alliance Of Church And State’, JEH 43 (1992), 271– 86. (2) Evans, Warburton and the Warburtonians, 1, 3. On the marginal position of Hume between the publication of The Treatise and The Enquiries, see J. Sitter, Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England (Ithaca, NY, 1982), ch. 1. (3) The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. I. Campbell Ross (Oxford, 1983), 309. (4) The Doctrine of Grace, (3rd edn., London, 1763), 309. (5) A Selection From Unpublished Papers Of The Right Reverend William Warburton, D.D. Late Lord Bishop Of Gloucester (London, 1841), ed. F. Kilvert, 342. For an interested clerical account of the libellous poem, see J. Kidell, A Genuine and Succinct Narrative of a scandalous, obscene, and exceedingly profane Libel, Entitled An Essay on Woman, as also of Other Poetical Pieces, containing the most atrocious blasphemies (London, 1763). (6) A Discourse, by way of general preface to the quarto edition of Bishop Warburton's works, containing some account of the life, writings, and character of the author (London, 1794), 138. (7) Ibid. 77–81. Hurd had written to Thomas Balguy, regretting recent products of Scottish learning, in Nov. 1777, as cited in F. Kilvert, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Right Rev. Richard Hurd, D.D., Lord Bishop of Worcester; with a selection from his correspondence and other unpublished papers (London, 1860), 133. (8) Discourse, 118, 123–5. For a rather different interpretation of the encounter with Voltaire, see N. Aston, ‘Warburton and Voltaire in the 1760s: Polemical Reputations and the Pentateuch’ (forthcoming). (9) Défense de mon oncle and A Warburton, in The Complete Works of Voltaire, ed. J.-M. Mourcaux, lxiv. (Oxford, 1984, 225–32 and 463–5 respectively.

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine (10) Hurd to Mason, 2 Jan. 1795, in The Correspondence of Richard Hurd and William Mason: And Letters of Richard Hurd to Thomas Gray (Cambridge, 1932), ed. E. H. Pearce and L. Whibley (Cambridge, 1932), 108. (11) Cf. J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcrafi Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge, 1992), 236. (12) Pope, An Essay on Man, epistle iv, 1. 390 in The Poems of Alevander Pope, ed. S. Butt (London, 1963); Hammond, Pope and Bolingbroke, 105–9. (13) Proposals For Printing By Subscription, In one Volume in Quarto, A Commentary Critical and Theological Upon the Learned Mr William Warburton's Apologetical Dedication to the Reverend Dr Henry Stebbing (London, 1746), 4. (14) ‘Letters or Essays Addressed to Alexander Pope Esq. Essay the First, Concerns the Nature, Extent, and Reality of Human Knowledge’, in The Philosophical Works, ed. D. Mallett (London, 1754), i. 16–23. On the reception of Locke's hypothesis, adumbrated in the Essay at IV. iii. 6. 539–43, see J. W. Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 1984). (15) ‘Fragments or Minutes of Essays’, xxix, XLVI, in Philosophical Works, iv. 206–11, 348–50. (16) Hurd, Discourse, 77. (17) A View of Lord Bolingbroke's Philosophy, Compleat, In Four Letters to a Friend. In which his whole System of Infidelity and Naturalism is Exposed and Confuted (3rd edn., London, 1756), 7–60. Warburton had similarly accused Anthony Collins, Locke's ‘Pupil and Friend’, of overstressing the incipent materialism of The Essay: see The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, On the Principles of a Religious Deist, From the Omission of the Doctrine of a Future State of Reward and Punishment In the Jewish Dispensation (London, 1738–41), vol. i, pp. xxii-xxiii. (18) ‘God's Moral Government’ in The Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion Occasionally Opened and Explained; In a Course of Sermons Preached before the Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn (London, 1753), i. 45–70. (19) M. C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London, 1981); J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in England’, in R. Ajello, E. Contese, and V. Piano (eds.), L'età dei lumi: Studi storici sul settecento europeo in onore di Franco Venturi (Naples, 1985), i. 523–62. (20) Memoirs of the Reign of King George II, ed. J. Brooke (New Haven, 1985), iii. 85.

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine (21) For a very particular reading of the ideological background to this systematic depreciation of Egyptian culture, and esp. Warburton's part in the process alleged, see M. Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, i. The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985 (London, 1987), 196–7. (22) ‘Persecution and The Art of Writing’, in Persecution and the Art of Writing (Westport, Conn., 1952), 22–37. (23) ‘Notes on Lucretius’, in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York, 1968), 76–139, at 85. For a trenchant critique of the Straussian position as being both unphilosophical and unhistorical, see S. Holmes, ‘Truths for philosophers alone’, in The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 61–87. (24) On this secularizing drift in the notion of the ‘double truth’, see P. Harrison, ‘Religion’, and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1990), 86. Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525) invoked the doctrine in a rejection of Christian ideas of immortality rather similar to that enunciated by Bolingbroke, on which see M. Pine, ‘Pomponazzi and the Problem Of “Double Truth”’, JHI 29 (1968), 163–76. Bartholomaus Keckermann (1571–1609), a Protestant scholastic, denied the separation of philosophical from theological truths, thus denying the veracity of the ‘double doctrine’, on which see R. A. Muller, ‘Vera Philosophia cum sacra Theologia nusquam pugnat: Keckermann on Philosophy, Theology, and the Problem of Double Truth’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 15 (1984), 341–65. It has been claimed that the very notion of the ‘double truth’ emerged from the misunderstandings of the I3th-cent. bishop who first condemned it as a heresy, and that, consequently, there never was such a tradition in the medieval period: see R. C. Dales, ‘The Origin of the Doctrine of the Double Truth’, Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 15 (1984), 169–79. For a related concept, see C. Ginzburg, ‘The High and the Low: The Theme of Fobidden Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, P&P 73 (1976), 28–42. The theme of ‘esoteric’ knowledge is central to D. Berman, A History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell (London, 1988). (25) Divine Legation, i. 20–3, 78–86, 88–102, 306–10, 367–410. (26) Ibid. ii. 344–6, 362–434, 446–50, 462, 468. The idea was revived by J. A. Froude, who argued that Egyptian doctrines of a future life acted both as a comfort to slaves and as a means of appeasing the consciences of owners. Providence then replaced the notion of futurity; with the progress of this worldly ameliorations, provided by science and political economy, the very idea of immortality may have been drawing to a close, a state of affairs possibly brought about by God Himself: ‘On Progress’, in Short Studies On Great Subjects (London, 1877–83) ii. 351–96, at 393–96. (27) Divine Legation, ii. 474–5, 481–553. Page 30 of 39

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine (28) Ibid. ii. 587. (29) On whom, see Evans, Warburton and the Warburtonians, passim, and J. S. Watson, The Life of Bishop Warburton (London, 1863), chs. 24 and 25. (30) An Examination of Mr. Warburton's Account of the Conduct of the Antient Legislators, Of the Double Doctrine of the Old Philosophers, Of the Theocracy of the Jews, And of Sir Isaac Newton's Chronology (London, 1744), 43–8, 51–2, 59, 103–56, 157–222, 222–364. (31) The Belief of a Future State Proved to be a Fundamental Article of the Religion of the Hebrews, And the Doctrine of the Ancient Philosophers Concerning a Future State, shewn to be consistent with Reason, and their Belief of it demonstrated: And the whole System of Heathen Theology Explained (London, 1745). (32) A Short Historical View of the Controversy Concerning An Intermediate State and the Separate Existence of the Soul Between Death and the General Resurrection, Deduced from the Beginning of the Protestant Reformation to the Present Times (2nd edn., London, 1772), 204–6; B. W. Young, ‘“The Soul-Sleeping System”: Politics and Heresy in Eighteenth-Century England’, JEH 45 (1994), 64– 81. For a useful study of i8th-cent. eschatology, see P. C. Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England (Cambridge, 1994). (33) Remarks On Dr. Warburton's Account of the Sentiments of the Early Jews Concerning the Soul, in The Works Theological and Miscellaneous, ed. F. Blackburne, L.L.B. (Cambridge, 1804–5), ii. 261–338, at 271–2, 286–7, 292–301. (34) Works, vol. i, pp. xxiv. (35) A Short but Sufficient Confutation of the Reverend Dr, Warburton's Projected Defence (As he calls it) Of Christianity, In His Divine Legation of Moses. In A Letter To the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of London (London, 1757), 5–6, 13, 21, 40, 42, 48–76. (36) Ibid. 81–4, 88–91, 100–5, 110, 136, 139–40, 151–2. (37) Bate, An Essay Towards Explaining the Third Chapter of Genesis, And the Spiritual Sense of the Law, In which the Third Proposition of the Divine Legation, and what the Author hath brought to support it, are considered (London, 1741), 1–2, 4–5, 5–6, 64; Newton, The Humble Petition of the FreeThinkers To The Right Honourable P—p E—l of H—k, L—d H—h C—r of G—t B— n; Setting forth their Right of Patronage, in a certain Book, called the Divine L— n of M—s, demonstrated &c. To be restored to the same (London, 1756). (38) Bate, Essay, 6–43, 65–70, 83–5, 106–8, 127, 135–6, 153–4, 168, 182.

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine (39) Ibid. 98–102, 195–96, 214. Warburton declined to chastise ‘such impotent Railers as Dr. Richard Grey and one Bate, a Zany to a Mountebank.’ (Remarks On Several Occasional Reflections In Answer to The Reverend Doctors Stebbing and Sykes. Part II (London, 1745), 245.) (40) E. G. Rupp, Religion in England 1688–1791 (Oxford, 1986), 473. (41) Romaine, The Divine Legation of Moses demonstrated from his having made express Mention of, and insisted so much on the Doctrine of a future state; Whereby Mr. Warburton's Attempt to demonstrate the Divine Legation of Moses from his Omission of a future State is proved to be absurd, and destructive of all Revelation. A Sermon (London, 1739), 1–3, 23–4; 17, 22, 25–40. (42) Ibid. 6–16. Cf. Locke, Essay 11. xxi. (43) Remarks On Dr. Warburton's Account 264, 268. (44) Remarks On The Divine Legation of Moses, &c. In Several Letters (London, 1739), pp. v, 1, 13–14. (45) Webb, A Letter to the Reverend Mr William Warburton, A.M. Occasioned by Some Passages in his Book Intituled, The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (London, 1742), 3, 62–3; Stebbing, The History of Abraham, In the Plain and Obvious Meaning of it, Justified, Against the Objections of the Author of the Divine Legation of Moses, &c., (London, 1746), 1–2, 105. (46) Stebbing, History of Abraham, 99–101, 104. Cf. Warburton, A Sermon on the Late Unnatural Rebellion (London, 1745). (47) An Apologetical Dedication to the Reverend Dr. Henry Stebbing, In Answer to his Censure and Misrepresentations of the Sermon Preached at the General Fast Day, Appointed to be Observed December 18, 1745 (London, 1746), 7–8, 18– 19. (48) An Examination of Mr Warburton's Second Proposition, In his Projected Demonstration of The Divine Legation of Moses (London, 1744), 132; Webster, Remarks, 3, 8–9, 17, 25, 33. (49) Apologetical Dedication, 18–19. Elsewhere he accused Stebbing of ‘Popery’, and also of reinforcing deism (Remarks. Part II, 131, 141.) (50) Future Rewards and Punishments Believed by the Ancients, Wherein some Objections of the Revd. Mr. Warburton, in his Divine Legation of Moses, are considered (London, 1740), pp. iii-ix, 7, 17–18, 25, 40–3, 81, 179, 181. (51) An Answer To The Reverend Mr. Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses, In Three Parts (London, 1743). For pro-Warburton criticism of Bott made by an Page 32 of 39

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine Oxford clergyman, see J. Edwards, The Duty of Forgiveness of Enemies Stated and Proved; And of the Excellency, Usefulness, and Truth of the Christian Religion. A Sermon Preached before the University of Oxford On Sunday at St. Peter's, March 13 1742–1743 (London, 1743), pp. i–xv, esp. pp. xi-xiii n. (52) A Brief Examination of the Rev. Mr. Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses (London, 1742), pp. iii–iv, vii, ix, xi, xiv. (53) Ibid. 4, 9–40. (54) Ibid. 5, 95–6. Detecting the wiles of ‘sacerdotalism’, Morgan claimed that ‘to make the best Compromise with you we can, with regard to the different Schemes of Pagan and Christian Churchism, till the Matter can be better settled, if you please let it stand thus; that the Heathen Churchism had Utility without Truth, and the Christian has ever had Truth without Utility.’ (55) Ibid. 173. (56) Caleb Fleming, a dissenting critic, also insisted on Old Testament knowledge of a future state, ‘notwithstanding the conceit in the florid scheme of Dr. WARBURTON'S divine legation’ (A Survey of the Search After Souls, By Dr. Coward, Dr. S. Clarke, Mr. Baxter, Dr. Sykes, Dr. Law, Mr. Peckard, and others (London, 1758), 183). (57) On the literary consequences of this debate see J. Lamb, ‘The Job Controversy, Sterne, and the Question of Allegory’, ECS 24 (1990), 1–19. (58) A good account of this movement can be found in G. Reedy, The Bible and Reason: Anglicans and Scripture in Late Seventeenth-Century England, (Philadelphia, 1985), esp. ch. 1. Cf. F. D’conninck-Brosard, ‘England and France in the Eighteenth Century’, in S. Prickett (ed.), Reading the Text: Biblical Criticism and Literary Theory (Oxford, 1991) 136–81. (59) ii. 674. (60) For a wide-ranging discussion of the 18th-cent. career of the book of Job, see J. Lamb, The Rhetoric of Suffering: Reading the Book of Job in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1996). (61) Writing in the 1680s, both Thomas Crane and Ralph Brownrigg, the bishop of Exeter, declared that the text acted as a direct prophecy both of Job's faith in Christ as Redeemer and in his own resurrection to a future state. T. Crane, Job's Assurance of the Resurrection. A Sermon at Winwick in the County Palatine of Lancaster, June 25. 1689. At the Funeral of the Reverend Richard Sherlock, D.D. late Rector there (London, 1690); R. Brownrigg, ‘Sermon Preached on EasterDay. Job. 19.25, 26, 27’, Twenty-Five Sermons by the Right Reverend Father in God, Ralph Brownrigg, Late Lord Bishop of Exeter, ed. W. Martyn (London, Page 33 of 39

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine 1685), ii. 149–60. This Christianized reading of the text was reinforced by its absorption into the libretto of Handel's Messiah. Recent biblical criticism suggests that a notional future life played no part in the argument of Job: see J. Barr, ‘The Book of Job and its Modern Interpreters’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 54 (1971–2), 28–46. For a philosophically nuanced reading of Job, see Martin Warner, ‘Job Versus His Comforters: Rival Paradigms of “Wisdom”’, in Philosophical Finesse: Studies in the Art of Rational Persuasion (Oxford, 1989), 105–51. (62) The Use of Intent and Prophecy, in the Several Ages of the World (London, 1725), 114–15, 147. (63) Jacques Derrida has claimed that ‘the problem of writing’ was central to the intellectual history of the 18th cent., citing Warburton's ‘massive’ influence on Rousseau and Condillac to this effect. Warburton's was a practical theory, Condillac's a poetic one: the transformation of writing from its origin in hieroglyphics was, Derrida claims, ‘the movement of idealization’, witnessing the creation of philosophy as prose. See Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore, 1976), 98, 335 n., 347 n., 272–3, 284–7. For criticism, see J. Milbank, ‘William Warburton: An Eighteenth-Century Bishop Fallen among PostStructuralists’, New Blackfriars, 64 (1983), 315–24, and 374–83. An appreciation of Warburton's scholarly contributions can be found in P. Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time, trans. L. G. Cochrane (Chicago, 1984), 236–45. (64) Divine Legation, ii. 625–6. (65) See P. J. Korshin, ‘The Development of Abstracted Typology in England, 1650–1820’, in E. Miner (ed.), Literary Uses of Typology from the Late Middle Ages to the Present (Princeton, 1977), 147–203. In a letter dated 18 Dec. 1738, Sherlock paid his respects to Warburton's explication of the Mosaic dispensation, although he was quietly critical of his notions regarding the translation of Enoch and the place of providence in that period of Jewish history (Warburton, Selection from Unpublished Papers, 71–6). (66) ‘Sense of the Antients before Christ’, appended to Use and Intent of Prophecy, 231–84. (67) Use and Intent of Prophecy, 267, 277–8. (68) Divine Legation, ii. 484–7, 506. (69) Ibid. 483–4, 491, 498, 500–6. (70) Ibid. 507–8, 511, 516–22, 527–30, 535, 541. (71) Ibid. 543, 549–50.

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine (72) Wesley, Dissertationes In Librum Jobi (London, 1735), 7–14. (73) Ibid. 15–16, 381–7, 395–402. Hurd's correspondent William Mason noted that Pope had recommended the work to Dean Swift because Wesley was ‘a staunch Tory’; Mason admired Wesley as a poet, speculating that this made his commentary all the more valuable since job was a lyrical work (letters xxxix and LVII, Correspondence of Hurd and Mason, 103, 152). (74) Liber Jobi (London, 1742), pp. x-xi (for comments on Warburton), and pp. xv, 132–6 (for an exposition of xix. 25–7); id., An Answer To Mr. Warburton's Remarks On Several Occasional Reflections, So far as they concern the Preface to a late Edition of the Book of Job; In which the Subject and Design of that Divine Poem Are set in a full and clear Light, And some particular Passages in it, Occasionally explain'd. In A Letter To the Reverend Author of the Remarks (London, 1744), 28, 38, 50, 91. His objection to Warburton lay in his method of reasoning: ‘Your Head has been altogether running upon a formal Disputation, logical Arguments, strict Reasoning, on Embarras, Doubts, Difficulties, and Solutions; of which we have hitherto seen very little, if any Appearance.’ (Ibid. 93.) For Warburton's criticisms of Grey, see Remarks On Several Occasional Reflections In Answer to The Rev. Dr. Middleton, Dr. Pococke, The Master of the Charter House, Dr. Richard Grey, and others, (London, 1744), 52–65. (75) Brown, Job's Expectations of a Resurrection Considered, Three Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1747), 51; Peters, A Critical Dissertation on the Book of Job. Wherein The Account given of that Book by the Author of The Divine Legation of Moses demonstrated, &c. is particularly considered; The Antiquity of the Book vindicated; The great Text (Chap. xix. 25– 7) explained; And a Future State shewn to have been a Popular Belief of the Ancient Jews or Hebrews (London, 1751), 3, 22, 101, 126. (76) ‘A Dissertation on the Design and Argumentation of the Book of Job’, appended to An Essay on the Scheme and Conduct, Procedure and Extent of Man's Redemption (London, 1743), 463–527, at 469, 471, 476, 484, 489. Worthington assumed that the whole of ch. 19 was to be read as a refutation of the pagan notion of metempsychosis. (77) A Dissertation On the Book of Job Its Nature, Argument, Age and Author (London, 1749), 175. Garnett's promotion aroused the ire of Mason, inspiring some verses entitled On a late ecclesiastical promotion: ‘Yet forth I believed e'er thou got this preferment | that thy hunting so long had quite emptied thy fob | And in all senses made thee as poor as thy Job.’ These lines earned Mason a rebuke from Hurd: ‘What you write of Garnet is very contemptible. But no matter, let him exult in his good fortune.’ (Correspondence of Hurd and Mason, 15–16 and n.)

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine (78) G. Costard, Some Observations Tending to illustrate The Book of Job, And in particular the Words I know that my Redeemer liveth, &c. JOB XIX. 25 (Oxford, 1747); [Towne], A Free and Candid Examination of the Principles Advanced in the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of London's Sermons, lately published; And his Very Ingenious Discourses on Prophecy (London, 1756). (79) Heath, An Essay Towards A New English Version of The Book of Job, From The Original Hebrew, With A Commentary, And Some Account of His Life (London, 1756); Hodges, Elihu, Or An Enquiry Into the Principal Scope and Design of the Book of Job (London, 1750), p. Ixviii. Intriguingly for a Hutchinsonian, Hodges claimed to follow the advice of Locke in his reading of Scripture, advice usually assumed to be demythologizing in character (Ibid. 63). He also emphasized his distance from as well as his concurrence with aspects of Locke's thought, introducing a quotation from Locke's pref to his Pauline paraphrases ‘without subscribing to all which that learned Man hath wrote as a Philosopher or Commentator’, (Ibid., pp. lxviii–lxix.) These remarks are indicative of Locke's high status at mid-cent., even amongst thinkers generally predisposed to dismiss him as a heretical ultra-Protestant. (80) Elihu, pp. xxv, 60, and passim. (81) N. Smith, ‘The Uses of Hebrew in the English Revolution’, in P. Burke and R. Porter (eds.), Language, Self and Society: A Social History of Language (Cambridge, 1991), 57–71. On the use of Hebrew among learned circles, see D. S. Katz, ‘The Language of Adam in Seventeenth-Century England’, in H. LloydJones, V. Pearl, and B. Worden (eds.), History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper (London, 1981), 132–45. Benjamin Kennicott, Lowth's protege, edited the Hebrew Old Testament to demonstrate the inerrancy of scripture by recovering an ‘orginal text’, see W. McKenna, ‘Benjamin Kennicott: An Eighteenth-Century Researcher’, JTS NS 28 (1977), 445–64. Kennicott opposed Hutchinsonian excesses: A Word to the Hutchinsonians: Or Remarks on Three Extraordinary Sermons lately preached before the Univeristy of Oxford, by the Reverend Dr. Patten, the Reverend Mr. Wetherall, and the Reverend Mr. Home (London, 1756). (82) A Commentary on the Book of Job, In which is inserted the Hebrew Text and English Translation (Cambridge, 1752), vol. i, pp. vi-vii, xiv-xv, 302. (83) Lamb, ‘Job Controversy’; S. Prickett, ‘Poetry and Prophecy: Bishop Lowth and the Hebrew Scriptures in Eighteenth-Century England’, in D. Jasper (ed.), Images of Belief in Literature (London, 1984), 81–103; id., Words and the Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge, 1986), 105–23; id., ‘Romantics and Victorians: From Typology to Symbolism’, in id. (ed.), Reading the Text: Bibical Criticism and Literary Theory (Oxford, 1991), 182–224.

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine (84) Anon., Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Late Right Reverend Robert Lowth, D.D. Lord Bishop of London (London, 1787), 23, 7. Lowth none the less ensured that his nominee for Canterbury, Bishop Moore of Bangor, succeeded to that office. Hurd was also offered the post, but declined it in favour of Moore: Kilvert, Memoirs, 146. (85) See a letter to Hurd dated 5 July 1752: ‘Reckon upon it, that Durham goes to some noble ecclesiastic. 'Tis a morsel only for them. Our Grandees have at last found their way back into the Church. I only wonder they have been so long about it. But be assured that nothing but a new religous revolution to sweep away the fragments that Harry the Vlllth left, after banqueting his courtiers, will drive them out again.’ Letter XLVII in Letters from a Late Eminent Prelate to One of His Friends, ed. R. Hurd (London, 1808), 85–8. Such social resentment extended to those who enjoyed the ready patronage of the nobility. (86) Memoirs of Lowth, 8–9. (87) Lecture xxxii, ‘Of The Poem Of Job’, in Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, trans. G. Gregory (London, 1787), ii. 345–85, at 346, 350, 353, 347. (88) Ibid. ii. 354, 356–7, 383–4. (89) Lecture xxxiv, ‘Of The Manners, Sentiments, And Style Of The Poem of job’, in Lectures, ii. 406–35, at 434, 431. (90) This private correspondence was published by Lowth in an app. to A Letter To The Right Reverend Author of The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated: In Answer to The Appendix To the Fifth Volume of that Work (Oxford, 1765), 104–39. (91) Ibid. 9, 101–2. (92) Ibid. 10. (93) Sharpe, A Defence of Strictures on Dr. Lowth, Respecting Liberty. With Observations on Other Men and Things (2nd edn. London, 1767), 5. (94) A Letter To The Right Reverend The Lord Bishop of O—————d. Containing some Animadversions upon a Character, given of the late Dr. Bentley, In a Letter, from a late Professor in the University of Oxford, to the Right Rev. Author of the Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (2nd edn., London, 1767), 19. (95) See the writings of ‘Warburtonians’, such as J. Brown, A Letter To The Rev. Dr. Lowth, Occasioned by his late Letter to the Right Rev. Author of The Divine Legation of Moses (3rd edn., Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1766), and J. Towne, Remarks On Dr. Lowth's Letter to The Bishop of Gloucester (London, 1766). Both Page 37 of 39

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine men elaborated on Warburton's insinuation, in an app. to the Divine Legation (2nd edn., 1765), that Lowth's interpretation of the Abrahamic dispensation led him to adopt a Hobbist notion of political authority. (96) A Defence of the Lord Bishop of London's Interpretation of The Famous text in the Book of Job, I know that my redeemer liveth, &c. Against the Exceptions of the Bishop of Gloucester, And the Examiner of the Bishop of London's Principles (London, 1760), 91. (97) A. H. Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Later Years (London, 1986), 5–7, 23; Doherty, ‘Sterne and Warburton: Another Look’. (98) Sermons x and xv, ‘Job's Account of the Shortness, and Troubles of Life Considered’, and ‘Job's Expostulation with his Wife’, The Sermons of Mr. Yorick (Oxford, 1926), i. 112–25, 169–80. Cf. J. Lamb, Sterne's Fiction and the Double Principle (Cambridge, 1989), ch. 1. Chs. 27 and 28 of bk. 5 of Tristram Shandy contain a suggestive satire on Walter Shandy's reliance on John Spencer's De Legibus Hebraeorum, Ritualibus et earum Rationibus (1685), a work closely related to the Divine Legation. (99) For a good statement of the ‘orthodox’ view, see M. C. Battesin, ‘Goldsmith: The Comedy of Job’, in The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form In Augustan Literature and the Arts, (Oxford, 1974), 193–214. For the ‘secularizing’ interpretation, J. H. Lehmann, ‘The Vicar of Wakefield: Goldsmith's Sublime, Oriental Job’, ELH 46 (1979), 97–121. The essentially spiritual meaning of the novel is ably argued in T. R. Preston, ‘The Uses of Adversity: Worldly Detachment and Heavenly Treasure in The Vicar of Wakefield’, SP 81 (1984), 229–51. (100) For a pronouncedly secular reading of the text in terms of political ideology, see J. Bender, ‘Prison Reform and the Sentence of Narration in The Vicar of Wakefield’, in F. Nussbaum and L. Brown (eds.), The New 18th Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (London, 1987), 168–88. (101) Critical Dissertation, 459–63. Cf. Lowth, lecture xxxiii, ‘The Poem Of Job Not A Perfect Drama’ (Lectures, ii. 386–405, at 404), ‘whatever rank may be assigned to Job, in a comparison with the Poets of Greece, to whom we must at least allow the merit of art and method; amongst the Hebrews, it must certainly be allowed, in this respect [the dramatic], to be unrivalled’. (102) Answer, 13. (103) The Autobiographies, ed. John Murray (London, 1896), memoir C, p. 282. (104) The importance of this work in Gibbon's career as a writer has been noted in some recent studies of his intellectual development. See P. B. Craddock, Young Edward Gibbon: Gentleman of Letters (Baltimore, 1982), 276–80; W. B. Camochan, Gibbon's Solitude: The Inward World of the Historian (Stanford, Page 38 of 39

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William Warburton, A Polemic Divine Calif., 1987), 24, 42–7; P. R. Ghosh, ‘Gibbon's Dark Ages: Some Remarks on the Genesis of The Decline and Fall’, Journal of Roman Studies, 73 (1983), 1–23. (105) Divine Legation, i. 133, 135, 144, 149, 182, 189. Warburton defended Virgil against those critics who interpreted him as knowingly perpetuating untruths (Ibid. i. 226–8). (106) Gibbon, Critical Observations, in The English Essays of Edward Gibbon, ed. P. Craddock (Oxford, 1972), 133, 134, 136, 141, 159, 152. (107) Ibid. T52–5, 159. Gibbon had composed his Observations before obtaining a copy of Jortin's work, adding his praise in a postscript. (108) Jortin, Six Dissertations Upon Different Subjects (London, 1755), P. iii. (109) ‘On the State of the Dead, as described by Homer and Virgil’, Ibid. 207–46. (110) Ibid. 293–310, 322. (111) Hurd, On The Delicacy Of Friendship. A Seventh Dissertation Address'd to the’ Author of the Sixth (London, 1755). In Oct. 1758 Jortin apologized to Warburton for having been at variance with him on the matter: Warburton, Selection from Unpublished Papers, 220–2. (112) J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Superstition and Enthusiasm in Gibbon's History of Religion’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 8 (1982), 83–94. (113) Letters, ccxxxi, p. 344; vi, pp. 10–11. (114) For the fragments of Warburton's reply, see Selection From Unpublished Papers, 311–15. For answers to Hume, see W. Adams, An Essay On Mr. Hume's Essay On Miracles (London, 1752) and J. Leland, A Supplement to the First and Second Volume of the View of the Deistical Writers (3rd edn., London, 1754–6), iii. 68–127. (115) E. Campbell Mossner, ‘Hume's Four Dissertations: An Essay in Biography and Bibliography’, MP 48 (1950–51), 37–57. (116) Hurd and Warburton, Remarks on Mr. Hume's Essay on The Natural History of Religion: Addressed to the Rev. Dr. Warburton (London, 1757), 94–6.

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Conclusion

Religion and Enlightenment in EighteenthCentury England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke B. W. Young

Print publication date: 1998 Print ISBN-13: 9780198269427 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269427.001.0001

Conclusion CATHERINE OSBORNE

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269427.003.0007

Abstract and Keywords This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study about the English Enlightenment. It investigated the religious controversies during this period and suggested that the traditional and prevalent notions of the Enlightenment still stand in need of considerable refinement. It acknowledged that for every David Hume there was during this period a myriad of religious apologists, and for every Edward Gibbon, whole coteries of intellectually respected clerical opponents. Keywords:   English Enlightenment, religious controversies, David Hume, Edward Gibbon, religious history, England

Whether ‘Enlightenment’ is construed as the systematic application of a newly critical philosophy to traditional problems in philosophy and divinity, or as the winning of an epochally anticlerical initiative in political life, it is a scholarly commonplace that such a phenomenon had its origins in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. In the first characterization, Locke and Newton figure as the presiding geniuses of intellectual advance; in the second, James Harrington and his heirs in the intellectual and political challenge to ‘priestcraft’ are seen as the inspiration behind the pamphleteering of philosophes and republicans. By concentrating on these features of eighteenthcentury England's intellectual landscape, historians have begun to understood the basic contours of an English experience of Enlightenment. This study, however, has sought to demonstrate that such prevalent notions of Enlightenment still stand in need of considerable refinement. Controversy has

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Conclusion been central to the material examined by this study for reasons made clear in an anticlerical aside in an essay by Hume: Few men can bear contradiction; but the clergy too often proceed even to a degree of fury on this head: Because all their credit and livelihood depend upon the belief, which their opinions meet with; and they alone pretend to a divine and supernatural authority, or have any colour representing their antagonists as impious and prophane. The Odium Theologicum, or Theological Hatred, is noted even to a proverb, and means that degree of rancour, which is the most furious and implacable.1 It needs to be acknowledged that for every David Hume there was during this period a myriad of religious apologists; for every Edward Gibbon, whole coteries of intellectually (p.214) respected clerical opponents.2 As the foregoing discussion of the work of William Warburton has demonstrated, it was an irascible English bishop who dictated the attentions, critical and appreciative, of a great many of his contemporaries in mid~eighteenth-century England. Moreover, Warburton had a European influence and reputation well before Hume.3 In France, Condillac's Lockean Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746) owed its notion of ‘signs’ to the linguistic theories of the Divine Legation, and it was to Warburton that Condillac dedicated the English translation of his work in 1756.4 Later in the century, Lessing's transformation of dispensationalist historiography, as controversially developed in Die Enzeihung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of Mankind) (1771), avowed a major debt to the Divine Legation, although Lessing's secularizing discourse led him in directions undreamed of by Warburton and such ‘progressive’ theologians as Edmund Law.5 Similarly, it was the work of Warburton's greatest opponent, Robert Lowth, which matured into the brand of critical biblical study associated with the name of his annotator, J. D. Michaelis, and hence into German historical criticism, the medium through which much of the Victorian crisis of faith was later engendered.6 British influence on Continental (p.215) thought was not, therefore, predominantly a matter of paving the way for a secular Enlightenment. England's true legacy, however, was not merely a unitary programme of Enlightenment but a dialectic between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment tendencies, especially as evinced in religious thought. Richard Watson, a protégé of Edmund Law (whom he considered ‘one of the best metaphysicians of his time’)7 emphasized the religious experience which informed much eighteenth-century English thought in a telling contrast with that of the Continental Enlightenment: It is proper that young men should be furnished with a ready answer to arguments in favour of Infidelity, which are taken from the high literary Page 2 of 6

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Conclusion character of those who profess it; let them remember then, that Bacon, Boyle, Newton, Grotius, Locke, Euler—that Addison, Hartley, Haller, West, Jenyns—that Lords Nottingham, King, Barrington, Lyttleton with an hundred other laymen, who were surely as eminent for their literary attainments in every kind of science as either Bolingbroke or Voltaire, were professed believers of Christianity. While Watson believed that ‘We live in a dissolute but enlightened age’, such a statement sprang not from a commitment to the forces of proto-secularization or even to historical criticism per se, but, rather, from the spirit of ‘Moderation’ which he laid against ‘rash expositors of points of doubtful disposition; intolerant fabricators of metaphysical Creeds, and incongruous Systems of Theology!’8 It was as an antidogmatic Protestant theologian, firmly attached to sola scriptura reasoning, that Watson considered himself as over-seeing the engines of progress, and not as any sort of Christian equivalent of the philosophes. Watson had his own involvement with the two ‘master-pieces’ of Pocock's Christianized notion of Enlightenment, Warburton's Divine Legation and Gibbon's Decline and Fall. In answering Gibbon (an activity which had become something of a cottage industry amongst late eighteenth-century (p.216) clerics),9 Watson adverted to those polemical divines who were ‘angry with me for not having bespattered him with a portion of that theological dirt, which Warburton had so liberally thrown at his antagonists’.10 Considering their fundamental disagreements, Watson's relations with Gibbon, cemented after he had published his answer to the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters of the Decline and Fall, were characteristically civilized in tone, if not in practical experience.11 Watson's commitment to reforming Whiggism and the most credally minimal variant of sola scriptura Anglicanism left him somewhat marginalized in the counter-revolutionary ethos of much conservative and religious thought in the 1780s and 1790s.12 It was, however, as an answerer to Gibbon's scepticism and to the revived deism of Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason that Watson can be seen as a broader contributor to the religiously conservative instincts of England's clerical Enlightenment.13 At the close of his answer to Paine, Watson affirmed his commitment to religious belief as opposed to entertaining sceptical dissension, declaring that ‘In the conclusion of my Apology for Christianity, I informed Mr. Gibbon of my extreme aversion to public controversy. I am now twenty years older than I was then, and I perceive that this my aversion has increased with my age.’14 Such an aversion had become a commonplace of Christian apologetic by the 1790s, as the controversies of the eighteenth century gave way to a counter-revolutionary ethos. High Church Tories such as Bishop Samuel Horsley (p.217) used the scientific and philosophical inheritance of the age to ward off revolutionaries and infidels, much as William Van Mildert, the early nineteenth-century bishop of Durham, turned to the work of Daniel

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Conclusion Waterland, a model of early eighteenth-century orthodoxy, in his defence of reasonable belief15 Clerics such as Watson, Horsley, and Van Mildert managed to steer a course somewhere between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, an area of intellectual and religious life which this study has demonstrated to be more ‘typical’ of eighteenth-century English thought than anything which might be more readily described as belonging to the mainstream of a European Enlightenment. Such a realization may be gleaned from the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who, as poet, philosopher, theologian, and social critic actively bridges the Unitarianism of the 1790s, the extreme end of England's Enlightenment, and the conservative religious instincts of the Romantic reaction.16 In his notion of the clerisy, the intellectual élite which oversaw the preservation and strengthening of a nation's cultural inheritance in schools, universities and churches, Coleridge provided a prescriptive delineation of a body of men whose work and defence of that work has provided the central subject of the present study.17 Deploring the supposed rationalism of the eighteenth century, and seeking solace in seventeenth-century theology, Coleridge had aimed at undermining ‘rationalism’ by providing much of the impetus for a revived sense of mystery in English religion, as well as by defending a Tory political vision drawn from the pages of Burke.18 (p.218) Coleridge, who was indebted to Daniel Waterland for his work on the Trinity, and who turned away from an early interest in the work of David Hartley in favour of the work of William Law, demonstrates that the boundaries between England's Enlightenment and its Counter-Enlightenment are decidedly permeable.19 It is the very penetrability of these boundaries which conclusively demonstrates the essentially religious basis of much eighteenth-century speculation in England. Coleridge would take this tension between Enlightenment and CounterEnlightenment into the first three decades of the nineteenth century, commenting in his Notebooks on much of the legacy of England's clerical Enlightenment. In Aids to Reflection, Coleridge urged clergy and laity to read the works of Daniel Waterland, ‘whose Judgement and strong sound Sense are as unquestionable as his learning and Orthodoxy. A Clergyman, in full Orders, who has never read the works of Bull and Waterland, has a duty to perform.’ Coleridge, rather surprisingly, was more circumspect in recommending a reading of William Law, noting how critics would cry out against anyone influenced by his later writings, ‘It is Mysticism, all taken out of WILLIAM LAW, after he had lost his senses, poor Man in brooding over the Visions of a delirious German cobbler, Jacob Behmen.’ Critical of Boehme as he was, Coleridge noted that it was the Law of the Serious Call with whom he was acquainted rather than Law the mystic, although he admitted to having read the Spirit of Prayer earlier in his life.20 That so much of Coleridge's thinking in this respect was preoccupied with the religion of subsequently neglected eighteenth-century

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Conclusion divines is a further demonstration of their centrality in any proper understanding of eighteenth-century English intellectual culture. Notes:

(1) ‘Of National Characters’, in Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, ed. E. F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1987), 199–201 n. (2) S. T. McCloy, Gibbon's Antagonism to Christianity (Chapel Hill, NC, 1933). (3) On the nature of such claims in the history of philosophy, see B. Kuklick, ‘Seven Thinkers and How They Grew: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz; Locke, Berkeley, Hume; Kant’, in R. Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Q. Skinner (eds.), Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy (Cambridge, 1984), 125–39. (4) H. Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1730–1860 (2nd edn., Minneapolis, 1983), 21–8. (5) N. Boyle, ‘Lessing, Biblical Criticism and the Origins of German Classical Culture’, German Life and Letters, NS, 35 (1980–1), 196–213. On ‘progressivism’ in 18th-cent. English theology, see O. Chadwick, From Boussuet to Newman (2nd edn. Cambridge, 1987), 74–95, 219–24, and R. S. Crane, ‘Anglican Apologetics and the Idea of Progress, 1699–1745’, MP 31 (1933–4), 273–306, 349–82. (6) J. C. O'Flahcrty, ‘J. D. Michaelis: Rational Biblicist’, JEGP 49 (1950), 172–81. Cf. H. W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, 1974); E. S. Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770–1880 (Cambridge, 1975); H. G. Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World (London, 1984); J. Drury, Critics of the Bible 1724–1873 (Cambridge, 1989). (7) Anecdotes of the Life of Richard Watson, Bishop of Landaff (London, 1817), 8. (8) Preface to A Collection of Theological Tracts (Cambridge, 1785), vol. i, pp. vxx, at pp. x—xi, xiii, xvi, xviii-xix. (9) Watson, An Apology for Christianity, In a Series of Letters, Addressed to Edward Gibbon, Esq., Author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Cambridge, 1776); McCloy, Gibbon's Antagonism to Christianity, chs. 2–4. (10) Apology, 60–1. (11) Gibbon, The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon, ed. J. Murray (London, 1896), 322; letter to Watson, 2 Nov. 1776, in The Letters of Edward Gibbon, ed. J. E. Norton (London, 1956), ii. 119; Watson, Anecdotes, 61–2.

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Conclusion (12) On which culture, considered as an English ‘counter-Enlightenment’, see N. Aston, ‘Horne and Heterodoxy: The Defence of Anglican Beliefs in the Late Enlightenment’, EHR 108 (1993), 895–919. (13) F. K. Prochaska, ‘Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason Revisited’, JHI 33 (1972), 561–76; Jack Fruchtman, Jr., Thomas Paine and the Religion of Nature (Baltimore, 1993). (14) An Apology for the Bible, In a Series of Letters, Addressed to Thomas Paine (London, 1796), 384. (15) F. C. Mather, High Church Prophet: Bishop Samuel Horsley (1733–1806) and the Caroline Tradition in the Later Georgian Church (Oxford, 1992); E. A. Varley, The Last of the Prince Bishops: William Van Mildert and the High Church Movement of the Early Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1992), 4, 104–6. (16) For useful discussion of allied themes, see J. Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass., 1981). (17) Coleridge, On The Constitution of the Church and State, ed. John Colmer (Princeton, 1979), 41–9. Cf. S. Prickett, ‘Coleridge and the Idea of the Clerisy’ in W. B. Crawford (ed.), Reading Coleridge: Approaches and Applications (Ithaca, NY, 1979), 252–73. (18) A. Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt Against the Eighteenth Century: A Study of the Political and Social Thinking of Burke, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey (2nd edn., London, 1960). (19) Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer (Princeton, 1993), 313 n; id., Biographia Literaria: Or Biographical Sketches of My Life and Opinions, ed. J. Engell and W.Jackson Bate (Princeton, 1983), i. 106–14, 140–1, 151–2. (20) Aids to Reflection, 313 n., 384–5.

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Religion and Enlightenment in EighteenthCentury England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke B. W. Young

Print publication date: 1998 Print ISBN-13: 9780198269427 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269427.001.0001

(p.219) Bibliography Manuscript Sources

Bodleian Library, Oxford MS Eng. misc. c. 116, fo. 6(v) MS Eng. Lett, d.74, fos. 144–7 MS Autogr. d.14, fo. 83 MS Eng. poet, c.51, p. 237a/b MS Eng. misc. c.816, fos. 57–60 MS Eng. th. c. 40, fos. 97–8 MS Eng. th. c.41, fos. 214–15, fos. 224–9 MS Eng. th. c.41, fos. 16–17, fos. 31–2, fos. 88–90, fos. 163–5 MS Eng. th. c.53, fos. 9–10 MS Eng. th. c.31, fos. 339, fos. 367–70 MS Eng. misc. d.150, fos. 154–5 MS Percy, c.3, fos. 45–6, 47, 78–9. British Library Add. MS 5832, fo. 147 Add. MS 4301, fos. 131–2 Page 1 of 42

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Bibliography Add. MSS 5831, fo. 172 Add. MS 5831, fos. 172–3 Add. MS 5831, fos. 173–5 Add. MS 6396, fo. 14 Add. MS Eg. 2325, fos. 15–16 Add. MS Eg. 2325, fos. 17–19 Add. MS Eg. 4301, fos. 127–8 Add. MS Eg. 2325, fos. 23–5 Add. MS Eg. 2325, fo. 23–5 Add. MS 34, 486, fo. 26 Add. MS 39, 311, fo. 109. Magdalene College, Cambridge Peckard Papers; Waterland Papers (p.220) Primary Sources

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Bibliography Legation, and what the Author hath brought to support it, are considered (London, 1741). BERKELEY, GEORGE , The Works, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (9 vols., London, 1948–57). [ BERRIDGE, JOHN ], A Fragment of the True Religion, Being the Substance of Two Letters From a Methodist-Preacher in Cambridgeshire, to a Clergyman in Nottinghamshire (London, 1760). BLACKBURNE, FRANCIS , The Works Theological and Miscellaneous of the Revd. Francis Blackburne, Archdeacon of Cleveland ed. Francis Blackburne, LL. B. (7 vols., Cambridge, 1804–5). ——, An Apology for the Authors of a Book, intituled, Free and Candid Disquisitions (London, 1750). ——, Remarks on The Revd. Dr. Powell's Sermons In Defence of Subscriptions, Preached before the University of Cambridge On the Commencement Sunday, 1757 (London, 1758). ——, The Confessional (3rd edn., London, 1770). ——, A Short Historical View of the Controversy. Concerning An Intermediate State and the Separate Existence of the Soul Between Death and the General Resurrection. Deduced from the Beginning of the Protestant Reformation to the Present Times (2nd edn., London, 1772). ——, Remarks on Johnson's Life of Milton (London, 1780). ——, Memoirs of Thomas Hollis (2 vols., London, 1780). BLAKE, WILLIAM , William Blake's Writings, ed. G. E. Bentley, Jr. (2 vols., Oxford, 1978). (p.221) BOEHME, JACOB , The Third Book of the Authour being The Highe and Deepe Searching out of the Threefold Life of Man (or according to) The Three Principles, trans. John Sparrow (London, 1650). ——, Mysterium Magnum, Or An Exposition of the First Book of Moses called Genesis, trans. John Ellistone (London, 1654). BOSWELL, JAMES , Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (6 vols., Oxford, 1934–50). BOTT, THOMAS , An Answer To The Reverend Mr. Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses, In Three Parts (London, 1743).

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Bibliography (p.222) CLARKE, JOHN , A Defence of Dr. Clarke's Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (London, 1732). ——, A Third Defence of the Being and Attributes of God, (London, 1733). [ CLARKE, JOSEPH ], Dr. Clarke's Notions of Space Examin'd. In Vindication of the translator of Archbishop King's Origin of Evil (London, 1733). CLARKE, SAMUEL , A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God: More Particularly in Answer to Mr. Hobbes, Spinoza, and their Followers (London, 1705). ——, The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity (London, 1712). ——, (ed.), A Collection of Papers, which passed between the late learned Mr. Leibnitz, and Dr. Clarke, in the Years 1715 and 1716, relating to the principles of natural philosophy and religion (London, 1717). ——, The Modest Plea, &c. Continuted (London, 1720). CLAYTON, ROBERT , An Essay on Spirit (2nd edn., London, 1752). COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR , On The Constitution of the Church and State, ed. John Colmer (Princeton, 1979). ——, Biographia Literaria: Or Biographical Sketches of My Life and Opinions, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (2 vols., Princeton, 1983). ——, Aids to Refection, ed. John Beer (Princeton, 1993). CONYBEARE, JOHN , The Case of Subscription to Articles of Religion Consider'd (Oxford, 1725). COOPER, SAMUEL , A Full Refutation of the Reasons Advanced In Defence of the Petition, Which is intended to be offered to Parliament by some of the Clergy, For the Abolition of Subscription of the Articles and Liturgy (London, 1772). CORNISH, JOSEPH , A Letter to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Carlisle (London, 1777). COSTARD, G., Some Observations Tending to illustrate The Book of fob, And in particular the Words I know that my Redeemer liveth, &c. JOB XIX 25 (Oxford, 1747). CRANE, THOMAS , Job's Assurance of the Resurrection. A Sermon at Winwick in the Country Palatine of Lancaster, June 25. 1689. At the Funeral of the Reverend Richard Sherlock, D.D. late Rector there (London, 1690).

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Bibliography CUMBERLAND, RICHARD , A Letter To The Right Reverend The Lord Bishop of O———d. Containing some Animadversions and a Character, given of the late Dr. Bentley, In a Letter, from a late Professor in the University of Oxford, to the Right Rev. Author of the Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (2nd edn., London, 1767). (p.223) DIDEROT, DENIS , and D'ALEMBERT, JEAN LE ROND , ‘Discours préliminaire des éditeurs’, in Encyclopédic, ou Dictionnaire des Bibliography sciences, des arts et des métiers par une société de gens de lettres (Paris, 1751), vol. i, pp. i-xlv. DISNEY, JOHN , A Letter to the Most Reverend the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, On the Present Opposition to any Further Reformation (London, 1774). ——, Remarks on Dr. Balguy's Sermon, Preached in Lambeth Chapel, at the Consecration of the Bishops of Lichfield and Coventry, and of Bangor, February 12, 1773. In a Letter to that Gentleman (London, 1775). ——, A Short View of the Controversies Occasioned by The Confessional, and the Petition to Parliament for Relief in the Matter of Subscription to the Liturgy and Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (2nd edn., London, 1775). ——, Reasons for Resigning the Rectory of Panton and Vicarage of Swinderby in Lincolnshire; and Quitting the Church of England (2nd edn., London, 1783). ——, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of John fortin, D.D. (London, 1792). ——, A Short Memoir of the Rev. Robert Edward Garnham (London, 1814). EDWARDS, JOHN , Socinianism Unmask'd (London, 1696). EDWARDS, JONATHAN , The Exposition Given By My Lord Bishop of Sarum, Of the Second Article of Our Religion Examined (London, 1702). EDWARDS, JOSEPH , The Duty of Forgiveness of Enemies Stated and Proved; And of the Excellency. Usefulness, and Truth of the Christian Religion. A Sermon Preached before the University of Oxford On Sunday at St. Peter's, March 13 1742–1743 (London, 1743). ERASMUS, DESIDERIUS , The Praise of Folly, trans. Betty Radice in The Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto, 1986), xxvii. FLEMING, CALEB , A Survey of the Search After Souls, By Dr. Coward, Dr. S. Clarke, Mr. Baxter, Dr. Sykes. Dr. Law, Mr. Peckard, and Others (London, 1758). GARNETT, JOHN , A. Dissertation On the Book of Job Its Nature, Argument, Age and Author (London, 1749). Page 6 of 42

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Bibliography Gentleman's Magazine, And Historical Chronicle, 43 (1772). GIBBON, EDWARD , The Miscellaneous Works, ed. John, Lord Sheffield (3 vols., London, 1796–1815). ——, The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon, ed. John Murray (London, 1896). ——, The Letters of Edward Gibbon, ed. J. E. Norton (3 vols., London, 1956). ——, The English Essays of Edward Gibbon, ed. Patricia Craddock (Oxford, 1972). (p.224) GOLDSMITH, OLIVER , The Vicar of Wakefield, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford, 1974). GRANT, JOHNSON , A Summary History of the English Church (4 vols., London, 1811–25). GRETTON, PHILIPS , A Review of the Argument A Priori, In Relation to the Being and Attributes of God: In Reply to Dr. Clarke's Answer to a Seventh Letter concerning that Argument, printed at the end of the last Edition of his Boyleian Lectures (London, 1726). GREY, RICHARD , Liber Jobi (London, 1742). ——, An Answer To Mr. Warburton's Remarks On Several Occasional reflections, So far as they concern the Preface to a late Edition of the Book of Job; In which the Subject and Design of that Divine Poem Are set in a full and clear Light, And some particular Passages in it, Occasionally explained. In A Letter To the Reverend Author of the Remarks (London, 1744). GUNNING, HENRY , Reminisences of the University, Town, and Country of Cambridge From the Year 1780 (2nd edn., London, 1855). HARDY, SAMUEL , A Vindication of The Church of England, In Requiring Subscription to Her Thirty Nine Articles; In an Account of the Rise and Occasion of those Articles; Humbly submitted to the Consideration of every sincere Member of the Church of England (London, 1773). HARRIS, WILLIAM , Civil Establishments in Religion, A Ground of Infidelity; Or, The Two Extremes Shewn to be United (London, 1767). HARTLEY, DAVID , Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, And His Expectations (2 vols., London, 1749). HARTLEY, THOMAS , Paradise Restored: Or A Testimony to the Doctrine of the Blessed Millennium (London, 1764).

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Bibliography HEATH, THOMAS , An Essay Towards A New English Version Of The Book of Job, From The Original Hebrew. With A Commentary, And Some Account Of His Life (London, 1756). HEGEL, G. W. F., Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. T. M. Knox and A. V. Miller (Oxford, 1985). HENLEY, SAMUEL , A Candid Refutation of the Heresy Imputed By R. O. Nicholas Esquire to the Reverend S. Henley of Williamsburg (Cambridge, 1774). History, Debates and Proceedings of Both Houses of Parliament of Great Britain, From the Year 1743 to the Year 1774 (London, 1792), vii. 160–71. HOADLY, BENJAMIN , The Nature of the Kingdom, or Church, of Christ (London, 1717). HODGES, WALTER , Elihu, Or An Enquiry Into the Principal Scope and Design of the Book of Job (London, 1750). (p.225) HODGSON, ROBERT , The Life of the Right Reverend Beilby Porteus, D.D., Late Bishop of London (London, 1811). HOOKE, NATHANIEL , The Roman History, from the Building of Rome to the Ruin of the Commonwealth (3 vols., London, 1738–71). HORNE, GEORGE , The Works, ed. William Jones (4 vols., London, 1818). ——, The Theology and Philosophy in Cicero's Somnium Scipionis, Explained. Or, A Brief Attempt to demonstrate that the Newtonian System is perfectly agreeable to the Notions of the Wisest Ancients: And the Mathematical Principles are the one sure ones (London, 1751). ——, The Christian King: A Sermon Preached before the University at Oxford, At St. Mary's, On Friday, January 30. 1761, Being the Day appointed to be observed as the Day of the Martyrdom of King Charles I (Oxford, 1761). ——, A Letter to the Right Honourable the Lord North, Chancellor of the University of Oxford. Concerning Subscription to the xxxix Articles; and Particularly The Undergraduate Subscription in That University (Oxford, 1773). HORSLEY, SAMUEL , The Charges of Samuel Horsely, LL. D. F.R.S. F.A.S. Late Lord Bishop of St. Asaph; Delivered At His Several Visitations Of the Dioceses of St. David's, Rochester, and St. Asaph (Dundee, 1813). HOTHAM, DURAND , The Life of Jacob Behmen (London, 1654). HUME, DAVID , A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1978). Page 8 of 42

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Bibliography ——, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. H. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Niddich (Oxford, 1975). ——, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. John Valdimir Price (Oxford, 1976). ——, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1987). HURD, RICHARD , On The Delicacy Of Friendship. A Seventh Dissertation Address'd to the Author of the Sixth (London, 1755). ——, A Discourse, by way of general preface to the quarto edition of Bishop Warburton's works, containing some account of the life, writings, and character of the author (London, 1794). ——, The Correspondence of Richard Hurd and William Mason: And Letters of Richard Hurd to Thomas Gray, ed. Ernest Harold Pearce and Leonard Whitley (Cambridge, 1932). ——, and WARBURTON, WILLIAM , Remarks on Mr. Hume's Essay on The Natural History of Religion: Addressed to the Rev. Dr. Warburton (London, 1757). (p.226) [ HUTCHESON, ELIZABETH ], A Short Account of the Two Charitable Foundations At King's-Cliffe, In the County of Northampton (Stamford, 1755). [ HUTCHINSON, JOHN ], Moses's Principia. Of The Invisible Parts of Matter; Of Motion; Of Visible Forms; And of their Dissolution, and Reformation (London, 1724). IBBETSON, JAMES , A Plea for the Subscription of the Clergy to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (3rd edn., London, 1768). JACKSON, JOHN , The Grounds of Civil and Ecclesiastical Government, Briefly Considered (London, 1718). ——, The Existence and Unity of God: Proved from his Nature and Attributes, Being a Vindication of Dr. Clarke's Dissertation on the Being and Attributes of God (London, 1734). ——, The Belief of a Future State Proved to be a Fundamental Article of the Religion of the Hebrews. And the Doctrine of the Ancient Philosophers Concerning a Future State, shewn to be consistent with Reason, and their Belief of it demonstrated: And the whole System of Heathen Theology Explained (London, 1745).

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Bibliography JEBB, JOHN , Letters on the Subject of Subscription to the Liturgy and ThirtyNine Articles of the Church of England (London, 1772). ——, A Short State of the Reasons for a Late Resignation (Cambridge, 1773). ——, Remarks Upon the Present Mode of Education in the University of Cambridge: To which is added, a proposal for its improvement (Cambridge, 1774). JOHNSON, SAMUEL , ‘Milton’, in The Lives of the English Poets; and a criticism of their works, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905), i. 84–194. JONES, JOHN , Free and Candid Disquisitions Relating to the Church of England, and the Means of Advancing Religion therein (London, 1749). JONES, WILLIAM , An Essay on the First Principles of Natural Philosophy (Oxford, 1762). ——, Remarks on the Principles and Spirit of a. Work, Entitled The Confessional (London, 1770). ——, The Scholar Armed Against the Errors of the Times (2 vols., London, 1795). ——, Memoirs of the Life, Studies, and writings of the Right Reverend George Horne, D.D., Late Lord Bishop of Norwich. To Which is Added, His Lordship's Own Collection of Thoughts on a Variety of Great and Interesting Subjects (London, 1795). JORTIN, JOHN , Remarks on Ecclesiastical History (5 vols., London, 1751–73). ——, Six Dissertations Upon Different Subjects (London, 1755). (p.227) [ KENNICOTT, BENJAMIN ], A Word to the Hutchinsonians: Or remarks on Three Extraordinary Sermons lately preached before the University of Oxford, by the Reverend Dr. Patten, the Reverend Mr. Wetherall, and The Reverend Mr. Horne (London, 1756). KIDELL, J., A Genuine and Succinct Narrative of a scandalous, obscene, and exceedingly profane Libel, Entitled An Essay on Woman, as also of Other Poetical Pieces, containing the most atrocious blasphemies (London, 1763). KING, PETER, LORD , The Life of John Locke, with Extracts from his Correspondence, Journals and Common-Place Books (2nd edn., 2 vols., London 1830). KING, WILLIAM , An Essay on the Origin of Evil, ed. and trans. Edmund Law (London, 1731).

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Bibliography LAW, EDMUND , An Enquiry Into the Ideas of Space, Time, Immensity, and Eternity; As also the Self existence, Necessary existence, and unity of the Divine Nature: In Answer to a Book lately Publish'd by Mr. Jackson, Entitled, The Existence and Unity of God Proved from his Nature and Attributes (Cambridge, 1734). ——, Considerations on the State of the World, With Regard to the Theory of Religion (Cambridge, 1745). ——, The True Nature and Intent of Religion, A Sermon Preached in the Cathedral Church of Durham, On the 15th of May, 1768 (Newcastle, 1768). ——, Reflections on the Life and Character of Christ (Cambridge, n.d.). ——, Considerations on the Propriety of Requiring a Subscription to Articles of Faith (2nd edn., London, 1774). LAW, WILLIAM , The Works (9 vols., London, 1762–85). ——, A Practical Treatise Upon Christian Perfection (London, 1726). ——, A Serious Call To A Devout And Holy Life (London, 1729). ——, The Case of Reason, Or Natural Religion. Fairly and Fully Stated. In Answer to a Book entitul'd. Christianity as Old as the Creation (London, 1731). ——, A Short but Sufficient Confutation of the Reverend Dr. Warburton's Projected Defence (As he calls it) Of Christianity. In His Divine Legation of Moses. In A Letter To the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of London (London, 1757). LELAND, JOHN , A Supplement to the First and Second Volume of the View of the Deistical Writers (3rd edn., 3 vols., London, 1754–6). LINDSEY, THEOPHILUS , The Book of Common Prayer Reformed According to the Plan of the Late Dr. Samuel Clarke (London, 1774). ——, A Farewell Address to the Parishioners of Catterick (London, 1774). LINDSEY, THEOPHILUS , A Sermon Preached At the Opening of the Chapel in Essex-House, Essex-Street, in the Strand (London, 1774). (p.228) LINDSEY, THEOPHILUS , The Apology of Theophilus Lindsey, M.A. On Resigning the Village of Catterick, Yorkshire (4th edn., London, 1782). ——, Letters of Theophilus Lindsey, ed. H. McLachlan (Manchester, 1920). LOCKE, JOHN , The Works, ed. Edmund Law (4 vols., London, 1777). Page 11 of 42

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Bibliography ——, A Letter Concerning Toleration, trans. William Popple (London, 1689). ——, The Reasonableness of Christianity, As Delivered in the Scriptures (London, 1695). ——, A Second Letter Concerning Toleration (London, 1690). ——, A Third Letter For Toleration, To The Author of the Third Letter Concerning Toleration (London, 1692). ——, A Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity, &c, From Mr. Edwards's Reflections (London, 1695). ——, A Second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity, &c. (London, 1697). ——, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. John W. and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford, 1989). ——, A Paraphrase and Notes on The Epistles of St. Paul to the Galatians, 1 and Corinthians, Romans, Ephesians, ed. Arthur W. Wainwright (2 vols., Oxford, 1987). ——, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975). LOWTH, ROBERT , Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, trans. G. Gregory (2 vols., London, 1787). ——, A Letter To The Right Reverend Author of The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated: In Answer to The Appendix To the Fifth Volume of that Work (Oxford, 1765). LUDLAM, WILLIAM , Two Essays on Justification and the Influence of the Holy Spirit (London, 1788). MADAN, MARTIN , A Full and Compleat Answer to the Capital Errors, Contained in the Writings of the late Rev. William Law, M.A. In A Letter to a Friend. To which are prefixed, some cautions to the readers of Mr. Law's Works (London, 1763). MEADLEY, G. W., Memoirs of William Paley, D.D. (Sunderland, 1809). MILNER, ISAAC , An Account of the Life and Character of the Late Rev. Joseph Milner. M.A. (London, 1804). MILNER, JOSEPH , Gibbon's Account of Christianity Considered: Together with some strictures on Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (York, 1781). Page 12 of 42

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Bibliography ——, Essays on Several Religious Subjects (York, 1789). MILTON, JOHN , Eikonoclastes, in The Columbia Edition of the Works of John Milton (New York, 1932), v. 61–309. (p.229) MORGAN, THOMAS , Philosophical Principles of Medicine (London, 1725). ——, A Collection of Tracts, Relating to the Right of Private Judgment, the Sufficiency of Scripture, and the Terms of Church-Communion; Occasioned by the late Trinitarian Controversy (London, 1726). ——, The Moral Philosopher: In A Dialogue Between Philalethes a Christian Deist, and. Theophanes a Christian Jew (London, 1737). ——, A Brief Examination of the Rev. Mr. Warburtoris Divine Legation of Moses (London, 1742). NEWMAN, JOHN HENRY , The Arians of the Fourth Century (Oxford, 1833). ——, Apologia pro vita sua, ed. Martin J. Svaglic (Oxford, 1967). NEWTON, BENJAMIN , The Humble Petition of the Free-Thinkers To The Right Honourable P—p E—l of H—k, L—d H—h C—r of G—t B—n; Setting forth their Right of Patronage, in a certain Book, called the Divine L—n of M—s, demonstrated &c. To be restored to the same (London, 1756). NEWTON, Sir ISAAC , Opticks: Or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light (2nd edn., London, 1718). ——, Correspondence, ed. H. W. Turnbull et al. (7 vols., Cambridge, 1959–77). ——, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. Andrew Motte (1729; 2 vols., London, 1968). ——, Sir Isaac Newton's Chronology, Abridged by Himself (London, 1728). ——, Observations on the Prophecies of Daniel, and Apocalypse of St John (London, 1733). NICHOLS, JOHN , Literary Anecdotes of the eighteenth century (2nd edn., 9 vols., London, 1812–16). OKELY, FRANCIS , Memoirs of the Life, Death, Burial and Wonderful Writings of Jacob Behmen (Northampton, 1780). ——, The Divine Visions of John Engelbrecht, A Lutheran Protestant, Whom God Sent From The Dead To Be A Preacher of Repentance and Faith to the Christian World (Northampton, 1780). Page 13 of 42

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Bibliography ——, A Faithful Narrative of God's Gracious Dealings With Hiel (Northampton, 1781). ——, The Disjointed Watch, Or Truth rent asunder and divided: a similitude, attempted in metre (Northampton, 1783). PAINE, THOMAS , The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology (2 vols., London, 1794–5). PALEY, WILLIAM , A Defence of the Considerations on the Propriety of Requiring a Subscription to Articles of Faith: In Reply to a Late Answer from the Clarendon Press (London, 1774). (p.230) PALEY, WILLIAM , The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (London, 1785). ——, A Short Memoir of The Life of Edmund Law, D.D., Bishop of Carlisle (London, 1800). PARRY, RICHARD , A Defence of the Lord Bishop of London's Interpretation of The Famous text in the Book of Job. I know that my redeemer liveth, &c. Against the Exceptions of the Bishop of Gloucester, And the Examiner of the Bishop of London's Principles (London, 1760). ‘PASQUIN’, ‘Cambridge Triumphant’, in J. Almon (ed.), An Asylum for Fugitive Pieces in Prose and Verse, Not in any other Collection With Several Pieces Never Before Published (2nd edn., 4 vols., London, 1785–95), iii. 136–8. PECKARD, PETER , A Sermon on the Nature and Extent of Civil and Religious Liberty, (London, 1754). ——, A Dissertation on Revelations, xii. Ver. 13 (London, 1756). ——, A Sermon Preached at the Visitation of the Rev. Archdeacon Cholwell, At Huntingdon, May 19, 1772 (Cambridge, 1772). ——, Subscription, Or Historical Extracts (London, 1776). ——, The Unalterable Nature of Virtue and Vice, A Sermon, Preached at St. James's, Westminster, Sunday, April 24, 1775. Containing Remarks on the Principles advanced by the late Lord Chesterfield (London, 1776). ——, The Nature and Extent of Civil and Religious Liberty. A Sermon Preached before the University of Cambridge, November the 5, 1783 (Cambridge, 1783). ——, Piety, Benevolence, and Loyalty, Recommended. A Sermon Preached before the University of Cambridge, January 30, 1784 (Cambridge, 1784).

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Bibliography ——, Am I Not a Man? and a Brother (London, 1788). ——, The Neglect of a Known Duty is a Sin, A Sermon Preached Before the University of Cambridge, on Sunday Jan. 31, 1790 (Cambridge, 1790). ——, National Crimes the Cause of National Punishment. A Discourse Deliver'd in the Cathedral Church of Peterborough, on the Fast-Day, Feb. 25th, 1795 (Peterborough, n.d.). PETERS, CHARLES , A Critical Dissertation on the Book of Job. Wherein The Account given of that Book by the Author of The Divine Legation of Moses demonstrated, &c. is particularly considered; The Antiquity of the Book vindicated; The great Text (Chap. 7) explained; And a Future State shewn to have been a Popular Belief of the Ancient Jews or Hebrews (London, 1751). POPE, ALEXANDER , The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London, 1963). POWELL, WILLIAM SAMUEL , A Defence of the Subscriptions required in the Church of England (London, 1757). (p.231) PRIESTLEY, JOSEPH , An history of the corruptions of Christianity (2 vols., Birmingham, 1782). PROAST, JONAS , The Argument of the Letter Concerning Toleration, Briefly Consider'd and Answer'd (Oxford, 1690). ——, A Third Letter Concerning Toleration: In Defence of the Argument of the Letter concerning Toleration briefly considered and answer'd (London, 1691). ——, A Second Letter to the Author of the Three Letters for Toleration from the Author of the Argument of the Letter Concerning Toleration Briefly Considered and Answer'd, And of the Defence of it (Oxford, 1704). RANDOLPH, THOMAS , A Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity from the Exceptions of a late Pamphlet Entitled An Essay on Spirit &c. (Oxford, 1753). ——, The Reasonableness of Requiring Subscription to Articles of Religion From Persons to be Admitted to Holy Orders, or a Cure of Souls, Vindicated in a Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Oxford in the Year 1771 (Oxford, 1771). ——, A Vindication of the Worship of the Son and the Holy Ghost Against the Exceptions of Mr. Theophilus Lindsey From Scripture and Antiquity, Being A Supplement to a Treatise Formerly published and entitled A Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity (Oxford, 1775).

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Bibliography RIDLEY, GLOUCESTER , Three Letters to the Author of The Confessional (London, 1768). ROBINSON, ROBERT , Arcana: Or the Principles of the Late Petitioners to Parliament for Relief in the Matter of Subscription (Cambridge, 1774). ROMAINE, WILLIAM , The Divine Legation of Moses demonstrated from his having made express Mention of, and insisted so much on the Doctrine of a future state; Whereby Mr. Warburton's Attempt to demonstrate the Divine Legation of Moses from his Omission of a future State is proved to be absurd, and destructive of all Revelation. A Sermon (London, 1739). ROTHERHAM, JOHN , Government a Divine Institution. A Sermon Preached before the University of Oxford At St Mary's. On the Twenty-Nineth of May, 1765 (London, 1766). ——, An Essay on Establishments in Religion With Remarks on The Confessional (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1767). RUTHERFORTH, THOMAS , A Defence of a Charge Concerning Subscriptions, In a Letter to the Author of The Confessional (Cambridge, 1767). SACHEVERELL, HENRY , The Perils of False Brethren, both in Church; and State (London, 1709). (p.232) SACHEVERELL, HENRY , False Notions of Liberty in Religion and Government Destructive of Both (London, 1713). ST JOHN, HENRY , VISCOUNT BOLINGBROKE , The Philosophical Works, ed. David Mallet (5 vols., London, 1754). SCRIBLERUS, MARTINUS , jun. [Pope, Alexander et al.], Proposals For Printing By Subscription, In One volume in Quarto, A Commentary Critical and Theological Upon the Learned Mr William Warburton's Apologetical Dedication to the Reverend Dr Henry Stebbing (London, 1746). SECKER, THOMAS , The Autobiography of Thomas Secker, ed. John S. Macauley and R. W. Greaves (Lawrence, Kans, 1988). SEDGWICK, ADAM , A Discourse On The Studies of The University (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1834). SEED, JEREMIAH , The Happiness of the Good in a Future State set forth: In a Sermon Occasioned by the Death of Dr. Waterland (London, 1741). SHARPE, WILLIAM , A Defence of Strictures on Dr. Lowth, Respecting Liberty. With Observations on Other Men and Things (2nd edn., London, 1767).

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Bibliography SHERLOCK, THOMAS , The Use of Intent and Prophecy, in the Several Ages of the World (London, 1725). SHIPLEY, JONATHAN , The Works of the Right Reverend Jonathan Shipley, D.D., Lord Bishop of St. Asaph (2 vols., London, 1792). SMART, CHISTOPHER , The Poetical Works, ed. Karina Williamson et al. (5 vols, so far, Oxford, 1980—). SPEARMAN, ROBERT , An. Enquiry After Philosophy and Theology. Tending to show when and whence mankind came at the knowledge of these two important points (Edinburgh, 1755). SPENCER, JOHN , De Legibus Hebraeorum. Ritualibus et earum Rationibus (1685). STEBBING, HENRY , An Examination of Mr Warburton's Second Proposition, In his Projected Demonstration of The Divine Legation of Moses (London, 1744). —— The History of Abraham, In the Plain and Obvious Meaning of it, Justified, Against the Objections of the Author of the Divine Legation of Moses, &c. (London, 1746). STERNE, LAURENCE , Sermons of Mr. Yorick (2 vols., Oxford, 1926). ——, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. Gentleman, ed. Ian Campbell Ross (Oxford, 1983). Sturges, Jolin, A Letter to a Bishop; Occasioned by the Late Petition to Parliament, for Relief in the Matter of Subscription (London, 1772). (p.233) SWIFT, JONATHAN , An Argument to Prove, That the Abolishing of Christianity In England, May, as Things now stand, be attended with some Inconveniences, and perhaps not produce those many Good Effects propos'd thereby (London, 1717). SYKES, ARTHUR ASHLEY , THE CASE OF SUBSCRIPTION TO THE xxxix Articles Considered (London, 1721). ——, An Examination of Mr. Warburton's Account of the Conduct of the Antient Legislators, Of the Double Doctrine of the Old Philosophers, Of the Theocracy of the few s, And of Sir Isaac Newton's Chronology (London, 1744). TILLARD, JOHN , Future Rewards and Punishments Believed by the Ancients, Wherein some Objections of the Revd. Mr. Warburton, in his Divine Legation of Moses are considered (London, 1740). TILLOTSON, JOHN , The Works, ed. Ralph Baker (2 vols., London, 1712). Page 17 of 42

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Bibliography TINDAL, MATTHEW , Christianity as Old as the Creation: Or, The Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature (London, 1730). TOPLADY, AUGUSTUS MONTAGUE , The Church of England Vindicated From the Charge of Arminianism; And the Case of Arminian Subscription particularly considered: In a Letter to the Revd. Dr. Nowell (London, 1769). ——, Clerical Subscription no Grievance: Or, The Doctrines of the Church of England proved to be the Doctrines of Christ, In a Sermon Preached at the Annual Visitation of the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of Exeter, Held at Columpton, Tuesday, May 12, 1772 (London, 1772). TOTTIE, JOHN , Sermons, Preached before the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1775). [ TOWNE, JOHN ], A Free and Candid Examination of the Principles Advanced in the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of London's Sermons, lately published; And his Very Ingenious Discourses on Prophecy (London, 1756.) ——, Remarks On Dr. Lowth's Letter to The Bishop of Gloucester (London, 1766). TUCKER, JOSIAH , An Apology fore the Present Church of England (2nd edn., Gloucester, 1772). VOLTAIRE, F. M. A. DE , Letters Concerning the English Nation (London, 1733). ——, Élémens de la Philosophie de Newton, Mis à la portée de tou. le monde (Amsterdam, 1738). ——, La Défense de mon oncle and A Warburton, in The Complete Works of Voltaire, ed. José-Michel. Moureaux, lxiv (Oxford, 1984). WAKEFIELD, GILBERT , Memoirs of the Life of Gilbert Wakefield (2 vols., London, 1804). (p.234) WALPOLE, HORACE , Memoirs of the Reign of King George II, ed. John Brooke (3 vols., New Haven, 1985). WARBURTON, WILLIAM , The Alliance Between Church and State: or, the necessity and equity of an established religion and a Test Law demonstrated (London, 1736). ——, The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated. On the Principles of a Religious Deist. From the Omission of the Doctrine of a Future State of Reward and Punishment In the Jewish Dispensation (2 vols., London, 1738–41). ——, A Sermon on the Late Unnatural Rebellion (London, 1745).

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Bibliography ——, Remarks On Several Occasional Reflections In Answer to The Rev. Dr. Middleton, Dr. Pococke, The Master of the Charter House, Dr. Richard Grey, and others (London, 1744). ——, Remarks On Several Occasional Reflections In Answer to The Reverend Doctors Stebbing and Sykes. Part II (London, 1745). ——, An Apologetical Dedication to the Reverend Dr. Henry Stebbing, In Answer to his Censure and Misrepresentations of the Sermon Preached at the General Fast Day. Appointed to be Observed December 18, 1745 (London, 1746). ——, A View of Lord Bolingbroke's Philosophy, Compleat, In Four Letters to a Friend. In which his whole System of Infidelity and Naturalism is Exposed and Confuted (3rd edn., London, 1756). ——, The Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion Occasionally Opened and Explained; In a Course of sermons Preached before the Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn (3 vols., London, 1753–67). ——, The Doctrine of Grace: Or, The Office and Operations of the Holy Spirit Vindicated from the Insults of Infidelity, And the Abuses of Fanaticism: With some thoughts (humbly offered to the consideration of the established clergy) regarding the right method of defending religion against the attacks of either party (3rd edn., London, 1763). ——, Letters From a Late Eminent Prelate to One of His Friends ed. R. Hurd (London, 1808). ——, A Selection From Unpublished Papers Of The Right Reverend William Warburton, D.D. Late Lord Bishop of Gloucester, ed. Francis Kilvert (London, 1841). WATERLAND, DANIEL , The Case of Arian-Subscription Consider'd, (Cambridge, 1721). ——, A Critical History of the Athanasian Creed, representing the opinions of antients and moderns concerning it (Cambridge, 1724). ——, Advice to a Young Student. With a Method of Study for the First Four Years (Cambridge, 1730). [——], A Dissertation Upon The Argument A Priori For Proving The existence Of A First Cause (Cambridge, 1734). (p.235) WATSON, RICHARD , A Christian Whig's Two Letters to the Members of the Honourable House of Commons (London, 1772).

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Bibliography ——, An Apology for Christianity, In a Series of Letters, Addressed to Edward Gibbon, Esq., Author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Cambridge, 1776). ——, A Collection of Theological Tracts (6 vols., Cambridge, 1785). ——, An Apology for the Bible, In a Series of Letters, Addressed to Thomas Paine (London, 1796). ——, Anecdotes of the Life of Richard Watson, Bishop of Landaff (London, 1817). WEBB, PHILIP CARTERET , A. Letter to the Reverend Mr William Warburton, A.M. Occasioned by Some Passages in his Book Intituled, The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (London, 1742). WEBSTER, WILLIAM , Remarks On The Divine Legation of Moses, &c. In Several Letters (London, 1739). WESLEY, JOHN , The Works, ed. Frank Baker et al. (25 vols, so far, Oxford, 1984 —). ——, Journals, ed. Nehemiah Curnock (8 vols., London, 1909–16). ——, Letters, ed. John Telford (8 vols., London, 1931). ——, Justification by Faith Alone: Being the Substance of a Letter from the Rev. Mr. Berridge in Cambridgeshire, to a Clergyman in Nottinghamshire (Sherborne, 1760). ——, A Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation: Or A Compendium of Natural Philosophy (2 vols., Bristol, 1763). ——, Works, ed. Gerald R. Cragg (Nashville, 1989). WESLEY, SAMUEL , Dissertationes In Librum Jobi (London, 1735). WOLLASTON, FRANCIS , An Address to the Clergy of the Church of England in particular, and to all Christians in general. Humbly Proposing An Application to the Right Reverend the Bishops, or through their means to the Legislature, for such Relief in the Matter of Subscription, as in their Judgements they shall see proper, together with the Author's Sentiments on the Present Forms; and his Reasons for such an Application (London, 1772). WORTHINGTON, WILLIAM , An Essay on the Scheme and Conduct, Procedure and Extent of Man's Redemption (London, 1743). WYVILL, CHRISTOPHER , Thoughts On Our Articles of Religion, With Respect to their Supposed Utility to the State (London, 1771). Page 20 of 42

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Bibliography BARR, JAMES , ‘The Book of Job and its Modern Interpreters’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 54 (1971–2), 28–46. BATTESIN, MARTIN C., ‘Goldsmith: The Comedy of Job’, in The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form In Augustan Literature and the Arts (Oxford, 1974), 193– 214. BECK, LEWIS WHITE , ‘World Enough and Time’, in Backscheider (ed.), Probability, Time and Space, 113–39. BEIER, A. L., CANNADINE, DAVID , and ROSENHEIM, J. M. (eds.), The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989). BENDER, JOHN , ‘Prison Reform and the Sentence of Narration in The Vicar of Wakefield’, in Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (p.237) (eds.), The New 18th Century: Theory, Politics. English Literature (London, 1987), 168–88. BENNETT, G. V., White Kennett, 1660–1728, Bishop of Peterborough: A Study in the Political and Ecclesiastical History of the Early Eighteenth Century (London, 1957). ——, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 1688–1730: The Career of Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester (Oxford, 1975). BENTLEY, G. E., Jr., Blake Records (Oxford, 1969). BERLIN, ISAIAH , ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (Oxford, 1981), 1–24. BERMAN, DAVID , A History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell (London, 1988). ——, ‘The Irish Counter-Enlightenment’, in Richard Kearney (ed.), The Irish Mind: Exploring Intellectual Traditions (Dublin, 1985), 119–40. BERNAL, MARTIN , Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, i. The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985 (London, 1987). BIDDLE, JOHN C., ‘Locke's Critique of Innate Principles and Toland's Deism’, JHI 37 (1976), 411–22. BOND, W. H., ‘Thomas Hollis and Samuel Johnson’ in Engell (ed.), Johnson and his Age, 83–105. BOWLES, GEOFFREY , ‘Physical. Human and Divine Attraction in the Life and Thought of George Cheyne’, AS 31 (1974), 473–88.

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Bibliography BOYLE, NICHOLAS , ‘Lessing. Biblical Criticism and the Origins of German Classical Culture’, German Life and Letters, NS 35 (1980–1), 196–213. BRADLEY, JAMES E., Religion. Revolution and English Radicalism: NonConformity in Eighteenth-Century Politics and Society (Cambridge, 1990). BRANTLEY, RICHARD E., Locke, Wesley, and the Method of English Romanticism (Gainsville, Fla., 1984). BRENT, RICHARD , Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion, and Reform 1830–1841 (Oxford, 1987). BREWER, JOHN , ‘Rockingham, Burke and Whig Political Argument’, HJ 18 (1975) 188–201. BRINKELY, RICHARD , ‘A Liberal Churchman: Edmund Law (1703–1787)’, Enlightenment and Dissent, 6 (1987), 3–18. BROWN, FORD K., Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce (Cambridge, 1961). BROWING, REED , The Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs (Baton Rouge, La., 1982). BROXAP, HENRY , The Later Non-Jurors (Cambridge, 1924). (p.238) BUCHDAL, GERD , The Image of Newton and Locke in the Age of Reason (London, 1961). BURNS, R. ARTHUR , ‘A Hanoverian Legacy? Diocesan Reform in the Church of England c. 1800–1833’, in Walsh, Haydon, and Taylor (eds.), Church of England, 265–82. CALINGER, ROLAND, S., ‘The Newtonian-Wolffian Controversy (1740–1758)’, JHI 30 (1969), 319–30. CANTOR, GEOFFREY , ‘Light and Enlightenment: An Exploration of MidEighteenth-Century Modes of Discourse’, in David C. Lindberg and Geoffrey Cantor, The Discourse of Light from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985), 67–106. CARNOCHAN, W. B., Gibbon's Solitude: The Inward World of the Historian (Stanford, Calif, 1987). CASH, ARTHUR H., Laurence Sterne: The Later Years (London, 1986). CHADWICK, OWEN , The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1975). Page 23 of 42

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Bibliography DAVIE, DONALD , ‘Enlightenment and Christian Dissent’, in Dissentient Voice: The Ward-Philips Lectures for 1980 and some Related Pieces (Notre Dame, 1982), 1–64. DECONNINCK-BROSARD, FRANÇOISE , ‘England and France in the Eighteenth Century’, in Prickett (ed.), Reading the Text, 136–81. DERRIDA, JACQUES , Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1976). ——, The Archaeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (London, 1987). DICKEY, LAURENCE , Hegel: Religion, Economics and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807 (Cambridge, 1987). DITCLIFIELD, G. M., ‘Ecclesiastical Policy under Lord North’, in Walsh, Haydon, and Taylor (eds.), Church of England, 228–46. ——, ‘The Subscription Issue in British Parliamentary Politics, 1772–1791’, Parliamentary History, 7 (1988), 45–80. ——, ‘Anti-Trinitarianism and Toleration in Late Eighteenth-Century British Politics: The Unitarian Petition of 1792’, JEH 42 (1991), 39–67. DOHERTY, F. M., ‘Sterne and Warburton: Another Look’, BJECS 1 (1978), 20–30. DRURY, JOHN , Critics of the Bible 1724–1873 (Cambridge, 1989). DUFFY, EAMON , ‘“Whiston's Affair”: The Trials of a Primitive Christian 1709– 1714’, JEH 27 (1976), 129–50. ——, ‘Correspondence Fraternelle: The SPCK, the SPG, and the Churches of Switzerland in the War of the Spanish Succession’, in Derek Baker (ed.), Religious. Motivation: Biographical and Sociological Problems for the Church Historian (SCH 15; 1979), 251–80. ——, ‘Wesley and the Counter-Reformation’, in Garnett and Matthew (eds.), Revival and Religion, 1–19. DUNN, JOHN , Locke (Oxford, 1984). ——, ‘Trust in the Politics of John Locke’, in Rethinking Modern Political Theory: Essays 1979–1983 (Cambridge, 1985), 34–54. (p.240) DUNN, JOHN , ‘The Identity of the History of Ideas’, Philosophy, 43 (1968), 85–104.

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Bibliography FROUDE, JAMES ANTHONY , Short Studies on Great Subjects (4 vols., London, 1877–83). FRUCEITMAN, JACK, JR. , Thomas Paine and the Religion of Nature (Baltimore, 1993). GARNETT JANE , and MATTHEW, COLIN , (eds.), Revival and Religion since 1700: Essays for John Walsh (London, 1993). (p.241) GASCOIGNE, JOHN , Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1989). ——, ‘Church and State Allied: The Failure of Parliamentary Reform of the Universities, 1688–1800’ in Beier, Cannadine, and Rosenheim, First Modern Society, 401–29. ——, ‘Anglican Latitudinarianism and Political Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century’, History, 71 (1986), 22–38. GAY, PETER , The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (2 vols., New York, 1967– 70). GHOSH, P. R., ‘Gibbon's Dark Ages: Some Remarks on the Genesis of The Decline and Fall’, Journal of Roman Studies, 73 (1983), 1–23. GIBBONS, B. J., Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought: Behmenism and its Development in England (Cambridge, 1996). GILLEY, SHERIDAN , ‘Christianity and Enlightenment’, History of European Ideas, 1 (1981), 103–12. GINZBURG, CARLO , ‘The High and the Low: The Theme of Fobidden Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, P&P 73 (1976), 28–42. GOLDIE, MARK , ‘The Nonjurors. Episcopacy, and the Origins of the Convocation Controversy’, in Eveline Cruickshanks (ed.), Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689–1759 (Edinburgh, 1982), 15–35. ——, ‘The Civil Religion of James Harrington’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987), 97– 112. ——, ‘Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism’, in Phillipson and Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse, 209–31. ——, ‘The Scottish Catholic Enlightenment’, JBS 30 (1991), 20–62.

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Bibliography HARRIS, IAN , The Mind of John Locke: A Study of Political Theory in its Intellectual Setting (Cambridge, 1994). HARRISON, PETER , ‘Religion and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1990). HASKELL, FRANCIS , ‘The Apotheosis of Newton in Art’, Texas Quarterly, 10 (1967), 218–37. HAWES, JOHN L., ‘Newton's Revival of the Aether Hypothesis and the Explanation of Gravitational Attraction’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 23 (1968), 200–13. HAWKINS, MICHAEL , ‘Ambiguity and Contradiction in “The Rise of Professionalism”: the English Clergy, 1570–1730’, in Beier, Cannadine, and Rosenheim (eds.), First Modern Society, 241–69. HAZARD, PAUL , The Crisis of the European Mind in the Seventeenth Century, trans. J. L. May (London, 1953). HEIMANN, P. M., ‘“Nature is a Perpetual Worker”: Newton's Aether and Eighteenth-Century Natural Philosophy’, Ambix, 20 (1973), 1–25. ——, ‘Voluntarism and Immanence: Conceptions of Nature in Eighteenth-century Thought’, JHI 39 (1978), 271–83. ——, and MCGUIRE, J. G., ‘Newtonian Forces and Lockean Powers: Concepts of Matter in Eighteenth-Century Thought’, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 3 (1971), 233–306. (p.243) HENRIQUES, URSULA , Religious Toleration in England 1787–1833 (London, 1961). HILL, BRIDGET , The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford, 1992). HILL, CHRISTOPHER , Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution (London, 1980). HILTON, BOYD , The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford, 1988). HIRST, DÉSIRÉE , Hidden Riches: Traditional Symbolism from the Renaissance to Blake (London, 1964). HOBHOUSE, STEPHEN , ‘Fides Et Ratio: The Book which Introduced Jacob Boehme to William Law’, JTS NS 36 (1936), 350–68.

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Bibliography ——, ‘John Toland and the Newtonian Ideology’, JWCI 32 (1969), 303–31. ——, ‘Newtonianism and the Origins of the Enlightenment: A Reassessment’, ECS 11 (1977–8), 1–25. JONES, WILLIAM POWELL , ‘The Idea of the Limitations of Science from Prior to Blake’, Studies in English Literature, 1 (1961), 97–114. KATZ, DAVID S., ‘The Language of Adam in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Lloyd-Jones, Pearl, and Worden (eds.), History and Imagination, 132–45. KIDD, COLIN , Subverting Scotland's Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689-C.1830 (Cambridge, 1993). KILVERT, FRANCIS , Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Right Rev. Richard Hurd, D.D., Lord Bishop of Worcester; with a selection from his correspondence and other unpublished papers (London, 1860). KIRK, LINDA , ‘Eighteenth-Century Geneva and a Changing Calvinism’, in Stuart Mews (ed.), Religion and National Identity (SCH 18; 1982), 367–80. KLEIN, LAWRENCE E., Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politics: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994). ——, ‘Shaftesbury, Politeness and the Politics of Religion’, in Phillipson and Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse, 283–301. KORS, ALAN CHARLES , and KORSHIN, PAUL J. (eds.), Anticipations of the Enlightenment in England, France, and Germany (Philadelphia, 1987). KORSHIN, PAUL J., ‘The Development of Abstracted Typology in England, 1650– 1820’, in Earl Miner (ed.), Literary Uses of Typology from the Late Middle Ages to the Present (Princeton, 1977), 147–203. KOSARY, DOMOKOS , Culture and Society in Eighteenth-Century Hungary (Budapest, 1987). KÖSTER, PATRICIA , ‘Baptist Noël Turner's “Intelligence ofjohn Bull”: An Allegorical Satire on the Subscription Controversy’, Church History, 54 (1985), 338–52. KUHN, A. J., ‘Glory or Gravity: Hutchinson vs. Newton’, JHI 22 (1961), 303–22. (p.245) ——, ‘Christopher Smart: The Poet as Patriot of the Lord’, ELH 30 (1963), 121–36. ——, ‘Nature Spiritualized: Aspects of Anti-Newtonianism’, ELH 41 (1974), 400– 12. Page 31 of 42

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Bibliography KUKLICK, BRUCE , ‘Seven Thinkers and How They Grew: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz; Locke, Berkeley, Hume; Kant’, in Rorty, Schneewind, and Skinner (eds.), Philosophy in History, 125–39. LAMB, JONATHAN , Sterne's Fiction and the Double Principle (Cambridge, 1989). ——, The Rhetoric of Suffering: Reading the Book of Job in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1996). ——, ‘The Job Controversy, Sterne, and the Question of Allegory’, ECS 24 (1990), 1–19. LANGFORD, PAUL , ‘Tories and Jacobites 1714–1751’, in Mitchell and Sutherland (eds.), University of Oxford, 99–127. LECKY, W. E. H., A History of England in the Eighteenth Century (8 vols., London, 1878–90). LEHMANN, JAMES H., ‘The Vicar of Wakefield: Goldsmith's Sublime, Oriental Job’, ELH 46 (1979), 97–121. LEVINE, JOSEPH M., Dr. Woodward's Shield: History, Science, and Satire in Augustan England (Ithaca, NY, 1977). LLOYD-JONES, HUGH , PEARL, VALERIE , and WORDEN, BLAIR (eds.), History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper (London, 1981). LUND, ROGER D. (ed.), The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response 1660–1750 (Cambridge, 1995). MCCOY, SHELBY T., Gibbon's Antagonism to Christianity (Chapel Hill, NC, 1933). MCGUIRE, J. E., ‘Existence. Actuality and Necessity: Newton on Space and Time’, AS 35 (1978), 463–508. MCKENNA, WILLIAM , ‘Benjamin Kennicott: An Eighteenth-Century Researcher’, JTS NS 28 (1977), 445–64. MCLACHLAN, H., English Education under the Test Acts: Being the History of the Non-Conformist Academies 1662–1820 (Manchester, 1931). MALEKIN, PETER , ‘Jacob Boehme's Influence on William Law’, Studia Neophilologica, 36 (1964), 245–60. ——, ‘William Law and John Wesley’, Studia Neophilologica, 37 (1965), 190–8.

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Bibliography ——, ‘The Character-Sketches in the Serious Call’ Studia Neophilologica, 38 (1966), 314–22. (p.246) MANDELBROTE, SCOTT , ‘“A Duty of the Greatest Moment”: Isaac Newton and the Writing of Biblical Criticism’, BJHS 26 (1993), 281–302. MANUEL, FRANK E., Isaac Newton Historian (Cambridge, 1963). ——, The Religion of Isaac Newton (Oxford, 1974). MARSHALL, JOLIN , John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge, 1994). ——, ‘The Ecclesiology of the Latitude Men 1660–1689: Stillingfleet, Tillotson and “Hobbism”’, JEH 26 (1985), 407–27. MATHER, F. O., High Church Prophet: Bishop Samuel Horsley (1733–1806) and the Caroline Tradition in the Later Georgian Church (Oxford, 1992). MEE, JON , Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford, 1992). MENDELSOHN, J. ANDREW , ‘Alchemy and Politics in England 1649–1665’, P&P 135 (1992), 30–78. MILBANK, JOHN , ‘William. Warburton: An Eighteenth-Century Bishop Fallen among Post-Structuralists’, New Blackfriars, 64 (1983), 315–24, 374–83. MILLER, PETER N., Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1994). MITCHELL, L. G., Charles James Fox (Oxford, 1992). ——, and SUTHERLAND, L. S. (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford, v. The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1986). ——, ‘Politics and Revolution 1772–1800’, in Mitchell and Sutherland (eds.), University of Oxford, v. 165–77. MONOD, PAUL KLÉBER , Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge, 1989). MONTUORI, MARIO , John Locke On Toleration and the Unity of God (Amsterdam, 1983). MOSSNER, ERNEST CAMPBELL , The Life of David Hume (2nd edn., Oxford, 1980).

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Bibliography ——, ‘Hume's Four Dissertations: An Essay in Biography and Bibliography’, MP 48 (1950–1), 37–57. MULLER, RICHARD A., ‘Vera Philosophia cum sacra Theologia nusquam pugnat: Keckermann on Philosophy, Theology, and the Problem of Double Truth’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 15 (1984), 341–65. NEVE, MICHAEL , and PORTER, ROY , ‘Alexander Catcott: Glory and Geology’, BJHS 34 (1977), 37–60. NEW, MELVYN , ‘Sterne, Warburton and the Burden of Exuberant Wit’, ECS 15 (1981–2), 245–74. NOCKLES, PETER BENEDICT , The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1837 (Cambridge, 1994). (p.247) ——, ‘Church Parties in the Pre-Tractarian Church of England 1750– 183 3: The “Orthodox”—Some Problems of Definition and Identity’, in Walsh, Haydon, and Taylor (eds.), Church of England, 334–59. O'BRIEN, CONOR CRUISE , The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (London, 1992). O'FLAHERTY, JAMES C., ‘J. D. Michaelis: Rational Biblicist’, JEGP 49 (1950), 172–81. ORCIBAL, JEAN , ‘The Theological Originality of John Wesley and Continental Spirituality’, in Rupert Davies and Gordon Rupp (eds.), A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain (London, 1965), i. 81–111. OVERTON, JOHN H., William Law, Nonjuror and Mystic: A Sketch of his Life, Thought and Character (London, 1881). ——, John Wesley (London, 1891). PATTISON, MARK , Essays, ed. Henry Nettleship (2 vols., Oxford, 1889). PATTISON, ROBERT , The Great Dissent: John Henry Newman and the Liberal Heresy (New York, 1991). PELIKAN, JAROSLAV , The Vindication of Tradition (New Haven, 1984). PETERS, MARIE , ‘“Names and Cant”: Party Labels in English Political Propaganda’, Parliamentary History, 3 (1984), 103–27. PHILLIPSON, NICHOLAS , and SKINNER, QUENTIN (eds.), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993).

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Bibliography PINE, MARTIN , ‘Pomponazzi and the Problem of “Double Truth”’, JHI 29 (1968), 163–76. POCOCK, J. G. A., Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge, 1985). ——, ‘Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in England’, in R. Ajello, E. Contese, and V. Piano (eds.), L’eté. dei Lumi: Studi storici sul settecento europe in onore di Franco Venturi (2 vols., Naples, 1985), i. 523–62. ——, ‘Post-Puritan England and the Problem of the Enlightenment’, in Perez Zagorin (ed.), Culture and Politics From Puritanism to the Enlightenment (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1980), 91–112. ——, ‘The Myth of John Locke and the Obsession with Liberalism’, in id and Richard Ashcraft, John Locke: Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, 10 December 1977 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980), 3–24. ——, ‘Within the Margins: The Definitions of Orthodoxy’, in Lund (ed.), Margins of Orthodoxy, 33–53. ——, ‘Burke and the Ancient Constitution: A Problem in the History of Ideas’, HJ 3 (1960), 125–43. ——, ‘Superstition and Enthusiasm in Gibbon's History of Religion’, EighteenthCentury Life, 8 (1982), 83–94. (p.248) PORTER, ROY , Mind-Forg'd Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (Harmondsworth, 1990). ——, ‘The Enlightenment in England’, in id. and Mikulàš Teich (eds.), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1981), 1–18. PRESTON, THOMAS R., ‘The Uses of Adversity: Worldly Detachment and Heavenly Treasure in The Vicar of Wakefield’, SP 81 (1984), 229–51. PRICKETT, STEPHEN , Words and the Word: Language, poetics and biblical interpretation (Cambridge, 1986). ——, ‘Romantics and Victorians: from Typology to Symbolism’, in id. (ed.), Reading the Text: Biblical Criticism and Literary Theory (Oxford, 1991), 182– 224. ——, ‘Coleridge and the Idea of the Clerisy’ in Walter B. Crawford (ed.), Reading Coleridge: Approaches and Applications (Ithaca, NY, 1979), 252–73. ——, ‘Poetry and Prophecy: Bishop Lowth and the Hebrew Scriptures in Eighteenth-Century. England’, in David Jasper (ed.), Images of Belief in Literature (London, 1984), 81–103. Page 35 of 42

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Bibliography PROCHASKA, FRANKLYN K., ‘Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason Revisited’, JHI 33 (1972), 561–76. QUINTON, ANTHONY , The Politics of Imperfection: The Religious and Secular Traditions of Conservative Thought in England from Hooker to Oakeshott (London, 1978). RACK, HENRY D., ‘“Christ's Kingdom Not of this World”: The Case of Benjamin Hoadly versus William Law Reconsidered’, in Derek Baker (ed.), Church, Society and Politics (SCH 12; 1975), 275–91. RATTANSI, P. M., ‘Voltaire and the Enlightenment Image of Newton’, in LloydJones, Pearl, and Worden (eds.), History and Imagination, 218–31. REDWOOD, JOHN , Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England, 1660–1750 (London, 1976). REEDY, GERARD, SJ, The Bible and Reason: Anglicans and Scripture in Late Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia, 1985). REVENTLOW, HENNING GRAF , The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World (London, 1984). RICHEY, RUSSELL E., ‘The Origins of British Radicalism: The Changing Rationale for Dissent’, ECS 7 (1973–4), 179–92. RIVERS, ISABEL , Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, i. From Whichcote to Wesley (Cambridge, 1991). (p.249) ROBBINS, CAROLINE , The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission. Development and Circumstance of English Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, Mass., 1959). ——, ‘Absolute Liberty: The Life and Thought of William Popple, 1638–1708’, in Absolute Liberty: A Selection from the Articles and Papers of Caroline Robbins, ed. Barbara Taft (Hamden, Conn., 1982), 3–30. ROGERS, G. A. J., ‘The Empiricism of Locke and Newton’, in Stuart C. Brown (ed.), Philosophers of the Enlightenment (Hassocks, 1979), 1–30. ——, ‘John Locke: Conservative Radical’, in Lund (ed.), Margins of Orthodoxy, 97–116. ——, ‘Locke's Essay and Newton's Principia’, JHI 39 (1978), 217–32. ——, ‘Locke's, Newton and the Cambridge Platonists’, JHI 40 (1979), 191–205. Page 36 of 42

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Bibliography RORTY, RICHARD , SCHNEEWIND, J., and SKINNER, QUENTIN (eds.), Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy (Cambridge, 1984). ROSSI, PAOLO , The Dark Abyss of Time, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago, 1984). ROUSSEAU, G. S., ‘Mysticism and Millenarianism: “Immortal Dr. Cheyne”’, in Ingrid Merkel and Alan G. Debus (eds.), Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe (Washington, 1988), 192–230. ——, and PORTER, ROY (eds.), The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science (Cambridge, 1980). RUPP, ERNEST GORDON , Religion in England 1688–1791 (Oxford, 1986). SCHAFFER, SIMON , ‘Natural Philosophy’, in Rousseau and Porter (eds.), Ferment of Knowledge, 55–91. ——, ‘The Consuming Flame: Electrical Showmen and Tory Mystics in the World of Goods’, in John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993), 489–526. SCHOFIELD, ROBERT E., ‘John Wesley and Science in 18th Century England’, Isis, 44 (1953), 331–40. SCHWARTZ, RICHARD B., ‘Berkeley, Newtonian Space, and the Question of Evidence’ in Backscheider (ed.), Probability, Time and Space, 259–73. SCREECH, M. A., Erasmus: Ecstasy and The Praise of Folly (London, 1980). (p.250) SEED, JOHN , ‘Gentlemen Dissenters: The Social and Political Meanings of Rational Dissent in the 1770s and 1780s’, HJ 28 (1985), 299–325. SEIDEL, MICHAEL , ‘Crisis Rhetoric and Satiric Power’, New Literary History, 20 (1988), 165–86. SHAFFER, E. S., ‘Kubla. Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770–1880 (Cambridge, 1975). SHAPIN, STEVEN , ‘Social Uses of Science’, in Rouseau and Porter (eds.), Ferment of Knowledge, 93–139. SHELTON, GEORGE , Dean Tucker and Eighteenth-Century Economic and Social Thought (London, 1981).

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Bibliography SHER, RICHARD B., Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1985). SITTER, JOHN , Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England (Ithaca, NY, 1982). SKINNER, QUENTIN , ‘A Reply To My Critics’, in James Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Oxford, 1988), 231–341. SMITH, NIGEL , Perfection. Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1989). ——, ‘The Uses of Hebrew in the English Revolution’, in Peter Burke and Roy Porter (eds.), Language. Self and Society: A Social History of Language (Cambridge, 1991), 57–71. SPADAFORA, DAVID , The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven, 1990). SPURGEON, CAROLINE F. E., ‘William Law and the Mystics’, in The Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge, 1912), ix. 305–28. SPURR, JOHN , The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven, 1991). ——, ‘“Latitudinarianism” and the Restoration Church’, HJ 31 (1988), 61–82. STAFFORD, BARBARA MARIA , ‘Science as Fine Art: Another Look at Boullée's Cenotaph for Newton’, SECC 11 (1982). STEPHEN, SIR LESLIE , History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (2 vols., London, 1876). STERN, J. P., Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions (London, 1963). STEWART, LARRY , The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge, 1992). ——, ‘Samuel Clarke, Newtonianism, and the Factions of Post-Revolutionary England’, JHI 42 (1981), 53–72. (p.251) STRAUSS, LEO , Persecution And the Art of Writing (Westport, Conn., 1952). ——, ‘Notes on Lucretius’, in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York, 1968), 76–139. STROMBERG, ROLAND N., Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1954). Page 38 of 42

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Bibliography SYKES, NORMAN , Edmund Gibson. Bishop of London, 1669–1748: A Study in Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1926). ——, William Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1657–1737 (2 vols., Cambridge, 1957). ——, From Sheldon to Seeker: Aspects of English Church History, 1660–1768 (Cambridge, 1958). ——, ‘Benjamin Hoadly, Bishop of Bangor’, in F. J. C. Hearnshaw (ed.), The Social and Political Ideas of Some English Thinkers of the Augustan Age A.D. 1650– 1730 (London, 1928), 112–56. TALON, HENRI , William Law: A Study in Literary Craftsmanship (London, 1948). TAYLOR, STEPHEN , ‘Sir Robert Walpole, the Church of England, and the Quakers' Tithe Bill of 1738’, HJ 28 (1985), 51–77. ——, ‘William Warburton and the Alliance of Church and State’, JEH 43 (1992), 271–86. THOMAS, STEPHEN , Newman and Heresy: The Anglican Years (Cambridge, 1991). THOMPSON, E. P., Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge, 1993). TREVOR-ROPER, HUGH , ‘The Great Tew Circle’ in Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans (London, 1987), 166–230. ——, ‘Religious Toleration after 1688’, in From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution (London, 1992), 267–85. ——, ‘The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment’, in Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (London, 1967), 193–236. VARLEY, E. A., The Last of the Prince Bishops: William Van Mildert and the High Church Movement of the Early Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1992). VENTURI, FRANCO , Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a Cosmopolitan Century, Eng. trans. (London, 1972). VON LEYDEN, WOLFGANG , ‘History and the Concept of Relative Time’, History and Theory, 2 (1963), 263–85. WAGNER, FRITZ , ‘Church History and Secular History as Reflected by Newton and his Time’, History and Theory, 8 (1969), 97–111. Page 39 of 42

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Bibliography WALKER, A. KEITH , William Law: His Life and Thought (London, 1973). (p.252) WALLACE, DEWEY D., Jr., ‘Socinianism, Justification by Faith, and 252 the Sources of John Locke's The Reasonableness of Christianity’, JHI 45 (1981), 49–66. WALSH, J. D., ‘Origins of the Evangelical Revival’, in G. V. Bennett and Walsh (eds.), Essays in Modern English Church History In Memory of Norman Sykes (London, 1966), 132–62. ——, and TAYLOR, STEPHEN ‘Introduction: The Church and Anglicanism in the “Long” Eighteenth Century’, in Walsh, Haydon, and Taylor (eds.), The Church of England, 1–64. ——, ‘Joseph Milner's Evangelical Church History’, JEH 10 (1959), 174–87. ——, ‘John Wesley and the Community of Goods’, in Keith Robbins (ed.), Protestant Evangelicalism: Britain, Ireland, Germany and America c. 1750-c. 1950: Essays in Honour of W. R. Ward (Oxford, 1990), 25–50. ——, ‘The Cambridge Methodists’, in Peter Brooks (ed.), Christian Spirituality: Essays in Honour of Gordon Rupp (London, 1975), 249–83. ——, HAYDON, COLIN , and TAYLOR, STEPHEN (eds.), The Church of England c.1689—c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge, 1993). [ WALTON, CHRISTOPHER ], Notes. And Materials for An Adequate Biography Of The Celebrated Divine And Theosopher William Law (London, 1854). WARD, W. R., ‘Mysticism and Revival: The Case of Gerhard Tersteegen’, in Garnett and Matthew (eds.), Revival and Religion, 41–58. WARNER, MARTIN , Philosophical Finesse: Studies in the Art of Rational Persuasion (Oxford, 1989). WATERMAN, A. M. C., Revolution. Economics and Religion: Christian Political Economy, 1793–1833 (Cambridge, 1991). ——, ‘A Cambridge “Via media” in Late Georgian Anglicanism’, JEH 42 (1991), 419–36. WATSON, JOHN SELBY , The Life of Bishop Warburton (London, 1863). WATTS, MICHAEL R., The Dissenters, i. From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1987). WEBB, R. K., ‘The Faith of Nineteenth-Century Unitarians: A Curious Incident’, in Richard J. Helmstadter and Bernard Lightman (eds.), Victorian Faith in Crisis: Page 40 of 42

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Bibliography Essays on Continuity and Change in Nineteenth-Century Religious Belief (London, 1990), 126–49. WEINBROT, HOWARD A., Augustus Caesar in ‘Augustan’ England: The Decline of a Classical Norm (Princeton, 1978). (p.253) WILDE, C. B., ‘Hutchinsonianisrn, Natural Philosophy and Religious Controversy in Eighteenth Century Britain’, HS 18 (1980), 1–24. ——, ‘Matter and Spirit as Natural Symbols in Eighteenth-Century British Natural Philosophy’, BJHS 15 (1982), 99–131. WILLIAMSON, KARINA , ‘Smart's Principia: Science and Anti-Science in Jubilate Agno’, Review of English Studies, NS 30 (1979), 409–22. WINCH, DONALD , Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge, 1996). WINNETT, A. R., ‘An Irish Heretic Bishop: Robert Clayton of Clogher’, in Derek Baker (ed.), Schism, Heresy and Religious Protest (SCH 9; 1972), 311–21. WINSTANLEY, D. A., Unreformed Cambridge: A Study of Certain Aspects of the University in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1935). WORMHOUDT, ARTHUR , ‘Newton's. Natural Philosophy in the Behmenistic Works of William Law’, JHI 10 (1949), 411–29. YATES, FRANCES A., The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London, 1972). YOLTON, JOHN W., Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain, (Oxford, 1984). ——, ‘Schoolmen, Logic and Philosophy’ in Michell and Sutherland (eds.), University of Oxford v. 565–91. YOUNG, B. W., ‘Knock-Kneed Giants: Victorian Representations of EighteenthCentury Thought’, in Garnett and Matthew (eds.), Revival and Religion, 79–93. ——, ‘“See Mystery to Mathematics Fly!”: Pope's Dunciad and the Critique of Religious Rationalism’, ECS 26 (1992–3), 435–48. ——, ‘William Law and the Christian Economy Of Salvation’, EHR 109 (1994), 308–22. ——, ‘“The Soul-Sleeping System”: Politics and Heresy in Eighteenth-Century England’, JEH 45 (1994), 64–81.

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Bibliography Unpublished Dissertations

BOWLES, GEOFFREY , ‘The Place of Newtonian Explanation in English Popular Thought, 1687–1727’, D.Phil., Univ. of Oxford, 1977. CHAMBERLAIN, JEFFREY S., ‘“The Changes and Chances of this Moral Life”: The Vicissitudes of High. Churchmanship and Politics among the Clergy of Sussex, 1700–1745’, Ph.D., Univ. of Chicago, 1992. FITZPATRICK, MARTIN , ‘Rational Dissent in the Late Eighteenth Century with Particular Reference to the growth of Toleration’, Ph.D., Univ. of Wales, 1982. (p.254) MURRAY, NANCY U., ‘The Influence of the French Revolution on the Church of England and Its Rivals, 1789–1802’, D.Phil. Univ. of Oxford, 1975. SPIVEY, J. T., ‘Middle Way Men. Edmund Calamy, and the Crises of Moderate Nonconformity (1688–1732)’, D.Phil., Univ. of Oxford, 1986.

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Index

Religion and Enlightenment in EighteenthCentury England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke B. W. Young

Print publication date: 1998 Print ISBN-13: 9780198269427 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269427.001.0001

(p.255) Index Aldrich, Henry 7 Algarotti, Francesco 117 Amory, Thomas 53, 62–3 antidogmatism 11, 20, 21, 23, 24, 33, 59–60, 61, 65, 68, 75, 80 see also latitudinarianism Apostles' Creed 30 Arianism 22, 33, 35, 37–9, 41, 50–3, 59–60, 77, 106, 115, 133, 141, 190 Aristotle and Aristotelianism 7, 137–8, 180 Ashmole, Elias 124 Ashton, Charles 37 Athanasian Creed 21, 30, 34, 35–6, 39, 52, 60 Atterbury, Francis 19 Ayers, Michael 88–9 Bacon, Francis 7, 59, 83, 106, 114, 123, 146, 176 Balguy, Thomas 66, 67, 68–9 Banville, John 91 Barrow, Isaac 190 Bate, Julius 183–4 Baxter, Andrew 173 Baxter, Richard 124 Bayle, Pierre 177, 186 Beattic, James 61, 210 Berkeley, George 84 Berkeley, George (son of the philosopher) 145 Berridge, John 153–5 Birch, Thomas 49 Blackburne, Francis 23, 42, 47–8, 49–56, 62–4, 66–7, 74, 75, 77–8, 181, 185 Blake, William 114, 116, 120, 121, 134, 157, 160–1 Böhme, Jacob, and Behmenism 123–6, 127–34, 139–40, 154–6, 158–61, 182, 218 Bolingbroke, Henry St John, viscount 168–9, 171–5, 177 Bott, Thomas 188 Page 1 of 7

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Index Boulleé, E. 114 Boyle, Robert 87, 93, 146 Brett, Thomas 32 Brewster, Sir David 86–7 Brown, Richard 196–7 Buffon, G.-L.-L., Comte de 138 Bull, George 218 Burke, Edmund 71–2, 146, 217 Burnet, Gilbert 28–31, 42, 50, 59, 77 Butler, Joseph 9, 48, 84 Calvinism 1, 28, 52, 60, 65, 76–8, 99, 117, 154 Cambridge: University of 7, 8, 11, 21, 22, 37–8, 47, 51, 53, 55–62, 63, 99–100, 110, 135, 153, 158, 172, 200 Christ's College 53, 100 Corpus Christi College 110 Jesus College 37, 42, 59 King's College 90 Magdalene College 35, 59–62, 102 Pembroke College 147 Peterhouse 55, 56, 58, 123 St John's College 53, 100 Sidney Sussex College 198 Trinity 59, 76, 87, 102 Caroline, Queen 33 Catcott, Alexander 138, 147 Chambers, Ephraim 112 Chappelow, Leonard 200 Charles II 24, 29 Charterhouse 90 Cheyne, George 143 Chillingworth, William 22–3, 24, 43, 49, 51, 52, 65, 66, 78 Church of England 10, 13, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 29–31, 34, 42, 44, 45–9, 80 Clark, J. C. D. 112 Clarke, John 101–111 Clarke, Joseph 101, 111 (p.256) Clarke, Samuel 9, 12, 22, 33–4, 36, 45, 51–3, 56, 65, 74, 84–5, 98, 100–3, 100– 12, 115, 117, 133, 137, 143, 144, 157,173, 180 Clayton, Robert 39–40, 42, 51,64, 65, 138 Cobbett, William 152 Cole, William 35 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 217–18 Condillac, E. B. 113, 214 Convocation 30, 34, 51 Conybeare, John 41, 65 Cooper, Samuel 63 Cornwallis, Frederick 79 Costard, George 198 counter-enlightenment 15, 47, 80, 119, 120, 210–18 Page 2 of 7

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Index Cudworth, Ralph 101–2, 104, 109, 146, 172 Cumberland, Richard 203–4 D'Alecmbert, J. Le R. 113 Derrida, Jacques 192 Descartes, René and Cartesianism 7, 99, 115, 116, 117, 123 Diderot, Denis 113 Disney, John 42, 74 Dissent 2, 6–9, 13, 38, 48, 51, 56–8, 71, 121, 157, 160 Doddridge, Philip 9 Dunn, John 13 Edwards, Jonathan 30 Encyclopédie 113 Engelbrecht, Johann 159 Enlightenment 2, 3, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15,19, 20, 21, 47, 59, 6o, 80, 83–4, 114, 118, 170, 171, 174, 212, 213–18 Episcopius 43 Erasmus, Desiderius 23–4, 43, 77–8 Erastianism 24, 41, 58, 59, 72, 74, 167, 208 Evangelicalism 1, 2, 40, 61, 79, 147, 160, 184 Fenclon, Archbishop 120 Firmin, Thomas 27 Fitzpatrick, Martin 21 Fox, George 124 Frederick the Great 116 freethinkers 3, 23, 35–6, 41, 43, 51, 127–9,130, 168–70, 174–5,183, 190, 199, 208 Garrick, David 204 Gasgoigne, John 99–100 George I 135 George II 33, 120 George III 168, 102 Gibbon, Edward 2–3, 73–4,174, 200–8, 209, 212, 213, 215, 216 Goldsmith, Oliver 205–6 Göttingen, University of 116, 117 Grant, Johnson 120 Gregory, David 99–100 Gregory, G. 201 Gretton, Philipps 102–3 Grey, Richard 196, 206 Grey, Zachary 37 Grotius, Hugo 43, 196 Hales, John 43, 51 Halley, Edmund 100 Hardy, Samuel 67, 69, 75 Hare, Francis 38 Harman, P. M. 84 Harrington, James 51, 213 Hartley, David 43–4, 45, 218 Hartlib, Samuel 124 Heath, Thomas 198 Page 3 of 7

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Index Hegel, G. W. F. 123 Henley, Samuel 56 Herring, Thomas 52 Hoadley, Benjamin 31–3, 51, 59, 66, 74, 75 Hobbes, Thomas 74, 91 Hodges, Walter 198–9 Homer 209 Hooke, Nathaniel 115 Hooker, Richard 59, 62, 66 Horace 208 Horne, George 12, 66, 70, 120, 138–47, 154–6, 162 Horsley, Samuel 118–19, 216–17 Hotham, George 123 Hull Grammar School 1 Hume, David 13, 14, 60, 61, 84, 129, 168–70, 210–12, 213, 214 Hurd, Richard 39, 162, 168–70, 173, 179, 209, 210, 211 Hutchinson, John, and Hutchinsonianism 12, 136–51, 156–7, 162, 183–5, 190, 198 (p.257) Huygens, Christian 93 Ibbetson, James 63–4, 65, 66, 70 Inge, W. R. 122–3 Jackson, John 53, 106–8, 180, 134 Jacob, Margaret 12, 85–6, 99, 136–7 Jacobites and Jacobitism 8, 32–3, 41, 86, 135, 160–1, 186 James I 49 James II 19, 24, 28 James III (the Old Pretender) 117 Jebb, John 55–8, 60 Job, Book of 179, 180, 190–207 Johnson, Samuel 49, 72–3 Jones, John 56 Jones, William 70–1, 80, 138–9, 140–1, 145–7, 157, 162 Jortin, John 42–3, 208–9, 210 Josephus 173 Kempis, Thomas à 153 Kennicott, Benjamin 147 King, Lord Peter 86–7 King, William 106–8 Kingswood School 151, 157 Lardner, Nathaniel 48 latitudinarianism 11, 19, 21, 28, 30, 33, 45–9, 85–6, 99, 161 Laud, William 77, 80 Law, Edmund 12, 13, 22, 42–3, 53–6, 75, 76, 102, 103, 106–12, 181, 214, 215 Law, William 6, 12, 14, 120–3, 127–36, 139, 150, 152–6, 158–60, 161–2, 181–3, 218 Lecky, W. E. H. 54 Leibnitz, G. E. 100, 106, 108, 110, 111 Lessing, G. E. 214 Lichtenberg, G. C. 116 Lincoln's Inn 174 Lindsey, Theophilus 56 Page 4 of 7

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Index Locke, John, and Lockeanism 1, 2, 7, 11, 12, 13, 14, 19, 20, 22, 24–8, 53, 59, 65, 77, 80, 83, 85–98, 99–119, 156, 172, 173, 185, 213 Lowth, Robert 190, 199–205, 214 Lowth, William 201 Lucretius 176 Macaulay, Catherine 74 McGuire, J. E. 93 Mandeville, Bernard 177 Mansfield, William Murray, Lord 210 Mason, William 170 Meredith, Sir William 73 Methodism 41, 52, 147, 150, 157, 158, 160–2 Michaelis, J. D. 214 Milner, Joseph 1, 3, 78 Milton, John 49, 74, 124, 156 Moravians 120, 152, 154, 157, 158, 161–2 Morgan, Thomas 38–9, 43, 58, 188–9 Newdigate, Sir Roger 74 Newman, John Henry 11, 21 Newton, Benjamin 183 Newton, Sir Henry 117 Newton, Isaac, and Newtonianism 11, 12, 14, 33, 37–8, 53, 59, 83–119, 120–21, 132, 134, 136–51, 180, 183, 190, 213 Nicene Creed 30, 33 Nonjurors 19, 32, 41, 121, 135–6, 190 North, Lord 74 Northampton Academy 8–9 O'Brien, Conor Cruise 71 Okely, Francis 157–60 Overton, John Henry 151 Oxford: University of 7, 8, 21, 73, 74, 138, 147, 152, 155–8, 161–2, 184, 200 Christ Church 7, 65 Corpus Christi College 9, 76 Jesus College 30 Lincoln College 152 Magdalen College 66, 73 Oriel College 9, 76, 198–9 St John's College 146 Wadham College 138, 198 Paine, Thomas 216 Paley, William 53–4, 74–5 Parry, Richard 204 Peckard, Peter 59–62 Pelikan, Jaroslav 22 Percy, Thomas 146 Peters, Charles 196–7, 206 Pitcairne, Achibald 99 Pitt, Thomas 73 Page 5 of 7

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Index Pitt, William 175 (p.258) Platonism and Neoplatonism 91, 124, 172, 173, 175, 178, 180 Pocock, J. G. A. 2–3, 12, 174, 210, 215 Pope, Alexander 162–3, 167–8, 171–2, 185 Pordage, John 124 Porteus, Beilby 78–9 Powell, William Samuel 45–8 Priestley, Joseph 2, 9, 112 Proast, Jonas 27 Pythogoras 180 Quarles, Francis 156 Randolph, Thomas 64–5, 67–8, 70 Ridley, Gloucester 63, 65, 66–7, 69 Robinson, Robert 76 Romaine, William 147, 184–5 Roman Catholicism 20, 23, 28, 31, 47–8, 52, 59, 70, 71, 75, 77, 117–18 Rotherham, John 63, 67, 71 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 54, 170 Rundle, Thomas 38 Rutherforth, Thomas 63, 64, 70 Sacheverell, Henry 19, 187 Sadducees 173, 184, 185 Savile, Sir George 73 Sawbridgc, John 74 Seeker, Thomas 9, 59, 62, 63 Sedgwick, Adam 87–8 Sharpe, William 203 Sherlock, Thomas 193–5, 197, 198, 199 Shipley, Jonathan 62 Skinner, Quentin 89 Smart, Christopher 120, 147–51, 158 Socinianism 2, 26, 27–8, 33, 34, 52, 53, 55, 59, 75–6, 77, 100 South, Robert 190 Southey, Robert 152 Sparrow, John 123 Spearman, Robert 144–5 Spinoza, Baruch 133, 175 Spurgeon, Caroline 122 Stebbing, Henry 186–7, 193 Stephen, Sir Leslie 33, 53 Sterne, Laurence 167–8, 190, 204–5, 206 Stillingfleet, Edward 66, 190 Strauss, Leo 175–6 Sturges, John 79 subscription 10, 21, 29–31, 36–7, 41–4, 45–79 Swift, Jonathan 31 Sydenham, Thomas 93 Sykes, Arthur Ashley 38, 53, 180, 183 Tewkesbury Academy 9 Page 6 of 7

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Index Tillard, John 188 Tillotson, John 28, 30, 43, 62, 190 Tindal, Matthew 127–9 Toland, John 27, 133 Toplady, Augustus Montague 75–8 Tory, and Toryism 13, 14, 86, 99, 118, 121, 136–7, 139, 147, 152, 161, 162 Tottie, John 65, 68 Towne, John 198 Trinity, the 11, 22, 30, 33, 35, 44, 52, 53, 60, 75–6, 100, 125, 133, 141, 145, 218 Tucker, Josiah 65–6, 67, 69–70, 71, 72 Turner, Baptist Noel 63 unitarianism 11, 22, 56–7, 61, 75–6, 217 Van Mildert, William 217 Vico, Giambattista 117 Virgil 206–9 Voltaire, F. M. A. de 60,114–16, 169–70 Wakefield, Gilbert 57, 59 Walpole, Horace 40, 174–5 Walton, Christopher 160 Warburton, William 2–3, 13, 14, 39–40, 41, 58, 74, 80, 133–4, 161–3, 167–212, 214, 215, 216 Warrington Academy 9 Waterland, Daniel 14, 35–8, 45, 50–1, 53, 65, 77, 100, 102–6, 110, 217, 218 Watson, Richard 75, 215–17 Webb, Philip Cartaret 186 Webster, William 186 Wesley, John 6,12, 74, 120, 121, 150, 151–7,1 58, 160–1 Wesley, Samuel 196 Whigs, and Whiggery 6, 8, 13, 14, 19, 33, 40, 74, 85–6, 99, 110, 114, 121, 136–7, 161, 162, 216 Whiston, William 35, 37 Whitefield, George 154 Wilberforce, William 1 Wilkes, John 68, 168 Wolff, Christian 116 Wollaston, Francis 79 (p.259) Wollaston, William 173 Woodward, John 137 Worthington, William 197 Wyvill, Christopher 68 Yorkshire Association 68, 73 Zinzendorf, Nikolaus Ludwig, Graf von 161

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