The incendiaries of sedition and confusion

Section IV of this book deals with William Warburton. This introductory chapter to Section IV charts Warburton’s idiosyncratic path to polemical divinity and the principles which guided his work. It traces his path from the law to the church. It also considers his first substantive publication, A Critical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Causes of Prodigies (1727). That work posited a method to distinguish truth from lies and first broached many of the subjects with which he would deal during his long polemical career.

Flood of resentment: assailing the primitive Church

Conyers Middleton’s History of the Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero (1741) proved not to be a vehicle for personal and professional redemption. Its content rankled the orthodox, and the book failed to remove the heterodox stain to his reputation. While he profited financially from the publication, his ecclesiastical career remained stalled, his resentment metastasized and he returned again to overt polemical divinity. This chapter explores how orthodox coercion and punishment could intensify and deepen a polemical divine’s heterodoxy. It explains what about an ostensibly theologically neutral work bothered the orthodox. It explains why Middleton returned to overt polemical divinity during the mid 1740s, uninhibited by hopes of ecclesiastical promotion. Finally, it shows how his treatment of miracles focused on epistemological and hermeneutical problems that had long consumed him and whose origins he explicitly traced to England’s Reformation.

Conclusion

The conclusion explains why the English Reformation ended in the late eighteenth century. It discounts a secular and secularizing Enlightenment as an explanation. Rather, it offers three other reasons for the Reformation’s ending. Firstly, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century enough time had passed to make the seventeenth-century wars of religion less threatening than they had seemed earlier in the century. Secondly, the Reformation issues with which the eighteenth-century English dealt got supplanted by other, more urgent ones, often having to do with England’s expanding empire. Finally, and importantly, the Reformation ended because the polemical divines who are the subject of this book failed fully in their tasks of defining truth and of defending the autonomy of the established Church of England. In the end, the modern state took on the role as truth’s arbiter and made the Church a subordinate, dependent institution.

A due degree of zeal: enthusiasm and Methodism

This chapter is about anti-Methodism and focuses especially on Warburton’s Doctrine of Grace (1763). Firstly, it reveals how Warburton’s engagement with George Whitefield’s Journals; with John Byrom’s work on enthusiasm; and with Daniel Neal’s History of the Puritans shaped and sharpened his thinking about Methodism. Secondly, it anatomizes the argument of a long anti-Methodist manuscript — The True Methodist — that Warburton wrote during the mid 1750s, yet never published. Finally, it shows how Warburton reworked the True Methodist’s anti-Methodist arguments in his Doctrine of Grace. Running through all of Warburton’s thinking on Methodism, from Methodism’s emergence in the late 1730s until the end of his life, was a fear of enthusiasm. Precisely what constituted enthusiasm was up for debate during the eighteenth century. Yet while enthusiasm was a labile term during the eighteenth century, it was almost always associated with the disordered religious and political life of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. This chapter shows how and why contemporaries made that association.

The religion of the first ages: primitivism and the primitive Church

This chapter illustrates how the history of the early Christian church was not an abstruse subject during the eighteenth century but a topical one. For the primitive church remained the standard for both orthodoxy and orthopraxis well into the eighteenth century. This chapter demonstrates how that was the case by focusing especially on two pieces by Zachary Grey — his Examination of the fourteenth chapter of Sir Isaac Newton’s observations upon the prophecies of Daniel (1736) and his Short history of the Donatists (1741). Grey’s engagement with Netwon’s work on prophecy centred osn Newton’s treatment of saints and of God’s nature. In writing about these subjects, Newton had aimed to show that the post-fourth-century church was infested with theological impurities; Grey’s rejoinder aimed to show that the eighteenth-century Church of England understood both the saints and God’s nature in a primitively pure way. Grey’s treatment of the ancient Donatist heresy similarly related to contemporary concerns. For he tried to show that Methodism was not novel but, instead, a revival of an ancient heretical sect which had almost rent asunder the fourth-century North African church.

Factions, seditions and schismatical principles: Puritans and Dissenters

This chapter anatomizes the dispute between Zachary Grey and Dissenting historians like Daniel Neal who together mined the recent English past for ammunition in eighteenth-century religious and political fights. It locates these historical debates within efforts during the 1730s to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts. It then charts the development of Grey’s take on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English history. It shows that while the seventeenth-century wars of religion were over, their causes and lessons remained contested. Precisely because the causes and lessons of those wars were not settled, polemical divinity retained practical political value. The chapter also uses Zachary Grey’s anti-Dissenting historical scholarship further to consider the economic realities of polemical divinity. While religious works continued to dominate booksellers’ catalogues, they had to be pitched and packaged in ways that were marketable. Grey’s anti-Neal tracts were hardly profitable. The chapter concludes by examining a work of English historical scholarship that was financially successful: Zachary Grey’s scholarly edition of Samuel Butler’s Hudibras.

The sacrament Socinianized: Benjamin Hoadly and the Eucharist

This chapter concerns the ways in which the Christian God effected men’s salvation. It reconstructs the Eucharistic debates between Waterland and Benjamin Hoadly. It locates those debates within wider debates during the 1730s about whether or not to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts. It shows how those sacramental debates got refracted through the memory of the seventeenth century which had produced the Test and Corporation Acts. Finally, it demonstrates why Waterland thought that when responding to Hoadly he was merely reiterating Thomas Cranmer’s Reformation-era sacramental theology, which itself had reiterated the pure sacramental theology of the primitive church.

Why then are we still reforming?

This introductory chapter uses the Thomas Woolston and Thomas Rundle controversies of the 1720s and 1730s to introduce the book’s historiographical framework. This chapter argues that the eighteenth-century English saw themselves as living within the Reformation, which is why religion predominated the era’s print culture. The English Reformation spurred a long conversation, one which was fundamentally about what constituted truth. Eighteenth-century polemical divinity grappled both with what constituted truth and with the consequences of divisions over what constituted truth. For this reason, some during the eighteenth century feared that they lived in an unending Reformation.

Neither a slave nor a tyrant: Church and state reimagined

This chapter anatomizes Warburton’s theory of church-state relations. It details the competing theories of church-state relations against which he situated his Alliance between Church and Stat (1736)e. It turns next to consider the marginal notes to his copy of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion, a work which exposed the breakdown of the religious and political order in mid-seventeenth-century England. The chapter concludes with a consideration of Warburton’s Alliance, highlighting the ways that he thought his conception of church and state might prevent a reversion to the previous century’s religio-political breakdown.

Popery in its proper colours

Part III of this book deals with Zachary Grey. This introductory chapter to Part III anatomizes eighteenth-century orthodox anti-popery. It begins by showing how Zachary Grey’s own family history emblematized the complicated legacy of England’s Reformation. It turns next to consider his undergraduate reading notebooks, which foreshadow his mature thought regarding the English church and state. It concludes with a close examination of his unpublished work on Islam and the Portuguese Inquisition, which reveal clearly the lineaments of his anti-popish thought.