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

241 Pages·4.04 MB·English

by  B. W. Young

Title Pages
Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century 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
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Title Pages
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© B.W. Young 1998
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Dedication
Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century 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-in-
law, Dr Ritabrata Bose
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century 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
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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
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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 Eighteenth-
Century 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
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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 Eighteenth-
Century 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
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