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Nature, History and the Search for Order: The Boyle Lectures, 1730–1785*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Robert G. Ingram
Robert G. Ingram*
Affiliation:
Ohio University
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Extract

History supplanted nature as the most important apologetical language among English polemical divines during the mid-eighteenth century, but not for the reasons usually adduced. The triumph of history over nature owed everything to the power of orthodox patronage and to nature’s demonstrable apologetical efficacy, and nothing to natural theology’s supposed failure sufficiently to prove God’s existence. Put another way, by the late 1720s orthodox apologists had come to believe that the popular argument from design in nature applied equally to history. Moreover, the argument from design in history appears to have been an apologetical strategy which accorded more closely with the disposition of an increasingly orthodox episcopate during the mid-century period. Little evidences the mid-century historical turn — a shift either missed or ignored by most historians — more clearly than the second generation (1730–1785) of the Boyle lectures, a series of public sermons founded by Robert Boyle in order to defend Christianity from the attacks of unbelievers. For whereas the first generation of lecturers founded their defences of Christianity on natural theology, the second built on Christianity’s historical record.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 46: God’s Bounty? The Churches and the Natural World , 2010 , pp. 276 - 292
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2010

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank William Gibson, Scott Mandelbrote, Johannes Wienand, Stephen Snobelen, Melanie Barber and Clare Brown, as well as the Editors of Studies in Church History, for help in the preparation of this paper.

References

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2 Ibid. 2: 413.

3 Ibid. 1: 219.

4 Ibid., prefatory dedication.

5 Ibid. 2: 414.

6 Ibid.

7 But see Ingram, Robert G., ‘“The Weight of Historical Evidence”: Conyers Middleton and the Eighteenth-Century Miracles Debate’, in Gibson, William and Cornwall, Robert, eds, Politics, Religion and Dissent, 1660–1832 (Aldershot Google Scholar, forthcoming); Walsham, Alexandra, ‘The Reformation and “The Disenchantment of the World” Reassessed’, HistJ 51 (2008), 497–528.Google Scholar

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23 McGrath, Alister, ‘A Blast from the Past? The Boyle Lectures and Natural Theology’, Science and Christian Belief 17 (2005), 25—33 Google Scholar; Pyle,’Introduction’, esp. 1.

24 Guerlac, Henry and Jacob, Margaret C., ‘Bentley, Newton and Providence: The Boyle Lectures Once More’, JHI 30 (1969), 307–18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Of the initial trustees, only Tenison was a cleric.

25 London, LPL, MS 2958, fols 20–21: Nominations to Boyle Trustees, 18 December 1711; Newton, Dissertations, 1: 287–88 n. 1. Of Tenison’s appointees, Gibson, Trimnell, Kennett and Bradford were all clerics, and all would serve as bishops in the Church of England.

26 MS 2958, fols 23–25: Nominations of Boyle Trustees, 21 March 1750. See also Newton, Dissertations, 1: 288 n. 1. At the time of their appointment, Sherlock, Benson and Secker all sat on the episcopal bench.

27 London, LPL, Secker Papers, vol. 4, fol. 273: Thomas Seeker’s nominations of Boyle Trustees, 1765. See also ibid. fol. 272: Seeker to Drummond, 1 August 1765. Drummond, Newcombe and Cornwallis were all bishops at the time of their appointment.

28 On orthodoxy, see Ingram, Robert G., Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century:Thomas Secker and the Church of England (Wbodbridge, 2007), 11–14.Google Scholar

29 See, e.g., Secker Papers, vol. 4, fols 267, 272: Nicholls to Secker, 20 November 1755; Secker to Drummond, 1 August 1765.

30 On Gibsons theological views and his patronage of orthodox clerics, see Taylor, S.J. C., ‘“Dr. Codex” and the Whig “Pope”: GibsonEdmund, Bishop of Lincoln and London, 1716–1748’, in Davis, Richard W., ed., Lords of Parliament: Studies, 1714–1914 (Stanford, CA, 1995), 9–27 Google Scholar. Sherlock published two of the most influential orthodox defences of miracles and prophecies during the eighteenth century: for an examination of his orthodox polemics, see Carpenter, Edward, Thomas Sherlock 1678–1761 (London, 1936), 294–322 Google Scholar. For the stable of prominent orthodox polemicists nurtured by Secker, see Ingram, Religion, Reform, and Modernity, esp. 71–113 Google Scholar. For Drummond, and Cornwallis, , see ODNB, s.n. ‘Drummond, Robert Hay (1711–1776)’ and ‘Cornwallis, Frederick (1713–1783)’.Google Scholar

31 The average Boyle lecturer (1730–85) graduated from Cambridge, served as a royal chaplain, embraced orthodoxy, and was firmly ensconced within the clerical establishment. Cf. Mandelbrote, Scott, ‘Eighteenth-Century Reactions to Newton’s Anti-Trinitarianism’, in Force, James E. and Hutton, Sarah, eds, Newton and Newtonianism: New Studies, International Archives of the History of Ideas 188 (Dordrecht, 2004), 93—112, at 101–03 CrossRefGoogle Scholar for the composition of those who delivered the Lady Moyer’s lectures, another prestigious forum for promoting orthodoxy. Only two of the second-generation Boyle lecturers (John Jortin and Ralph Heathcote) would not have counted themselves among the orthodox: see, e.g., Jortin, John, Remarks on Ecclesiastical History, 5 vols (London, 1751–73), 1, esp. xi–xxxii Google Scholar; Nichols, John, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 9 vols (London, 1812—16), 3: 531—44 Google Scholar: ‘Memoir of Rev. Dr. Ralph Heathcote’. Nevertheless, both Jortin and Heathcote gave lectures which defended the historical facts of Christianity, and Jortin owed his nomination to the Boyle lecturership to Thomas Sherlock’s lobbying: Jortin, John, Tracts, philological, critical, and miscellaneous, 2 vols (London, 1790), 1: x.Google Scholar

32 Heathcote, Ralph, A Discourse Upon the Being of God (London, 1763), 26.Google Scholar

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34 Heathcote, Use of Reason, 5.

35 Berriman, William, The Gradual Revelation of the Gospel, 2 vols (London, 1733), 1: 8–9.Google Scholar

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37 Ibid. 23–27. See also Stebbing, Henry, Christianity Justified upon the Scripture Foundation (London, 1750), 22–54, 289–90 Google Scholar; Owen, Intent and Propriety, 1: 28–30.

38 Worthington, William, The Evidence of Christianity Deduced From Facts, 2 vols (London, 1769), 1: 6–7 Google Scholar. See also idem, An Impartial Enquiry Into The Case of the Gospel Demoniacks (London, 1777), 2–5.Google Scholar

39 Worthington, Evidence of Christianity, 1: 14.

40 Ibid. 9.

41 Ibid. 12–13.

42 Ibid. 26–27.

43 See Biscoe, Acts of the Apostles, 1: 11; 2: 466–67, 540–41, 563–65; Stebbing, Christianity Justified, 255–56; Heathcote, Use of Reason, 16, 25–34; Owen, Intent and Propriety, 9.

44 Stebbing, Christianity Justified, 261.

45 Jortin, Ecclesiastical History, 1: 84.

46 Heathcote, Use of Reason, 33.

47 Owen, Intent and Propriety, 1: 5.

48 Apthorp, East, Letters on the prevalence of Christianity (London, 1779), vi.Google Scholar

49 Jortin, , Ecclesiastical History, I: xii Google Scholar. Cf. Pocock, J. G. A., Barbarism and Religion, 4 vols (Cambridge, 1999–2006)Google Scholar, which explores the perceived corruption of Christianity by philosophy in some detail; idem,’History and Enlightenment’, 83–96, states his thesis succinctly.

50 Biscoe, Acts of the Apostles, 1: 26.

51 Ibid. 39.

52 Stebbing, Christianity Justified, 280–90; Owen, Intent and Propriety, 33.

53 Twells, Leonard, Twenty-Four Sermons, 2 vols (London, 1742), 1: 3, 86.Google Scholar

54 Cf. Shaw, , Miracles Google Scholar; Walsham, Alexandra, ‘Miracles in Post-Reformation England’, in Cooper, Kate and Gregory, Jeremy, eds, Signs, Wonders, Miracles: Representations of Divine Power in the Life of the Church, SCH 41 (Woodbridge, 2005), 273–306.Google Scholar

55 Jortin, Ecclesiastical History, I: xi.

56 Ibid. 258–67.

57 London, LPL, Sion Arc. L40.2/E34 (2): Manuscript notes for eleven of Joseph Roper’s Boyle lectures, 1744–45, unpaginated, is the lone Boyle lecture to confront, even briefly, the inscrutability of the mechanics of Providence.

58 Clark, J. C. D., ‘Providence, Predestination and Progress; Or, Did the Enlightenment Fail?’, Albion 35 (2003), 559–89 Google Scholar; Ingram, Robert G., ‘“The Trembling Earth is God’s Herald”: Earthquakes, Religious and Public Life in Britain during the 1750s’, in Braun, Theodore E. D. and Radner, John B., eds, The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755: Representations and Reactions (Oxford, 2005), 97–115.Google Scholar

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61 Owen, Intent and Propriety, 36.

62 Newton, Dissertations, 1: 397–98 (emphasis mine).

63 Secker Papers, vol. 4, fol. 268: Samuel Nicolls to Thomas Seeker, 5 May 1758. Neither Wienand nor Nicholls list a lecturer for the years 1733—35.

64 Roper could not complete his course of lecturers because he died in March 1746: John, and Venn, J. A., Alumni Cantabrigienses, 10 vols (Cambridge, 1922–58), Part 1, 3: 486 Google Scholar. For manuscript notes for eleven of them, see Sion Arc. L40.2/E34 (2).

65 Secker Papers, vol. 4, fol. 267: Nicolls to Seeker, 20 November 1755; London Evening Post, no. 3923 (19 December 1752). Neither Wienand nor Nicholls list a lecturer for the years 1753–55.

66 Newton, Dissertations, 1: 288–89.

67 Though he published only two of his lectures, Heathcote, pace Wienand and Nicholls, preached the full course of twenty-four Boyle lectures: Literary Anecdotes, 2: 538.

68 Literary Anecdotes, 3: 96, 99 note that Apthorp’s Letters on the prevalence of Christianity earned him an immediate D.D. and a subsequent nomination to present the Boyle lectures. They also intimate that Apthorp reworked his volume as his Boyle lectures for the years 1781–85. Certainly, his understanding of Christian history and his critical method did not change between 1779 and the publication of his Discourses on prophecy: read in the chapel of Lincoln’s-Inn, at the lecture founded by the Right Reverend William Warburton, 2 vols (London, 1786). As such, for the purposes of this paper, the general historical principles which Apthorp spelled out in the initial chapters to Letters on the prevalence of Christianity are taken to reflect accurately the theoretical foundation for his subsequent Boyle lectures.