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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
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.
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.
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2 Ibid. 2: 413.
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4 Ibid., prefatory dedication.
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6 Ibid.
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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.
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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).
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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.
