Benjamin Hoadly, Samuel Clarke, and the Ethics of the Bangorian Controversy: Church, State, and the Moral Law

Abstract

The Bangorian controversy has been described as ‘the most bitter ideological conflict of the [eighteenth] century’ (J.C.D. Clark). However, while its impact is widely recognised, there are few studies dedicated to the controversy itself. Moreover, the figure at the centre of it all—Benjamin Hoadly, the Bishop of Bangor—has not always been taken seriously. Such scholars as Norman Sykes, G.R. Cragg, and B.W. Young have dismissed Hoadly as an opportunistic ‘political bishop’, rather than an adept theological thinker. By contrast, this article demonstrates that Hoadly’s Bangorian writings were embedded within the ethical rationalist moral theology of Isaac Newton’s friend, and defender against Gottfried Leibniz, Samuel Clarke. As a follower of Clarke, Hoadly objected to the doctrine of apostolic succession, and to the existence of religious conformity laws in Church and state, because they prevented Christianity from being what he thought it ought to be: a religion of conscience.

1. Introduction

The Bangorian controversy followed publication of a 1717 sermon, ‘The Nature of the Kingdom of Christ’ by Benjamin Hoadly, Bishop of Bangor. First delivered before King George I, and published at his insistence, the sermon received responses from fifty clergymen, with seventy-four pamphlets appearing in one month alone.1 Its impact is illustrated by Dr Johnson:

At this time the attention of the literary world was engrossed by the Bangorian controversy, which filled the press with pamphlets, and the coffee-houses with disputants.2

Hoadly’s sermon was controversial, not least because it created conflict with his fellow Whig bishops.

The King, and the recently installed Stanhope-Sunderland Whig ministry, supported Hoadly because he stated their position on repealing religious conformity laws to allow for toleration of non-conformists. Moreover, Hoadly’s sermon, delivered in the shadow of the Hanoverian Succession (1714) and the first Jacobite rebellion (1715), furthered the Whig claim to be the only party that truly supported the new King. Hoadly grouped together opponents of Whig relaxation of religious conformity laws with enemies of the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian Succession. ‘High Churchmen’, Tories, non-jurors, and Jacobites all supported conformity laws because:

(1)

they were grounded in the doctrine of apostolic succession: the belief that ‘true’ clergymen stood in a line of spiritual leaders that could be traced back to Christ’s apostles;

(2)

they created hierarchies within the Church that elevated ‘apostolic’ clergymen above ordinary Christians, and granted them authority over even lay political rulers.

For Hoadly, (1) betrayed the fact that supporters of conformity laws were obsessed with hereditary de jure right; the same obsession that saw non-jurors and Jacobites oppose the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian Succession. Meanwhile (2) granted such individuals a privileged status within the political state they were otherwise attempting to undermine.

Despite government support, Hoadly’s sermon was opposed by High Church Tories and other Whig bishops. The latter sided with Hoadly in criticising orthodox Tories, but felt that his Low Church principles went too far.

For example, Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, criticised Hoadly, but sided with him in supporting Stanhope’s Bill for Strengthening the Protestant Interest (1718/19), which repealed the Occasional Conformity Act (1711) and the Schism Act (1714). Both had been introduced by the Tory Bolingbroke-Harley government under Queen Anne. The latter required school tutors to receive a Bishop’s licence, undermining dissenting academies; the former sought to eradicate ‘occasional conformity’: that is, ‘occasionally’ taking Anglican communion in order to qualify for public office. Under the Test and Corporation Acts (1661; 1673; 1678) (which remained in force in some form in Great Britain and Ireland until the nineteenth century), public office-holders had, for example, to take Anglican communion, deny transubstantiation, and subscribe to belief in the Trinity.

Gibson, with other Whig bishops, supported Stanhope’s repeal of the Bolingbroke-Harley Acts. Where the greatest threat to the post-Revolution establishment remained ‘papists’ and Jacobites, a wider tolerance for Protestants could help to shore up the Protestant Succession. However, tolerance for non-conformity must be limited. Hoadly claimed there was no need for conformity laws, other than those against Roman Catholics. This left Church and state vulnerable to the anarchy of competing, equally authoritative, Protestant sects; and, to the possibility that another Cromwellian totalitarian sect would rise to power from that anarchy.3

Similarly, prior to the Bangorian controversy, Gibson and William Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury, together with Hoadly, had resisted the High Tory view of Church of England Convocation. Under the leadership of Francis Atterbury (made Bishop of Rochester in 1713, and later convicted of Jacobitism), the Convocation’s Lower House, again on the basis of spiritual authority and apostolic succession, had argued that Convocation could convene without the crown’s permission. Wake insisted that Atterbury’s position revealed the Tories’ ‘papist’ and non-juring principles. To argue, with Atterbury, for ‘the rights of a Convocation man’ was another way of insulating enemies of the post-Revolution settlement from civil censure. However, for the likes of Wake and Gibson, their objections to Atterbury did not mean they supported Hoadly in rejecting apostolic succession. For them, the Church of England, within its present post-Revolution establishment, was the true, apostolic Church. In denying any special spiritual authority to Anglican clergymen, Hoadly made the Church the state’s ‘creature’, reducing Anglicans to equivalence with members of other Protestant denominations.4

Given the rivalries exposed during the Bangorian controversy, scholarship has always appreciated the long shadow that it cast.5 Works from the controversy were reprinted until the Oxford Movement, whenever conformity laws and apostolic succession were debated.6 Indeed, the controversy appeared to give a definitive answer to the central question of whether the Anglican Church was founded on Erastian principles: when the Lower House of Convocation recommended censure of Hoadly, the King prorogued Convocation, which did not meet again for 140 years.

However, despite wide-spread recognition of the controversy’s significance, modern commentators point to a tension within existing scholarship: although its impact is recognised, few studies are devoted to the controversy itself,7 while there is ‘little…that has sought to engage with the [controversy’s] theological and political argument’.8

Moreover, recent scholarship highlights a tension in the way Hoadly has been represented. Modern commentators help give us an image of Hoadly as a serious political and theological figure. John Gascoigne, Andrew Starkie, and William Gibson have drawn attention to how Hoadly’s Bangorian writings spread, like a ‘fever’,9 throughout Great Britain, Ireland, and America, as he became a seminal figure for dissenters and political reformers into the nineteenth-century.10

However, Hoadly the serious political and theological figure runs parallel with the other dominant image of the ‘political bishop’ who has ‘been judged representative of the worst in the eighteenth-century Church’:11 ‘a Whig opportunist and a blatant clerical careerist’.12 Hoadly is the Bishop of Bangor who never visited his own diocese, and who enflamed the Bangorian controversy, not from genuine theological conviction, but as part of his career as a Whig propagandist. His rise through four successive bishoprics was ‘the gravest offence…the mere reward for political services’.13

This article aims to help the Hoadly who ‘never received his due’14 as a serious, rather than an ‘inconsiderable’ and ‘incidental’,15 theological thinker. In answer to the first tension identified by recent scholarship, it does so as a study dedicated to Hoadly’s Bangorian writings.16 It will make an original contribution to existing scholarship in three ways:

First, when discussing Hoadly, commentators often refer to the fact that his Bangorian writings emphasised ‘sincerity and liberty of conscience’.17 However, there has been no discussion of Hoadly’s ethical rationalist theory of conscience, which this article argues underpins his conception of sincerity, and his rejection of conformity laws and apostolic succession.

Second, there is disagreement as to whether Hoadly’s Bangorian writings defend some form of established Anglican ‘civil religion’ or are a prescient statement of modern liberalism.18 Below, it will be shown that the civil religion model accords best with Hoadly’s understanding of conscience. When the established Church helps to preserve a state which is avowedly Protestant, but not denominationally hegemonic, then Christianity is allowed to function properly as a religion of conscience.

Third, this article demonstrates that Samuel Clarke’s moral theology (what I term Clarkean ethical rationalism: see Section 2.2 and Section 2.3 below) is fundamental to Hoadly’s Bangorian writings.

Clarke was an Anglican priest and Cambridge academic who was celebrated in the eighteenth-century by figures as varied as Queen Caroline, Joseph Butler, John Witherspoon, Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire. He is probably best-known today for his a priori argument for the existence of God; his version of rational intuitionism; and his defence of Newtonianism in the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, exchanged 1715–1716, and itself first published in 1717.19

Existing scholarship often draws attention to Clarke’s and Hoadly’s friendship.20 Hoadly edited the posthumous 4 volume edition of The Works of Samuel Clarke (1738) and wrote the preface for the posthumous 10 volume edition of Clarke’s Sermons on the Following Subjects (Clarke 1730), edited by Clarke’s brother, John, and dedicated to Queen Caroline by Clarke’s wife, Catherine. In his preface to the latter, he remarked:

I shall think Myself greatly recompensed for the want of Any other Memorial, if My name may go down to posterity thus closely joyned [sic] to His; and I myself be thought of, and spoke of, in Ages to come, under the Character of The FRIEND of Dr. CLARKE.21

Clarke and Hoadly’s obvious friendship only makes it more surprising that there should not yet be a study of Clarke’s influence upon Hoadly’s Bangorian writings.22 This article corrects that omission.

Section 2 of this paper analyses the influence of Clarke on Hoadly’s theory of conscience. Section 3, Section 4 and Section 5, respectively, explain how that theory of conscience informed Hoadly’s position on conformity laws; apostolic succession; and, Church and state.

2. Hoadly’s Bangorian Writings: Church, Clarke, and Conscience

2.1. The Nature of the Church

For Hoadly, the Church is governed by particular laws and sanctions, because it is a Kingdom: the Kingdom of Christ. Moreover, as a Kingdom, it is governed by a single ruler—a King—who legislates its laws and sanctions. As the Church is the Church of Christ, it follows that, ‘The Church of Christ is the Kingdom of Christ. He is King in his own Kingdom. He is Sole Law-giver to his subjects, and Sole Judge, in matters relating to Salvation’.23

Those seeking membership of Christ’s Church must obey that Kingdom’s laws and sanctions. To discover the laws and sanctions of Christ’s Kingdom, we need to consult the gospel, where ‘our Lord himself declared the Nature of his own Kingdom’.24 The gospel tells us: (a) that the reward or positive sanction for being a member of Christ’s Kingdom is ‘eternal salvation’; and (b) that receiving that reward is dependent upon forsaking our sins: ‘the plain Tenour of the Gospel…expressly delcareth Men to be in God’s Favour upon their forsaking their Sins’.25

The forsaking of sins is multi-layered, but one crucial aspect is the belief that Christ, and Christ alone, will judge whether we have genuinely forsaken our sins, and reward us accordingly. Members of Christ’s Kingdom believe that Christ is ‘Sole Law-giver’ and ‘Judge’ in his own Kingdom. Consequently, Church members must recognise that there is only one ‘General Law’26 that must be obeyed in order to satisfy the laws and sanctions of Christ’s Kingdom: sola fide in Christ:

the only True, Account of the Church of Christ, or the Kingdom of Christ…[is] That it is the Number of Men, whether Small or Great, whether dispersed or United, who truly and sincerely [my italics] are Subjects to Jesus Christ alone.27

To be members of the Church, we must ‘truly and sincerely’ subject ourselves to Christ alone. Unsurprisingly, Hoadly recognised that his position would be criticised for encouraging an extreme subjectivism (an ‘undue freedom and latitude’),28 according to which nominal Christians could justify all sorts of beliefs and practices simply on the basis of what they ‘sincerely’ felt.29

A central part of Hoadly’s response to the charge of subjectivism returns us to my observation above: that the forsaking of sins is multi-layered. Just as Paul and Luther insisted that certain types of actions flow from a genuine faithfulness, Hoadly maintained that a sincere forsaking of sins leads to a reformation in action, as we ‘live and act as becomes Subjects to Christ’, and ‘direct…[our] Worship by his Rule, and…whole practice by the General Law which He laid down’.30

For Hoadly, a sincere faith has some external measures: it leads to reformation in action, where that includes the performance of particular types of actions, ‘as becomes Subjects to Christ’. Moreover, as people with sincere faith undergo the same reformation in action, and direct their lives according to the same ‘General Law’, genuine members of Christ’s Church will agree about the types of actions they should perform.

Below, we shall see that the external measures for Hoadly’s sincere faithfulness stem from his Clarkean theory of conscience; that is, a theory of conscience which is ‘Clarkean’, because it is a theory of conscience Hoadly shares with Samuel Clarke, as a result of his commitment to Clarke’s ethical rationalist moral theology.

2.2. Clarkean Conscience

For Hoadly, a true and sincere faith in Christ, is a matter of conscience, in two ways:

First, our commitment to Christ is when we give our conscience over to him: a member of Christ’s Kingdom is one who subjects themselves to Christ, ‘in all matters truly relating to Conscience, or Eternal Salvation’.31

Second, conscience is that within which we self-evaluate the completeness of our subjection to Christ, and so measure the sincerity of our faith. True Christians subject themselves to Christ alone, and if anyone ‘feel[s] themselves in this disposition, They may be very certain that They are truly his Subjects, and Members of his Kingdom.32 However, because Hoadly’s conception of conscience is Clarkean (that is, a fundamental aspect of his commitment to Samuel Clarke’s ethical rationalism), our reflective awareness, in conscience, that we are utterly and sincerely subjected to Christ is not self-authorising; there are external measures against which we can assess the sincerity of our faithfulness, including the objective moral law, or law of reason.

In his Bangorian writings, Hoadly insisted that all human beings have before their ‘Eyes the Boundaries of Right and Wrong’, which gives them ‘recourse to the Original of Things: to the Law of Reason’.33 This is language taken directly from Clarke who insisted that all human beings can ‘see’ moral truth in the same way that we ‘see’ 2 + 2 = 4, because moral truths, like mathematical truths, are according to the ‘reason of the case’ and the ‘nature of things’; that is, truths built into the fabric of reality itself.34 Indeed, Clarke famously asserted that moral truths ‘are so notoriously plain and self-evident’ to all human beings, ‘that nothing but the extremist Stupidity of Mind…can possibly make any Man entertain the least Doubt concerning them’.35

Human ability to perceive objective moral truth qua the law of reason stems from the fact that God created us with reason.36 God gave us access to the law of his own nature, and made the law of reason constitutive of our own nature as rational creatures. Thus, rational perception of moral truth includes the knowledge and experience of God’s ‘Nature’, as well as the desire to ‘imitate’ God in operating according to the law of reason. Moreover, because the law of reason is the law of our own nature, as well as God’s, our desire to ‘imitate’ God by operating according to the law of reason is also always our desire to ‘perfect’ our own nature as rational creatures.37

For Clarke, the rational faculty of conscience concerns not just our knowledge and experience of the law of reason qua our law and God’s law, but our reflective capacity to judge our actions according to the law of reason qua our law and God’s law. It is in conscience, therefore, that we are reflectively aware of our own agency, where it consists in our accountability to God and ourselves for the acts we autonomously choose to perform as rational creatures under the law of reason.38

Thus, for Hoadly, in Clarkean terms, human beings know in their own rational conscience that a sincere faith includes reformation in action, because we know by the ‘Common Reason of Mankind’ that it is ‘a Heresy’ against the ‘Nature of things’ to say that ‘Men’ can be in or ‘out of the favour of God, which way sover They act’.39 Also, our ‘Natural Notions’ of God’s nature as ‘true, and Just, and Good’40 according to the law of reason mean that we know, in our own rational conscience, that God will only count a faith as sincere when that reformation in action is accomplished by the individual on the basis of their own free conscientious reflection: ‘The favour of God…follows from Sincerity’, which ‘must depend upon…Conduct honestly enter’d into, by the Dictate of your Conscience’.41

2.3. Universal Moral Law

Hoadly’s Clarkean conscience explains why he thought all sincere Christians agree that a reformation in action is part of a genuine forsaking of sins: it is a requirement revealed by the universal law of reason, as well as the general law of the gospel. Clarkean conscience also explains why he thought that sincere Christians agree about the types of action a sincere faith entails.

In our conscience we are not only aware of our responsibility to the law of reason qua our law and God’s law; we also know what acts satisfy that law. For Clarke and Hoadly, moral acts satisfy each of our ‘tripartite’ duties under the law of reason: (1) our duty to ourselves as rational creatures created by God; (2) our duty to others as our fellow rational creatures within creation; and, (3) our duty to God as creator and moral governor of the world for whom the moral law is an ‘attribute’.42

Hoadly’s Clarkean conscience helps to answer the charge of subjectivism: as the law of reason is equally ‘plain’ to all human beings, when faithful Christians conscientiously scrutinise the sincerity of their faithfulness, they will each evaluate their actions according to the same ‘tripartite’ duties enjoined by the law of reason. Indeed, Hoadly maintained that true Christians will gauge the sincerity of their faith by their ‘tripartite’ duties, not only because this is the law of reason, but because it is the law of the gospel.

As a Clarkean, Hoadly insisted that ‘Whatsoever contradicts the Natural Notions of God…cannot be the True Meaning of any Passage in that Gospel’.43 The law of reason is the law of our nature and of God’s nature; consequently, the law of the gospel, as God’s revelation of himself, will cohere with the law of reason qua our law and God’s law. This means not only that the New Testament, like ‘first Principles of all Truth’, is ‘plain’44 to all human beings, but that the law of the gospel and the law of reason both make our tripartite duties the hallmark of a sincere faith.

Thus, we are told in the gospel that ‘Keeping…[Christ’s] Commandments is declared the Way to Life; and the doing his Will, the Entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven’.45 Keeping Christ’s commandments is part of a true sola fide in Christ according to the general law of the gospel. Crucially, Christ’s commandments are the love commandments: to love God, to love our neighbour, while also loving ourselves. The recognition that a sincere faith includes actions which satisfy our tripartite duties is part of the law of the gospel, as well as the law of reason, which represents ‘religion’ as ‘Virtue and Integrity, as to ourselves, and Charity and Benevolence to others; before God’.46

3. Religious Conformity Laws

Having established Hoadly’s Clarkean theory of conscience, and its relationship to his conception of sincerity, we turn to examining how that theory underpins his position on conformity laws (below) and apostolic succession (Part 4). In each case we shall see that Hoadly’s central criticism was that they prevented Christianity from being a religion of conscience; which is to say that they encouraged a form of Church law in which ‘neither the Consciences nor Understandings of Men, neither Spirit nor Truth…[are] at all concerned in the Matter’.47

For Hoadly, where conformity laws operate within the Church or state, Christians have set about ‘erecting’ a Temporal Kingdom, under the Covert and Name of a Spiritual one’.48

Christianity as a religion of conscience promises ‘future’ salvation through becoming a member of an ‘invisible’ and ‘spiritual’ Kingdom, which is not yet ‘of this world’.49 Conscience is that which we give over to Christ when we believe in him as our sole judge and king. Our conscience does not promise us immediate reward; instead, we live in hope of the positive sanction that Christ has promised to those who fulfil the general law of his Kingdom: eternal salvation in the life to come. Consequently, Christ’s ‘Laws and Sanctions are plainly fixed: and relate to the Favour of God; and not at all to the Rewards, or Penalties, of this World’,50 the ‘Offices, or Glories, of this State’.51

Conformity laws not only ‘change’ the sanctions that Christ promulgated for his own Kingdom, but overthrow the only ‘General Law’ he laid down for his followers: ‘If Christ be our King; let us shew ourselves Subjects to Him alone, in the great affair of Conscience and Eternal Salvation’.52 Conformity laws mean that Christ is no longer ‘Sole Law-giver’ and ‘Judge’ in his own Kingdom; instead, Christians are bound to laws invented by human beings, and rewarded or punished by ‘usurping’ human ‘vicegerents’:53

[conformity laws] equally devest Jesus Christ of his Empire in his own Kingdom; set the obedience of his Subjects loose from himself; and teach them to prostitute their Consciences at the feet of Others, who have no right in such a manner to trample upon them.54

In deposing Christ and an individual’s conscience, conformity laws bind members of the Church to clerics and civil magistrates. Consequently, they prevent Christianity from being a religion of conscience, founded upon free-enquiry and self-responsibility through sincere reflection.

As a religion of conscience, whose truths are easy to understand, and where each individual is self-responsible for gauging the sincerity of their own faithfulness, ‘All of Christ’s subjects, have the right of ‘Enquiry…into his Original Message from Heaven’.55 Conformity laws deny this right, and coerce us into handing over our capacity and responsibility for free enquiry to another human being. Consequently, Christ’s Kingdom is no longer filled with members conscientiously examining the sincerity of their beliefs and actions, but with:

Lethargy…and a Sleep unto Death, when his Subjects shall throw off their relation to Him; fix their subjection to Others; and…where They have a right to see…his Will otherwise…shut their Eyes, and go blindfold at the Command of Others, because those Others are not pleas’d with their Enquiries into the Will of their great Lord and Judge.56

Conformity laws deny that ‘True real Faith cannot be the effect of Force’;57 instead, they drive people to take part in particular religious ceremonies. Such coercion encourages us to separate religion from morality, and creates ‘External Religion’.58 What matters is not what Church-members do, ethically speaking, or what they inwardly and sincerely believe. It only matters that they outwardly participate in particular religious ceremonies, and publicly confess certain beliefs, such that: ‘Sincerity, and Hypocrisy; Religion, and No Religion; Force, and Perswasion; A Willing Choice, and a Terrified Heart; are become the same things’.59

4. Apostolic Succession

In his Bangorian writings, Hoadly objected to the doctrine of apostolic succession, as well as conformity laws, not least because he thought that the latter were rooted in the former.

The belief that present-day clergymen are ‘apostolic’ allows them to ‘erect Tribunals’ (like Convocation) where they hold the Christ-like ‘Spiritual Power’ ‘to exercise a Judgement over the Consciences of Men’.60 It also justifies coercive conformity laws on the grounds that those laws will save souls by driving people into the one ‘true’ ‘apostolic’ communion.61

For Hoadly, we can be certain that apostolic succession is contrary to real Church law, because it is contrary to both the law of the gospel and the law of reason. It contradicts the law of the gospel, by supporting conformity laws that overthrow the ‘General Law’ of the gospel, and because the doctrine is not mentioned in the New Testament.62 In contravention of the law of reason, it claims for the clergy a greater ‘spiritual’ insight into religious and moral truth than anyone else. However, Christianity as a religion of (Clarkean) conscience tells us that all truth, moral and religious, is equally ‘plain’ to all human beings qua rational creatures, ‘in what Station sover they may be’.63

Moreover, not only does apostolic succession deny that moral and religious truth is ‘plain’ to all human beings, it is itself a doctrine ‘wrap[ped] in clouds of Obscurity, and Uncertainty’.64 The fact that no individual can be certain that there has really been a ‘Regular Uninterrupted Succession’65 of bishops since the time of Christ, further demonstrates that apostolic succession contravenes the law of reason qua our law and God’s law.

As rational agents, we have the right to, and the responsibility for, autonomous conscientious reflection on our beliefs and actions. Apostolic succession is an ‘obscure’ doctrine that no individual can sincerely believe when exercising that right and responsibility; it is also an ‘obscure’ doctrine that encourages rational agents to give up that right and responsibility and ‘to set up to Themselves the Idol of an unintelligible Authority, both in Belief, and Worship, and Practice’.66 Where apostolic succession leads human beings to contradict our rights and responsibilities as rational agents, we can also be certain that it defies God, who created us with those rights and responsibilities under the law of his own ‘Nature’. As we know God to be ‘true, and Just, and Good’, we know he ‘cannot put the Salvation and Happiness, of any Man, upon what…[God] himself hath put it out of the Power of any Man upon Earth, to be entirely satisfied in’.67

5. Church and State

Christianity as a religion of (Clarkean) conscience underpins Hoadly’s criticism of the High Church, but it also informs his understanding of the relationship between Church and state. There are two principal ways of reading Hoadly on this relationship: the first, ‘liberal’ reading, suggests that Hoadly looks forward to modern liberalism; the second makes Hoadly a defender of establishment Anglicanism qua civil religion.

The first reading draws out the fact that Hoadly agreed with High Churchmen that Church and state are two separate spheres. His objection to conformity laws, and the privileging of apostolic priests, was precisely that both are ‘a plain confounding of Two Rights, as distinct as Heaven and Earth’.68 If Church and state are two distinct ‘rights’, and the former is ‘spiritual’ and ‘invisible’, a Kingdom ‘not of this world’, then it is tempting to think of the spiritual Kingdom as something which belongs to an individual’s privatised conscience, outside the public sphere of the state:

In all your Civil Concerns, the Public Good; the Peace, the Happiness, of that Society to which You belong, will easily, and safely conduct You, both to know, and to do, the Will of God.69

Religion is not a concern of the outward and ‘this-worldly’ kingdom of human civil society. Religion concerns our own inner (‘invisible’) conscience, just as the kingdom conscience ‘presages’ is future and divine. However, at the same time, peace, in the kingdom of civil sphere, is that which is of ultimate importance. Thus, on the one hand, civil society exceeds its bounds (the public as it tries to control the private) when it legislates positively to enforce particular religious beliefs and practices, because here the public is seeking dominion over that which is private. On the other hand, civil society is within its bounds when it legislates negatively to restrict religious beliefs and practices that threaten civic peace, because here the private is seeking dominion over that which is public and private: that is, the conscience of certain individuals is seeking to control the public sphere, not least as a means of coercing other individuals’ private conscience.

However, turning to the second ‘civil religion’ reading, it is important to emphasise how Hoadly described the ‘peace’ that is essential to the public sphere:

The Peace of Christ’s Kingdom is a manly and Reasonable Peace; built upon Charity, and Love, and mutual forbearance, and receiving one another, as God receives us.70

Within the Church-Kingdom, peace results from the satisfaction of our tripartite duties under the law of reason and the law of the gospel, in which we love ourselves, others, and God. Crucially, the peace of Christ’s Kingdom is not something that remains within the Church qua particular ‘apostolic’ visible communion; it is a peace which infuses, and becomes the model for, society as a whole.

Hoadly agreed with High Church Whigs that an established Church was a necessary ‘buttress’ against those who threatened the post-Revolution settlement. The success of the Glorious Revolution and the suppression of the Jacobite rebellion were miracles which showed how divine providence favoured the Protestant succession. Consequently, Hoadly supported conformity laws for non-jurors, Jacobites, and Roman Catholics: those ‘treasonous’ groups could not be tolerated in public because their religious worship threatened the post-Revolution settlement by actively praying to God to overturn it.71

Hoadly’s public sphere is neither disestablished, secular, or unlimited in its liberalism. He agreed with the High Churchmen that ‘unity’ and peace in society follow from ‘unity’ in religious belief, but he denied that conformity laws achieved them. Unity of a sincere, as opposed to merely ‘external’, religion is not achieved through coercion, but through progress. Unity is the consequence of a vibrant and avowedly Protestant public sphere, which allows for the free ‘profession and publication’72 of religious ideas, allowing each individual to advance in their own understanding of moral and religious truth. If, in Clarkean terms, conscience concerns our knowledge of objective moral and religious truth, it is as each individual is allowed to follow their own conscientious reflection that religious and moral harmony develops between individuals as autonomous rational agents. Hoadly’s public sphere is Anglican, therefore, when that Anglicanism is Clarkean, and helps to create a tolerant Protestant civil religion which recognises the capacity of each individual to progress in their own sincere appreciation of universal moral and religious truth.

6. Conclusions

Hoadly’s position on ecclesiastical law and doctrine is informed by his Clarkean understanding of conscience as that through which we have knowledge of the law of reason, and possess the capacity to judge ourselves according to that law. According to Hoadly’s Clarkean ethical rationalism, the law of reason is the universal standard by which we judge all human action, including any attempts to define the law of the Church qua the law of the gospel for other Christians. It is only when we are certain that ecclesiastical law and gospel law have parity with the law of reason that we can be confident that Christianity is as it should be: a religion of conscience.

This article aimed to contribute to the image of Hoadly as a serious theological thinker by addressing certain omissions within existing scholarship, not least the influence of Clarke and Hoadly’s theory of conscience. On the one hand, it has focused narrowly on Hoadly’s Bangorian writings. On the other hand, that focus is justified: (a) by the novelty of this focus upon Clarke and conscience in Hoadly’s Bangorian writings (see Introduction); and (b) by fact that this article can act to prepare the ground for further study of the Bangorian controversy, in at least three ways.

First, further study of the controversy will reveal the commitment of Hoadly’s supporters to his Clarkean conception of conscience; not least, John Balguy, who wrote in defence of Hoadly under the pseudonym ‘Silvinius’. Balguy not only employed Clarkean conscience as Silvinius, but was a dedicated follower of Clarke in his other theological writings, and another close friend of Hoadly.73 At the end of the century, Richard Price opposed, and Edmund Burke supported, conformity laws as part of their disagreement over the French Revolution. Price invoked Clarkean conscience in his Discourse on the Love of Our Country (London, 1789), the work that prompted Burke to write his Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1790). Unsurprisingly, Price was not only a committed Clarkean,74 but spoke highly of Hoadly.75

Second, further study of the Bangorian controversy will reveal that Hoadly’s critics, in opposing his Clarkean ethical rationalism, emphasised rival definitions of conscience. The likes of William Law, Henry Stebbing and Thomas Sherlock argued against Clarke and Hoadly that we cannot simply ‘see’ right and wrong: fallen human beings have to be taught God’s will, and to be trained into an appreciation of the moral and religious duties God commands; a teaching and training that only happens under conformity laws in the apostolic Church. Consequently, they insisted that religion was a matter of public, as opposed to individual, conscience, where the latter shapes, and becomes the measure of, the former.76

Third, further study will reveal more about connections between the history and legacy of Hoadly’s and Clarke’s ‘liberty and sincerity of conscience’. For example, there has been a tendency to associate both ‘liberty and sincerity of conscience’, and Hoadly and Clarke, with deism and radical dissent. Such an association is unsurprising given the fact that Matthew Tindal dedicated chapter 14 of his Christianity as Old as Creation (Tindal 1730) (the so-called, ‘Deist’s Bible’) to proving that Clarke was a ‘true deist’; just as Tindal produced writings on church and state, not least The Rights of the Christian Church (Tindal 1706), that paralleled Hoadly’s position in his Bangorian writings.77 Moreover, in both works by Tindal just named he defended liberty and sincerity of conscience.78 At the same time, the debate over what constituted liberty and sincerity of conscience, and what tolerance should and could be afforded to such a conscience, was not only live in controversies over deism and radicalism in the eighteenth-century, but in connected debates in the previous century over latitudinarianism and heterodoxy (not least antitrinitarianism, in particular Socinianism).79 A point of contact illustrated by Clarke in the background to the Bangorian controversy itself.

Clarke’s Scripture–Doctrine of the Trinity (London, 1712) opens with a defence of tolerance in terms of liberty and sincerity of conscience, with appeals to seventeenth-century latitudinarians, who defended tolerance, and who were accused of Socinianism (for example, William Chillingworth and John Tillotson). In turn, Clarke was himself accused of antitrinitarianism and attempting to undermine religious conformity laws in his Scripture-Doctrine, leading, in 1714–15, to (unsuccessful) attempts to censure Clarke for that book in Convocation. And, it was Hoadly’s anti-Convocation and anti-conformity law writings in defence of Clarke that formed part of the backdrop to his Bangorian writings.80

Consequently, further study could not just situate Hoadly’s (and Clarke’s) ‘sincerity and liberty of conscience’ in the history of early modern latitudinarianism more generally, but do so as part of assessing the historiography of both Hoadly’s negative reputation and of the Enlightenment’s role in a ‘secularisation narrative’. That is, such scholars as J.C.D. Clark and S.J. Barnett,81 in criticising the ‘secularisation thesis’ (according to which the modern era, since the Age of the Enlightenment, is increasingly secular), points to how Hoadly’s ongoing reputation as a ‘political bishop’, rather than adept theological thinker, has (at least some of) its roots in a rhetoric employed by conservative opponents of theological and political liberalism; a rhetoric which, to further the cause of conservativism, inflated the dangers of liberalism/radicalism, and tarnished the motives of such liberal/radical figures as Clarke (heterodoxy) and Hoadly (opportunism). Thus, so far as a wider focus on Hoadly’s Clarkean conscience helps to rehabilitate him as a serious moral theologian, it also furthers the question of whether his current reputation is less to do with the content of his writings, than with a rhetoric, which, in the early modern period, successfully associated ‘liberalism’ and ‘radicalism’, and which, in modern scholarship, continues to inform the once dominant association between ‘enlightened’ and ‘secular’.