I should like to thank the British Academy for its generous award of a postdoctoral fellowship. I am grateful to Mishtooni Bose, Scott Mandlebrote, Geoffrey Rowell, John Walsh and the referees for the JOURNAL for their comments and criticism.

¹ Much of this originates in the work of Clark, J. C. D, particularly English society 1688'1832: ideology, social structure and political practice during the ancien regime, Cambridge 1985, and Revolution and rebellion: state and society in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Cambridge 1986. The second of these studies goes some way towards accommodating the general revision of the 1660'1832 periodisation offered in this article.Google Scholar

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⁵⁶ Daniel Whitby, ‘Appendix to 2 Thessalonians, shewing that the endless miseries or torments of the wicked are well consistent, both with the justice, and the goodness of God’, in his A paraphrase and commentary on The New Testament, London 1703, ii. 418–28; George Whitefield, The eternity of hell torments, London 1738; William Whiston, The eternity of hell torments considered: or, a collection of texts of Scripture, and testimonies of the three first centuries, relating to them, London 1740; William Dodwell, The eternity of future punishment asserted and vindicated: in answer to Mr. Whiston's late treatise on that subject, Oxford 1743. More generally see D. P. Walker, The decline of hell: seventeenth-century discussions of eternal punishment, Chicago 1964, and Paul C. Davies, ‘The debate on eternal punishment in late seventeenthand eighteenth–century English literature’, Eighteenth–Century Studies iv (1970–1), 257–76.

⁵⁷ The Gentleman's Magazine xxiv (1754), 518; xxvi (1756), 16–17, 173–6.

⁵⁸ David Hartley, Observations on man, his frame, his duty, and his expectations, London 1749, ii. 382‐403.

⁵⁹ Peter Stephen Goddard, The intermediate state of happiness or misery between death and the resurrection, proved from Scripture, London 1756.

⁶⁰ John Steffe, Five letters, London 1757, esp. letters 1, 2, pp. 1–18, 21–44, and Two letters on the intermediate state, London 1758; John Bristed, A letter to the Rev. Dr. Edmund Law, occasioned by his discourse on the nature and end of death, and his appendix concerning the use of the word soul in Holy Scripture, and the state of death there described, London 1760.

⁶¹ Thomas Morton, Queries addressed to the Reverend Doctor Law arch-deacon of Carlisle and Master of St. Peter's College in Cambridge: relative to what he has advanced on the soul of men, and a separate state: with a few remarks on the Reverend Mr. Peckard's observations on the doctrine of an intermediate state, Lincoln 1757, 1, 5–9.

⁶² Ibid. 45–6, 49–56.

⁶³ Daniel Sturmy, Discourses on several subjects, but principally on the separate state of souls, Cambridge 1716; Morton, Queries, 38–9; Thomas Seeker, Lectures on the catechism of the Church of England, 2nd edn, London 1769, i. lecture 16, pp. 247–64. Cf. John Wesley's critique of Law in The good steward: a sermon, London 1769.

⁶⁴ Blackburne, Short View, pp. xxxix, lx.

⁶⁵ Ibid. 335, 342.