¹ See J. G. A. Pocock, “Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in England”, in R. Ajello, E. Contese and V. Piano, eds., L’ eta dei Lumi: Studi storici sul settecento europeo in onere di Franco Veturri, 2 vols. (Naples, 1985), 1: 523–62, 553–4; and idem, “Histriography and Enlightenment: A View of Their History”, Modern Intellectual History 5/1 (2008), 83–96. The claim was endorsed by Roy Porter in Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2000), xviii.

² Robertson, John, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 43, 9Google Scholar.

³ Ibid, 44. My italics. See also 28, 32, 47.

⁴ See Young, Brian, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debates from Locke to Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, 42. In attempting to displace France as normative and in viewing England as “an exception”, Robertson is following Franco Venturi. See, for example, Venturi, Franco, Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a Cosmopolitan Century, trans. Corsi, Susan (London: Longman, 1972)Google Scholar.

⁶ These criticisms aside, Robertson's study of eighteenth-century Scottish and Neapolitan philosophy represents an important contribution to the history of ideas, especially in the impetus it offers to comparative study.

⁷ See LeMahieu, D. L., The Mind of William Paley: A Philosopher and His Age (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1976), chap. 5Google Scholar.

⁸ The term latitudinarian (“latitude men”) was coined in the seventeenth century as a pejorative term for Anglican churchmen who wished to reduce Christianity to a small number of fundamental teachings that Protestants could generally agree on. In this article it refers to the erudite circle of divines influenced by Edmund Law and Abraham Tucker.

⁹ Tucker, Abraham, The Light of Nature Pursued, ed. Mildmay, H. P. St. John, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1831; first published 1768–78), 1: 110Google Scholar.

¹⁰ According to Robertson, this “Epicurean account of human nature” was central to Enlightenment thought. Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, 301.

¹¹ See Hilton, Boyd, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1795–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 21Google Scholar.

¹² For Paley's response to Hume's Dialogues see Niall O’ Flaherty, “The Rhetorical Strategy of William Paley's Natural Theology”, forthcoming in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, section 2. For his defence of miracles see Hitchin, Neil, “Probability and the Word of God: William Paley's Anglican Method and the Defence of Scriptures”, Anglican Theological Review 77/3 (Summer, 1995), 392–407Google Scholar.

¹³ William Wilberforce to Ralph Creyke, 8 Jan. 1803, in Robert Isaac and Samuel Wilberforce, eds., The Correspondence of William Wilberforce, 2 vols. (London, 1840), 1: 252.

¹⁴ Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Lectures 1818–1819 on the History of Philosophy, ed. Jackson, J. R. de J., 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 1: 149Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Stephen, Leslie, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 3rd edn, 2 vols. (London: Elder & Co, 1876), 2: 124Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Albee, Ernest, A History of English Utilitarianism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1902), 174Google Scholar; Clarke, M. L., Paley: Evidences for the Man (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1974), 60Google Scholar.

¹⁷ LeMahieu, Mind of Paley, 128–9.

¹⁸ Ibid., 23.

¹⁹ Waterman, A. M. C., Revolution, Economics and Religion: Christian Political Economy, 1798–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 125CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ The coinage comes from Forbes, Duncan, Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 41Google Scholar.

²¹ He stipulated in his will that he “would not have the said sermons published for sale”, insisting instead that they be distributed “first to those who frequented the church, then to farmers’ families in the county, then to such as had a person in the family who could read”. William Paley, “Extract from a Codicil to the Last Will and Testament of The Rev. William Paley, D D.”, in Sermons on Several Subjects (Sunderland, 1806), iii.

²² See Clark, J. C. D., English Society 1688–1831, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 293, n. 16Google Scholar.

²³ Hole, Robert, Pulpits, Politics and Public Order in England 1760–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ Ibid., 81–2.

²⁵ OED.

²⁶ Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Politie VII, XV, S. 14.

²⁷ The construction is from Bourke, Richard, “Edmund Burke and the Politics of Conquest”, Modern Intellectual History 4/3 (2007), 403CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ Edmund Law to John Law, 1782, London, National Archives, Edward Law 1st Earl of Ellenborough Papers, PRO 30/12/17/3/23.

²⁹ Gascoigne, John, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 238–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ Jebb, John, “An Address to the Freeholders of Middlesex”, in The Works Theological, Medical, Political, and Miscellaneous of John Jebb MD FRS., 3 vols. (London, 1787), 2: 479Google Scholar. See also 3: 287–8.

³¹ He told his son that Paley's discourse was “highly approved” by vice-chancellor Richard Beadon. Edmund Law to John Law, November 1782, PRO 30/12/17/1/21.

³² Anon., “Paley's Principles of Philosophy”, The Critical Review or, Annals of Literature LX (1785), 208.

³³ Paley, William, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, in The Works of William Paley: with Additional Sermons and a Corrected Account of the Life and Writings of the Author, ed. Paley, E., 6 vols. (London, 1830), 3: viiGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ Principles, xiv–xv.

³⁵ Rutherforth, Thomas, Institutes of Natural law: Being the Substance of a Course of Lectures on Grotius de Jure Belli et Pacis Read in St John's Cambridge, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1754–6), 1: 10Google Scholar.

³⁶ Principles, x.

³⁷ Ibid., 48–49.

³⁸ Gay's essay first appeared anonymously in the first edition of Law's translation of Bishop King's On the Origin of Evil (1731). Law added his own treatise to the fourth edition. See John Gay, “Preliminary Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality”, in An Essay on the Origin of Evil by William King, trans. Edmund Law, 4th edn. (Cambridge, 1758); Edmund Law, “On Morality and Religion”, in An Essay on the Origin of Evil.

³⁹ Principles, xi.

⁴⁰ Tucker, Light of Nature, 1: 88.

⁴¹ Principles, xiv.

⁴² Gay, “Preliminary Dissertation”, xxiv.

⁴³ Ibid., xxviii.

⁴⁴ Ibid., xxx.

⁴⁵ Edmund Law, “Morality and Religion”, xliv.

⁴⁶ Ibid., xlvii.

⁴⁷ Tucker, Light of Nature, 1: 299, 268.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 23, 209.

⁴⁹ Tucker, Light of Nature, 3: 24

⁵⁰ Tucker, Light of Nature, 1: 365

⁵¹ Tucker, Light of Nature, 2: 365.

⁵² Tucker, Light of Nature, 1: 375.

⁵³ Ibid., 378.

⁵⁴ Ibid., 375, 378. Paley took a more conciliatory attitude towards evangelicals, assuring his flock in 1790 that the “danger . . . of preaching up the necessity of faith, which was left to be unproductive is nearly overpast.” The clergy would do better to vent their fury on those intent on “setting up a kind of philosophical morality, detached from religion”. Edmund Paley, Life of Paley, xc.

⁵⁵ Tucker, Light of Nature, 3: 18.

⁵⁶ Tucker, Light of Nature, 1: 366.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 66–8.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 391.

⁵⁹ Ibid., 382, 383, 385.

⁶⁰ Ibid., 389.

⁶¹ Ibid., 385, 391, 35.

⁶² Ibid., 33, 43, 47.

⁶³ Ibid., 402, 31.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 394. Hume writes, “Men are always more concern'd about the present life than the future; and are apt to think the smallest evil, which regards the former, more important than the greatest, which regards the latter.” Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Norton, David Fate and Norton, Mary J. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000; first published 1739–40), 337Google Scholar. For the psychological foundations of this view see 79.

⁶⁵ Edmund Paley, An Account of the Life and Writings of William Paley, D.D. (1825), in The Works of William Paley, 1: li. In 1765, while in Greenwich, Paley won the Cambridge Members’ prize (for Bachelors) for an essay, in Latin, comparing the effects of Epicureanism and Stoicism on society. See ibid., xliv–liv. A year later he was elected a fellow of Christ's.

⁶⁶ William Paley to John Law, 1765, PRO/30/12/28/49.

⁶⁷ William Paley to John Law, 1778, PRO/30/12/28/103.

⁶⁸ This is despite his assertion that such lessons were “the end of all moral speculation”. Hume, David, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, in Selby-Bigge, L. A., ed., Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1975; first published 1751), 136Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ Of course, Gay had brought Locke's notion of association to bear on morals before the publication of either Hume's Treatise (1739–40) or Hartley's Observations on Man (1749).

⁷⁰ However, on his adaptation of Hume's political theory see below, 29.

⁷¹ Principles, 28. See Law, “Morality and Religion”, lii.

⁷² Principles, 46.

⁷³ Ibid., 43.

⁷⁴ Ibid., 45.

⁷⁵ See Joseph Butler, “Of the Nature of Virtue”, The Analogy of Religion Natural and Revealed to the Constitution and the Course of Nature to which are Added Two Brief Dissertations, in W. E. Gladstone, ed., The Works of Joseph Butler, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1896), 1: 410.

⁷⁶ Principles, 50.

⁷⁷ Ibid., 52.

⁷⁸ Gisborne, Thomes, The Principles of Moral Philosophy Investigated (London, 1789), 17–18Google Scholar.

⁷⁹ Principles, 28.

⁸⁰ Ibid., 38, 39, 40.

⁸¹ Ibid., 40.

⁸² Ibid., 42.

⁸³ Ibid., 33.

⁸⁴ The Thirty-Nine Articles refer only to salvation and hell.

⁸⁵ Hume, Enquiry Concerning Morals, 244, 178, 245.

⁸⁶ Ibid., 231.

⁸⁷ Ibid., 233.

⁸⁸ See ibid., 228–234.

⁸⁹ Principles, 44–5.

⁹⁰ Ibid., 15.

⁹¹ Ibid., 16.

⁹² Ibid., 18–9, 21.

⁹³ Ibid., 23.

⁹⁴ Ibid., 45.

⁹⁵ Ibid., 52.

⁹⁶ Paley accused Gibbon and Hume of using sly rhetorical strategies to deprecate Christian testimony. See ibid., 317.

⁹⁷ Ibid., 282.

⁹⁸ Ibid., 42.

⁹⁹ This was one of Paley's objections to moral sense theory, but it was equally pertinent to the assault on Hume. Ibid., 14.

¹⁰⁰ Ibid., 153.

¹⁰¹ Ibid., 164.

¹⁰² Ibid., 158.

¹⁰³ William Paley, “Good Friday”, Sermon IV, Works, 6: 169.

¹⁰⁴ William Paley, “Observations upon the Character and Example of Christ and the Morality of the Gospel” (1776), Appendix to Memoirs of William Paley, DD., by George Wilson Meadley (Sunderland, 1809), 57. This essay was originally annexed as a summary and appendix to Edmund Law, Reflections on the Life and Character of Christ (Carlisle, 1776).

¹⁰⁵ Evidences of Christianity, in Works 2: 32.

¹⁰⁶ Principles, 164.

¹⁰⁷ Ibid., 153.

¹⁰⁸ Ibid., 179. Charitable values were recommended because they contributed “most to the happiness and tranquillity of social life.” William Paley, Evidences of Christianity, in Works, vols. 1 and 2, 1: 18.

¹⁰⁹ Evidences, 2: 205.

¹¹⁰ Wesley, John, A Sermon on Salvation by Faith, 10th edn. (London, 1778), 7Google Scholar.

¹¹¹ Principles, 153.

¹¹² Law, Edmund, Considerations on the Theory of Religion, 7th edn (Carlisle: R. Faulder, 1784), 237Google Scholar.

¹¹³ Richard Price and Jeremy Bentham are also included. Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, 42.

¹¹⁴ Priestley, Joseph, An Essay on the First Principles of Government, and the Nature of Political, Civil and Religious Liberty, 2nd edn (London, 1771), 1–2Google Scholar.

¹¹⁵ Principles, xi. For Law's account of the ‘the perpetual progress of knowledge in the world’ see Edmund Law, Considerations on the Theory of Religion, 233–4, 237.

¹¹⁶ Fruchtman, Jack, The Apocalyptic Politics of Richard Price and Joseph Priestley: A Study in Late Eighteenth-Century English Republican Millennialism (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983), 1Google Scholar.

¹¹⁷ Principles, 157.

¹¹⁸ I have argued elsewhere that Paley's response in Natural Theology to Hume's demolition of the argument from design in the Dialogues may well have been grafted from Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever (1780). See O’ Flaherty, “Rhetorical Strategy”, section 2.

¹¹⁹ Clark, English Society, 373.

¹²⁰ See Burrow, John, Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 54Google Scholar. Niall O'Flaherty, “The Theology and Social Thought of William Paley 1743–1805” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2008), 173, n. 233.

¹²¹ Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics, 78.

¹²² Paley agreed with Hume in rejecting the theory that “resolves the duty of submission to civil government into the universal obligation to fidelity in the performance of promises”. Both claimed that the laws derive their moral sanction from their effects, but for Paley utility supplies moral justification only because it coalesces with the divine will. See Principles, 81, 84; Hume, Treatise, 347–8.

¹²³ Pocock, “Historiography and Enlightenment”, 94.

¹²⁴ Hume, David, The Natural History of Religion, ed. Colver, A. Wayne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976; first published Edinburgh, 1757), 87, 89Google Scholar.

¹²⁵ Hume, Natural History of Religion, 87.

¹²⁶ Wesley, John, “The Witness of Our Own Spirit”, Sermon XI, in Sermons on Several Occasions (Bristol, 1760; London, 1985), 128Google Scholar.

¹²⁷ Hume, Natural History of Religion, 90.

¹²⁸ Wesley, “The Witness of Our Own Spirit”, 129.

¹²⁹ Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics, 87.

¹³⁰ See Pocock, “Clergy and Commerce”, 531–3, 552.

¹³¹ Principles, 6. See Gay, “Preliminary Dissertation”, xxiiiiii–xxiv. Tucker, Light of Nature, 1: 197–8, 222, 263, 278, 284.

¹³² Principles, 9.

¹³³ Ibid., 30.

¹³⁴ Ibid., 9.

¹³⁵ Ibid., 30.

¹³⁶ Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, 3 vols. (Glasgow, 1755), 1: 63. Of course, Butler believed in an ethical faculty.

¹³⁷ Ibid., 55.

¹³⁸ Wesley, Sermon XI, in Forty-four Sermons, 124, 128.

¹³⁹ Ibid.

¹⁴⁰ Principles, 164.

¹⁴¹ Ibid., 164.

¹⁴² Ibid., 244. See Luke 3:9 and Matthew 3:10.

¹⁴³ Principles, 239.

¹⁴⁴ More, Hannah, An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World, 3rd edn (Dublin, 1791) 150Google Scholar.

¹⁴⁵ For the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries see Max Weber's The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–5), and Skinner's engaging defence of Weber's thesis in Quentin Skinner, “Moral Principles and Social Change”, in idem, Visions on Politics, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1: 145–57. For the nineteenth century see Hilton, The Age of Atonement.

¹⁴⁶ Wesley, John, Thoughts on the Present Scarcity of Provisions (London, 1773), 5, 13Google Scholar.

¹⁴⁷ Winch, Donald, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 66Google Scholar. See Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 2nd edn (London, 1761), 273Google Scholar.

¹⁴⁸ Sedgwick, Adam, A Discourse on the Studies of the University (Cambridge, 1833), 57Google Scholar. Sedgwick lavishly praised Paley's Natural Theology in the appendix.

¹⁴⁹ Joseph Butler, ‘Preface’, Fifteen Sermons, in The Works of Joseph Butler, 2: 28. Butler's ethics were also more congenial to High Church intellectual traditions at Oxford, where Paley was less influential. See Brock, M. G. and Curthoys, M. C., eds., The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 6 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 210Google Scholar.

¹⁵⁰ In 1843 a committee could still remark that the Principles and the Evidences “formed an important base of the theological curriculum”. Martha Garland, McMackin, Cambridge before Darwin: The Idea of a Liberal Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also 56–68.