titude of
pamphlets it evoked, or stand amazed at their personal bitterness, can
understand why more than a hundred writers should have thought it
necessary to inform the world of their opinions, or why the London Stock
Exchange should have felt so passionate an interest in the debate as to
cease for a day the hubbub of its transactions. Nor can any one make
heroes from the personalities of its protagonists. Hoadly himself was a
typical bishop of the political school, who rose from humble
circumstances to the wealthy bishopric of Winchester through a
remarkable series of translations. Before the debate of 1716, he was
chiefly known by two political tracts in which he had rewritten, in less
cogent form, and without adequate acknowledgment, the two treatises of
Locke. He clearly realized how worthless the dogma of Divine Right had
become, without being certain of the principles by which it was to be
replaced. Probably, as Leslie Stephen has pointed out, his theorizing is
the result of a cloudy sense of the bearing of the Deist controversy. If
God is to be banished from direct connection with earthly affairs, we
must seek a human explanation of political facts. And he became
convinced that this attitude applies not less completely to
ecclesiastical than to secular politics. Of his opponents, by far the
ablest was William Law, the only theologian whom Gibbon may be said to
have respected, and the parent, through his mystical writings, of the
Wesleyan movement. Snape, then Provost of Eton, was always incisive; and
his pamphlet went through seventeen editions in a single year and
provoked seven replies within three months. Thomas Sherlock would not be
either himself or his father's son, were he not caustic, logical and
direct. But Hoadly and Law between them exhaust the controversy, so far
as it has meaning for our own day. The less essential questions like
Hoadly's choice of friends, his attitude to prayer, the accuracy of the
details in his account of the Test Act, the cause of his refusal to
answer Law directly, are hardly now germane to the substance of the
debate. Hoadly's position is most fully stated in his _Preservative
against the Principles and Practice of Nonjurors_ which he published in
1716 as a counterblast to the papers of Hickes; and they are briefly
summarized in the sermon preached before the King on March 31, 1717, on
the text "My Kingdom is not of this world," and published by royal
command. Amid a vast wil