217.

BALGUY, JOHN (1686-1748), English divine and philosopher, was born at
Sheffield on the 12th of August 1686. He was educated at the Sheffield
grammar school and at St John's College, Cambridge, graduated B.A. in 1706,
was ordained in 1710, and in 1711 obtained the small living of Lamesley and
Tanfield in Durham. He married in 1715. It was the year in which Bishop
Hoadley preached the famous sermon on "The Kingdom of Christ," which gave
rise to the "Bangorian controversy"; and Balguy, under the nom de plume of
Silvius, began his career of authorship by taking the side of Hoadley in
this controversy against some of his High Church opponents. [v.03 p.0256]
In 1726 he published _A letter to a Deist concerning the Beauty and
Excellency of Moral Virtue, and the Support and Improvement which it
receives from the Christian Religion_, chiefly designed to show that, while
a love of virtue for its own sake is the highest principle of morality,
religious rewards and punishments are most valuable, and in some cases
absolutely indispensable, as sanctions of conduct. In 1727 he was made a
prebendary of Salisbury by his friend Hoadley. He published in the same
year the first part of a tractate entitled _The Foundation of Moral
Goodness_, and in the following year a second part, _Illustrating and
enforcing the Principles contained in the former_. The aim of the work is
two-fold--to refute the theory of Hutcheson regarding the basis of
rectitude, and to establish the theory of Cudworth and Clarke, that virtue
is conformity to reason--the acting according to fitnesses which arise out
of the eternal and immutable relations of agents to objects. In 1729 he
became vicar of Northallerton, in the county of York. His next work was an
essay on _Divine Rectitude: or, a Brief Inquiry concerning the Moral
Perfections of the Deity, particularly in respect of Creation and
Providence_. It is an attempt to show that the same moral principle which
ought to direct human life may be perceived to underlie the works and ways
of God: goodness in the Deity not being a mere disposition to benevolence,
but a regard to an order, beauty and harmony, which are not merely relative
to our faculties and capacities, but real and absolute; claiming for their
own sakes the reverence of all intelligent beings, and alone answering to
the perfection of the divine ideas. Balguy wrote several other terse and
readable tracts of the same nature, which he collected and publ