It is

The Divine Legation,' published in 1737 and in 1741. much to Warburton's credit that, although he was naturally impetuous, eager for distinction, and conscious not only of his own powers, but also of his unusual stores of book-knowledge, he did not hurry into print. He was nearly thirty-eight years of age before he published any independent work of value in itself, or weight with the public. All he wrote previously to the appearance of the famous Alliance' would have been long since forgotten, as their author desired it to be, but for the officious zeal or malignity of Dr. Parr. That pompous and prodigious pedant did more to injure Warburton's reputation by his unseasonable and uncalled-for panegyrics than twothirds at least of his assailants.

Warburton pursued so devious a course in his literary career, that in order to be intelligible we must divide our brief sketch of it into distinct epochs, no less than if we were describing the vicissitudes of peace and war as they succeed or interlace one another in the pages of history. We shall accordingly divide the Warburtonian acts and wars into three principal heads :(1) The Alliance of Church and State,' for which he was deservedly praised as a bold and original thinker, a forcible and logical if not an elegant writer, and a divine who, insisting on the necessity of an establishment, refrained from extravagant assertion of the power of the Church. (2) The 'Divine Legation,' for which he was both deservedly praised and censured-praised for his energy, ingenuity, and multifarious reading; censured for the rashness of many of his speculations, and for his generally ferocious and sometimes unfair defence of them. (3) His connexion with Pope and the Dunciad,' which will ever remain among the curiosities of friendship as well as of literature. Eight years after his presentation to Brant-Broughton, Warburton published his first important work. His name survives principally in connexion with his more ambitious one, The Divine Legation,' but the benefits he conferred on his own times and posterity must be sought in The Alliance between Church and State.' It came forth without a dedication, a singularity which did not escape the lively author of the Canons of Criticism,' who thus writes of it in an appendix to that sharp diatribe:The first edition of "The Alliance " came out without a dedication, but was presented to the bishops; and when nothing came of that, the second was addressed to both the Universities; and when nothing came of that, the third was dedicated to a noble Earl, and nothing has yet come of that.'

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The Puritans had maintained that the magistrate had no

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concern with religion, because the Church and the State were two distinct societies, independent of each other. Hooker, in opposition to this opinion, had asserted that the State in every society was supreme over the Church, and consequently that the magistrate had a right of control in religious affairs, because the State and the Church were only different members of the same body politic. Selden and Hobbes nearly coincided in opinion with Hooker, in requiring from the Church strict obedience to the commands of the State. Warburton differed from the Puritans, from Hooker, and from Hobbes and Selden. He regarded Church and State as two contracting parties who had formed a voluntary alliance with each other for their common advantage. He adopted, it would seem, the French theory of the contrat social between those who govern and those who are governed. Any satisfactory analysis of The 'Alliance' would far exceed our limits, and the readers of Mr. Watson's volume are provided with one full, clear, and sufficient. We can merely afford to notice such points in Warburton's theory as mark his liberal, and for the time bold views of the relations between the temporal and spiritual powers. 1 'know,' said Burke in 1774*, when he was at the zenith of his intellect, I know the map of England as well as the noble Lord, or as any other person; and I know that the way I take is not the road to preferment.' You know,' writes Warburton to Stukeley in January 1739-40, how dangerous new roads in theology are by the clamour of the bigots against 'me.' The cause of their clamour is shown in the following passages from Mr. Watson's abstract of The Alliance.' First, he maintained that, at whatsoever time the State entered into this supposed compact, it looked out providently for the strongest or most numerous among the existing churches or sects, and with that it allied itself, granting to less numerous or less robust religious societies the free enjoyment of their opinions and forms of worship. Complete toleration, however, could not be granted, since there are sects disposed to injure the State-religion; and inasmuch as the magistrate had agreed and promised, in return for the acknowledgment of his superiority, to protect the Church in her acts and support her authority, such dangerous or restless sects must be curbed and bound over to good behaviour.

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Here were unpalatable conditions for a certain order of churchmen, and for certain classes of dissenters. The one could not brook what they must consistently with their prin

* Parl. Hist. vol. xvii. p. 1269.

ciples regard as an assumption by the State: the other could as little endure what in their eyes was an arbitrary exclusion. Shall the Apostles and their successors, said the High Churchmen, hold their doctrines at the will of Cæsar? Shall we, said the excluded dissidents, be treated like dogs and sorcerers,' because we account your creeds, articles, forms of ordination, vestments, and ceremonies as the ordinances of men or the corruptions of Babylonian Rome?

Yet more unsavoury to some prelates was the tenet, that, if the religious society which had allied itself with the State dwindled in number or declined in power, then the alliance' became naturally void. Such voidance was inseparable from the very nature of the supposed compact. For if the Church, owing to desertion or depletion, became unable to promote virtue and good order in the community, and to support the civil jurisdiction, as she had covenanted to do, then the State was free to make a new election of her spiritual partner. Here Warburton treads upon ignes suppositos cineri doloso.' The excluded might indeed view this contingency with favour. The whirligig of time might bring its revenges, and an assembly of Westminster divines once again sit around the table of Convocation. But in days when Wesley and Whitfield were adding thousands to their herds, how might it fare with the Established Church flock? If the wolves of dissent carried off too many sheep, the shepherds might once more, as in 1642, be turned adrift in the wilderness. If the State for its own sake must discard a sleeping and adopt an active partner, might not the successors of the Apostles once again be reduced to primitive simplicity, walking where once they rode, and sitting at meat with Lazarus instead of Dives?

In another clause of the compact, there was, however, a barrier against this contingency-a provision against the danger of establishing a church on the principle of counting noses. For one reasonable method of restricting the religious societies 'or sects, not in alliance with the State, from injuring that which is allied with it, is the establishment of a test-law, by which the dissenting bodies are excluded from those offices of honour and power in which they might exert influence to the 'hurt of the allied society.' This argument Warburton supports by decent and specious precedents. Such a test-law had been very judiciously introduced in England, in the reign ' of Charles II., as a security to the Established Church against 'the Puritans.' James II. had insidiously proposed to abolish it, not that he loved dissent, but because its abolition would take the yoke off the neck of the Romanists. No monarch of

the time was so friendly to complete toleration as William III., yet, both as Prince of Orange and as king, he was averse to abolishing tests. It would be unfair to blame Warburton, in 1736, for not viewing this question of test-law with the eyes of men living in 1828. We can afford him credit for toleration, even though he considered it expedient or necessary to fence the Church with oaths and disabilities. The next clause of The Alliance' we shall cite is perhaps the most important of any in this remarkable treatise, and certainly proves him to have been before his time in his conception of the relations between Church and State. We again avail ourselves of Mr. Watson's concise and lucid abstract:

'The superior courts must always be the civil, and appeals must be allowable to them from the ecclesiastical, otherwise the ecclesiastical courts would form an imperium in imperio, and might erect themselves into tyrannies. And, though the magistrate does not confer the ecclesiastical character (for, if he were to confer it, the Church would be, not allied, but incorporated with the State), yet no ecclesiastic is to be allowed to exercise his functions without the magistrate's approbation and license. Nor can the Church, as a body, enter into any business, even in the convocations which they may hold, without express permission from the civil power.'

To make the holder of such opinions a bishop was a great feat for the eighteenth century, and would have been an impossible one for the seventeenth. These were his private as well as his published sentiments. In 1762 he writes to Pitt, and he had then been nearly two years on the bench :- My ' opinion is, and ever was, that the State has nothing at all to do with errors in religion, nor the least right so much as to attempt to repress them.'*

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Bishop Horsley was delighted with the book; Bishops Hare and Sherlock warmly applauded it. The Alliance' came to be talked of at Court, and Warburton narrowly missed preferment for which, if he were no better a courtier under George II. than he describes himself as being under George III., he would have been unsuited. Queen Caroline, in her unmarried days, had sat at the feet of Leibnitz, discussing with him the perfectibility of man and the providential scheme of the world, and retained as a wife her taste for such sublime speculations. Her intimacy with Dr. Samuel Clarke had led Tories, clergymen, and the elder ladies of her Court to regard her as an Arian at least, if indeed she were not worse. Hare had promised the author of The Alliance' a good word with the givers of good things.

* Chatham Correspondence, vol. ii. p. 190.

'Her Majesty (Mr. Watson says) chanced one day, in the autumn of the year 1737, to ask the Bishop if he could recommend her a person of learning and ability, to be about her and to entertain her at times with reading and conversation. The Bishop named the author of "The Alliance between Church and State." The recommendation was graciously received, and the Bishop was expecting every day to hear the favourable result of it, when the Queen was suddenly seized with an illness which carried her off in the midst of November.'

Three bishops approved the book; not so the clergy in general. Their displeasure, however, did not lead to strife, for Warburton was then little known, and had not yet provoked the hostilities that occupied and embittered the remainder of his days. But at a later period, when he had irritated nearly every one of mark in letters, besides nettling a host of dunees, The Alliance' was not forgotten. His shrewd antagonist Edwards, the author of the Canons of Criticism,' made merry with the ideal compact between Church and State, in a poor sonnet and in some stinging prose. The book, however, was too good to be hurt by mere slingers and archers. "Si sic omnia,' Warburton might have been what he aimed at becoming, one of the most effective champions of sound yet liberal opinions. It is much to his credit to have been aware, while composing it, that the book was not likely to gain him preferment. Writing to his friend Stukeley, in 1735, he calls the subject of it a ticklish subject,' adding, with his usual self-complacency,

'Res antiquæ laudis et artis Ingredior, sanctos ausus recludere fontes.'

We now pass on to the work with which his name is inseparably connected. Should our estimate of The Divine 'Legation' appear below its merits, or irreconcileable with the fame it once enjoyed, it proceeds from no want on our part of admiration for Warburton's genius and attainments. Setting aside, for the present, objections to its narrow basis and paradoxical argument, we believe that no scholar of the time could have conducted that argument with equal vivacity, or sustained it with such opulence of illustration. Like enchanters in Eastern stories, Warburton casts his spells on the sands and the clouds, and from such shifting and unsubstantial materials builds a palace wherein the wayfarer reposes for the night; but when in the morning he looks around him,

"The palace and the groves are seen no more,

He stands amid the wilderness alone.'

Even before he had given the last touches to The Alliance,'