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Preface, Brett C. Mcinelly

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Volume 2 of Religion in the Age of Enlightenment brings together the work of both established and up-and-coming scholars from a variety of fields of study and helps to solidify RAE's thematic and methodological scope. Looked at collectively, their work spans more than a century, from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, and the varied topics and approaches demonstrate the rich possibilities for the study of religion during the Enlightenment.

"If God ... See Fit To Call You Out": "Public" And "Private" In The Writings Of Methodist Women, 1760-1840, Joanna Cruickshank

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In 1770, the renowned Methodist leader Mary Bosanquet (later Fletcher) published a letter of advice she had written to a young woman named Elizabeth Andrews. Amidst a flood of detailed advice about the life of faith, including recommendations about spiritual disciplines, reading matter, and marriage, Bosanquet urged her young friend:

Strive to be little and unknown; and remember that our Lord lived thirty years in private, and only three in publick, and that the word of God allows a woman, professing godliness, no adorning but that of a meek and quiet spirit. Strive, I say, to be little and unknown; …

Front Matter

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

No abstract provided.

"Improving The Present Moment": John Wesley's Use Of The Arminian Magazine In Raising Early Methodist Awareness And Understanding Of National Issues (January 1778-February 1791), Barbara Prosser

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In March 1747, when defending the Methodist practice of lay preaching, John Wesley announced: "I am not careful for what may be an hundred years hence. He who governed the world before I was born shall take care of it likewise when I am dead. My part is to improve the present moment:'' The same thought was apparent thirty years later when counseling Ann Bolton: "Whatever our past experience has been, we are now more or less acceptable to God as we more or less improve the present moment."

Samuel Johnson At Prayer, Elizabeth Kraft

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Samuel Johnson's life was punctuated by prayer. In this essay, I will examine Johnson's prayer practice in terms of both meaning and behavior. Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language provides clear and succinct evidence in Johnson's own words of what he understood prayer and the act of praying to be. Of the two definitions of prayer and the seven definitions of to pray included in the Dictionary, the first in each category concerns religion and simply states that the noun and the verb are the same. According to Johnson the first meaning of to pray is "to make petitions to …

Allegiance, Sympathy, And History: The Catholic Loyalties Of Alexander Pope, Steven Stryer

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

The charges leveled by John Dennis against the young author of An Essay on Criticism are characteristically hyperbolic: Alexander Pope is disparaged as a historical partisan whose loyalties (to the Catholics James II and his son the Pretender) and antipathies (to the Protestants Charles II and William III) are determined entirely by his allegiance to the Church of Rome. Dennis claims that in comparing the classical writers to absolute monarchs, Pope had hinted his approval of James's suspension of the operation of the penal laws against Catholics in defiance of Parliament-in contrast with his explicit rejection later in the poem …

Front Matter

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

No abstract provided.

Preface, Brett C. Mcinelly

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

As I was breaking into the profession some years ago, religion was a mere blip on my radar of scholarly interests. Having come through graduate school in the 1990s, I naturally followed disciplinary trends in literary and eighteenth-century studies, focusing much of my research on issues of race, class, and gender and examining the relationships between Britain's imperial history and the literature and culture of the period. Religion factored into my queries at times, say, in considering the ways Crusoe's Protestantism informed his sense of self while taking possession of a West Indian island. But religion itself remained on the …

"This Interesting Female Shone As The Morning Star": Protestant Missions, American Indian Schoolgirls, And The Rhetoric Of True Womanhood, Elizabeth J. Thompson

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

During the settlement era of the English colonies in North America, narratives that expressed hopefulness about the assimilation of Indians often did so through tropes of intermarriage. From William Byrd to Thomas Jefferson, writers fantasized that the most obvious, effective, and nonviolent solution to the ongoing Indian problem could have been-even should have been-intermarriage. Writers, however, seldom suggested their contemporary readers actually seize on this solution. Instead, the overwhelming majority cast such panaceas in the distant past, while a few imagined them taking place in the remote future. Almost all of them ignored actual intermarriage taking place between white men …

"Expectation And Amendment Maketh Me To Become An Usurer": Usury, Providentialism, And The Age Of Projects, Dwight D. Codr

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In an Internet postscript to his 1989 history of usury, Norman Jones remarks that "by the eighteenth century the moral issue of usury was no longer of interest to most Protestant thinkers. In practice lending at interest with collateral had become normal, as had deposit banking:'1 Indeed, usury itself was of relatively minor importance to economic theorization and debate in the eighteenth century when compared to the financial debates of the period Jones's work covers, 1571-1624, spanning Elizabeth's Act Against Usury and the Usury Act of 1624. During the earlier period, usury was not simply linked to an emerging system …

Sermon Publishing, Clerical Reading, And John Wilkins's Ecclesiastes, 1646-1750, Rosemary Dixon

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Francis Bacon had little to say about the study of divinity in The Advancement of Learning (1605), his critical survey of the state of knowledge at the turn of the seventeenth century. In contrast to the other fields of learning Bacon explored, divinity needed but little encouragement: "For I can finde no space or ground that lieth vacant and vnsowne in the matter of Diuinitie, so diligent haue men beene, either in sowing of good seede, or in sowing of Tares:' Bacon did, however, have an intriguing suggestion for a hypothetical theological book:

that forme of writing in Diuinitie, which …

Evangelical Literacies: Predestination And Print, 1739-1740, Jennifer Snead

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In his 1744 The Reverend Mr. Whitefield's Answer to the Bishop of London's Last Pastoral Letter, the controversial evangelical George Whitefield claimed that he would indeed own up to any of his writings found "blameable in any Respect:' Reader John Holmes of Exeter commented in the margins of his copy, "Oh ho! And how do you know and distinguish your mistakes from verities? Supposing that there are any verities and realities:'1 Frank Lambert, in his 1994 study of Whitefield in the context of transatlantic print culture, cites Holmes's marginalia as an instance of "readers... [ engaging] in dialogue with writers …

Vice, Virtue, And Industry: The Church Of Scotland's Employment Of Political Economy, C. 1700-C. 1750, Ryan K. Frace

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

When describing the Scottish Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge in 1750, Edinburgh's minister Hugh Blair proclaimed:

It must be the interest of every good man, of every Briton, to encourage this design tending so evidently to make us a happy, a free, and a united nation. Religion and liberty, industry and joy, are sisters, and never appear to such advantage as when in company [together], so that now, Religion and Industry go hand in hand, strengthen and establish one another.

Blair's comment illustrates an intriguing and important development: by the mid-eighteenth century, political economy-a central component of the Scottish Enlightenment-had …

The Primitive Church, The Primitive Mind, And Methodism In The Eighteenth Century, Kathryn Stasio, Micheal J. Stasio

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists, Henry Abelove reminds his readers that Methodism was part of a larger evangelical movement that began in the 1730s but, while it grew, other sects barely sustained their numbers or disappeared entirely. Citing Frank Baker, Abelove notes that when Wesley died in 1791, Methodists owned 558 preaching houses in the British Isles, and membership totaled 72,476.1 Abelove then chronicles Wesley's ability to lead the Methodist movement, crediting much of its success to the force of Wesley's personality. Yet not all of Wesley's contemporaries found him so charming, as the anti-Methodist …

The Mentor's Anxiety: Conduct Books And The Proliferation Of Virtuous Guidance, David B. Paxman

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Thomas Fuller's Directions, Counsels and Cautions, Tending to Prudent Management of Affairs in Common Life (London, 1725) gives its audience of young readers 1,761 axioms of conduct. Later editions swelled the number to 3,152. Fuller's phrase "prudent management" seems ironic: no one could possibly remember so many points of advice, much less apply them in an orderly way. This book exemplifies a tendency that may deserve notice. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, guidance on virtue and goodness, in one sense a simple and unified project, tends to fragment into levels of multiplicity that outstrip the ability of basic …

The Holy Surprise Party: Glimpses Of Divinity In Suddenly Emerging Literary, Artistic, And Geographical Settings, 1660-1785, Kevin L. Cope

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Antiquity, eternity, and expectation often intersect in outof- the-way environments. In rural southwest Louisiana, an unlikely venue in which to encounter the Ancient of Days, the Zigler Museum, a pair of exhibition halls housed in an incongruous, somewhat less than Cajun colonial-style building, displays its collection of eighteenth-century paintings beneath an optimistic sign reading "The Age of Reason:' The symmetrically arranged portraits gaze on an imagined focal point near the center of the room while scattered landscape paintings open windows on a mild English pastoral world far away from rice fields and crawfish ponds. Imported memories of a British culture …

Leibniz And China: Religion, Hermeneutics, And Enlightenment, Eric Sean Nelson

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is not typically seen as having formulated a "hermeneutics;' or as being a "hermeneutical thinker;' despite his discussions of the art of interpretation and his influence on the development of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century hermeneutics in Germany. Nonetheless, many of his works involve issues of how best to interpret texts and other persons. His voluminous writings thus contain-at least implicitly-a hermeneutics, or art of understanding signs, through his practice of interpretation. Furthermore, hermeneutical concerns are prevalent in a number of Leibniz's international projects. Through various philosophical and practical endeavors, Leibniz attempted to reconcile conflicting and seemingly irreconcilable arguments …

On The Good Name Of The Dead: Peace, Liberty, And Empire In Robert Morehead's Waterloo Sermon, Bob Tennant

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

On Sunday, July 2, 1815, a fortnight after the battle of Waterloo, the Scottish Episcopalian minister Robert Morehead ( 1777-1842) preached a sermon- On the Good Name of the Dead [Ecclesiastes 7:1]-which displayed many of the components of a theory of Christian empire and combined them with the radically new approach to pulpit oratory that Morehead was helping to develop. The present essay offers a method of exploring the connection between ideology and rhetoric based on tools belonging to linguistic analysis rather than conventional historiography. Thus it is hoped that the evidential base available to historians may be extended. …

Irish Clergy And The Deist Controversy: Two Episodes In The Early British Enlightenment, Scott Breuninger

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

D uring the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, an important question facing Anglican divines was the relationship between reason and religion. Initiated by the publication of John Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), the controversy concerning deism raged across both sides of the Irish Sea and called into question the sanctity of revealed religion, forcing believers to articulate more "rational" defenses of Christianity. Closely associated with the problematic origins of the "English Enlightenment;' Toland's provocative tract valorized reason in matters of religion and drew heavily upon the ideas of natural philosophy. Although viciously attacked for its heretical tenets, Toland's position …

Early American Mikvaot: Ritual Baths As The Hope Of Israel, Laura Arnold Leibman

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

On July 27, 1656, at the age of twenty-three, Baruch Spinoza was cast out of the Jewish community of Amsterdam. In a proclamation read publicly in the Portuguese Synagogue, the "Lords of the ma'amad" [Synagogue Board] declared that,

having long known of the evil opinions and the acts of Baruch de Spinoza... [and] having failed to make him mend his wicked ways, and, on the contrary, daily receiving more and more serious information about the abominable heresies which he practiced and taught and about his monstrous deeds... [we] have decided... that the said Espinoza should be excommunicated and expelled …

Index

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

No abstract provided.

Submissions

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment (RAE) is an annual, peer-reviewed journal that publishes scholarly examinations of (1) religion and religious attitudes and practices during the age ofEnlightenment; (2) the impact of the Enlightenment on religion, religious thought, and religious experience; and (3) the ways religion informed Enlightenment ideas and values, from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including, but not limited to, history, theology, literature, philosophy, the social and physical sciences, economics, and the law.

Theological Enlightenments And Ridiculous Theologies: Contradistinction In English Polemical Theology, David Manning

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In 1730 high-churchman Richard Grey (1696-1771) delivered a sermon at St. Mary's Church, Leicester, in which he revelled in England's "Enlighten'd Age ... where the Gospel shines forth in its utmost purity:' unfettered "from those Corruptions and Superstitions, which so much disguise and dishonour it in other places:' Grey went on to use this representation of the epistemological superiority of England's established faith to lament the status of an apparently belligerent minority who would not or could not discern the truth of the Church of England. Such claims had long been part of the Church's Reformation mantra against heretics in …

More Light? Biblical Criticism And Enlightenment Attitudes, Norman Vance

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Goethe's dying words-his request for Mehr Licht, more light in the darkened sickroom-were meant literally, but they were immediately given metaphorical significance. What did they signify? Did they imply Olympian confidence that more intellectual light would keep flooding in-or frustration and despair at the lack of it? A similar ambiguity is reflected in the history of biblical criticism, an archetypal Enlightenment enterprise that somehow failed to obey the rules and deliver as hoped and failed to obey the rules, despite all the dry light shed upon it. When Jurgen Habermas responded to the award of the Adorno Prize in …

Holy Land Travel And The Representation Of Prayer In The Enlightenment, Michael Rotenberg-Schwartz

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Something about publicized supplication embarrasses critical readers, especially of the Enlighenment, who, since Samuel Johnson, have been trained to doubt if not the sincerity at least the efficacy of rhetoricized prayer. Milton was "nothing satisfied" with the preliminary eight stanzas of his unfinished lyric "The Passion;' for example, and printing it anyway has been cause enough for his critics to remain so. For one, the closest Milton gets to the scene of

the crucifixion is Jesus's tomb after the resurrection; he finds the "sad Sepulchral rock / That was the Casket of Heav'ns richest store" ( 43-44; emphasis added). More …

Religion In The Age Of Enlightenment: Putting John Wesley In Context, Jeremy Gregory

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Wesley's long life ( 1703-91) spanned almost the whole of the eighteenth century, and any attempt to understand him undoubtedly needs to include some sense of the period in which he lived. There have, of course, been many attempts to evoke Wesley's context, whether broadly defined-as in the thousands of books and scholarly articles that have been written about the era in general, ranging from the economy, politics, and society to cultural, intellectual, and religious matters (and much else besides), or in the various studies that have more directly positioned Wesley, and early Methodism, within his, and its, time. Most …

Jonathan Edwards's Metaphors Of Sin In Indian Country, Joy A. J. Howard

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

T he move to Indian country was an uncommon one for a preacher of Jonathan Edwards's status and age, but the seven years he lived in Stockbridge preaching to Mohawks, Mahicans, and colonial settlers proved to be some of the most fruitful of his career. Jonathan Edwards accepted the position in Stockbridge after his Northampton congregation voted to dismiss him in 1750 and, after visiting the mission town multiple times, he was officially installed as pastor in August of 1751. Edwards valued Protestant mission imperatives, and although the pastorate was remote and he faced a significant language barrier between him …

Reading Diderot's La Religieuse As An Evangelical Novel, Muriel Schmid

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

D enis Diderot's novel, La Religieuse, has traditionally been read as a diatribe against convent life. Diderot's critique is then described as twofold: first, he strongly condemns the common practice of forced vows; and second, he describes life in a convent as fundamentally unnatural, leading individuals to perverse behaviors. Suzanne Simonin, the third daughter of a Parisian lawyer, is the main character of the novel, and her fate illustrates Diderot's critique. As the reader discovers in the course of the narrative, her birth is the result of an affair, and her mother regards her illegitimate daughter as a source …

Porn, Popery, Mahometanism, And The Rise Of The Novel: Responses To The London Earthquakes Of 1750, Samara Anne Cahill

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In February and March of 1750, two earthquakes hit London, provoking panic in the population and generating a great deal of providentialist rhetoric from religious authorities and selfproclaimed prophets alike. Public figures used the earthquakes as didactic opportunities to structure domestic identity and national security along gridlines of reason, faith, and national guilt. Such representations indicate not only that religious identity and faith remained important to Britons throughout the eighteenth century but also that, although Britons used Christian belief to structure their national identity, they were by no means convinced of the superiority of actual Christian behavior compared to that …

Enlightenment Sermon Studies: A Multidisciplinary Activity, Bob Tennant

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

The past two decades have seen a collective reconsideration of the positions occupied by religion in the eighteenth century, amounting to a fundamental shift in historiography. The revived study of the period's sermon literature seems to contribute to this. The present essay suggests the need for more interdisciplinary cooperation in better defining sermon studies and presents four questions about sermons to scholars working on the British Enlightenment, and, more generally, the Long Eighteenth Century, which will be referred to as "our period": What are the characteristics of the corpus? What is distinctive about the relationship of sermons to theological and …