When Warburton was in good spirits with his great work (for he was not always so), he wrote thus to a friend:—“You judge right, that the next volume of the D. L. will not be the last. I thought I had told you that I had divided the work into three parts: the first gives you a view of Paganism; the second, of Judaism; and the third, of Christianity. You will wonder how this last inquiry can come into so simple an argument as that which I undertake to enforce. I have not room to tell you more than this—that after I have proved a future state not to be, in fact in the Mosaic dispensation, I next show that, if Christianity be true, it could not possibly be there; and this necessitates me to explain the nature of Christianity, with which the whole ends. But this inter nos. If it be known, I should possibly have somebody writing against this part too before it appears.”—Nichols’s “Literary Anecdotes,” vol. v. p. 551.
Thus he exults in the true tone, and with all the levity of a sophist. It is well that a true feeling of religion does not depend on the quirks and quibbles of human reasonings, or, what are as fallible, on masses of fanciful erudition.
Warburton lost himself in the labyrinth he had so ingeniously constructed. This work harassed his days and exhausted his intellect. Observe the tortures of a mind, even of so great a mind as that of Warburton’s, when it sacrifices all to the perishable vanity of sudden celebrity. Often he flew from his task in utter exhaustion and despair. He had quitted the smooth and even line of truth, to wind about and split himself on all the crookedness of paradoxes. He paints his feelings in a letter to Birch. He says—“I was so disgusted with an old subject, that I had deferred it from month to month and year to year.” He had recourse to “an expedient;” which was, “to set the press on work, and so oblige himself to supply copy.” Such is the confession of the author of the “Divine Legation!” this “encyclopædia” of all ancient and modern lore—all to proceed from “a simple argument!” But when he describes his sufferings, hard is the heart of that literary man who cannot sympathise with such a giant caught in the toils! I give his words:—“Distractions of various kinds, inseparable from human life, joined with a naturally melancholy habit, contribute greatly to increase my indolence. This makes my reading wild and desultory; and I seek refuge from the uneasiness of thought, from any book, let it be what it will. By my manner of writing upon subjects, you would naturally imagine they afford me pleasure, and attach me thoroughly. I will assure you, No!”—Nichols’s “Literary Anecdotes,” vol. v. p. 562.
Warburton had not the cares of a family—they were merely literary ones. The secret cause of his “melancholy,” and his “indolence,” and that “want of attachment and pleasure to his subjects;” which his friends “naturally imagined” afforded him so much, was the controversies he had kindled, and the polemical battles he had raised about him. However boldly he attacked in return, his heart often sickened in privacy; for how often must he have beheld his noble and his whimsical edifices built on sands, which the waters were perpetually eating into!
At the last interview of Warburton with Pope, the dying poet exhorted him to proceed with “The Divine Legation.” “Your reputation,” said he, “as well as your duty, is concerned in it. People say you can get no farther in your proof. Nay, Lord Bolingbroke himself bids me expect no such thing.” This anecdote is rather extraordinary; for it appears in “Owen Ruffhead’s Life of Pope,” p. 497, a work written under the eye of Warburton himself; and in which I think I could point out some strong touches from his own hand on certain important occasions, when he would not trust to the creeping dulness of Ruffhead.
His temerity had raised against him not only infidels, but Christians. If any pious clergyman now wrote in favour of the opinion that God’s people believed in the immortality of the soul—which can we doubt they did? and which Menasseh Ben Israel has written his treatise, “De Resurrectione Mortuorum,” to prove—it was a strange sight to behold a bishop seeming to deny so rational and religious a creed! Even Dr. Balguy confessed to Warburton, that “there was one thing in the argument of the ‘Divine Legation’ that stuck more with candid men than all the rest—how a religion without a future state could be worthy of God!” This Warburton promised to satisfy, by a fresh appendix. His volatile genius, however, was condemned to “the pelting of a merciless storm.” Lowth told him—“You give yourself out as demonstrator of the divine legation of Moses; it has been often demonstrated before; a young student in theology might undertake to give a better—that is, a more satisfactory and irrefragable demonstration of it in five pages than you have done in five volumes.”—Lowth’s “Letter to Warburton,” p. 12.
Hurd was the son of a Staffordshire farmer, and was placed by him at Rugely, from whence he was removed to Emmanuel College, Cambridge. At the age of twenty-six he published a pamphlet entitled “Remarks on a late Book entitled ‘An Inquiry into the Rejection of the Christian Miracles by the Heathens, by William Weston,’” which met with considerable attention. In 1749, on the occasion of publishing a commentary on Horace’s “Ars Poetica,” he complimented Warburton so strongly as to ensure his favour. Warburton returned it by a puff for Hurd in his edition of Pope, and the two became fast friends. It was a profitable connexion to Hurd, for by the intercession of Warburton he was appointed one of the Whitehall preachers, a preacher at Lincoln’s Inn, and Archdeacon of Gloucester. He repaid Warburton by constant praises in print, and so far succeeded with that vain man, that when he read the dedication he made to him of his “Commentary on the Epistle to Augustus,” he wrote to him with mock humility—“I will confess to you how much satisfaction the groundless part of it, that which relates to myself, gave me.” When Dr. Jortin very properly spoke of Warburton with less of subserviency than the overbearing bishop desired, Hurd at once came forward to fight for Warburton in print, in a satirical treatise on “The Delicacy of Friendship,” which highly delighted his patron, who at once wrote to Dr. Lowth, stating him to be “a man of very superior talents, of genius, learning, and virtue; indeed, a principal ornament of the age he lives in.” Hurd was made Bishop of Lichfield in 1775, and of Winchester in 1779. He died in the year 1808.—Ed.