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WILLIAM GIBSON. Enlightenment Prelate: Benjamin Hoadly, 1676-1761. Cambridge, England: James Clarke, 2004. Pp. 384, introduction, bibliography, index. £50.00.
Hoadly has had a bad press. It made him notorious, the archetypal example of a worldly and self-interested bishop riding the Whig gravy train under the first two Georges, using political acceptability as a route to fame and fortune in his own day, but to infamy thereafter. Gibson sets out to reverse this picture and to depict his subject as "a conscientious churchman with a consistent and coherent message." This he attempts with enthusiasm in a study that taps a wide range of sources; indeed he has undertaken a task the scale of which deterred earlier scholars.
The book is not centrally concerned with Hoadly's theology, which has been the subject of recent Ph.D. theses by R. L Warner and S. L. Rutherford. Gibson focuses instead on Hoadly's "life and work." This proves to be centrally a series of set-piece polemical exchanges, especially over "comprehension, occasional conformity and the nature of political authority," with Atterbury and Blackall; over Sacheverell's sermon of 1709; in the Bangorian Controversy; and over the nature of the Eucharist, the last two controversies provoked by...