Note 163 — QUARRELS OF AUTHORS;

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.