Some of the most important contributions to the history of moral and political thought have been framed by the notion of “Enlightenment”. Until recently a consensus appeared to be forming around the view that it was no longer possible to talk meaningfully about the Enlightenment, but only about Enlightenments, so diverse were the preoccupations of eighteenth-century men of letters and so various were the historical and intellectual contexts in which they wrote.Footnote ¹ Concerned that the “many Enlightenments” view of eighteenth-century thought “had rendered the subject so blurred and indeterminate that it is impossible to reach any assessment of its historical significance,” John Robertson has identified the emergence of a “European-wide” intellectual movement that in its originality and intellectual coherence deserves to be described as the Enlightenment.Footnote ² Produced by a concourse of Augustinian and Epicurean streams of thought in the last decades of the seventeenth century, according to this view the Enlightenment extended from the 1740s to the 1790s and was characterized by “the commitment to understanding, and hence to advancing, the causes of human betterment in this world.”

With regard to the vexed question of whether England experienced enlightenment, Robertson's repeated insistence that it was a concern with the improvement of “life on earth, regardless of the next” that defined enlightened thought is highly suggestive.Footnote ³ At first glance, it seems to imply that those scholarly priests who, according to John Pocock and Brian Young, had formed the vanguard of England's distinctively conservative and clerical Enlightenment ought rather to be seen as representing the counter-Enlightenment.Footnote ⁴ Considering, at least, the amount of intellectual energy eighteenth-century English divines expended on defending religion from Hume's sceptical assaults, and the fact that eschatological considerations permeated most of their thinking about human welfare, this appears to be the logical implication of Robertson's scheme. According to Robertson, however, their position in relation to the Enlightenment was more tangential:

It is this description of eighteenth-century English thought, rather than Robertson's case for the Enlightenment, which this essay seeks to question.Footnote ⁶ It is argued here that the application of the science of man to moral, political and religious questions was indeed the object of sustained focus for some of the most prominent English minds of the period, not least for scholarly clerics, many of whom, it needs to be emphasized, were no less concerned with human betterment than were their sceptical counterparts. Nowhere is this more amply demonstrated than in the development after 1730 of what was to become the dominant strain of moral thought in England in the last quarter of the century, the so-called doctrine of expediency, often referred to by modern historians as theological utilitarianism.Footnote ⁷ Pioneered by the Cambridge divines John Gay and Edmund Law, and developed by the influential Anglican philosopher Abraham Tucker, the tradition reached its apogee in 1785 with the publication of William Paley's Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785). The volume became a Cambridge textbook in 1787 and remained compulsory reading for undergraduates into the 1830s. Frequently quoted in the Commons, it was Paley, and not Jeremy Bentham, whom contemporaries recognized as the chief exponent of utilitarian ethics. Though it was only at the end of the eighteenth century that his influence blossomed, the Principles was, as the author admitted, largely a systemization of the researches of his predecessors in the theological utilitarian tradition, and therefore provides us with the perfect case study of moral thought in England in the period in which it was allegedly estranged from an Enlightenment thriving elsewhere on the Continent.

Such a study will further demonstrate the untenability of an important assumption that underlies the exclusion of non-secular thought from the Enlightenment. Robertson's emphasis on the fact that such researches were not coloured by eschatological concerns seems to imply that the philosophical pursuit of progress was necessarily encumbered by religious modes of thought, with the added connotation that the pursuit of secular improvement was ostensibly, if not exclusively, a secular project. But human improvement was a priority for theological utilitarians because of, and not despite, their theological commitments. Indeed, Paley's primary objective when writing the Principles was to establish a particularly anthropocentric theology on the Cambridge syllabus, one that sanctified secular advancement. This religious philosophy was erected on three pillars. God's benignity, established by natural theology, is the first premise of the Principles, from which the telos follows. Because God wishes his creatures’ happiness, mankind should seek to promote human satisfaction. This was the be-all and end-all of theological utilitarianism; its adherents therefore tended to eschew those aspects of religion that failed to add to the stock of contentment. One always prayed for something. Devotion for the sake of devotion was enthusiasm, virtue for its own sake, peevishness. Secondly, under the influence of Locke and Hartley, eighteenth-century latitudinarian divines developed a highly psychologized theology.Footnote ⁸ At its heart was the so-called “doctrine of motives” which, stated crudely, held that all intentional human action was motivated by the pursuit of pleasure or the avoidance of pain.Footnote ⁹ Accordingly, ethics and religion were largely concerned with the rational regulation of the passions. Where traditionally the Christian had pitted his spiritual energy against fleshly wants, Paley's ethics were about choosing to satisfy some wants over others. Unsurprisingly, his definition of a morally good action as one that was motivated by a concern for heavenly rewards was castigated by evangelicals and romantics, who unanimously adopted Hutcheson's and Butler's dictum that deeds performed with prizes in mind were devoid of moral content.

It is a testament to the difficulty of drawing the battle lines of philosophical debate in the period, and therefore of ring-fencing a quintessentially “enlightened” viewpoint, that theological utilitarians held this conception of man as essentially a bundle of appetites, always pursuing his self-interest, in common with their sceptical adversaries.Footnote ¹⁰ Like Hume, they identified satisfaction, defined as serenity, as the goal of human existence.Footnote ¹¹ Indeed, though they were locked in an ongoing debate about the relationship between religion and morality, an expansive common ground underlay latitudinarian and sceptical contributions to the controversy. An assessment of William Paley's intervention in this debate, and especially his engagement with Hume, is long overdue. That Robertson places the latter at the forefront of the Enlightenment adds further significance to such an account. Whereas much has been written about his influential responses to the assaults on revealed and natural theology contained in Hume's “Of Miracles” (1748) and his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) respectively, historians have had little to say about Paley's defence of religious ethics from the challenge laid down in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) where Hume argued that a moral code adequate to man's needs could be fashioned without religious sanctions.Footnote ¹² The latitudinarian counterblast contained an alternative narrative of human development, which dated enlightenment back to Christ's instigation of a gradual but profound transformation of human morals. This then was the third pillar of theological expediency, a uniquely utilitarian construal of Christ's mission on earth which emphasized the strategic and moral over the propitiatory aspects of his coming.

Forged mainly in the nineteenth century, when he became a whipping boy for both evangelicals and romantics, Paley's historical reputation has had a distorting influence on the historiography of his ideas. The backlash began in 1789, when Clapham sect initiate Thomas Gisborne attacked the Principles for putting the dictates of expediency above the edicts of scripture. While praising the perspicuity of his Christian evidences, Wilberforce castigated Paley for failing in what “ought to be the grand object of every moral writer . . . to produce in us that true and just sense of the intensity of the malignity of sin.” In giving priority to establishing the benevolence of the Deity, argued Wilberforce, Paley had neglected “that attribute . . . on which so much stress is laid in Scripture—I mean His holiness and justice.” Utility was simply “too low a standard of moral right and wrong,” for the test of expediency did not give sufficient weight “to those sins that respect the supreme-being”, and hence allowed the seed of all evil, deficient love of God, to flourish.Footnote ¹³ In Coleridge's view, founding morality on “the calculations of utility” was tantamount to sanctioning the exertions of all man's noblest powers “to cultivate the very worst objects of the beasts that perish.”Footnote ¹⁴ Doubting Paley's candour, Leslie Stephen surmised that the theistic aspects of his moral philosophy were merely “flimsy theological disguises”, and that his system embodied another stage in the inevitable progress of moral philosophy towards a purely secular system.Footnote ¹⁵ This sometimes unthinking denigration of Paley's religious thought continued into the twentieth century. Where Ernest Albee identified “a lack of spirituality” in his ethics, more recently an otherwise sympathetic biographer complained that Paley's moral teaching was “too much based on the values of this world”.Footnote ¹⁶

In recent years, a number of scholars have challenged this view of Paley's philosophy as spiritually bankrupt. D. L. LeMahieu argues that in his appeal to teleological categories, Paley had much in common with the sometime favourite philosopher of his evangelical and High Church detractors, Bishop Butler.Footnote ¹⁷ Both Paley and Butler put revelation and belief in an afterlife at the heart of their moral philosophies, and both inculcated the cultivation of innocent habits. For those “elements of devotion and seriousness which nineteenth-century critics accused their Enlightenment predecessors of lacking”, LeMahieu refers the reader to Paley's sermons.Footnote ¹⁸ Likewise, contrasting the naturalistic, doctrinal minimalism of Paley's “didactic” works with the orthodoxy of his “pastoral” writings, Anthony Waterman finds in the sermons a reservoir of “liturgical and mystical language”.Footnote ¹⁹ The consensus seems to be that if you are looking for mystical language, “orthodoxy” and other features of “serious” devotion in Paley's works, you must turn to his preachments.

Certainly, these sermons show a side of Paley which before LeMahieu wrote had been neglected. But if the history of Paley's thought has suffered from “premature secularisation” in the past,Footnote ²⁰ it could be argued that by giving too much weight to sermons that the author never meant for scholarly publication, recent historians have bled it too liberally of its worldliness.Footnote ²¹ Moreover, such accounts appear to concede to Paley's detractors what the theologian himself never would have, that what constitutes “religious seriousness” is mystical doctrine and so-called “orthodox language.” Given that such elements are absent in Paley's major works, this amounts to a tacit confirmation of what the critics had said all along—that is, that Paley's was indeed a rather worldly moral philosophy. To suggest, as we do here, that there is some truth in this assessment is not to subscribe to Stephen's view of Paley as a lukewarm Christian, for clearly in the Principles Paley was committed to a serious theological agenda. But if critics unfairly questioned the sincerity of latitudinarian theology, they rightly identified its anthropocentric nature, for by Catholic, Calvinist and High Church standards, and even by those of rational religionists like Butler and Hutcheson, the spirit of Paley's thought was worldly.

This description of religious orthodoxy moves beyond the rigid bipolarity that has constrained the debate about secularization in the period. In response to the charge that his preoccupation with temporal happiness made Paley a force for secularization, Jonathan Clark—in keeping with his thesis that the so-called patrician “ideology of order” in eighteenth-century England was fundamentally theological—would no doubt point out (and rightly so) that contentment was prioritized for theological reasons.Footnote ²² By “secular” Clark means simply non-religious, so obviously theology could have nothing to do with secularization in that sense. Surprisingly, Robert Hole, who feels that Paley's religious thought “was far more radical, than either he or his disciples were aware”, is content to accept the same definition.Footnote ²³ Paley was a secularizer, in his view, because he was willing to abandon the theological parts of his moral theory when they conflicted with his secular agenda.Footnote ²⁴ But secular can also refer to something “of or belonging to the present or visible world as distinguished from the eternal or spiritual world”.Footnote ²⁵ “Religion and the fear of God”, wrote Hooker, “as well induceth secular propensities as everlasting bliss in the world to come.”Footnote ²⁶ A rejection of moral sense theory, and scepticism about ideas relating to the conspicuous presence of the Holy Spirit, are just two of the reasons why Paley's theology belonged less to the spiritual world than most of its counterparts. Critically, while in Hooker's formulation “secular propensities” were a fortunate by-product of Godliness, for Paley enhancing the worldly welfare of our fellows was the very stuff of holiness. This explains why the goal of human improvement, far from being the sole preserve of a sceptical enlightenment, was part and parcel of the doctrine of expediency. By restoring the context of theological debate to Paley's thinking about ethics,Footnote ²⁷ this essay will attempt to establish his genuine commitment to a worldly theology and to a programme of human advancement.

This will be achieved, firstly, by locating Paley's moral philosophy in relation to that of his progenitors in the theological utilitarian tradition. A potted history of the doctrine of expediency will reveal the extent to which latitudinarian moral philosophy was conceived of as a scion of the “science of the mind”. Secondly, his response to Hume's attack on theological morals in the Enquiry will be analysed with a view to illustrating the latitudinarian counternarrative to sceptical accounts of enlightenment, on the one hand, and the common suppositions underpinning these opposing viewpoints, on the other. The relative worldliness epitomized by such assumptions is further explored in section III, which examines the theological utilitarians’ replacement of moral sense theory with expediency in the key context of debates between latitudinarians and evangelicals in the mid- and late eighteenth century about the true nature of the Christian life.

I. INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT

Whereas Paley's political philosophy grappled with the hot political issues of the 1780s, trading blows with his opponents on questions relating to the reform of regal power and parliamentary representation, the context of Paley's ethical thought is more difficult to reconstruct. We know that much of the Principles was based on lectures given at Christ's College in the early 1770s. Vacating Christ's in 1776, Paley took up residence among the rural community of Appleby in the diocese of Carlisle. Then, from 1780 onwards, he had two houses, a prebendal residence in the close of Carlisle Cathedral and the vicarage at Dalston. In 1782 he replaced John Law, his college friend and confidant, as archdeacon of Carlisle. He owed these appointments to John's father, the eminent theologian Bishop Edmund Law. In the late 1770s, Edmund began pressing Paley to get on with the job of developing the lectures into a book.Footnote ²⁸ The bishop's apparent anxiety about Paley's slow progress might have been brought on by the changing intellectual climate at Cambridge.

In an atmosphere of toleration and erudition, natural-theological apologetics flourished in “Whig-Cambridge” for much of the eighteenth century, and, as Paley recognized in his dedicatory preface to the Principles, few had laboured harder than Law to render religion more credible. However, according to Gascoigne, from the 1770s on, this tradition gradually began to give way to more transcendental doctrines, a shift that was partly the result of changes in the political landscape at the university.Footnote ²⁹ As master of Peterhouse, Edmund had been among the foremost advocates of reform in the university. A confirmed Hoadlyite, he joined the campaign to relieve the clergy from mandatory subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles, efforts which culminated in the Feathers Tavern petition to Parliament in 1772. In the wake of the American Revolution, many at the university became more wary of the reform movement, not least because they believed that the concerted efforts of Wilkes and Wyvill to enlist popular support for their petitioning campaigns threatened to turn an innately tumultuous populace into actors on the political stage, where hitherto they had been mere spectators. Such worries help to explain why some at Cambridge thought the Feathers Tavern men, by petitioning Parliament, had taken matters too far. The defections from the church that followed the petition's failure appeared to point to the schismatic tendency of latitudinarian lenity. In 1779 one such renegade, John Jebb, advised the freeholders of Middlesex that if the government continued to deny the people their rights to equal representation and universal suffrage, “it would be truly constitutional” for an extra-parliamentary convention to declare the dissolution of the Commons.Footnote ³⁰ Small wonder that by the 1780s, conservative clerics, and some who had dallied with reform in less troubled times, began to equate the distaste for creeds with sedition. As Gascoigne observes, one upshot of this growing ideological polarization at Cambridge was that anxious dons began to look more to the certainties of revealed theology.

No doubt sensitive to these changes, in 1782 Law was advertising Paley's talents to influential figures at Cambridge,Footnote ³¹ probably in the hope of installing a latitudinarian work of ethics on the syllabus while like-minded clerics still held sway in university affairs. It was the reformer Thomas Jones who, as moderator in the philosophical schools, introduced the Principles into exams at Trinity in 1786, and university-wide after 1787. If Law had expected Paley to throw in his lot with the reformers, he must have been disappointed, however. For despite his avowed aloofness from such disputes, the Principles expressly rejected calls for a reform of the representation of Parliament and for the abolition of subscription. A laudatory reviewer of the Principles perceived “so strong a conviction of the utility of establishments, that we fear, in some eyes it may detract from the merit of his work”.Footnote ³² Yet if his politics had disappointed them, there was plenty for Law and Jones to like about Paley's theology, for the Principles was a work of rational religion par excellence. It was his unparalleled ability to give cogent answers to their theological and ethical questions that recommended the book to so many divines.

Paley himself saw his system as a remedy for the failings of the moral philosophy curriculum at Cambridge. Whereas the writings of Grotius and Pufendorf were “of too forensic a cast, too mixed up . . . with the jurisprudence of Germany” for his liking,Footnote ³³ the “sententious apophthegmatising style” of Ferguson's Institutes of Moral Philosophy (1769) gained “not a sufficient hold upon the attention” of the ordinary reader. Moral philosophy should aim at nothing less than “the information of the human conscience in every deliberation to come before it”,Footnote ³⁴ according to Paley, and expediency met this criteria by providing a hard and fast rule, applicable in all situations. Thomas Rutherforth's Institutes of Natural Law (1754–6), popular with tutors at Cambridge, had defined the “law of our nature” as those rules that it is “necessary to observe, in order to be happy”.Footnote ³⁵ But here the doctrine of expediency was lost in a fog of otiose definitions which Paley believed would blunt its effect on young minds.Footnote ³⁶ By contrast, Paley's bold affirmation that it is “the utility of any moral rule alone, which constitutes the obligation of it”,Footnote ³⁷ signalled his intention to expound the principle in a manner sufficiently clear and comprehensive to direct behaviour. The Principles drew heavily on John Gay's groundbreaking “Preliminary Dissertation” (1731) and Edmund Law's follow-up, “On Morality and Religion” (1758).Footnote ³⁸ But where these earlier pioneers had explored the psychological underpinnings of theological utilitarianism, they had said little about its practical application. First in his lectures, and then in the Principles, Paley applied expediency to the lives of eighteenth-century Englishmen.Footnote ³⁹

In doing so he was continuing the systemization of theological utilitarianism initiated by Abraham Tucker, who in his Light of Nature Pursued (1768, 1778) had sought to demonstrate the sanctity of human happiness by a rigorous examination of human nature. Fearing that the profuseness of his speculations would confine his readership to the learned, Tucker modestly observed that it was “no uncommon thing in the sciences to see one man prepare materials for another to work up.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Paley apparently read this as a personal invitation, declaring that “I shall account it no mean praise, if I have sometimes been able to dispose into method . . . or to exhibit in more compact and tangible masses, what, in that otherwise excellent performance, is spread over too much surface”.Footnote ⁴¹ However, there was more to “working up” Tucker's theology than distilling it into a practical code. Not only had Tucker failed to address the challenge of Hume, he had in some respects left theological expediency exposed to sceptical assault. One of Paley's main objectives when developing his lecture notes into the Principles was to reinforce these theological defences.

A vital influence on Tucker and Paley, Gay's Dissertation was a highly original contribution to the debate about moral sense theory. The fact that we approve of certain actions without knowing why we do so is no proof that God has provided man with an instinct for discerning virtue, argues Gay. Our approbation of certain behaviour was “finally resolvable into Reason pointing out private Happiness”,Footnote ⁴² and the pursuit of happiness itself was sanctified by its concordance with the divine plan. By the abundantly evident goodness of His works, we could be assured, indeed, “that he could have no other design in creating Mankind than their Happiness”.Footnote ⁴³ As the will of God was “the immediate Criterion of virtue”, a morally good action was one that furthered God's design by promoting the happiness of our fellows. Fretting, however, that in the bustle of everyday life the moral agent might be inclined to focus exclusively on utility, forgetting that it was really only a barometer of the true criterion of virtue, the divine will, Gay set about trying to establish the necessity of divine sanctions to ethics, citing instances where concern for the happiness of man fell short of producing “sufficient” levels of virtue. In “particular Cases, such as laying down my Life,” the good of mankind “is contrary to my happiness”, and could not therefore “be any Obligation to me”.Footnote ⁴⁴ But given how few people actually ever faced such a dilemma, this was hardly a convincing demonstration of the supposed inadequacy of the purely “heathen” part of the doctrine. For Paley's engagement with Hume, a far more potent source of ammunition was Edmund Law's Religion and Morality, annexed to Gay's Dissertation in 1758.

Law was clearly anxious to address the theological shortcomings of Gay's masterpiece. First, by amalgamating two arguments briefly stated in the Preliminary Dissertation—that our happiness depends on God, and that men are generally concerned for their welfare in the life to come—he achieved a significant synergy. The fact that most of a man's portion of happiness is served in the life to come explained, in a more satisfactory way than Gay had managed, why we were obliged “to an action when we can see no further Reason for it”.Footnote ⁴⁵ Bringing eternal reward and punishment to the fore crystallized the practical significance of the so-called “immediate criterion” of virtue, something Gay had failed to achieve. Secondly, to Gay's stipulation that only actions motivated by a concern for mankind had merit, Law added the crucial requirement that an action is good only in so far as it is intended to obey the will of God. “The Matter of the Act”, reflects Law, “can neither be of Advantage nor Disadvantage to him; therefore the Intention is all that can make it bear any relation to him.”Footnote ⁴⁶ For Law expedient actions are right only when they represent a conscious conformity to God's will. By thus tying merit to mindfulness of the divine will, he had defined ethical choice as an act of religious duty.

As the preceding account suggests, adherents of expediency accepted it as a methodological first premise that ethics were a branch of the science of the mind. Few were more insistent of this point than Abraham Tucker. If satisfaction was so evidently the telos of human nature, it was incumbent upon philosophers to apply this forensic knowledge of the mind to the task of increasing levels of happiness by making men more virtuous. To increase the per capita production of human happiness, defined as “the aggregate of satisfactions”, the moralist had become adept in “the art of bookkeeping”.Footnote ⁴⁷ Peak productivity was achieved in the equanimity brought about by the adherence to salutary habits, a progress set in motion by the fixing of a long-term goal and the making of a resolution to pursue it.Footnote ⁴⁸ The compound ideas that constitute motives were merely vehicles for satisfaction, as much pleasure being derived from the pursuit of far ends as from their actual attainment. This was partly because the stages en route to success, though often tiresome in themselves, were sweetened by their association with the final prize, and partly because regular repetition helped to make the means more palatable. It was this steady stream of engagements that rendered “peace habitual to the mind”.Footnote ⁴⁹

When it came to moral inculcation, Tucker observed that two facts of human psychology in particular had to be taken on board. First, as satisfaction is the ultimate end of action, “it behoves me to show what reference the quality I recommend bears to that end, or else it will not appear worth the wise man's possessing it”.Footnote ⁵⁰ Tucker set a premium on “establishing universal charity on self-interest”Footnote ⁵¹ because, for him, self-interest was the only possible grounds for accepting any moral scheme. Failure to recognize this was “the grand mistake of enthusiasts and rigid observers of a stoical rectitude”:Footnote ⁵² an obvious reference to Methodism, which for Tucker represented a revival of that misdirected religious fervour that had wreaked havoc in the seventeenth century. By demanding pointless austerities, Whitefield and Wesley were themselves guilty of succumbing to an unprofitable passion for virtue,Footnote ⁵³ and their “exhortations to inward righteousness” begat nothing but “spiritual pride” and “sourness”.Footnote ⁵⁴ There followed a move which exposes the fault line in eighteenth-century religious thought between anthropocentric latitudinarian theology and the more pietistic attitudes of evangelicalism. To the charge, frequently levelled at theological utilitarians by evangelicals in the mid- and late eighteenth century, that he was “making religion subservient to temporal interests,” Tucker unashamedly pleaded guilty. For what was the point, he begged to know, in devotions that did not promote peace of mind? “Temporal interests” were the “magnetic needle” by which “we ought to steer our course in the voyage of life”.Footnote ⁵⁵

This compass pointed towards the honing of kindly impulses, in Tucker's view, because while a reputation for fairness increased the merchant's gains, the motive of short-term profit-seeking could not compensate society fully for a deficit of goodwill. Predictably, nurturing a charitable disposition was a matter of habit formation. A carrot was needed, however, to entice the moral agent down the goodly path. Thankfully, then, virtue was well rewarded. On top of increasing society's crop of conveniences, beneficence “will generally engage a return of like”—a grateful neighbour is a friend indeed.Footnote ⁵⁶ While the determination to please our brethren is partly driven by the gratifications and invitations that come with a good nature, selfless acts soak up some sweetness from the final cause. Also, we associate useful actions, even when of no value to ourselves, with types of behaviour we know to have benefited us in the past. Thus by a complex osmosis benevolence acquires its immediate pleasantness for both moral agent and observer.Footnote ⁵⁷

In the conclusion to volume 1, Tucker refused to apologize for “attempting to prove that the practice of virtue is the wisest course a man can follow to attain happiness even in this world”.Footnote ⁵⁸ Of course, it was imperative that good deeds were seen to be productive of happiness in this life, for by definition they were commendable because of this tendency. Hence Tucker's insistence that any man with the slightest regard for his future prospects in this life would be aware that the road to worldly ruin was paved with secret misdemeanours.Footnote ⁵⁹ Cheat once, thinks the prudent man to himself, and one is bound to cheat again in circumstances where exposure is more likely. But Tucker was walking a theological tightrope, for while advertising so enthusiastically the worldly wages of virtue, he also needed to show that earthly rewards were not motive enough in themselves to stimulate acceptable levels of selflessness. Morality without religious sanctions was limited, in Tucker's view, because there were some states of being where good behaviour was not worth the effort. With little to gain from being virtuous, the elderly were bound to play up. Neither, as Gay had observed, could a reason be found why a wise unbeliever would “suffer martyrdom in the cause of virtue”.Footnote ⁶⁰ Though undoubtedly it would not do to have an elderly population that was “hell bent on gluttony”, many readers might have wondered whether the hole in Godless virtue was worth losing sleep over.

His admission, in volume 1, that a man could have no compunction about stealing sly pleasure at the expense of others where there was no chance of his being found out, appeared to point to an expansive role for religious motives, however. Insisting, indeed, on the “absolute necessity” of religion “to make the system of morality complete”, Tucker took up the cudgels for theological morals in three long volumes. To understand that a price must inevitably be paid for sneaky transgressions, it was necessary to perceive “a like connection of interests running through the whole” of God's realm.Footnote ⁶¹ Tucker envisaged a cosmic economy of pleasures and pains in which each ounce of earthly virtue received proportional reward. He speculated that heaven was designed to elicit the maximum amount of virtue/satisfaction from mankind. Among His many mansions, there was probably a medium stage between our state—so heavily burdened with defective matter—and a purely spiritual existence. Here the spirit, though less flesh-laden, retained its “perceptivity and activity” and “who knows what organs”, and Tucker thought it likely therefore that our “natural endowments”—themselves the products of habits formed in this life—were preserved in “our future constitution”. This thought might deter us from covert trespasses, because our well-being in the “active” intermediate state hinges upon our preparation in this one.Footnote ⁶² Dividends of satisfaction are strictly proportional to lifetime levels of investment in virtue. Right-minded residents, as well as being better prepared to carry out their duties, would enjoy more intense pleasures than before, while others would be forced to settle arrears by enduring an age of serious punishment. But as it could not be supposed that a disinterestedly benevolent governor would be so partial as to make some for heaven and others for Hades, even wicked spirits would eventually “fly naked and alone”.Footnote ⁶³

There may have been enough in Tucker's theology to embolden the prospective martyr, but if there was he frequently appeared to expose what, according to Hume, was the Achilles heel of religious ethics: rewards, when “removed too far from us”, have little effect on our behaviour.Footnote ⁶⁴ To show how right actions frequently flowed from man's concern for the afterlife was, therefore, high on Paley's agenda. Furthermore, Paley apparently felt that the inadequacies of expediency sans religion were more considerable than Tucker had realized. It was necessary, therefore, to expand the latter's theology, especially as Paley wished to lay bare the flimsiness of the solely secular civilization preferred by Hume.

Though no doubt tailored to win favour with the judges, Paley's entries for the members’ prize at Cambridge (1764–5) indicate that he was au fait with the basic arguments of theological utilitarianism before the publication of Tucker's first two volumes in 1768. The willingness of ancient heroes to sacrifice their own happiness for the good of the nation did not prove that they were “acted upon by some higher principles than a regard to private utility,” argued Paley. It was likely, instead, that they were driven to heroism by some “implicit persuasion of its utility, habitually settled in the mind”.Footnote ⁶⁵ The rebuff had a Humean ring to it, but the threads of influence for the Principles must be unravelled with care. We know that he read the Enquiry when preparing his argument for the members’ prize essay,Footnote ⁶⁶ and that later, in 1778, he asked Law to bring a copy of the Treatise of Morals up to Carlisle with him.Footnote ⁶⁷ But Hume was principally interested in explaining the epistemology of morals and rarely presumes “to teach us our duty”.Footnote ⁶⁸ There was a yawning gap, indeed, between the theory that man naturally finds beauty in utility and the utilitarian injunction “whatever is expedient is right”. Considering the wealth of solid theological utilitarian theory at his disposal, it is hard to believe that Paley would attempt such a perilous translation.Footnote ⁶⁹ Moreover, when tracing the genealogy of his ethics it makes sense to look to those works that shared Paley's objective of preserving the cohesion of religion and morals.Footnote ⁷⁰ Hume, after all, wanted the opposite. The theoretical core of Paley's moral philosophy was largely derived from Tucker.

II. THE CHALLENGE OF HUME

Quoting Law verbatim, Paley defines virtue as “the doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness”.Footnote ⁷¹ The rule, says Paley, is the will of God; human welfare constitutes the subject. Subject and rule melt into a single directive, however, as God evidently wishes man's happiness. This we know, says Paley, because the contrivances of nature bespeak a benevolent architect. Their object is always some beneficial purpose. So, while evil surely exists, it is never the final cause of any organism. Teeth are made to eat, “not to ache”.Footnote ⁷² Though in this instance the Almighty's designs are revealed by the light of nature, it would be folly, warns Paley, to ignore “his express declarations, when they are to be had”.Footnote ⁷³ Given, however, that Christ pronounced on a mere handful of moral questions, we largely have to make do with nature's beacon. From His evident preoccupation with our welfare, it follows, Paley assures us, that “the method of coming at the will of God, concerning any action, by the light of nature, is to enquire into the tendency of the action to promote or diminish ‘the general happiness'”.Footnote ⁷⁴ The tendency of an action to increase or decrease human satisfaction determines its moral value.

Paley countered Butler's objection to expediency that it allows many actions which, while useful, no one would permit: assassination, for instance.Footnote ⁷⁵ Such actions are simply inexpedient. The immediate outcome might be welcome, but the general consequence of violating “some necessary general rule” could be catastrophic.Footnote ⁷⁶ Allow one assassination now and you must, to be consistent, permit any man to eliminate those he finds obnoxious. Examples are multiplied to impress “on the minds of young readers” the importance of computing consequences “collateral and remote”.Footnote ⁷⁷ Fears that man's inability to accurately predict long-term outcomes rendered Paley's system a recipe for pandemonium were thus unwarranted,Footnote ⁷⁸ for utilitarian arbitration usually found in favour of existing precepts and institutions. Anyway, Paley's cautious ground rules meant that such calculations were rarely warranted. Virtue, after all, was primarily a matter of fostering laudable habits.Footnote ⁷⁹

Having established expediency as the measure of right, Paley sets about applying it. His starting point was a question that bridged the gap between speculative and practical ethics: “Why am I obliged to keep my word?” The only time I am obliged to do anything, returned Paley, is when I am “urged by a violent motive resulting from the command of another”. Obligation is defined in terms that tie it in with the interdependencies of this world. A motive is violent when it comes from “one on whom my fortune depends”.Footnote ⁸⁰ I am obliged to serve my master or benefactor because my welfare depends on his goodwill. An element of command is also necessary to impose a duty, but not just anyone can command; it takes “the will of a superior to move us”. The master is the master because he has the power to punish and reward, and “we can be obliged by nothing, but what we ourselves are to gain or to lose something by”.Footnote ⁸¹ I must keep my word because God commands it. My motive is eminently violent: rewards and punishments of the eternal variety. There followed the distinction which for many encapsulated the gross materiality of Paley's vision. The only difference between prudence and duty, proffered Paley, was that in the one case we had in mind worldly advantages; in the other “we consider also what we shall gain or lose in the world to come”.Footnote ⁸²

Conceptually, this was a straightforward repackaging of Tucker. Morality was still a matter of accounting. But heeding Tucker's advice, Paley tailored the package to suit the recipients. For Tucker, a motive was deemed violent when the act of resisting it was painful. The Principles used the term to evince the moral efficacy of future-state settlements. By equating them with the injunctions of the manorial master, Paley gave divine commands an air of immediacy that was lacking in the works of his predecessors. The divine realm became an extension of the familiar hierarchy of human dependencies, thus putting far less strain on the inward eye than Tucker's intermediate state. Paley retained Tucker's system of proportionate heavenly rewards, however, thinking it conformable to our ideas of justice “that there are prepared for us rewards and punishments, of all possible degrees, from the most exalted happiness down to extreme misery; so that our labour is never in vain”.Footnote ⁸³ Bona fide saints would sit higher than those borderline cases who had avoided the other place by the skins of their teeth. By removing the sharp dividing line between heaven and hell, Paley hoped to assuage the fear that came with not knowing how much virtue was required to avoid damnation. Like Tucker, he was willing to disregard orthodox notions of heaven and hell in order to maximize happiness and virtue.Footnote ⁸⁴ His readers would have taken it for granted, though, that he was describing an everlasting condition, there being no mention of intermediate states and suchlike that might provide sinners with an insurance policy. If otherworldly concerns could promote moral well-being, Paley did not wish to dilute the medicine. But two serious theological challenges still confronted him.

Though, from Paley's perspective, Tucker had probably overstated the efficacy of worldly motives for virtue, at least he had recognized their inadequacy. Hume, on the other hand, thought such inducements more than sufficient for man's needs. According to his Enquiry, the rewards for good behaviour are twofold. Benevolent actions recommend themselves because of their “immediate accord or agreement with human sentiment”. He agreed with Gay that our moral sentiments, and therefore our virtues, acquire their existence from their utility. It follows from our approval of useful actions that have no reference to ourselves, says Hume, “that everything, which contributes to the happiness of society, recommends itself to our approbation”. The happiness and misery of others naturally give us pleasure and pain, the very mainsprings of human action; here is motive enough for selfless deeds. “Virtue is an end” in itself, “desirable . . . merely for the immediate satisfaction it conveys”.Footnote ⁸⁵ If such immediate inducements, then, explained the day-to-day milking of human kindness, Hume did not deny that moral sentiments had to compete for primacy with other passions, including avarice. He was in no doubt, however, that we had an “interested obligation” to cultivate social virtues. As the most extravagant selfishness could do no more than satisfy some desire, it made sense in the long term to indulge the kinder affections. “What other passion is there where we shall find so many advantages united; an agreeable sentiment, a pleasing consciousness, a good reputation?” asks Hume.Footnote ⁸⁶ Occasions might arise when dishonest deeds redound to my fortune without harming my reputation or endangering the social bond. But whatever a man profits from breaking a general rule will be little compensation for the disturbance of “his inward peace of mind”. Only a dupe would sacrifice a clear conscience for “worthless toys and gewgaws”.Footnote ⁸⁷

Paley singled out these passages in the Enquiry for special attention, arguing that there was an insufficient basis for civilized morality in the human passions sans religious motives. Responding to Hume's complaints about “the modern scheme of uniting ethics with Christian theology”, Paley urged his readers to study the second part of the ninth section of the Enquiry:Footnote ⁸⁸

It was a demonstrable fact, in Paley's view, that the prospect of judgement did impact on the way people live in a number of ways. First, though each man was mainly moved by earthly incentives, a serious concern for his fate after death was bound to influence his choice of near ends for the better. Furthermore, by providing a long-term objective of such moment it gave life a joyful vibrancy. Why Paley considered this to be such an important point can only be understood in the context of his analysis of human happiness in chapter 6 of the Principles. Basically, happiness consisted in an aggregate of pleasures over pains. Unlike pleasure, which refers to a particular object, or is produced by sensual gratification, contentment is “the secondary effect which such objects and gratifications produce upon the nervous system”.Footnote ⁹⁰ Physiologically, it was the condition of the nervous system when the nerve fibres were relaxed. As a pleasure-producing “machine” the human frame was prone to fatigue when overextended. But this could be avoided and maximum output maintained in the long term by processing a steady stream of pleasures. Paley assessed the various sources of fulfilment like a production manager. Sensual pleasures are not in themselves the stuff of happiness, for “Computing strictly the actual sensation, we shall be surprised how inconsiderable a portion of our time they occupy”.Footnote ⁹¹ Moreover, these enjoyments go stale with repetition. High delights also damage the delicate mechanism. They take the shine off lesser ones, and because of their rarity condemn the pleasure addict to an “empty and uneasy existence”. His faculties burnt out, the voluptuary finds life “irksome” and “restless”. Exemption from cares is equally deleterious, being attended with “imaginary anxieties”, “hypochondriacal affections” and “depression of spirits”; while the vaunted pleasures of rank and station are blighted by “the anxiety of the pursuit, and pain of disappointment”.Footnote ⁹²

Exercising the social affections was one means of achieving mental tranquillity, in Paley's view. Good health was another source of pleasure, and a prerequisite for other enjoyments. The prime directive, however, was that happiness consisted in “the exercise of our faculties, either of body or of mind, in the pursuit of some engaging end”. This was clear to anyone who compared

In short, “Engagement is everything”: happiness comes to those who select their enjoyments wisely. Having chosen our ends judiciously, the trick was to marshal the imagination so that we found pleasure in the means; the end could then be substantially forgotten. In the human happiness stakes the believer was at a distinct advantage over the most benevolent Humean. For he had a goal of profound consequence, and in the many subordinate ends that conduce to this far end, a source of perpetual engagement for life. Religious belief gave rise to that mental steadiness which for Paley was happiness itself.

Paley admitted that the utility of belief in a future state had no bearing on its truth. The existence of an afterlife would be the subject of a future work: Evidences of Christianity (1794). In the Principles it was taken as a given. If it can be proven that such sanctions exist it would be foolish to attempt to construct morality without them, insists Paley.Footnote ⁹⁴ But to counter Hume's assertion that morality necessarily suffered when wedded to religion, Paley did not need to prove the first principle of Christian ethics as such. It was enough to show how Christian belief influenced everyday human behaviour for the better, how indeed it was integral to and inseparable from the so-called natural social affections that Hume thought sufficient for human ethics. What was it that kept the servant honest when his master's back was turned? asks Paley, but his belief that he was serving God. This “affords a greater security to the master than any inferior principle, because it tends to produce a steady and cordial obedience, in the place of that constrained service, which can never be trusted out of sight, and which may justly be called eye-service”.Footnote ⁹⁵ But consciousness of being divinely monitored also had a powerful humanizing effect on society's masters.

Whereas sceptical histories had emphasized the barbarism occasioned by religion as it oscillated between superstition and enthusiasm, Paley presented abundant evidence of the efficacy of Christianity as a softener of human hearts.Footnote ⁹⁶ It was evident, for one, that accountability to divine authority checked the master's behaviour towards his servant. The principal virtue of public worship, according to Paley, was that it promoted humility among the higher orders by reinforcing the uniquely Christian principle of equality before the divine law. It kept men mindful of “their mutual infirmities and common dependency” on the same great source of bounty, and reminded them that they would all be subject to the same judgement. However lax or superstitious Englishmen were in their beliefs, Paley thought it an observable fact that salvation was still “the supreme object to all of their hopes and fears.”Footnote ⁹⁷ To expose the poverty of morality without religion, he argued that divine sanctions were the very bedrock of the code of ethics observed in advanced nations. Remove them, and reluctant martyrs or scurrilous grandparents (the bugbears of heathen morality, according to Tucker) would be the least of society's worries.

Where Hume and (inadvertently) Tucker had cast doubt on the effectiveness of next-life ambitions as moral motives, the Principles argued that worldly aims were actually less productive of good behaviour than heavenly ambitions. This is because there was no guarantee that selfless actions would be rewarded in this life. “They who would establish a system of morality independent of a future state must show . . . that virtue conducts the possessor to certain happiness in this life, or to a much greater share of it than he could attain by a different behaviour”.Footnote ⁹⁸ Neither was remorse, a powerful agent for good in Hume's philosophy, motive enough to make the moral agent forgo secret evils, because guilt feelings could be tolerated for the sake of profit.Footnote ⁹⁹ Paley did not deny that good conscience was a major source of contentment, but thought the charitable impulse would be especially vulnerable to any decay in belief. “Whilst worldly prudence will direct our behaviour towards our superiors . . . there is little besides the consideration of duty, or an habitual humanity that comes into the place of consideration, to produce a proper conduct towards those who are beneath us”, and such beneficence could not flourish, even to its present degree, without religious sanctions.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The salutary influence of religious motives observable in contemporary society was viewed by Paley and Law as a product of the enlightenment initiated by Christ. Here, then, was the latitudinarian alternative to sceptical histories which saw commerce, politeness and the law of honour as the primary agents of civilization, and religion as a source of barbarous regression. The crux of this counternarrative was the assumption that charity was a distinctively Christian virtue, a belief borne out, in Paley's view, by the fact that hospitals, infirmaries and public charities, mainstays of modern European societies, had not existed before the arrival of Christianity. Even “the most humanised nations of antiquity” had not managed to institute a poor law as England had done.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Whereas in the ages before Christianity servitude was slavery, the ethos of equality before God, itself a product of the belief in divine judgement, made for a “spirit of liberality” that had changed the nature of master–servant relations in Christian countries. Aware that meddling in national politics would have hindered the progress of global conversion—it being unlikely that statesmen would welcome the cadres of a subversive political movement—Christ had not been so politically naive as to openly declare himself an enemy of slavery. Rather than directly challenge Caesar, Christianity operated as an “alterative”, gradually softening men's hearts.Footnote ¹⁰² Inevitably, the slow transformation of attitudes led to the collapse of odious institutions, and as knowledge of Christianity became universal, so would barbarities recede around the globe.

Elsewhere, Paley recognized that scripture affirmed the “expiatory, and atoning”, character of Christ's death, but as this nature was beyond human understanding, it was advisable to concentrate on its comprehensible practical consequences.Footnote ¹⁰³ This emphasis on the moral aspects of the mission appeared justified in the light of the Saviour's insistence on “the inferiority of and subordination of the ceremonial to the moral law”.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ His primary purpose was to encourage the fulfilment of our duties, though not chiefly through the actual teaching of morality. Delivering precepts was “only a subordinate part” of Christ's mission, “his great business being to deliver stronger moral sanctions, and clearer assurances of a future judgement”.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ It was no accident, then, that charitable institutions had sprung up in countries that had received this revelation.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The promise of a reckoning in the life beyond provided an incentive to the type of behaviour that narrow self-interest could never induce.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ And though subsidiary to the assurance of resurrection, Christ's bold espousal of humility and charity in a world that privileged the heroic values of pride, patriotism and active courage represented a profound shift in moral direction. This was a thoroughly utilitarian revolution—such values being recommended “by their solid utility”—which found its institutional embodiment in the English poor law.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Here was proof, then, that the influence of Christian doctrine, though more readily perceptible “in the silent course of ordinary and domestic life,” did eventually “reach public institutions”.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

This modus operandi helps, to some degree, to reconcile Paley's anti-reformism with his belief in providential human progress. For while he opposed the main reform proposals of the 1780s, the primary objective of his social thought, it could be argued, was to reinforce his readers’ acquired moral sense, thereby providing a cultural climate in which humane social policy would thrive. Blending parable, scriptural injunction and utilitarian calculation in a heady rhetorical cocktail, Paley produced the most comprehensive defence of the rights of the poor to subsistence in the period. He exhorted readers to make regular charitable donations as a supplement to the poor law, while doctors and lawyers were encouraged to offer their services gratis to the unprivileged. In terms of its inclusion in a book of moral philosophy designed for use in the universities, this call for a more active citizenship, a Christian philanthropy, was strikingly original. And while, for Wesley, charitableness was one of the “heavenly tempers” enjoyed by the faithful, it was still merely a tributary of the true source of redemption, “trust in the blood of Christ.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ For Paley, on the other hand, “The promoting the happiness of our inferiors” was nothing less than “the principal province of virtue and religion.”Footnote ¹¹¹ His practical scheme was thus the apotheosis of a theological tradition that defined religion as “the way of promoting our most perfect happiness upon the whole, together with that of others, in this life; as well as qualifying us for . . . higher degrees of it in the next”.Footnote ¹¹² Far from being a distinctly Continental European and Scottish phenomenon, progressive anthropocentrism was at the heart of eighteenth-century English moral thought.

Admittedly, Paley's model of advancement was less radical in its political implications than that of Joseph Priestley, and this may explain why Robertson includes the latter, but not the former, among a list of English thinkers who may have contributed to the Enlightenment.Footnote ¹¹³ At the beginning of his Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768) Priestley claimed that human beings were capable of two kinds of progress: the progress in knowledge and virtue that men could achieve in their lifetimes and the progress of the human species over aeons. It was with this second kind of improvement in mind that strides should be made to improve laws and institutions.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Less inclined than Priestley (or even Edmund Law) to speculate on the long-term advancement of humanity, Paley made his primary concern “the life of an inhabitant of this country in this time”.Footnote ¹¹⁵ That context in which the drive for reform finds its historical meaning and divine function in Priestley's thought was less prominent in Paley's. But, as we have seen, a narrative of gradual improvement was written into the fabric of theological utilitarianism, and Paley's system cannot be understood outside the historical framework it provides. He was clearly confident that if the church concentrated on fostering moral improvement in the present generation, the progress of mankind would inevitably follow. Underpinning this outlook was a conviction that history was unfolding according to the Divinity's benevolent master plan. The same optimism enabled him to interpret the loss of the American colonies as part of a providential stratagem to hasten the end of slavery. Of course, he did not share Priestley's view that such events could be read as providential blueprints for future reforms or as portents of the coming millennium for which man was to strive.Footnote ¹¹⁶ But his faith in providential progress allowed him to speculate that the revolution was “designed” to occasion “a season for reflecting, whether a legislature which had so long lent its assistance to the support of an institution replete with human misery, was fit to be trusted with an empire the most extensive that ever obtained in any quarter of the world”.Footnote ¹¹⁷

For all their differences, however, it was still rational dissenters like Priestley—frequently discussed in their correspondence with a sympathy bordering on reverence—whom Paley and John Law saw as their main allies in the battle against their true bête noire, atheism practical and philosophical.Footnote ¹¹⁸ This allegiance, largely neglected by scholars, casts serious doubt on the view of intellectual life in the period as characterized chiefly by a struggle between a church “increasingly committed to theological and monarchical orthodoxy” and its heterodox, nonconformist enemies.Footnote ¹¹⁹ It also shows how, like the latter thesis, schematic definitions of enlightenment tend to scythe through the tangled web of alliances and affinities that comprised intellectual debate in eighteenth-century Britain. That Paley's conception of improvement was indicative of his preference for the kind of “sociological” conception of society and politics associated with the Scottish “political economists”, over the so-called “models of speculative perfection” mooted by Price and Priestley, reveals an even more startling entwinement. Much of his political theory, including his rejection of Lockean contract theory and his identification of prejudice and ignorance as the main sources of political obligation, was adapted from Hume.Footnote ¹²⁰ It is no small irony, then, that primary elements of a theory designed to replace “the religious hypothesis as the ground of political philosophy”Footnote ¹²¹ were absorbed—in Christianized form—into England's clerically controlled academic culture.Footnote ¹²² Nor was this the only way in which aspects of Hume's Enlightenment agenda found their way into mainstream Christian thought. For however clearly the battle lines between sceptic and divine were drawn on many issues, the controversy about the impact of religion on morality also revealed a number of important shared assumptions, and these further highlight the degree to which latitudinarian thought reduced “the independence of the sacred from the civil”.Footnote ¹²³

In the Natural History of Religion (1757), Hume had argued that popular religion engendered a state of anxiety that was poisonous to morality. It was generally accepted, observed Hume, that one did one's duty for the good of society and oneself. But the “superstitious man”, liable to worry that by merely following the stirrings of his heart in this way he did not gain any particular credit with his maker, was prone to seek the divine favour “by frivolous observances” and “intemperate zeal”. So haunted was he, indeed, by tortuous misgivings about divine judgement that “he considers not that the most genuine method of serving the divinity is by promoting the happiness of his creatures”.Footnote ¹²⁴ Driven by religious terrors, he is capable of heinous crimes in the name of righteousness.

But, as we have seen, latitudinarians shared this contempt for overzealousness and pompous ceremonialism, ardently proclaiming the Deity's preference for beneficence. In fact, Paley's rational creed even appeared to correct many of religion's failings as described in the Natural History. Where, according to Hume, popular religionists ascribed “barbarities” to God, Paley trusted wholly in His good nature. “It seldom happens, that a popular religion were found, in which it was expressly declared, that nothing but morality could gain the divine favour”, complained Hume.Footnote ¹²⁵ And yet for Law and Tucker religion did consist primarily in “moral attainments”. Not forgetting Hume's disdain for the philosophical claims of rational religion, in practical terms Paley's religious man had more in common with Hume's virtuous type, whose decision-making process was ruled by the calm passions, than with Wesley's man of “simple heart” who in all things “aim[ed] at God alone”.Footnote ¹²⁶ Paley agreed with Wesley that the religious mind aims at God in all its actions, but he denied that such reflections could be divorced entirely from considerations of reward and punishment. The Wesleyan, on the other hand, could not accept that an action born of natural human desire could have moral value. In this respect he resembled Hume's superstitious man, who “offers the strongest violence to his inclinations” because an action that “proceeds from no mixture of any other motive or consideration appears to him ‘more purely religious'”.Footnote ¹²⁷ This perception that piety and the everyday human passions were mutually exclusive goes a long way to explaining why evangelicals and some High Churchmen thought an ethical system based on the doctrine of motives inimical to true religion. For them, the most virtuous Paleyan lived too much “in the flesh” to be deemed sincere.Footnote ¹²⁸ Theological utilitarians agreed with Hume that happiness consisted in the calm state of mind that comes from a busy life, moral probity in the right “direction of energies into secular . . . channels,”Footnote ¹²⁹ though they argued that religious sanctions were indispensable to both. This common extolment of equanimity was rooted in the desire, widespread in the decades following the Restoration, to spare the eighteenth century from the errant religious emotion that had plagued the seventeenth.Footnote ¹³⁰ But the continued promulgation of a man-centred creed must also be read in the context of ongoing debates between latitudinarians and evangelicals in the second half of the eighteenth century about the nature of virtue and spirituality, to which we now turn.

III. ANTHROPOCENTRIC VERSUS GOD-CENTRED MORALITY

Given these crossovers between theological utilitarianism and Humean thought, it is not surprising that expediency was seen by some contemporaries as presenting a serious challenge to more traditional modes of Christian thought. For theologically minded critics the rejection of moral sense theory had some particularly disconcerting implications. Substantially borrowed from Gay and Tucker, Paley's refutation of the theory hung on the Lockean premise that if God had given man an innate capacity to discern what was right, the whole of mankind would share the same moral values.Footnote ¹³¹ The fact that American savages enjoyed spectacles of cruelty that would repulse citizens of “polished” European nations proved conclusively that this was not the case.Footnote ¹³² Of course, Paley agreed with the moral sense school that ordinarily moral approbation was a matter of impulse. We usually have little time to calculate the utility of an action, and are therefore “for the most part determined at once”.Footnote ¹³³ It was their account of the origins of moral sensibility that theological utilitarians found suspect. “Moral approbation follows the fashions and institutions of the country we live in; which . . . themselves have grown out of the exigencies, the climate, situation, or local circumstances of the country”.Footnote ¹³⁴ Take into account also the influence of arbitrary rulers, and “this . . . looks very little like the steady and indelible hand of nature”, figures Paley. A more likely explanation was that “having experienced, in some instance, a particular conduct to be beneficial to ourselves . . . a sentiment of approbation rises up in our minds; which sentiment afterwards accompanies the idea or mention of the same conduct, although the private advantage of it no longer exist.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Most people approve of a virtue because they are taught to do so in their childhood. Imitating their elders, they pick up the habit of praising or condemning particular types of conduct, and these associations are reinforced by censure and encouragement.

This expulsion of the moral sense had important theological ramifications. According to Francis Hutcheson, “the desire of glory, or even of rewards in a future state, were they supposed the sole affections moving an agent in the most beneficial services, without any love of God . . . would not obtain our approbation as morally good dispositions”.Footnote ¹³⁶ Our having a natural sense of the antecedent good of an action prevents ethical behaviour from being contaminated by “associations of advantage”.Footnote ¹³⁷ This desire to preserve the pristine character of moral agency dovetailed with the pietistic devotional attitudes of God-centred theologians, for decisions made under the influence of the moral sense could seem to involve particular emanations of the divine will. For Wesley, indeed, the moral sense was only “a new name” for conscience and referred not only to the implanted moral faculty, but also to that state of being “when the eye of our mind is singly fixed on God”.Footnote ¹³⁸ With our thoughts thus fixed, God's will “runs through our whole soul . . . and is the constant spring of all our thoughts, desires, and purposes.”Footnote ¹³⁹ By Paley's definition of virtue, on the other hand, Wesley's and Hutcheson's good deeds lacked moral content, not being motivated by the pursuit of future life benefits. According to him, the reason why charitable institutions had sprung up in Christian countries was that the divine revelation “overwhelmed all worldly considerations in the expectation of a more important existence”.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ But given their understanding of what constituted moral action, it was reasonable for “innatists” to question whether acting from these “hopes and fears” made Paley's devout man any the less “worldly”, his end being personal gain.Footnote ¹⁴¹

Hannah More's distinction between those preachers “who lay the axe to the root” and those who take “the pruning knife to the branch” illustrates well the distinctive modes of Christian life on offer to Protestants at the end of the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁴² A prime example of the former approach, Wesley's doctrine of Christian perfection aimed at setting hearts alight with an all-consuming faith. With God's help the sinner becomes “pure from desire”, effectually transcending his animal existence. “I live not,—my evil nature, the body of sin, is destroyed.” Thus “Free from self-will”, the faithful “feel that all their sufficiency is in God; and it is he alone who is in all their thoughts and worketh in them both to will and do His good pleasure”. Paley preferred to work with man's passions, coaxing and cajoling him on to the right course. Fathers were warned, for example, to avoid perpetually disturbing family recreations with expressions of “morose” or “rigorous” piety lest children should develop “a settled prejudice against seriousness and religion, as inconsistent with every plan of a pleasurable life”.Footnote ¹⁴³ The idea that religion had to be shown to be compatible with a pleasant life, fitting into the economy of human wants, was anathema to the apostles of vital religion. “Religion is never once represented in scripture as a light attainment”, thundered More. “On the contrary, it is exhibited under the active figure of combat.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴

These conflicting models of Christian life made for contrasting attitudes to commercial society. It has often been observed that in Protestant countries capitalistic practices were accorded quasi-divine justification, as religious terms and metaphors were attached to money-getting activities that had previously been considered unchristian,Footnote ¹⁴⁵ but suffering none of the Methodist's disquiet about whether he was serving God or the world, the latitudinarian did not feel the need to sanctify worldly activity by imbuing it with a spiritual significance beyond that which it acquired from its utility. The attitude that an activity was either favourable to human happiness and therefore divinely sanctioned, or was not, explains the remarkably smooth assimilation of orthodox economic thought into the theological utilitarian canon. Wesley had condemned the extravagant habits of the rich, complaining that, of the various causes of high prices, conspicuous consumption was “the most terrible of all, and the most destructive to personal and social happiness”.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Paley concurred instead with what by the 1780s had become the “standard defence” of luxury, that it “was both a source of employment and a way of taxing the rich to support the poor that induced the rich to strive harder to increase the income necessary for their vice and folly”.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ As long as it was confined to those of elevated station, it would stimulate trade and employment without promoting the kind of habits among the masses that discouraged them from multiplying. By stimulating population growth, commerce increased “collective happiness”, and was therefore concordant with the divine agenda as defined by Gay and Law. Thus another key aspect of “the enlightenment” was also central to the man-centred Anglican programme.

Although moderate evangelicals were generally complimentary of Paley's celebrated exposition of the argument from design in Natural Theology (1802), in the early decades of the nineteenth century increasing numbers at Cambridge shared Adam Sedgwick's anguish that a moral philosophy so deeply “in bondage to the world, measuring every act by a worldly standard, and estimating its value by worldly standards” retained so much influence in the university.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Because of his commitment to the twin propositions that God should be treated as “an object of affection” “apart from reward and punishments” and virtue pursued “as an end for itself”, Butler's philosophy was identified as the natural antidote to expediency.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Hence, from the mid-1830s on, Sedgwick campaigned energetically to have Butler's Sermons replace the Principles as the main moral textbook for undergraduates. By the time its influence finally began to wane in the in the late 1830s, Paleyan ethics had endured as moral orthodoxy for half a century.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ While it has become a truism for historians of England in the long eighteenth century that conservative social thought in the period was deeply intertwined with the theology of the Church of England, the worldly character of this orthodoxy is seldom recognized.