Moderation in the Scottish Enlightenment : the case of Robert Wallace

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History of European Ideas, Early online. https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2024.2319388 2024 Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rhei20 History of European Ideas ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rhei20 Moderation in the Scottish Enlightenment: the case of Robert Wallace Elad Carmel To cite this article: Elad Carmel (20 Feb 2024): Moderation in the Scottish Enlightenment: the case of Robert Wallace, History of European Ideas, DOI: 10.1080/01916599.2024.2319388 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2024.2319388 © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 20 Feb 2024. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 161 View related articles View Crossmark data Moderation in the Scottish Enlightenment: the case of Robert Wallace Elad Carmel Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland ABSTRACT Robert Wallace (1697–1771) was a leading minister of the Church of Scotland, but he remains a largely overlooked figure in the literature. Nevertheless, his participation in philosophical and theological debates offers a glimpse of the complex positions of the Scottish clergy – and of Scottish moderation on its own terms. Wallace’s moderation was evident, for example, in his opposition both to radical deism and orthodox dogmatism. Yet what makes Wallace’s case particularly interesting is that he described himself as a ‘moderate freethinker’ in a letter to David Hume, while distinguishing elsewhere the ‘moderate’ and ‘sober’ freethinkers from the dangerously sceptical ones. Exploring his consistent statements on this issue in various writings throughout his career, this article investigates the self-identified moderation of Wallace – in opposition, for example, to his rival freethinker William Dudgeon – and thus the clergy’s attempt to use this category in the shaping of their vision of the Scottish Enlightenment. KEYWORDS Robert Wallace; moderation; freethinking; Enlightenment; William Dudgeon 1. Introduction In 1751, a letter was written to David Hume in response to his essay ‘Of National Characters’ from 1748. The essay included an elaborate footnote in which Hume attacked the character of the clerics, whose very profession, he argued, was motivated by hypocrisy, conceit, and ambition. 1 In the response letter, the author rejected Hume’s argument regarding the clergy as a whole and suggested that if there were such faults in certain priests, then they had to be attributed to their personal dispositions rather than to the clerical profession. The letter was entitled A Letter from a Moderate Freethinker to David Hume … Concerning the Profession of the Clergy. The author, then, self-identified as a moderate freethinker – an intriguing phrase, given that by the mid-eighteenth century those who were identified by themselves or by others as freethinkers were usually seen as radical sceptics or deists if not atheists and thus not quite moderate. 2 The author of the letter suggested that a ‘freethinker ought to be of no particular party but the party of good sense, he ought to aim at nothing but truth peace & charity; a sincere Freethinker will have this chiefly in his view: he will not scruple to detect the Errors of a friend, & will deal generously with a foe’. 3 What exactly did make this freethinker moderate? Even though the author of this letter described himself as a freethinker, a label which he also attributed to Hume, his position was far from previous freethinkers such as Anthony Collins or Matthew Tindal, or indeed Hume himself. In fact, the author of this letter was himself a clergyman coming to the defence of his own profession. This © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. CONTACT Elad Carmel [email protected] HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2024.2319388 was Robert Wallace (1697–1771), a minister of the Church of Scotland and a leading figure in the kirk in the 1740s. Wallace is known primarily as a writer on the world’s population and as a friendly acquaintance of Hume, whom he defended on two different occasions, once when Hume was denied an academic chair at Edinburgh in 1745 and once when there was an attempt to censure Hume’s so-called infidel writings in 1756. 4 Yet Wallace remains a hugely overlooked figure in the literature, and when he is mentioned, he is regarded consistently as a peripheral writer who is yet to receive full scholarly attention. 5 In addition to his ecclesiastical work, Wallace was a philosopher in his own right, committed to free debate and inquiry, and a prominent member of vibrant intellectual circles such as the Rankenian Club and the Philosophical Society in Edinburgh alongside William Wishart, George Turnbull, and others. The emphasis on moderation was arguably Wallace’s most important legacy for the Scottish Enlightenment. As scholars have shown, Wallace’s ecclesiastical conduct was characterised by ‘mildness and prudence’ and he belonged to a crucial strand of the Scottish Enlightenment – no less crucial than Hume’s and Smith’s – which promoted morality, tolerance, and gradual reform. 6 Wallace and his fellow ‘heterodox Presbyterians’, argues Thomas Ahnert, believed that ‘the essence of true religion was charity, which was expressed in a practical holiness of life that set apart the genuinely faithful from hypocrites, whose observance of religious principles was superficial and insincere’. 7 Others, however, have illuminated some more radical aspects of Wallace’s ideas, such as his inspiration by republican thought as well as his utopian and egalitarian vision of an agrarian reform, an abolition of private property, return to simplicity and to a lack of luxury, and even an easing of the conditions of forming and breaking marriages. 8 What kind of moderation precisely did Wallace represent, then? The clergyman’s moderation was evident, for example, in his opposition both to radical deism and orthodox dogmatism. In a broader sense, Wallace fits the image of the Scottish Enlightenment as moderate, perhaps even a case study of a conservative or clerical Enlightenment. He was certainly part of ‘the Scottish literati’ who, according to J. G. A. Pocock, ‘held high and legitimate office in church, law and university’, who ‘formed part of the group of elites who conducted Scottish affairs in the interests of the Kingdom of Great Britain’, and hence whose ‘philosophy was neither critical nor uncritical of established power, and was designed to support it’. 9 Yet what makes Wallace’s case particularly interesting is his self-identification as a ‘moderate freethinker’ in the letter to Hume as well as the distinction that he made in other writings between the ‘moderate’ and ‘sober’ freethinkers on the one hand and the dangerously sceptical ones on the other. My focus here is therefore on the hitherto unexplored ways in which Wallace understood ‘moderation’ and hence on the ways in which he consciously promoted a moderate Scottish Enlightenment. Investigating Wallace’s moderation – in opposition, for example, to his rival freethinker William Dudgeon – will shed new light on the clergy’s attempt to use this category in the shaping of their vision of the Scottish Enlightenment. Finally, it is important to note that moderation in the present discussion should not be confused with the ‘Moderates’ of the Scottish Church, a term that is associated primarily with the party of William Robertson which emerged in the 1750s and was opposed to the ‘Popular’ party. Even though Wallace was arguably an inspiration for the Moderate party, they did differ on some central issues of church administration and especially on the issue of patronage (‘the authority of certain lay patrons to nominate candidates for ministerial posts in parishes’), which Wallace, unlike the Moderates, did not fully support. 10 Here, therefore, I discuss Wallace’s moderation in the context of his own use of the term and with an emphasis on what we might call his enlightened moderation rather than the Moderatism of the Scottish Church. 2. ‘Christianity has been made the occasion of much Mischief’: Tindal, Wallace, and Dudgeon in the 1730s Matthew Tindal (1657–1733) was a Whig lawyer, a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and a notorious deist. He wrote in favour of the 1688 revolution, religious toleration, and the liberty of the press 2 E. CARMEL in the 1690s, and in 1706 published The Rights of the Christian Church Asserted, wherein he attacked the independent power of the church in society. 11 In Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730), Tindal finally formulated his ideal of a religion of nature and reason, free of corrupt errors instilled by ‘priestcraft’ throughout history. Perhaps the most controversial principle that Tindal promoted in Christianity as Old as the Creation was that the role of revelation was to confirm what reason already shows us, which implied that revelation was unnecessary for happiness and salvation. God, Tindal added, does not need to interfere in His perfect creation arbitrarily, and hence reports of miracles should be thoroughly questioned and most probably dismissed as frauds. By deriving these conclusions against Anglican apologists such as Samuel Clarke, Tindal defended both deism and freethinking and thus this text has come to be known as the bible of English deism and one of its very last peaks. 12 Specifically with regard to freethinking, Tindal interestingly reappropriated what by then had served the critics mostly as a term of abuse: ‘give me Leave to add, that I shall not be surpris’d, if for so laudable an Attempt, as reconciling Reason and Revelation, which have been so long set at Variance, I shou’d be censur’d as a Free-Thinker; a Title, that, however invidious it may seem, I am far from being asham’d of’. 13 Being a freethinker for Tindal was both subscribing to an idea – namely, the sufficiency of natural religion – and an anticlerical social identity. With this explicit statement, Tindal became one of the very few individuals who openly self-identified as freethinkers in early eighteenth-century Britain. 14 Christianity as Old as the Creation provoked numerous responses in England by theologians such as Daniel Waterland who accused Tindal’s dangerous sect of becoming the new ‘Infidel, pagan Priests’. 15 The Scottish response was provided by Robert Wallace. As a moderator of the provincial synod of Dumfries before becoming a minister in Edinburgh, Wallace preached a sermon in 1729, The Regard due to Divine Revelation, wherein he attacked deism and argued that revealed religion was still necessary. It was then published with a preface containing Wallace’s response to Tindal. Wallace agreed with Tindal that the truth that we need to know is founded on the nature of things, but he argued that it does not necessarily follow that we can know all the rules by which to live only by using our natural reason: some rules must be revealed by God Himself and by supernatural means. 16 Furthermore, argued Wallace, Tindal was right to warn his readers about the possibility of deception and imposture in some reports of revelation, but this could be avoided. 17 We could, for instance, examine testimonies of miracles by assessing the moral character of those testifying and whether or not they have an interest to deceive us. Thus, it is possible to decide whether to accept or reject such stories without rushing into discarding them categorically. 18 Finally, Wallace even accepted Tindal’s harsh accusations against Christianity and the wars that it had caused, conceding that ‘Christianity has been made the occasion of much Mischief’ and that ‘it has been, and still continues to be abused to the vilest purposes’. At the same time, he emphasised that any such occurrence ‘is a manifest Abuse and Perversion of it; not only quite foreign, but grossly and obviously contrary, to its original Design and genuine Tendency: and is, therefore, only an Instance that the best things may be abused, and perverted to the very worst purposes’. 19 We are starting to get an impression of how Wallace’s moderation manifested in both the content and the style of his response: rather than rejecting his opponent’s views altogether, he consistently emphasised the premises that he did share with Tindal in order to then show why they did not necessarily support Tindal’s conclusions. Such an attack on English deism was quite characteristic of sermons preached to a synod at the time. Furthermore, Wallace’s line of argument was similar to the attacks of many clerical critics of English deism in previous decades, and especially those who were considered ‘latitudinarians’ and who were willing to accept some form of rational religion so long as it did not compromise on the status of revelation. 20 Yet unlike many other critics, Wallace embraced the identity of a freethinker and advocated what we can call a freethinking version of Presbyterianism. 21 Thus, after making his case against the deists, he moved to attack the same orthodox practice that the deists themselves opposed, namely, that ‘Men not only do not examine in Matters of Religion, but discourage a free Trial and Examination in others’. 22 Such conduct, for Wallace, was contrary to the original HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 3 spirit of Christianity as shown by both the Apostles and the Reformation. It was at this point that he offered his version of freethinking: Free-thinking, therefore, in the true sense of the Word, is very noble and generous, being nothing else but this; The hearkening to the Voice of sound Reason, the examining impartially both sides of the Question, with a Disposition always to adhere to the strongest Side, and to imbrace the Truth wherever it appears, in spite of all Prejudices, of all the Opposition and Authority of Men. 23 Following natural reason in the face of prejudice and superstition, judging the truth of doctrines according to the strength of the evidence, and pursuing liberty rather than tyranny and authority of others were precisely the principles that the so-called radical freethinkers, and especially Anthony Collins (1676–1729), had started to formulate some twenty years earlier. 24 In this sense, Wallace’s ‘noble’ kind of freethinking might not have been all that different from the model that was promoted by his opponents. For him, however, it certainly was. Wallace’s freethinking aimed precisely to correct the kind of freethinking assumed by those radicals: ‘What I have in view, is of a different nature; That under the pretence of doing this, many think very unjustly and unreasonably, and seem fond of rejecting Christianity’. 25 What is more, Wallace perceived his own freethinking to have been located exactly in the middle between two equally risky extremes: But then there are some on the other side, who, perhaps, out of a design of guarding against this abuse of Freethinking and Examination in Matters of Religion, tho’ they will not openly assert, that men ought not to examine impartially … yet by the strain of their Conversation, by their haughty and imperious Carriage, by their still putting us in mind of Authority and the Opinions and Determinations of Men, cannot even in Charity be considered otherwise than as Discouragers of due trial and examination in Matters of Religion. 26 Wallace’s innovation was to situate his version of freethinking in the middle of a well-defined spectrum. On one end of this spectrum were sceptics such as Tindal who outright rejected providence, revealed religion, and therefore Christianity as a whole. On the other end of this spectrum were those who were just as dangerous to religion, namely, the dogmatic fideist circles, and particularly the Orthodox Calvinists and evangelical enthusiasts. 27 Those, according to Wallace, attempted to eliminate critical thinking in themselves and in others, and, instead, asked people to follow authority blindly in all religious matters and to follow fixed and rigid doctrines without examination. Furthermore, while Wallace’s critique here was primarily aimed at conservative Presbyterianism, it could also be read by contemporaries as a hinted – and less usual – objection to the requirement of subscription to confessions of faith. 28 Despite this daring position that targeted large parts of his contemporary orthodoxy, the Regard due to Divine Revelation received wide support, including from Queen Caroline, and Wallace himself achieved promotion in the church following its success. His mission, then, started to bear fruit: if Tindal had sought to reappropriate the label of a freethinker from an insult to a proud identity, then Wallace reappropriated the same label once more, this time from an identity of a misguided believer to that of the true believer. The debate on deism and freethinking continued to take place in Scotland. One of the interesting names in this context was another understudied writer, William Dudgeon (1705/6–1743). Dudgeon was a necessitarian deist or even pantheist, influenced by Spinoza, Collins, Tindal, and others, and who ‘has equal claim to be, prior to Hume, Scotland’s most active defender and proponent of radical freethinking doctrines’. 29 For Wallace, Dudgeon was to represent the first extreme, namely, those freethinkers whose views amounted to an utter rejection of Christianity. Indeed, Dudgeon refuted Wallace and defended Tindal in The Necessity of Some of the Positive Institutions of Christianity Consider’d (1731). There Dudgeon rejected Wallace’s defence of Christianity, stressing how inherent in Christianity were ‘all that bitter and implacable Hatred, Persecution, and Blood-shed, with which the differing Parties of Christians, inflamed with mad Zeal, for their several Opinions, have raged against each other’, as opposed to ‘the ancient Religions, in which, as there were no credenda enjoin’d by Authority, there was no Ground of Strife and Discord’. 30 In other words, it was the orthodoxy itself that was the problem and not merely its perversion as Wallace suggested. Dudgeon continued to develop his radical views in the following year in The State of the Moral World 4 E. CARMEL Consider’d (1732), wherein he suggested that there was no real evil in the world and questioned the idea of punishments in the next life. The reactions to Dudgeon were severe by some prominent Scottish figures, such as the philosopher Andrew Baxter, while for the English future bishop William Warburton, Dudgeon was the direct successor of Toland, Tindal, and Collins. 31 Dudgeon continued to echo previous freethinkers in his advocacy of natural religion as well as in his militant anticlericalism. This was evident in another work from 1739, A Catechism Founded upon Experience and Reason, which included an epistle on natural religion. For Dudgeon, natural religion was an almost utopian model of religion in which people are not persecuted for holding different ‘useless’ beliefs but that rather stresses one’s good and loving behaviour towards God and humankind. 32 Dudgeon argued, as Tindal had done, that the clergy was solely responsible for the destruction of this pure religion of nature, which was the basis of all religions and societies, in the name of their own political interests. Therefore, priests opposed freethinkers ‘for no other Reason that I can find, but because Free-thinkers do commonly expose the licentious Writings of the Clergy, who place the great stress of People’s Salvation in a strong Belief of those Opinions upon which are established their Claims to Wealth, Power and Reverence’. 33 Even though some clergymen were indeed on the side of liberty, the vast majority was not: ‘while our Clergy exclaim against the detestable Principles of Popery, they inconsistently retain the wickedest Parts of it, viz. its persecuting Spirit, and Claims to Dominion over the Consciences of Men’. 34 This led Dudgeon to conclude that his ideal kind of moral and natural religion – and not what one church or another advocated – was not only universal but sufficient for happiness, which of course meant that revelation was excluded. From the point of view of the church, the threat of anticlerical freethinking was imminent, and Wallace’s way of dealing with this problem remained sophisticated – and indeed moderate – in the following decades. As we will see in the next sections, Wallace continued in his effort to represent a middle-way between Tindal, Dudgeon, and their radical milieu on the one hand and the zealous dogmatists on the other, which eventually brought him back to defend freethinking, rightly understood. 3. ‘Why cannot all the world entertain different opinions as amicably as we do’: Wallace, Hume, and Moderate Conduct in the 1740s–50s ‘Ignorance causes Violence and Perverseness, and these, in their Turn, produce and beget Ignorance’, said Wallace in a sermon from 1746. 35 In the wake of the Forty-Five, Wallace attempted to demonstrate the advantages of knowledge – of the order of nature, of the principles and ends of society, and of true religion – for the common good and happiness. Ignorance and erroneous views, in contrast, result in selfish and seditious acts, such as that recent Jacobite rising. 36 Wallace’s primary target here was Bernard Mandeville’s suggestion in The Fable of the Bees (1714) that a certain degree of ignorance, especially among the poor, could be beneficial to society and his consequent objection to charity schools. 37 ‘Clear and extensive Knowledge’, Wallace stated in response, is nothing short of ‘the Glory of Men, as rational Creatures’, not just of some privileged subsets of society. 38 Much like this sermon, Wallace’s mature project of moderate freethinking, to which we now turn, was aimed against ignorance and superstition – and against the disastrous cruelty that they generate. Nevertheless, unlike his freethinking opponents, Wallace sought to emphasise the role of a large part of the clergy in fostering, rather than supressing, the spirit of learning and true knowledge in mid-eighteenth-century Britain. It is against this background that we should read the letter that Wallace wrote to Hume some five years later. In ‘Of National Characters’, Hume argued: ‘The Ambition of the Clergy can often be satisfy’d only by promoting Ignorance and Superstition and implicite Faith and pious Frauds’. 39 Wallace, too, emphasised the dangers of ignorance and superstition but he denied the part that Hume attributed to the clergy in the spreading of these evils. Wallace’s letter to Hume, therefore, demonstrates his attempt to find a via media in this debate, and as with his answers to previous HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 5 freethinkers, his conduct was no less moderate than his position. The letter to Hume was one of several interactions between the two in which Wallace practiced exactly what he preached for, namely, an open yet respectful management of disagreement – although his decision not to publish it could also be considered a lost opportunity to display an enlightened discourse. In any case, the letter is a striking illustration of how nuanced the Scottish Enlightenment was, but since it remained unpublished until 2013 it has received very little scholarly attention to date. 40 Wallace opened the Letter by positioning himself ‘as a Freethinker’ but ‘among the most Moderate of the Fraternity’, who therefore agreed with Hume to some extent but differed from him on some important principles: ‘There is one subject in particular in which you have pushed things too far’, he explained, ‘I mean the influence of the Profession of the Clergy’. 41 The first objection, then, was that Hume simply exaggerated in his assessment of the wickedness of the clergy and that he was mistaken to attribute the vices that he recognised in human nature to the very nature of this profession. Wallace’s aim was to vindicate the clerical profession following Hume’s attack after, to his surprise, no other member of the clergy undertook this task: perhaps, he suggested, because they ‘expected that some of the Freethinkers would do them justice as many of the Clergy have done signall service to the cause of freethinking’. 42 This may have been a naïve expectation, to say the least, but it reveals the second layer of Wallace’s argument, which he would develop from this point onward, namely, that the British clergy had in fact supported the cause of freedom of thought. 43 He stated: Have not we seen a great number of the Protestant Clergy take a great deal of trouble to promote knowledge and an impartiall examination of all Doctrines & opinions, even the most sacred, and to banish implicit faith and pious frauds? In truth, we who are freethinkers have been greatly obliged to them. ‘Tis [a] pity that we should not be more gratefull. 44 For Wallace, it was the divines – more specifically, the Protestants and especially the latitudinarians – who encouraged the spirit of inquiry in Britain in the years leading to and following the Restoration, concerning both natural and moral philosophy. Furthermore, the clergy encouraged the laity to examine even religious doctrines, as evinced in the fact that they debated their own disagreements so much that some even felt ‘that the Clergy have gone too far in cherishing an Inquisitive humour, that they have raised unnecessary Doubts about things of importance’. 45 To drive his point home, Wallace concluded that ‘there is a high spirit in Brittain for inquiring unto all Doctrines & opinions whatsoever, & that this Spirit has been much promoted by the Clergy. Sceptics have been much obliged to them; without their assistance the freethinkers had never been able to do the mighty feats they have done’. 46 The point, then, was twofold: it was an argument about the state of liberty in Britain, which Wallace esteemed highly, and about the character of the British clergy, which Wallace portrayed as conducive to and even crucial for the maintenance of that liberty. Sceptics such as Hume, it followed, merely took a well-trodden path – but might have gone too far down that path. This point was central to Wallace’s view, and he repeated it in other writings. In the Characteristics of the Present Political State of Great Britain (1758), Wallace defended the British constitution after 1688 as a source of happiness and liberty against the French despotism. With regard to religion, he argued, in France there was an emphasis on outward ceremony and superstition, whereas in Britain, the emphasis was on inward piety and virtue. As opposed to the clerical tyranny in France, ‘the British, from the mild spirit of their government, and from the happy moderation of their clergy, enjoy so much religious freedom: that in order to determine the force of their religious principles, it is not safe … to trust solely to external appearances of devotion’. 47 Just as he had suggested in his unpublished manuscript in 1751, Wallace stated now in print that there was a direct link between the moderation of the clergy and the liberty of the multitude and that for this reason the British people were able to enjoy considerable freedom of conscience. This of course was exactly the opposite from what freethinkers such as Collins, Toland, Tindal, and Dudgeon thought: for them, the church acted precisely in a tyrannical manner, having attempted to achieve control 6 E. CARMEL over and enslavement of the minds of humankind. 48 To be sure, the British clergy was far from monolithic, which at least Wallace seems to have admitted; yet what he attempted to show – and this was by no means unoriginal – was that one could be a freethinker without being outright anticlerical. This is not to say that Wallace did not have any criticism about his fellow clergy: in fact, his central position obliged him to communicate similar messages of compromise also to the other side. Remarkably, this was evident in another instance that involved Hume, only that this time it was Hume that Wallace defended. In 1755–6, a motion to censure Hume’s infidel writings took place. Hume, argued the initiators, was not only subversive in his writings on morality and religion but also bold enough to claim these writings publicly. The matter was discussed as an overture, but eventually the committee decided not to transmit it to the general assembly. Wallace expressed his view on the case in The Necessity or Expediency of the Churches Inquiring into the Writings of David Hume. His intervention came already after the decision was made and Hume was spared, and perhaps because of that this manuscript, too, remained unpublished. 49 Wallace’s plea not to persecute infidel writers such as Hume had two main justifications, neither of which betrayed an agreement with the content of Hume’s views but a concern for the matter of expediency. First, Wallace argued that censuring and perhaps excommunicating someone like Hume would only grant an increased exposure to him and his writings; indeed, infidels like Toland had already been forgotten and would remain so ‘unless care is taken to awaken the attention of the world and raise the curiosity of the great & small vulgar’. 50 What is more, it was simply unlikely that Hume would be convinced to change his mind following such a reaction, but rather by reasoning and conversing. Second, it was wrong of the clergy to invest their energies in persecuting Hume’s beliefs, whereas so many other immoral behaviours – not mere theoretical views – were taking place and going unpunished: ‘Are there not many criminalls in higher & lower life, vitious, immoral, and abandoned in their lives, Drunkards revellers, whoremongers adulterers contemnors of Christian worship, despisers of Christian Piety, open supporters of impious, lewd, and immoral principles in companies?’ 51 These immoral acts were harmful both to society and religion not only in theory but also in practice. It was therefore these common and well-known crimes that had to be dealt with and with much greater urgency than Hume’s books. Furthermore, the church had to enforce discipline sensibly, that is, only insofar as the circumstances allowed and in a way that would not be damaging: ‘if the Doctrines, & worship, & essentiall parts of the Government of a church are kept pure’, Wallace explained, ‘Discipline may be greatly relaxed att the same time that the Church may continue a happy instrument in the hands of Providence of comforting & confirming the Pious, reclaiming the wicked, & may serve as a mighty bulwark against vice, errors, & impiety’. 52 Even if this were a prudential point, deriving from an understanding of the changing times and the limits of the power of the church, it was at the same time a normative statement that brings to mind Wallace’s latitudinarian affinity or his self-identified freethinking: freedom of conscience in all matters beyond the essential creed of the church was to be allowed. In this sense, Wallace’s position against censorship was twofold, consisting both of pragmatic considerations about how the church would be wise to act and moral considerations about the right of thought as well as expression in religious matters. 53 Finally, Wallace’s view in the case of Hume had another layer which is especially intriguing in our context. Unlike the criminals that he mentioned, Hume was a polite, educated, sociable figure, even if his views challenged the church dramatically. Therefore, according to Wallace, the clergy should engage with the likes of Hume: the Clergy need not be affraid to encounter Gentlemen of this sort, be they ever so scepticall or heterodox. If we suppose that they are rather wrongheaded than wrong hearted, that in their enquiries into nature & philosophy they have been led into mistakes by some unlucky train of thinking, [that] they are far from rejoicing in such mistakes … if they are disposed to converse on these subjects with learned & ingenious men, ‘twere pity to debarr them from the company of any of the Clergy with whom they would wish to converse. 54 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 7 75. Ibid., 341. 76. Ibid., 344. See Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 3 vols. (London, 1711). 77. Raffe, ‘Intellectual Pluralism’. See also Paul Russell, ‘Wishart, Baxter and Hume’s Letter from a Gentleman’, Hume Studies 23, no. 2 (1997): 245–76. 78. Wallace, Various Prospects, 397. 79. Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), especially 154–74. Acknowledgement I thank Alasdair Raffe and Thomas Ahnert for their insightful advice during the preparation of this article and the editors and reviewers for their helpful suggestions. I am grateful to the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh for supporting my ongoing research on these topics. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). Bibliography Ahnert, Thomas, The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, 1690–1805 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). Bulman, William J., Anglican Enlightenment: Orientalism, Religion and Politics in England and its Empire, 1648–1715 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 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