Martha F. Bowden
The joke is, of course, that we never actually see any of Parson Adams’s sermons, he having inadvertently left home without them (his wife, a practical theologian, decides that clean shirts will be more useful than nine manuscript volumes of the sermons she hears every Sunday). He reads one before being unceremoniously dumped into a barrel of water by the roasting squire, but the author does not transcribe the text for us. There are, nonetheless, many references to sermons in Joseph Andrews, both Parson Adams’s own and those of several real preachers of the period.
Of the parson’s own sermons, we hear that he is particularly proud of a sermon on vanity, and that he has a standard sermon he uses for weddings, on the text, “Whosoever looketh on a Woman so as to lust after her.” He applauds the sentiments of a disguised Roman Catholic priest, and claims to have preached on them often. Of the popular preachers being read in his own day, the notes to the Wesleyan edition are filled with references to Clarke, Tillotson, Barrow, and Hoadly, in some ways a standard pantheon, especially in the latitudinarian tradition in which Battestin places Fielding.1 The only one of these preachers, however, to which the parson makes particular and approving reference is Benjamin Hoadly. His advocacy of Hoadly comes directly out of a discussion of Whitefield in which he disparages that preacher’s theology of faith over works. Martin C. Battestin’s article on Fielding’s revisions of Joseph Andrews demonstrates that a number of those revisions are directly concerned with the sermons, whose numbers varied between three and nine volumes, and are finally established as nine in the fourth edition. The treatment of the missing sermons is expanded in the second edition, and the marriage sermon with its dubious text is a later addition.2 But the references to Hoadly are in the original.
The choice of Hoadly rather than Tillotson or Clarke is significant for both Adams and Fielding. Tillotson’s sermons had already entered into the canon, being widely reprinted since his death in 1694, and even being taught in divinity schools. A surgeon listening to the conversation among a bookseller and Parsons Barnabas and Adams is astonished at the number of sermons the bookseller claims are in print, having himself only read Tillotson: “Five thousand! . . . what can they be writ upon? I remember, when I was a Boy, I used to read one Tillotson’s Sermons; and I am sure, if a Man practised half so much as is in one of those Sermons, he will go to Heaven.”3 Clarke, a divisive figure despite being Queen Caroline’s favorite preacher, had been nonetheless a modest man, who had refused two bishoprics for fear of ripping the church apart over his Arian views. He also was safely dead, and thus ready to be beatified if not canonized. But Benjamin Hoadly was very much alive, and as a result of his 1717 sermon on the governance of the Church, the Canterbury convocation essentially was shut down, and would remain so until the nineteenth century.
Recent work by a number of church historians has revised the standard view of Hoadly. The traditional opinion is summed up usefully by Susan Rutherford, one of his recent apologists: “Contemporary nonjuring, high church and Tory opponents maintained that he was an ambitious, unprincipled opportunist who used the ideas of deists, Socinians and atheists to foster anarchy in the Church of England and rebellions in the state. Although some later commentators have been more objective, many have accepted the view that Hoadly employed the secular reason of the deists to dilute Christianity and undermine the established Church.”4 In this number may be counted
B. W. Young, who in Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England (1998), describes Hoadly as a schemer determined to advance his own career: he refers to “the near-heterodoxy of an ultra-latitudinarian such as Hoadly, who was widely held, with good reason, to be a Whig opportunist and a blatant clerical careerist.”5 Hoadly’s reputation, however, has benefited from changes in church history methodology in the recent past. Jeremy Gregory and Jeffrey S. Chamberlain describe “a revolution in the archives,” with the increasing availability of the collections in various repositories, and the publication of many local church records. As a result, the picture of the church in this period has been made more detailed and specific, and scholars are beginning to recognize local and regional diversity that calls into question the monolithic depictions of older studies. It is no longer possible to say that the Church of England in the eighteenth century was either universally neglected or completely vibrant throughout its dioceses, or that it sailed along, unchanged and unchanging, from the beginning of the period to its end.6
This newly available material suggests that Hoadly was a conscientious bishop, instead of a bloated pluralist moving from episcopacy to episcopacy in a path that took him farther east with each promotion, from the poverty of a Welsh bishopric to the eventual reward of the princely see of Winchester. His modern biographer, William Gibson, posits him as a victim of nineteenth-century High Church and Tractarian historiography, for many years the dominant voice in our understanding of the period.7 Gibson overturns the conventional view that Hoadly never went to his diocese in Bangor, whose name he has made notorious for the controversy he began while the incumbent; there is evidence that he was in his diocese in 1719 and kept his house there fully staffed.8 Philip Jenkins, proceeding under the received opinion of Hoadly’s neglect, defends it by describing nonresidence as “typical” of the eighteenth-century Welsh episcopate. Hoadly’s successor, Thomas Herring, who was exceptional in his devotion to his charge, nonetheless “admitted that ‘Though I love Wales very much, I would not choose to be reduced to butter, milk, and lean mutton.’”9 Thus, Hoadly’s actual attention to Bangor is all the more notable. Hoadly has a reputation for being equally derelict in his next position, the Diocese of Hereford, where he was the bishop from 1721–1723. New evidence, however, has shown that there too he ordained and did a primary visitation in 1722. Because primary visitations (that is, by the bishop and not the local archdeacon) were only expected to be done every three years, and Hoadly was only in Hereford for two, he was not neglectful of his charge. He also was very conscientious in his parliamentary duties at a time when all bishops sat in the House of Lords, but not all of them appeared there.10
His most significant episcopacy, and his last, was in the Diocese of Winchester. While William Gibson does not deny that he and his immediate predecessor, Richard Willis, reached out to dissenters, he insists that Hoadly and Willis always worked within the system: “The strategy of Willis and Hoadly was to exploit the episcopal patronage at their disposal to appoint tolerant Latitudinarians to the diocese, who would bring dissenters into the Church. It was an approach that complemented the Whigs’ national policy of making loyalty to the Church compatible with support for the House of Hanover.”11 Although his most controversial writings opposed subscription and sacramental tests, he nonetheless insisted that his clergy must subscribe—he even refused his close friend Samuel Clarke a preferment because the latter would not do so. His approach was to encourage dissenters into the fold by emphasizing toleration; he also rejected “the High Church sacerdotalism that placed great weight on the Apostolic Succession and therefore on a monopoly of Anglican ministry. . . . This position was not lost on dissenters. It came close to the dissenters’ model of Christian ministry, marked by sincerity of motivation rather than the exclusiveness of an apostolic sacrament.” And he was successful—four of the ten dissenters who were ordained in the Diocese of Winchester in the eighteenth century came during his tenure.12 Of course, this position was also guaranteed to raise the ire of the High Church clergy. That he was quoted by no less an advocate for individual liberty against tyranny than John Adams does indicate his importance in disseminating Locke’s views among the American colonists before the revolution;13 it is an equally clear indication of why he alarmed his contemporaries. In a collection of sermons and tracts published in March 1715/1716 to celebrate his preferment to the see of Bangor, thus before that particular controversy and characterized by Gibson as “a welcome re-statement of the Whig Low Church position on the 1689 Revolution,”14 he gives evidence of similar ideas. The date is significant for the kingdom as well, as it followed the first major Jacobite Rebellion. When describing four of the sermons in the preface, he emphasizes his objections to the external and regulatory nature of the Church as being in contradiction to the Gospels:
To these I have now added Four Sermons, Preached at the same Time: in which I have, at more length, handled the same Subjects; and added what is of great Importance, to take Mens Minds off from all pretenses to that Incontestable Authority, and Imperfect Subjection, which are the strongest of all Bars against Inward, and True, Religion. I should be sorry to find that, amongst Protestants, it should stand in need of any Apology, to refer Men to Christ himself, for the Fundamentals of Christ’s Religion; and not to any Humane Constitution whatsoever.15
Indeed, however much the worthiness of his actions in the episcopate has been illuminated by the current research, no one denies that he was a serious troublemaker.
In the dispute about Whitefield, Parson Adams invokes several of Hoadly’s works, including his most notorious sermon. On March 31, 1717, Hoadly, at that time bishop of Bangor, preached a sermon on the text “Jesus answered, My Kingdom is not of this World” (John 18:36). Because he was preaching at the Royal Chapel at St. James’s Palace, and his audience included the king, the sermon had a political heft it would not have had in a parish church in the countryside, or even in his cathedral in Wales. He begins by deploring the fact that while the nature of things is “unmoveable,” the words that human beings use to describe those things change connotatively; and in matters of religion, language is at its most debased, and results in an “Evil” that must be rectified by a return to originals, in this case the words of Jesus himself. After a short disquisition on the particular evils of enthusiasm, whose proponents have changed the meaning of the love of God from “keeping his Commandments, or doing his Will” to “a violent Passion, Commotion, and Ecstasy, venting it self in such sort of Expressions and Disorders, as other Passions do,”16 he is ready for his central argument.
He equates the term “Church” with the Kingdom of Christ (in itself an interpretation), whose original meaning he believes is, “the Number, small or great, of Those who believed Him to be the Messiah; or of Those who subjected themselves to Him, as their King, in the Affair of Religion” (10). The first of the two heads of the sermon attacks those who “erect Tribunals, and exercise a Judgment over the Consciences of Men” as usurping the sole power of Jesus, who “left behind Him, no visible, humane Authority; no Vicegerentes, who can be said properly to supply his Place; no Interpreters, upon whom his Subjects are absolutely to depend; no Judges over the Consciences or Religion of his People” (14, 11–12). Such surrogate authority would change the nature of the Church, so that it would become ruled by the men in whom such authority was vested, and thus be their kingdom. The second head claims that if the Church is the Kingdom of Christ, and not of men, then the laws are Christ’s as well, and punishments and rewards, being the prerogatives of God, belong to the future world of the Day of Judgment.
While the sermon bears in it many of the hallmarks of anti-Catholic rhetoric—the complaint that worship has denigrated into mere ritual, the assertion that no prelate can claim to be Christ’s representative on earth, the attack on the tyranny of zealous church legalists—there is no doubt that the rhetoric was aimed at the Church of England, and it was certainly taken personally by that body. It calls into question the validity of the hierarchy of the Church, its courts, and governance structures. At the time it was preached, the Church was in the midst of one of several controversies about subscription and comprehension—the requirement that all clergy subscribe to the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles, and the desire of a number of prominent churchmen, including Hoadly, that the regulation be relaxed to include many fine and upstanding clergy who under the present system were forced into nonconformity. Hoadly concludes with an implicit attack on subscription: “All his Subjects are equally his Subjects; and, as such, equally without Authority to alter, to add to, or to interpret, his Laws so, as to claim the absolute Submission of Others to such Interpretation.” It is better, he claims, to accept the plain word of God in scripture as a source of his laws than “to hunt after Them thro’ the infinite contradictions, the numberless perplexities, the endless disputes, of Weak Men, in several Ages, till the Enquirer himself is lost in the Labyrinth, and perhaps sits down in Despair, or Infidelity” (30, 31). Gibson enumerates the response to this challenge: “In the ensuing controversy, over 50 writers entered the lists in pamphlets or books. Most of these works had astonishingly big print runs, sometimes over a thousand for individual editions. One account, taken in 1718, lists 41 contributions ‘of note,’ some with two or three answers to each, and a further twenty-four publications on the matter, in addition to the thirteen works written by Hoadly himself during the furore. In fact hundreds of tracts poured forth during the protracted debate.”17 He also contends that, while Hoadly is generally blamed for the impotence of the Canterbury Convocation for the next century, the Convocation was already in trouble as a body, and that William III had frequently used prorogation as a means of controlling it.18
Another work by Hoadly to which Adams appears to refer explicitly is no less controversial than the sermon. When the bookseller who is participating in the conversation about Whitefield asks what Adams’s own sermons are like, Adams, with unerring instinct for ruining his own case, describes a position that is the opposite extreme of Whitefield’s sola fide beliefs: that “a virtuous and good Turk, or Heathen, are more acceptable in the sight of their Creator, than a vicious and wicked Christian, tho’ his Faith was as perfectly Orthodox as St. Paul’s himself” (82, 82n2). This statement, Battestin notes, echoes Hoadly’s sermon on the Good Samaritan, an especially appropriate allusion given the treatment to which Joseph has been subjected, and no doubt less inflammatory in context than out: the Samaritan is the biblical exemplum of the outsider pointing the way to the righteous. The sermon, however, was not published until 1755, some time after the publication of Joseph Andrews, although Hoadly was said to have preached it frequently.19 But on its own Adams’s position suggests a heterodoxy that alarms the bookseller: he declines all interest, because he does not want to publish books that will bring down the wrath of the clergy, who, he implies, might be offended both at the suggestion that they should do as they preach, and that there might be righteousness outside the established church. Adams settles his fate by discounting the influence of a small number of disgruntled clergy to damage the sales of a book, giving as his example the opponents to Hoadly’s Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament, “some few designing factious Men, who have it at Heart to establish some favourite Schemes at the Price of the Liberty of Mankind, and the very Essence of Religion” (83). He insists that the peevish attempts of these troublemakers were insufficient to damn the book, of which he himself has a very high opinion. Barnabas, convinced he is in the presence of a heretic as egregious as any of the deists, rings the bell vociferously and requests his bill so that he can get out before the lightning strikes.
Adams’s summary of A Plain Account is accurate, although naive and lacking in nuance: “A Book written (if I may venture on the Expression) with the Pen of an Angel, and calculated to restore the true Use of Christianity, and of that Sacred Institution: for what could tend more to the noble Purposes of Religion, than frequent cheerful Meetings among the Members of a Society, in which they should in the Presence of one another, and in the Service of the supreme Being, make Promises of being good, friendly and benevolent to each other?” (83).20 In this description the text sounds innocuous, its only hint of controversy the statement that the proper use of the Eucharist needs to be restored, because it points toward the requirement under the Test Act that those persons taking the oath follow it by receiving communion. It also is accurate in emphasizing Hoadly’s insistence that the Eucharist is meant to be a unifying action:
Christians, meeting together for Religious Worship; and eating Bread and drinking Wine, in Remembrance of Christ’s Body and Bloud, and in honour to Him; do hereby publickly acknowledge Him to be their Master, and Themselves to be His Disciples: and, by doing this in an Assembly, own Themselves, with all other Christians, to be One Body or Society, under Him the Head; and consequently profess Themselves to be under His Governance and Influence; to have Communion or Fellowship with Him, as Head, and with all their Christian Brethren, as Fellow-Members of that same Body of which He is the Head.21
But in fact the book calls into question the Church of England’s sacramental theology. From a political standpoint, while there is nothing in the book or Adams’s description of it that directly addresses the controversy over the sacramental tests, the statement that the sacrament is significant in part because it is unifying points directly at its requirement as part of the test, a requirement that resulted in polarization; those persons who could not in all conscience receive the Eucharist in the Church of England precisely because they disagreed with its theology in some way were automatically excluded from many roles in civic life.
Not all critics have agreed with Adams that Hoadly’s prose is angelic. Leslie Stephen, who admired Hoadly’s ideas, felt he committed the ultimate crime of writing badly, something Stephen rarely does: “His style is the style of a bore; he is slovenly, awkward, intensely pertinacious, often indistinct, and, apparently at least, evasive; and occasionally . . . not free from a tinge of personal rancour. . . . The three huge folios which contain his ponderous wranglings are a dreary wilderness of now profitless discussion.”22 Certainly, Hoadly’s replies to Atterbury reprinted in 1715 catch hold of a single issue, the question whether virtuous people are happy or miserable, and, terrierlike, shake it until there is little life left in it (or the reader). His favorite criticism of his opponents is that they are begging the question, but he himself is not free from that logical fallacy. On the other hand, his sermons and other writings do exhibit the clarity and careful argumentation that Gibson claims are hallmarks of his style. A reading of his works that includes both sermons and polemics demonstrates why he was admired as a preacher and loathed as a controversialist.
Hoadly’s preface to A Plain Account also makes the innocuous, or perhaps evasive, case that the book, which takes the form of a series of propositions supported by explanation and scriptural references, grew out of a sermon that he had preached when he was a parish priest in London. He claims that his congregation was unwilling to take their communion for superstitious reasons, and their religion had become a burden to them. The problem was real, and lay in the wording of the Exhortation, the charge required to be read the Sunday before the priest intended to celebrate the Eucharist. With its stern directive to self-examination and its dire warning that those who receive their communion “unworthily”—unprepared and not reconciled to all their friends and neighbors—are in worse condition than if they had never received it, it had been frightening the laity for a century and a half at this point. The preface to the invitation to the General Confession repeats many of the same sentiments: “So is the danger great, if we receive the same unworthily. For then we are guilty of the body and blood of Christ our Saviour; we eat and drink our own damnation.”23 Certainly, the work does contain much to allay these fears; it counsels that while examination of one’s entire life may be a salutary exercise, it is not necessary each time one prepares for the sacrament; “worthily” can be understood as reverently and mindfully (as opposed to carelessly or thoughtlessly), thus not suggesting a requirement for a state of spiritual perfection. Hoadly presents preparation as a matter of ascertaining whether the Christian comes to receive communion “not as a Common Meal, or an Ordinary Eating and Drinking; but as a particular Rite appointed by Christ.” Always an apologist for his own denomination to the outside world, he points out that Anglican practice is preferable to all others by administering both wine and bread directly into the hands of the communicant, thus making it virtually impossible to receive it unmindfully.24
These statements do not contain any doctrine that could possibly offend the Church, and no doubt include much that could be useful to Parson Adams, who might well have experienced the same reluctance and superstitions in his own parish. Nor could any Anglican theologian argue against Hoadly’s insistence that they should base their beliefs about the nature of the sacrament on a reading of the New Testament. But Hoadly’s interpretation of the text does not reflect Anglican beliefs in the period, although it is in line with the Zwinglian theology of many Church of England clergy, including Thomas Cranmer, in the years immediately following the Reformation. His remark that the nature of the Eucharist be read figuratively, not literally, and his emphasis on its being a memorial meal only, without any suggestion of the real presence, was very close to Zwinglian memorialism: “This Wine is allowed by All, not to be itself the New Covenant; nor to be changed (or transubstantiated) into the New Covenant; but only to be the Memorial of the New Covenant. . . . it follows, by all the rules of Interpretation, agreeably to the Way of speaking throughout the Whole, that the Bread and Wine are not the Natural Body and Bloud of Christ, but the Memorials of his Body and Bloud.”25 The word “All” at the beginning of this passage is particularly contentious. The rubrics for the disposal of the remnants of the bread and wine at the end of the service, which differentiate between the consecrated and unconsecrated elements, indicate that the official theological stance of the Church of England, a weighty component of the “All,” is rather more complex. The reference to transubstantiation is a useful rhetorical ploy to redirect his attack to the Church of Rome, but does not cover his strict insistence on the memorial nature of the sacrament, the denial of any sacrifice in the celebration, and the declaration that the communion table is only a table, and not an altar, because there is no sacrifice. His insistence that the whole thing is really very simple, while no doubt reassuring to his stated audience (should any such persons read it), must have been infuriating to many of his clerical contemporaries.
And infuriated they were. Susan Rutherford shows, as neither Fielding nor Adams do, that the context for Hoadly’s contemporaries included another work, Objections against the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts Considered, a reply to a pamphlet by the bishop of London, Edmund Gibson. Published in 1736, and thus after the book on the Eucharist but written before it, the text makes explicit what A Plain Account implies: that the use of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper as a state-required demonstration of loyalty taken in conjunction with an oath, as both the Corporation Act (1661) and the Test Acts (1673 and 1678) required, was an egregious misuse of a holy thing.26 Most people were not in favor of repeal at that exact moment, but while Queen Caroline and Walpole and other Whigs believed that the time might come eventually, Thomas Sherlock and Edmund Gibson were staunchly against repeal at any time, present or future. Men like Hoadly, the most liberal of the Whigs, and all Protestant dissenters, however, were staunchly against any kind of test. Thus it was not an issue that manifested a simple Tory-Whig split, if such matters are ever simple, but a fracturing and divisive question.
Hoadly’s position aligned him with Protestant Dissent, especially because he objected to the Occasional Conformity Act, which made it illegal for dissenters to communicate in the Church of England if required to do so in order to take public office. The Act excluded this behavior as subverting the intention of the tests, whereas Hoadly in the eighteenth century and dissenters like Calamy and Baxter in the seventeenth believed that the requirements of the tests were oppressive.27 Walpole, for this reason and because he knew the dissenters tended to be Whigs and he wanted to pacify them, in 1730 invited Hoadly (through Queen Caroline with whom Hoadly was on good terms) to approach the Committee of Dissenting Deputies to explain to them why, despite its sympathy, the government could not eliminate the tests. According to Rutherford, the historical understanding of Hoadly’s role as intermediary also requires revision: “It has sometimes been suggested that Hoadly was a political opportunist rather than a man of principle. The evidence does not support this view. The bishop reminded the queen that he had already spoken and written against the Test and Corporation Acts and informed her that he would support repeal whenever it was proposed in Parliament. Nevertheless, he realized that the issue was dividing the Whigs and agreed to speak to the Dissenters.”28 Hoadly suffered the usual fate of people who attempt to mediate between two obdurate groups and was vilified by both sides for failing to support them sufficiently and conceding too much to the opposition. He was in fact effective in quieting dissenting demands for repeal of the Test Act, but was in an “equivocal” position, in Gibson’s words: “he was committed to the repeal of the Test Act but sworn to discourage the Dissenters from agitating for it.”29
Given this fraught context, as well as the Zwinglian character of his theology, it is not surprising that A Plain Account caused an uproar, both theologically and politically, although in this case those two matters cannot be considered independently. William Gibson describes Hoadly as a “spent force” by 1730,30 but he had obviously not lost the ability to inflame his contemporaries. Most respondents to the book did not consider it angelically inspired, but, reading the subtext that was certainly there, as an assault on the tests.31 In a period that did not hesitate to draw the personal into the political, satirists linked Hoadly’s severe lameness with his perceived spiritual crookedness. It is not clear what caused the disability (his son claimed it was the result of smallpox badly handled) but he was forced to walk with assistance—walking sticks in public, crutches at home—and he preached in a kneeling position to avoid standing on his weak legs.32 His walking stick becomes his identifying characteristic in prints like “The Schismatical attack of ye Church, Besieged by ye Ephesian Beast” and “Guess at my Meaning.”33 He is linked in both these prints to Puritans and dissenters: in the first, he is compared to Commonwealth men, and in the second, the books on his shelves include those by Milton, Harrington, Locke, and Hobbes. Gibson quotes “The British Censors,” in which Hoadly is also linked to Milton:
Let Whigs have their will they’d quickly all
The Apostles writings vote Apocryphal
That square not with their interest, and instead
Milton’s and Hoadly’s to the canon add.34
Parson Barnabas joins the company of such commentators as William Warburton in understanding the context of the book; in fact, Barnabas knows only the context: “I never read a Syllable in any such wicked Book; I never saw it in my Life, I assure you” (84). The name is enough for him.
The controversy, both in the countryside of Joseph Andrews and in the wider world, is a good example of the complexities of theological disputes. Parson Barnabas has complained against Whitefield, of whom Fielding did not approve, by citing the one tenet with which Fielding was in agreement: “He would reduce us to the Example of the Primitive Ages forsooth! and would insinuate to the People, that a Clergyman ought to be always preaching and praying. He pretends to understand the Scripture literally, and would make Mankind believe, that the Poverty and low Estate, which was recommended to the Church in its Infancy, and was only temporary Doctrine adapted to her under Persecution, was to be preserved in her flourishing and established State” (81). Parson Adams responds with what are apparently Fielding’s true objections to Whitefield. He first indicates that he is in agreement with him about the proper role of the clergy, couched in words that echo Hoadly’s notorious sermon: “Surely those things, which savour so strongly of this World, become not the Servants of one who professed his Kingdom was not of it.” His objections are to Whitefield’s emphasis on faith over works, and to his preaching style: “but when he began to call Nonsense and Enthusiasm to his Aid, and to set up the detestable Doctrine of Faith against good Works, I was his Friend no longer” (82). It should be noted, however, that Whitefield joined the majority (against Fielding and Adams, and in agreement with Barnabas, who opposed his theology of orders) in disagreeing with Hoadly’s sacramental theology (83n1). While theological controversies in the eighteenth century were undoubtedly polarizing (as they continue to be), it was possible for most Protestants, dissenting and establishment, to be in agreement with many others at least some of the time.
Gibson believes that most purchasers of sermons knew the political affiliations of the clergy whose sermons they selected35—they might well be buying both Hoadly and Atterbury, but they knew that the two authors would take no delight in their proximity on the buyers’ bookshelves. While Parson Adams seems to be oblivious to the reaction his chosen preacher would receive, we cannot expect the same of Fielding, who was much more knowledgeable and worldly than his character. But even if he did wish to praise Hoadly (and there were many personal and theological reasons why he might), why choose the most controversial of his works? There was much else to choose from: in many of his sermons Hoadly expresses the latitudinarian principles of practical divinity, offering his auditors and readers advice on how to lead a godly life. Gibson’s contention in the biography that Hoadly generally espoused a theology that argues for a beneficent God who wishes only for the happiness of his people is borne out in his writing: “I, for my part, was ever ready to contend that the Christian System of Precepts carried Morality to a greater Heighth and perfection, than unenlighten’d Reason ever did, or ever would have done: tho’ at the same time nothing is recommended in it, but what is perfectly agreeable to our best and uncorrupted Reason. And I argue, because it carries its sincere Professors to the greatest heighths of Virtue; therefore, doth it tend more effectually to their present Happiness.”36 It was unnecessary for Fielding to choose the sermon that started the Bangorian controversy or the Zwinglian Eucharistic theory, or even the most inflammatory part of a sermon whose subject is a good reflection on the recent action of the novel. Why, then, did he so choose?
The answer may be distributed between Fielding’s past and his invocation of Cervantes on his title page. According to Brian McCrae, when Fielding arrived in London in 1724, at the age of seventeen, his journey was much more significant than a trip to the big city. By leaving his grandmother, who had fought for custody of him and his siblings, and reconciling with his father, from whom he had been estranged by the custody suit, he left behind his boyhood and the countryside in which he grew up. McCrae considers him to have made an implicit declaration of independence, choosing an urban life, most of it dedicated to literary projects, rather than a rural existence and the legal career that his grandmother intended for him. He also “accepted a financially uncertain patrimony.” 37
The destination in Joseph Andrews may well symbolize a return to that authorial past, as the village could be a recreation of East Stour, complete with its parson, generally identified with William Young, who held the living in Fielding’s youth. Young had many of the characteristics of Fielding’s cleric, including his classical learning, certain vague habits of mind, and the occasional violent outburst.38 But if that is the case, the memories of boyhood may not have been entirely sunlit. The fictional trip back to the place of his youth is not without its shadows—Joseph and Adams march straight into “darkness visible,” a world where the clergy and courts are corrupt, squires shoot little girls’ pets, and the lady of the manor thinks it amusing that the curate is forced to live in squalor because his stipend is so low. Furthermore, when a man suggested to William Young that he was the original of Parson Adams, Young threatened to knock him down, a gesture that considerably undermines the denial it seeks to enforce, bringing to mind as it does the fictional parson’s offering to support his friend Joseph, and “clenching a Fist rather less than the Knuckle of an Ox” (67). One wonders with what part of the cleric’s character Young did not want to be associated.
The presence of Don Quixote in the wings of the tale gives us a hint as to how to read it; the full title reads, “The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams. Written in Imitation of The Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote.” Adams has many of the physical attributes of the Don, including his scrawny horse, his tattered appearance, and his devotion to peculiar ideas. Simon Dickie shows in the reception history of the character of Parson Adams that by and large the early readers of the novel had no trouble with the way in which Adams was treated; he links this to the enjoyment of practical jokes in the period, particularly among the elite—a propensity that conduct manual writers frowned upon, needless to say, but that was otherwise acceptable.39 In the discrepancy between an apparently admirable character’s being maltreated in a way that makes readers laugh at the scenes, apparently with the encouragement of the author, Dickie locates an instability in the satiric rhetoric of the text. He appropriately links Parson Adams’s treatment with Don Quixote’s, but claims that Quixote “was, for mid-eighteenth-century readers, not the loveable eccentric or noble idealist that he subsequently became, but a hilariously deluded old man and the deserving victim of so much comical mistreatment.” Dickie maintains that this attitude was changing, and that Joseph Andrews marks a significant point in that change.40
Whether Quixote was universally held up to be a purely comic character in the period is certainly a matter for debate. Patricia C. Brückmann’s work on the Scriblerians suggests that they held him in rather higher regard.41 But doubtless both he and Parson Adams are ambivalent figures. The Knight of the Mournful Countenance, much admired for his sweetness of character and for his admirable principles, is recognizably mad, and his madness is both induced by and results in misreading; his devotion to romance literature renders him unable to “read” the world around him. He is quite right to be appalled by the world in which he finds himself; he is mad to think that the fictions with which he has been entertained in any way represent the real world, that they can or should be imitated, and that they can provide him with a means of righting the wrongs he sees. Adams, too, does not read well, especially the human character. In several places in Joseph Andrews, Fielding points out Adams’s inability to read beyond surfaces: he does not see subtexts, is vulnerable to pranksters, and is completely at the mercy of hypocrites. Nonetheless, the mistreatment of Adams, while indubitably part of the comic world (it does not appear to do lasting harm to anything but his cassock), does not lead us to admire his tormentors any more than we admire the duke and duchess for their treatment of Quixote and Sancho Panza. Their pranks and jests at the Don’s expense might make us laugh, but we do not miss them when they disappear from the text. And unlike Fielding, Cervantes allows his hero to be severely injured and finally killed; when his grieving friends and relatives surround his bedside, surely we are there with them.
Adams, while admirable in many ways, is a menace to others, much as the Don is to everyone he meets, from sheepherders, to puppeteers, to the faithful Sancho. For all his parish experience, Adams is unable to live by his own tenets—witness his grief at his son’s reported drowning immediately after he has preached stoicism to Joseph—and unfit to lead his young friends into the Miltonic darkness that is the English countryside. He is unable to pay; cannot keep track of his horse; is oblivious to pranksters, hypocrites, and other cheats; and quixotically champions exactly the wrong latitudinarian prelate. Dickie claims that Parson Adams becomes the moral center of the book, but Brian McCrae astutely suggests otherwise. McCrae sees the true center of the book in Joseph’s gradual development from student to teacher. It is Joseph who leads his parson safely home, and not the other way around.42 Young may not have wanted to be associated with a character who so often seemed to be the butt of everyone’s jokes, and Adams’s ecclesiastical record was not one a country parson would want to emulate.
But there may in fact be two cervantic figures in the text, and it may be the second one from whom Young wished to distance himself. According to Battestin, Benjamin Hoadly and Gilbert Burnet, both bishops of Salisbury in Fielding’s lifetime, were the clerics whom Fielding most admired,43 and there is much evidence that his theological beliefs coincided with Hoadly’s brand of rationalist latitudinarianism, as his political beliefs matched both prelates’ Whig loyalties. Hoadly was both a part of the past to which Fielding returned and, with his Whig allegiances, a manifestation of the political loyalties he embraced. From 1723 to 1734 Hoadly was bishop of Salisbury, where he did visitations in 1726 and 1729, and was as active as the bad roads and weather, which took their toll on his already fragile health, allowed.44 He was a friend of Fielding’s from the latter’s time in Salisbury in the 1730s, and Fielding was even closer to Hoadly’s son Benjamin.45 John Hoadly, archbishop of Armagh, the bishop’s younger brother, held various positions in the diocese from 1703 to 1718: he was appointed to a prebendary seat at Salisbury by Burnet, after he defended the latter’s book on the Thirty-Nine Articles in 1703. He remained in Salisbury until 1718, when Fielding was eleven, rising in power to archdeacon and finally chancellor. According to Gibson, John was even more radical than Benjamin, and probably influenced his opinion on the tests, having come to the conclusion that the Test Act should be repealed more than a decade earlier than Benjamin did.46 McCrae asserts that the change in loyalty, from the Tories that Fielding’s grandmother’s family supported to the Whigs from whom his father received patronage, is related to his reconciliation with his father and the influence of his cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,47 but he may have been swayed earlier by the Whig clergy in Salisbury.
His defense of Hoadly, then, can be read quite straightforwardly as a tribute to an old friend, as his portrait of Adams seems to have been. It is also an equally straightforward statement of his political and religious beliefs, and however his political tenets might have been shaped by his alliance with his father, the theological ideas can be traced to his boyhood. But when we reflect on the fact that Fielding has put his defense of that friend in the hands of a man who is rarely heeded and often undermined, we should remember that the novel is described on its title page as being in the manner of Cervantes. Fielding’s sympathies with Hoadly could well lead him to see in that belligerent cleric a man who, despite the opposition of his contemporaries, wished to practice what the period called comprehension and we call ecumenicalism. While Christians often invoke unity as a desideratum, they are rarely accommodating enough with each other to put it into practice. Hoadly was faced with a dilemma: a need for competent and committed clergy, and a body of men whom he could not incorporate into his diocese because of their doctrinal differences with his church. In his desire to eliminate sacramental tests and in his belief that, if educated and encouraged, dissenters would be willing to conform, he was in some ways as naive as Parson Adams, who claims that reading about a place is the equivalent to going there, although he did have some success at bring dissenters into the fold, especially in Winchester.
He too, however, was as ambivalent a character as Adams. His determination to promote unity in the Church and to heal the denominational breaches caused at the Restoration is admirable, but his rhetoric was often calculated to destroy concord rather than to create it. Even in his own defense, he was as irascible as Adams, his rhetoric as confrontational as a blow from a fist. The preface to Sixteen Sermons skates dangerously close to the apologetics that Fielding found both risible and contemptuous in Colley Cibber:
The only Inferences in my own Favor, which I wish to be drawn from what is now published, are, That I never omitted any One public Opportunity, in proper Time and Place, of defending and strengthening the true and only Foundation of all our Civil and Religious Liberties, when it was every Day most zealously attacked; and of doing all in my Power, that All the Subjects of this Government, and this Royal Family, should understand, and approve of, those Principles, upon which alone their Happiness is fixed; and without which, it could never have been rightly Established, and must in Time fall to the Ground: And also, That I was as ready, whenever Occasion was offered, by the Writings and Attacks of Unbelievers, and by the absurd Representations of Others, to defend a Religion, most amiable . . . in it’s native Light, with which it shines in the New Testament itself, free from all the False Paint with which Some, or the undeserved Dirt with which Others, have covered it.48
As with his claim that his views in A Plain Account are transparently truthful, his accusation that his opponents are applying paint and slinging dirt is not likely to quell the opposition. Furthermore, despite the work of his most recent apologists, there is no avoiding the contradictions of his own position: while opposed to subscription, he accepted the Thirty-Nine Articles over and over again in order to be sworn into his sees, and required that his clergy do the same in order to receive preferment. He preached against the external hierarchy of the Church, but did not hesitate to benefit by it; he accepted a leading role in a church whose theology he clearly questioned.
Fielding’s championing of such a cleric, even long after the controversies in which he had engaged had died away, is a clear indication that his own theology lay on the side of the radical latitudinarians. As a “fictional continuation of the campaign begun in The Champion to correct a prevalent contempt of the clergy” (in Battestin’s words), he picks an unlikely ally, especially if he is holding up Adams as “the good clergyman, heroically maintaining the true religion in a benighted world badly in need of him.”49 If Hoadly’s views on the Eucharist and church governance reflect Fielding’s, we would be advised seriously to consider including him with leading dissenters, a place that many commentators then and now believe is the appropriate place for Benjamin Hoadly.
Notes
1. See Martha F. Bowden, Yorick’s Congregation: The Church of England in the Time of Laurence Sterne (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), especially chapter 3, “The Company of Preachers: William Rose’s The Practical Preacher (1762).”
2. Martin C. Battestin, “Fielding’s Revisions of Joseph Andrews,” Studies in Bibilography 16 (1963): 86, 98, 88, 100, 116.
3. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin, the Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 76; hereafter cited in the text.
4. Susan Rutherford, “Benjamin Hoadly: Sacramental Tests and Eucharistic Thought in Early Eighteenth-century England,” Anglican and Episcopal History 71 (2002): 473.
5. B. W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 32–33.
6. Jeremy Gregory and Jeffrey S. Chamberlain, “National and Local Perspectives on the Church of England in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in The National Church in Local Perspective: The Church of England and the Regions, 1660–1800, ed. Jeremy Gregory and Jeffrey S. Chamberlain (Woodbridge, England: Boydell Press, 2003), 7, 9.
7. William Gibson, Enlightenment Prelate: Benjamin Hoadly, 1676–1761 (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2004), 11.
8. Ibid., 138.
9. Philip Jenkins, “Church, Nation and Language: The Welsh Church, 1660–1800,” in The National Church in Local Perspective, 280. The Welsh dioceses were notoriously impoverished, and were often seen as transitional: “At best, a Welsh diocese was an apprenticeship position that might augur well for one’s future career.”
10. W. M. Marshall, “The Dioceses of Hereford and Oxford, 1660–1760,” in The National Church in Local Perspective, 205, 207–8, 209.
11. William Gibson, “‘A happy fertile soil which bringeth forth abundantly’: The Diocese of Winchester, 1689–1800,” in The National Church in Local Perspective, 109.
12. Ibid., 110–11.
13. Gibson, Enlightenment Prelate, 9.
14. Ibid., 132.
15. Benjamin Hoadly, preface to Several Tracts Formerly Published: Now Collected into One Volume . . . To which are added, Six Sermons, never before Publish’d (London, 1715), n.p. Italics reversed.
16. Benjamin Hoadly, The Nature of the Kingdom, or Church, of Christ: A Sermon Preached before the King, at the Royal Chapel at St. James’s, on Sunday March 31, 1717, 2nd ed. (London, 1717), 3–4, 8–9; hereafter cited in the text.
17. Gibson, Enlightenment Prelate, 152.
18. Ibid., 179, 197.
19. Ibid., 277. Arguing for Hoadly’s important influence on Hogarth, Gibson writes, “Hoadly emphasized that an honest and sincere heathen was more acceptable to God than a deceitful Christian; and Hogarth depicted this emphatic belief in the external works of charity in the [St. Bartholomew’s] Hospital murals” (280).
20. Gibson (ibid., 335n160) calls attention to a passage from The Pulpit-Lunaticks (London, [1717]), in which the author, a supporter of both Hoadly and the dissenters, also describes Hoadly as an angel, and “a Bright Luminary of our Church, A Glorious Asserter of Religion and Liberty and A Shining Pattern of Piety, Charity, Moderation” (32, italics reversed).
21. Benjamin Hoadly, A Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament of the Lord’s-Supper (London, 1735), 58.
22. Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), 2:129.
23. The Book of Common Prayer, and Administration of the Sacraments, and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church, According to the Use of the Church of England; Together with the Psalter or Psalms of David, Pointed as they are to be Sung or Said in Churches (Oxford: John Baskett, 1717), n.p.
24. Hoadly, A Plain Account, 71, 91. For students of liturgical history, this point is particularly interesting because it implies that at the administration, the priest handed the chalice to the communicants rather than holding it to their lips, as is the common practice today.
25. Benjamin Hoadly, A Plain Account, 17.
26. Rutherford, “Benjamin Hoadly: Sacramental Tests and Eucharistic Thought,” 474–75.
27. William Gibson, The Church of England, 1688–1832: Unity and Accord (New York: Routledge, 2001), 194.
28. Rutherford, “Benjamin Hoadly: Sacramental Tests and Eucharistic Thought,” 476–77.
29. Gibson, Enlightenment Prelate, 228.
30. Gibson, The Church of England, 92.
31. Rutherford, “Benjamin Hoadly: Sacramental Tests and Eucharistic Thought,” 482.
32. Gibson, Enlightenment Prelate, 48.
33. British Museum Catalogue Numbers 1502 and 1503, respectively.
34. Gibson, Enlightenment Prelate, 113.
35. Gibson, The Church of England, 160.
36. Hoadly, “A Second Letter to the Reverend Dr. Francis Atterbury,” in Several Tracts Formerly Published, 144.
37. Brian McCrae, Henry Fielding and the Politics of Mid-Eighteenth-Century England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981), 47.
38. Martin C. Battestin, with Ruthe R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (New York: Routledge, 1989), 189.
39. Simon Dickie, “Joseph Andrews and the Great Laughter Debate,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 34 (2005): 272–77.
40. Ibid., 301.
41. Patricia Carr Brückmann, A Manner of Correspondence: A Study of the Scriblerus Club (Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 103–7.
42. Dickie, “Joseph Andrews and the Great Laughter Debate,” 301; McCrae, Henry Fielding and the Politics of Mid-Eighteenth-Century England, 108.
43. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life, 98.
44. William Gibson, Enlightenment Prelate, 214–18.
45. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life, 104.
46. William Gibson, “Brother of the More Famous Benjamin: The Theology of Archbishop John Hoadly,” Anglican and Episcopal History 75 (2006): 417, 401.
47. McCrae, Henry Fielding and the Politics of Mid-Eighteenth-Century England, 9–10, 24–25.
48. Benjamin Hoadly, Sixteen Sermons Formerly Printed, Now Collected into One Volume, to which are added, Six Sermons upon Public Occasions, Never Before Printed (London, 1754), viii.
49. Battestin, “Fielding’s Revisions of Joseph Andrews,” 93.