Opposing Enlightenment: Reverend Charles Peters's Reading of the Natural History of Religion

Abstract

This essay presents newly-discovered evidence for the reading of Charles Peters, minister of St Mabyn in Cornwall. It reveals how an early encounter with Thomas Blackwell's Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735) stimulated Peters, a self-consciously orthodox High Churchman, to develop a private critique of the emerging Enlightenment discourse of natural religion. This episode sheds new light on the cultural preoccupations of England's parish clergy, as well as upon the significance of misinterpretation and misunderstanding in the social history of ideas. It also provides an illuminating additional context for the "Job Controversy", in which Peters, utilizing similar arguments to those he had first deployed against Blackwell, later entered the lists against both Bishop Warburton and Lord Bolingbroke.