The Principles of Moral and Christian Philosophy: In Two Volumes

Introduction

ix introduction George Turnbull’s Christian Philosophy, volume 2 of his Principles of Moral and Christian Philosophy, was undoubtedly written by a devout Christian, though whether Turnbull throughout his life endorsed the kind of Christianity to be found in volume 2 is doubtful. It is reasonable to suppose that he did at least begin as a Calvinist, for that was the kind of religion he would have learned from his father, the Church of Scotland minister George Turnbull senior, who was ministering to the Church of Scotland parish of Alloa in the Scottish county of Clackmannanshire when George junior was born.1 We do not know what sort of Calvinist George Turnbull senior was (for Scottish Calvinism covers a broad spectrum of belief), but if George Turnbull the younger began as a Calvinist of the more robust sort, he must have started to move away from this position when still quite young. For in Edinburgh in his later teens, after completing his studies for the arts degree (M.A.), he joined the newly founded Rankenian Club, whose ideological bias toward Lord Shaftesbury did not sit comfortably with Calvinism (though it could be made to sit more or less uncomfortably with it). In 1718 Turnbull tried (under the assumed name Philocles) to start a correspondence with the Irish freethinker John Toland (1670– 1722), whose espousal of a form of Spinozistic pantheism2 (or atheism, as many judged it to be) made any hint of agreement with Toland a potentially risky enterprise for a youth wanting to make his way in the 1. He moved to take charge of the parish of Tyninghame in East Lothian one year later. 2. See Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 609–14. x introduction world. At about the same time Turnbull wrote a short work on religious toleration which, as he later claimed, was rejected by publishersbecause, in an age when religious free thought carried with it sanctions of one form or another, the publishers whom Turnbull approached were not prepared to take responsibility for marketing a tract advocating such thinking. Indication of Turnbull’s strength of opinion in the matter is found in a letter he wrote at about this time to the Irish peer LordMolesworth . In a manner characteristic of Molesworth, Turnbull affirms that “our Colleges are under the Inspection of proud domineering pedantic Priests whose interest it is to train up the youth in a profoundveneration of their Senseless metaphysical Creeds & Catechisms, which for this purpose they are daily inured to defend against allDoubters&Enquirers with the greatest bitterness and contempt, in a stiff formal bewildering manner admirably fitted indeed to Enslave young understandings betimes and to beget an early antipathy against all Free thought.”3 It is hard to believe that the Marischal faculty knew about Turnbull’s vigorous advocacy of religious free thought or his broadly sympathetic attitude to Toland. But, in any case, after becoming regent at Marischal College in 1721, Turnbull moved toward a more orthodox position; though not immediately, as witness the fact that the aforementionedletter to Molesworth was sent a full year after Turnbull had taken up his appointment at the college. The softer position he adopted in his teaching involved emphasis on the central role of revelation in religion, though he did believe, and say, that, to speak generally, the Christian revelation could hold its own under cross-examination before the tribunal of reason since it satisfied criteria of rationality, such as consistency with itself and also with experience. The Principles of Moral and Christian Philosophy probably represents 3. Letter dated 3 August 1722. The letter is quoted in M. A. Stewart, “George Turnbull and educational reform,” in J. J. Carter and Joan M. Pittock, eds.,Aberdeen and the Enlightenment (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), 95–103; see 96. For much of the biographical information in this introduction (as for the introduction to volume 1) I have relied on this article by Stewart and also on Paul Wood, “George Turnbull (1698–1748),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). introduction xi rather closely the belief system that Turnbull espousedbothatMarischal and in the years thereafter until publication of the work. The period included a dramatic shift in Turnbull’s institutional religious allegiance. His matriculation at Exeter College, Oxford, with the aim of securing the degree of bachelor of civil...