Civility and Skepticism in the Woolston-Sherlock Debate over Miracles

Certainly no man ever took more Pains to be engaged in Controversy than I have.

— Thomas Woolston

The Woolston-Sherlock exchange is at first glance a minor episode within an esoteric theological debate, containing little of interest for all but a few scholars of English religious history. Thomas Woolston, a former fellow of Cambridge’s Sidney College and a specialist in the writings of Origen, instigated a controversy over the New Testament miracles, following the scandalized reaction to Anthony Collins’ Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion(London, 1724), a Deist attack on scriptural prophecy. From 1727 to 1729 he publishedSix Discourses on the Miracles of our Saviour,arguing that one should interpret the miracles of Jesus only as allegories of spiritual truths. ¹ Woolston claimed to be a sincere Christian focusing on the Bible as a document of faith; but his tendency to mock and attack Christianity belied those claims and alienated his contemporaries. In addition to receiving more than seventy vitriolic replies to his publications he was tried, fined, and imprisoned in 1729 for criminal blasphemy. For his penury as much as for his obstinacy he remained in prison until his death in 1733. ² After he had been imprisoned, Thomas Sherlock, then bishop of Bangor, anonymously publishedThe Trial of the Witnesses to the Resurrection of Jesus (London, 1729). Describing a group of barristers who settle the dispute by staging a mock-trial, Sherlock’s text was one of the most successful and popular replies to Woolston, seeing several editions by 1743.

Woolston’s writings, and the textual and legal responses to them, acquired the notoriety of a major controversy. Woolston received much attention from London papers and even merited cameos, however unflattering, in poems such as Swift’s “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift.” ³ His one-time friend and advocate, William Whiston, was not exaggerating when he wrote in hisMemoirs, almost twenty years after Woolston’s demise, that Woolston “for some Time made a great Noise in the World.” ⁴ Yet Woolston’s and Sherlock’s writings, let alone the many other tracts involved in this controversy, have received minimal attention in the last few decades, and then only as a moment in the Deist controversy or in the long-running debate over miracles from Locke’sDiscourse of Miracles (1706) to Hume’s essay “Of Miracles” (1748). The attention given Woolston’s and Sherlock’s writings and the hubbub surrounding them is not inaccurate, but it is incomplete.

When reexamined, the Woolston-Sherlock exchange illuminates the interrelations of religion, philosophy, rhetoric, law, and gentlemanly conduct in early modern England. In order to demonstrate such impact, however, we need first to examine the rhetoric informing the primary texts; for what is significant about Woolston’s writings is their strident, disorderly, and rude rhetoric. They under-cut and contradict themselves, amuse and outrage their readers, and often do not make solid points. His rhetoric obscures his intentions and his religious beliefs, making it uncertain whether he considered himself to be a Christian and whether he was sane. Woolston’s messy rhetoric so entangles the substance of his arguments that the manner in which he writes tends to become the center of his argument. Although his irreverent tone stands within a heterodox tradition that allowed aggressive ridicule as a weapon, ⁵ both the intensity of his style and his insistence on theorizing his rhetoric are distinctive. Even within a culture paradoxically accustomed to rudeness, while obsessed with civility, Woolston stood out as someone who “made a great Noise.”

Scholars who approach Woolston philosophically or theologically tend to see his style as merely noise; and when they do not ignore it, they regard it with puzzlement. ⁶ Since scholars rarely attend to his rhetorical intricacies, the very factors that caused Woolston’s imprisonment are what now lead to his obsolescence, because we do not interrogate those factors in their rhetorical context. William Trapnell has noted that when scholars mention Woolston at all, their comments are overdetermined by the reputation he received of being a Deist and...