[MORGAN (Thomas)]: - A Brief Examination of the Rev. Mr. Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses. In which The Mosaic Thocrac, the Nature and Character of the Sacred Writings, the Antiquity of hero-Gods, and a future, separate State of Animal Life, and Action for Souls after Death; with other Principles and Positions of that learned Writer are occasionally considered and discussed. Address'd to the Author. By a Society of Gentlmen.

London Printed for T. Cox..., 1742 FIRST AND ONLY EDITION. 8vo, 195 x 120 mms., pp.lxxxiv, 175 [176 blank], recently rebound in half plum calf, marbled boards; text water-stained at margins at beginning and end of text, no label on spine, but a good copy. "While commonly regarded as just another deist Morgan's originality lay in his application of the tools of historical criticism to scripture and to the history of religions. In the various controversies in which he was engaged he showed a keen intelligence and an enviable ability to turn the arguments of his opponents against them" (Peter Harrison in Oxford DNB). Warburton ostensibly took no notice of Morgan's book, and when Morgan the year after his Brief Examination was published, Warburton wrote to the clergyman Thomas Birch to say, "I live in peace, now that the redoubtable Dr. Morgan is dead." Warburton, who edited Alexander Pope's works for a collected edition in 1751, seems to have persuaded Pope to include Morgan as one of the Dunces in The Dunciad. Reviving a text that he had used in his Divine Legation of Moses, Warburton in his edition of Pope commented, "A writer against religion, distinguished no otherwise from the rabble of his tribe than the pompousness of his title; for, having stolen his morality from Tindal and his philosophy from Spinoza, he calls himself, by the courtesy of England, a Moral Philosopher." See Jan van der Berg's note, "'Morgan and Mandevil could Prate no More,' Pope's Dunciad, II, 414," Notes and Queries (2009).

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