Author: CLAYTON (Robert):
Title: A Vindication of the Histories of the Old and New Testament In Answer To the Objections of the late Lord Bolingbroke. In Two Letters to a Young Nobleman.
Description: Dublin, Printed, London Reprinted for W. Bowyer, and sold by M. Cooper...and George Woodfal ...[no date]. [1752]. 8vo, 207 x 127, pp. [iv], 140, including half-title, recently rebound in quarter calf, linen boards, red morocco lae on front cover, gilt rules on spine; text a little dusty and several leaves creased. Robert Clayton (1695–1758) was an ambitious clergyman who never quite obtained the high positions that he had hoped for. However, as the articcle in the Oxforfd DNB records, hE "had the leisure to display a talent hitherto unsuspected, even among those closest to him, as a theological writer. He had already engaged in writing to a limited degree, but it was only now that the two dominant concerns of his religious thought—millenarianism and Arianism—became clear. His first serious scholarly effort, The Chronology of the Hebrew Bible Vindicated, which appeared in 1747, already indicated the importance of millenarianism for him. A Dissertation on Prophecy was published in 1749, and 1751 saw two letters of apologetic addressed to Jews, An (Impartial) Enquiry into the Time of the Coming of the Messiah. The work in which he publicly acknowledged his Arianism, his Vindication of the Histories of the Old and New Testament (1752, 1757), also owed its beginning to a millenarian interest in chronology. The English tradition of millenarian thought was frequently an important element in the religion of the adherents of rationalist heterodoxy, both before and after Clayton. Founded on the Reformation imperative of locating Antichrist in the Roman church, it was easily united with a doctrinal stance which was depicted by its adherents as a more enlightened and radical continuation of the work of the sixteenth century. Clayton's infamously Arian Essay on Spirit appeared in 1750. Though published anonymously, its authorship was generally known. A denial that Clayton was the author, which originated with his niece's husband and recipient of the greater part of his fortune, Bishop Thomas Barnard, was made only many years later and is not to be taken seriously. The work brought a minor storm of refutations and a good deal of scorn from orthodox churchmen. Clayton, however, did not desist. He published a Genuine Sequel to the Essay in 1752, and in 1756 called in the House of Lords for the omitting of the Nicene and Athanasian creeds from the Church of Ireland's liturgy. His views could no longer be ignored when they were restated in the third and final volume of the Vindication of the Histories in 1757."

Keywords: religion theology


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