Author: TUNSTALL (James):
Title: Lectures on Natural and Revealed Religion, Read in the Chapel of St. John's College, Cambridge.
Description: London, Printed by William Bowyer, 1765. FIRST EDITION. 4to, 260 x 193 mms., pp. 20, 308, contemporary calf, recornered and rebacked in darker calf, with new morocco labels; top margin of first ten leaves slightly wormed, rather clumsily rebound, with the bookplate of David Arthur Pailin on the front paste-down end-paper. The list of subscribers (pp. 5 - 20) accounts for about 1200 copies. Tunstall (1708 - 1762) began his literary career with an attack on Conyers Middleton's life of Cicero; Middleton replied vigorously, and Tunstall renewed his charges in a further publication. The above lectures were published by subscription to benefit his widow and children and were edited by his brother-in-law, Frederick Dodsworth. The lectures have more to do with practical morality than natural religion, since Tunstall argues for the truth-value of revealed religion. The work was sympathetically reviewed in a long article in the Critical Review for 1765, with the reviewer concluding, "This learned author, having perhaps calculated his lectures for the benefit of younger students, has suggested only the plainest and most obvious arguments: but he has treated them in a distinct and regular way, and, upon the whole, furnished us with a useful treatise on this important subject."

Keywords: morality religion prose


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