Education for Life. George Turnbull
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in Britain in the summer of 1745. After a period in the Eternal City, Turnbull and Walpole went on to Naples before returning to England in the spring of 1747.34 Turnbull then drops entirely from view until his death from unspecified causes in the Hague on 31 January 1748. What took him to the United Provinces is unknown, but it is said that he was again spying on exiled Jacobites for the British government.35
Turnbull’s Place in the Enlightenment
Turnbull’s intellectual identity was defined by his formative experiences as a student at Edinburgh and his understanding of the relations between the different branches of human learning. At the turn of the eighteenth century, proponents of what we now identify as Enlightenment in Europe were consolidating their hold over the cultural institutions of Edinburgh.36 Thanks to the Gregory family, the University became a bastion of Newtonianism in the 1690s, while other parts of the curriculum were gradually updated, especially following the adoption of the professorial system of teaching in 1708. When Turnbull arrived in 1711, he would have encountered
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a residue of scholasticism mixed with newer currents of thought, including the natural law theories of Grotius and Pufendorf. He would also have been given a good grounding in Greek and Latin; significantly, his Latin professor, Laurence Dundas, apparently used Justin’s epitome of Pompeius Trogus’s Philippic Histories, which Turnbull subsequently edited.37 Turnbull then studied divinity under the Principal, the Rev. William Wishart, and the Professor of Divinity, the Rev. William Hamilton. Wishart was an orthodox Calvinist who had been sympathetic to the Covenanters in his early years, whereas Hamilton was said to have instilled in his pupils “moderation and a liberal manner of thinking upon all subjects.”38 Outside of the classroom, Hamilton’s moderate form of Presbyterianism seems to have inspired the discussion of religious topics in the Rankenian Club.
We know little about the proceedings of the Club. Comments made by Robert Wodrow in the mid-1720s show that the Rankenians were known to be critical of orthodox Calvinism.39 A manuscript dating from before 1720 by Wallace challenging the use of “Creeds or Confessions of faith” and Turnbull’s contemporaneous manuscript on civil religion published below, indicate that they debated whether the state or a national church can legitimately regulate religious belief.40 These manuscripts show that the Rankenians registered not only the case for religious toleration advanced by John Locke, but also the arguments involved in the Bangorian Controversy sparked by Benjamin Hoadly and the disputes over subscription to formulas such as the Westminster Confession of Faith that had recently flared up in Ireland, England, and Scotland.41 Moreover, Turnbull’s letter
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to John Toland written in 1718 (below, pp. 3–4) suggests that the club members were exploring the writings of Toland and other English Deists and flirting with radical Enlightenment ideas. The place of religion in society and the credibility of Christianity continued to preoccupy Turnbull over the next two decades. His letters to Molesworth show that in private he echoed the Deists in railing against priestcraft and the imposition of creeds, and that he had read Anthony Collins.42 But Turnbull was also a theist who maintained that the design and order of the moral and natural realms evinced in the work of Newton refuted “atheism,” in both its ancient and modern forms.43 Moreover, in the early 1720s he was already familiar with the debate over miracles sparked by Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise (1670), which rumbled across Europe for a century.
Turnbull entered this debate in A Philosophical Enquiry concerning the Connexion betwixt the Doctrines and Miracles of Jesus Christ, which appeared anonymously in 1731 while he was on the continent. The Enquiry was ostensibly a letter written “to a Friend” dated 10 April 1726 (that is, while he was still teaching at Marischal College) and signed “Philanthropos” (lover of humanity). In the “Advertisement” to the first two impressions of the pamphlet he explained that he had delayed publication because he had
expect[ed] to see a Discourse upon Miracles, promised by the Author of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, [but] does not know whether that Discourse is at last published or not, [or] whether a late Book entitled, Christianity as old as the Creation, takes any notice of miracles; and is, in one word, an utter stranger to what has been publish’d in England for two years past.44
The “Author” referred to here was Anthony Collins, and Turnbull’s puzzlement was genuine because Collins mentions his “Discourse upon Miracles”
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in The Scheme of Literal Prophecy Considered (1726), but the “Discourse” remained unpublished at Collins’s death in December 1729.45 The Enquiry was thus most likely initially conceived as a response to Collins’s argument that miracles were no proof of the truth of Christianity, which he likewise advanced in A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1724) and the Scheme. Turnbull may also have been prompted to publish because of the furor over Thomas Woolston’s six discourses on Christ’s miracles published in the years 1727 to 1729. Woolston’s pamphlets, his imprisonment for blasphemy in 1729, and the deluge of attacks on him ensured any contribution to the dispute over miracles a wide readership, which the Enquiry evidently enjoyed. And although Turnbull did not fundamentally alter the miracles debate the way Hume later did, his ingenious argument that Christ’s miracles provided “experimental” or empirical proof of the truth of His teachings was a striking attempt to show that belief in the miraculous foundations of Christianity was as rational as a belief in the truth of Newtonian natural philosophy.46
Turnbull and his bookseller likewise took advantage of the controversy aroused by Matthew Tindal’s Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730) by publishing Christianity Neither False nor Useless, Tho’ Not as Old as the Creation as a pendant to the Enquiry. Turnbull here insists that in humanity’s fallen state, unaided reason can discover the basic principles of morality, but not establish the truth of the doctrines of the resurrection, a future state, the forgiveness of sins, and divine rewards and punishments. These doctrines, he argues, are necessary to “enforce sufficiently upon [humankind] obedience” to the law of nature; hence we need revelation to assist us in the pursuit of virtue. Against Tindal, he maintained that the moral teachings of Christianity amount to more than simply the dictates of natural law, and that miracles are not only credible but also provide us with the necessary evidence of the truth of revelation.47 Christianity Neither False nor Useless was thus not merely a cynical attempt to promote the Enquiry
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among readers of Tindal.48 Rather, Turnbull’s pamphlet is intellectually significant because it underlines his debt to Samuel Clarke’s blend of rational Christianity and moderate Enlightenment.
Turnbull’s indebtedness to Clarke resurfaced in his last pamphlet, An Impartial Enquiry into the Moral Character of Jesus Christ (1740). Turnbull elaborated on Clarke’s assertion that Christ’s spotless character showed that he was “neither an Imposter nor an Enthusiast,” and that Jesus’ moral integrity “add[s] great Weight and Authority to his Doctrine, and make[s] his own Testimony concerning himself exceedingly credible.”49 Using the epistolary form, Turnbull addresses himself to a Deist and endeavors to persuade this imaginary friend that Christ was an even greater teacher of morality than Socrates and that Christ’s exemplary behavior and good works attested to his divine mission. Turnbull was implicitly arguing that Christ’s unimpeachable character and his miracles constitute “extrinsic” evidence for the truth of Christianity which complements the “intrinsic” evidence derived from the excellence of his teachings. Together, this evidence suffices to persuade the candid unbeliever of the reasonableness of Christian belief.50 With the Impartial Enquiry (and The Principles of Moral and Christian Philosophy), therefore, Turnbull’s protracted dialogue with Deism and his public defense of the reasonableness of Christianity (and hence of the moderate Enlightenment) came to an unresolved end.
Turnbull’s apologetic agenda in his writings on religion was set while he was a student in Edinburgh. His Aberdeen graduation theses, which document
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