[WARBURTON (William).]
A Critical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Causes of Prodigies and Miracles, as related by Historians. With an Essay towards restoring a Method and Purity in History. In Which, The Characters of the most celebrated Writers of every Age, and of the seve
Disowned by its author
[WARBURTON (William).]
A Critical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Causes of Prodigies and Miracles, as related by Historians. With an Essay towards restoring a Method and Purity in History. In Which, The Characters of the most celebrated Writers of every Age, and of the seve
A scarce early work by the leading religious polemicist and sometime Bishop of Gloucester, William Warburton (1698-1779).
“Warburton’s first publication of any note was an anonymously published anti-Catholic and anti-deist tract entitled A Critical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Causes of Prodigies and Miracles (1727). In this work – which he later disowned to the extent of buying up copies and destroying them – he laid down a theory of why the ancients had been more credulous than the moderns as to the meaning and reality of prodigies and portents. He defended the miracles of the early Christian centuries as necessary truths, serving as impressive witnesses to the veracity of the faith, while he distinguished them from purely Roman Catholic miracles, which he dismissed as credulous impostures” (Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century British Philosophers, Thoemmes Press, 1999).
Provenance: Henry Bowes Howard, 11th Earl of Suffolk, 4th Earl of Berkshire (1687-1757), with his engraved armorial bookplate to front pastedown.
