be the conclusion arrived at by those who accept his arguments. To understand his work, it must be remembered that ‘reasonableness’ was the keynote to all the discussions respecting theology in the first half of the eighteenth century. The pamphlet appeared towards the close of the deistical controversy, after the deists had been trying to prove for half a century that a belief in revealed religion was unreasonable, and the orthodox that it was reasonable. In opposition to both, Dodwell maintained that ‘assent to revealed truth, founded upon the conviction of the understanding, is a false and unwarrantable notion;’ that ‘that person best enjoys faith who never asked himself a question about it, and never dwelt at all on the evidence of reason;’ that ‘the Holy Ghost irradiates the souls of believers at once with an irresistible light from heaven that flashes conviction in a moment, so that this faith is completed in an instant, and the most perfect and finished creed produced at once without any tedious progress in deductions of our own;’ that ‘the rational christian must have begun as a sceptic; must long have doubted whether the gospel was true or false. And can this,’ he asks, ‘be the faith that overcometh the world? Can this be the faith that makes a martyr?’ After much more to the same effect, he concludes, ‘therefore, my son, give thyself to the Lord with thy whole heart, and lean not to thy own understanding.’
At the time when Dodwell wrote the reaction had begun to set in against this exaltation of ‘reason’ and a ‘reasonable christianity.’ William Law had written his ‘Case of Reason,’ &c., in which he strives to show that reason had no case at all, and Dodwell's pamphlet seems like a travesty of that very able work. The methodists had begun to preach with startling effects the doctrines of the ‘new birth’ and instantaneous conversion, and some of them hailed the new writer as a valuable ally, and recommended him as such to John Wesley. But Wesley was far too clear-sighted not to see the real drift of the work. ‘On a careful perusal,’ he writes, ‘of that piece, notwithstanding my prejudice in its favour, I could not but perceive that the great design uniformly pursued throughout the work was to render the whole of the christian institution both odious and contemptible. His point throughout is to prove that christianity is contrary to reason, or that no man acting according to the principles of reason can possibly be a christian. It is a wonderful proof of the power that smooth words may have even on serious minds that so many have mistook such a writer as this for a friend of christianity’ (Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, p. 14). This was the general view taken of the work, though Seagrave (a Cambridge methodist of repute), as well as other methodists, thought otherwise, and some mystics, John Byrom for instance, and even so powerful a reasoner as William Law, were doubtful about the writer's object. He was answered by Philip Doddridge, who calls the work ‘a most artful attempt, in the person of a methodist, but made indeed by a very sagacious deist, to subvert christianity,’ and says ‘it is in high reputation among the nobility and gentry;’ by John Leland, who not only devoted a chapter to it in his ‘View of the Deistical Writers,’ but also wrote a separate work on it, entitled ‘Remarks on a late Pamphlet entitled Christianity not founded on Argument’ (1744); by Dr. George Benson, in an elaborate work, entitled ‘The Reasonableness of the Christian Religion as delivered in the Scriptures’ (1743); by Dr. Thomas Randolph, in ‘The Christian Faith a Rational Assent’ (1744), and by the writer's own brother, William Dodwell [q. v.], in two sermons preached before the university of Oxford (1745). The work is undoubtedly a very striking one, and hits a blot in the theology both of the deists and their antagonists. He died in 1784.
[Dodwell's Christianity not founded on Argument; Hunt's Religious Thought in England; Abbey and Overton; information privately received from the Rev. Henry Dodwell Moore, vicar of Honington, and others connected with the Dodwell family.]
DODWELL, WILLIAM (1709–1785), archdeacon of Berks and theological writer, born at Shottesbrooke, Berkshire, on 17 June 1709, was the second son and fifth child of Henry Dodwell the elder, the nonjuror [q. v.] He was educated at Trinity College, Oxford, where he took his degree of M.A. in 1732. On 27 Nov. 1740 he was married at Bray Church to Elizabeth Brown, by whom he had a large family, one of whom married Thomas Ridding, a relation of the present bishop of Southwell. Dodwell became rector of his native place, Shottesbrooke, and vicar of White Waltham and Bucklesbury. Dr. Sherlock, bishop of Salisbury, gave him a prebendal stall in Salisbury Cathedral in 1748, and he afterwards obtained a residentiary canonry in the same church. Another bishop of Salisbury, Dr. Thomas, made him archdeacon of Berks in 1763; some years before (23 Feb. 1749–50—Dr. Thomas did not become bishop of Salisbury until 1761) the university of Oxford conferred upon him the degree of D.D. by diploma, in recognition of his services to religion by his answer to Dr. Middleton.
