That this is the meaning of the struggle did not appear until the reign
of George I. What is known as the Bangorian controversy was due to the
posthumous publication, in 1716, of the papers of George Hickes, the
most celebrated of the Nonjurors in his generation. The papers are of
no special import; but taken in connection with the Jacobite rising of
1715 they seemed to imply a new attack upon the Revolution settlement.
So, at least, they were interpreted by Benjamin Hoadly, then Bishop of
Bangor, and a stout upholder of the Latitudinarian school. The conflict
today has turned to dust and ashes; and few who read the multitude of
pamphlets it evoked, or stand amazed at their personal bitterness, can
understand why more than a hundred writers should have thought it
necessary to inform the world of their opinions, or why the London Stock
Exchange should have felt so passionate an interest in the debate as to
cease for a day the hubbub of its transactions. Nor can any one make
heroes from the personalities of its protagonists. Hoadly himself was a
typical bishop of the political school, who rose from humble
circumstances to the wealthy bishopric of Winchester through a
remarkable series of translations. Before the debate of 1716, he was
chiefly known by two political tracts in which he had rewritten, in less
cogent form, and without adequate acknowledgment, the two treatises of
Locke. He clearly realized how worthless the dogma of Divine Right had
become, without being certain of the principles by which it was to be
replaced. Probably, as Leslie Stephen has pointed out, his theorizing is
the result of a cloudy sense of the bearing of the Deist controversy. If
God is to be banished from direct connection with earthly affairs, we
must seek a human explanation of political facts. And he became
convinced that this attitude applies not less completely to
ecclesiastical than to secular politics. Of his opponents, by far the
ablest was William Law, the only theologian whom Gibbon may be said to
have respected, and the parent, through his mystical writings, of the