The brief foregoing account of the overlapping characteristics of a
rhetoric of interruption, embracing personal integrity, historiography,
and political eloquence within an unfolding of tautologies that is com-
mon both to eighteenth-century narratives and the book of Job, will help
explain some of the passion invested in the conflicts over the interpret-
ation of Job between the mid-1740s and the mid-1760s. ¹ At the centre
of this conflict stands William Warburton, an ambitious divine with
strong political affiliations, both theoretical and practical, who wished
to rescue Job for orthodoxy and systematic narrative. Although he was
fussy enough about party differences to despise Hume as an atheistical
Jacobite, 'a monster as rare with us as a hippogriff, he himself is
vulnerable to the criticism Hume made of Socrates, namely, of raising
Tory consequences on Whig foundations. ² He sets out his commitment
to Whig principles in an early piece on history, where he refers to 'the
divine Right of Tyranny and Slavery' as one of the worst impostures an
unenlightened mind can harbour. 'Publick Liberty', he affirms in the
same essay, 'is the Balm of human Misery, the Quintessence of human
Felicity, and the Recompence for the Loss of a Terrestrial Paradise.' ³ In
his ambitious attempt to reconcile Revolution principles with the pri-
ority of the integrity of the state, The Alliance between Church and State
( 1736), he indicates the limits of his libertarian way of thinking.
Although the end of civil society is the security of the 'temporal liberty
and property of man' under an 'Original Compact' which is its only
legitimate foundation, this does not include insuring dissenters and
atheists against loss of employment, even though it guarantees the
freedom of their consciences. ⁴ The 'Free Convention and Mutual Com-
pact' which makes the interests of church and state interdependent
decrees that people who refuse to profess the faith of the state religion
be excluded from all areas of public administration (63).

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