Warburton, WILLIAM, a famous but not a great English divine, was born at Newark, the son of its town-clerk, December 24, 1698. He received his education at Oakham and Newark grammar-schools, and at sixteen was articulated to an attorney. He seems to have practised his profession for some years at Newark, while diligently keeping up his studies, and he was ordained deacon in 1723, priest in 1727. Presented by Sir Robert Sutton to the rectory of Brant-Broughton in Lincolnshire, he gave himself here for eighteen years to severe and unbroken study. His Alliance between Church and State (1736) first called attention to his powers, but it was The Divine Legation of Moses (books i.-iii. 1738; iv.-vi. 1740) which formed the sure foundation of his fame, although Gibbon could describe it in his autobiography as 'a monument, already crumbling in the dust, of the vigour and weakness of the human mind.' His object was to prove the divine authority of Moses, but he wanders discursively into all manner of subsidiary inquiries, and fortifies defects of argument with vulgar abuse of all manner of adversaries, especially in his foot-notes—his 'places of execution.' A characteristic excrescence was the explanation of Virgil's descent of Æneas into the shades as an allegorical version of initiation as a law-giver into the Eleusinian mysteries, which called forth the anonymous Critical Observations on the Sixth Book of the Æneid (1770) of the yet untried historian Gibbon. The Deists had made much of the absence from the Old Testament of any distinct reference to a future life, but Warburton makes bold to take this itself as a proof of divine authenticity, for no mere human legislator would have omitted such a sanction, and therefore the motive of Moses in leaving out so necessary a condition of morality must needs have been that he expected a further revelation. Of this preposterous work books vii. and viii. never appeared; book ix. was only published posthumously in 1788. It displays no speculative power or profundity of thought, but merely a vigour in verbal logic, and a reading multifarious and vast indeed, but inaccurate. This man has 'monstrous appetite and bad digestion' said Bentley. Insolent, dogmatic, arrogant beyond belief, prone to paradox, devoid of any spiritual insight, intolerant of any difference of opinion, he brings to theological controversy the habits of mind of the attorney's office, brow-beating his opponents with abuse and imputation, reading, says Mr Leslie Stephen, the Bible precisely like an act of parliament. In a series of letters in the Works of the Learned for 1739 he voluntarily defended the orthodoxy of Pope's Essay on Man in answer to Croussaz, and the poet was so grateful at being proved to be not a fatalist that he rewarded his boisterous apologist with a close and unbroken friendship, leaving him at his death in 1744 his literary executor—a bequest which Johnson estimated at £4000. This friendship also gave him an introduction to the wealthy owner of Prior Park, Ralph Allen, whose favourite niece, Gertrude Tucker, he married in 1745. Warburton's preference was now rapid: he became successively Preacher of Lincoln's Inn (1746), Prebendary of Gloucester (1753), King's Chaplain (1754), Prebendary of Durham (1755), Dean of Bristol (1757), finally, through the nomination of Allen's warm friend, William Pitt, Bishop of Gloucester (1759). He was remiss in his episcopal duties, but the standard of that age was not high, and Hurd, who had the honesty to be as obsequious in his flattery to him dead as living, counts the loss to his diocese gain to the church. The grace of apostolical succession did not drive out his fighting spirit, and he wore out his days in endless warfare with Hume, Jortin, the Deists wholesale, Voltaire, Lowth, and Wesley. The most famous of these struggles was that with Lowth, who was as much his superior in scholarship as in courtesy. Lowth's famous Letter (1765) remains scarce rivalled to this day in polite raillery and point, and Warburton for once had the prudence to offer no retort. His Doctrine of Grace (1762) was a weak attack on Wesley, to which both Whitefield and Wesley made a satisfactory reply. Warburton's mental powers did not last out his life, and the loss of his only son in 1755 was a trial from which he never recovered. He died June 11, 1779, and was buried in his cathedral. His widow in 1781 married a former chaplain, John Smith.
Warburton in his early years had aided Theobald in his Shakespeare, and in 1747 he himself issued an edition which brought him no credit, for Douce was within the truth when he called him of all Shakespeare commentators 'surely the worst.' His chief remaining works were the credulous enough Julian (1750), on the renegade emperor's attempt to rebuild the temple at Jerusalem, à propos of Middleton's Inquiry concerning the Miraculous Powers of the Early Church; his edition of Pope (1751); The Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion, sermons (3 vols. 1753-54-67). A sumptuous edition of his works was published in 1788 by his jackal, Bishop Hurd, in seven quarto volumes, at the expense of his widow; a more recent edition is in 12 vols. (1811).
—His name survives in the Lecture he founded at Lincoln's Inn with £500 in 1768.—See the Lives by F. Kilvert (1860) and J. S. Watson (1863), also Leslie Stephen in Fortnightly Review for February 1872, and in his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876), Mark Pattison's Essays (vol. ii. 1889), and Sir J. F. Stephen's Horæ Sublaticæ (vol. ii. 1892).