Leland, JOHN

Leland, JOHN, an eminent 18th-century English apologist for Christianity, was born at Wigan, in Lancashire, in 1691, and educated at Dublin, where he was a Presbyterian minister from 1716 till his death in 1766. His first publication was A Defence of Christianity (1733), in answer to Tindal's deistical work, Christianity as Old as the Creation. This was followed by The Divine Authority of the Old and New Testaments, in answer to Morgan's Moral Philosopher. His most important work is A View of the Principal Deistical Writers that have appeared in England (1754-56). Leland was, in Leslie Stephen's phrase, the 'most worthy, painstaking, and commonplace of divines,' and many more than the few that read it still regard his work as a satisfactory demolition of deism. To his Discourses on Various Subjects (4 vols. 1768-89) was prefixed a Life.