Middleton, CONYERS,

Middleton, CONYERS, a famous controversialist, was born at Richmond in Yorkshire in 1683. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 1706 obtained a fellowship, which a prudent marriage soon enabled him to resign. About 1722 he became librarian to the university, and in his later years was presented to the living of Hascombe in Surrey. He died at his seat at Hildesham in Cambridgeshire in 1750. All his life through Middleton was busy in controversy, and in bitterness of tone and ferocity of temper he was a match for any of his contemporaries. His first antagonist was the redoubtable Bentley; but, though at first successful, he was afterwards obliged to apologise to him for libel. His later controversies were theological in character, and in these he gained great distinction, but left his own sincerity under grievous suspicion. His Letter from Rome, showing an exact Conformity between Popery and Paganism (1729), was a severe attack on the Catholic ritual, the method employed being the historical—so much more deadly than dogmatic arguments. He next assailed the orthodox champion Waterland, and startled the devout by giving up literal inspiration and the historical truth of the Old Testament stories. He professed to be giving an unassailable answer to Tindal and his school of Deists, but it is none too certain that he was not himself a freethinker, bent on dealing a secret stab to a religion the bread of which he ate. In 1747 and the following year he published his famous Introductory Discourse and the Free Inquiry into the miraculous powers claimed to have subsisted in the Christian church after the apostolic age. He attacked the ecclesiastical miracles, pointing out that their true source was in the general intellectual condition of the age that produced them, without needing to postulate either supernatural interference on the one hand or human imposture on the other. It is not a little interesting that Gibbon ascribes his boyish conversion to the Roman Catholic faith to the indirect influence of this work, which convinced him not that that church had preserved the gift of miraculous powers during the first four or five centuries, but that most of its distinctive doctrines were already formulated within that period. Middleton's best-known book remains his well-written and eulogistic Life of Cicero (1741). See Leslie Stephen's English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, chap. iv. part 6.