SOURCE: Taylor, Stephen. “William Warburton and the Alliance of Church and State.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 43, no. 2 (April 1992): 271-86.

In the following essay, Taylor refutes the common critical belief that Warburton's pamphlet The Alliance between Church and State reflected the standard opinion held by most contemporary clerics.

In January 1736 an anonymous pamphlet appeared under the title, The Alliance between Church and State, or the Necessity of an Established Religion, and a Test Law demonstrated.¹ Its author was William Warburton, a well-to-do but still comparatively obscure country clergyman.² Although this was only his second publication in the field of divinity, he was already revealing the taste for controversy which was to characterise his literary career.³ The Alliance appeared at the height of the campaign by the Protestant dissenters to repeal the Test Act of 1673, and only weeks before the defeat, on 12 March 1736, of a motion for its repeal in...