SOURCE: Evans, A. W. “Conyers Middleton—‘The Divine Legation of Moses’—Webster's Attack.” In Warburton and the Warburtonians: A Study in Some Eighteenth-Century Controversies, pp. 48-70. London: Oxford University Press, 1932.

In the following excerpt, Evans examines the friendship between Warburton and Middleton and the controversy surrounding Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses.

By the publication of the Alliance, Warburton had made a successful entry into the world of letters, and was now in a position to bring himself before the notice of men of acknowledged learning and distinction. One of these was Conyers Middleton, then chief librarian at Cambridge, and engaged in writing his Life of Cicero. Middleton, whose book on the miracles, though of a sceptical tendency, was to have the odd effect of helping to make Gibbon a Roman Catholic,¹ had already incurred the hostility of the orthodox because in an embittered controversy with Waterland and Zachary...