ABSTRACT
Like Beilby Porteus, James Cornwallis believed in ‘a super-intending providence’ over earthly affairs. Rather than adopting Porteus’s anti-modernist rhetoric, though, Cornwallis uses a more up-to-date discourse. ‘It must be agreeable’, he writes, ‘to the dictates of Reason, that there should be a divine interference in human affairs’. As well as ‘the dictates of Reason’, Cornwallis argues that ‘This great truth, the existence of a national providence, is farther confirmed by the general conduct of mankind, recorded in Profane History’. Cornwallis seems more concerned with proving the truth of his providentialist doctrine than with ‘the particular application of this doctrine, which our present humiliation requires’. Indeed, Cornwallis has surprisingly little to say, certainly a lot less than Porteus, about precisely why God would have imposed ‘reverses of situation’ on the British empire.
