ABSTRACT
In the first years of George III’s reign the apologetics of the State Church will be found occupied very largely with the fundamental challenges long made by the Deism, native to the country and very worthily represented at the time by Peter Annet. The politically dominant landlord class might fully recognise the utility of a State Church, which inculcated social discipline and buttressed it with divine sanctions. But the support of the State Church, mainly by an agricultural tithe, subtracting greatly from the rents demandable from tithable tenantries, inevitably made landlords grumblers as well as tenants. Archdeacon Horsley’s nomination to a Bishopric in 1788 was not only richly earned but served, by example, to incite further controversial ardour on behalf of the Church. Yet during the eighteenth century, the checking of the attack upon Christianity from one quarter by no means implied a cessation of the attack from others.
