ABSTRACT
Theodicy was a major concern for Paley from the very beginning of his career. The thesis he had intended to submit for his final disputatio at Cambridge had originally been entitled: ‘Aeternitas paenarum contradicit divinis attributis’, that is, ‘Eternal punishment contradicts God’s attributes’, a claim that sounded subversive. Even though it flies in the face of the Malthus-the-reactionary mythology, it is a fact that more than once he manifested commitment to the equality of human beings as an ideal, one not fully implementable but nonetheless a normative standard on which assessment of policies and institutions should be based. This was no reluctant concession by a not-too-convinced Anglican priest to the spirit of the time, but was instead a view fully justified by his own interpretation of the Whig tradition as well as of the teachings of Christianity.
