ABSTRACT
Historians praise Benjamin Hoadly (1676-1761) as an able political controversialist, but, at the same time, they castigate him as a scandalous cleric. This hardly surprises. Since his own day, the great defender of the Revolution settlement was vociferously blamed as a pluralist, nepotist, and absentee. Indeed Hoadly's preferment from Bangor to Hereford, Salisbury, and finally to Winchester, seemed to most of his contemporaries a reward for his support of the Hanoverians, rather than for promoting the interest of the Church. Additionally, Hoadly had a reputation for heresy. Many of his brethren would condemn him as an impostor, a fifth-columnist of Dissent with theological opinions dangerously close to those of the Arians, Socinians, even Deists.
