ABSTRACT
The most studied work from John Witherspoon’s Scottish career is the one that gave him his reputation as a thorn in the side of the Moderate Party. Because Witherspoon’s most famous Scottish work seems to lampoon so much of the Enlightenment ethos, while his most famous American work seems to embrace so much of the Enlightenment’s philosophical foundations, scholars have tended to analyze Witherspoon’s intellectual contribution through the lens of Enlightenment categories. If Witherspoon’s intellectual climate was strikingly personal, it was also relentlessly pastoral. Whatever Enlightenment Witherspoon participated in, it was not an Enlightenment that was anti-clerical or anti-Christian. Like the English Puritans, and consistent with typical Scottish preaching, Witherspoon had a prominent role for the conscience in his theology. Witherspoon’s most comprehensive treatment of the conscience can be found in the sermon he preached before the Synod of Glasgow and Ayr on October 9, 1759.
