Person

Richard Watson (Bishop of Llandaff)

Richard Watson (1737-1816) was an English chemist, Cambridge professor of divinity and Bishop of Llandaff who wrote the two best-known Anglican replies to the great skeptics of his age. An Apology for Christianity (1776) answered Edward Gibbon's treatment of the rise of Christianity in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. An Apology for the Bible (1796) answered Part II of Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason, letter by letter, and went through many editions in Britain and America.

He is remembered for the manner of his replies as much as for their matter. Both are addressed to their opponents by name, both are courteous, and both argue on the evidence rather than from church authority, which some of his fellow churchmen thought too generous. He is a different person from the Wesleyan Methodist theologian Richard Watson (1781-1833), author of Theological Institutes.

Life

• 1737, born in August at Heversham, Westmorland, and educated at Heversham Grammar School
• 1759, graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, as Second Wrangler; elected a fellow of Trinity in 1760
• 1764, elected Professor of Chemistry at Cambridge, though by his own account he knew little chemistry when appointed. His research on the solution of salts led to his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1769, and he later published Chemical Essays
• 1771, became Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge on the death of Thomas Rutherforth. He later wrote that he "determined to study nothing but my Bible," setting aside the opinions of councils and fathers, and that a colleague nicknamed him "the self taught divine" (Anecdotes of the Life, as quoted in the memoir prefixed to the 1833 New York edition of the Apology for the Bible)
• 1776, published An Apology for Christianity, in a Series of Letters Addressed to Edward Gibbon. Gibbon acknowledged the copy Watson sent him with marked politeness
• 1782, appointed Bishop of Llandaff, a poor Welsh see he held until his death. A Whig in politics, he never received the promotion his abilities seemed to promise
• 1788, bought the Calgarth estate at Windermere in the Lake District, where he lived for much of his later life
• 1793, a sermon of his provoked the young William Wordsworth to write a radical Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, which Wordsworth left unpublished
• 1796, published An Apology for the Bible
• 1816, died, still Bishop of Llandaff, and was buried at St Martin's Church, Bowness-on-Windermere. His autobiography, Anecdotes of the Life of Richard Watson, Bishop of Landaff, finished in 1814, was published by his son in 1817

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The reply to Paine

An Apology for the Bible, in a Series of Letters Addressed to Thomas Paine (1796) takes Part II of The Age of Reason in its own order, in ten letters. It opens by saying that Paine's objections contain little that is new, and that what is new is how widely he spread them. The main lines of the reply:

1. Third-person narration is a convention. Xenophon, Josephus and Caesar wrote of themselves in the third person, so Paine's "style and manner" argument against Mosaic authorship proves nothing.
2. A later note is not a later book. Watson grants that the list of Edomite kings in Genesis 36 may be a later insertion, and states the principle: "A small addition to a book does not destroy either the genuineness or the authenticity of the whole book." He illustrates it with Paine's own example of a French town renamed during the Revolution.
3. Genuineness is not authenticity. "A book may contain a true history, though we know not the author of it; or though we may be mistaken in ascribing it to a wrong author."
4. Testimony is not geometry. "The relation of a fact differs essentially from the demonstration of a theorem." Witnesses who differ in detail are not discredited on the fact itself, which is his answer to Paine on the genealogies and the resurrection narratives.
5. Deism has its own difficulties. In the last letter he lists them, from an uncaused cause to the existence of evil, and observes that they have "driven not a few from deism to atheism, just as the difficulties in revealed religion have driven yourself, and some others from Christianity to deism."

Not every reply has worn well. His defence of the order in Numbers 31 as "good policy, combined with mercy" is the weakest part of the book, and his suggestion that the Dan of Genesis 14:14 might be a river rests on an etymology of the Jordan no longer accepted. The detailed assessment, charge by charge, is at The Age of Reason Objection Defeater.

Scholarship

Published academic works this page draws on, each matched to a publisher, index or library catalog record.

• Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology (1794). Open Library
• Richard L. Watson Jr, An apology for Christianity (1776). Open Library
• Richard L. Watson Jr, Anecdotes of the life of Richard Watson, Bishop of Landaff (1817). Open Library
• Richard Watson, Theological institutes (1834). Open Library

See also

• The Age of Reason Objection Defeater, Paine's charges with Watson's replies and later scholarship
• Thomas Paine, the opponent he answered
• Deism and Deism vs the Christian God, the position Paine argued from
• Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch, the question at the centre of his Letters II and III
• Moses Did Not Write the Torah Objection Defeater, the modern form of Paine's Pentateuch argument
• David Hume, whose case against miracle testimony Watson calls a "deistical axiom" already "an hundred times refuted"