BALGUY, John, an eminent English theologian and moral philosopher, was born at Sheffield on August 12, 1686. He received his early education partly under his father, and partly under Mr Daubuz, his father’s successor, in the grammar-school of that town. He entered St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1702, graduated Bachelor of Arts in 1706, was ordained to the ministry in 1710, and soon after obtained the small living of Lamesly and Tanfield in the county of Durham. He married in 1715. It was the year in w hich Bishop Hoadley preached that famous sermon on The Kingdom of Christ, which gave rise to the long, wearisome, and confused theological war known as the “Bangorian controversy;” and Balguy, under the nom de plume of Silvius, began his career of authorship by taking the side of Hoadley in this controversy against some of his High Church opponents. In 1726 he published A Letter to a Deist concerning the Beauty and Excellency of Moral Virtue, and the support and improvement which it receives from the Christian Religion, chiefly designed to show that, while a love of virtue for its own sake is the highest principle of morality, religious rewards and punishments are most valuable, and in some cases absolutely indispensable, as sanctions of conduct. He supposed that a contrary opinion had been maintained by Lord Shaftesbury in his Inquiry concerning Virtue; but an examination of that essay will prove him to have in this respect done Shaftesbury injustice. In 1728 he was made a prebend of Salisbury by his friend, Bishop Hoadley. He published in the same year the first part of a tractate entitled The Foundation of Moral Goodness, and in the following year a second part, “illustrating and enforcing the principles contained in the former.” The aim of the work is ...