Divine Benevolence

4.4 Conclusion

I find it difficult, as one who is not theologically trained, to pass an authoritative judgement on the relative merits of the tracts by Balguy, Bayes, and Grove. The summary given by Doddridge, which we have already quoted, seems to be a fair reflexion of the contents of each, and it is unclear, at least to me, who, if any, emerged the victor in the ‘celebrated controversy’. Perhaps Doddridge, finding some inadequacies in Bayes’s work, would assign the laurels to the treatises by Balguy and Grove rather than to that of the more obvious recipient³⁴, though against this we must weigh the prominence given to benevolence in Hartley’s book.

After all this perhaps the most we can say is that we are, if not wiser, at least better informed on God’s attributes and the motives guiding Him — or, as Edward FitzGerald put it perhaps rather despondently in his translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Myself when young did eagerly frequent Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument About it and about; but evermore Came out by the same Door as in I went.