End of Controversy? Monks, Friars, Methodists

Abstract

Milner’s End of Religious Controversy, written in 1801–2, was first published in 1818. He had intended it as a reply to Beilby Porteus’s Brief Confutation of the Errors of the Church of Rome (1796), when Porteus was bishop of Chester. But by 1802, Porteus was bishop of London, and Milner had already created a stir with his Letters to a Prebendary (1800), addressed to Dr. John Sturges and incidentally attacking the latitudinarian former bishop of Winchester, Benjamin Hoadly. Bishop Samuel Horsley, who himself moved in 1802 from Rochester to St. Asaph, had spoken in the House of Lords against the Bill designed to subject English and émigré monastic institutions to stricter regulation. The Milner-Sturges confrontation had been cited by the lord chancellor during the debate, and Horsley understandably advised Milner not to excite further controversy with his proposed new publication (Mather 109–12). Porteus died in 1809, and when a fifth edition of his Confutation appeared posthumously in 1815, Milner evidently decided to wait no longer. The End of Religious Controversy was not only a delayed answer to Porteus, but a wide-ranging answer to Protestant critics of Catholicism as well. As the title suggests, it was meant to be conclusive and unanswerable. Instead it re-ignited debate.