Coda

Abstract This Coda closes the book by discussing the continued scholarly debate about the soul in the public sphere of the mid-eighteenth century, particularly William Warburton’s huge and erudite but ultimately public-facing Divine Legation of Moses (1738–41). Over many years, Warburton built what he believed was a fool-proof case against the heterodox use to which mortalists and freethinkers had put the history of pagan, Jewish, and Christian belief in immortality. In doing so he brought together a vast body of scholarship that ultimately had its origins in the debates canvassed in Part I. In contrast to what the unintended consequences or ‘slippery slope’ model implicitly assumes, then, radical writers who ‘twisted’ mainstream scholarship for heterodox purposes were not the end of the story. On the contrary, debate continued. Heterodoxy stimulated yet more scholarship from the mainstream, and vice versa. Claims that acquired heterodox connotations could later be defused.