Colloque des 24 et 25 novembre 2006

L'héritage judeo-chrétien dans la culture et la civilisation anglo-américaines
des XVIIe et XVIIe siècles

Abstract

Vendredi 24 novembre
[Salle 216 (2ème étage) Paris I - 12 place du Panthéon]

Après-midi : Présidente : Professeur Françoise Deconinck-Brossard, université de Paris X

- 15 heures : Professor Isabel Rivers, guest speaker, Queen Mary College, University of London
'The life of God in the Soul of Man' : The fortunes of a book

Henry Scougal (1650-1678) was successively a student and then regent (or tutor) at King's College, Aberdeen, a minister in the Scottish Episcopalian church, and Professor of Divinity at King's. His small devotional book The Life of God in the Soul of Man was published in 1677, shortly before his early death, with a preface by Gilbert Burnet (later to be Bishop of Salisbury and one of the principal defenders of the latitudinarians in the Church of England). It was extremely popular among a variety of readers and went through a large number of editions and adaptations well into the nineteenth century. I will first describe Scougal's account of the Christian life, and then turn to the way in which his book was received in the eighteenth century, concentrating on three editions in particular. These are the edition of 1739 by the Scottish moderate Presbyterian William Wishart, who offended the Edinburgh Presbytery by his recommendation of what appeared to be an unorthodox, anti-Calvinist book; that of 1744 by the Arminian Methodist leader John Wesley, who absorbed some key aspects of Scougal's religious language, and whose abridgements had a very wide circulation over a period of more than sixty years; and that of 1782 by the Baptist Unitarian Joshua Toulmin, who doctored Scougal's trinitarianism, and whose version reached a much smaller audience. All three admired the book and were keen to make it better known, but each had a different reason for giving it prominence.

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