Essay: Thirty-nine Articles

Overview
Edward Young’s "Thirty-nine Articles" is a concise, clerical essay that vindicates the doctrinal settlement of the Church of England against the twin pressures of deist rationalism and sectarian enthusiasm. Writing as a newly ordained divine at a moment of acute theological debate, Young presents the Articles as a measured charter for national religion: neither a fetter on honest inquiry nor a license for doctrinal anarchy, but a commonsense framework that secures unity, preserves revealed essentials, and protects public worship from the volatility of private opinion.

The Place of Reason and Revelation
A central thread is Young’s negotiation between reason and revelation. He grants reason a jurisdiction over the credentials of revelation, reason may weigh testimony, sift evidence, and preserve the mind from credulity. But once revelation is deemed authentic, reason does not sit in perpetual appeal over its substance. The Articles, in this view, distill what revelation authoritatively teaches; they are not substitutes for Scripture but a public, intelligible summary by which the Church declares what it understands Scripture to mean. Far from exalting blind assent, Young argues that coherent doctrine, publicly owned, is the rational consequence of believing that God has spoken.

Subscription and Conscience
Young addresses the scruple, prominent since the Bangorian controversies, that subscription to fixed articles coerces conscience. He answers that conscience is most dignified when it declares itself openly. If a minister cannot in good faith teach what the Church teaches, he should not bind the Church to his private creed; nor should the Church be compelled to revolve doctrinally around each individual’s changing sentiment. Subscription, for Young, is not a casuist’s loophole or a tacit reservation; it is frank agreement to plain meaning. Yet he also admits that the Articles are written with judicious breadth, crafted to exclude contradictions to the Gospel without wringing every speculative dispute into confessional law. Their number, he implies, signals restraint more than litigiousness.

Against Deism and Enthusiasm
Young presses two polemical fronts. Against deists who reduce religion to ethics and natural reason, he maintains that Christianity’s distinguishing glories, grace, incarnation, atonement, are matters of revelation, not of unaided philosophy, and that the Articles safeguard these. Against enthusiasts who claim immediate inspiration or collapse doctrine into private feeling, he argues that unbounded spiritualism dissolves common worship and erodes the moral authority of the clergy. The Articles, he maintains, are the via media: they protect the mysteries that reason cannot mint and the order that zeal cannot keep.

Church, Nation, and Peace
There is a civic note throughout. A national church exists not to police every nuance of speculation but to maintain intelligible, shared boundaries for preaching, sacraments, and public devotion. Doctrinal indifference breeds as much strife as doctrinal tyranny; without agreed articles, parishes become pulpits of perpetual novelty, and the people are left shifting between rival gospels. By defining essentials, the Church stabilizes instruction, fosters charity in non-essentials, and reserves controversy for the study rather than the sanctuary.

Style and Aim
The essay’s manner is Augustan: poised, aphoristic, and fond of balanced antitheses. Young’s rhetoric leans toward moral suasion rather than scholastic proof, pressing the reader with common-sense analogies and public consequences. His aim is pastoral as much as polemical: to reassure the hesitant that subscription is compatible with integrity and to remind the confident that liberty without form soon undoes itself.

Sum
Young’s defense of the Thirty-nine Articles is a case for principled coherence in an age tempted by both doctrinal drift and sectarian heat. It proposes a settlement in which reason acknowledges revelation’s authority, conscience speaks plainly, and the Church maintains a generous but definite rule of faith for the good of souls and the peace of the nation.