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Henry Dodwell (October 16417 June 1711) was an Anglo-Irish scholar, theologian and controversial writer.
In 1654 he was sent by his uncle to Trinity College, Dublin, where he became a scholar and fellow, receiving the Bachelor of Arts in 1662 and Master of Arts in 1663. Having conscientious objections to taking Holy orders, he relinquished his fellowship in 1666, but in 1688 was elected Camden professor of history at Oxford. In 1691 he was deprived of his professorship for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary., endnotes:
Dodwell retired to Shottesbrooke in Berkshire to be near his friend, Francis Cherry. As the movement behind the nonjuring schism declined, with the death of William Lloyd who had been deprived of his bishopric, and the decision by Thomas Ken to relinquish his claim to the See of Bath and Wells, Dodwell returned to the Church of England in 1710.
In his ecclesiastical writings he was regarded as one of the greatest champions of the Nonjuring schism; but the doctrine which he afterwards promulgated, that the soul is naturally mortal, and that immortality could be enjoyed only by those who had received baptism from the hands of one set of regularly ordained clergy, and was therefore a privilege from which dissenters were hopelessly excluded, did not strengthen his reputation.
Gilbert Burnet thus addresses him in one of his letters : "You are a learned man ; and your life has been not only without blemish, but exemplary ; but you do not seem to remember, or enough to consider, the woe our Saviour has denounced against those by whom scandals come ; and, according to the true notion of scandal, I know no man, that has laid more in the way of the little ones, or weaker Christians, than you have done. I do assure you, I would rather wish that I could neither read nor write, than to have read or writ to such purposes as you have been pursuing now above thirty years. You seem to love novelties and paradoxes, and to employ your learning to support them. I do assure you, I have a just value for many valuable things that I know to be in you ; and do heartily lament every thing that is otherwise." (Image of p. 338 & p. 339 & p. 340 at Google Books)
We have at this day, certain most authentic ecclesiastical writers of the times, as Clemens Romanus, Barnabas, Hermas, Ignatius, and Polycarp, who wrote in the same order wherein I have named them, and after all the writers of the New Testament. But in Hermas you will not find one passage, or any mention of the New Testament, nor in all the rest is any one of the evangelists named. If sometimes they cite passages like those we read in our gospels, you will find them so changed, and for the most part so interpolated, that it cannot be known whether they produced them out of ours, or some apocryphal gospels. Nay, they sometimes cite passages which most certainly are not in our present gospels. Image of p. 102 at Google Books
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