Francis Blackburne (priest)

Francis Blackburne (9 June 1705 – 7 August 1787) was an English Anglican clergyman, archdeacon of Cleveland and an activist against the requirement of subscription to the Thirty Nine Articles.

Blackburne was said to sympathise with their views but to have declined an offer to succeed the nonconformist Samuel Chandler at the Old Jewry meeting house at a salary of £400.

[1] In 1749, vicar of Alconbury John Jones published his Free and Candid Disquisitions,[3] proposing modifications of the church services and ritual with a view to meeting difficulties of the latitudinarians.

He supported the semi-materialist theory of the sleep of the soul of his college friend Edmund Law, in a tract called No Proof in the Scriptures of an Intermediate State,[4] 1755; and in 1758 he argued against the casuistry which would permit subscription to the articles to be made with latitude of meaning, in Remarks on the Rev.

[5][1] The debate that followed led to Blackburne's major work, The Confessional, or a full and free inquiry into the right, utility, and success of establishing confessions of faith and doctrine in protestant churches.

[6] The manuscript had remained unpublished for some years, when a friend who had seen it mentioned it to the republican Thomas Hollis, through whom Andrew Millar the bookseller was introduced to the author, and published the book anonymously in May 1766; a second edition appeared in June 1767.

This is supported by historical considerations, and the device of lax interpretation of the articles is denounced as a casuistical artifice of William Laud's in defence of Arminianism.