"An unnatural war between Faith and Reason": Horsley and Anglican Enlightenment

Returning to William Bulman's idea of Anglican Enlightenment, words from a 1789 sermon by Horsley.  This is a good example of the High Church tradition rejecting obscurantism, affirming the good of scientific inquiry, and celebrating a Thomist and Hookerian understanding of the gift of Reason.  It is also a reminder, as Bulman insists, that Enlightenment discourse was not the preserve of Latitudinarians but was also embraced by the High Church tradition (and, indeed, throughout the 18th century, not ceasing, as Bulman suggests, early in the century), offering a conservative reading of the Enlightenment.  In this case, Horsley points to "the light which philosophy and revelation may be brought to throw upon each other".  The Age of Reason, then, coheres with and does not undermine the Church's proclamation:

Nothing hath been more detrimental to the dearest interests of man - to his present and his future interests, – to his present interests, by obstructing the progress of scientific discovery, and retarding that gradual improvement of his present condition which Providence hath left it to his own industry to make; to his future interests, by lessening the credit of revelation in the esteem of those who will ever lead the opinions of mankind, - nothing hath been more contrary to man’s interests both in this world and in the next, than what hath too often happened, that a spirit of piety and devotion, more animated with zeal than enlightened by knowledge in subjects of physical inquiry, hath blindly taken the side of popular error and vulgar prejudice: The consequence of which must ever be an unnatural war between Faith and Reason, - between human science and divine. Religion and Philosophy, through the indiscretion of their votaries, in appearance set at variance, form as it were their opposite parties: Persons of a religious cast are themselves deterred, and would dissuade others, from what they weakly deem an impious wisdom; while those who are smitten with the study of nature revile and ridicule a revelation which, as it is in some parts interpreted by its weak professors, would oblige them to renounce their reason and their senses, in those very subjects in which reason is the competent judge, and sense the proper organ of investigation.