This dissertation presents the first thorough study of Charles Leslie's political and theological writings. During his career as a pamphleteer and journalist, Leslie wrote against whigs, disserters, freethinkers and latitudinarians. These groups, he believed, had conspired to bring about England's rebellion against legitimate authority in both church and state. Leslie attempted to demonstrate the veracity of the scriptual record and to argue that legitimate government must be deduced from the divine model set down there. In the process, he become his generation's most vigorous opponent of whig political thought and offered the first detailed criticism of John Locke's theory of government. Throughout the thesis the theological aspect of post-revolutionary politics and political thought has been emphasised. Leslie derived his theory of monarchical government from his theory of episcopal government. Freeing the church of England from secular control was his fundamental goal, and a restoration of the Stuarts--who had promised to give up certain prerogatives in the area of ecclesiastical affairs--was a first step towards such a reform of the church. None of the scholars who have noticed Leslie's writings in the past few years have been concerned with his emphasis upon theological questions and the proper relationship of church and state. Historians of jacobitism have not considered what a Stuart restoration would have meant for the church of England. A close examination of Charles Leslie's career and writings helps to clarify both the motives and the goals of that small group of English churchmen of which he was a leading member. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis advances a claim for the centrality of a politics of peace in early Christianity, with particular focus given to the letters of Paul and the Gospel of Matthew. In brief, I argue that Paul’s task of announcing the gospel to the nations involved calling and equipping assemblies of people whose common life was ordered by a politics (by which I mean, chiefly, a mode of corporate conduct) characterised by peaceableness, and this theological politics was a deliberate participation in the political order announced and inaugurated by Jesus of Nazareth. To this end, there are three main components of the thesis. Chapter Two is focused on the Gospel of Matthew, particularly the way in which violence (and peace) are constructed by the evangelist. Chapter Three bridges the first and third components of the thesis, attending to the important question of the continuity between Jesus and Paul on the issue of non-violence. The third component involves two chapters. Chapter Four attempts to identify the trajectory of violence and peace in Paul’s biography and in the “biography” of his Galatian converts (as he portrays it), and the fifth chapter traces the presence of this non-violent gospel in (arguably) Paul’s earliest letter. The intended effect is to show that a politics of non-violence was an early, central, non-negotiable component of the gospel, that its presence can be detected in a variety of geographical expressions of early Christianity, that this (normally) “ethical” dimension of the gospel has a political aspect as well, and that this political dimension of the gospel stands in stark contrast to the politics of both the contemporary imperial power and those who would seek to replace it through violence.