Charles Leslie (nonjuror)

Charles Leslie (July 1650 – 13 April 1722) was an Anglican nonjuring divine.

He was the son of John Leslie (1571-1671), bishop of Raphoe and afterwards of Clogher, born in July 1650 in Dublin, and educated at Enniskillen school and Trinity College, Dublin. Going to England he read law for a time, but soon turned his attention to theology, and took orders in 1680. In 1687 he became chancellor of the cathedral of Connor and a justice of the peace.

He began a long career of public controversy by responding in public disputation at Monaghan to the challenge of the Roman Catholic bishop of Clogher. Although a vigorous opponent of Roman Catholicism, Leslie was a firm supporter of the Stuart dynasty, and, having declined at the Glorious Revolution to take the oath to William and Mary, he was on this account deprived of his benefice.

In 1689 the growing troubles in Ireland induced him to withdraw to England, where he employed himself for the next twenty years in writing various controversial pamphlets in favor of the nonjuring cause, and in numerous polemics against the Quakers, Jews, Socinians and Roman Catholics, and especially in that against the Deists with which his name is now most commonly associated. He had the keenest scent for every form of heresy and was especially zealous in his defence of the sacraments. In 1704 Leslie started his weekly periodical The Observator (1704-9), changing its name to The Rehearsal of Observator in 1705 and then to The Rehearsal. In this work he expounded his Jacobite political principles and attacked the Whiggish and Dissenting views of John Tutchin's Observator (founded 1702) and Daniel Defoe's Review (1704–13).

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