As Thomas Herne's apology for his own labours indicates, the Bangorian controversy has from the beginning required its digesters and commentators. Much of the dispute concerned the question of what the dispute was about: Herne's view that the controversy concerned ‘Protestant Popery’ took a Hoadleian perspective. That view has had its proponents in the intervening years. Henry Hallam, for example, writing in the nineteenth century could confidently maintain that ‘the principles of Hoadley [sic] and his advocates appeared, in the main, little else than those of protestantism and toleration’. Were this actually the case, the dispute would, of course, be inexplicable. To understand the Bangorian controversy at all, one must recognize, as Howard Erskine-Hill has noted, that ‘the eighteenth-century world was not our world’. Most importantly, the present-day scholar must be aware that the meanings annexed to words have not only changed (as Hoadly himself insisted, if somewhat disingenuously), but that their meanings, if apparently settled now, were once disputed, and that those meanings have been settled through a process of political, theological and historical contention.