Arthur Ashley Sykes

Arthur Ashley Sykes (1684–1756) was an Anglican religious writer, known as an inveterate controversialist. Sykes was a latitudinarian of the school of Benjamin Hoadly, and a friend and student of Isaac Newton.

Sykes was born in London in 1683 or 1684 and educated at St. Paul's School. In 1701 he was admitted to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he received a scholarship (1702), B.A. (1705), M.A. (1708), and D.D. (1726). He was vicar of Rayleigh in Essex from 1718 till his death in 1756.

In 1739 with Thomas Birch he helped George Turnbull become ordained in the Church of England.

Sykes took part successively in many of the Anglican theological controversies of his time.

Sykes wrote in support of Samuel Clarke's line on the Trinity, against an attack of 1718 by Thomas Bennet, in A Discourse of the Ever-Blessed Trinity in Unity (1718).

The sermon of Hoadly that set off the Bangorian Controversy had been anticipated by Sykes preaching in January 1717, on the same text with essentially the same theme. Sykes answered the Discourse of the Visible and Invisible Church of Christ in the controversy, by John Rogers, with his own The Authority of the Clergy and the Liberties of the Laity Stated; to which Rogers replied.

In 1718 he wrote to defend Richard Bentley in the St James's Post, who had been deprived of his degrees by Thomas Gooch acting as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. The controversy was continued by Thomas Sherlock and Conyers Middleton.

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